The Four Winds of Heaven (77 page)

G
eorgi Yenudinia had not slept well
, and as he drank his thick Turkish coffee with his uncle, he coughed and asked, “Don't you think that now is the time to attend to Gino de Gunzburg? I could fetch him myself, off the
Don…
”

“No,” Charykov answered, crossly dismissing his nephew's pleading eyes. Georgi had always been such a homely lad, so sweaty and gangling and unappealing. A man to be crushed and disregarded. “You will go to the Hotel d'Angleterre, where, I believe, Mesdames de Gunzburg are staying. Bring the note to them.” He thought bitterly of his wife's father, Minister Ivanov, who had shown such familiarity to Baron David, the Jew in his fold, while regarding his own son-in-law, Anatoly Tcharykov, with relative lack of favor. The notion still galled the former Ambassador, and he glared at his wife's nephew with particular distaste. Sniffing audibly, he said, to quell the faint stirrings of his own conscience, “The young man has obviously survived two wars. A slight chill will not kill him. Was he not the most stalwart among the Baron's brood?”

“I believe so,” Yenudinia said. He averted his eyes from his uncle and gulped the last swallow of coffee. “I am going now,” he said, rising. He grabbed his hat and cane and ordered the landau. When it came to the front door, the young man stepped inside and said to the coachman, “The Hotel d'Angleterre, quickly, please.”

In the coach, Yenudinia felt guilty. He had heard of Mathilde's presence in Constantinople, yet he had not called upon her once, concentrating instead upon packing for his uncle. He had seen her and Sonia in a tea room, with another family from Petrograd whom he had vaguely known as a young man. He had stopped, shocked by Sonia's emaciation, at the grayness of Mathilde's hair. They had been dressed in long gowns, out of style and shiny with wear, and Sonia's hair had been discreetly knotted at the top in the fashion of 1908. Yet, strangely, this style became her, and her intense thinness served to emphasize the delicacy of her bone structure, the largeness of her clear gray eyes. He felt regret; once, as a student, he had thought that he loved her from afar. And, orphaned so early in life, he had found a serene solace in the person of Mathilde Yureyevna, his aunt's friend. To see them this way pained him, and he hid from them thereafter. His uncle had lunched with the two refugees following Yenudinia's encounter, but he had not repeated the courtesy. After all, the Tcharykov fortune was intact, the Gunzburgs destitute.

Yenudinia found Sonia alone in the dining room of the Hotel d'Angleterre, and she rose, greeting him on the tip of her small toes, like a girl. She smiled, and a pink color flowed into her cheeks. “How delightful,” she declared. He could not restrain his own answering smile, thinking that she had changed so little from their youth in Petrograd— Petersburg then—when she would greet all her guests thus, with the gracious head tilted becomingly in its topheavy coiffure. “Mama has gone for a breath of fresh air, with Madame Kholodny,” she added. “Have you taken your breakfast, Georgi Petrovitch?”

“Yes, yes,” he said, blushing, thinking of his mission. He could not look into her oval face, so unlined still, so alive with perception, or she would read his guilt. He fumbled with his breast pocket, and removed the crumpled note, clumsily. Sonia was watching him with narrowed eyes, wondering. He cleared his throat. “We have received news for you, Sofia Davidovna,” he said. “It is extraordinary, actually. A true coincidence, your still being here at this time. You see—” And he could not continue under her gaze. He gave her the note, and watched her eyebrows quirk with mystification. He mopped his perspiring brow.

But she turned on him, blue sparks in her eyes, and cried, “This message is dated yesterday! What have you done about this, Georgi Petrovitch?”

He coughed delicately. “My uncle thought it best to wait till morning, so that we might consult you and Mathilde Yureyevna. We... I...”

“What kind of consultation did you expect? My brother is in dire straits, and you dared to wait and risk his life? You have wasted precious hours. But what am I saying? We must go at once.” She rushed to the table, found a piece of writing paper, and scrawled a rapid note to her mother. Then she wrapped herself in a thick shawl, took her bag, running toward the door. She turned back and regarded Yenudinia. “Are you coming?” she demanded.

