I sensed he was talking to me alone.
Mother, when she cared, could hold her own, teasing, flattering, with the strengths of contrast. Her flimsy gowns, bare shoulders, her jewels and scents, low exclamations and rippling laugh, could shelter slyness, the subtlety of the weak. Her flirtatiousness was akin to her childish handwriting and petulance at cards.
From her chatter and music I now judge that, for her, the presentation of a rose or visiting card outmatched the thunder of war and revolution. In her presence, the telephone was uncannily alive, transforming her from indolence to laughter, from silky drowsiness on tasselled, cloudy cushions to an excited rush to the hall. I absorbed hearing her English childhood: grandmother’s escapades at Windsor, a formal shoot to which certain people could not be invited, laments when the old queen died.
Father, with his polite withdrawals, was less vivid. I did not then realize that they could seldom be seen talking together with any intimacy. For them to saunter hand in hand through Forest was unthinkable. At the brilliant dinner-table they held fine balance. Father’s grave dignity held pace with the Herr General’s ebullience, Mother’s glistening skin and eyes redressing the weight of ageing ladies and whiskered, boiled-looking gentlemen.
I was often fascinated by adults, less by recondite allusions than by chance details: a footman’s white gloves fluttering like butterflies behind tidy heads; clutches of candle-lit roses in slim silver shafts; a dead moth on a lady’s hair; a glance, queerly secretive, darting between a hussar major and a young lady whom I had earlier seen introduced to each other as strangers. One old lady, always in twinkling black, regularly allowed me a single, unchanging remark – did I know that cats’ eyes expanded with the moon? – then, duty done, ignoring me, to mutual satisfaction.
When disregarded, I yet felt particularly strong. My sharply cut goblet, when upright, reflected people as composed, secure, but, when tilted, made them caricatures: faces were smothered by beards or noses, collapsed into oblongs, blobs, slashes; a magnified earring, at a hand-shift, vanished into an abnormally swollen neck.
Most adults were scarcely distinct from the animals they so cherished. Elderly aunts were covered by hard, cracking rind, grandee cousins very possibly had tails, high-heeled ladies stepped precariously, like water-birds, others resembled lame kangaroos. All women flourished plumes, furs, skins: they shuffled, fluttered, preened; they frisked, nuzzled, rumbled, clucked and clicked; they pecked and embraced in small, ritual gestures, then stalked back to their dens. Some, like overweight hippos, lay in mud baths at Kunessaare, scarcely breathing, their curved bellies doubtless platforms for coffee or herons. Periodically they lifted a snout, grunted, laboriously rubbed against sludge, then relaxed in bubbles.
I remember Gerda von Hörsen, so obedient to her husband that, on his death, she neighed slightly, then followed, quietly dying.
Table talk was in German, with French interpolations whenever something should be kept from servants. Herr Max might place a silver cock between the candles, during over-heated discussion, the traditional precaution against ill will. Now, 1938, disagreeable flavours made the cock more necessary. Several names always attracted dispute, diplomatic coughs, alarming silence. The Reich was a rampart against Russia. I heard a joke about Hector, tamer of horses, and Herr Churchill, wearer of hats. All I know of the latter was that Mother once called him Mr Chatterbox.
Our group mostly had sentimental regard, though scarcely active loyalty, not to Konstantin Päts, former peasant, now president of Estonia, but to the High Gentleman, the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II. He was, however, mentioned less often than the Gutter King, ersatz Wolf, the Führer, much praised for promising that Germany would never injure European peace. Though the Herr General was conspicuously silent, most agreed that with the mounting Czech crisis, the Wehrmacht officers, modern knights, would depose the Führer and restore the Kaiser.
I could see Gutter King, dubious Wolf, as Robber-Knight in grass-green Loden jacket and foolish-looking shorts, prancing opposite the solid moustached Bear Chief in his golden-domed Moscow castle. Estate hands muttered, like their forebears, about the Russian Boot.
Faces flushed over the wine, tongues shook out half-stories.
‘Did you know, General, that precious Adolf informed the Reichsmarschall that he, Adolf, was the second Richard Wagner?’
The Herr General’s smile, often lopsided, went full and boyish. ‘I would not be astonished if Hermann failed to identify the first.’
A quip about Goering as Marshal of Telephones eluded me: I could imagine only a tusked warlord detained from battle by immoderate love of talk.
