The Four Winds of Heaven (73 page)

O
n April 24
, a Red detachment of one hundred fifty carts and wagons appeared in Stary Krym, disgorging soldiers who proceeded to commandeer rooms for a week in the houses of the large village. It was this convoy which contained the two men who threw terror into Mathilde's life, and who made Sonia realize that she had planned wisely when she had pried loose the floorboards in their bedroom. The small, soft-spoken boy, Igor Plotkin, had been an actor before being drafted into the Red Army. No one could guess what occupation might have been held by his companion, Pavel Antonov. Thickset and red-faced, with a wide, flattened nose, Antonov reminded Sonia of a large, uncouth ape. His bouts of drunkenness made her aware that his blood lust was demented, uncontrollable. She could not sleep while he was in the house. Hollows formed beneath her eyes, and her body twitched with nervousness.

Sonia had been so alert to the goings-on in town that Johanna de Mey's final plunge into madness was not noticed. She knew that her former governess had grown increasingly frenzied since Olga's death. But Sonia did not know that for Johanna the girl's suicide had brought about a swift justification against the seeping effects of guilt. Olga was a bad seed, Johanna insisted, and then, wringing her hands, she shrilly wept, overwhelmed by anger and pain at the idea of what Mathilde had seen in Olga's mother. No, Johanna thought, shaking her head back and forth rapidly: I merely evened the score. If I could not keep the mother, certainly the intruder's child should not have the son. It was justice.

But Mathilde had not made do with justice. She had not allowed herself to be cleansed by Olga's death and Nadia's absence. She stayed in her house, obeying Sonia, that most hateful of the Gunzburg children, David's true daughter. More than before, Johanna's loneliness ate away at her, ulcer like. She had to affect the final purge. Mathilde could not be permitted to proceed with her life as though she, Johanna, had not spent her own lifetime pushing away the obstacles that had separated them. In anguish and despair, Johanna sought her revenge. She would expose the proud aristocrats from Petrograd.

S
onia stood
in the market place by the dairy cart, watching absently. To her left was the fruit stand, and beyond, the vegetables. Mathilde was examining the tomatoes, her finely tapered fingers rough on the edges. The girl could see her from where she stood, but she could also see the soldiers straggling to their post, and the villagers bargaining for produce. Her black hair was tightly braided around her head, and her gray eyes picked over the crowd. Suddenly she froze. Her lips parted, her eyes widened. She had seen the soldier Antonov conversing with Johanna. Sonia watched as the woman turned and looked at Mathilde, then saw her furtive gaze travel until it met her own troubled stare. In an instant, Sonia turned and fled, leaving her eggs in the vendor's hand, and lifting her skirt so that she could run. She darted between the villagers, to the vegetable stand, and grabbed her mother's arm, startling her. “Come at once,” she whispered under her breath.

“But—?”

“Never mind. Hurry!” She pushed the older woman ahead of her, out of the crowd and onto the street. When they had run a distance from the market, she said in low, tense tones, “We have been betrayed. Antonov knows about us.”

Mathilde's sapphire eyes were enormous. “But—who?'' she stammered.

The girl's face set itself into grim lines. When she spoke, bitterness seemed to slap the other woman across the cheek. “Who do you think?”

Sonia knew it would happen that night. When Johanna entered their house, hoping to cauterize her own wounds by watching the final vengeance as it took place, Sonia maneuvered her into the armoire so that she would not know about the hideaway that would protect Sonia and her mother. Then they waited, as if in a dream, for the inevitable sound of footsteps, for the awful, drunken sounds of the soldiers as they returned. It was after midnight when they heard Antonov's crude singing and felt the firm vibrations of his boots upon the floor above their heads. Sonia imagined the two men searching the small house… opening drawers… discovering Johanna's hiding place. And when she heard the shot, in her mind's eye she saw Olga, and a scarlet pain swallowed her consciousness, so that she did not realize for a moment that the drop that had fallen upon her was Johanna's blood. It was only then that her brain reeled, that she lost her hold on reality.

Sonia's mind flew like a frightened dove above herself, above the tiny space where she crouched with her unconscious mother. It flew up, up, into blue skies that offered hope and balm, the skies of her childhood. How could she die now, if she had become herself as a child of five, before Juanita had even entered their lives? She was at Mohilna, anticipating the birth of Gino, who would complete their family circle. She was Before. And then, as though a book were quickly flipping its own pages, her dove's mind flew over all the twenty-eight years of her existence, so rapidly that she glimpsed it all, all the joys and pain, beneath her like a plain crested with valleys and hillocks. All of her past, even the bad times, possessed the grace of life, and she clung to that grace, afraid of Now, when Antonov might kill her and push her headlong into oblivion. The Jews, her father had taught her, had no heaven for which to yearn. That was why survival meant everything to this race that had been threatened countless times, as she was threatened now, with extinction.

It was the acrid stench of the blood that brought her back to the urgent need for action in the present. The odor acted upon her like smelling salts, restoring her thoughts. She shuddered, wondering where she had been and if time had raced on or stopped altogether. Mathilde still leaned against her, heavily unconscious. Mama, the escapist, Sonia thought wryly. She looked around them. The tiny, cramped area seemed their last refuge, but Sonia felt a slight chill, as if there were a draft. She groped behind her: there was nothing but stone. Gently she pushed her hands behind her mother; and there, she had it!—an aperture.

