Encore Page 38

  These people have invaded my life, my soul, my consciousness, he thought. The golden count and his dancing Sugar Plum Fairy. They had excluded him and made a cocoon to protect themselves from the world, shutting him out, hating him.

  Blood throbbing in his throat, Pierre raised his head and examined the vellum in front of him. Boris would be doubly hurt at receiving word through Pierre, and this, then, would be justice. He dipped his pen in the inkwell and began to write. Words had never come easily to Pierre, and he tried to imagine Boris in the Caucasus, reading about his son’s death and his wife’s withdrawal. An unexpected stab shot through his middle. He couldn’t picture the child dead, not when he’d held him in the heather, when he’d risked his own life to help save him. Suddenly he felt the pain of Natalia’s loss, imagining her arms hanging limp without Arkady. “Boris:” he began stiffly:

  Consul Nicolai Medveyev suggested that the task of writing to you should fall on me as a friend of the Kussov family. You needn’t be told that I demurred. Our friendship came to an end long ago. But Medveyev does not know the particulars.

  First of all, I do wish to assure you that what I am about to relate came to me through Nicolai Petrovich Medveyev, and not firsthand. For whatever it’s worth to you, Natalia hasn’t loved me for a long time. I helped her to escape from Germany in memory of the past. There is nothing whatsoever between us. This said, the news I bring is bad—the worst, I’m afraid.

  Little Arkady passed away. He’d suffered all his life from faulty kidneys, and his death was no more painful than the nine months that he was alive. Natalia, Medveyev tells me, could not write to you about it. He says that she has gone to Geneva, and I’m certain you can reach her at the address he’s given me, which I’m enclosing. She’s distressed and refuses to see the Medveyevs, who had been friendly to her since her arrival in Switzerland. Probably a letter from you would help her to adjust. She is afraid that all this is her fault and that you won’t forgive her. There’s nothing I can hope to accomplish on her behalf, so I will not go there to call on her. But if she needs a friend, Igor Stravinsky is in Switzerland too, I’ve been told. She is your wife, and I have finished meddling in her life and yours.

  I must add that I am truly sorry. Words, as usual, fail me totally. Whatever ill feelings may have passed between us, I don’t think even you deserve to be hurt this way. No human being does, and having been the one to convey this message has helped me to understand how truly wrong war is to separate families and countries from each other. Arkady is the first war casualty for whom I have wept. Pierre laid down his pen and shut his eyes. It the letter sounded dry, heartless, and inarticulate, then so be it. He’d done the best he could, under the circumstances, and damned be the Kussovs and Medveyev.

  In the late fall of 1914 an exchange of gravely wounded prisoners had been established between the Allies and members of the Central Powers. Convoys of French as well as German veterans passed through Geneva on their way home. Each night at midnight and again at three in the morning, a train would stop on either side of the tracks at the large terminal. Women in Red Cross uniforms would wait on the platform and dispense bandages, chocolate bars, and coffee. Society ladies who had volunteered as nurses would come to help, bringing the treats onto the trains to the soldiers. A crowd always gathered to watch, to see how bad the gaping faces looked, but also to lend support to those who had lost limbs for their various countries.

  The hospitals from which the prisoners came were short of bandages, medicines, and disinfectants, and those on convoy trains suffered most from this scarcity. In Geneva the halt at the station took a long time, while officials checked papers and went over formalities. The nurses, therefore, could take their bundles onto the train cars at leisure and sit in turn by each patient, changing dressings and administering tranquilizers, helping the men to drink hot coffee, and leaving them chocolate bars and cigarettes. The military commander of the Place de Geneve, a Swiss colonel named Rodolphe Senglet, was in charge of these proceedings. It was his duty to make certain that all went smoothly.

  When Natalia left Lausanne, she went to the nearest city that was large enough to guarantee her anonymity but familiar enough to make her adjustment relatively easy. Her bank account was in Geneva, and there was sufficient activity to drown out her thoughts. She had trouble finding a hotel that could accommodate her, but at length she was given a comfortable room at the Hotel Metropole. She did not care about the opulence of her surroundings because she had really ceased to care about herself, but the Metropole was centrally located, and she needed that so as not to feel isolated.

