The Four Winds of Heaven Page 47

  “But you are going to the sun, and the fields, to rest. You are not running.”

  His face, so gaunt, so sallow, with its pale blue eyes, regarded her with tenderness that now, for some reason, she could not stand. “Oh, Papa!” she cried and burst into tears. He removed the fingers from her eyes, and gently kissed each eyelid. “My very little girl,” he murmured.

  Inexplicably, she could not erase the vision of her father’s harried face from her consciousness. She wept and wept. Finally, Ossip took her aside, sat her down upon a suitcase, and kneeled before her. “What on earth is the matter?” he demanded.

  Sonia threw her arms around her brother’s neck, and wildly, without knowing why, she cried out, though he alone could hear: “You must find a way to tell him—now! About the boy. Something tells me that he must know. Do it, Ossip! I beg of you.”

  Bewilderment creased her brother’s handsome features. “But Sonitchka,” he declared, “you aren’t making a bit of sense. What boy? And who’s the one who should be told?”

  A cold chill passed through her. “Oh, my God,” she muttered. “It—it is nothing, Ossip. Simply that I don’t want to go and leave you and Papa. But you’re right—I wasn’t making any sense. Forgive me?”

  “Someday you must do me the favor of enlightening me,” he teased her. He helped her to rise, and, arm in arm, they made their way back to her father and mother. Sonia said nothing more. She could not speak.

  On the morning of March 11, 1917, Baron David said to his son at the breakfast table, “The Tzar has issued an order to stop the continuation of the Duma. I cannot understand this. Our Duma in no way interferes with his authority, as does the British Parliament, for example, which wields more power than the King. I am glad that your mother and sister have left town. General Ivanov is being sent here with a full battalion to quell an eventual mob, should the need arise.”

  Ossip blanched. He could not answer his father. He thought only of Natasha, who was coming to the apartment he had rented for them months before. She was coming at noon, when Sasha would be out of the offices. No one at the bank would miss Ossip, and he had begged Natasha to find a way to come to him for a stolen afternoon. Now, he considered the dangers she might encounter, and his blood ran cold. My God, he thought, how can I stop her? Send a note? But she is probably taking Lara to her mother’s home, and will come from there... He covered his face briefly with trembling fingers, and his father exclaimed, “Ossip! Are you quite well?”

  How can I tell him that I have brought a fine lady to shame, that the wife of one of our country’s generals comes to my bed when he is gone, that she risks all for me, without thought of herself, her name, her daughter? Ossip said, “It’s all right, Papa, I assure you.” But as he smiled, he cringed with shame. His father, who had never committed adultery. Ossip felt nauseated. He was filled to the brim with self-loathing.

  “You are not proposing to go to the bank, on such a day?” David demanded when his son rose abruptly from the table.

  “It isn’t that, Papa. I have some… other business, which cannot be put off.” He thought of Natasha, her face brimming with love, and he was angry, insanely angry. They have done this to us! he thought bitterly, the old resentments surging up again. I wanted to marry her. I waited eight years. She had no wish to wed this other. And yes, he was part of it too, he, my beloved father, with his pious shtadlanism. To hell with them all, Tagantsevs and Gunzburgs alike!

  He asked Vova to drive him to the city, and from a street corner he hailed a troika which he took to the discreet avenue where he had rented an apartment and hired a manservant. It was an elegant district, but not a fashionable one, as it had been in the days of his great-grandfather and namesake, the first Baron Ossip. Ossip stepped down from the troika, paid the coachman, and was about to ascend the stoop of the gray brick house when the man called out after him: “There are crowds gathering downtown, Excellency. How about an extra few kopecks to see me safely home?”

  Pinpricks of annoyance assailed Ossip but he reached inside his vest and withdrew a purse, removing the requested coins. He nearly hurled them at the driver, then turned his back and ran up the three steps to the door. Once inside, he ran the remainder of the way to his second story apartment. His valet opened to his ring. “Monsieur is early today,” the man commented. “Madame has not yet arrived.”

  “I didn’t think she had. Fetch me a brandy, Pavel.”

