The Four Winds of Heaven (48 page)

Rumors of war had come, faint rumblings about mobilization. Baron Yuri and his plump wife sat together on the train in their private compartment, and she held his hand and stroked it. The train moved with infinite slowness and the heat was suffocating. Many times Ida rang for water compresses for her husband. She too was exhausted when at last they pulled into the station at Badenweiler. The old man was leaning heavily upon his wife.

But no sooner had they descended, when a German official directed them to the waiting room. A small straight-backed officer stood before a large group of people, and Ida asked, “What is going on? Why are we here?”

“You are not German citizens,” someone near her replied. She appeared dazed, and a young man took pity and rose from his seat so that the Baron might have it. Ida stood by his side, for she was too tired to rouse one of the younger people and insist upon a seat for herself.

The officer began to speak, in clipped, harsh tones. “War has been declared,” he announced. “As neutrals and enemies, you who are gathered here shall be allowed to do the following things.” He proceeded to list numerous activities which were lost upon Ida, whose head had begun to spin. Sitting in the chair, Yuri's face had sunk and his color was ashen. Finally, the German clicked his heels and shouted, “You may now go to your hotels!”

Distraught, Ida found the young man who had kindly given up his seat for her husband. She had never been a woman given to tears, but now they peeked from the corners of her magnificent blue eyes beneath their white brows. “Please,” she begged, “find us a hansom cab. My husband is ill.” The young man took her hand and called to her when the coach was ready. Then he helped Yuri to the carriage. They were deposited at their hotel, and Yuri went to sleep at once. Ida watched over him silently.

The very next day, Ida and Yuri de Gunzburg were roused at dawn and told to go to Baden-Baden, where all foreigners were being collected. When they arrived there and found a hotel, Yuri could hardly open his eyes. Four days later, holding the hand of his wife, he breathed his last sigh, and died. Ida was alone in a hostile land, and she knew that Mathilde, in Switzerland, would not be able to come to her. Mathilde was a Russian citizen and would not be granted a visa, as Russia was at war with Germany. But what was happening to Mathilde and to Sonia and Anna? Were they all right? The old woman, bewildered and sick and alone, decided to go to Stuttgart, where she collapsed in a sanatorium.

In Grindelwald, the peaceful mountains seemed to belie the political news. Mathilde, Sonia, and Johanna de Mey proceeded with their easy summer existence, took walks in the woods and feasted on hot chocolate and crumpets in their favorite tea room. On the morning of August 2, Sonia came to her mother and said, frowning, “The newspaper is not here.” When she rang for the bellboy, he arrived with his cap on backward and burst out, “Baroness! They say that war has broken out!”

No further news reached the three women, and in the afternoon, because they were tired of their idleness, and because the sky was the color of cornflowers, they decided to go out for a stroll to an inn, the Little Scheidegg, which was higher on the hill than their hotel. They arrived in time for tea, and ordered it on the terrace. But the owner came to them, her face red, her clothes awry, and shook her head. “We can give you only bread and butter, my ladies,” she said. “For war has come, and the cakes have not been delivered.”

Sonia and Mathilde looked at each other, all color leaving their cheeks. War? They hardly knew the meaning of the word! Mathilde had been a mere child at the time of the war of 1870, and she and her mother had fled Paris for Switzerland. And the conflict with Japan in ‘04 had been so far away… Now they had to believe that war had actually reached them, in remote Grindelwald, this charming resort of pines and winding trails.

For the next two weeks, chaos reigned. Switzerland was neutral, and sought to remain so, surrounded as it was by fighting nations: France, Germany, Italy, Austria. The Swiss sent their soldiers to the borders, to prevent invasion at all cost. The Gunzburgs and Johanna remained as prisoners in Grindelwald, where the hotels were full but the banks were closed. Nervous, without news, the vacationers clustered together, and an American businessman, seeing the beginnings of mass panic, called a meeting in Mathilde's hotel. Hundreds crowded into the dining room, and the American stood on a dais and spoke out, his voice calm and serene:

“I shall attempt to reach Bern, and there charter a train to take the American guests to Paris, and then to Le Havre, and from there to the United States. If there is room, I shall accept foreign citizens, too. The journey to Paris will last about three days, and we shall have to bring our own food, plenty of raisins and other dried fruits for energy. Lemons, too, for lemon juice can make any water drinkable.” His words sounded reassuring to his audience, for he was a natural leader.