The young man followed, his large knuckles cracking as he bent his fingers inside each other in his nervousness. He was frightened of Sonia, of her white fury, of her determination. He ran ahead of her to the landau, tried to help her inside, but she pushed him off and climbed in by her own efforts. He did likewise. She said to the driver, “The Bosporus harbor, please. Leave us at one end, we shall find our way.”

But at the port, they were confronted with a long line of transports, ship after ship of Russian Whites evacuating their country. Sonia clamped her fist to her mouth, and fought back tears of frustration. “There are caïques for rent,” Yenudinia suggested lamely. “You know—Turkish rowboats. We can row past the ships, and go along the harbor, noting the names of the ships as we pass alongside them at the back.”

She merely nodded, scanning the horizon. He helped her down, and they rented a caïque as he had suggested. She would not let him pay for the boat, but pressed her own coins into the hand of the man who pushed their vessel out into the Sea of Marmara. Yenudinia began to row, steadily, until he had gone beyond the length of the transports, and then he changed his route and paralleled the harbor, behind the ships. They rowed steadily for several hours, but none of the ships presently docked bore the name
Don.
Tears sprang from Sonia's eyes. “Take me back, Georgi Petrovitch,” she asked. “And then go home to your uncle. I shall walk on the pier and question the soldiers. I do not need you anymore, and besides, your arms must ache. Anatoly Kirilovitch will wonder what has become of you.” She smiled through her tears, and he was moved. All his life pretty women had made it known that they could live without him, but none more eloquently than Sonia, now.

He left her after they returned their caïque, although he lingered by his landau, half expecting her to backtrack in distress. But she had already forgotten his sorry existence. Her hair disheveled with the sea wind, she walked at a brisk, British pace, stopping one soldier after another. Each one shrugged, said he did not know, or told her that the
Don
had sailed earlier in the morning. At length she encountered a sympathetic dock official who confirmed this statement. The
Don
had left for Gallipoli, and she had missed it.

Now Sonia sat down on a large flat stone and began to weep. Oh, Gino! she cried, where are you? And can you ever forgive us, for what we failed to do? I failed to protect Olga, and now I have failed you again, when you called out so desperately…

She walked off the pier, wearily, her feet hurting inside the old boots. There was a carriage at the side, for passengers, and she hailed it and returned to her quarters at the Hotel d'Angleterre. She entered just as Anatoly Tcharykov was departing, and she brushed past him rudely, her eyes glistening with tears. “Leave us alone!” she said to him. “For that is precisely what you did to Gino. Now he is God-knows-where, en route to Gallipoli, while you pack your precious books into cushioned boxes. Go away, Anatoly Kirilovitch. You are no longer our friend.”

Her mother did not utter the words of polite retraction the former Ambassador was expecting. In her stern silence, she echoed her daughter's utter condemnation. Tcharykov replaced his hat upon his head, thinking: Those damned Jews. Thank God that something has happened to take them down a peg in their arrogance. He strode away in outrage.

O
n the island of Lemnos
, chaos reigned, for the Russians were taking over control from the British. Some straggling members of the families of important officers of the White Army had been sent ahead of the convoys and troops, and some of the women had become nurses at the French Hospital, which needed assistance. But, after some strenuous weeks, many of them were now leaving the island at their husbands' insistence. Generals and their men were flooding the area, and needed to be reorganized after the massive evacuation from the Crimea. It was time for the women and children to think of a permanent move, and British and French ships were beginning to transport these branches of Russian families in exile to their own home ports. Although most of the White volunteer army had gone toward Gallipoli, troops were being disembarked each day along the way, adding to the frustration of the officials who attempted to keep track of all who entered as well as exited from the ports.

