“They would hardly interest you,” Ivan said. “We do not dance. We discuss matters of consequence, which are beyond you, my dear sister.”
“How utterly boring.”
“Will you be joining your father’s enterprises, Ivan Aronovitch?” Mathilde asked, handing her daughter a glass of tea.
The young man hesitated. Then, resolutely, he looked into Mathilde’s eyes and shook his head. He pointed to his clothing. “I do not think so. Somehow .. .”
Anna chimed in abruptly, “Somehow all your father’s wealth makes you uncomfortable?”
And as Alia and Mathilde, shocked, stared at her, the young man nodded. “Yes, yes, Anna Davidovna. That is so! How well you have stated my feelings.”
Anna was very red. She murmured, looking at her toes, “It was easy for me to say. I share those feelings.” And then, overcome by embarrassment, she fell silent. Alia and Mathilde daintily chewed on coconut cream puffs. The silence was unbearable. Ivan Aronovitch was regarding Anna with keen appraisal.
Finally he said to his hostess: “Your daughter is by far the most attractively clothed young lady I have seen. I must apologize for mentioning personal appearance, which is such a delicate matter. But I am in love with color, and Anna Davidovna has arrested my imagination.”
“Thank you,” Anna replied. She wanted to be struck dead upon the spot.
“Yes. It is a pleasure to hear Anna’s clothing complimented. She possesses a style quite her own, and refuses to go along with Paris,” her mother commented. The young man’s words had taken her aback, but she was glad for Anna, and thankful that Johanna was out of hearing range. Everyone, even her eccentric daughter, deserved a good word now and then to boost her morale.
“Still, Anna, Paris is a delight. You must try it soon. I shall give a ball and you must come,” Alia said.
Mathilde’s eyes registered shock, but Ivan said quickly: “Anyone who attires herself with such imagination has better ways to occupy her life, Alitchka. What do you like to do, Anna Davidovna? I am certain that you do not like dancing.”
“Everyone is not a bear, like you, Vanya,” Alia said peevishly.
“But Ivan Aronovitch is right,” Anna replied. She looked up at him. His green eyes were riveted to her face. “I like to paint,” she said shyly. “And to read.”
“I should have guessed!” he cried joyfully. “A painter! I would be very honored if you would show me your work.”
“It is only a hobby,” Anna said.
“Yes, but my writing began as a hobby, and when I was in Paris Anatole France read my book, Tamara, and said that not a word should be changed. So now I have a career,” Alia interposed.
“That is a formidable compliment,” Mathilde said.
“Alia writes like a schoolgirl. But I am sure that Anna Davidovna paints like Cezanne. All brightness and light.” Ivan Aronovitch was looking at Anna’s skirt, and his green eyes glimmered. “And what do you read?”
Anna mumbled, almost to herself, “My favorite is Gorky.”
The young man clapped his hands. “Mine, too! We must compare thoughts. Which was your favorite short story?”
“Chelkash” Anna murmured.
“Pah! Sentimental! If you go for sentiment, why not choose Malva? Ah, to be Seryozhka, retiring to the watch-place on the spur with that incredible woman! To live like that, unfettered, with a woman that would not be fettered!”
“That would indeed be a dream come true,” Anna said. Her eyes glittered. “But old Chelkash had suffered, he was full of his past. And still he was a man. He did not need a woman.”
“They are going to argue, and aren’t they adorable?” Alia said. “I have never heard of such nonsense. Gorky! Whoever has heard of him?”
“He was elected to the Academy of Sciences,” Anna said.
“And just as quickly ousted,” her mother commented, having heard David speaking of it to a friend.
“By the Tzar! What does he know of writing?” Ivan scoffed. Then he bit his lip. “Oh, Mathilde Yureyevna, please forgive me. I did not mean to insult you.”
“But you did,” his sister said peevishly.
Ivan did not respond. He was standing in front of Mathilde, and his brow was knit. “Please,” he begged. “Forgive what I have said. It was impulsive and thoughtless, and impolite.”
