The Four Winds of Heaven Page 64

  “Who is he?” the nurse asked curiously, sipping her tea.

  Madame Trévin sighed. “He’s a Russian, just as you are, Princess. His name is Baron Eugene—Evgeni, you would say, wouldn’t you?—de Gunzburg. A strange Teuton name that, if you ask me.”

  Natasha Kurdukova uttered a small cry. “Gino?” she said. “Oh, dear God! How his mother and sister searched for him, in Sevastopol…”

  “You knew the family, then?” Madame Trévin asked.

  Natasha began to weep. She nodded. Swiftly, she rose, and walked to the bed where the young Russian soldier lay gasping for breath. She took his hand, and caressed it softly with her long, sensitive fingers. “Yes,” she murmured gently, her tears falling upon the sheet. “Ossip was right when he told me you reminded him of Volodia. The world can only afford to lose one of you. Volodia is gone, Gino. You probably do not even remember him. But you must live, for all the Gunzburgs who love you. Listen to me through your fever, Gino. You can’t let go.”

  She remained by his bedside, counting the labored breaths, sponging his brow, murmuring softly to him in his agony. It was only when the doctor sent her away that she remembered that she had to pack, that she and Lara were leaving for France the following day.

  When the ship lifted anchor the next morning, Natasha Kurdukova waved to her husband with a little white handkerchief from her youth in Petrograd. As she listened with half an ear to Larissa’s excited warblings, a sudden thought pierced her mind: She had left without checking on Gino. And she had promised his mother and sister. She felt the tears rise to her eyes, wiped them away. She had also promised Sonia something else, that night in Sevastopol…

  “Why do you cry, Mamatchka?” Lara asked. “Is it because Papa has a hurt lung, and won’t be himself anymore?”

  “Yes,” Natasha replied, tangling her fingers in her daughter’s hair as she had done so often with Ossip’s. “That, and the fact that none of us will ever be himself, or herself, again. Part of me lies strewn all over Russia, in Petrograd with your grandparents, in Sevastopol, perhaps in Odessa… And even beyond Russia, in Persia with your Uncle Volodia, whom you never knew… and here, in Lemnos.”

  “With Papa,” Lara declared, nodding her head. “But he’ll come to us.”

  “Yes,” Natasha whispered. “He’ll come to us.” She closed her magnificent eyes.

  Chapter 25

  By the New Year of 1921, Sonia and Mathilde had settled into new lives. Mathilde had happily found the house of her parents, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and had made a large bedroom on the third story her own. Her mother, old Baroness Ida, resided permanently in Lausanne, and had rented out the two lower floors of her French manor, in order to add to her small income. Mathilde, after three years in the Crimea, after meals of boiled barley and abject poverty at the end, was at peace in this house, where so much had occurred. She did not think, in her room in Saint-Germain, of Johanna’s betrayal, of the ugliness that had entered her friend’s soul and had disfigured her blond loveliness. She remembered days of peace, moments that had been windbreakers in the gusts of life, and she was, if not happy, at least serene.

  Misha had arranged for Mathilde to be paid a small income every year, enough for her to take several long trips to Switzerland, where the other half of her family lived. In this way she could share her time between Sonia in Paris and Baroness Ida, her daughter Anna, and the boy, Riri, all of whom lived in Lausanne. Riri was now fifteen. Mathilde found him the painful, living reminder of Ivan Berson, but could never broach the subject with Anna; never could she have brought herself to discuss his illegitimate birth, this proof of what her daughter had meant to the son of the wanton Bersons. Yet she loved the boy, and thought him strangely beautiful, as only children of true love can be.

  She had seemed to make peace with her older daughter. There was no Johanna to come between them, and, at thirty-six, Anna had mellowed and was able to regard her mother with compassion. Perhaps, thought Mathilde, wishing she could be open with Anna, her daughter had been a mother herself long enough now to have learned of parental frailties. Yet she went out of her way to treat her grandson as the child of Anna’s friend. If Anna guessed at the subterfuge, she did not mention it either. And so the door, once left ajar by the error of two sisters, quietly closed between the mother and her daughter. Perhaps neither had the courage to throw aside the veil, or perhaps Anna loved the boy too deeply to risk his overhearing a damaging truth.