‘Flying champion though he was,’ the Herr General continued, ‘rather lovable in certain lights, I am sometimes forced to wonder whether, in all meanings save the most blatant, he has sufficient stomach.’
That he was ever forced into anything was as unbelievable as the legendary bridge made from fingernails of the dead.
‘Well, you know him, General. After your Karinhall hunts …’
‘I’ve taken care, Hilde, to be on respectful terms. He’s the Corporal’s only trustworthy friend.’
Unexpectedly he looked across at me and winked. I pitied the lonely Corporal, abandoned by all save Reichsmarschall and Herr General, and wondered who he was.
‘I will never forget my first sight of Goering.’ The Herr General turned to Mother, her eyes round as coins, brightly admiring. ‘He was in toga planted with emeralds, gold shorts, gold sandals, toenails crimson. More jewels in his scabbard. He had artificial tan, pasted thick, eyelids smeared blue. The lion beside him was as tame as his hounds.’
Germania in person. And lion! Also, the pistol, perhaps, perhaps not, in the Herr General’s pocket. And Pahlen, laughing with the Tsar he was to kill.
Debate swung to the Spanish Civil War, which, apparently, the Führer wished to prolong, mortally to divide Russia, France, Britain, Italy. The Herr General, conversational, lucid, attentive to Mother, punctiliously mindful of Father as host, frequently paused for assent without imposing it.
‘I’m archaic, Theo. A cave-monster. I regret the decline of duelling. The duel is prompt, vivid, conclusive. As for the widow we discussed earlier, I remember not her taste for duelling but her head for heights. She married successively a Hessian margrave, a French duke, though of Bonaparte variety, and a Bavarian prince with blood he assumed older than Adam’s.’
Mother led a flurry of laughter, Father smiled but as if at something else. Afterwards, in the Turret, I coveted gold lion, jewelled toga, then thought of bloodied feet dancing towards me in red shoes. I drifted against an Estonian poem Father had translated for me:
What they built in morning had fallen by noon,
What they raised at noon was broken by sundown,
Twelve masons conferred, as I have heard tell,
What must be done to maintain the wall?
She of my wives the first to arrive,
Her ashes so sweet we must mix in the lime.
4
Light summer nights; northern glimmer opened swiftly on spectacular dawns and shrill birds. More phrases, overheard or plucked from books: Fearful Outcome, First Equerry, The Great Gate of Kiev, Unnatural Practices. Masturbation gave access to further delights, though, when boasting to a stable-lad, his crude rejoinder showed these were not unique.
I read greedily about the French Revolution, more engrossed with chance episodes than in principles: M. Dutart, arrested on suspicion of being suspect; Mirabeau’s thunder; citizens denouncing themselves, transfixed by the bright glow of Sainte Guillotine. The Revolutionary Calendar was beautiful: Month of Buds, Month of Flowers, Meadow Month, Harvest Month.
Less instructive was school, a modernized hunting lodge for sons of Germanic gentry. Later, I must go to the Domschule at Reval, then to the German-dominated Tartu University. Lessons were strict and dull. I had no intimates, no enemies, desired neither promotion nor demotion, sat secure in private knowledge.Yet my fellows were pl
easant, their parents family friends, always meeting at picnics, tennis, sailings down the Sound. Girls were aloof, guarded by Swedish nannies, at tennis moving with straight legs. What were they like? Impossible to ask. Paintings, statues might deceive, books were evasive, movies out of reach.
For companions I preferred coarse estate trainees, who, dodging work, would join me swimming, riding, climbing. Mihkel, Aadu, Juri. They asked my help in writing or reading German, sometimes asking about the Reich’s New Order.
On long summer afternoons families sailed to ‘Ogygia Island’, for wine, roaming cliffs and rocks, children’s games, the wide sands tropical in intensity of light. I began stories: ‘Es war einmal …’
Mother promised me a trip across water to Helsinki, always forgetting to do so, though apt to speak as if we had already been there. I had seen Reval and admired the copper spires.We stayed at the Lion d’Or, near Catherine the Great’s Kadriov Palace. ‘She added twenty-five thousand versts to her empire,’ Father said. ‘You might not consider this womanly restraint.’
Days were familiar but not monotonous. In the library Father would be reading, reading, reading, Mother entertaining friends, as if dreading loneliness, though loneliness, I now knew, was not the same as being alone. Pahlen would have understood. Then a hand might descend on my shoulder. The Herr General and Caspar had returned from Reval, Warsaw, Berlin, requesting, as he put it, the honour of my company. He knew my eagerness for tales of the Wide World. General Skobelov ordering himself to be whipped to death by ladies in a ‘Moscow hotel’.