He was gone the next day, no one knew how, and when he returned on the third day he had chartered a long train. But by then the tracks were occupied with special military trains, and the Americans had to wait. He had promised to take Mathilde, Sonia, and Johanna along as far as Paris with his convoy.

Then, slowly, life began to resume. Banks reopened. The tracks cleared. Mathilde changed her mind. “We shall go to Geneva,” she stated. “I have a special bank account there with some emergency funds. Why should we go to St. Germain and bother Mama and Papa?”

In Geneva, the Gunzburgs found a pension, a simple boarding house in a pleasant neighborhood, where all the guests were French and Russian refugees. Mathilde managed to wire her husband and sons in St. Petersburg, and her parents at their manor on the outskirts of Paris. Several days passed, and then a telegram from David arrived, announcing the death of Baron Yuri. Mathilde sat down, her hand trembling. She regarded her daughter and cleared her throat. “Your grandfather is dead,” she declared. She felt numb and tired.

Softly, Sonia began to weep. “Poor Grandmother,” she whispered.

“I don't know,” Mathilde sighed. “The world is a shambles. Papa is gone, and perhaps he left just in time. He was never a man to face his problems.” To her amazement, tears came to her eyes for the man who had shamed and frightened her in her youth, who had belittled her mother. She remembered how she had loved him as a small girl, when he had delighted her with his stories. “One of the world's great entertainers has died,” she said.

A
lthough Mathilde
, Sonia, and Johanna felt somewhat isolated in Geneva, the common route back to Russia entailed crossing Germany, an enemy nation. Mail took five weeks to reach them from David, Ossip, and Gino, but in each communiqué, her husband reiterated his hope that they would remain safely in neutral territory. Besides, Mathilde possessed a bank account in Geneva, and as they could hardly trust the mail to furnish them with their living expenses, they attempted to rely upon Mathilde's reserve funds. The Pension de la Grande Bretagne was comfortable, its occupants genteel, and in these days of war it was hardly the moment to live lavishly. The Gunzburgs and their companion felt that they might manage quite adequately there, and rented an extra sitting room where Mathilde had a piano installed for her daughter. Then she purchased a tea set, a copper kettle, and a kerosene lamp, so that they would not have to take their midafternoon tea in pastry shops and tea rooms.

Life had slowed down. Young men and those of healthy middle age had all been mobilized, and now scout organizations, the old, the sick, and the women attempted to take over wherever they could. Sonia had heard that in Russia the people were united in their realization of the need for this war. The Duma and the district governments all backed the government in its decree for Slavic emancipation from the Germans and Austrians. David wrote that pro-Serb, pro-Polish sentiments had risen to such a pitch that St. Petersburg had been renamed “Petrograd,” so that it would sound less Germanic.

Sonia had loved Kolya Saxe with all the idealism, all the strength of her convictions, and now she felt the same commitment to helping the Allies. Issues mattered not at all to this young woman, who, though intelligent, never questioned those things she idolized. She had never formed a criticism of her mother, even though she sometimes noted Mathilde's fretful need of Johanna, a person who seemed altogether unworthy of her mother's devotion. She had never questioned the dictates of the Jewish religion. She would never have questioned Kolya's love, after their engagement, had he not betrayed her trust. And Russia, her homeland, was almost like her God, a holy entity higher even than her earthly idols. If Russia was at war, then war was honorable, and she, a patriot, wanted to serve her country's allies in any way possible.

But to her intense disappointment and self-directed annoyance, her senses failed her at the wrong moment. Johanna had declared, with a glint in her magnificent aquamarine eyes, that though she was fifty years of age, it was not too late for her to serve as a nurse for the convoys of wounded soldiers that passed through the train station each night. There the men were rebandaged, fed, and given hot drinks. Sonia agreed with Johanna. She would become a nurse, too. But on her first day of training she was asked to give an injection, and the sight of the soldier's bloodied arm, half mangled, made her faint on the spot. She resolutely returned to duty, but once again, although she clenched her teeth and took a deep breath, she became faint. The doctor took her aside and gently reprimanded her: “My dear young Baroness, we waste precious moments reviving you, while these men are dying. I should think that there might be more suitable ways for you to serve your country.”

Her shame was profound—and Johanna's triumph all the greater. She made a great production of her nightly journeys to the station, causing Mathilde to clasp her hands together with worry over the icy drafts that buffeted her friend about as she distributed chocolates and cigarettes to the wounded, and sometimes changed a messy dressing. Sonia was mortified. But she had not fully recuperated from her bout with the kidney ailment, and was still weak. Yet pride was not at stake here. It was, Sonia thought, a mere matter of doing what needed to be done, and although nursing was covered with a veil of glory, other tasks too needed to be performed.

