Encore (40 page)

At the beginning of November, Dr. Combes had said to her: “There's more and more protein in his urine. The kidneys are degenerating, Countess. It's nephrosis.”

She nodded mutely. What was there to say?

Natalia practiced ballet movements in her living room several hours a day. Only then did she feel lifted out of herself, out of this baser being that had engendered nephrosis in a newborn child. These were her only moments of peace.

Her worst times came when she received a letter from her husband. They had only just begun to reach her and took so long in arriving that the news was already stale by the time she received it. Boris, however, came alive for her through his words. Better not to have been so acutely reminded of his reality.

“My love,” he wrote,

If you still hate me for having abandoned you, then you'll be maliciously pleased at my discomfiture here. I had imagined battles filled with blood and glory, with your humble servant—what an inappropriate epithet!—leading a battalion forward, bayonets pointing to the morning star. Instead, I am attached to the Headquarters of the Division Sauvage, where the closest I come to a bayonet is when I sharpen a pencil. A truly creative endeavor.

Because of my title and standing—which seem to throw the rest of humanity into quite a turmoil, both good and bad—I am at present the bearer of the rank of major. Like my golden hair, it's only a facade, however. Svetlov got me in, and my fellow Sauvages are loath to trust me. What do I know of the trenches, I, dilettante
par excellence?
Who can blame them for their lack of enthusiasm? But at Divisional Headquarters I do the same paperwork as I used to do for the Ballets Russes, and our heroic savages are less entertaining than Serge. I wax impatient by the minute and squirm at the vision of your superior disdain as you read this woeful missive. Perhaps I was a fool after all, Natalia. I wonder if Arkady remembers me. Of course I know this is absurd. I am relieved beyond words to know that you are both in Switzerland, on neutral ground, and that Dr. Combes is taking care of our son. When I think of him, I cease to care what they will do with me here and remain quite content with my ineffectual activities among the pencils. For then I start to care about life as never before. He is so small, so frail, and he does need me. Even you, Natalia, are strong and independent, and will never need me as that little creature already does. How we two cynics, we two atheistic sinners ever came to form him, to bring forth the miracle of him, is still to me the greatest wonder of all. I shall have lived for something, after all.

The story of your adventures leaving Darmstadt frightened me more than the nearness of the Turks to Tiflis, where we are stationed. Only you could have managed such an escape and survived. You're right, I am despicable, to have left you to your own devices. Still, you have to admit that those devices were ingenious and worthy of all my faith in you. You are the better part of me, without doubt. But even so, is that a good thing? Before you I was without conscience, outlined in black. But if Pierre were to paint me now, in spite of your softening influence, he'd still omit pure white from his palette.

It is natural that I think of him now and then, darling, for I am in his native habitat here in Georgia. This is where he played and romped and had his black-haired maidens. How strange life can be, setting me down here of all places! Tiflis is a beautiful city, but our patrol squads travel far out to peer over the crested mountains. I envy them! A Turk would lend more color to my existence than those bloody pencils—pardon the pun. For you, in Lausanne, it must be the same: Boring routine and the same faces, no?

We shall have our summer home in Monte Carlo. Plan

its decor. It's about time you worked on a house, isn't it? Every place we've had is imprinted with my ineffable good taste, and people have begun to wonder just how bad yours might be. Gossip can kill a marriage: Prove them wrong, my darling, and then we can pick up the pieces of our life.

Seriously, seriously, that's what I want: to pick up the jagged puzzle pieces and put back our life, yours and mine and Arkady's. The Caucasus has brought out an oddly annoying sentimentality in me. Learn to overlook it, will you? I love you and belong to you forever, if you'll still have me. I can't go on too much longer without you.