  Upon arriving in Paris at the end of 1920, Sonia had asked her aunt and uncle for a few weeks more of rest, and had gone to Saint-Germain with her mother. Her emotions were in a state of upheaval. She could think only of her brothers—Gino, who had left no trace to follow, and Ossip, who was married to a stranger, and who was reportedly about to depart for Tokyo with the France-Asian Bank. She kept wetting her lips, wondering whether to discuss her encounters with Natasha Kurdukova in Sevastopol with Ossip. Natasha’s words had left little doubt in Sonia’s mind as to their relationship, but Sonia balked at the idea that so fine a lady as Natasha could have become anyone’s—even Ossip’s—mistress. Perhaps the two had merely run into each other in Petrograd, and become reacquainted and friendly. Perhaps, with a lack of discretion, they had even spoken of love. But the rest was unthinkable, and perhaps it was best for Sonia to leave well enough alone. Everybody had suffered enough.

  Ossip did not waste time in calling upon them in Saint-Germain. When Sonia answered the door, and saw him, she uttered a short cry and threw her arms around his neck. He smelled of himself, his laughter in her ears was the same; he was here with her! “I’ve missed you so!” she cried, and for a moment it was as if they were adolescents again, before Natasha and Volodia had forever split the atom of their togetherness.

  “My love, this is Vera,” Ossip was saying, and Sonia found herself glancing toward a pretty blond girl much as her cousin Tania had been in her childhood. “Vera—this is my sister, Sofia Davidovna de Gunzburg.”

  “You must call me Sonia, for I am to be your aunt,” the young woman said. “But come in—I am forgetting Mama! She has been so anxious to see you, my Ossip!”

  Mathilde was waiting in the sitting room, for her legs had been causing her much pain since the Crimea. Ossip came to her quickly, and enveloped her in his arms, rocking her back and forth. Mathilde could not speak, so great was her emotion at once more being held by her favorite child. Too much had happened. When he finally broke away, laughing somewhat tremulously, he was motioning to the small girl. “Come, Verotchka. Meet your new grandmother.”

  But Mathilde was looking around the room. “Where is your wife, Ossip?” she asked.

  Her son averted his face, and Sonia thought: How pencil thin he has grown, where before his fineness was etched in charcoal… And he is not himself, no indeed. He seems… ashamed. Ashamed, and emptied of spirit, that spirit that had returned after his imprisonment at the Fortress. Could it be that this woman was not making him happy? Suddenly she was angry.

  “Lizette is not well today, Mama,” Ossip explained. But he did not look at his mother.

  “Is it serious?” Mathilde asked.

  “It’s a headache,” Vera interposed. She seemed a bright child, well-mannered and attractive, and Sonia judged her to be ten or twelve.

  “A headache? Indeed.” Mathilde’s blue eyes met Ossip’s, and held them silently. Pride and outrage were contained in her magnificent chiseled face, the pride of an affronted mother-in-law, upon whom one has reversed the rules of etiquette. “I understand, Ossip. Do not bother with explanations.” The words appeared to slap her son’s cheek, and he blinked. Sonia saw pain upon his features, and pain too upon her mother’s. Never before had Mathilde looked so rebuffed as now, by her son and his absent wife. And Sonia began to hate Lizette, who had made this reunion a humiliating occasion. How had Ossip allowed such disgraceful behavior?

  “Yes, Mama is prone to headaches,” Vera was saying in her trilling young voice. “When she goes to bed at night, Ossip a
nd I have to sit by her side and hold her hand or she cannot fall asleep.” She called her stepfather “Ossip” in adult fashion.

  “Then your mother must be quite miserable right now,” Mathilde commented. “You are both here.”

  Ossip, Lizette, and Vera, it was revealed, had lived in the house in Saint-Germain until a few days before the return of Mathilde and Sonia, when Baroness Ida had asked them to move. Lizette had been most resentful. This was explained by Misha and Clara de Gunzburg, who had kindly taken Ossip’s family into their mansion in Paris for several days. Misha said, touching his upper lip with embarrassment, “Our Lizette thought that she had married into a royal family, it would appear. I do believe she’d hoped you had both perished at the hands of the Bolsheviks, so that she might be the Baroness de Gunzburg. Now, in Paris, she was faced with an entire clan of us; and her mother-in-law, to boot, is still alive and well. This did not sit nicely with her; nor did Aunt Ida’s request that she move out of Saint-Germain to accommodate you, my dear Mathilde.”