So she signed up with the committee headed by the wife of the Russian Consul, who had opened a workshop in her house. Two afternoons a week ladies gathered to sew flannel shirts and pajama bottoms for the wounded. Wagons full of garments were sent back to Russia, and Sonia was an accomplished seamstress, after her years of training with Johanna. But the young woman was annoyed. The ladies arrived on time, for the most part, their hair elaborately coiffed and their nails polished, and arranged themselves comfortably so that their taffeta and silk skirts were not creased. But during the sewing, they would sip from china teacups and then they would laugh together and gossip. An elderly plain woman next to her whispered to Sonia, seeing the fine line that had drawn between the young woman's gray eyes: “Indeed! One cannot work while visiting.” And Sonia noticed that at the end of the session, calmly and without fanfare, this woman, a Countess Benckendorff, took some of the unfinished pieces home with her. Sonia, her face lighting up, did likewise, and soon she was spending all her free hours at the pension sewing busily.

There was another job which Sonia performed in addition to her sewing for the Russian Consul's wife. Near the pension was a milk cooperative, where working mothers were able to drop off their babies' empty milk bottles in the morning, and where young girls would fill them anew according to each baby's specified formula during the day. Everybody vied for this work, so that there was no one to perform the equally necessary task of washing the three hundred bottles and drying them upside down in a strainer. Sonia undertook this job, and for approximately three hours a day she stood all alone in the vast kitchen of the cooperative, interrupted only when the bottles were brought in and later picked up. She never saw the young girls in the next rooms, pouring out the babies' formulas. But she had time to think, to compose poetry and fairy tales, to remember. Where was Kolya now? she wondered. She still hurt, but now the pain was less acute, less personal. And she would think about her brothers.

Gino, at nineteen, had become a man. He was tall and broad, not unlike his Uncle Sasha, but in his coloring he resembled neither of his parents, nor, for that matter, his four grandparents, all of whom had possessed black hair and blue-gray eyes. He was “bold and brown,” as his father put it, and with the mahogany of his large frank eyes he had inherited a measure of his great-grandmother Rosa Dynin's sturdy peasant stock. But he did not seem plain. There was a nobility to his carriage, a simple elegance that did not even attempt to challenge the more flamboyant style sported by his brother Ossip, eight years his senior. He had entered the University the previous year, and was specializing in the reading of law, not because of any particular fascination on his part, but rather because that seemed to be the most practical of disciplines, short of the natural sciences for which he felt no affinity. Like Sonia, he was diligent and possessed a sound memory. He would laughingly acknowledge his lack of imagination. Unlike Ossip, he could not pay court to a young girl with a quick wit; he was charming in his honesty, in his lack of pretense. Had he been older, he might have loved Nina Tobias, now comfortably married to Zenia Abelson, a wealthy young burgher of Petrograd. Natasha Tagantseva would have been too bright, too dramatic for his tastes.

His father had long since stopped hoping that Gino might become a scholar. He had, early on, given up on Anna, and recognized the artist's temperament in her. Ossip had performed exceptionally at the University, but Ossip, the Baron realized, with his usual pinch of annoyance whenever he thought more than cursorily about his older son, lacked something essential—something called “nerve” or “backbone.” He would keep working for Sasha for lack of other motivation; he was not ambitious, and let challenge slip by with a careless smile. A disturbing thought pierced David's mind: Could it be that Ossip was a coward, refusing to meet life head on? But no; his childhood illness had merely weakened him, and that was all. Sonia? Yes, she might yet be the family scholar, but only if she did not marry. For, once married, Baron David envisioned his daughter more than ever emulating her mother. And she would marry, even if that young fool from Kiev had seen fit to humiliate her. But Gino was not an intellectual, any more than Anna had been.

Sometimes, David would speak to him about Henri Sliosberg, a dear friend, the family attorney, and a great
shtadlan
in the cause of the emancipation of the Jews of Russia. “Yes, maybe I shall train with him,” the young man would nod gravely. And then he would smile, with his whole soul, that marvelous childlike smile that revealed large white teeth, and say with love, “But I am best at commerce, Papa. And I am most at ease in the country.” And what could David say? Love of the land was more Russian than tea. David himself possessed it.

