The Four Winds of Heaven (59 page)

It was the beginning of June 1917. Gino was infinitely demoralized. This was to have been Russia's moment of triumph. The troops were well supplied, and surely, he had thought, the Central Powers would be defeated this year—in the fall, at the latest. But then the March Revolution had taken place, deposing the Tzar and autocracy. Gino was not actually sorry. Nicholas II and his Tzarina Alexandra had not exactly handled their nation with finesse. He, a Baron, felt that the British system of Parliament was most suitable, allowing for the best of all sorts of people to rise and rule. But, as his father had always maintained, for a man to rule, he had to be suitably educated. Vassya, who was Gino's friend, could hope to make a good statesman, but only if taught the precepts of statesmanship and law.

The March Revolution disturbed many people more than it had Gino. The fact was that Gino believed that people were reasonable, that the Tzar had abdicated as a defeated nation surrenders, without bloodshed, because he had seen no other way out. So be it, thought the young man; now let us turn to the next step, the Provisional Government. But he had forgotten Lenin, and the Bolshevik element of the Social Democratic Party. They had become, with their own All-Russian Congress of Soviets, a sort of countergovernment that ran alongside Prince Lvov's and Alexander Kerensky's Provisional Government. At the heart of this Congress were Lenin, Trotsky, and a few other extremists who frankly bewildered Gino at first, and then infuriated him. It was they who advocated a separate peace tantamount to surrender, who wished to create havoc within the army. Soldiers' committees, indeed! Now little Kostya, the dim-witted, was telling him what to do and how to fight, while Kerensky's commissar, who knew nothing whatsoever about rifles and ammunition, got in the way when he sought to explain a maneuver to Gino's men. He did not need a sniffy bureaucrat to worry about, not in the middle of a war.

Milyukov, Pavel Milyukov, the man in charge of Foreign Affairs in Petrograd—a man that Gino remembered had once kindled the admiration of his sister Anna—now
there
was an honorable man, who had told the Allies that Russia would keep fighting for their cause, their common cause! But he had resigned in disgust, and Kerensky, Minister of War and the Navy, had issued a disclaimer, insisting that Russia would fight only a defensive war from then on. A defensive war! Those were fine words with which to conciliate the Congress of Soviets and Lenin. Gino spat and shook his head. “Do you know whom I found, laughing in his beer with the Austrians?” he demanded of his friend.

“Who, Baron?”

“Kostya. I had to shake him away. Singing bawdy songs, clear over in the enemy camp. There's total chaos, Vassya. Sometimes I do feel as you—I want to find my sister and mother in the Crimea, and have a civilized meal with them, and listen to my sister play the piano. But we can't just give up!” he cried, spilling some tea onto the ground in his excitement.

“Kerensky, for all he's said, is on the offensive, Baron,” Vassya said gently. “Wait and see.”

Gino munched on his bread and looked across the camp at the evening star, near the crescent of a moon that had risen. His heart swelled with yearning, but he was uncertain as to what he yearned for: warmth, love, victory? His sister had written him that she had made a new friend in Feodosia, a very young and attractive girl. How long it's been since I have danced, he mused. Then he chuckled. Was dancing to become outdated, too, like autocracy?

I wonder what she looks like, this Olga Pomerantz, he thought, and felt foolish. “Do you have a girl?” he asked Vassya.

“Me? Of course!” the soldier replied merrily, throwing back his head and laughing. In that moment, Gino felt loneliness such as he had never experienced.

“I have never had a girl,” he said softly, almost with surprise.

The two men finished their supper, and Vassya wiped his grease-stained fingers on his trousers. A hoot owl emitted its nocturnal cry, crickets added their crissing noises. All at once, a shadow came between Gino and the moon, and a boot cracked a stick of dry wood. “May I join you?” a voice asked in courteous, measured tones.

Gino raised his head and encountered a civilian uniform. Damn! he thought, and his cheekbones suddenly splashed with vivid red. He bit his lower lip and regarded Vassya, who shrugged. “We may as well put up with this one. He's here, and that's all there is to it,” the young peasant stated with disdain.

Gino cleared his throat. “Yes. Well. We are hardly gracious, Commissar. This is an army, in spite of its appearance, and most of us don't know what to do with our government supervisors. However—we are men, all of us, and Vassya's right. We may as well learn to live with one another.”