In Lemnos, a very sick Gino was transported to the French Hospital, where he was at once put into a clean, cool bed. He was barely conscious of the white-clad nurses who hovered over him, feeding him broth or taking his temperature. He could not breathe, and experienced panic each time he attempted to force his lungs to function. “Pleurisy,” the French doctor said, shaking his head.

A young nurse, wiping her brow, sat down for a quick cup of tea with her companions. The oldest of the nurses, a robust Frenchwoman, asked, “So it's for tomorrow, my dear?”

“Yes,” the young one said. She pushed strands of black hair behind her cap. “My daughter and I are taking the ship to France.”

“And the general? Will he be following?”

“My husband will remain here with his troops, until he can join us,” she replied. She looked tired, but her skin was remarkably rosy, the perfect background for her eyes, which shone like lapis lazuli, a deep blue. She smiled. “This training has been most useful, Madame Trévin. Perhaps I can find work in an infirmary of some sort in Paris. Andrei is not well. It will fall upon me to earn our living, and we gay flowers from Petersburg were singularly unprepared for adversity. You must despise us now that our regime has been torn down.”

“No, my dear, we are only sorry. It is always sad to see whole lives crumbling, though we nurses have borne witness to that phenomenon since we nursed our first patients. Look at that helpless old man with both legs in splints. And the young Baron over there, for instance. Pleurisy. And such a fine-looking young man. We still can't predict if he'll pull through.”

“Who is he?” the nurse asked curiously, sipping her tea.

Madame Trévin sighed. “He's a Russian, just as you are, Princess. His name is Baron Eugene—Evgeni, you would say, wouldn't you?—de Gunzburg. A strange Teuton name that, if you ask me.”

Natasha Kurdukova uttered a small cry. “Gino?” she said. “Oh, dear God! How his mother and sister searched for him, in Sevastopol…”

“You knew the family, then?” Madame Trévin asked.

Natasha began to weep. She nodded. Swiftly, she rose, and walked to the bed where the young Russian soldier lay gasping for breath. She took his hand, and caressed it softly with her long, sensitive fingers. “Yes,” she murmured gently, her tears falling upon the sheet. “Ossip was right when he told me you reminded him of Volodia. The world can only afford to lose one of you. Volodia is gone, Gino. You probably do not even remember him. But you must live, for all the Gunzburgs who love you. Listen to me through your fever, Gino. You can't let go.”

She remained by his bedside, counting the labored breaths, sponging his brow, murmuring softly to him in his agony. It was only when the doctor sent her away that she remembered that she had to pack, that she and Lara were leaving for France the following day.

When the ship lifted anchor the next morning, Natasha Kurdukova waved to her husband with a little white handkerchief from her youth in Petrograd. As she listened with half an ear to Larissa's excited warblings, a sudden thought pierced her mind: She had left without checking on Gino. And she had promised his mother and sister. She felt the tears rise to her eyes, wiped them away. She had also promised Sonia something else, that night in Sevastopol…

“Why do you cry, Mamatchka?” Lara asked. “Is it because Papa has a hurt lung, and won't be himself anymore?”

“Yes,” Natasha replied, tangling her fingers in her daughter's hair as she had done so often with Ossip's. “That, and the fact that none of us will ever be himself, or herself, again. Part of me lies strewn all over Russia, in Petrograd with your grandparents, in Sevastopol, perhaps in Odessa… And even beyond Russia, in Persia with your Uncle Volodia, whom you never knew… and here, in Lemnos.”

“With Papa,” Lara declared, nodding her head. “But he'll come to us.”

“Yes,” Natasha whispered. “He'll come to us.” She closed her magnificent eyes.

B
y the New
Year of 1921, Sonia and Mathilde had settled into new lives. Mathilde had happily found the house of her parents, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and had made a large bedroom on the third story her own. Her mother, old Baroness Ida, resided permanently in Lausanne, and had rented out the two lower floors of her French manor, in order to add to her small income. Mathilde, after three years in the Crimea, after meals of boiled barley and abject poverty at the end, was at peace in this house, where so much had occurred. She did not think, in her room in Saint-Germain, of Johanna's betrayal, of the ugliness that had entered her friend's soul and had disfigured her blond loveliness. She remembered days of peace, moments that had been windbreakers in the gusts of life, and she was, if not happy, at least serene.