  The town, though busy and filled with foreigners who had been caught there by the outbreak of war, was operating in slow motion. It had become a women’s town. The Swiss men had been mobilized to ensure their country’s neutrality, by protecting its frail borders. The old, the weak, and hordes of female citizens and visitors had taken over their soldiers’ previous occupations. Natalia was in shock, and saw this different Geneva without interpreting how its changed aspect might affect her. Nothing was real to her anymore. If she encountered Boy Scouts throughout the city streets, running errands on their bicycles, they were not worth considering—just another volunteer group helping to keep the city alive and functioning.

  Natalia went at once to sign up for nurse’s training. In the hospital she made herself look straight at the white walls and learned to wear the starched uniform as a punishment. She felt fundamentally unclean and guilty, and this service, she thought, would be her expiation. She believed that blood cleansed blood, that only by immersing herself in the suffering of others would she be able to forget the suffering of her son. She had always faced the inevitable with uncommon staunchness; now she attacked the healing profession in the same indomitable manner. The doctors and other trainees found her oddly unflinching—even in the worst of circumstances.

  In January the group in which Natalia was training began to greet the convoy trains of the gravely wounded. It was extremely cold, and patches of ice lined the platform on which she stood with the other volunteer nurses. Over her uniform Natalia wore a long velvet cape of dusky rose, with silver fox trimmings at the collar and hem. She felt goose bumps shiver over her skin but ignored them as she did all physical discomforts. The more her body ached, the more vindictive she felt against her own infirmities.

  The crowd was loud and dense that night. Young boys and girls tense with wartime excitement shouted in the darkness. Old men and women peered about them with owlish fascination. A train pulled in, whistling shrilly, and a sudden pain shot through Natalia as a picture of the dead colonel flashed through her mind. This was a French convoy, and the Swiss, who were Francophiles, ran up to the cars and waved, their handkerchiefs and scarves dancing in the cold winter wind, banners of joy. Natalia took her bundle of foodstuffs and dressings and climbed aboard.

  In the first compartment she paused in the doorway for a quick intake of breath. The face staring at her drained the color from her cheeks. One round eye, its brow and eyelid burned away, regarded her from one of the bunks, its mate completely swathed in dripping red bandages. From somewhere else a French voice called her, but, mesmerized, Natalia went toward the ghastly sight and sat down on the edge of the bunk. In a low, confident voice she said: “Hello. I’m Natalia Oblonova. What’s your name?”

  “Antoine Mayard. You’re a beautiful lady. I haven’t seen anyone like you in months.”

  He sounded so young! “Shall I change your dressing?” Natalia asked, realizing how banal her words were, compared with the courage of his statement. Her staunchness began to give way. With increasingly trembling fingers, she unpinned the bandage around his head and saw a hole where the other eye had been. She could feel her stomach slowly turning, felt herself begin to gag. Then she thought: Who am I to be disgusted? His wounds are on the outside, while no one can see mine. But they’re there, and they made Arkady die! She controlled her nausea, washed the blood from the empty socket, and applied a new gauz
e bandage.

  Gently, she raised Antoine Mayard’s head so that he could drink from a cup of hot coffee. Both his hands had dressings wrapped around them. Natalia wanted to weep. She felt like crying out: Why are you fighting? Why did you give up one of your eyes? Is the Archduke Ferdinand really your intimate concern, that you and my husband and Heinrich Püder should all be willing to die because of him? But Arkady had died for no reason, and Natalia remained silent.

  When she climbed off the train, one of the Swiss nurses, Louise Dondel, said to her: “How can you do it? I saw him—such a dreadful wound. Did it make you sick to have to change it?”

  “Yes,” Natalia replied in a soft, even voice. “That young man is in such pain, and there was so little I could do. Death and maiming make me sick, Louise. Because we can’t control what happens to us.”

  Another train was pulling in, this one with the German colors on it. All at once the crowd appeared to swell and began to roar. Next to Natalia, Louise had blanched, and Natalia heard her mutter: “The damned pigs! It’s all their fault. Well, I’m not going. No one can make me!”

