The Four Winds of Heaven

by Monique Raphel High

  A young male voice echoed behind her. “Ah, Sofia Davidovna. Why are you so sad?” Someone placed a strong, firm hand on her shoulder. She was dumbstruck, for she had thought herself completely alone, and then furious at the intrusion. She wheeled about on the piano stool and found her gray eyes directly confronting the chestnut gaze of Volodia Tagantsev, Ossip’s friend. He had grown, for he was now sixteen, and sported a light mustache on his frank, tan face. She had opened her mouth, but now found herself totally speechless.

  “The weather was so dreary that our master let us out early for the noon break,” he explained. Then, conscious of his hand still upon her shoulder, he reddened and removed it. “You are going away,” he added.

  “Only for a little while, until the disturbances end. My Mama is very concerned.”

  “Mine, too,” he said, and smiled, revealing his large white teeth. “I suppose that is the nature of motherhood, don’t you think?” His tone was pleasantly casual.

  But all at once Sonia felt her anger rising. “Your mother has much to fear, for your family is close to the Tzar,” she said, and something in her voice made him start.

  “You are not exactly members of an unknown clan, yourselves,” Volodia replied, continuing to smile. “We all have much to safeguard from the seething masses.”

  His words made her feel ridiculed. She shrugged lightly, and regarded him with a stern expression. He was so compact, so trim and well dressed in his dark suit, and his hands, which he now held clasped together, were excellently shaped for a musician. She remembered his fondness for the piano. Impulsively, she said: “It is such a gloomy day, Vladimir Nicolaievitch. Why not sit with me for a while, and play this exercise for four hands?” She showed him some sheets of music.

  He looked about for another stool, or for a low chair to place next to hers, but there was none. Apologetically, he said, “You shall have to permit me to share your stool, Sofia Davidovna.” When she blushed violently, his smile reappeared. He sat close to her, and she felt the smooth muscles of his thigh touching hers beneath the fine broadcloth. A shiver ran through her. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  They began to play, their fingers first stumbling, then dancing from ivory to black and back to ivory. The still room reverberated with their noise, which pealed in trills, in waves of sudden joy. And then they became conscious of the presence of someone else within the room. Volodia stopped playing. “Ossip,” he said.

  Sonia started, and pink spots touched her cheekbones. She lifted her eyes to her brother’s, which sparkled like dark blue gems. “I was saying good-bye to this piano, for these few months,” she said lamely.

  “We were saying ‘see you soon’ to each other,” Volodia added. Ossip smiled. But his sister gave their guest a hard look, and a line formed between her brows.

  “I have packing to do,” she declared. Then she rose and rushed from the room.

  Ossip raised his brows and remarked, with amusement, “Strange that she did not bid you good-bye. Sonia is usually a most correct young lady…”

  In May, when the streets of St. Petersburg were starting to dry from their overflow of thawed, dirty snow, Anna wrapped herself in a velvet cape and secured her feet in thick sealskin boots. It was early afternoon, and her father was at one of his Ministries. She saw dim sunlight peeking through a hazy sky, and resolutely walked out of the apartment, down the stairs, and into the open air. Then, breathing deeply, she directed her footsteps toward the University. Now and then she peeked out from the hood of her cape at the houses she passed, but she did not truly see them. At length she reached a small, somewhat dirty side street. There, in front of a brick building, she stopped. The building was not unlike the one in which Sonia had found her the night of her escapade almost eighteen months before. Anna bit her lower lip and entered the house. She ascended the staircase and stopped before a small wooden door on the second landing. She knocked, and waited.

  Ivan Aronovitch Berson opened the door. His blond hair was more tumbled than usual, and he wore no coat and no vest, only a plain cotton shirt, open at the collar. When he saw the hooded figure on his threshold, he stared with embarrassment. “Annushka,” he said. And then: “You have never come here, to my students’ quarters.”