“I did not choose to be sent here, Sergeant,” the civilian replied with gentle irony. Gino scrutinized him in the dusk, and wondered, Have I not heard that voice before—and seen this man? Is he from Petrograd? He was momentarily baffled, and the other took that opportunity to sit down beside him and to extend his hand. “I am Ivan Berson,” he declared.

A flood of sensations took over Gino's consciousness. Berson! He ignored the proffered hand and concentrated upon the longish, wispy white-blond hair, the eyes which shone green as emeralds. This man must have been somewhere in his mid-thirties. His fine-grained skin was etched with thin dry lines about the eyes and mouth. Gino shook his head in amazement. “So,” he said.

“You know me?” Now it was the other who regarded him closely while Vassya, opposite them, stared at the two with open mouth.

“It was so long ago, I was just a boy of eight when you came to the house,” Gino murmured, his brown eyes fastened upon the man beside him. “You would hardly know me. But yes, I remember you. My name is Gino de Gunzburg.”

“Gino! For God's sake!” The green eyes lit with recognition, the thin mouth turned up in a broad smile. “Little Gino… But I should have known you. Do you recall a very fine portrait that… Anna… made of you, when you were a lad? She showed it to me, and that's when we became friends. I could not have forgotten you—never!”

Gino battled conflicting impulses, seeing Ivan Berson's hand outstretched in his direction. His hunger and loneliness propelled him to want to hug this unforeseen acquaintance from the past, the comfortable past of home; yet there were memories that thrust themselves between his desire to soothe his flesh and heart, and fulfillment of this desire. He saw his Grandfather Horace holding his father by the arm, the stern look on the old man's face, the tortured, ravaged appearance of his father. He saw his sister Anna before him, too: Anna, whose face had sagged except when he had come to tea, this Ivan Berson, and then his sister had been beautiful and radiant. But his sister had come home in the winter, and she had gone to sleep in the widows' quarters near the kitchens, and had not been allowed to sleep with Sonia. Ivan Berson… Terrible arguments with Juanita… Vanya?

“Vanya. It's good to see you,” he said at last, extending his own hand to the other, his natural good humor eclipsing his doubts and torn family loyalties. There had definitely been more than a hint of scandal; yet, so long ago…

They shook hands, and starting to laugh like schoolboys, they embraced, pulled apart, and embraced again. “I'm going to see about the fellows,” little Vassya muttered, rising. He shook his head at them, but they paid no attention, not even when he left. Gino felt joyful as a child, the child he had been when last he had seen Ivan Berson eating crumpets at the Gunzburg apartment.

“So?” Gino said. “You are a commissar for the Provisional Government. I shan't ask you what exactly you're supposed to do—but what about your family? Weren't they avowed Tzarists?”

Ivan Berson's face contracted. “I broke with them long ago,” he answered calmly. Then, bits of the puzzle fell somewhat more into place for Gino, who appeared embarrassed. “It's perfectly all right,” Ivan smiled. “You were, as you say, still a child. I've been a socialist—a Social Revolutionary, like Kerensky, our War Minister—for many years. He appointed me. But the Bolshevik Congress of Soviets hampers us in Petrograd, and the soldiers' committees here think we're the enemy. But what about you… and your family?”

“Papa's in Petrograd, with my brother Ossip. My mother took my sister, Sonia, to Feodosia, because she was ill. My grandfather, Horace, died in ‘09.”

“Little Sofia Davidovna, the undaunted,” Ivan said with a grin. “She… wasn't overly fond of me.”

Anna hung between them, an unspoken barrier. At length, Ivan whispered, “Well? Tell me about her.”

A strange compassion filled Gino's heart. Looking toward the distant evening star, he said, “I have not seen her for some time, you know. She lives in Switzerland, with a friend, a Persian lady who has a son. They paint. They live simply.”

“She is happy?”

Gino's brown eyes rested upon the young commissar, and he said reflectively, “She's safe, isn't she?”

Ivan Berson rose, and buttoning his coat against a gust of wind, stated bitterly, as if to himself, “Safety! That was the last thing she ever hoped for!”

“And you?” Gino asked. “Are you happy? Is it—” and he smiled with irony—“truly fulfilling to be an envoy from the Provisional Government, which may or may not survive? Was this why you read law at the University, Vanya?”