  “The usual, sir?”

  Ossip fell into an armchair and loosened his cravat.

  “Yes, yes, be gone,” he said, when he noticed the man, half-bowing, still awaiting his reply. He was filled with fear for Natasha, fear renewed by the anxious words of the coachman. Surely, surely she would not come, not if she would be in danger. Her father would keep her with the family, in spite of her protestations. He almost smiled: ah, yes, she would protest. In her heart, she would want to come, more than anything in the world… But of course she would be wise, and not risk it.

  He sat and smoked, leaning forward tensely. He could not tell whether hours or only minutes went by. Pavel, tall and silent, passed by like a shadow, bearing trays of brandy and foodstuffs. Ossip waved him off distractedly, but gulped the liquor, and his nervousness began to abate with the slow warmth that was spreading through his body. He hardly realized that he dozed off, that night fell, that he awakened, startled to a new dawn. When her ring came, he jumped from his seat, perspiration beading beneath the waves of his black hair. He had slept upright in his clothes, and it was now morning.

  He heard her voice, strained with agitation, and smelled her heady scent of wildflowers before he saw her. She rushed into the room, her day gown splotched with mud at the hem, tendrils escaping everywhere upon her neck, her cheeks scarlet. He tried to speak, but the sounds gurgled, caught in his throat, and she threw herself into Ossip’s open arms.

  “It was quite horrible?” he asked, sitting her down upon the sofa and rubbing her fingertips.

  “Oh, my darling, it was dreadful! There are mobs everywhere. The carriage was jostled and nearly lost a wheel, and when I stepped out near Mama’s house, we were splattered, Lara and I. But that was nothing—just minor discomfort! They’ve opened the Kresty prison and let everyone out, the reserve troops have joined in the fray, our court house is on fire—and they’ve arrested Papa!”

  “What?”

  “Yes! The members of the Duma met, and elected a kind of emergency group, and appointed commissars to keep the peace. But the people in revolt have seized the ministers, and when Papa left the house very early... I saw them... grab him! Oh, Ossip, I am so frightened, so terribly frightened! Is there nothing you can do?”

  “I? But Natasha, my sweetest love, who am I but a bank employee? My own father would be a poor match for the revolutionaries. If the Duma people have named commissars, the mob will surely release your father within hours. Do not worry. He will be all right.”

  “He helped you once! Why can’t you at least try to do something?” she cried, and her beautiful face became wracked with tears and grimaces of pain. She started to sob, pitiful small sobs of defeat, and he kissed her hands. But she pulled them away, wildly. “You are a coward, Ossip!” she exclaimed. “Even—yes, even my husband is braver than you, for he is at the front, and you do nothing!”

  Her wide blue eyes, red-rimmed, met his, which clouded with sudden, profound shock. He moved away from her. “So it comes to this,” he stated, and his calm tone of voice brought chills to her spine. “He is a better man than I. Have you ever thought, Princess, that you cheapen yourself each day that you come to me, for I am not a general, and merely a lower tiered aristocrat whose title dates back a simple four generations? I am a Jew, Natasha. And to a Tagantsev, that is tantamount to being an ant upon the ground. The Tagantsevs wield the power to save Gunzburgs, but the opposite is not true. And to add insult to your demeaned situation, I am a virtual cripple, afraid for his back, who bears a white paper while your husband, beribboned, reviews his troops
.” His jaw muscles contracted, and he examined her with the utmost disdain. Then, suddenly, he cried out, “Why didn’t you leave me alone, Natasha? Why did you come today? Why didn’t you do the honorable thing, at least this single time, and remain with your mother, who is a decent woman, unlike her daughter, and who is doubtless scared to the point of apoplexy? Why didn’t you stay to comfort her, to hold your Lara?”

  “I couldn’t stay away from you,” she answered quietly, lifting her small tear-stained face with its trembling chin. “Yesterday I didn’t come, because of the rumors—”

  “But you are a fool! A Tagantsev, you know, can still be a fool, in spite of his lineage. Coming here, when God only knows how long we shall have to stay, cooped up like frightened chickens. What have you told your mother?”

