The Four Winds of Heaven Read online

  The Gunzburg children had been reared to speak French, not merely because they had spent most of their lives abroad, but also because people of their status spoke that language among themselves in Russia. They could converse in imperfect, but adequate Russian with their servants. Now Anna replied, “We are Sonia Davidovna and Anna Davidovna de Gunzburg, and we think we are lost. Who are you?”

  The man laughed, an unpleasant, disbelieving sound.“Who do you think I am? Count Tuminsky’s chief overseer in the fields. And you are no Gunzburgs. Your Russian is too poor. And with no shoes, too. You are no doubt some of my workers who decided to sneak away from your duties. Tell me where you belong, and maybe I shall simply make you work over the usual time, instead of flogging you.”

  Anna shook her head stubbornly. “You do not understand! We are truly Baron David’s daughters. Our Mama always lets us go barefoot in the summertime, and we were raised in the French language, so that our Russian is not yet perfect. But we are not liars. If you don’t believe us, why not send one of your people on horseback to our parents, and they will come for us?” But even she was beginning to tremble, for Count Tuminsky, whom she had never seen, was a legendary figure of fear to the Gunzburg children.

  The overseer displayed elongated yellow teeth in a rictus of a smile. “Horseback, no less! You’re liars. Extra work would be too lenient a punishment for you!” He raised his whip. Sonia began to scream, but Anna stood still, and the cat-o’-nine-tails hit her full on the back. She fell forward, sobbing, the back of her dress torn, a streak of blood defined upon her pale skin. Sonia threw herself on top of her sister, smothering her head against Anna’s legs, screaming incoherently. “That’s what we do to vermin who don’t obey,” the man said, and raised his whip once more.

  But he did not have a chance to bring it down. A rider on horseback was racing toward them, calling out at the top of his lungs. Through her tears, Sonia saw that it was Eusebe. The water carrier dismounted and ran to the two girls. Then, as his gentle fingers touched Anna’s wound, he raised his tortured face to the overseer and whispered, “Man, what have you done? These are our misses, the Baron’s daughters. You will be dismissed for this. I shall speak to the Baron myself, and show him Anna Davidovna’s back. Poor sweethearts, such an innocent trick that they played on their faithful Eusebe, sneaking behind my water barrel.” Eusebe was distraught. The moment he had found Sonia’s lace handkerchief in the back of the cart, he had begun his frantic search for the children, but had never imagined they would wander off as far as the Count’s property behind the brook. His voice broke, and tears spilled from his eyes. He stood up and carried each of the girls in his arms to his horse. Silence enveloped the group; the overseer’s face had turned ashen.

  “Come,” Eusebe said. “I’ll take you home.”

  * * *

  When Anna’s back had been bathed and bandaged, and the two white-faced sisters had received a dinner tray in their beds, Ossip came to see them. “Mama says you have been far more punished than you deserved, especially you, Annushka,” he said soberly. “And Papa will have to go to the Count tomorrow. I was very frightened for you, and when no one could find you at teatime, I missed you so much! It was lucky for you that Eusebe came when he did, or you would have received a horrible whipping.”

  “That is really how they flog those children who work there, isn’t it?” Anna said bitterly. She was still in great pain, but her eyes flashed brilliantly. “Oh, how unfair! They have no one to come running for them, as we did! Because they were born poor, and we weren’t.”

  “I suppose what you say is true,” her brother agreed. He sat down on Sonia’s bed and stroked her hand. “If it weren’t indecent, Annushka would become unbearable now and show everybody her back, like a badge of courage!” His eyes twinkled.

  But downstairs, in the living room, David de Gunzburg was saying to his wife: “Tuminsky is without doubt embarrassed at this episode. But in his heart he must be amused. After all, has his man not degraded that annoying Jew who had the audacity to settle next to him?”

