The Four Winds of Heaven Page 42

  “Gino is a sensitive person, Mama,” Sonia answered pensively. “He must have considered his alternatives at length before appealing to you. And how can you even think that any woman might find you lacking in taste or propriety? You must write to her, and you will find the proper words. For, after all, she is—or was—a mother like you, with a beloved child at the front. She will not find your compassion offensive.”

  Mathilde sat down at her secretary, and composed a short letter for this lady unknown to her, whose husband’s name was familiar in wartime news, this grand Prussian lady who had lost a son, but who was now residing at the estate of her daughter, the Countess von Bismarck. She wrote in German, which she had learned during her childhood in Paris under the tutelage of a German governess. Thinking of Gino and of her own terror, she selected her words with sparing care. Then she slipped her note as well as the one dictated to Gino into a heavy vellum envelope embossed with the family “G.” “And that is the end of this episode,” she sighed. “She will not deign to answer me.”

  But six weeks later, Sonia handed her mother a sealed envelope, and when Mathilde had opened it and scanned its contents, tears came to her eyes. She handed her daughter the sheet of note paper.

  My dear, gentle Baroness [the letter read],

  Only you, a mother, can understand how the news of my loss has affected me. At night, when I remember Hans as a baby, and when I think that morning will never come, there is but one thought to assuage my sorrow. And that is that your son befriended him, and helped him in that most arduous task, to face death. Thank you for your kind words, and having borne such a son as Eugene, who must be a joy to you, in spite of the distance that separates you from him. When this dismal war is over, I should like to meet you in person.

  The signature read: “Lina von Falkenhayn.”

  “It is time for us to return home, Mama,” Sonia said, and there was an urgent note to her voice. “You and Papa need each other now, more than ever.”

  Anna de Gunzburg, in Lausanne, played with the little boy, Riri, who was nine years old. She painted and gardened; but she was nonetheless aware of the presence of Lenin in Switzerland, and of the ideas which he was propagating in his native country, which was also hers. She knew that the Bolshevik members of the Duma had spoken out in behalf of abandoning the war effort, that they favored defeat, and that because of this they had been arrested that very spring of 1915. Anna sat in her bedroom, gazing out toward the blue-green hills, and thought: I am not certain anymore, of many things. Gino and Sonia want to crush the Triple Entente and Turkey; Mama and Ossip only want life to return to what it was before. And Papa? He too is uncertain. Oh, not about the war, for he supports his government loyally; but is he fearful for the people, for their stirred-up emotions? And what about Lenin? Is he so single-minded that he does not care about the peasants, or the poor, so long as he can rule? Is it right to forego one system for another that is equally oppressive? Anna wondered what Vanya would say.

  Oh, Vanya, Vanya, she would cry out, her heart suddenly aching fiercely. She would squeeze shut her eyelids and shake her red mass of hair, and say aloud, “No, I must not try to learn what has become of him, or wonder if he still cares! But wherever he is, I am certain that he is a leader among men. And I shall always love him, and the memory of our time together.”

  In the spring, she went to Stuttgart to retrieve her grandmother, Baroness Ida, who had been in a sanatorium. “After all,” she had written her mother, “Grandmother cannot live comfortably with you in your pension, but she will have a garden here, and Riri. There is no one like a child to lighten the atmosphere.” Mathilde was glad. At least her mother would be out of Germany and in neutral territory, and Anna and Dalia were strong and would care for her. As for Riri… Mathilde was grateful that her mother had always resided in France, and had never met the Bersons.

  When she and Sonia went to Lausanne to see Baroness Ida, she refused to allow Johanna de Mey to accompany them. “You and Anna have never gotten on, and you have nursing duties here,” she had stated. Johanna had been startled at her tone, insistent and almost hard in its urgency. Mathilde had sensed her friend’s shock, and had placed a hand upon her arm, adding, “Don’t you see? Mama has just recovered from a great loss, and a debilitating illness. Any sort of disharmony would be most upsetting to her nerves.”

