The Four Winds of Heaven (51 page)

Sonia had no free time, and therefore no time to think, as she had done in the kitchen of the milk cooperative. She merely labored, under the fearful gaze of Mathilde. Whenever her mother would offer her tea and biscuits, she would shake her head with its coiled black tresses, and reply, “It's all right, Mama. I'm not hungry.” Sometimes she would sit at her rented piano, but her mother knew that she was doing so out of a sense of obligation toward her, and not from any inner joy or desire. Clasping her hands to her breast, Mathilde cried out one day, “How like your father you have become! Duty, duty. Is there no life for the likes of you?”

Sonia merely smiled, and arched her brows. She was hardly accustomed to bursts of emotion from her placid mother. She looked into her mother's eyes and said gently, “During such times the world has need of people like Papa and me. Or at least like me. Papa is a brilliant man, a linguist, a scholar, a diplomat, and his talents are always in demand. I am simply a worker, who does what needs to be done. There is no time now for joy, or even for a life of my own. Later, when the war is over, I shall dance, and sing duets, and eat delicacies. But now I cannot. I suppose you are right, that I am obsessed by duty. But I am what I am.” She thought wryly of her beloved brother, Ossip. How like their mother he was! Ossip, so gay and charming, would now have found his Sonitchka an unbearable bore, as Mathilde probably did. But it could not be helped.

If Sonia spent so much time away from the Pension de la Grande Bretagne, a small part of her reason was selfish. Johanna's nervousness was making life even more unpleasant than the circumstances warranted. With age, Mathilde had grown plumper, more gray, but her skin was still smooth, her figure agreeable. Johanna, on the other hand, had lost that marvelous supple slenderness, the full breast, and had become thinner with the years, so that she now resembled a high voltage wire, taut and sinewy. Her eyes were the same, almond-shaped and aquamarine, and her hair was still gold, but now it, too, was thin. She made a big to-do over her nursing duties, and complained endlessly of fatigue each morning. If she noticed Sonia's loss of weight or her pallor, she failed to mention them to Mathilde. In fact, she spent her time with Mathilde fretting, sighing, pacing the carpeted sitting room, picking up a book and then thrusting it down impatiently.

One day at breakfast, Mathilde broached a familiar subject with her friend: she wanted to leave Switzerland to return to Russia where she belonged. But Johanna flew into a rage. She berated Mathilde, who sat eating her meal: “You think that you could do some good by merely being in the same country as Gino—that's nonsense! As for Ossip, you moan about missing him, but a young man such as he has better things to do than spend time with his mother. And then, the way you carry on about Sonia! She is strong, and willing. One thing I have noticed about Sonia —she only does what she wants, the selfish girl, and to the devil with other people! Aren't you at all happy to be here with me—away from your household worries?”

Mathilde carefully swallowed, then dabbed at her lower lip with a lace napkin. “I long to return home, Johanna,” she stated. Dear God, she added silently, now I would even welcome David and his obsessions, his religious and patriotic fervor… She sighed and said, “These are strenuous times. You do not need to accompany me if the voyage will upset you.”

But at the idea of such a trip without her, Johanna shrieked with anger and terror. Mathilde took her calmly into the bathroom and sponged her forehead with cold water. “It was only for your sake that I suggested it,” she murmured, her sapphire eyes gleaming with tears. “You are now in a neutral nation. Clearly you have less reason than I to wish to return to Petersburg—Petrograd.”

Some days later, the pension bellboy delivered a letter from the Russian front, which Mathilde tore open with trembling fingers. Her mouth, as she read the news, formed a small circle. “This is extraordinary, indeed,” she commented. Turning to her daughter, she said, “Gino sends me a letter dictated to him by the dying son of a Prussian general, von Falkenhayn. He writes: ‘Mama dear, Upon my honor I promised this boy that I would make this message reach his mother, in Germany. No one can help me but you, who are in a neutral zone and can send mail anywhere. Here is the address of Frau von Falkenhayn.' But I can't write to this woman, can I? I, who am not only an enemy but a Jewess as well? I fear she would find me indelicate, and her grief would be all the greater, wouldn't it?”

“Gino is a sensitive person, Mama,” Sonia answered pensively. “He must have considered his alternatives at length before appealing to you. And how can you even think that any woman might find you lacking in taste or propriety? You must write to her, and you will find the proper words. For, after all, she is—or was—a mother like you, with a beloved child at the front. She will not find your compassion offensive.”

Mathilde sat down at her secretary, and composed a short letter for this lady unknown to her, whose husband's name was familiar in wartime news, this grand Prussian lady who had lost a son, but who was now residing at the estate of her daughter, the Countess von Bismarck. She wrote in German, which she had learned during her childhood in Paris under the tutelage of a German governess. Thinking of Gino and of her own terror, she selected her words with sparing care. Then she slipped her note as well as the one dictated to Gino into a heavy vellum envelope embossed with the family “G.” “And that is the end of this episode,” she sighed. “She will not deign to answer me.”

But six weeks later, Sonia handed her mother a sealed envelope, and when Mathilde had opened it and scanned its contents, tears came to her eyes. She handed her daughter the sheet of note paper.

“It is time for us to return home, Mama,” Sonia said, and there was an urgent note to her voice. “You and Papa need each other now, more than ever.”

