The Four Winds of Heaven (26 page)

His eyes filled with tears, and softly, she kissed his eyelids and his cheeks. “You are truly my wife,” he murmured.

And so, in the cold and the worry caused by their grim duties, this journey, with Lolya facing them and Petya as their driver, was their honeymoon. The peasants were kind to them, and smiled upon their clasped hands and whispered words of love, seeming to understand the look in their eyes far more than they did Petya's dry instructions regarding the revolution, and Lolya's exhortations against the Tzar. They stared with glazed expressions when the little printer distributed weapons and demonstrated how to make them work. “We are cold, our crops lie beneath blankets of snow,” they said with wonder to Anna and Ivan. “What need do we have of weapons, or even of this Duma your companions have discussed?”

With infinite patience, Ivan explained that the way to a fuller stomach was through elected officials, that Russia's peasants made up a large majority which needed to be represented, that they possessed the right to demand laws to better their living conditions. “But why the arms?” they asked him tentatively.

Stiffening himself against his natural peace-loving disposition, he replied, “The workers in our capitals have made their requests known by going on strike. Now the government is afraid not to listen to them. It is your turn. If you accept your lot, and allow yourselves to become dulled with hunger and fatigue, you will never accomplish anything to give yourselves an easier life. The government wanted to issue land grants to you but the gentry has persuaded it to rescind this decision. You must display your strength to turn the tide once more in your direction.”

But Anna murmured to him, “Your words are those of a University scholar. You must simplify your expressions, my Vanya.” And then, sitting upon the surface of the ovens, her legs crossed beneath her thick skirts, she began to talk, the way that she had spoken as a child to Eusebe the water carrier and to the other peasants of Mohilna. It was not rhetoric, not exhortation. She spoke calmly, sometimes flaring into momentary anger, but she was not self-righteous or political. The peasants knew that she was one of them.

Sometimes, during the first nights of their journey, she cried in her sleep, dreaming of her father. Ivan held her tightly against him then.

Although it seemed to her that they had left St. Petersburg months before, they crossed the frozen Volkhna River in ten days. “We shall be in Novgorod in a day or two,” Petya announced to them. “And then we shall meet up with other groups, and with the Novgorod leaders.”

But Anna thought: Is that all the distance we have traveled? When the railroads were running, it took only a single day to go from the capital to Novgorod. She shivered, and looked out the window of the troika. An immensity of whiteness faced her, flat and bleak. And she thought: I love you, my Russia, I love all of you, your spaces and your forests alike. Papa loved you too. Why is it then that we oppose each other on your behalf? She felt cold and unwashed, and drained of emotion.

T
he telegram was delivered
to a startled Mathilde during the midday meal. When she opened it, her fingers trembled. As she read David's message, her face blanched, and she fell back into her chair. The piece of paper fell to the floor, and Gino squirmed near her, his eager young features scrutinizing her. “Who's it from, who's it from?” he demanded in his boyish tones. Yuri rose, and placed strong arms around Mathilde's shoulders. “What is it?” he asked.

But she could not reply. Only Ossip saw Johanna de Mey pick up the telegram and run her eyes over its contents, then pocket it noiselessly. It was she whose voice now came, crisp and decisive: “Come, children. We must all begin to pack at once. We are returning to Petersburg.”

In the bedlam that followed, Sonia clung to her older brother, and when Johanna ushered them from their mother's presence, Ossip spoke to Sonia in his calm voice, quieting her fears with little jokes. She did as she was told, packing her clothes, and helping Gino. But all the while her restless gaze ran back to Ossip, and she did not hear the smaller boy's exclamations. Her heart constricted in the fear that their father had died. Nothing could dispel this vision from her mind.

A
nna did not know
that the majority of Russian liberals had accepted the Tzar's manifesto of October 30, and his further explanation as to the formation of a Duma. She had not realized that their backing would give the Tzar sufficient strength to finally control the second railroad strike that had placed St. Petersburg in virtual isolation from the end of November to the middle of December. She believed, as did her companions, that the city would exist without rails at least until the New Year. But her grandfather, Baron Horace de Gunzburg, was one of the first to learn of the strike's end. He was still a major investor in the Russian railways, and possessed a network of intelligence that could supply him with information almost upon demand.

