The Four Winds of Heaven (78 page)

An elevator took Sonia to these quarters, where Serge, bright-eyed, awaited her. He was ten, nearly eleven, and she remembered him with gladness. He had been a babe of two when she had gone to Kiev with Clara, and five when she had returned to Petrograd by way of Paris in 1915. She thought, without emotion: Eight years ago, before we went to Kiev, I slept on the second story, in the choicest guest apartment. Now I share a toilet with servants. But what does any of this matter? Of all our relations, of all the Gunzburgs who settled in France and whose fortunes are still intact, only Misha and Clara came to me with a concrete offer of help. She hugged the little boy, and questioned him about his favorite games.

In the morning, Sonia breakfasted with Serge in his lesson room, but she did not have to instruct him, as Johanna had her. Instead, she sent him to his school, a private one, with the chauffeur. Toward the end of the morning she would go and meet him there, and they would take a walk. One of his friends had a governess who followed the same routine, and so the two women with their charges would take walks to the Avenue du Bois or the Square Lamartine to play. In the afternoon a lady came to help Serge with his homework. Sonia had to watch him when he practiced his piano, take him to his gymnastics class and his drawing class, walk with him and bring him to and from the homes of his friends. She played with him, but his mother brought him herself to the dentist and the hairdresser, and the nurse took care of his clothes and put him to bed and awakened him in the morning. At seven in the evening a dumbwaiter would bring him his supper, and Sonia would sit with him, but she herself took her evening meal with her aunt and uncle downstairs, at seven thirty. She was free in the evenings. Compared with what Johanna had performed for her family, Sonia was amazed at the light work load. The Mishas employed so many specific servants that she had been relegated to a kind of supervisory status.

Sonia's Uncle Misha had loved her since her first visit to Kiev, in 1904, and would spend many evenings reading with her in his study. The servants, goaded by Stepan, adjusted quickly to this niece who played a dual role in their lives. When Sonia was with her pupil, they would say, “Monsieur Serge's car is waiting,” or “Monsieur Serge's tea is served.” But as soon as evening came, or if she was alone during the day, they spoke to her with reverence as to a Gunzburg, and called her “Mademoiselle Sonia.”

The only problems arose in her dealings with Clara. From the onset of their relationship, Sonia had been unsure of her feelings toward this dark, somewhat brooding woman who had married her dashing uncle. There had been mental illness in Clara's family, and during her pregnancy it had manifested itself in Clara. She was known in the Gunzburg circle as an eccentric, although she had treated Sonia perfectly during the social season in Kiev, when Kolya had proposed marriage. Now Clara seemed abstracted, quickly irritated. She had a manner of greeting people by tossing her chin upward and retracting her bust, so that some felt rebuffed. She was not affectionate, except slavishly to her son and husband. Her coldness toward Sonia was so obvious that the young woman did not know how to treat her.

Clara had resolved to pay Sonia every three months. Once in a while she would offer her money for treats for Serge, but when payment time came, Clara fussed over every centime. Misha did not interfere; he never had with the other governesses, and Sonia would have been shocked if he had done so with her.

With her son, Clara was possessive in the extreme. One day when the boy was ill, Sonia was sitting by his bed, reading to him. His mother entered, and Sonia, tactfully, rose and went to the window. Clara sat down in her place, but would not take up the reading. Instead, red with anger, she turned to Sonia and cried, “When I am with my son, he needs no one else. Please leave the room, at once!” From that day on, Sonia never remained present when Clara came into a room where her son was playing, resting, eating, or sleeping. She would exit quickly by a side door.

Clara would also insist, several times during the night, upon checking on Serge. She opened his door and held a candle to his face, and one time, a frightful cry awakened Sonia. The little boy was screaming: “The devil, the devil! Go away, you horrid devil!” She ran into his room and saw her aunt in the doorway. Serge, clutching at Sonia, began to sob. “Mama awakened me,” he stammered. “I was dreaming, and I thought she was the devil, come to get me!” Sonia quieted him down with a cup of warm milk laced with honey, and she gently asked Clara to refrain from her nocturnal visits, for the child was impressionable. But her aunt replied crossly that she was nervous, and could not sleep herself until she knew that her baby was resting in peace. Sonia could think of nothing to reply. She had gone into this position with her eyes wide open; unlike Johanna de Mey, she had no intention of breaking her agreement with her employers by stepping beyond her allotted area of influence. She merely attempted to avoid her aunt whenever she could, and not to raise issues of controversy. But sometimes the woman's coldness would pain her, like a sudden, swift dagger to the side.