  When Mathilde and Sonia returned to Geneva after their brief trip, Sonia did not look well. She hardly touched her plate at mealtimes, and was white, with blue circles under her eyes. Often, during the night, the bathroom door remained locked, until both Mathilde and Johanna realized that something was seriously wrong with her. They had no need to take her to a specialist, for an excellent Geneva physician declared without the slightest doubt that Sonia was suffering from enteritis, a bad form of colitis. Her mother took her to the Ballaigues, in the Jura Mountains, and there she remained for the summer, restricted to a special diet once again. She was exhausted from her war relief work. Now, she breathed the crisp mountain air and allowed the children of her hotel to surround her chaise longue on the open porch, where she would tell them fantastic stories that she invented on the spur of the moment.

  In the fall, when Sonia had recovered, Mathilde knew that she could no longer delay their return to Petrograd. God only knew what conditions were like in Russia, but David was not healthy, and the boys… Encouraged by Johanna, she proposed that Sonia remain with Anna and their grandmother in Switzerland.

  But Sonia was outraged. “Mama, have you gone mad?” she cried passionately, her gray eyes darting blue sparks of fire.

  Mathilde stood back, shocked at the way her daughter had spoken to her. “But my dear, you have been sick…” she stammered.

  “And Papa suffers from angina pectoris! He is no longer his strong self. God knows, Ossip is unreliable, much as we love him dearly. I would entrust you to Gino, but he is at the front. Don’t you see? I must go with you. You will need me!”

  “Your mother has me,” Johanna cut in.

  “But you are not her family!”

  The two of them stared at each other, Sonia’s hatred at last showing as nakedly as Johanna’s. Mathilde trembled, wishing that somehow peace might be restored, tempers calmed. This was more dreadful than she had ever feared. At length she spoke up: “Very well, Sonia. There is no need to create such a scene. We only meant that the voyage will be dangerous and that we shall not have an easy time. In your condition this is hardly safe. But if you insist, I cannot stop you from coming.”

  “Not even God could stop me,” her daughter replied with a steady look of steel gray.

  Because of Johanna de Mey’s sullen ill humor, it was Sonia who organized the trip. They would go via Paris, London, and Norway, and from the north of Norway travel the whole length of Finland until they reached Petrograd. It was the only way to circumvent enemy territory. They would travel by train and ship, and as there were no longer any porters at the stations, Anna had painted green and yellow circles on their luggage, so that they might pick it out right away and not risk losing part of it. The week before their departure, Russian refugees clustered round them at the pension, begging them to deliver messages to beloved members of their families, to sons and husbands at the front. “You know that we are not supposed to bring any written material with us,” Mathilde gently reproached them. But Sonia stood forward, and allowed each person, one by one, to give her his message. And each day she endeavored to memorize them.

  “It is really quite a straightforward method,” Sonia explained to her mother. “I have Papa’s good memory. Each morning, before breakfast, and each night in bed, I have been enumerating the messages and counting them off on my fingers. To these poor people this represents a sacred mission, and I could not let them down, any more than you could have let Gino down in the matter of the Falkenhayns.”

  “But how many messages do you have?” Mathilde asked.

  “Forty, exactly. Eight hands’ worth.”

  “All this wasted
energy for people we shall never see again!” Johanna sniffed disdainfully. But Sonia regarded her levelly, and she turned away.

  It was October, and a cold, frosty one. The train ride to Paris went smoothly, but there it was discovered that the necessary papers had not been prepared for them as planned. Johanna de Mey openly cursed Sonia, and set out for the Dutch Consulate to prod along the officials of her country. Sonia went to the Russian Consulate and waited patiently in line, a trim figure in muted gray, her small hat perched demurely on the coils of black hair, one egret feather its single ornament. In the meantime, Mathilde went to the home of her brother-in-law, Misha de Gunzburg, and visited his wife, Clara, and their five-year-old son, Sergei.