She crawled to it and saw that there was an opening between the stone foundations, just large enough for a very small person to crawl through. Sonia's consciousness was all at once flooded with elation: here, then, was the way to safety, to fetch help for her mother.

Sonia allowed her mother to slump to the damp ground. Then she pushed herself between the stone pillars, on her knees. She edged her thin torso between them, panting, beads of perspiration streaming down her face. Dropping to her stomach, she propelled herself by the sheer force of her hands and elbows, slithering out of the hideaway into the blackness of the night. She could hear the two men, little Plotkin and Antonov, but they were probably on the road ahead. Sonia hesitated; she could go to the militia, but that would take time. Or they might not believe her, and accuse her of the murder. There were the hills. Without further consideration, Sonia ran, on the balls of her feet, in back of the rows of houses, behind the entire village until at last she reached the small house occupied by Aspasia Vassilievna, the veterinarian's widow. She did not know her well, but she recalled that she had said that her brother had been murdered by Red anarchists. Sonia reached her kitchen door and knocked on it, urgently, yet softly, so as not to alert neighbors.

When the woman came to the door, she stood back, agape at Sonia's appearance. “I don't have time to explain,” the young woman said, panting. “But I need help. You are not young, it is not fair to ask you to exert yourself—but I cannot do this alone. Mama lies between the stone foundations of your other house—our house—and she is unconscious. I cannot tell you everything, only that the men who commandeered the house have killed your boarder, our friend. I must get Mama out! If you could go inside the house and find the potato sack where I have stuffed eggs and tomatoes and a blanket, I can take Mama to the hills to hide for several days...”

Aspasia Vassilievna nodded. She was a silent, Greek woman with thick dark hair, and as she wrapped a black shawl about her shoulders, she reminded Sonia of a shrouded raven. But, for a woman well into middle age, she walked briskly, keeping up with Sonia as the young woman brought her along the backs of the houses, to escape detection. When they reached the Gunzburg house, Aspasia Vassilievna said, “There is no one here. They have probably gone to celebrate, God knows where.”

“Then I shall go inside the house, and you can keep watch,” Sonia stated. She had already decided that it would be easier to drag Mathilde up through the bedroom floor than between the foundation stones. She entered silently, and when she came to the bedroom she closed her eyes to prepare herself for the sight of Johanna, but it was even worse than she had imagined. Her mind reeling, she clung to the wall for support.

Mechanically, to keep from allowing the horror to overwhelm her, Sonia began to recite Hebrew psalms that David had taught her as a child. She muttered them, uncomprehending, in order not to see the dead body, the torn clothing, the face. She had to move all this in order to pry up the boards. Sickened, bile rising in her throat, Sonia repeated psalm after psalm, as Igor Plotkin had reiterated the Lord's Prayer to cushion his own shock at Antonov's deed. Sonia threw an old coat over the body, and mouthed the words that had once possessed deep significance for her, words about valleys and shepherds and green and God, but which now meant nothing at all. Then she rolled the body to the side, wondering with piercing clarity how such a thin, angular woman could have become so heavy to displace.

Then Sonia pulled up the boards, and bent down into the cavity where her mother was slumped. She took her mother's arms and began to pull. Mathilde's eyelids flickered, and she murmured something as she came to. “No,” Sonia said. “You must not say a word.” She brushed the dark strands of hair from her mother's face and once more tried to pull her up out of the hole. But Mathilde was too weak to help, and finally Sonia had to lower herself into the hiding place beside her mother, propping up the heavy wooden planks with her back. At last Mathilde managed to climb out. “Don't look,” Sonia warned her. “Just run out the back door.” Then she herself climbed up and let the boards fall askew. She could not straighten her back, but had to walk bent in two into the kitchen, where she gathered the potato sack from the pantry in preparation for flight into the hills.

She found her mother and Aspasia Vassilievna behind the house, and the widow came to her, agilely belying her years. “I could have helped,” she remonstrated. Her face displayed concern as she saw Sonia, bent over from the strain of the plywood planks on her back. Sonia knew only that her legs possessed no further strength. But she willed them to move, taking her mother's arm and allowing Aspasia Vassilievna to take Mathilde's other arm. They walked, silently, three abreast, toward the hillside woods. Once there, Sonia collapsed, and the widow covered her with the blanket and helped Mathilde to lie down in the dirt, beneath a pine tree. Mathilde had not uttered a syllable since leaving the hiding place.

“I am going to tell the militia,” Aspasia Vassilievna declared when she had settled them as best she could. “The Red Army is disciplined now, and punishes its men for looting and killing. They will hang Antonov for this.” She turned resolutely to leave.

The pine tree exuded a fresh scent of strong resin, and the earth was moist. Sonia's body felt numb with agony, so numb that her brain could no longer function. But Mathilde's eyes, round and staring, kept filling with salt tears that spilled over and over from her thick black lashes. It was not until the next morning that she spoke. “Thank you,” she said to Sonia, “for the coat.”

“You shouldn't have looked,” Sonia replied. She gazed at the sun that was coming up between folds of hazy dawn, and added, “But we're alive.” Her back still hurt, and she could barely turn, but her fingers clutched at a blade of grass and plucked it. It was green, and earth clung to its root. “We're alive,” she repeated. Now the psalms returned to her, with meaning, and her father's voice, vibrating with his own love of God, echoed in her mind.