How to survive such letters? How to read them without starting to tremble, without weeping? But she wasn't weeping. Her tear ducts appeared to have dried out from worry about Arkady. She wrote to Boris because it would have been unthinkable not to—what would he have thought, so removed from the mainstream of life? That she no longer loved him? Or that something truly tragic had occurred? She knew that he loved the boy more than he had ever thought he would be capable of loving another human being. Sometimes she even felt jealous of her own son. To relate the illness, the progressive degeneration that Combes did not seem able to stop, would have been sadistic: One did not pull the life out of a man so close to combat. Besides, if she refused to acknowledge the nephrosis, perhaps it would go away.

Pierre did not write and did not come to see her. She had learned from Medveyev that the painter had moved to Locarno, on the Lago Maggiore. She remembered when she had written to break off their relationship in St. Petersburg, six years before. He had succeeded in shutting her out completely. He thought that she and Boris had each played with his life, pushing him in and out of their own lives at will. Perhaps he was right. Threesomes don't work, she thought. We can't love you, Pierre. We can only love each other. Had we lived in an enlightened society, the three of us might have tried to love each other and live together in understanding. But it wouldn't have worked! Somehow, some way, someone would have felt forced out, loved less.

By December, when the small lake had thoroughly frozen over and Lausanne was indistinguishable from every other Swiss town beneath its hood of snow, Natalia's existence had become regulated by her routines. Outside of them, her mind did not function. She rose and went to the hospital, saw Arkady, went home, exercised, went for a walk, and returned to eat and write meaningless letters. She could not even read through the nonsense of others' missives. She read only Boris's. Sometimes she would bite her lip until it bled to drown out the pain. Then she would eat a light supper and go to bed. She had forgotten that she had ever danced on a stage or been married to a man of flesh and blood.

Dr. Combes worried about her. “You're wasting away,” he said gently. “Are you still not sleeping?”

“On and off. I have nightmares. I see Arkasha's face. All I can see are the eyes, and they're eating me alive.”

“Have you been taking the pills I ordered for you?” Combes asked.

“No. I don't care anymore whether I sleep or not.”

But the Swiss physician frowned and said: “Punishing yourself isn't doing the child a bit of good. Do you want to let yourself die?”

Natalia's enormous eyes, so like her son's, fastened on his thin, craggy face. “Because that's what's happening to him, isn't it?” she said dully. “He's dying.” And then, in a sudden wail: “You're letting him die! Why, Doctor, why? Why don't you just inject him with poison and be done with it?”

Combes did not answer. Slowly Natalia's eyes filled with tears, and the tears overflowed onto her thin, colorless cheeks. “I never wanted a child,” she said.

A week before Christmas 1914, Natalia arrived early at the children's wing of the hospital. She walked into Arkady's room, for which she was paying a small fortune. He was so tiny among the white sheets, in a child's bed, which was too large for him. Why hadn't they simply put him in a crib? His small body was turned to her, and he was sleeping. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at him. All alone, covered with patches where the needles had been inserted, he slept, his features drawn. They had to feed him through tubes now, but today he was singularly free of them, alone in the cot, almost normal in his stillness. Natalia touched his forehead and could not breathe.

My child, my own, myself. Do something, do something! Children your age crawl everywhere. I saw one at the lake yesterday; he made me think of you. He was just beginning to walk. You're nine months old now; maybe you'll walk soon. Why don't you open your eyes and say my name, Arkasha? “Mama.” My name.

Why don't they paint the children's rooms a different color? Something bright and cheerful to encourage you to live. Your papa, whose bright joy you are, would hang this room with Lyon silk, but I'd have my say, and pick something plebeian, such as checkered wallpaper. To make you laugh. Or smile, at least. Why can't you smile? You've never once smiled at me. Am I such a bad mama that I don't deserve a smile?

She kneeled down to stare at the sleeping face and touched the tip of his nose. When are they going to put the tubes back in and feed you? How much do you weigh now? They don't tell me anymore; they're afraid I'll become hysterical.

Natalia sat, mesmerized by the sleeping child. Why was no one there? No nurses, no doctor. She stood up, unsteadily, and moved to the open door. No one was in the corridor. Then she heard a small whimper and started. The child on the bed had moved, spasmodically. She ran to him and took his hand. It was limp. She stroked his forehead again. Then, wildly, she began to scream: “Somebody, somebody come! Somebody come now!”