  Horrid faces stared from the compartment windows, faces as ghastly as those of Antoine Mayard. The Swiss crowd was now hurling insults and obscenities at them, waving not banners but clenched fists. Rodolphe Senglet was pacing frantically about and shouting admonitions in a frantic effort to control the partisan feelings among his countrymen. In his colonel’s uniform, with his trim mustache and Van Dyke beard, he resembled an elegant Swiss monkey. No one paid any attention to him.

  Natalia stared at the frightened faces of the German prisoners. One of them had raised a handless arm to protect his eyes, as in the line of fire. Her heart, so often closed these days, suddenly burst open like a dam, and nameless fury shook her. She seized Louise Dondel by the arm and propelled her forward. “We are nurses, for God’s sake!” she cried. “Get on that train or I shall push you onto it myself!”

  Several startled faces turned to her. Natalia made her way to the stepladder and climbed to the train level. She stood above everyone else on the platform and placed her hands around her mouth to form a sound tunnel. “I can’t believe it!” she exclaimed. “The Swiss are the only nation with an ounce of sense in this war. You, of all people, should understand that where a wounded man comes from is immaterial! He’s wounded, and he needs care—and the rest simply doesn’t matter! My husband is fighting on the Russian front, and so I have more reason to hate the Germans than you do. But I don’t. I was helped once by a noble man, and he happened to be a German officer. So I’m going to go up there with bandages and coffee and some good words, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be the only one to go. We need every nurse on this platform!”

  Hypnotized, the crowd had frozen, looking up at the tiny figure in rose with her large eyes. Colonel Senglet took advantage of the sudden calm. He waved to his soldiers, and they, in turn, dispersed the angry bystanders. Louise Dondel took one small step, then another, toward the train. She was the first of the Swiss nurses to climb up the ladder behind Natalia.

  When the three A.M. trains had departed, and it was time to return to the Metropole, Natalia noticed that her velvet cape was besmirched with blood. She could not control the nerves that twitched in her hands and shoulders, but, for the first time since Arkady’s death, it was the stench on the outside of her that rose to the surface of her brain. The cape, and not her womb. The blood of others, and not of her son. Pressing trembling fingers to her brow, she began to weep.

  At the beginning of February the Headquarters of the Division Sauvage was stationed on the outskirts of Tiflis, capital of the Caucasus. The Caucasus constituted a veritable barrier between Europe and Asia: High, steep, and jagged, its mountain range rose like a solid wall, beginning west at the Black Sea and stretching east to the Caspian. Its peaks were abrupt and majestic, their ragged crests like boar tusks on the horizon. Boris Kussov saw this view daily.

  He was living at Division Headquarters, attached to the support staff of General Baranov. The men of this Cossack division were all bold and daring, having selected this branch of the army because of its reputation for heroic endeavors and great risks. Boris, too, had found the atmosphere exhilarating in the beginning. In his uniform he appeared particularly distinguished, like a modern swashbuckler. The tunic, with its large trousers stuffed into boots, was black with a silver cartridge belt and white buckles and buttons, unlike the other Cossack uniforms which were red, maroon, or royal blue with black accoutrements. With his tall, slender figure and golden hair, Boris seemed cut out for action—but instead of spending his days on a horse fighting in the mountains he sat behind a desk battling piles of paperwork.

  He had been made a major. Baranov was a thickset man of advancing years who had known the old count, Vassily Arkadievitch. The younger soldiers had certainly heard of the gallant, courtly Boris as well. Everyone seemed to know that he had married Natalia Oblonova, and it made Boris smile to think how much her reputation had enhanced his own so close to the front. Any man who could pick for a wife one of the leading ballerinas of the Mariinsky was indeed worthy of the Division Sauvage. And so they drank with him, told him stories, and listened mesmerized to his anecdotes. But still, they were loath to let him near the battlefront.

  “Everyone knows you don’t know anything about maneuvers and strategy,” Baranov told him one evening over coffee and cigars. Brandy would come later; there were as yet no shortages among this division of wealthy rogues. “Let’s face it, you pulled strings to get in, and others have had to sweat through the ranks. Entrusting a mission to you, my dear Boris, would be tantamount to committing suicide. Perhaps next year.”