  Sonia was outraged. How could Ossip have married that kind of person? She felt fiercely protective of her mother, and angrier than ever at her brother. Why had he allowed this woman to humiliate their mother by not coming at once to greet her, with him and Vera? But a full week later, Lizette did come, dressed soberly but with flair, in an inexpensive but elegant afternoon suit of navy blue, her black eyes piercing, her features sharp and angular, her carriage impeccable. She bent toward Mathilde and pecked at her cheek, accepted tea from Sonia, and spoke. She did not ask about their adventures in the Crimea, about their health. She talked, instead, of her devotion to her husband, of nursing him in Odessa, of their plans to go to the Orient which had always been part of his dream. One could see the sparks which flew into her eyes whenever she spoke of “Ossip’s brilliant career, which lies ahead of us like a road strewn with gemstones.” Sonia thought: But my brother is not ambitious. She does not understand him at all!

  During the days that preceded Ossip’s departure, Lizette did not leave him any time alone with his mother or his sister. She clung to him, touching his sleeve, his hand, his elbow, almost as if to reassure herself that he had not left her side. She told sparkling anecdotes in her nervous manner, amusing the company around her. But Sonia and Mathilde were disquieted. Certainly this was not the marriage they had dreamed of for Ossip. Sonia thought, wryly: You have picked your Gentile, my brother, but if you had to go against the religion of your fathers, why did you not wait for the other? But the constant presence of Lizette prevented Sonia from having to decide whether or not to speak of Natasha to her brother.

  Once, by the door, Ossip did succeed in retaining Sonia for a brief minute. He bent toward her, and whispered, rapidly, “You see, my sweet, I owe my life to her. And I owe her more, because—well, because it is not within my power to give her what she needs: a man’s true heart. Don’t you understand? If I did not have Lizette, or Vera, why should I continue to push on, to live at all? They give me a reason to earn a living, to rise in the morning. I am grateful to them for that.”

  “But—why, Ossip? What has happened to bereave you so?” his sister demanded, searching his face for clues.

  He brought his fingers to his eyes. “I cannot explain,” he merely stated. But he added: “Did I tell you whom I saw in Odessa? Ivan Berson! He was a member of the government on the Volga. It was... an emotional encounter. He gave money to Stepan for us.”

  Sonia blanched. “And you told him, about Annushka?”

  Her brother regarded her strangely. “What was there to tell? I did not want to dwell on what was obviously painful to him. I said that she was well, and in Switzerland.” He scratched his chin: “Why? Should I have told him something else?”

  “Of course not,” Sonia replied. She knew now that she would not speak of Natasha. She herself felt no desire to learn what might have occurred to Kolya Saxe. The past was gone, forever. She kissed her brother, and let him out the door. Already Lizette’s shrill voice was calling to him, impatiently.

  Stepan had remained with Ossip and Lizette, but he did not appear happy. Sonia felt a flow of warmth and gratitude for this old man of more than sixty years, so tall and elegant, who had not forsaken their family. “Elizaveta Adolfovna is not easy, is she?” she asked of him one day, blushing at her own impudence. But he had not replied. Instead, he had tactfully commented upon the bloom that seemed restored to her own cheeks. When, in January, Ossip and his family departed for Japan, Stepan remained with Clara. She already possessed an excellent maître d’hôtel, but could, she said, employ Stepan as his assistant. It would mean a definite step down for him, but he was in no position to refuse. Mathilde simply did not have the funds with which to pay him, and besides, he would not feel quite so exiled if he could see Sonia, his little mistress of yore.

  When Ossip left, Sonia heaved a sigh, partly in sadness that her beloved brother, after so long a separation, was going to be far from her again; but also partly in relief, for Lizette had put Sonia’s nerves on edge. But Mathilde said, “Perhaps, although she is not our kind, she is good for him. She has protected him, and he needed that. He has given her his name, his care. Theirs is not a union made in heaven, but it may be a marriage to survive where others, created in the heart, have failed. At least my son has picked a lady born and bred.”