A nurse, clothed in the standard white uniform, brushed past her into the room. She went to the cot and sat down. Natalia saw her expert hands feel his face, his pulse, his chest. Slowly she turned to Natalia and regarded her without saying a word. She was a plump, middle-aged woman, and now her chin trembled.

But Natalia did not tremble. She asked: “Why was no one here? Why weren't the tubes in?”

The nurse shook her head listlessly from side to side. “Countess, Countess. Dr. Combes told you last week that we were stopping the intravenous feedings. I'm so sorry.”

But Natalia couldn't remember. “Dr. Combes? He said that? Really? But why?”

Now the nurse looked away at a speck of dirt on the wall. Her voice was so low that Natalia had to strain to hear it. “Because,” the nurse answered, “nothing was doing him any good anymore.”

Natalia blinked. She stood before the nurse, a diminutive figure in a cape of black sable. “So what are you going to try now?” she asked in a cold, matter-of-fact voice.

The nurse seemed taken aback. She twisted her hands together. Then she cried out: “I'm so sorry, Countess! Your son is dead. He just passed away. I thought you were aware of it, and that this was why you'd summoned me. I—”

“He isn't dead,” Natalia stated firmly. Her eyes appeared totally vacant. The nurse reached for a cord above the bed and pulled on it frantically. She had seen many cases of grief prostration, but never such a calm, assured denial. Natalia sat down on the chair that faced the bed and said to the nurse: “Of course he wouldn't die, just like that. I've never been sick in my life, and my husband is as healthy as I. Our child is still alive, and you will be fired for lying to me this way. Dr. Combes will be shocked that you could be so cruel for no reason. I have never disliked you, Nurse Trévin. Why do you hate me, then?”

But Dr. Combes, roused by the alert, had entered the room. He went first to examine the baby and exchanged glances with the nurse. Then he placed his hands on Natalia's shoulders, looked into her glassy eyes, and said: “Countess Kussova, this is dreadful for you. Dreadful for all of us. Please, let me keep you in the hospital tonight, under sedation. You haven't slept in days.”

Suddenly she sprang up, throwing off Combes's hands. Her face was alive again and twisted into a grimace of total horror as, finally, the truth hit the bottom of her soul. “You want me to stay here, where you have killed my child?” she exclaimed. “Here? Do you think I shall let you kill me, too? You are all butchers and murderers, and one day you will pay for this! One day you will awaken in hell, and—and—”

She collapsed on the floor, her face drenched with tears, and Combes and Nurse Trévin watched in shock as she began to tear out her hair in clumps. The doctor kneeled down and took hold of her hands to restrain her. She spat in his face. Then, just as suddenly as this had begun, her paroxysm of hatred and self-loathing died down. Her eyes closed, and she lay back, un-moving. Nurse Trévin began to cry.

Several hours later Natalia regained consciousness in a small, white hospital room. She was in a large cot, in infirmary clothes. She got out of bed and swayed unsteadily on her feet but went to the chair where she had noticed her clothes. Silently she dressed. She pulled the cord to summon a nurse. “Please inform Dr. Combes that I'm going home,” she said to the bewildered young woman. “I'm going home and I shall never come back again. Let him make all the arrangements. I shall pay the bill, but I don't ever want to see him again—not ever.”

“The doctor?” asked the young nurse.

Natalia shook her head impatiently. “No, my son,” she replied. “From now on I've never had a son. The doctor was going to take care of him, so I'm going to let him: He can take better care of him now than he could when he was alive. Tell him that for me.”

She adjusted the collar on her sable cape and walked out.

P
ierre Riazhin slammed
the fist of one I hand into the palm of the other. “I'm not the one to do it,” he said. “I'm sorry you've wasted your time coming out here.”