  “I have come today,” she said. She stepped into the room and saw the unmade bed and the lawbooks scattered haphazardly on the floor and piled on the single chair. “I wished to see how you lived, since you moved from your parents’ home,” she said.

  “It is very different. Alia came yesterday, and nearly fainted.” He was smiling at her, extending his hands.

  She seized them with sudden ardor. “I do not care what Alia did. I care about you, Vanya—oh, how much I care!” She closed the door with the back of her heel, and gazed at him with her wide brown eyes until he felt that he was swimming in them.

  “Vanya,” she said, “Vanya, I have come to you because I love you, and because we are free. Free to love each other.”

  He pulled her down upon the sofa, and carelessly brushed off the handwritten pages which had been strewn there. Without hurry, she unfastened her cape and removed it. Then she began to unpin the coil of red hair to the right of her face, letting the brilliant red mane surround her shoulders. She bent over and removed her boots, and then stood up, in her simple skirt and blouse, and faced him. Her brown eyes glowed. She moved her hands behind her back and unfastened the hooks on her skirt, which fell like a collapsed bell by her toes. Then she unbuttoned her blouse and dropped it to the floor. She stood, uncorseted, in her drawers and chemise. But she said nothing.

  Vanya’s mouth had fallen open, and the blood had drained from his cheeks. Now he looked at her, his serious green eyes going to her brown ones and then to the clothes she had discarded. “You may touch me, Vanya,” she said gently. “I am real.” And now it was she who smiled. “There has always been my face—but there is the rest. Most people would stop at the face.” She winced, a hurt expression passing over her features. She brushed a wave of red hair over her left cheek, as though to hide it.

  But he was rising to envelop her in his arms, and she buried her face in his chest. Softly he tangled his fingers through her hair. “I had thought—of asking your permission to speak to your father,” he told her in a muffled voice.

  She reared her head and became rigid. “You do not have it!” she cried. “I do not wish to be bound to you by law, or by religion. If I came here today, it is because I thought that you would want my love, offered freely. Please, Vanya. You must not humiliate me. I do not wish to become someone’s wife, not even yours.”

  “But Annushka. We could buy a small farm, work it together. You could paint. I do not want to dishonor you.”

  “You could never do that.” She touched his face with her fingertips. “If you love me, then what is the meaning of honor?”

  He pressed her fiercely against him, crushing her parted lips with his own. He lifted her in his arms to the bed, and it was there that they discovered each other for the first time, the girl of twenty and the man of twenty-two.

  When they had lain together and fallen asleep, their hair entwined, a sudden brilliant shaft of sunlight filtered through the glass pane of the window. He awakened abruptly, and touched her arm. “Annushka,” he whispered, “I want you to stay with me forever.”

  Anna raised herself upon one elbow and regarded him gravely. “I am happy now,” she murmured. “I had never been happy before. Do not frighten me with talk of tomorrow, when we have this moment.” Slowly, she kissed his nose, his chin, his eyelids. “Go to sleep, my Vanya. I must go home.”

  Chapter 7

  On September 5, 1905, the Peace of Portsmouth was signed, marking the termination of the war with Japan. For the aristocracy, this peace was a blessing, after the waste of lives and materials which had drained their powerful nation and made it, at length, bow in abject defeat. Baron Horace de Gunzburg said to his son, David: “Now we can turn the page upon our national shame.” But for the Russian pe
ople, peace was a meaningless word; war had sharpened their senses, rubbed their nerve endings raw. Its end was hardly noticed in the rising crest of their grievances.

  Autumn had come to St. Petersburg. In Ivan Berson’s small apartment, Anna heated a pot of water on top of the old cast-iron stove in the corner. In another part of the room, several young people were engaged in animated conversation. Some were seated on the sofa, others on the floor, still others stood, their backs to the wall. She could hear Ivan calmly telling a thin, nervous girl with her hair falling in strands down her back: “Of course I am not in favor of the October Manifesto. Who in his right mind would not understand that the Tzar’s Duma will never equate with the British system of Parliament? There’s going to be a hitch of some sort, wait and see. Still, the idea of gaining what we want through terrorism goes against my moral code.”

