The Four Winds of Heaven (22 page)

Gazing with wonder at his hat and turning it over in his trembling fingers, the young man shook his head, dazed. “I don't know!” he exclaimed. His knees buckled under him quite suddenly.

N
ot long afterward
, on January 22, 1905, an event occurred that convinced Jean de Gunzburg not to visit his cousins in St. Petersburg. Several hundred workers, under the guidance of a priest, Father Gapon, marched peacefully to petition the Tzar for reforms while the sovereign was at his Winter Palace, only blocks away from the residence of Baron Horace de Gunzburg. They were received with volleys of open fire, and this massive slaughter was given the name of Bloody Sunday. Anna, prostrate with tears, demanded of David during the days that followed: “Are you not sorry now that you did not join the Union of Unions, Papa? What will happen next?”

David took her by the shoulders, but she stiffened defensively. “My beloved,” he replied, his own face reflecting deep grief, “what happened to Sonia, what has occurred so recently here, are demonstrations of violence that defy comprehension. Surely the Tzar cannot be blamed for the actions of some of his soldiers. I am not so naive as you think. There are of course agents provocateurs who stir up trouble. But as a member of two Ministries, I know more than men such as Pavel Milyukov who have formed this Union. I know, for example, that the Tzar has plans to instigate a Duma, a kind of Parlilament. He is attempting to face his problems. Do not lose your faith in your country.”

But Anna regarded him with ill-hidden contempt. “I possess a strong faith in my country, Papa,” she said. “In its healthy peasants. But the Tzar frightens me, and you frighten me with your blindness. I share a room with Sonia. Since her experience in Kiev, she cannot sleep properly. She cries out. Somehow the pogroms are tied into this Bloody Sunday, although I cannot quite see how. But the people are being deluded. Of that I am certain.”

Sonia was not so certain. Unlike her sister, she accepted David's explanations of the massacre of Bloody Sunday. Horrified, she believed, nevertheless, as he did, that the Tzar could not be held responsible. But she could not rationalize Kiev. Over and over, she kept hearing Shoshana's mocking voice. Finally, she took her anguish to her father. Her small face was white, and purple circles puffed beneath her eyes when she appeared in David's study.

“Maybe we are wrong,” she said gently. “Perhaps it is the Zionists who are correct, for if the Russian mob can turn against members of their own nation, then perhaps we are truly citizens of nowhere.”

His heart filling with love and a deep pain, David tilted the small, firm chin upward, and gazed into Sonia's face. “Never, my sweet,” he said. “We shall never cry defeat. This is our country, and should you or Anna happen to marry a foreigner, my last request would be that you might never forget that you are Russians.”

Sonia threw her arms around his neck, and pressed her cool cheek against his, which had grown gaunt. For the moment, she was comforted.

But Ossip, who was eighteen, regarded all this with irony in his deep blue eyes. He said nothing at all, but he was thinking: We could so easily convert. Then nobody would harm us, and the Tzar would have to find proper means to deal with his peasants, rather than taking the easy way out by making scapegoats of the Jews. Ossip did not believe in God. It did not matter to him how, or whether, he worshiped.

Mathilde, however, had lost patience with philosophy. Her fine black hair piled into a thick chignon, her hands pressed against her alabaster cheeks, she came to her husband and stated calmly: “I have borne all I can. We could all be murdered! If you will not accompany me, because of your work, then I shall take Johanna and the children back to France.”

David's heart contracted. He took her hands in his, but she withdrew them angrily. “I know all about your duties. Duty to the government, duty to the Jews. What about duty to us, your family? Ossip could be hurt.”

“You will not stand by me?” he whispered.

“No, it is you who will not stand by us! Tomorrow. We are leaving tomorrow! Was it not sufficient that your daughter and your niece nearly lost their lives in Kiev, that your brother Misha has had to settle his wife in Paris, that he intends to come to Kiev only during the months of the sugar campaign? He, at least, is a man who cares for his wife.”

“But he is not a man of purpose,” David said with distress. “I would lose my honor if I abandoned my country, my Jews. Even Sasha, who has only the bank to think of, is not departing.”

“He probably has some seamstress hidden away in a garret!” Mathilde declared. “Besides, he is not my husband.”

The following morning, Anna came to her mother in her boudoir. She stood erect, in an embroidered blouse over a multicolored skirt that ballooned from her waist. There was a look of fierce determination on her face. She said, “Mama, I am twenty. I do not want to leave during this crisis, as the others must. I have my landscape work, with the artist Kuindji. Besides, the only friends I have are in Petersburg. I would like to remain here, keep house for Papa. If there is anything, Aunt Rosa will be here, and Grandfather Horace. I am not a child, to be sheltered.”

A wave of despair washed over Mathilde. She saw the pride in her daughter, the burning resolve. Suddenly she was tired. Forcing Anna to go would make the trip unbearable for everyone, especially for Mathilde herself. Johanna would quarrel with the girl, there would be shouting and sullenness. “I am leaving to escape from havoc, not to create more of it,” she sighed. “You are stubborn and selfish, traits which seem to run in this family. All right, Anna, stay. But remember that you are a lady, and a Gunzburg.”

“I am never allowed to forget it,” the girl murmured. But a glimmer of joy flickered in her deep brown eyes.

S
onia had grown
thinner during the months since the pogrom in Kiev. It was her last morning in St. Petersburg before leaving for Paris with her mother. Ossip had gone to the gymnasium, and she had had her lesson with Johanna. They had not taken their customary stroll afterward, for with the strikes, people were afraid to be on the streets unless they had to. She sat at the piano, the gray skies beyond the house penetrating to her soul, which felt inexplicably mournful. Her fingers traveled absently over the keys and she began to play an ineffably sad melody, a Schubert composition to which she could not place a name. She sat erect and the delicate bones of her back could be seen beneath the batiste of her shirtwaist. Suddenly she felt tears upon her eyelids.

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…”

I
n 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.