  Chapter 2

  David and Mathilde de Gunzburg, the squires of Mohilna, were undergoing quite different emotions that summer. For David, life was a simple matter which he thoroughly enjoyed. There were two sides to David: the driving force that had made his father, Baron Horace, an astute banker as well as the foremost advocate of the Jews of Russia; and the childlike passions which transported him to a bliss few mature men ever experience. With his first side, he was a dedicated scholar. He spoke over thirty languages and dialects with fluency, and he applied himself relentlessly to the mastering of each new tongue. Similarly, he found poetry a furious challenge, and often would sit up half the night attempting to place emotion within the narrow, precise boundaries prescribed by rules of prosody. He was dedicated to his religion in an almost Rabbinical manner.

  His loves, however, were founts of pure fire, and they were few but constant. He had conceived a passion for Mathilde, his cousin, when he had been twelve years old, and she, five. He had loved the serene blue eyes, the beautiful black curls, the demure, well-mannered little girl. It had never occurred to him that perhaps she might have felt another kind of emotion for him, for once David loved, it was irrevocable. He did not know why, only the fact that she was there, in his grandfather’s house, and that he would marry her someday. Having decided on Mathilde, he never even glanced at other girls, but channeled his furious energy into his studies instead. He had never followed his older friends to the fashionable brothels of Paris, nor did he bother to learn the art of courtship. Polite, well educated, he had known how to speak to his mother’s friends, to girl cousins, to friends of friends. But he had never wanted to waste precious time making love to anyone but Mathilde, and to her he was sincere and not romantic. For, after all, did she not know of his devotion?

  His father, for whom David had always felt respect and affinity, approved of his plan, although Baron Horace had made it clear to his agnostic brother Yuri, Mathilde’s father, that religion was essential to all Horace’s clan. And so David had become engaged to Mathilde. He wanted to be married as soon as he had finished his stint in the Uhlans, and had obtained his degree from the University of Göttingen in Hesse. But Uncle Yuri had delayed the wedding by six months. It was said that he was much in debt, and perhaps he had hoped to force his brother Horace to aid him more generously with his creditors. Poor David had been so frustrated, so dreadfully hurt by the delay, that he had run off to Russia, this time to Georgia so that he could lose himself in the learning of two new dialects, Georgian and Armenian. When he had returned, the marriage took place at last. He had already loved her for thirteen years.

  In all that time, he had never wavered in his passion. It was for her that he composed his verses, and for her that he arose each morning to face the day. Unlike his brother Sasha and most of his friends, he never took a mistress, even though he saw Mathilde only during vacations. Since Ossip’s illness, the family had moved from St. Petersburg’s foul, miasmic climate. David alone remained in the capital. But his loyalty to Mathilde was total.

  He also loved Russia, her grandeur and her vastness and her untamed diversity. At Mohilna he felt complete, fulfilled. He would awaken at the first bleak streak of dawn and walk stealthily beneath his daughters’ windows, calling to them to join him. Anna and Sonia, holding up their nightshirts, would slide their window up, and taking care not to disrupt the steady sonorous snoring of their nurse, Titine, would climb onto the outer ledge of the sill and wait for Papa to help them jump down from the second story. Then, together, they would go for a nature walk, David explaining why certain plants flourished where they did, and naming all the flowers. He loved Anna with a fierce protectiveness, for she was not beautiful, and he loved her bravery and her outspoken mischief because they were full of unbridled energy, like the horses he had loved to ride in Georgia. Sonia he loved for her precise, dainty beauty that recalled Mathilde to his mind, for her steadfast application, so
like his own, and for her desire to make him proud. David’s mornings alone with his daughters were sacred to all three. During the summer, his children grew to know this simple yet passionate man from whom they were separated for the remainder of the year.

  The specialist who examined Ossip yearly in Paris had declared that perhaps at the start of 1896 the boy might be strong enough for the family to return to St. Petersburg, as long as his young patient was back at Mohilna by the time the spring thaws, with their accompanying diseases, wrought their havoc upon the capital. For when the great snows thawed, St. Petersburg once again became a swamp. Anna and Ossip could each remember their native city. Sonia did not. She had been born only three months before the family had been forced to leave its spires and cupolas. But because she adored David and could sense his patriotism, her soul wanted to reach out to his city and embrace it as her own. For she was a child of deep emotions, who sought the sublime and shuddered at baseness and ignored the ordinary.