Misha had arranged for Mathilde to be paid a small income every year, enough for her to take several long trips to Switzerland, where the other half of her family lived. In this way she could share her time between Sonia in Paris and Baroness Ida, her daughter Anna, and the boy, Riri, all of whom lived in Lausanne. Riri was now fifteen. Mathilde found him the painful, living reminder of Ivan Berson, but could never broach the subject with Anna; never could she have brought herself to discuss his illegitimate birth, this proof of what her daughter had meant to the son of the wanton Bersons. Yet she loved the boy, and thought him strangely beautiful, as only children of true love can be.

She had seemed to make peace with her older daughter. There was no Johanna to come between them, and, at thirty-six, Anna had mellowed and was able to regard her mother with compassion. Perhaps, thought Mathilde, wishing she could be open with Anna, her daughter had been a mother herself long enough now to have learned of parental frailties. Yet she went out of her way to treat her grandson as the child of Anna's friend. If Anna guessed at the subterfuge, she did not mention it either. And so the door, once left ajar by the error of two sisters, quietly closed between the mother and her daughter. Perhaps neither had the courage to throw aside the veil, or perhaps Anna loved the boy too deeply to risk his overhearing a damaging truth.

Upon arriving in Paris at the end of 1920, Sonia had asked her aunt and uncle for a few weeks more of rest, and had gone to Saint-Germain with her mother. Her emotions were in a state of upheaval. She could think only of her brothers—Gino, who had left no trace to follow, and Ossip, who was married to a stranger, and who was reportedly about to depart for Tokyo with the France-Asian Bank. She kept wetting her lips, wondering whether to discuss her encounters with Natasha Kurdukova in Sevastopol with Ossip. Natasha's words had left little doubt in Sonia's mind as to their relationship, but Sonia balked at the idea that so fine a lady as Natasha could have become anyone's—even Ossip's—mistress. Perhaps the two had merely run into each other in Petrograd, and become reacquainted and friendly. Perhaps, with a lack of discretion, they had even spoken of love. But the rest was unthinkable, and perhaps it was best for Sonia to leave well enough alone. Everybody had suffered enough.

Ossip did not waste time in calling upon them in Saint-Germain. When Sonia answered the door, and saw him, she uttered a short cry and threw her arms around his neck. He smelled of himself, his laughter in her ears was the same; he was here with her! “I've missed you so!” she cried, and for a moment it was as if they were adolescents again, before Natasha and Volodia had forever split the atom of their togetherness.

“My love, this is Vera,” Ossip was saying, and Sonia found herself glancing toward a pretty blond girl much as her cousin Tania had been in her childhood. “Vera—this is my sister, Sofia Davidovna de Gunzburg.”

“You must call me Sonia, for I am to be your aunt,” the young woman said. “But come in—I am forgetting Mama! She has been so anxious to see you, my Ossip!”

Mathilde was waiting in the sitting room, for her legs had been causing her much pain since the Crimea. Ossip came to her quickly, and enveloped her in his arms, rocking her back and forth. Mathilde could not speak, so great was her emotion at once more being held by her favorite child. Too much had happened. When he finally broke away, laughing somewhat tremulously, he was motioning to the small girl. “Come, Verotchka. Meet your new grandmother.”

But Mathilde was looking around the room. “Where is your wife, Ossip?” she asked.

Her son averted his face, and Sonia thought: How pencil thin he has grown, where before his fineness was etched in charcoal… And he is not himself, no indeed. He seems… ashamed. Ashamed, and emptied of spirit, that spirit that had returned after his imprisonment at the Fortress. Could it be that this woman was not making him happy? Suddenly she was angry.

“Lizette is not well today, Mama,” Ossip explained. But he did not look at his mother.