  “And you? What did you say to your father?”

  They regarded each other, sapphire eyes meeting in a blaze of anger and fear and hatred and love. She looked away first, tears streaming from her eyes. “I am so terrified,” she whispered. “But also, you are right. I am a shameless woman. For I am happy, Ossip. In the confusion and the danger, we shall have to remain here, shan’t we? For the whole night perhaps?”

  He turned to her and felt as though he were being pulled by a magnet. She extended her hands to him, her face full of hope, begging forgiveness, but he pushed them aside and fell upon her with urgent passion. She uttered one small, surprised cry, then fell back upon the cushions as he buried his face in the crook of her neck. Her hat slid to the side, and she mingled her fingers with strands of his hair. She could feel his own tears on her soft skin, and she pulled his face to hers, and kissed his eyelids. “Do not leave me,” she whispered. “Never go away from me, Ossip.”

  They did not notice that Pavel had discreetly closed the thick velvet curtains of the small sitting room, that only a corner lamp was lit. They had not forgotten Petrograd, awash in chaos and fury. The passions of their city had merely added fuel to their own, and their frenzied love-making became tinged with the same hysteria that was shaking the capital.

  Ossip and Natasha remained together through the night, in the safety of their private enclave. They embraced in total abandonment as the Petrograd Soviet of Workers met in the Taurida Palace, without prior warning, in derisive indifference to the Temporary Committee of twelve elected Duma members. They drank giddily from champagne coupes the following day, while Tzar Nicholas left army headquarters in Mogilev and boarded the train for Tsarskoe Selo. But a quiet knock disturbed them on March 14, and while Natasha, her lovely face crimson with embarrassment, pulled up the silk coverlet to hide her alabaster limbs, Ossip, with annoyance, bade Pavel enter. “We are sick to death of pâté de foie gras!” he cried in disgust.

  The valet, pale in his black frock coat, declared quietly, “I thought perhaps that Monsieur and Madame should know. The Tzar has abdicated.”

  Natasha turned to Ossip, and her face went suddenly white. He drew her protectively against him. “What else have you learned, Pavel?” he demanded.

  “Just this, sir. The Temporary Committee has appointed a Provisional Government, under Prince Georgi Lvov. Its members are no surprise: Guchkov in charge of the War Department, Milyukov of Foreign—”

  “My father!” Ossip cried.

  “Yes, Monsieur. I said, no surprises. There is one: an Alexander Kerensky for Justice. He’s the only socialist.”

  “My God,” Natasha exclaimed, “now they will kill Papa!”

  The two young people regarded each other, horror painted upon their features.

  “No,” Pavel demurred politely. “Let me reassure Madame. The mob has been quelled. Her father has been returned to safety.”

  “But you don’t know… about my father!” Natasha gasped. Her teeth began to chatter.

  “Madame needn’t worry about anything,” the valet stated. He turned to leave, then apparently changed his mind and faced the lovers once more. “The Tzar,” he said deferentially, “has also abdicated on behalf of his son, Tzarevitch Alexei. So now it’s up to the Grand Duke Mikhail, the Tzar’s brother.”

  “Thank you, Pavel,” Ossip intoned emptily, as the servant noiselessly slipped out. He looked at Natasha, took her hands in his. But he too was trembling, and goose bumps had spread over his entire body. Her eyes stayed glued to his, seeking a guidance that he could not give. He said, softly, regretfully, “We must go home, my angel. It is time.”

  The first thing that Baron David said the next morning at breakfast to his son, was strangely anticlimactic: “The Romanovs have reached the end of the line, my boy. The Grand Duke Mikhail has refused Tzardom, and has passed the governing power to the Provisional Government.” He did not ask where Ossip had been until the previous afternoon, when he had entered the Gunzburg apartment with a haggard expression haunting his eyes. Too much had occurred for the mere comings and goings of his son to be of importance. Ossip wondered, his heart constricting with anguish, if Natasha had similarly escaped questioning. After all, she was a mother, and her own father had been held captive. More had been at stake in her case. But there was no way to find out. He could only hope, and now he wished he were a believer, so that he might pray.