Nicolai Medveyev, the Russian consul from Basel, scratched the top of his head and sat pensively in front of the fireplace. They were in the living room of the small chalet that Pierre was renting in Locarno, in Italian Switzerland. “Still,” he insisted, “it's imperative that Boris Vassilievitch be told. For such a delicate task, only someone close to the Kussovs should be chosen. She refuses to write to him about their son, but he has a right to know.”

“If she refuses, then it is her decision. I no longer wish to involve myself in their affairs. This story, tragic though it may be, does not concern me.” Pierre sat down abruptly in front of Medveyev.

“You are a hard man, Pierre Grigorievitch. If you had only seen her! She's moved out of the villa in Lausanne, and that's understandable, given the suffering she's had to endure in that city. She's taken up residence in Geneva. I fear for her sanity.”

A spasm of emotion passed over Pierre's face, but when he turned to look at his guest, there was only grim resolution in his black eyes. “Nicolai Petrovitch,” he said slowly, “you could not possibly understand why I don't choose to go to Natalia Dmitrievna. Each person has his own anguish to bear, and I've had mine. She's a strong girl. I've known her a long time, and she's never lost her hold on reality, as for her husband, there could not exist a less feeling individual on the face of this earth. Write to him. He'll survive. Little children die every day, and they're two healthy people. When he returns home from his dabble in heroism, he can make her a number of other babies.”

Medveyev stood up, his drawn features white, his frame shaking with suppressed indignation. “You are not a man, Pierre Grigorievitch,” he whispered. “Have you no heart? A vague acquaintance should not be the person to write to a father about the death of his only son. If you will not do it for the count, or for her—then you owe
me
this favor. I took you in, I arranged to obtain false entry papers for you, a resident's visa—and in return I ask only this.”

Pierre sat down, the muscles in his legs visibly twitching beneath the broadcloth trousers. “Very well!” he cried, color flowing into his cheeks. “I'll write the damned letter for you. But don't ask anything else of me, Nicolai Petrovitch. Don't ever ask it!”

The brilliant sunlight made tiny dots, like golden buttercups, on the white snow and on the blue tips of the pine trees. Pierre looked out the window over the large Lago Maggiore, almost purple in its depth, and ran his fingers through his thick curls. Perspiration ran in rivulets down his temples, and the whites of his eyes were shot with red. The Kussovs always came out the winners, he thought, resentment swelling again within him. Even when they lost, he lost even more.

These people have invaded my life, my soul, my consciousness, he thought. The golden count and his dancing Sugar Plum Fairy. They had excluded him and made a cocoon to protect themselves from the world, shutting him out, hating him.

Blood throbbing in his throat, Pierre raised his head and examined the vellum in front of him. Boris would be doubly hurt at receiving word through Pierre, and this, then, would be justice. He dipped his pen in the inkwell and began to write. Words had never come easily to Pierre, and he tried to imagine Boris in the Caucasus, reading about his son's death and his wife's withdrawal. An unexpected stab shot through his middle. He couldn't picture the child dead, not when he'd held him in the heather, when he'd risked his own life to help save him. Suddenly he felt the pain of Natalia's loss, imagining her arms hanging limp without Arkady. “Boris:” he began stiffly:

Consul Nicolai Medveyev suggested that the task of writing to you should fall on me as a friend of the Kussov family. You needn't be told that I demurred. Our friendship came to an end long ago. But Medveyev does not know the particulars.

First of all, I do wish to assure you that what I am about to relate came to me through Nicolai Petrovich Medveyev, and not firsthand. For whatever it's worth to you, Natalia hasn't loved me for a long time. I helped her to escape from Germany in memory of the past. There is nothing whatsoever between us. This said, the news I bring is bad—the worst, I'm afraid.