Ivan Berson did not turn around. “Don't be a fool, Gino,” he said. The younger man stood up, too, and walked toward his companion. The evening wind tossed dirt in their faces, and now Gino felt cold. Their steps took them toward the embankment where campfires were beginning to glow. Gino wished, with sudden fervor, that he had never met this old acquaintance, that he had been left in peace to finish his meal with little Vassya. When he made out his squad by the light of a flame, he placed a hesitant hand upon Vanya's sleeve, and said, “He's not so bad, your Kerensky.”

“Neither are you. Good luck, Gino. And—” Ivan's green eyes pierced the night air, and the young sergeant waited. But the other did not pursue his words, and so, with a final wave of the hand, Gino broke into a run toward his men. I shall not write her, he decided. No, she has forgotten that he ever existed. Let her have peace.

T
he capital was
in a state of confusion. Baron David no longer held any official position, for at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs translators and diplomats were hardly needed; nor were educational reforms at issue in a nation at war with outside enemies as well as inner ones. David read Gino's letters from the front with a measure of hope, for General Kornilov had become Commander in Chief after the offensive on the Austrian front had fizzled out because of internal disorders earlier in July. Kornilov, Gino said, wanted a stop to governmental intervention in army affairs; he was rebuilding his forces. And after a quick outburst from the Bolsheviks, Alexander Kerensky had officially assumed the Prime Ministry of the Provisional Government. “The only problem,” David told his son Ossip at the start of the month of August, “is that each of these groups competes with the other two. Kornilov is backed by the conservatives, Lenin by the Bolsheviks, in spite of his flight to Finland, and Kerensky's government by the socialists. There is no true leadership in the nation.” Once, Ossip would have suggested immediate flight to Paris, but now he bided his time, for there was Natasha. He listened to his father with taut muscles, knowing that Prince Kurdukov was one of Kornilov's generals. When, unable to withstand the strength of his opposition, Kerensky dismissed Kornilov in September, then had him arrested, Ossip went to the apartment and found Natasha awaiting him, her hair undone, her expression distracted. He took her into his arms, not knowing what to say, knowing only too well what she was thinking. If Kurdukov came home, what would become of them? And while she secretly hoped that matters would work out in her favor, she did not actually hate her husband. He was Lara's father, and did not deserve to die simply to avoid prolonging her anguish. “But I shall not live with him again,” she declared, and Ossip felt as though he would never be delivered of the jealousy that he bore the absent general. He could only repeat to her his promise of faith, and his pledge to stay beside her. Nothing mattered but the two of them. No marriage on earth could be more binding.

David was busy trying to find homes and work for the Polish Jews brought to him by Ossip's convoys. With the fall of the Tzar, he had allowed more illegal refugees into his home, for the Secret Police did not operate the way they had under Nicholas II. So Ossip was accustomed to bumping into strange kerchiefed women in the hallways of the apartment, or to finding small children sitting around the kitchen table eating bowls of borscht. But his own anxieties were such that he hardly paid them any attention. He could think only of General Prince Kurdukov. He and Baron David passed each other with polite smiles and courteous inquiries, but each felt besieged by his own problems. They rarely had time to talk.

On November 7, Ossip washed, shaved, and came down to breakfast, preparing to go to the bank. The Baron greeted him dressed in a warm gray suit with matching silk cravat. Next to him stood a thin little man with a yarmulke and a woman, neither young nor old. “These are our guests, the Tchomskys,” David announced. “I have promised to find work for Mendel Adolfovitch, who is a printer by profession. But the widows' rooms are filled, so I have told Stepan that the Tchomskys may occupy your sister's room.”

“I am pleased to meet you,” Ossip replied, and he held a chair out for the woman, who thanked him in Yiddish. Then the young man sat down, buttered a sweet roll, and began his meal. His father engaged the couple in conversation, and Ossip smiled, thinking of his mother and what she would have said to this little scene of hospitality. He missed her clear mind, so akin to his own, but for some reason he felt touched today by his father's behavior toward the refugees. For the thousandth time in his life, Ossip told himself that it was a pity that compassion, so strong and pure in David, was so filtered in himself; but he had long ago accepted his own detached nature. His father had been born and would die an idealist.

It was at the bank that morning that Ossip first learned that the Bolsheviks had seized most of the government buildings, that the Petrograd garrison had allowed them to enter the Winter Palace and had joined ranks with the insurgents.