  “You are a fool, Vanya!” the girl cried. Her voice was shrill. She was wearing a shapeless gown of corduroy, belted at the waist, and rimless spectacles. Anna knew that she was a schoolteacher, and very poor. “One can see that underneath all your good will lies the soul of a burshui—a true burgher. We have been forming fighting groups in the countryside since 1903, in order to educate the peasantry. Yes, there is bloodshed! How else are we going to show the aristocracy that we mean what we say? The first strike was not sufficient. Living without electricity, water, and railroads did not terrify those in power, as we’d planned. The Soviet may be divided but they are real Social Democrats, who are concerned with the workers. We Social Revolutionaries have grown out of the Narodnyk party, and are going to obtain what we want through the people of the Russian soil… our peasants. We need your help. You are almost a lawyer. Educate the ignorant, Vanya, in the laws, so they may find out how inadequate these laws are to them. And then help them to formulate proposals for new legislation! But we shall not be granted a single new freedom without some fighting.”

  Anna poured the boiling water into a large pot of thick porcelain into which she had put black tea leaves. She left the brew standing, and hastily came to Vanya and placed a light hand on his arm. “Lolya,” she said, “you are a mistress of rhetoric, but so are all our friends. You have made a grave mistake in calling Vanya a burshui. His father— and mine—are wealthy men, but we do not espouse their ways of life. Vanya lives as meagerly as you, and it is his life I have been sharing far more than that of my family. Vanya is reading law in order to become a legislator, in order to educate, as you say. But not with hot words that incite to murder. What about the agents provocateurs who tell the angry peasants that the Jews are responsible for their unjust standard of living, rather than the Tzar? I am frightened of violence, but if the workers can obtain reforms by striking I am all for it. I myself would much prefer to live in the country and work the land, and not be bothered with electricity or railway systems. But the fighting cells which you organize among the peasants are not formed to bring facts to them: only to use them, and the force of their numbers. I’m against this infighting among Social Democrats, Social Revolutionaries; workers, peasants; Mensheviks and Bolsheviks; Trotsky and Lenin. All that is meaningless. What is important is the goal of getting the right of vote for everyone, and seeing that the men and women who vote know whom they are electing, and why.”

  Lolya’s face reddened fiercely. “You say that you do not live like your father. Do you know what the poor Jews of the Pale call him and your honored grandfather, and their fine friends? The Council of Notables! Count Witte, our new Prime Minister, drinks his afternoon tea with Baron Horace de Gunzburg, and comes to his home to bring him the Tzar’s most distinguished decoration, second only to the one granted to the Imperial family: Evident State Councillor! Among the wealthy, prejudices seem to disappear. And while they sip their tea, Baron Horace’s protégés, the poor Jews of the Pale, die slow deaths of starvation. You are for gentle teaching of the peasants? Very well, Anna Davidovna, my elegant demoiselle. Go out there yourself and test the climate. The peasants are ready for blood, not school desks!”

  “You think I am afraid to go, don’t you?” Anna accused her. Her voice was low, and trembled slightly, but her fingers on Ivan’s arm did not tighten. She said, “Send us there, then, Lolya. And do not boast so of your own parentage, for it makes me ill. We all know that your mother was a prostitute, and your father unknown. We are all bored of it, too.”

  Lolya rose from the sofa and stood before Anna with a fierce expression on her face. She raised her hand into a fist and held it out toward Anna. Ivan smiled ironically. “We have had sufficient drama from Bizet’s score sheets for a single evening,” he declared. “Come, Annushka. Let us serve tea to our friends.”

