Blood Ties (10 page)

Standing in the arched entrance, she had very briefly
searched the faces of the guests. Which were her children? But she had turned
too quickly, fearful that the sight of them would dissipate her courage. She
needed the full measure of it now. She was finished with defeat. Konrad. The
name articulated whispered a mist onto the pane. Konrad, she spoke, calmly.
Your sons are here.

The Baron was surprised at the durability of his aging
carcass. He had worried about not being able to find the strength for this
dinner. Now he was delighted with himself, feeling some security, too, in the
knowledge that he might be able, after all, to sustain himself for the duration
of the reunion.

He watched Albert spinning around the dance floor with his
brother's wife. He had been surprised at the youth of the woman. Wolfgang
always had a romantic spirit, the urge to fantasize and idealize. So where did
it get him? In the end, there was only the von Kassels. He peered into the face
of little Aleksandr. The resemblance was clear. There was even a hint of his
grandfather. The irony warmed him.

The old Baron was forever the standard of his life, the
measure of his being. How sharply the images of his old grandfather returned.
Of course, Charles thought, he lives in me.

Perhaps it was the absence of place, the Estonian lands,
endless along the shores of the blue lake, that stoked these flames of memory.
Again he could smell the sweet salt-tinged Baltic breeze sweeping nightly into Tallinn, where they spent the season in their grand house in the Domberg. There the Baltic
Germans reigned supreme, content to savor their God-given rewards. Again he
could hear the hooves of von Kassel horses, backs gripped by von Kassel rulers,
sweeping through the villages on horseback, villages where every man, woman,
and child was von Kassel chattel, property to be bartered, no different from
animals.

He had seen his father whip a broad muscled peasant's back
in the center of one of the villages, watching the welts cut into the flesh and
the blood seep like jelly out of the open wounds. All the villagers watched,
mutely, as if the enforcement were for their own good as well. The peasant,
broad-faced and salivating, but not uttering a sound, had stolen some of the
von Kassel horses and had sold them to Russian peasants at the other end of the
lake.

Tears of anger had rolled down his father's cheeks, adding
fury to the whip's lash. The poor man was desperately trying to prove his
worthiness, but it was clear to his son, even then, that despite the peasant's
pain, the greater hurt was inside the man who held the whip. Therein lay his
father's flaw. Compassion could never interfere with command. To rule was to
know the power of fear.

On their estates, well guarded by what amounted to a small
army, were warehouses stocked with arms. Every vintage was represented, rifles
honed in England, pistols from Belgium, cannon cast in the Krupp works in Essen and carted East, left on some bloody battlefield to be bartered for profit by arms
scavengers. The von Kassels always provided a ready market for such goods.

Once, when he was very small, one of the powder warehouses
exploded and the villagers and the family gathered from the von Kassel lands to
watch the fireworks, a spectacular ear-splitting performance, the sounds of
which could still reverberate in his memory.

"That sound is power," his grandfather, whose
hand he held, had whispered, his eyes aglow with wonder at the miraculous
spectacle. A week later the warehouse was still exploding. Perhaps it was his
grandfather's favoritism that had charged Wolfgang's resentment. The old Baron
might still have been in his prime at the time, somewhere around 1910. He could
remember the dates by the stamps burned into the wooden arms crates that lined
the hard mud floors of the warehouses. In those days men in resplendent
uniforms arrived, sometimes in coaches pulled by arrogant horses, sitting for
hours around the huge table over which hung a giant chandelier lit by hundreds
of candles. The room, Charles remembered, was lined with baroque-framed mirrors
and the resplendent men, beefy faced and heavily moustached, could watch
themselves as they bargained with his grandfather as he and Karla and Wolfgang
observed the spectacle in night clothes from the head of the stairs.

In the night, sometimes in the tunnel of drugged sleep, he
could hear the sounds that had punctuated his youth, like a repetitive musical
phrase. Wagon wheels along bumpy trails, the naying of hungry sweated horses,
the jangle of metal against leather, swords of rank swatting high leather
riding boots, the curses of wagon drivers, and the sharp bark of throaty
military orders in many languages. The language of the household was
German—both as code to keep their matters private from the servants and as an
insistent reminder of their origins—but tutors had taught him Russian, German,
English, and French.