Together we observed April wood-sorrel under fresh leaves, blue speedwell, mayflies quivering above greeny-white water, the November heron. He spoke of marshy Estonian humour, adding that we could well do without it. He described the Teutonic Knights and hunger for the East, hitherto dangerous for Germany. ‘It will need a fiery dragon to extirpate it.’
Unable to recognize ‘extirpate’, I imagined him commanding the Right Wing, dispersing communists and Germany’s eastern enemies with a flick of a whip, like an English lord. That he could ever undergo Rising Tide was unthinkable. He often laughed at himself but with the stance of one who could easily afford it. ‘Our Herr General is a poet.’ Father’s voice was inexpressive.
The Herr General stood with me, while birds rustled, the sky blue pieces between leaves. He shrugged at a passing woodman, bowed, trudging, saluting him like a teacher compassionate to a pupil under detention.
‘Swedes once ruled here, better than our animal knights, prisoners of the toxic. I’ve heard a farmer sigh for what he called the Golden Swedes, as if he remembered them himself. Later, these regions were mutilated in Peter’s Great Northern War with Sweden. This was the Great Wrath. Forests in flames, fields blackened, all towns destroyed, except Reval. Kalmuks, Peter’s delight but most primitive of the eastern hordes, he ordered to stamp down any survivals. People, beasts, plants. His generalissimo soon boasted that nothing remained to destroy. He was the only cock left crowing from Lake Peipus to the Gulf of Riga. We Germans supported the Tsar, to maintain our position.’
The Great Wrath. Peasants’ ears and noses severed in heaps. I shivered in delicious horror, glad that Europe would never again endure such pain. But what was toxic?
The Herr General’s eyes, clear blue, occasionally grey, gazed beyond the hedge. ‘The Estonians clung to us like burrs, though we despised them as Mischling, which you can render as Inferior Stock.’ Elder-brother smile. ‘During the delicate, high-stepping era of Lermontov, Mozart, Scott, Goethe, the peasants were actually imploring us not to renounce rights to flog them. They regarded this as a sort of love, as wives did their men’s brutality. Inferior Stock was becalmed in what I call Africa: animal, instinctive, stagnant. Estonian children could be sold for a handful of roubles, a bottle of vodka or kaas, for a cartwheel, a hound of suspect breeding, even for an old pipe.With post-war native independence, we Germans have had to share some of the cake.’
His voice, deep, fluent, could also change colour. Now it darkened. ‘These people, with their little parliament, busy agrarian unions, their pretty army, are learning to organize. We must remember to look over our shoulders.’
Involuntarily, I did so, made foolish by his pretence of not noticing but knowing I must reconsider our servants and retainers. There was frequent talk of Estonians on farms confiscated from the High Folk but behaving more harshly.
The Herr General gently pressed my arm. ‘Other matters may, quite soon, concern you more directly.You could see butcher-boy Stalin fulfilling Tsar Peter’s testament. He directed that Russia should expand without conscience, at whatever cost. One way of uniting Europe.’
We were walking back. ‘My great-grandfather, Erich, a privy councillor at the Russian court, desired universities, academies, high schools, but to exclude offspring of cooks, washerwomen, cobblers, fishmongers, domestics and Jews. He was killed, probably very justly, during the Polish rebellion.’
5
Foreign names were being repeated, greeted with disdainful pouts, approving nods, difficult silences. Colonel Beck, General Franco, Litvinov, Chamberlain – the English Mr J’aime Berlin. Prague, Memel, Danzig, Geneva, the League. England, Mother was told, reproachfully, coveted military bases in Estonia, possibly to pass to Russia in an anti-German deal. I might have English cousins selling Gulf harbours in a spirit of fun. In sly attentiveness, I heard talk of Russia preparing to attack Finland.
In America, realm of gangsters and huge cars, a youth, in protest of having been born, was suing his parents.
Father was speaking even less, Mother chattered like a hungry bird or Mr Churchill. The Herr General, though preparing for another journey, another adventure, sat with us, intervening only when asked to, as arguments flowed between faces ageing and well-fed.
‘Four prima donnas descending on Munich, eh? Well, we’ll hear whatever they choose to tell us.’