  After a fortnight, they were able to obtain their traveling papers, and they took a train to Calais, a boat to Dover, and another train to London, which lay shrouded in folds of bleak fog. But because of wartime emergencies, the consulates there too had become tangled in webs of paperwork, and the necessary visas and passports were not ready. Mathilde remained in their hotel, holding her fingers out toward the overworked radiator for warmth, while her daughter stood in line once more, her bones chilled to the marrow.

  Ten days later, consumed with impatience, worries concerning Gino, and sensations of infuriating impotence, the three women, papers in hand, took yet another train to Hull, a British port on the North Sea. It had been decided that they would travel to Bergen, in Norway, on the only available passenger ship, a small Norwegian cruiser that could hold some forty people comfortably. When they arrived in Hull, it was evening. The Haakon VII stood before them on the pier, high upon the waves, so high, in fact, that Sonia was troubled at the sight of it. But she looked about her and shivered, dismayed. At least sixty people, indistinct in the mist and the oncoming night, were waiting to board the Haakon VII. “Come on, Mama,” she urged gently, and pushed her mother before her onto the deck. Johanna de Mey, her back erect and dignified, her features tightly drawn, climbed on behind Sonia.

  The ship began to crowd, and soon Mathilde, Sonia, and Johanna were pushed against a rail, from which they could see the sea. The vessel pulled up its anchors, and took off, dancing like a nutshell over the waters. Sonia was an excellent sailor who had traveled by boat many times, and never felt too ill to take an interest in the sailing process. Now she winced. But she said nothing as she gazed at the swirling gray waters that threatened to upset the hull of the ship itself.

  Before the hour was out they were caught in a tremendous storm, and passengers gathered in small groups that could hardly be perceived in the blackness. Many fell prey to seasickness. Mathilde retched, as Sonia held her by the waist and helped her to lean over the railing. Next to them, a girl with a Swiss accent kept repeating in French, “This is exactly like home! Exactly like it! Why do they have foreign countries if everything remains the same everywhere?” Sonia smiled grimly, clenching her teeth as the deck swayed back and forth and her feet slipped. Like everyone else, she was entirely drenched by the spray.

  A surge of unquenchable frustration had taken hold of her, and the more the ship wavered, the less she could quiet her need to do something. “Please take care of Mama,” she asked Johanna. “I am going to find someone, if I can.” She did not explain, for she hardly knew what she would do in the raging storm, on this tossing deck. But she needed to move.

  This was hardly easy. The young woman, holding on to her hat with one hand, and to her muff with the other, slid between groups of shrieking people whom she could barely make out, nearly falling on the slippery planks. And then, in the distance, toward the prow, she discerned a white figure moving about, and went toward it, hoping. She saw, as she grew closer, that the figure was indeed one of the ship’s officers, giving orders to some sailors. A sudden gust of salt spray threw her against him, and she gasped with shock. “I beg your pardon!” the man cried in English. “You must look for something to hold onto, Madam.”

  “I wanted to speak with you,” she stated evenly. She saw his look of polite annoyance, but nevertheless he took her arm and led her to the nearest railing. “I’m sorry to trouble you,” she said humbly. “But—doesn’t the ship carry any cargo in its hold? We seem to be buffeted about as if we were inside a floating eggshell!”

  An expression of alarm, for one small moment, appeared upon his face, and she began to tremble. “Madam,” he said, “leave the sailing to our captain. This is no time for chitchat. We are not rowing for Oxford, or taking a pleasure cruise to the Americas. Don’t you have any friends on board?”

  She jerked her arm from his patronizing hold and faced him, her gray eyes alive with anger. “I have asked you a simple question. You have evaded an answer. Why?” she asked.

  “You are taking up my time,” he said gently, turning aside.

  But she grabbed his sleeve. “All right,” she said tersely, looking around her at the little groups of people crowding the deck. “I shall yell, at the top of my voice, that there is something wrong with the ship! Or,” she continued matter-of-factly, “we can speak together as two adults, for five minutes, after which you will no longer be troubled by my presence.”