There was a room in the house, part of the old section then
used to quarter servants, a stone and brick configuration with high ceilings
and small arched windows built for defensive purposes. But the room was filled
with objects of the Teutonic Order—banners, musky and faded with time; suits of
armor, shields, spears, odd ominous metal weapons, spiked heavy balls, massive
axes, weapons of destruction far more frightening than the shiny samples of
modern warfare that filled the special showing rooms in the von Kassel
warehouses.

But these were merely the trinkets of family history. Other
tangible symbols abounded. A family cemetery surrounded by a high spiked gate,
sprinkled then with more than three hundred gravestones, the dates barely
visible. Familiar von Kassel names abounded on the stones: Charles, Albert,
Wolfgang, Siegfried, Rudi, Fredrick. The cemetery, like the museum room, was
immaculately kept, the retainers who watched over them having inherited the job
from generation to generation.

There were other symbols, too, some beyond explanation,
except through the oral history of a family legend. A stone marker on a knoll
at the edge of the lake, about ten feet high, a rounded phallic shape, icy to
the touch in summer and winter. He had learned about that from Petya, his
Estonian nurse. She was a perpetually scolding woman, with whom he had been
inseparable during the first seven years of his life. He was never out of her
sight. He could recall being the object of some ridicule by his brother and
sister because of Petya's concern.

It was through Petya that odd family legends were fed into
his mind. God knows where she had heard them. Most of them were distorted by an
underling's perception, which was understandable, except to a child's
imagination. Perhaps she had made them up. She was under twenty at the time,
and he could resummon the smell of her, the taste of her mouth, the feel of her
soft breath, the sight of her fleshed body, her blue eyes, the color of the
lake, slanted, hinting that the Mongols had moved further west than history had
recorded. Her voice was low, throaty, as if she feared to raise it.

"Speak up, Petya. I can't hear you," his mother
would cry at her in exasperation. He could never understand that since he could
hear every word clearly. In his mother's presence, she always kept her eyes
lowered when she addressed her, fearful perhaps that she would reveal the
independent spirit to which Charles was secretly exposed.

"Here. Right here," Petya had told him slapping
the phallic stone. "The first von Kassel stuck his sword on this spot and
proclaimed this his land for all time."

"Where did he come from?" the little boy,
Charles, had asked, certain that he had dropped from the heavens.

"From the West," Petya pointed, her back to the
blue lake.

"Why did they come?"

"For God," she had said, looking skyward.
"To bring us God."

"And did they?"

Her slant eyes looked about her nervously and she bent down
putting her mouth against his ear.

"They were the servants of the devil," she
hissed. The little boy had shivered, and his lips trembled too much for him to
speak.

"The devil told them: Go East, Knights. Pile the
corpses until they reach the heavens. Bathe the land in blood."

The little boy had moved closer to her skirts, and she
enveloped him in her arms.

"And it was all that spilled blood that made the
rivers and the lakes."

"But the lake is blue," the little boy had
protested, finding courage in the woman's closeness.

"The blood of Estonians is blue," she said.

It was to be a fatal explanation for Petya, for the little
boy would remember it.

Dinner at the von Kassels' was always a formal family
event. A huge dining room opened out to a garden at one end and a parlor at the
other. There were never less than twenty for dinner and sometimes up to fifty.

Until his death, the old Baron had sat at the head of the
table. Events at that stage of his life seemed more vivid to Charles, perhaps
because it was the zenith of the family's old way of life, the golden age. That
time was the standard by which he judged his own life. He had never lost the
clarity of the image. The huge candled chandelier, steam wafting from plates
piled high with foods, all products of the family lands, voices ebbing and
flowing with the rhythm of the meal, the eye-boggling display of uniforms, the
elaborate coiffures of the ladies, the heavy scent of perfume laced with the
tempting smells of the food; he could replicate them in his memory until tears
of loss and pain ran down his cheeks.