When her mother would question her, however, Sonia refrained from the mention of her humiliations. After all, a few rebuffs were nothing in contrast to what she had suffered in Stary Krym, or during Mathilde's illness in Simferopol. But the fact was that then she had possessed solace in the presence of Mathilde, or of Ekaterina Zevina. Now there was no one to turn to. Mathilde was so frequently absent, Ossip was in the Far East, Anna in Switzerland… and Gino, where was he now? God was the only one who could have answered that question. She thought of Tania, sometimes wistfully. For all their bad moments, Tania had been a companion, someone her own age. The expatriates, such as Nina, whom she had encountered in Paris, were all occupied with families of their own. Still, Sonia refused to succumb to self-pity—it went against her nature. To complain, when she was healthy and alive, would have been base, a dent in her strong pride.

Had she allowed herself to be sorry, she would have admitted a dreadful, tearing homesickness. But she attempted to divorce Russia from her bones and her blood, with that same determination with which she had decided, in the Crimea, that life was worth fighting for.

What spare time she possessed, between Serge's many activities, Sonia devoted to a cause which she could not abandon: the search for Gino. She and Mathilde had read the note appended by Afanassiev for Tcharykov, so they arranged for a small sum of money to be deposited each month at the Gilchrist Walker Bank in Gallipoli, for Master Sergeant Evgeni de Gunzburg. Mathilde wrote to the bank manager, asking him to get in touch with her son there and to notify him that his mother was sending him this amount. No news arrived in Paris from Gino, and by April the bank manager sent a disturbing message to Mathilde, telling her that no one had ever come to take out any money.

Extremely uneasy, Misha de Gunzburg asked his friend, Baron Felleisen, to telegraph the military authorities in Gallipoli. Sonia showed Afanassiev's note to the Baron, and shortly afterward Felleisen managed to discover that Gino had never disembarked at Gallipoli. Now Sonia and Mathilde became frantic, and Sonia wrote directly to General Kutepov, under whom her brother had served. She received a reply, not from the general, but from Boris Afanassiev, who explained to her that Gino, ill with pneumonia, had been transferred in the Bosporus harbor to another ship, the Cossack transport
Dobrovòletz,
bound for the island of Lemnos. Gino was to have been sent to the French Hospital there.

At once Sonia composed another letter, this time for the Chief of Staff of the French Hospital at Lemnos. But this man responded with confusion. So many sick men had been treated there during those chaotic days that he could find no record of Gino's presence. Sonia's heart contracted with fear. But she would not put a halt to her efforts. Gino was a survivor. She would not give up the thin thread that was bound to lead her to her brother.

Then, just before fall, Clara said to Sonia at the dinner table, “I went to my dentist today, Davenport. He has a new assistant, a pretty young Russian refugee, who was most interested in me when she learned my name. It seems that she knows you, my dear. Her name is Natalia Kurdukova—Princess Kurdukova. She gave me this address, begging me to ask you to come to see her. She said—and this truly amazed me—that she had something to tell you about Gino!”

The address was 37, rue de Rome. Amazed and apprehensive, Sonia excused herself and took the underground metro to the rue de Rome. She rang the doorbell at the stated apartment and was admitted by Natasha herself, a thinner Natasha with a slight pink tint beneath her blue eyes, a Natasha whose clothing was modest but trim, although not a single jewel adorned her. Sonia felt her customary sense of unease approach, then strangely recede. In its place a warmth pervaded her at the sight of the attractive dark-haired woman. She entered, and Natasha touched her shoulder. “I did not know you were in Paris,” Sonia said, her voice low and guarded. Now she remembered Lizette, and momentarily balked.

She was standing in a pleasant living room that looked somewhat empty but for two magnificent candelabra. Natasha said, motioning toward them, “I did not arrive with much, but I have had to sell most of it—all my bibelots, the trinkets that make one's house a home. I am holding on to these for as long as I can last.” She smiled. “But it is an old story, one you have surely heard before. How are you, Sofia Davidovna? Is your mother well?”