  Dear God, he thought, if you exist, which I doubt, please help Natasha through these days of confusion. And, he added tersely, help Russia.

  Chapter 18

  Alexander Zevin managed the entire hundred and twenty-five thousand acres belonging to the Gunzburg clan in the Crimean peninsula. This was the property which the patriarch, Ossip Gunzburg, had purchased in disparate lots throughout the region, so that its yearly revenues should go to the Dynins, relatives of his wife, Rosa. He had been tired of their pleas for money, and had devised this plan to rid himself of the nuisance of their demands.

  The lots were comprised of wheat, barley, and buckwheat fields, salt mines and fallow ground; some of the land was extremely fertile, while in other areas it was arid. And some of the estate was cultivated by peasants who reaped part of the profits, while other lots were worked by men and women who were paid wages by the season.

  But no longer did the Dynins enjoy the proceeds of this land. Upon the death of Ossip, his children in France had allowed their brother in Russia, Baron Horace de Gunzburg, to buy their shares in the Crimean property, and when he in turn passed away in 1909, his own children had inherited a great deal of land.

  Once a year, Zevin would come to Petrograd to bring the account books and the actual cash revenues to David and Sasha. But Sasha was a city man, without much interest in the country; and David was already the squire of Mohilna, in Podolia. There was no need for the brothers to concern themselves with this land, which to them meant only additional wealth, welcome but hardly essential. No family members had ever desired to live on their Crimean land, even for short periods of time to investigate this part of their bounty, so no manor had been constructed for them. Zevin possessed a small house on the estate, but spent most of his time traveling back and forth among his workers.

  When Sonia’s health had begun once again to show signs of deterioration, Baron David at first thought of sending his wife and daughter to Mohilna. But he wanted them to leave the city soon, for political reasons as well, and Mohilna, though beloved by Sonia, had never been a favorite spot of Mathilde’s. It was too countrified, and Mathilde needed to be surrounded by civilized gentry, at the very least. He could not bear the thought of her alone with an ailing Sonia and Johanna de Mey, with her bright eyes that detested him and were constantly searching for new flaws in his character. Then, late one night, he had thought of the perfect solution: to have Zevin arrange for Mathilde, Sonia, and Johanna to rent a house in one of the jewel-like Crimean cities which he, as overseer to the Gunzburg estate, would know intimately. David’s family could then live on the proceeds from the harvests of ‘17, and the Baron would not even have to worry about problems arising in the mail system, whereby checks could be lost and his wife’s comfort might suffer.

  Zevin’s mother resided
in Feodosia, an agreeable, comely town with a harbor, and it was there that the estate manager located the house which he rented for the Gunzburgs. It was on top of a hill, overlooking the Black Sea on the most elegant avenue of all, the Catherine Boulevard. Mowed grass sloped down from it to the street, then came the railroad tracks, then the beach. The entryway was not through the front; a road wound toward the courtyard in back, leading to a garden and a porch, with an entrance to the foyer. The magnificent living room looked out to the sea, and before the street, a thick wall with an iron gate closed off the property. Only Sonia’s maid of many years, Marfa, had come with them, and they had hired no other servants. Mathilde proposed to live quietly. It was still wartime, and in this community there would be no reason to entertain. As it was, they knew very few people.

  Feodosia was an old town with Greek relics, including a fortress that had been erected by Mithridates. Sonia, who was anemic and still quite weak, was not able to enjoy many walks. But one day, after one of their own walks her mother and Johanna arrived in time for tea and greeted Sonia with lively faces. “We have met the most charming girl,” Mathilde exclaimed. “She will come to see you—we have invited her. Her name is Olga Pomerantz, and her mother is the leader of Jewish society here. Madame Pomerantz owns a wheat exporting business, and they say she runs it herself!”

  “It hardly matters about the mother, my dear,” Johanna added quickly. “The daughter is a pretty child. She was a student at the University of Kharkov, but because of the troubled time, she has returned home, and has enrolled as a day student at the nearby University of Simferopol for the fall term.”