  “Always the perfect gentleman,” Lolya said derisively. But she lowered her fist. Then, as Anna turned her back to her and began to move toward the stove, she called out: “But don’t forget! The fighting cells shall have two new members. I’ll hold you to your word. The Gunzburg word is gold, is it not? Rubles and rubles of gold…”

  “I for one am glad that Mathilde and the three little ones are out of the country, my son,” Horace de Gunzburg said, resting his back against the comfortable leather cushions lining the armchair in David’s study. “I wish Sasha had sent Rose away with Tania. And that Anna had accompanied her mother, as she should have. Why didn’t you and Mathilde insist upon it?”

  David said, “I do not seem to understand my daughter these days. She is so quiet, my little ball of fire. And she is angry with me. She would have me join unions, and Lord knows what else. When I pointed out to her that Pavel Milyukov was encouraging a renewal of the general strike, she said, ‘He is wiser than I thought.’ It is good that Mathilde does not hear such talk. But Anna frightens me.”

  “At least she is no Milquetoast, David,” his father said. He shifted his weight in the armchair, and stroked his whiskers. They were nearly white now, barely tinged with gray. But still his blue eyes shone with keenness. “Anna has character, even if she is misguided. Which leads me to the point: why do you not guide her properly, David? Sasha tells me that two years ago there may have been something with the Berson boy. Heaven knows, I do not approve of the Berson girls, but Aron, their father, is a man with whom to side, financially. His enemies fear him. Why did the boy not come to you to propose?”

  “We do not know that it was ever serious between them. I rather liked Ivan. He used to come to tea. I must say, I did… entertain hopes. But Mathilde told me that she had spoken to Anna. Anna said they were merely friends. I do not want my daughters to marry men of my choice. Times have changed, and young girls now marry for love. I did the same. How could I try to force Anna, when I myself made such a definite choice, even as a child? I would not trade my Mathilde for any other woman.”

  The old gentleman regarded his son with a strange, bemused expression. But David pressed him suddenly: “You and Mama were my examples. You loved each other from the very first. Why should Anna not have the same opportunity?”

  But Horace was thinking of a transaction that had occurred in Paris almost a quarter of a century earlier. He recalled his father’s house on the Barrière de l’Etoile, where he and his brother Yuri had each possessed an apartment for their respective families. He saw himself once more, a rather somber, elegant man of early middle age, seated at his secretary; his brother, slightly younger and clothed with flamboyant good taste, his flowered waistcoat barely touching his growing embonpoint, smiling, smiling. That damned smile that had created so much scandal. He had sat—he, Horace—composing the financial agreement that would bind his young niece, Mathilde, to his son, David, and all the while he had felt pangs of conscience. Had he not noticed how this calm, serene young girl, with her slim waist and thick hair, had looked with longing at Sasha? Had she not sat one day at her window, dreamily ignoring David who sat entranced by her side? Horace had been in the street below, about to climb into his carriage, and he had seen the two young people and caught their expressions. Space, empty space, seemed more romantic to
his niece than his own favorite son. For a brief moment, then and there, Horace had felt a stab of pity, and then once more, when he had signed the agreement. But Yuri had merely looked triumphant. “They say I breed beautiful daughters,” he had said, to goad his brother. But Horace had ignored the lewd implication. He had thrust the paper into Yuri’s waiting hand, all the time telling himself that David would love Mathilde, that David was his own child, that every man must learn to make certain compromises. Now he wondered, permitting doubt to play with his thoughts.

  “I miss her,” David was saying. “I miss her scent, I miss her silly way of gathering her breadcrumbs to the side of her plate. Do you know that Sonia has picked up this habit? I miss Sonia, too. And the boys. Ossip will have so much to catch up on for his classes. I wonder how the Tagantsev boy is doing, without my son? They have become so inseparable.”

  “I do not approve of this friendship,” Horace said abruptly.

  “I am not totally in favor of it myself, Papa,” David sighed. “But Mathilde is happy. She feels that Ossip needed a truly good friend, a soul-brother, and that Volodia just happens to be the one.”

  “And that Dutchwoman, Johanna de Mey? Is that what she has become for your wife, David? A soul-sister?” Horace de Gunzburg watched as his son’s features began to tighten.