  Ossip, who had become observant as befits one who does not participate in normal activities, was unduly mature for his age, somewhat of a cynic at eight years old. He had accepted his condition, but the true ebullience of childhood had passed him by, drying out some essential fonts of naiveté in the process. Anna provided him with a vicarious joie de vivre, and with her he could laugh and grow excited. His little sister, Sonia, filled him with all the tenderness of his being. He pitied her exalted emotions, yet also clung to her sweetness. She took care of him, almost as though he were younger than she, and in turn he wanted to shield her from her own vulnerability. Sometimes he thought that Sonia was much like their father, David, whom Ossip admired for his reputation as a statesman and a linguist, but whom he gently despised for his almost childlike passions. For Ossip was above all a small realist, who saw an excess of idealism as a barrier to the process of going from day to day. In this way Ossip most resembled his mother, Mathilde.

  Mathilde, at thirty-one, did not like Mohilna. She did not like its rustic furniture, nor the isolation she felt when she was there. Her gay, elegant friends rarely passed through Podolia, and this summer, heavy with the new baby, she felt particularly languid and exhausted in the Russian heat. She looked forward to this new infant, but more for the relief it could bring to her life than for its own presence. She fervently hoped it would be a boy, for with Ossip’s fragility, she knew that David yearned for the additional security of a second son. If it was a boy, then David’s wish would be fulfilled, and she would no longer need to produce any more children. But she was resolute on one point: she would insist, whatever the baby’s sex, that the family not expand any further. David might not agree, but she had ways of making sure, and she would use them, too.

  With shivers of repulsion, Mathilde would think back on her father, Yuri, who, to amuse himself freely with his fancy ladies, had kept her mother, Ida, constantly with child. Ida had given life to nine children in less than thirteen years. Mathilde did not like anything to do with procreation, and sometimes was sorry that her husband kept himself so occupied with his work. Mistresses, she thought cynically, had their uses—so long as the man was discreet and did not publicly bring shame to his wife, as her father had done with his escapades.

  She had married David for several reasons, but love had not been among them. As a child, she had grown up in a house of discord, for the debonair, flamboyant, charming Yuri had been anything but gentle in his home, terrifying the servants, cowing his wife, and making small Mathilde retreat within herself like a frightened snail. Mathilde had loved her mother, who was a true lady, who demonstrated control in every situation, whom she had never heard raise her voice. At one time she had also loved her father, for who would not succumb to the boyish charm of this man who made virtuous women lose their virtue with laughter? But she had witnessed the results of his rascality, had steeled herself against her love, and had condemned him. In David she saw an earnest man who worshiped her, who gave her blessed security and peace, something unknown in Yuri’s household.

  Mathilde knew that when David had first declared his intention to marry her, Uncle Horace had made some kind of arrangement with his brother. Mathilde had looked at her mother, at her sisters and brothers, and known that if she married David de Gunzberg, they would reap a part of Horace’s bounty. Mathilde believed in duty, in honor. It was her duty to provide what she could for those she loved. And besides, if she had opposed the match, what possible excuse could she have given? That she would rather wait for someone who might never come? That David, who was tall, slender, and red-haired, was less handsome than his brother, that she disliked the color of his hair, that she disliked Biblical names? Yes, she might have preferred Sasha, because he was handsome with glossy black hair, an erect posture, and brilliant blue eyes, whereas David stooped slightly from too much bending over books, and his eyes were paler than his brother’s. But Sasha was arrogant, and arrogant men do not bring peace to their wives.