Mathilde smiled. “We were all young once,” she said kindly. “Never mind, Ivan Aronovitch. May I pour you another glass of tea?”
“I shall gladly take one,” the young man answered, his relief spreading across his face in a smile. He turned from his hostess to her daughter. “But would you permit Anna Davidovna to do me this honor?”
Silently, Anna rose and took the glass that was handed to her. She filled it with tea from the small pot, then leveled it off with hot water from the samovar. At that moment, she saw Johanna enter the room. Abruptly, she passed the cup to Ivan without asking if he wanted cream, sugar, or lemon with his tea. Looking away from him, her face shining crimson, she said quickly. “Please excuse me,” and, lifting her heavy flowered skirt, ran from the salon without further explanation. Her eyes had filled with tears, suddenly and illogically, and the others watched her flight with consternation.
It was Johanna de Mey who broke their silence. “Good afternoon,” she said, and sat down.
The Gunzburg children were now eighteen, fifteen, thirteen, and eight, and apart from her art lessons Anna had ceased her education. But Ossip was still taking his lessons with Johanna. David had seen his work, and was proud of it, and because he was a boy, he had told Mathilde that he would have to supplement Ossip’s learning with tutoring in mathematics by someone other than the Dutchwoman. Mathilde felt as though she had been hit in the stomach. “You will hurt Johanna’s feelings,” she said.
“A boy must know his mathematics,” David replied. Mathilde passed her tongue over dry lips and remembered her father, Baron Yuri, who, instead of going to his own tutor as a child, had hidden in the fruit trees of his father’s orchard. Now he could not compute his own gambling losses. She shivered, and straightened her back, and told her friend that her husband was sending for someone from the University to coach her older son in the more complex facets of calculus and solid geometry.
Johanna smiled, her lovely, illuminative smile which showed her perfect, large white teeth. She did not mind. Ossip, the favorite, was going to be one step removed toward the realms of manhood.
He was growing tall, and his appearance was poetic, for he was slight of build from his years of illness. Learning fascinated him. He did not care a fig for politics, but he was drawn to the Orient, and the trouble between his country and China and Japan disturbed him because he wished to study there one day. He knew that a dear friend of the family, Moise Mess, had settled in Nagasaki, and made a fortune in the coal industry. “What will happen to him?” he often asked.
“He is planning to transfer his enterprises to Port Arthur should the situation with Japan worsen,” his father answered. “Why do you ask?”
“I am keeping track of those we know in the Orient,” Ossip said. “Someday I shall go there.”
Ossip did not set aside his dreams of the Orient. When he was not quite sixteen, he went into his father’s study and meticulously shut the door. “Papa,” he began, “I have been mulling over a plan these past months. I wish, more than anything else, to obtain my baccalaureate degree and go on to the Faculty of Far Eastern Studies at the University afterward.”
David was pleased. “We shall have another linguist in the family then,” he said, smiling.
But the elegant young boy with the waves of black hair and the blue eyes beneath their delicate brows remained disturbed, and intense. “I am not yet certain what I wish to do with my life, Papa. I only know that Oriental art, haiku poetry, all that breathes of those foreign cultures appeals to me. But I am not, like Annushka, an artist. In fact, I am not certain at all of my calling. You see, Papa, I have had absolutely no experience of the real world, of r
eal life as other boys live it. I have lived secluded by my illness, and protected from… well, normalcy.”
David stroked his chin and reflected. Then he nodded. “That is so, my son. But I do not know how we could have avoided this, your mother and I. What have you in mind?”
Ossip leaned across the desk and searched his father’s face. It was so dreadfully important, so essential, to convince his father, and to do so now. But he was scared. What if, instead, he threw a wall between the two of them, and his father refused ever to hear him through again? David possessed faith in him, but the boy was not built of the same material as his father. Ossip realized this more than did David, who only knew that in the presence of his smoothly polished son he felt a gnawing sadness, the sadness of the perennial optimist, of the devout, when faced with a true cynic. Ossip, who did not like to take risks, weighed the alternatives in his mind. No, he had to speak.