Dominating the etched memory, was his grandfather's ridged
and bearded face. The beard was white and smartly trimmed and the face lined
deeply, tanned by the outdoors, the eyes shining and intense, the nostrils
always flared with excitement. His own father aped the old man in carriage and
dress, down to the trimmed beard, blond, golden in some light. In appearance
they were more like brothers than father and son, tall and straight, rigid even
in repose as if the slightest waffle in their posture might indicate a
weakening in the von Kassel chain. They both wore suits made in the finest
tailoring shops of London where they visited frequently since that was the center
of the world of arms manufacturing at that time. When they were gone the family
was ensconced in their big mansion on the Domberg in Tallinn.

It was at the dinners that the history of the von Kassels
was verbalized. Huge tapestries decorated the rooms, depicting scenes of
Teutonic glory. The Order had been founded in the twelfth century, an
amalgamation of Knights Templar who had exhausted themselves in the crusades
and a new group of zealous young men who burned with the passion of conversion
and the lust for spoils and adventure. The battle scenes depicted both their
victories and defeats.

Yet the tapestries seemed to glorify the defeats somewhat
more than the victories, as if death for the Order's cause offered the highest
form of salvation. The most famous, the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410, in which
the Knights were slaughtered by the Poles, was depicted in three tapestries
hung in the household. Among the others, the largest depicted the defeat of the
Knights by Alexander Nevsky on the frozen lake Peipus near Novgorod in 1242.
The theme of the tapestries was the central raison d'être of the von Kassel
legacy, in which defeats were transitory. The only permanence was survival.

Although the Order was monastic, the vow of celibacy, was
reversed by God, or so the family history went, so that the von Kassels could
preserve the essence of the Order on earth. The history lesson was litanized at
those family dinners, a repetitive obligatory review conducted by his
grandfather for every new guest that ever arrived at the table. Once the story
began, all chewing had to stop and the new guest would nod politely as each
point was emphasized.

"The first von Kassel arrived here with the Order
early in the thirteenth century. He had been recruited by Herman von Salza, the
first Grand Marshal, 1239, one of the first to rise to the call and follow the
banner. The mission, sanctified by both the Pope and the German Emperor, was to
subdue the heathens to the East. They began in East Prussia, a fierce race
those Prussians, a worthy match for the Knights who reveled in military action.
They were quite bloodthirsty, you know." His grandfather would pause,
awaiting the obligatory chuckle. "These lands were inhabited by a race of
barbarians. Livonia, the land was called, an inferior, godless, cultureless
swarm of humanity, no better than animals." Again his grandfather would
interrupt the flow of the narrative, his eyes drifting over some of the
servants in the room. "No different from this very day." If the servants
understood, they remained impassive. It was not politic on their part to show
any reaction to anything.

"The Danes actually were the first civilized force,
but they could not hold their ground and called for the Knights. We came. We
conquered. We earned our lands with blood. You have seen the castles we have
built? You cannot imagine what they threw at us to dislodge our domination.
Swedes, Poles, Slavs, even little pitiful rebellions. But we clung to it. We
still cling to it, ladies and gentlemen. The land has been ours now for nearly
eight hundred years." His grandfather's eyes would seem to turn inward and
although the young Charles and those before him might have shut their ears in
boredom, the essence of the blood was being transferred in those moments.

"They still fight over this land," his
grandfather would conclude. "The Russians want it. The Germans want it.
The Poles want it. The Estonians want it. We've bartered with the Romanovs with
our brains. We could not care less who rules. Other families have been destroyed.
Their lands confiscated. Removed. Murdered. We survive now by bartering arms to
all sides."

"But how did it happen?" a guest would invariably
ask. It was, of course, the principal curiosity. How did the von Kassels get
into the arms business? His grandfather, the old Baron, would roll his head
back, the brown eyes would sparkle as the candle flames focused their light in
them. He was pointing with his eyes at the huge Battle of Tannenberg tapestry
that hung across the entire wall of the dining room.