“They want to prevent the elections to the Constituent Assembly from taking place,” his Uncle Sasha stated, his blue eyes wide with horror. “So if their side doesn't win, they'll be in control anyway.” But Ossip was hardly listening. Beads of perspiration coursed down his back, and he thought: My God, if Papa has ventured to a ministry, or to see anyone in government, on behalf of those Tchomskys… But he could not complete his thought. In cold fear, he went to the telephone and asked the central operator for the Gunzburg number. The lines had been cut. His uncle burst into his office, his eyes wild. “I'm going home,” he said tersely. “Rosa is terrified. I could curse myself today, for having succumbed to her irrational preference for a household of female help. What good are they to her now?”

Ossip remained glued to his seat. What about Natasha? Her parents, the idiots, are still here, waiting with her for news of that husband which they had imposed upon her. What if insurgents once again seized the Count? But there was still Nicolai Nicolaievitch, Natasha's older brother, the one Ossip had never liked, who had served in the Senate with their father. He would protect his own mother, Maria Efimovna, and Natasha, and little Larissa. Ossip half-rose, thinking: To hell with them, Natasha is mine, and I shall go to her. And then he thought again: But Papa! I am the only one he can count on. Uncle Sasha will be with Aunt Rosa…

Maybe nothing will happen, just another of the many uprisings we've already gone through, Ossip murmured to himself. But he seized his hat and coat, grabbed his silver-studded cane, which he carried for effect alone, stopped only to withdraw a sheaf of banknotes from the family account, and hailed a passing coach. He would, he decided, go first to his father, simply to ease his mind. Then he would stop at the apartment to check with Pavel. Perhaps, if she needed him, she would send word through him, or even go to the apartment. He wanted to take care of her and of little Lara, and even of Maria Efimovna, if it were necessary. But first, his father.

The hired coach took Ossip to the front door of his house, but there, as he stepped down, his own Vova came hurtling toward him, his coat torn, his face haggard. “Ossip Davidovitch!” he cried, and in his frenzy grasped Ossip's waistcoat lapels in trembling fingers. “There're soldiers upstairs with your father, and those Jews! I was going for the police—”

“Soldiers?” Now Ossip felt goose bumps on his scalp, and he shook Vova roughly. “Who, and why?”

“Riots, that's why! Petrograd garrison's gone wild. Looting and beating. Do you want me to go for the police? Or will you go, and I'll stay to help?”

“No, you go!” Ossip cried. “I'm going upstairs right now.”

“It's not safe,” the coachman stammered. “You know, sir, your back—”

But the young man had pushed past him, racing blindly up the flights of stairs and arriving at the apartment disheveled and red. The door stood ajar, and Ossip pushed it open and entered the vestibule. He could hear voices in the sitting room, Stepan's and his father's, and the shrill cry of the Tchomsky wife. Then there were harsh, drunken voices which were totally unfamiliar to him. From the doorway he peered into the room, hearing his own heartbeat in his wrists and temples. His eyes were opened wide and he tried to breathe quietly, but gasped in spite of himself.

His father, blue marks around his pale lips, stood in front of Madame Tchomskaya. Stepan was next to him, standing erect in his black suit, like a dignified raven. The little Tchomsky man was not to be seen. But there were three soldiers in the room, and one of them brandished a bayonet at his father's throat and said, “A Baron and a Jew! What luck! But it's the woman I'll have, and now!” He seized Madame Tchomskaya by the arm and dragged her, screaming, to a corner. Then the soldier threw her into the wall and watched with laughter as she collapsed, whimpering, to the floor. He hurled himself on top of her, and she uttered the most frightful scream, a plaint in Yiddish, which appeared to die in her very throat. Ossip saw Stepan take an enormous step toward her, saw him raise a fist which held a glistening copper paperweight, saw him bring the fist down upon the head of the soldier who had thrown himself atop Madame Tchomskaya—and then saw Stepan himself crumple with a soft moan, as blood trickled from his neck. One of the other soldiers had gouged him with the tip of his bayonet.

Ossip stood as if mesmerized by the scene before him. He could not think at all. The third soldier was yelling something, and he and the one who had struck Stepan now grabbed David by the arms, and began shouting something about the safe. Ossip saw them forcibly remove his father from the sitting room, leaving their unconscious companion still straddling Madame Tchomskaya, who had fainted. Ossip breathed deeply, again and again, until a purple rage seized hold of him, and he rushed into the room, moving toward the woman and disentangling her from her unmoving assailant whom he fiercely kicked. But he was not thinking about this woman, except in passing. Let them empty the safe! he thought wildly. It will give me time to find Papa's revolver, or else they will murder him, and me, and the lot of us. But as he tiptoed to his father's bedroom, neatly avoiding the study where he assumed that David was unlocking the family safe, he stopped for a brief instant by Stepan's body. Ossip kneeled, touched the servant's wrist, and quivered with hope: the pulse, though weak, was still present. He was miraculously alive! Ossip went to his father's bedside table and took out the small pearl-handled revolver that his brother Sasha had given Baron David as a precaution during the previous uprising. Now, Ossip praised the practical banker!