“Papa,” he said, “I need to go to school, like other fellows. And then I will compete and obtain the marks that will gain me entry into the University. You know a Jew needs to score a ‘five’ in every subject, and that ‘five’ is the highest mark one can obtain. Here at home, no one will mark my work, and I shall not be admitted to the University, and will not receive my baccalaureate. I must attend a gymnasium.”
David looked at his son, surprised at his intensity, his determination. Always it had been Ossip’s easy-going passivity that bothered him. Aloud he replied, “But in gymnasia, there are forty boys to a form. Someone might push you, and if you fell, your back might be damaged for life. Worse—you could easily die. That is why your mother wants you to study here.”
“But I want friends, Papa. I am not a fighter. I will provoke no one.” The blue eyes shone with a strange brilliance that dazzled David.
“How many nations have spoken as you do, and been attacked by a greedy aggressor! It would be risking your life.”
Ossip blushed. “My future depends on your decision, Papa,” he said. “I do not want to be a houseplant where I fit into the scheme of things. Sonia can stay at home and visit with Mama, for one day she will marry and be a hostess, and a mother. But I shall be a man, and need to seek a direction. I need to know people, not merely my own family.”
“You would be held back a form or two, because of your illness,” David countered. “How would it feel to be sitting in class with people hardly older than Sonia?”
Ossip raised his head. “It would feel like living,” he answered quietly. His eyes held his father’s, and finally David looked away. Ossip took a deep breath. He knew that he had won, that he would soon be going to school. And David, his father, felt a tremor of pride that he had never experienced before in regard to this boy, whose scholarship had pleased him but whose essential soul had never come within his grasp. The lad has character, he caught himself reflecting. And then he felt a stab in his chest, and was ashamed at having doubted this handsome adolescent who was his flesh and blood.
Sonia had waited for her brother outside the study, and when he emerged, they embraced. She was glad that Ossip was going to have his freedom. Mathilde felt otherwise. She recalled the dreams that had haunted her before Gino’s birth, when she had been pursued by visions of her son in the renewed throes of Pott’s disease. She confronted her husband with contained arguments, but inwardly she was torn. She held back sobs and kept her lovely face immobile, only her eyes betraying her by their extraordinary wideness. Her son was going to be killed, and all for a whim! But with his mother Ossip stood his own ground, for he was meeting an opponent whom he knew as completely as he knew himself. “You must trust Papa,” he told her. “He is going to find me a school of which even you will approve. But you must give him the opportunity to search for one. You would not have me hanging onto your skirts forever, would you now, Mama?”
David found a school. It was a private school, and so contained only twenty boys per form instead of the forty of public establishments. But it was accredited by the state, and would obtain for Ossip his baccalaureate degree. It was situated within walking distance from the Gunzburg home, on Vassilievsky Island itself, and only scions of important families were sent there to study. Ossip would meet other boys, and the high breeding of the pupils helped to reassure Mathilde. “Besides, my love, he will be close enough to return home for luncheon,” David comforted his wife. And so Ossip was enrolled, and began his formal schooling just before his sixteenth birthday.
He did not mind, as he had predicted, being placed in a form where the other students were only fourteen. He had missed the companionship of other boys, and so, in this regard, Ossip was still immature. He realized that his illness had slowed down his learning at its onset, and he was not at all ashamed of being older than the others. On the first day of classes, the school director introduced him with an explanation. “This is Ossip Davidovitch de Gunzburg, your new comrade,” the man told the assembled boys. “He has been ill, and cannot endure any rough physical contact. I trust that you will all watch your actions around him, although he insists on being treated as everyone else. But a single push, or a shove, can kill this youth at once.”
Ossip never mentioned his ailment, and the other boys took a quick liking to him, for he was witty and bright, and so happy to be among his own kind that a newfound youthfulness seemed to emanate from him, where before he had appeared overly mature. At once, his marks proved as excellent as his father had hoped. He brought home only “fives” and “five-pluses,” the highest honors in the class. He shared those top grades with a small group of fellow students who became his close friends. All came from distinguished families. Sergei Botkin was the nephew of the Tzar’s private physician, Vassili Petri was the son of a famous geographer, and Vladimir, or Volodia, Tagantsev, was the second son of Count Nicolai Tagantsev, who sat in the Senate. It was Volodia who was Ossip’s best and dearest friend, and about whom he spoke the most.