Little Arkady passed away. He'd suffered all his life from faulty kidneys, and his death was no more painful than the nine months that he was alive. Natalia, Medveyev tells me, could not write to you about it. He says that she has gone to Geneva, and I'm certain you can reach her at the address he's given me, which I'm enclosing. She's distressed and refuses to see the Medveyevs, who had been friendly to her since her arrival in Switzerland. Probably a letter from you would help her to adjust. She is afraid that all this is her fault and that you won't forgive her. There's nothing I can hope to accomplish on her behalf, so I will not go there to call on her. But if she needs a friend, Igor Stravinsky is in Switzerland too, I've been told. She is your wife, and I have finished meddling in her life and yours.

I must add that I am truly sorry. Words, as usual, fail me totally. Whatever ill feelings may have passed between us, I don't think even you deserve to be hurt this way. No human being does, and having been the one to convey this message has helped me to understand how truly wrong war is to separate families and countries from each other. Arkady is the first war casualty for whom I have wept. Pierre laid down his pen and shut his eyes. It the letter sounded dry, heartless, and inarticulate, then so be it. He'd done the best he could, under the circumstances, and damned be the Kussovs and Medveyev.

In the late fall of 1914 an exchange of gravely wounded prisoners had been established between the Allies and members of the Central Powers. Convoys of French as well as German veterans passed through Geneva on their way home. Each night at midnight and again at three in the morning, a train would stop on either side of the tracks at the large terminal. Women in Red Cross uniforms would wait on the platform and dispense bandages, chocolate bars, and coffee. Society ladies who had volunteered as nurses would come to help, bringing the treats onto the trains to the soldiers. A crowd always gathered to watch, to see how bad the gaping faces looked, but also to lend support to those who had lost limbs for their various countries.

The hospitals from which the prisoners came were short of bandages, medicines, and disinfectants, and those on convoy trains suffered most from this scarcity. In Geneva the halt at the station took a long time, while officials checked papers and went over formalities. The nurses, therefore, could take their bundles onto the train cars at leisure and sit in turn by each patient, changing dressings and administering tranquilizers, helping the men to drink hot coffee, and leaving them chocolate bars and cigarettes. The military commander of the Place de Geneve, a Swiss colonel named Rodolphe Senglet, was in charge of these proceedings. It was his duty to make certain that all went smoothly.

When Natalia left Lausanne, she went to the nearest city that was large enough to guarantee her anonymity but familiar enough to make her adjustment relatively easy. Her bank account was in Geneva, and there was sufficient activity to drown out her thoughts. She had trouble finding a hotel that could accommodate her, but at length she was given a comfortable room at the Hotel Metropole. She did not care about the opulence of her surroundings because she had really ceased to care about herself, but the Metropole was centrally located, and she needed that so as not to feel isolated.

The town, though busy and filled with foreigners who had been caught there by the outbreak of war, was operating in slow motion. It had become a women's town. The Swiss men had been mobilized to ensure their country's neutrality, by protecting its frail borders. The old, the weak, and hordes of female citizens and visitors had taken over their soldiers' previous occupations. Natalia was in shock, and saw this different Geneva without interpreting how its changed aspect might affect her. Nothing was real to her anymore. If she encountered Boy Scouts throughout the city streets, running errands on their bicycles, they were not worth considering—just another volunteer group helping to keep the city alive and functioning.

Natalia went at once to sign up for nurse's training. In the hospital she made herself look straight at the white walls and learned to wear the starched uniform as a punishment. She felt fundamentally unclean and guilty, and this service, she thought, would be her expiation. She believed that blood cleansed blood, that only by immersing herself in the suffering of others would she be able to forget the suffering of her son. She had always faced the inevitable with uncommon staunchness; now she attacked the healing profession in the same indomitable manner. The doctors and other trainees found her oddly unflinching—even in the worst of circumstances.

In January the group in which Natalia was training began to greet the convoy trains of the gravely wounded. It was extremely cold, and patches of ice lined the platform on which she stood with the other volunteer nurses. Over her uniform Natalia wore a long velvet cape of dusky rose, with silver fox trimmings at the collar and hem. She felt goose bumps shiver over her skin but ignored them as she did all physical discomforts. The more her body ached, the more vindictive she felt against her own infirmities.