Armed, Ossip hastened noiselessly to the study, and found his father confronting the two inebriated soldiers, his face stark white. “You cannot take what has already been taken,” Baron David was asserting calmly. “I have told you—two of your men were here earlier, and took everything. My wife's jewels, all our cash reserves—everything that was here! I have been wiped clean of my riches, gentlemen. You will have to look elsewhere to do your thieving.”

David had not seen Ossip. Neither had the soldiers. Now one of them took the Baron by his shoulders and began to beat his head against the mantelpiece. Ossip's mouth parted, his breath stopped. Sheer horror convulsed his body. Without second thought, he cocked the pistol behind the back of the man who was holding his father, aimed and pulled the trigger. With a violent shout, half of surprise, the man fell sideways. On impulse Ossip fired at the other man as his lips opened in bewildered fury.

“Papa!” Ossip cried, running, but the Baron, gagging, clutched at his throat, choking and falling forward. Ossip reached him and turned him onto his back, loosening his cravat and holding his head. He could not understand what was happening.

Ossip, on the floor with his father, did not hear Madame Tchomskaya enter the study. He helped his father turn to his side, so that he might vomit. Madame Tchomskaya whispered, in Yiddish, “It's his heart, isn't it?”

“For God's sake, get a doctor!” Ossip cried. But the woman shook her head, tears streaming from her eyes. She mumbled something about “too long,” and “day like today.” Ossip wanted to grab her and kick her as he had kicked the man who had attacked her. “He was thinking of you, only of you!” he screamed at her. “Now do something for him!” But the woman stood still, crying softly, as Ossip wiped his father's mouth with his embroidered linen handkerchief. He had never felt so helpless in his entire life, not even during the years of his childhood, strapped to his crib.

“Your mother… respect her…” the Baron was whispering, and now Ossip stroked his face, his cheeks, and nodded, repeating his father's words. He knew that his own tears were falling on his father's chin, that he was sobbing like a boy. But he could not cease, even when Madame Tchomskaya moved him aside and insisted upon closing the Baron's eyes. It was unthinkable that his father would simply collapse like this, simply die! Yet his breathing had stopped, the woman was right, and only this body remained of what had been Baron David de Gunzburg. Ossip's shoulders rose and fell with wracking sobs. He could not leave the room.

At long last, Madame Tchomskaya said, “Your kind servant is badly hurt. But he is alive, Ossip Davidovitch. You must think of him. And of yourself. My husband had gone to see about a job—I shall await him here, with the other servants. But you must be gone. They will know who fired the gun. You must think of leaving the city.”

Dazed, Ossip rose and followed her to the sitting room, where she had placed a crude bandage about Stepan's head. Several scared chambermaids were clustered near the wall. Suddenly Ossip's mind cleared. “Do you all have places to go?” he demanded. They nodded. He cleared his throat: “Then go. And somebody please take the Tchomskys. My father… would want them taken care of. Have them go to my uncle, Baron Alexander. I shall take Stepan with me, for he will have to leave this city too. The man he hurt is not dead, and can come for him. I—” and he smiled wryly—“have no more bullets left in the revolver. My father must have practiced, to have left me only two good shots…” He thought: Yes, Uncle Sasha must have made him learn to shoot, four times—but for what?

Tears stood once more in his eyes. He spoke again: “Is it true, that others came this morning, and looted the safe?”

“Yes, Baron,” one of the girls replied. “The funds from the Judaica are gone, too.”

Ossip sighed. “Here,” he said, and handed her a purse with some coins. “I shall keep some money for Stepan and me, to see us through, but you will need this.”

Vova and Madame Tchomskaya's husband came in together, and Ossip, his face suddenly paling, fell against the wall and whispered that he wanted them to carry Stepan to the landau. He wanted Vova to drive them somewhere in the city. “I can no longer pay you,” he said to Vova. “They have taken all but what my father has invested in the bank. My uncle will pay you, when I am gone. But I shall need the landau for myself and Stepan.”