“Is it serious?” Mathilde asked.

“It's a headache,” Vera interposed. She seemed a bright child, well-mannered and attractive, and Sonia judged her to be ten or twelve.

“A headache? Indeed.” Mathilde's blue eyes met Ossip's, and held them silently. Pride and outrage were contained in her magnificent chiseled face, the pride of an affronted mother-in-law, upon whom one has reversed the rules of etiquette. “I understand, Ossip. Do not bother with explanations.” The words appeared to slap her son's cheek, and he blinked. Sonia saw pain upon his features, and pain too upon her mother's. Never before had Mathilde looked so rebuffed as now, by her son and his absent wife. And Sonia began to hate Lizette, who had made this reunion a humiliating occasion. How had Ossip allowed such disgraceful behavior?

“Yes, Mama is prone to headaches,” Vera was saying in her trilling young voice. “When she goes to bed at night, Ossip and I have to sit by her side and hold her hand or she cannot fall asleep.” She called her stepfather “Ossip” in adult fashion.

“Then your mother must be quite miserable right now,” Mathilde commented. “You are both here.”

Ossip, Lizette, and Vera, it was revealed, had lived in the house in Saint-Germain until a few days before the return of Mathilde and Sonia, when Baroness Ida had asked them to move. Lizette had been most resentful. This was explained by Misha and Clara de Gunzburg, who had kindly taken Ossip's family into their mansion in Paris for several days. Misha said, touching his upper lip with embarrassment, “Our Lizette thought that she had married into a royal family, it would appear. I do believe she'd hoped you had both perished at the hands of the Bolsheviks, so that she might be
the
Baroness de Gunzburg. Now, in Paris, she was faced with an entire clan of us; and her mother-in-law, to boot, is still alive and well. This did not sit nicely with her; nor did Aunt Ida's request that she move out of Saint-Germain to accommodate you, my dear Mathilde.”

Sonia was outraged. How could Ossip have married that kind of person? She felt fiercely protective of her mother, and angrier than ever at her brother. Why had he allowed this woman to humiliate their mother by not coming at once to greet her, with him and Vera? But a full week later, Lizette did come, dressed soberly but with flair, in an inexpensive but elegant afternoon suit of navy blue, her black eyes piercing, her features sharp and angular, her carriage impeccable. She bent toward Mathilde and pecked at her cheek, accepted tea from Sonia, and spoke. She did not ask about their adventures in the Crimea, about their health. She talked, instead, of her devotion to her husband, of nursing him in Odessa, of their plans to go to the Orient which had always been part of his dream. One could see the sparks which flew into her eyes whenever she spoke of “Ossip's brilliant career, which lies ahead of us like a road strewn with gemstones.” Sonia thought: But my brother is not ambitious. She does not understand him at all!

During the days that preceded Ossip's departure, Lizette did not leave him any time alone with his mother or his sister. She clung to him, touching his sleeve, his hand, his elbow, almost as if to reassure herself that he had not left her side. She told sparkling anecdotes in her nervous manner, amusing the company around her. But Sonia and Mathilde were disquieted. Certainly this was not the marriage they had dreamed of for Ossip. Sonia thought, wryly: You have picked your Gentile, my brother, but if you had to go against the religion of your fathers, why did you not wait for the other? But the constant presence of Lizette prevented Sonia from having to decide whether or not to speak of Natasha to her brother.

Once, by the door, Ossip did succeed in retaining Sonia for a brief minute. He bent toward her, and whispered, rapidly, “You see, my sweet, I owe my life to her. And I owe her more, because—well, because it is not within my power to give her what she needs: a man's true heart. Don't you understand? If I did not have Lizette, or Vera, why should I continue to push on, to live at all? They give me a reason to earn a living, to rise in the morning. I am grateful to them for that.”

“But—why, Ossip? What has happened to bereave you so?” his sister demanded, searching his face for clues.