The crowd was loud and dense that night. Young boys and girls tense with wartime excitement shouted in the darkness. Old men and women peered about them with owlish fascination. A train pulled in, whistling shrilly, and a sudden pain shot through Natalia as a picture of the dead colonel flashed through her mind. This was a French convoy, and the Swiss, who were Francophiles, ran up to the cars and waved, their handkerchiefs and scarves dancing in the cold winter wind, banners of joy. Natalia took her bundle of foodstuffs and dressings and climbed aboard.

In the first compartment she paused in the doorway for a quick intake of breath. The face staring at her drained the color from her cheeks. One round eye, its brow and eyelid burned away, regarded her from one of the bunks, its mate completely swathed in dripping red bandages. From somewhere else a French voice called her, but, mesmerized, Natalia went toward the ghastly sight and sat down on the edge of the bunk. In a low, confident voice she said: “Hello. I'm Natalia Oblonova. What's your name?”

“Antoine Mayard. You're a beautiful lady. I haven't seen anyone like you in months.”

He sounded so young! “Shall I change your dressing?” Natalia asked, realizing how banal her words were, compared with the courage of his statement. Her staunchness began to give way. With increasingly trembling fingers, she unpinned the bandage around his head and saw a hole where the other eye had been. She could feel her stomach slowly turning, felt herself begin to gag. Then she thought: Who am I to be disgusted? His wounds are on the outside, while no one can see mine. But they're there, and they made Arkady die! She controlled her nausea, washed the blood from the empty socket, and applied a new gauze bandage.

Gently, she raised Antoine Mayard's head so that he could drink from a cup of hot coffee. Both his hands had dressings wrapped around them. Natalia wanted to weep. She felt like crying out: Why are you fighting? Why did you give up one of your eyes? Is the Archduke Ferdinand really your intimate concern, that you and my husband and Heinrich Püder should all be willing to die because of him? But Arkady had died for no reason, and Natalia remained silent.

When she climbed off the train, one of the Swiss nurses, Louise Dondel, said to her: “How can you do it? I saw him—such a dreadful wound. Did it make you sick to have to change it?”

“Yes,” Natalia replied in a soft, even voice. “That young man is in such pain, and there was so little I could do. Death and maiming make me sick, Louise. Because we can't control what happens to us.”

Another train was pulling in, this one with the German colors on it. All at once the crowd appeared to swell and began to roar. Next to Natalia, Louise had blanched, and Natalia heard her mutter: “The damned pigs! It's all their fault. Well, I'm not going. No one can make me!”

Horrid faces stared from the compartment windows, faces as ghastly as those of Antoine Mayard. The Swiss crowd was now hurling insults and obscenities at them, waving not banners but clenched fists. Rodolphe Senglet was pacing frantically about and shouting admonitions in a frantic effort to control the partisan feelings among his countrymen. In his colonel's uniform, with his trim mustache and Van Dyke beard, he resembled an elegant Swiss monkey. No one paid any attention to him.

Natalia stared at the frightened faces of the German prisoners. One of them had raised a handless arm to protect his eyes, as in the line of fire. Her heart, so often closed these days, suddenly burst open like a dam, and nameless fury shook her. She seized Louise Dondel by the arm and propelled her forward. “We are nurses, for God's sake!” she cried. “Get on that train or I shall push you onto it myself!”

Several startled faces turned to her. Natalia made her way to the stepladder and climbed to the train level. She stood above everyone else on the platform and placed her hands around her mouth to form a sound tunnel. “I can't believe it!” she exclaimed. “The Swiss are the only nation with an ounce of sense in this war. You, of all people, should understand that where a wounded man comes from is immaterial! He's wounded, and he needs care—and the rest simply doesn't matter! My husband is fighting on the Russian front, and so I have more reason to hate the Germans than you do. But I don't. I was helped once by a noble man, and he happened to be a German officer. So I'm going to go up there with bandages and coffee and some good words, and I'll be damned if I'll be the only one to go. We need every nurse on this platform!”