The Four Winds of Heaven (57 page)

“
I
t is only
necessary to pack old clothing,” Mathilde said to Johanna de Mey. They were in her bedroom, folding gowns and shirts. “It is warm in the Crimea. Sonia will recuperate.”

Sonia, Johanna thought. Always Sonia. She had returned to Petrograd during the fall, and the wretched girl had been busy all winter with her war relief work. Johanna had wanted to sob with joy. But the moments while Tatiana Halperin had hung between life and death had been dreadfully painful for the Dutchwoman, for they had separated her almost daily from Mathilde. Then, Rosa had altered her plans by coming with the Gunzburg women to Pavlovsk, and Mathilde had not discouraged her. She had even sent Johanna herself off with cheerful messages for her mother. But things were going to change. Away from David, away from this city with its brewing conflicts, away from his angina pectoris… and Mathilde's guilt. She smiled. “The Crimea must be a veritable dreamland,” she said.

“Yes. But wait, do not bring your pearls, Johanna. I tell you, society is very simple there. Oh, Feodosia is a pleasant, civilized city, but very informal. Bring the comfortable corduroy suit. And your cameo, as single adornment.”

“Surely you exaggerate, my sweet,” Johanna demurred.

But Mathilde had ceased paying her attention. She had opened a large leather box filled with her jewels, and was lifting out a tiara from delicate tissue paper. “I wore this at the Coronation,” she commented, almost to herself. She gazed with rapture at the rubies, diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds in her hands, and sighed. “It was in Moscow, in ‘96. But you remember that.”

“Indeed,” Johanna remarked acidly. She particularly remembered having had to remain in St. Petersburg to supervise those horrid children.

“I know, you were here,” Mathilde stated gently, placing a fond hand upon the other's arm. Then, brightly, she announced: “We must wrap these for the safe, Johanna. David has too much on his mind to worry about what I have done with which pieces. So I shall lock them all away, except for the crab. You know—the diamond crab I'm so fond of. Though I can't see where I shall be wearing it!” She sighed. “We are growing old, Johanna. Don't you feel it, too?”

“The whole world is growing old,” the Dutchwoman replied with asperity.

S
onia
, Mathilde, and Johanna de Mey departed from Petrograd on the same day that the new session of the Duma opened, the twenty-seventh of February. David and Ossip came to the station to see them off. Sonia looked about her at the city she loved, where she had been born, and, as always, its spires and bulblike cupolas made her heart soar. Only this time, the emotion was ineffable sadness. She took her father's hand, caressed it softly, and began to weep. “I do not want to run away from you,” she whispered softly, and dropped her head upon his shoulder.

“But you are going to the sun, and the fields, to rest. You are not running.”

His face, so gaunt, so sallow, with its pale blue eyes, regarded her with tenderness that now, for some reason, she could not stand. “Oh, Papa!” she cried and burst into tears. He removed the fingers from her eyes, and gently kissed each eyelid. “My very little girl,” he murmured.

Inexplicably, she could not erase the vision of her father's harried face from her consciousness. She wept and wept. Finally, Ossip took her aside, sat her down upon a suitcase, and kneeled before her. “What on earth is the matter?” he demanded.

Sonia threw her arms around her brother's neck, and wildly, without knowing why, she cried out, though he alone could hear: “You must find a way to tell him—now! About the boy. Something tells me that he must know. Do it, Ossip! I beg of you.”

Bewilderment creased her brother's handsome features. “But Sonitchka,” he declared, “you aren't making a bit of sense. What boy? And who's the one who should be told?”

A cold chill passed through her. “Oh, my God,” she muttered. “It—it is nothing, Ossip. Simply that I don't want to go and leave you and Papa. But you're right—I wasn't making any sense. Forgive me?”

“Someday you must do me the favor of enlightening me,” he teased her. He helped her to rise, and, arm in arm, they made their way back to her father and mother. Sonia said nothing more. She could not speak.

O
n the morning
of March 11, 1917, Baron David said to his son at the breakfast table, “The Tzar has issued an order to stop the continuation of the Duma. I cannot understand this. Our Duma in no way interferes with his authority, as does the British Parliament, for example, which wields more power than the King. I am glad that your mother and sister have left town. General Ivanov is being sent here with a full battalion to quell an eventual mob, should the need arise.”

Ossip blanched. He could not answer his father. He thought only of Natasha, who was coming to the apartment he had rented for them months before. She was coming at noon, when Sasha would be out of the offices. No one at the bank would miss Ossip, and he had begged Natasha to find a way to come to him for a stolen afternoon. Now, he considered the dangers she might encounter, and his blood ran cold. My God, he thought, how can I stop her? Send a note? But she is probably taking Lara to her mother's home, and will come from there... He covered his face briefly with trembling fingers, and his father exclaimed, “Ossip! Are you quite well?”

How can I tell him that I have brought a fine lady to shame, that the wife of one of our country's generals comes to my bed when he is gone, that she risks all for me, without thought of herself, her name, her daughter? Ossip said, “It's all right, Papa, I assure you.” But as he smiled, he cringed with shame. His father, who had never committed adultery. Ossip felt nauseated. He was filled to the brim with self-loathing.

“You are not proposing to go to the bank, on such a day?” David demanded when his son rose abruptly from the table.