  Mathilde had never loved a man, nor had she been courted in the usual fashion, for her fate had been sealed long before she attended her first ball. And who would spend time with someone else’s betrothed, even though she was voluptuous and had soft white skin, sapphire eyes, and long, waving ebony hair? Her feelings for her cousin, David, included devotion and friendship, but certainly she did not understand him. Mathilde de Gunzburg was anything but emotional, and could not even comprehend David’s deep love for her. Nor did she share his unquenchable need to learn. She enjoyed a yellow-backed love story far more than a well-formed sonnet. Least of all did she understand David’s religious zeal. If she could have stated her life’s philosophy, it would have been with these words: “Above all, I want peace. I dislike excess of any sort, for it disturbs my equilibrium.”

  David’s religion was excessive. For that matter, Russia itself was excessive. Her mother, her sisters, her friends were all Parisians. But David said, “The Gunzburgs are not French, my sweet, but Russian. You will see, your own origins will come out in you once we are settled.” She had bowed her head and accepted her duty, and then, in agony and fear, had allowed her husband to come to her bed and to enter her soft round body, which had, until now, been hers alone. She had borne this with wretched calm. Yet after their train was within the Russian borders she had finally cried out against him, and it was his religion that had pushed her to this.

  One day as the sun went down and their train pulled into a small station, Mathilde had been wrenched out of her daydreams by the brisk entrance of the conductor, who had ordered some porters to remove the Baron and Baroness’s luggage from their compartment. “David!” she exclaimed. “What is happening here? Where are we?”

  He had placed a gentle hand on her shoulder, and replied, “Nothing is wrong, beloved. But the Sabbath has begun, and we must get off. One does not ride during the Sabbath.”

  “And you made reservations at a hotel here?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “There are no hotels here. This is a very small village. We shall be forced to sleep on a bench in the waiting room.”

  Mathilde’s emotions, so long kept hidden, had come flooding out of her in a humiliating torrent of tears, and she had cried out, her voice shrill with outrage and loneliness and horror: “No! I shall not get down! You may sleep wherever you wish, in the gutter if it appeals to you, but not I! You say you love me. How can you place a silly rule before me in your heart? I detest you, David, and I detest your religion, and I always shall! It is a religion for fools and fanatics!”

  “But those rules help make our lives more sensible,” he had replied with kindness. Yet inside his heart he was quaking, for never in the eighteen years of her life had he heard Mathilde lose her temper. She had wounded him, and though he pitied her, he also felt as though she had ripped something precious from their union. But he did not yield. In the end, holding up her heavy skirts, she had followed him off the train and had sat down on a hard bench in the station, facing him. All night long he had felt those hard blue eyes b
oring into him with their hatred, although Mathilde never said another word. Her cheeks glowed white with tension and he had been afraid, yet not certain why.

  And she had thought: I have married a madman. But after that episode she never again tried to oppose his faith, although in other matters she learned that his love frequently changed his mind in favor of her own wishes.

  Having children had been a special ordeal for her. There had been two miscarriages before Anna was born in 1885. Anna, colicky and red-haired like David, was a disappointment to her. During Anna’s first year, she had suffered convulsions so strong that the muscles on the left side of her face, still immature, had slackened. Mathilde, so beautiful, so fastidious, had wondered with horror what would become of this ugly daughter of hers. Who would ever marry her?

  Worse, little Anna had early displayed the most remarkable temper, rolling herself on the floor and howling her fury. To Mathilde, who shuddered when a carriage drove too noisily in front of the house, her child could have committed no worse offense. Yet this spindly, unruly little individual was still her daughter. She did love her, though with misgivings and doubts—and with guilt at not surrendering herself to maternal love more wholeheartedly. It was David who rescued her from her bouts with guilt, for he, who loved all the unfortunate of the world, immediately formed a bond with his small daughter.

  When Ossip arrived two years later, Mathilde felt as though finally her life had been justified. The baby was calm, with her own eyes and hair and an alabaster complexion. She took care not to favor the new child over her daughter, masking her genuine appreciation of the boy in quiet reserve. And then one day, when Ossip was three years old, David had entered the nursery and found his son doubled over.