David was undergoing a unique experience, living with both his grown sons under the same roof. He missed his wife, missed her intensely, and often he did not feel well, his bouts with angina pectoris more frequent than before. His hair had thinned, his expression was more gaunt, his posture somewhat more stooped. Mathilde was now fifty, with an ampler figure than before and some strands of gray in her thick black hair. But still, he desired her, and though their years together had been interspersed with moments of withdrawal and bitterness on her part, he could not help but feel how much her presence brightened his existence. He also missed his daughters, who had adored him each in her own way. Yet there was something appealing about this enforced male cloister in his house, for he was a man much like most, and proud of his sons. They were his scions, they would carry on his genes if not his work. Sonia alone seemed ready to take his duties upon her frail shoulders, but it was hardly fitting. She was a woman, and would soon be too busy bearing sons of her own. No, his sons would pass on his name, but without the tradition with which he had taken it from his own father. They would not continue his mission, they would not be
shtadlanim
for the Jews of Russia.

David knew, without ever having discussed the matter with his older son, that Ossip shared his mother's agnosticism and derision of the intricacies of the Hebrew faith so dear to himself. Ossip accompanied his father to the synagogue when David asked it of him, but lately the Baron had not asked, for Ossip's presence, though outwardly un-marred by disrespect, brought David disquiet and a sense of shame. It was as though he felt Ossip's profound indifference, as well as something else, something indistinct that David preferred not to explore: it was as though Ossip actually found his Judaism a bother, an impediment, as one would a wooden leg. Anna had been impervious to her faith, for she had been concerned with the poor, the downtrodden; like most idealists she had not cared about such matters as the Sabbath. But Sonia cared, and of this David was certain. In his own way, Gino too cared, though not at all like Sonia. In Gino's simple way he revered God, and the God he revered happened to be the God revered by his father, for Gino loved and respected David. So when it came time to go to the synagogue, David turned to his younger son, who had the soul of a child but the stalwartness of a man. Yet Gino would never be a
shtadlan.
He was too robust, too vital, and not patient or unselfish enough. He was the most totally Russian of all David's children, and his love of God was as simple as that of a peasant.

With sadness, David had told his sons that he could not foresee either of them needing his Judaica library, as neither was a scholar or a devout Jew. This Judaica consisted of some thirteen thousand erudite volumes of Jewish law and lore, and David had collected it with intense love. “But if you will not use them, these books will be dead after I am gone,” he said to his sons. “I would rather have strangers consult them, than let them sit upon your shelves, gathering dust. Perhaps a university would purchase them.”

“We need not speak of this now, Papa,” Ossip said. “You are alive, and well. You use them.”

“But I am suffering more each day. The pains in my chest grow more acute all the time. Should the moment come, then I would not wish this burden to rest upon your shoulders. I will sell the books, with the arrangement that I keep them until I die,” he said. “Do not look so glum; my affairs must be in order, and your dear mother must not be troubled. I am not preparing to lie down and expire, my sons. But I want to know where this beloved collection will go.”

Only days before the outbreak of the war, the Baron received a letter from the University of Pennsylvania, asking to purchase his Judaica collection. As a scholar, he was overjoyed. But when the war came, communications were cut off. David sighed, and went about his business. With the world in turmoil, it was hardly the moment to worry about his books. He was a statesman, and concerned with matters of more far-reaching import. And, not long afterward, a personal matter came up that caused him conflicting emotional reactions.

With war came mobilization for all youths of twenty-one years or more, except for those who had a physical ailment, such as Ossip, or who managed important businesses, such as Sioma Halperin, who still pursued Tania with his ardor. Ossip easily obtained his white exemption paper. Mathilde, in Geneva, was relieved, for with one son out of danger due to a previous infirmity, and another too young to be called up, she had no personal maternal worries. She knew Ossip well enough to imagine his thoughts, as did his cousin, Tania. On the day that he received his white paper, the young woman came to see him at her father's bank, and removing her ermine-trimmed silk cape she flung her graceful legs over his desk and sat among his papers. “You, at least, are not a hero, my pet,” she announced.

He laughed. “I must admit that I would not relish risking my life,” he assented.

“It hardly seems worth the bother. You are too European. The Russians nauseate me, with their mujik mentality. Kill the Hun! And why? There are very civilized Huns, I am told, who are as loath to die as you or I.”

“You really have your heart set on a continental wedding,” he said. “Most unpatriotic.”