‘A city for the cultured drinker. For ladies, too expensive. First-class toys. And down at Schwabing, despite the squalor, you’ll find attempts at genuine art. Some mysticism, very elementary.’
The Munich Crisis bottled up a new war.We heard on the wireless the Reichsmarschall address the Czechs. ‘I pledge my word of honour that we only want better relations between us.’
Our spring came early, a scherzo of satiny buds, waterside harebells, swallows darting into reeds. But, without warning, two neighbouring families departed to Germany, leaving their estates for sale. Our own friends. Tenants began emigrating, or fleeing to Poland, abandoning their leases. A visitor informed us that the White Lady of Padiski had been seen trailing through a ballroom, an apparition foretelling trouble unless she carried a cowslip.
Mother trilled with gaiety. ‘So tell me, Joseph, what was she carrying?’
‘Nothing, dearest lady. Nothing at all.’
Yesterday, amid snowstorms, the German army had seized Czechoslovakia. Back with us in green and brown riding attire and a regimental tie certainly not Estonian, the Herr General joined us in the Small Drawing-Room, sitting, slightly apart by the fire, as if in a stage-box, while others closed in over schnapps and dispute.
A paunched, spade-bearded old gentleman, Alpine climber, President of the Ritterschaft, Court of Honour of the Baltic Nobility, grunted like a badger. ‘Should it come …’ he dropped the words, rather than passing them, ‘our interests will be respected. The Führer needs us. We, it may appear, need him. The country, too, of course. He’s scarcely the last word in culture, but he knows his own mind about the Soviet eczema.’
‘Tonight he sleeps in Prague. Castle of the Bohemian Kings. Queer contrast. But he’s not the worse of our continent’s afflictions.’
‘Questionable means, I suppose. Nevertheless, Bismarck himself … But we can trust him not to distribute bon-bons to those we need not name.’
‘Lithuania should surrender Memel. That can only strengthen us against the Bear. I understand that the good gentlemen in Reval have rejected the Kremlin’s guarantee o
f frontiers.’
‘Rightly so. That Georgian cannibal’s lost in a swamp, having butchered his officer corps and party élite. Scoundrels devour scoundrels as France so often showed, while showing little else. God be praised, the Reds have never been weaker. The Estonian Parliament, where foolishness is not unknown, at least knows how to treat communism. But an ungrateful lot. Dr Goebbels maintains that grumbling is the soul shitting. Not how his wife would express it, or so I suppose.With my own ears I heard …’ His ears, high and pointed as a goblin’s.
‘Those that live by the sword, Kurt … for once the Saviour’s text may be amply justified, apparently in Finland. If we ourselves must choose between Bear and Wolf …’
‘But is there a choice, Bruno? Our little Burgomaster, Päts …’
‘The choice is within our grasp. Perfect chalice, I could say Grail, Baltic independence, whatever the Finnish digression, suits the Great Powers. Cordon sanitaire, to put it so. The newspaper public is fatalistic, waiting for something to happen, while the lout in Moscow, the booming patrician in Washington, my Lord Halifax and the rest, dangle their gifts, few though they may be.’
The slabbed, mottled features grimaced as if over a chosen cigar, and still the Herr General warmed his hands, silent, but attentive as the voice continued. ‘Europe manoeuvres, it scarcely evolves. In its disunity is our safety. The Wolf cannot mate with the Bear, so smaller creatures can sit in the sun. But conceivably the time of lean kine and glutton philosophy is ending. So …’
Though he was wholly ignored, I suddenly fancied that Herr Max, formally black and white, dispensing liqueurs, had become more eavesdropper than servant. Then, exhausted, the chipped faces curved in one motion to the big man by the fire.
The Herr General’s nod was deceptively apologetic. ‘I have long had the notion, it would be presumptuous to call it more, but simple, and vital as a comma.Your newspaper public, Luther’s Herr Omnes, remains in astrological time, while dependent on science. The mystique of stars, oaths, flags, numbers … to escape this would be genuine revolution, not yet accomplished, barely attempted. And in any age, life had convinced me that history is maintained by a Ten Per Cent Factor. About this proportion passionately loves art, religion, charity. The equivalent is equally passionate in hating them. The remainder drift, at behest of fashion and leadership. This clarifies contemporary events, and, since you were discussing choice, surely this is already made. The lean kine are selected for requisite disposal.’
Secret Protocols Page 3