He brought his fingers to his eyes. “I cannot explain,” he merely stated. But he added: “Did I tell you whom I saw in Odessa? Ivan Berson! He was a member of the government on the Volga. It was... an emotional encounter. He gave money to Stepan for us.”

Sonia blanched. “And you told him, about Annushka?”

Her brother regarded her strangely. “What was there to tell? I did not want to dwell on what was obviously painful to him. I said that she was well, and in Switzerland.” He scratched his chin: “Why? Should I have told him something else?”

“Of course not,” Sonia replied. She knew now that she would not speak of Natasha. She herself felt no desire to learn what might have occurred to Kolya Saxe. The past was gone, forever. She kissed her brother, and let him out the door. Already Lizette's shrill voice was calling to him, impatiently.

Stepan had remained with Ossip and Lizette, but he did not appear happy. Sonia felt a flow of warmth and gratitude for this old man of more than sixty years, so tall and elegant, who had not forsaken their family. “Elizaveta Adolfovna is not easy, is she?” she asked of him one day, blushing at her own impudence. But he had not replied. Instead, he had tactfully commented upon the bloom that seemed restored to her own cheeks. When, in January, Ossip and his family departed for Japan, Stepan remained with Clara. She already possessed an excellent maître d'hôtel, but could, she said, employ Stepan as his assistant. It would mean a definite step down for him, but he was in no position to refuse. Mathilde simply did not have the funds with which to pay him, and besides, he would not feel quite so exiled if he could see Sonia, his little mistress of yore.

When Ossip left, Sonia heaved a sigh, partly in sadness that her beloved brother, after so long a separation, was going to be far from her again; but also partly in relief, for Lizette had put Sonia's nerves on edge. But Mathilde said, “Perhaps, although she is not our kind, she is good for him. She has protected him, and he needed that. He has given her his name, his care. Theirs is not a union made in heaven, but it may be a marriage to survive where others, created in the heart, have failed. At least my son has picked a lady born and bred.”

Sonia smiled. She could say nothing, for she knew now that her mother too had married for comfort, and not for love. But she vowed within herself that when and if she pledged her troth again, it would be in a total commitment guided by her sentiments. Spinsterhood was no dishonor. Marriage could not include compromises; better to be alone and whole.

R
osa and Sasha de Gunzburg
were no longer in Paris. A cousin of his and of Baron David, who owned many banks, had offered Sasha the management of the Amsterdam branch of his Bank of Paris and the Low Lands. But on February 21, Tatiana Halperina, who resided in Basel, Switzerland, with her husband's family, gave birth to twin sons, whom she named Jean and Vladimir, or Volodia. Sonia thought ruefully: In one blow she has surfaced our memories of youth, hers and mine together. And she thought: But Tania knew nothing of the business with the Tagantsevs. Her twins represent a coincidence in our lives, a strange harkening back to golden days in Petrograd… to other twins...

She sent her cousin a warm letter of congratulations and wrote to her of Ossip's marriage, wondering whether Tania had ever really cared for her brother. Suddenly, at thirty, Sonia felt old. She had held out, hoping, hoping… for what? The realists had settled for less than what they had originally wanted, all of them, even her sweet friend Nina. She had found Nina again, with her husband and child, among the thousands of White Russian refugees in Paris. Even Nina had a child, a handsome boy.

Now it was time for Sonia to move into the three-story house of her Uncle Misha, time to assume her responsibilities. She took her single suitcase, filled with books and old clothing, and brought it to the luxurious rooms of the rue de Lubeck, in the elegant sixteenth
arondissement,
Paris's most aristocratic neighborhood. She crossed the vestibule, then entered the ground floor, passing the ballroom and salon, the dining room and the study. The carpets were soberly muted in color, fine Aubusson rugs which reflected quiet good taste. On the first floor were the master bedroom suite, several bathrooms, and boudoirs for guests, and on the top floor were smaller rooms, including Serge's lesson room, his playroom, and his bathroom, his bedroom and that intended for his governess, who was to share a bathroom with the nurse and the laundry girl.