A
nna de Gunzburg
, in Lausanne, played with the little boy, Riri, who was nine years old. She painted and gardened; but she was nonetheless aware of the presence of Lenin in Switzerland, and of the ideas which he was propagating in his native country, which was also hers. She knew that the Bolshevik members of the Duma had spoken out in behalf of abandoning the war effort, that they favored defeat, and that because of this they had been arrested that very spring of 1915. Anna sat in her bedroom, gazing out toward the blue-green hills, and thought: I am not certain anymore, of many things. Gino and Sonia want to crush the Triple Entente and Turkey; Mama and Ossip only want life to return to what it was before. And Papa? He too is uncertain. Oh, not about the war, for he supports his government loyally; but is he fearful for the people, for their stirred-up emotions? And what about Lenin? Is he so single-minded that he does not care about the peasants, or the poor, so long as he can rule? Is it right to forego one system for another that is equally oppressive? Anna wondered what Vanya would say.

Oh, Vanya, Vanya, she would cry out, her heart suddenly aching fiercely. She would squeeze shut her eyelids and shake her red mass of hair, and say aloud, “No, I must not try to learn what has become of him, or wonder if he still cares! But wherever he is, I am certain that he is a leader among men. And I shall always love him, and the memory of our time together.”

In the spring, she went to Stuttgart to retrieve her grandmother, Baroness Ida, who had been in a sanatorium. “After all,” she had written her mother, “Grandmother cannot live comfortably with you in your pension, but she will have a garden here, and Riri. There is no one like a child to lighten the atmosphere.” Mathilde was glad. At least her mother would be out of Germany and in neutral territory, and Anna and Dalia were strong and would care for her. As for Riri… Mathilde was grateful that her mother had always resided in France, and had never met the Bersons.

When she and Sonia went to Lausanne to see Baroness Ida, she refused to allow Johanna de Mey to accompany them. “You and Anna have never gotten on, and you have nursing duties here,” she had stated. Johanna had been startled at her tone, insistent and almost hard in its urgency. Mathilde had sensed her friend's shock, and had placed a hand upon her arm, adding, “Don't you see? Mama has just recovered from a great loss, and a debilitating illness. Any sort of disharmony would be most upsetting to her nerves.”

When Mathilde and Sonia returned to Geneva after their brief trip, Sonia did not look well. She hardly touched her plate at mealtimes, and was white, with blue circles under her eyes. Often, during the night, the bathroom door remained locked, until both Mathilde and Johanna realized that something was seriously wrong with her. They had no need to take her to a specialist, for an excellent Geneva physician declared without the slightest doubt that Sonia was suffering from enteritis, a bad form of colitis. Her mother took her to the Ballaigues, in the Jura Mountains, and there she remained for the summer, restricted to a special diet once again. She was exhausted from her war relief work. Now, she breathed the crisp mountain air and allowed the children of her hotel to surround her chaise longue on the open porch, where she would tell them fantastic stories that she invented on the spur of the moment.

In the fall, when Sonia had recovered, Mathilde knew that she could no longer delay their return to Petrograd. God only knew what conditions were like in Russia, but David was not healthy, and the boys… Encouraged by Johanna, she proposed that Sonia remain with Anna and their grandmother in Switzerland.

But Sonia was outraged. “Mama, have you gone mad?” she cried passionately, her gray eyes darting blue sparks of fire.

Mathilde stood back, shocked at the way her daughter had spoken to her. “But my dear, you have been sick…” she stammered.

“And Papa suffers from angina pectoris! He is no longer his strong self. God knows, Ossip is unreliable, much as we love him dearly. I would entrust you to Gino, but he is at the front. Don't you see? I must go with you. You will need me!”

“Your mother has me,” Johanna cut in.

“But you are not her family!”

The two of them stared at each other, Sonia's hatred at last showing as nakedly as Johanna's. Mathilde trembled, wishing that somehow peace might be restored, tempers calmed. This was more dreadful than she had ever feared. At length she spoke up: “Very well, Sonia. There is no need to create such a scene. We only meant that the voyage will be dangerous and that we shall not have an easy time. In your condition this is hardly safe. But if you insist, I cannot stop you from coming.”

“Not even God could stop me,” her daughter replied with a steady look of steel gray.

Because of Johanna de Mey's sullen ill humor, it was Sonia who organized the trip. They would go via Paris, London, and Norway, and from the north of Norway travel the whole length of Finland until they reached Petrograd. It was the only way to circumvent enemy territory. They would travel by train and ship, and as there were no longer any porters at the stations, Anna had painted green and yellow circles on their luggage, so that they might pick it out right away and not risk losing part of it. The week before their departure, Russian refugees clustered round them at the pension, begging them to deliver messages to beloved members of their families, to sons and husbands at the front. “You know that we are not supposed to bring any written material with us,” Mathilde gently reproached them. But Sonia stood forward, and allowed each person, one by one, to give her his message. And each day she endeavored to memorize them.

“It is really quite a straightforward method,” Sonia explained to her mother. “I have Papa's good memory. Each morning, before breakfast, and each night in bed, I have been enumerating the messages and counting them off on my fingers. To these poor people this represents a sacred mission, and I could not let them down, any more than you could have let Gino down in the matter of the Falkenhayns.”

“But how many messages do you have?” Mathilde asked.

“Forty, exactly. Eight hands' worth.”

“All this wasted energy for people we shall never see again!” Johanna sniffed disdainfully. But Sonia regarded her levelly, and she turned away.

It was October, and a cold, frosty one. The train ride to Paris went smoothly, but there it was discovered that the necessary papers had not been prepared for them as planned. Johanna de Mey openly cursed Sonia, and set out for the Dutch Consulate to prod along the officials of her country. Sonia went to the Russian Consulate and waited patiently in line, a trim figure in muted gray, her small hat perched demurely on the coils of black hair, one egret feather its single ornament. In the meantime, Mathilde went to the home of her brother-in-law, Misha de Gunzburg, and visited his wife, Clara, and their five-year-old son, Sergei.