When Ossip first mentioned Volodia, at supper, David felt as though a sudden arrow had pierced his heart. He looked up quickly, his temples pounding, and saw that Mathilde’s sapphire eyes were thoughtful and alert. She had caught the name, too. He cleared his throat. “Ossip,” he said tentatively, “why are you so fond of this particular boy?”
His son’s face, more pink than usual, stared back at him over the magnificent Limoges tureen the servant girl was holding between them. Ossip said, “Why, he is a marvelous fellow. He is strong, and has a fine, firm heart. He laughs well, but never at others. He—he—please do not laugh, Papa, but you know how much I love my Sonia, and Volodia, well, possesses the same kind of character as she. I enjoy his company and I respect him. I know that you will like him yourself.”
David felt deeply troubled. Mathilde, across from him, bore a furrow between her black brows that indicated her own disturbance. Ossip’s joy, his wholehearted enthusiasm in his first real friendship, hurt David, who knew that rarely was his son as purely innocent as in this new experience. But still... He said, “Does Volodia talk much about his father, Count Tagantsev?”
The boy shrugged lightly. “I suppose so. They are not as close a family as we are, and I gather that Volodia is not his father’s favorite. There is an older brother, Nicolai, who is a law student, and the Count, I think, favors him. But I am not sure. His sister, Natalia, is Volodia’s twin, and the two of them are the best of friends. We have spoken of you, Papa, and of Sonia, and of course of Mama. The way boys speak.” He smiled as he said this, with some pride.
David ran his index finger over his nose and waved away the offerings from the servant girl’s tray. “You have often helped me with the widows of Jewish artisans,” he said. “You know of the law that banishes them from Petersburg twenty-four hours after the death of their husbands.”
“Yes, Papa. But what has that to do with Volodia?” Impatience forced itself into Ossip’s tone. He was irritated at the turn in conversation. Happy in his friend, he wanted to bask in the attention of his family, and not return to what he privately considere
d his father’s obsession. There was time enough for that on another day.
But David continued. “This law is most ardently supported by two men, both highly influential. One of them, as you know, is Pobedonòstsev, head of the Holy Synod, who has been the Tzar’s mentor for many years. The other advocate is your friend’s father, who sits in the Senate. Did you know this, Ossip?”
Horror registered itself in Ossip’s eyes. “Of course not, Papa! We do not discuss religion. And Volodia is not anti-Semitic. I am his best friend, and I know for a fact that he speaks of me in his home. Did you think I was betraying you behind your back, Papa?”
David sighed. He saw his son’s anger and dismay. “I would never accuse you of betraying me,” he said finally, weighing his words carefully. “I merely felt that you should know with whom you were dealing. Whether or not he is close to his son, Volodia’s father is perhaps my most bitter opponent. Do with this what you will.”
Johanna de Mey, who had daintily wiped the corners of her mouth, ventured to speak. “If the boy is as noble a creature as Ossip says, should we not allow this friendship to develop between them, as a private matter? After all, Ossip has never disappointed us. His judgment can be trusted. And if the boy were anti-Semitic, would he have picked a Jew for his best friend?”
“Johanna makes a valid point,” Mathilde said softly. Her large eyes sought those of her friend, and she smiled. “Would we create a children’s war by our own foibles? Perhaps this friendship is an omen of good things to come. Perhaps Nicolai Tagantsev will relent. In any case, let us not discredit his young son.”
“I had no intention of showing prejudice in regard to the boy, Mathilde,” David told her. “But Ossip is sixteen, and my successor. I felt he had to know about the boy’s father, and be forewarned.”
“Thank you, Papa,” Ossip said. He picked up a piece of cake with his fork, and began to lift it to his mouth. Then he stopped, and regarded his father. “I may continue the friendship with no bad feelings?” he demanded.
The Four Winds of Heaven Page 11