  Reluctantly, he turned to her. “God and the captain forgive me,” he said in a low voice, in clipped tones. “But even before we pulled into Hull, we spotted an enemy submarine following us. The captain refused to accept any freight, and drastically reduced the ballast, so that we would float high and free above our shadow. In this storm, he could not plot a zigzagging course, so we have proceeded north, to the far north of Norway, in order to throw off our pursuer. There will be no submarines on the lookout there, and then we can make our way back to Bergen, and let the passengers off. Now I beg of you—”

  “But,” Sonia interrupted indignantly, “how could you have accepted passengers, and endangered all our lives by sailing at all, if you knew you had already been trailed to Hull?”

  He sighed. “It was not an easy decision, Madam. But during the war, nations prevail over mere human beings. There is an important diplomatic courier on board. He needed to leave today, and we were his only means.”

  “Well.” Sonia stood numbly in front of him, overwhelmed. She had requested information, but had not expected anything such as this. Now she only nodded. “You have been most kind and courteous,” she stated. “I was a nuisance. Forgive me. And God be with you—and with us all!”

  She left him by the railing, and made her way back to her mother. How she found her footing, how she wound through the clusters of people in the slippery darkness, she never knew. She did not have time to ponder over the officer’s words. It was only when she found herself holding Mathilde by the shoulders that a wave of pure fear, as well as relief that she was no longer lost among strangers, exploded within her. She held her mother and thought: Dear Lord, if I so much as breathe wrong, she will know that there is danger… And she started to talk, loudly, incoherently, her phrases jumbling together. Mathilde nodded, nodded again, reassured not by the words, which she could hardly make out, but by the sound of her daughter’s strong voice.

  Thirty-six hours later scores of bedraggled passengers disembarked from the Haakon VII. Once safely ashore, Sonia considered, then rejected, the notion of telling the others about their near-confrontation with the submarine. The Gunzburgs and Johanna then took the train to Oslo, which had been named Christiana when they had been there last, then proceeded far north to the border of Finland, at Hammerfest. At the border they changed to a Russian train, for Finland was part of the Russian Empire, but to reach it they had to travel a mile on foot, between the two customs stations. The snow lay deep, and Sonia could feel her toes tingling with the slush and ice that penetrated through her leather boots. Thankfully, the luggage was being driven from one train to another on sleighs. The three women, Sonia and Johanna sandwiching Mathilde in her sealskin coat, crossed a long bridge, and at length passed through the Russian customs booths. They were on home soil!

  The next day they arrived in Petrograd, where Dav
id and Ossip and Vova, the coachman, were waiting for them with the landau. David! How pale he looks, Mathilde thought with a surge of emotion as she allowed her husband to clasp her tenderly to him. And he was thinking: How gray she has become in two years! Sonia was rocking back and forth in Ossip’s arms, crying and laughing with exhaustion and joy. Only Johanna remained apart, seemingly forgotten in this reunion. “You will be cold if you don’t climb in, Johanna Ivanovna,” Vova chided her with deference. He and the other servants had always feared her.

  There was no blackout, no soldiers on leave in the streets, and because of the immensity of the population, and of the dispensation of the precious white exemption papers, there were still young men around, doffing their hats at ladies. It was almost as if there were no war at all, it was so far away. A welcome numbness spread over Mathilde and Sonia in the landau. But it did not last long. “How is Gino?” they demanded, almost simultaneously.

  “He will be here soon,” David smiled. “He has a leave coming up, and he saved it till after your return. How is Aunt Ida? And my Annushka?”

  As soon as they had unpacked their most essential bags, Sonia left her mother, father, and brother talking animatedly in the sitting room, in front of a roaring fire, with hot tea and cakes. She went into her room, closed the door, unpinned her hair, and let it fall loosely about her frail sloping shoulders. She sat at her secretary and dipped her favorite quill into the inkwell. Her notepaper, a muted gray, lay before her. She pressed her left hand over her aching forehead, then resolutely began to write. She had forty messages to compose for forty Russians scattered all over the nation, and she knew that she must do this now, before she rested and forgot.