Dulled by the wintry journey south, Ivan had not thought that his troika might have been noticed. When Baron Horace began his inquiries concerning the disappearance of his granddaughter, it was not long before he put together the fact that Alia's brother possessed certain revolutionary connections. But the railroad was still out, and the old Baron, above all, wished to avoid alerting the Secret Police to anything that might cause harm to his oldest granddaughter. He sat with his son, David, and the two men smoked their pipes, sharing a tense silence. The old man was astute enough to know how tortured David felt, how he blamed himself for Anna's disappearance. Though he would never have voiced this to his son, the patriarch blamed the absent Mathilde.

When the trains began to move once more, it was only a matter of days before several of Baron Horace's agents picked up the trail of the fugitives. Aron Berson had come to him, his face ashen. “Perhaps they have eloped,” he suggested, wringing his hands. But Horace's blue eyes silenced him with their icy disdain. Berson did not dare approach David. But even more than he feared Horace or David, Berson feared Mathilde. He knew that she would return soon, and he dreaded facing her.

Horace's agents took the first available train to Novgorod, then doubled back to the small village of Netylskiy. They came upon Ivan and Anna as the two were about to head south for the final few miles to the larger city. They seized Anna as gently as possible, but she cried out, kicking them, and called for Vanya. “Your grandfather sent us, Baroness,” they told her respectfully. “You have nothing to fear. But we shall not leave without you.”

“Then I shall come, too, and we shall stop somewhere and be married,” Ivan stated firmly.

Anna burst into tears, and kissed his hands. “It does not matter about me,” she said, shaking her head wildly. “But I will not have your life ruined. If you return, they will change you, Vanya! They will make us live
their
lives! If I return alone—what else can they do but send me away? I would not wish it otherwise. I shall not remain on Russian land enslaved by their ways! In another country, perhaps there will be some peace for me…”

His arms were about her, and he would not let her go. “You cannot leave my life,” he murmured. Tears streamed down his cheeks, but he was unmindful of them. “I have always wanted you to be my wife! These men will allow us to be married. That is the life I want: a life with you!”

“But I do not want that! I have told you many times—I shall not marry you, especially not like this, almost by force, to please my family. Nor even to please you, my darling. For one day you would hate me! I would rather go, and have you love me, than cling, and cause you to turn from me later. A banker's life is not for you. Please, Vanya! Stay here, do what you must—but don't ever return to St. Petersburg. No, no—don't talk anymore!”

She hurled herself away from him, catapulting herself into the arms of one of Horace's men. They took her by the shoulders and led her toward their carriage, and Ivan followed, screaming incoherently and attempting to grab her from behind. But they kept him from her. He could hear her muffled sobs, which rang pathetically in his ears. A frenzied anger seized him, and he began to shout, but the doors of the carriage were closing. He beat his fists against them. Her tiny face appeared in the window, the brown eyes dilated, her mouth parted, and he felt his face contort with grief, uncomprehending. Then the carriage started off, and he stood in the snow, his tears slowly freezing upon his cheeks, his face numbed with cold.

He felt someone put thin arms about his body, and a harsh, yet strangely warm female voice murmured, “Come, Vanya. The troika is ready.” Lolya's face, with its angular nose and chin, and its beady eyes behind their rimless spectacles, took shape before his eyes. He heard her sigh. “When Russians suffer, their pain is like a roar in the wilderness,” she said softly. And then, pressing his arm: “You don't have time to suffer. She knew it, too.”

S
onia thought
that she had never spent a stranger New Year's Eve, waiting in her room for Anna. Johanna had not allowed her to wait in the sitting room, with Mama, Papa, Uncle Sasha, and Grandfather Horace. So she sat on her bed, twisting her handkerchief. Gino had been sent to bed, but Ossip was beside her, stroking her small hand. “I don't understand at all,” she murmured.

“Anna was never happy here,” Ossip stated. “Perhaps she could not stand it. We never really knew what she went through, did we?”

Her sister shook her head mutely. “Vanya Berson must have loved her after all,” Ossip murmured pensively. But Sonia stood up, rejecting him with a jerk of the hand.

“No!” she cried. “Once I believed him, when he said he loved Anna! But when you love someone, you do not bring shame to that person, you do not tear a family apart. Ossip, have you no honor?”

He began to chuckle gently. “Oh, Sonitchka, Sonitchka. Will nothing ever make you see the way things really are? You are my little Joan of Arc, my little Bernadette, my Esther. Anna is made of flesh and blood. As for poor Ivan—I myself will not condemn him as everyone else seems to be doing. He simply had ideas of his own.”