“It isn't that, Papa. I have some… other business, which cannot be put off.” He thought of Natasha, her face brimming with love, and he was angry, insanely angry. They have done this to us! he thought bitterly, the old resentments surging up again. I wanted to marry her. I waited eight years. She had no wish to wed this other. And yes, he was part of it too, he, my beloved father, with his pious
shtadlanism.
To hell with them all, Tagantsevs and Gunzburgs alike!

He asked Vova to drive him to the city, and from a street corner he hailed a troika which he took to the discreet avenue where he had rented an apartment and hired a manservant. It was an elegant district, but not a fashionable one, as it had been in the days of his great-grandfather and namesake, the first Baron Ossip. Ossip stepped down from the troika, paid the coachman, and was about to ascend the stoop of the gray brick house when the man called out after him: “There are crowds gathering downtown, Excellency. How about an extra few kopecks to see me safely home?”

Pinpricks of annoyance assailed Ossip but he reached inside his vest and withdrew a purse, removing the requested coins. He nearly hurled them at the driver, then turned his back and ran up the three steps to the door. Once inside, he ran the remainder of the way to his second story apartment. His valet opened to his ring. “Monsieur is early today,” the man commented. “Madame has not yet arrived.”

“I didn't think she had. Fetch me a brandy, Pavel.”

“The usual, sir?”

Ossip fell into an armchair and loosened his cravat.

“Yes, yes, be gone,” he said, when he noticed the man, half-bowing, still awaiting his reply. He was filled with fear for Natasha, fear renewed by the anxious words of the coachman. Surely, surely she would not come, not if she would be in danger. Her father would keep her with the family, in spite of her protestations. He almost smiled: ah, yes, she would protest. In her heart, she would want to come, more than anything in the world… But of course she would be wise, and not risk it.

He sat and smoked, leaning forward tensely. He could not tell whether hours or only minutes went by. Pavel, tall and silent, passed by like a shadow, bearing trays of brandy and foodstuffs. Ossip waved him off distractedly, but gulped the liquor, and his nervousness began to abate with the slow warmth that was spreading through his body. He hardly realized that he dozed off, that night fell, that he awakened, startled to a new dawn. When her ring came, he jumped from his seat, perspiration beading beneath the waves of his black hair. He had slept upright in his clothes, and it was now morning.

He heard her voice, strained with agitation, and smelled her heady scent of wildflowers before he saw her. She rushed into the room, her day gown splotched with mud at the hem, tendrils escaping everywhere upon her neck, her cheeks scarlet. He tried to speak, but the sounds gurgled, caught in his throat, and she threw herself into Ossip's open arms.

“It was quite horrible?” he asked, sitting her down upon the sofa and rubbing her fingertips.

“Oh, my darling, it was dreadful! There are mobs everywhere. The carriage was jostled and nearly lost a wheel, and when I stepped out near Mama's house, we were splattered, Lara and I. But that was nothing—just minor discomfort! They've opened the Kresty prison and let everyone out, the reserve troops have joined in the fray, our court house is on fire—and they've arrested Papa!”

“What?”

“Yes! The members of the Duma met, and elected a kind of emergency group, and appointed commissars to keep the peace. But the people in revolt have seized the ministers, and when Papa left the house very early... I saw them... grab him! Oh, Ossip, I am so frightened, so terribly frightened! Is there nothing you can do?”

“I? But Natasha, my sweetest love, who am I but a bank employee? My own father would be a poor match for the revolutionaries. If the Duma people have named commissars, the mob will surely release your father within hours. Do not worry. He will be all right.”

“He helped you once! Why can't you at least try to do something?” she cried, and her beautiful face became wracked with tears and grimaces of pain. She started to sob, pitiful small sobs of defeat, and he kissed her hands. But she pulled them away, wildly. “You are a coward, Ossip!” she exclaimed. “Even—yes, even my husband is braver than you, for he is at the front, and you do nothing!”

Her wide blue eyes, red-rimmed, met his, which clouded with sudden, profound shock. He moved away from her. “So it comes to this,” he stated, and his calm tone of voice brought chills to her spine. “He is a better man than I. Have you ever thought, Princess, that you cheapen yourself each day that you come to me, for I am not a general, and merely a lower tiered aristocrat whose title dates back a simple four generations? I am a Jew, Natasha. And to a Tagantsev, that is tantamount to being an ant upon the ground. The Tagantsevs wield the power to save Gunzburgs, but the opposite is not true. And to add insult to your demeaned situation, I am a virtual cripple, afraid for his back, who bears a white paper while your husband, beribboned, reviews his troops.” His jaw muscles contracted, and he examined her with the utmost disdain. Then, suddenly, he cried out, “Why didn't you leave me alone, Natasha? Why did you come today? Why didn't you do the honorable thing, at least this single time, and remain with your mother, who is a decent woman, unlike her daughter, and who is doubtless scared to the point of apoplexy? Why didn't you stay to comfort her, to hold your Lara?”

“I couldn't stay away from you,” she answered quietly, lifting her small tear-stained face with its trembling chin. “Yesterday I didn't come, because of the rumors—”

“But you are a fool! A Tagantsev, you know, can still be a fool, in spite of his lineage. Coming here, when God only knows how long we shall have to stay, cooped up like frightened chickens. What have you told your mother?”

“And you? What did you say to your father?”