  Sonia smiled. She could say nothing, for she knew now that her mother too had married for comfort, and not for love. But she vowed within herself that when and if she pledged her troth again, it would be in a total commitment guided by her sentiments. Spinsterhood was no dishonor. Marriage could not include compromises; better to be alone and whole.

  Rosa and Sasha de Gunzburg were no longer in Paris. A cousin of his and of Baron David, who owned many banks, had offered Sasha the management of the Amsterdam branch of his Bank of Paris and the Low Lands. But on February 21, Tatiana Halperina, who resided in Basel, Switzerland, with her husband’s family, gave birth to twin sons, whom she named Jean and Vladimir, or Volodia. Sonia thought ruefully: In one blow she has surfaced our memories of youth, hers and mine together. And she thought: But Tania knew nothing of the business with the Tagantsevs. Her twins represent a coincidence in our lives, a strange harkening back to golden days in Petrograd… to other twins...

  She sent her cousin a warm letter of congratulations and wrote to her of Ossip’s marriage, wondering whether Tania had ever really cared for her brother. Suddenly, at thirty, Sonia felt old. She had held out, hoping, hoping… for what? The realists had settled for less than what they had originally wanted, all of them, even her sweet friend Nina. She had found Nina again, with her husband and child, among the thousands of White Russian refugees in Paris. Even Nina had a child, a handsome boy.

  Now it was time for Sonia to move into the three-story house of her Uncle Misha, time to assume her responsibilities. She took her single suitcase, filled with books and old clothing, and brought it to the luxurious rooms of the rue de Lubeck, in the elegant sixteenth arondissement, Paris’s most aristocratic neighborhood. She crossed the vestibule, then entered the ground floor, passing the ballroom and salon, the dining room and the study. The carpets were soberly muted in color, fine Aubusson rugs which reflected quiet good taste. On the first floor were the master bedroom suite, several bathrooms, and boudoirs for guests, and on the top floor were smaller rooms, including Serge’s lesson room, his playroom, and his bathroom, his bedroom and that intended for his governess, who was to share a bathroom with the nurse and the laundry girl.

  An elevator took Sonia to these quarters, where Serge, bright-eyed, awaited her. He was ten, nearly eleven, and she remembered him with gladness. He had been a babe of two when she had gone to Kiev with Clara, and five when she had returned to Petrograd by way of Paris in 1915. She thought, without emotion: Eight years ago, before we went to Kiev, I slept on the second story, in the choicest guest apartment. Now I share a toilet with servants. But what does any of this matter? Of all our relations, of all the Gunzb
urgs who settled in France and whose fortunes are still intact, only Misha and Clara came to me with a concrete offer of help. She hugged the little boy, and questioned him about his favorite games.

  In the morning, Sonia breakfasted with Serge in his lesson room, but she did not have to instruct him, as Johanna had her. Instead, she sent him to his school, a private one, with the chauffeur. Toward the end of the morning she would go and meet him there, and they would take a walk. One of his friends had a governess who followed the same routine, and so the two women with their charges would take walks to the Avenue du Bois or the Square Lamartine to play. In the afternoon a lady came to help Serge with his homework. Sonia had to watch him when he practiced his piano, take him to his gymnastics class and his drawing class, walk with him and bring him to and from the homes of his friends. She played with him, but his mother brought him herself to the dentist and the hairdresser, and the nurse took care of his clothes and put him to bed and awakened him in the morning. At seven in the evening a dumbwaiter would bring him his supper, and Sonia would sit with him, but she herself took her evening meal with her aunt and uncle downstairs, at seven thirty. She was free in the evenings. Compared with what Johanna had performed for her family, Sonia was amazed at the light work load. The Mishas employed so many specific servants that she had been relegated to a kind of supervisory status.

  Sonia’s Uncle Misha had loved her since her first visit to Kiev, in 1904, and would spend many evenings reading with her in his study. The servants, goaded by Stepan, adjusted quickly to this niece who played a dual role in their lives. When Sonia was with her pupil, they would say, “Monsieur Serge’s car is waiting,” or “Monsieur Serge’s tea is served.” But as soon as evening came, or if she was alone during the day, they spoke to her with reverence as to a Gunzburg, and called her “Mademoiselle Sonia.”