  “I should have stayed with my wife,” Boris said bitterly. “Somehow, there’s always been something I could do that was unique—even if it was only to manage the financial aspects of a ballet company. Surely you can find me something besides organizing the filing system.”

  Baranov puffed on his cigar and closed his eyes beneath the bushy brows. “You’re that restless?” he asked, his rasping voice sympathetic.

  “Yes. I’d be elated to go with a company patrol, as an observer—I’m certain the junior officer could give me something to do to help. I could carry the water flasks, maybe? Or sing Wagner to egg the troops on to battle?”

  “That isn’t funny, Borya. But I do see your point. Perhaps I could work something out. From Headquarters we have been sending out three regiments toward the Turkish border; these regiments web out into twelve battalions, containing forty-eight companies of some two hundred ten men each, with a staff support system of forty per company. Stretching even farther out are small platoons of seventy men, including staff. Our patrols go out by squads of fifteen under a sergeant. The purpose of webbing out this way—”

  “—is to make certain that no Turks can invade our frontier. And the small squads are our exploratory force?”

  “Yes. Would you like to participate in one of these patrols? I could attach you as an observer to a platoon headquarters, and you’d go out with the men. Hardly a brilliant venture, but necessary and dangerous. And you’d learn, my boy. There’s nobody like a sergeant to teach you.”

  Boris smiled. “I’d be delighted,” he said. “Thank you, Anton Alexandrovitch.”

  But Baranov sighed. “We have problems in the mountains, Boris. Revolting Cossacks. Oh, don’t remind me that we’re a regiment of Cossacks ourselves, because our being on the same side doesn’t seem to matter a damned bit. It isn’t that they want to go over to the Turks—it’s that they’re fierce and proud and refuse to be dominated by anyone. They feel we’ve been disturbing their life.”

  Boris narrowed his eyes and fingered his mustache. “Our men have not always behaved honorably,” he said. “They’ve raped and plundered villages. The Cossacks are quite naturally angry. Under the best of circumstances, they are an unruly lot. They’d kill a man for looking at a woman that wasn’t his. Think how justified they now feel to hate our soldiers! Not ever
y last Sauvage knows how to be a gentleman.”

  Baranov set down his cigar and motioned to his orderly for cognac. “The Cossack women are beautiful, indeed,” he murmured. “And now we’ll drink to your new activity. And to little Arkady in Switzerland, who may yet join our ranks someday!”

  No one at platoon headquarters knew quite what to make of Major Count Kussov. He was a splendid man, graceful and easygoing, with impeccable manners, a charming man who seemed to know how to speak to the lowliest soldier. But did he know how to fight? Did he even know how to protect himself? Doubtful eyes exchanged glances, which were averted when the major appeared on the scene. But worried thoughts continued.

  They were encamped some miles to the southwest of Tiflis—seventy men comprising three squads and a support staff. Each of these squads went on an exploratory trail for two days, then was off patrol for four. For the first six days Boris had stayed in camp with the remainder of the staff. He was getting to know the men, the three sergeants and the lieutenant in charge of the platoon, a small muscular man from Kiev by the name of Ivan Outchakov—or Vanya, as he was called. Ivan was suspicious of Boris. Although he was learning to enjoy smokes with the Division major, he still wondered what Boris wanted. Adventure? Color? “And why not, Vanya?” Boris asked easily. “Why should that trouble you?”

  “War isn’t a game, Boris Vassilievitch. Above all, it’s not a parlor game.”

  “So I’m told, repeatedly. How the hell am I to prove you right or wrong if I’m forever kept on the periphery of things? I am not a voyeur, mon cher.”

  To Boris’s amused surprise, the young lieutenant blushed a deep scarlet. Boris threw back his head and laughed.

  The next morning he awoke before Outchakov. A creeping restlessness and dissatisfaction had kept him up most of the night, and now he washed and dressed and wandered out of the tent that he shared with the lieutenant. The panorama, so rugged and lonely, struck him like a blow. In front of him the Elboruz and Kazbek peaks, covered with snow, stretched their jagged tips toward the dawn skies. He felt a burning in his stomach, the old pain reviving. It did so now and then. What was he doing here? Playing “parlor games”? Certainly not what I came here to do, he thought angrily.