“Mama is in Lausanne with my sister Anna,” Sonia replied. “And you, Natalia Nicolaievna? My aunt says you are working for her dentist.”

“I was most lucky to find this position. I had some nurse's training, and Monsieur Davenport needed help with his files and his correspondence too. We are not destitute, but Lara is at the Lycée Racine and there is rent to pay and her expenses. My… husband recently passed away, and after the funeral expenses Lara and I took in a boarder. If we had not, we should have been obliged to move into one room together. This is better, but the other would not have been so bad. We are very close, she and I, and her presence is always a comfort.”

Sonia accepted a cup of tea, and thought that Natasha had never appeared so beautiful, so striking, as now, in her pale mauve dress which was somewhat too large for her shoulders. It was an inexpensive dress, Sonia decided, noticing its cut. Sonia's own sewing expertise indicated details to her that would have escaped most women. She herself was dressed in one of her aunt's discarded suits, which she had retailored. She knew that the color, cerise, was completely wrong for her complexion and eye color. Suddenly she felt comfortable, a sister to this woman whose own life had entwined with hers in such convoluted ways.

Now Lara entered the room bearing a platter of butter cookies. She was eleven now, taller than when Sonia had seen her in Sevastopol, and with a hint of budding breasts. She would resemble her mother one day, Sonia thought. And then, almost wistfully, she mused: She could have been Ossip's own child… Sonia took a cookie from the platter and spoke to the girl, admiring her elegant fingers, so like Natasha's, and Lara laughed, her head thrown back. Emotion caught at Sonia's throat: the gesture brought back the summer in the Tambov in all its poignancy, the long walks with Volodia, Natasha's kiss, all that which could never be.

Natasha had bent toward her, her face earnest and somewhat somber. “If I had known you were in Paris, I should have come to you earlier,” she said. “I asked your aunt about Evgeni Davidovitch, and she explained that no one had heard of his whereabouts since his arrival in Lemnos. Sofia Davidovna, I can confirm that he was there. I was a nurse at the French Hospital, and I saw your brother. He was very ill, with pleurisy.”

“And?” Sonia asked. But she closed her eyes, afraid of the outcome.

“I do not know,” Natasha said sadly. “Larissa and I departed for France the very day after I found him at the hospital. I was never able to learn what had become of him, and he was unconscious when I was with him. But it seemed as though I knew him, although he was a child and only saw me once, ever so briefly, in Petrograd. I spoke to him—but naturally, my words did not reach him. I spoke mainly for my own benefit, actually… This is no help, is it?” she added softly. The room was quiet around the two women and the girl, echoing Natasha's tone of gentle appeal.

Sonia wiped her gray eyes quickly, raised them to the face of her hostess. “Yes,” she asserted, “you have helped me. You are a good and generous person, Natalia Nicolaievna. I am sorry that we were never the friends we should have been.”

“Perhaps,” Natasha replied, “it is not too late yet?”

Sonia did not reply. She pressed the hand that Natasha had laid upon her arm, and rose. More than anything, she needed to be alone. Lizette gnawed at her memory, and her voice crept into Sonia's consciousness and scratched at its surface like pointed chalk upon a blackboard. Larissa followed both women to the door, and Sonia kissed her lightly on the forehead. Then she was in the darkness of Paris, enveloped in a chill dankness under a gaslight. She was confused. Nothing seemed under her control. She wondered whether Clara had informed Natasha of Ossip's marriage, and was supremely grateful that the child's presence had prevented any awkward questions.

Sonia had heard in the Russian community that Baroness Wrangel, wife of the Commander in Chief of the White Army, was in Paris at the Hotel Marceau, and she wrote a letter to her, outlining the puzzlement of the Gunzburg family and seeking an interview. Baroness Wrangel promptly answered, inviting Sonia to call upon her during the week. Sonia brought with her all the papers pertaining to her brother, and was received in the Baroness's private salon. She found there a most gracious, sympathetic woman, who informed Sonia that she was about to join her husband in the Orient and would personally attempt to clear up the mystery. Sonia departed with a small weight removed from her shoulders: the sincerity and diligence of Baroness Wrangel reassured her. But there was apprehension, too. Mysteries had their veil of comfort: knowing could bring with it certainties which were better left undiscovered.