The Four Winds of Heaven (49 page)

She made an unpleasant face, and turned from him. She did not like his mocking eyes, which said too much. He had once offered to marry her, and now she sometimes regretted her refusal. So many of the young men were being called to arms, so many would die… And who would be left? Sioma Halperin, who was pockmarked and whose offspring would bear the patronym “Solomonovitch.” Should she instead have married her cousin? Ossip was elegant, appealing, worldly, and hardly the religious fanatic Sioma was reputed to be. But he knew her altogether too well and did not adore her. He did not even love her. They would amuse each other—and then? “You are really a coward, my darling,” she commented, half-closing her cornflower-blue eyes and regarding him malevolently.

He stirred in his seat. His face was pale, drawn, serious. “Perhaps,” he murmured. “But I shall never need to test myself, shall I?”

“Don't you care—about anything?” she cried. “Anything at all?”

He looked at the soft pastel shade of her gown, at her apricot complexion, at her parted lips. Slowly, very slowly, he shook his head. “If I did, I might care enough about my life to risk losing it, wouldn't I? How I envy those who do! And you, Tanitchka? Do you care enough to refuse Solomon Moisseievitch Halperin?”

She tossed her head with a fierce movement. “I can't stand him! But what else lies in store for me? To be a spinster, because of this absurd war, which threatens to kill off all the Frenchmen, the British, the Russians, and yes, the Austrians and the Germans? I don't want to be a spinster, to live at home, in Mama's house, following her around like a faithful mouse—like Sonia! Oh, Ossip, what choice do I have?”

“You don't have much respect for my sister, do you?” he said tersely.

“Do you? She couldn't keep him, and that's the truth. A country boy, and she couldn't hold on to him! What is there to respect?” Tania's color was rising.

Ossip's blue eyes, like piercing sapphires, glimmered at her. “At least she had a marriage proposal, my love,” he replied, his words almost a whisper. Her head jerked up, her eyes widened, her lips pulled back from her small pearly teeth. He shrugged. A cynical smile played over his features. “Don't ask for trouble, and you won't get it,” he said amiably.

In her haste to leave Ossip's office, Tania nearly collided with Gino, who was opening the door, his face red with excitement. He stepped back, startled, to make way for his cousin, whom he knew to despise him. She looked, he thought, like a lioness on the rampage, and had he not possessed such tremendous news he would have been amused to learn what Ossip had done to upset Tania. Politely, he made a small bow, but she shrugged her shoulders at him and raised her eyebrows. “Russian boor,” was her only comment, and it left Gino openmouthed with bewilderment. He did not know whether to laugh or to protest.

“Don't worry about it,” Ossip told him when she had departed, and he had closed the door upon her. “You merely exemplify all that she is angry with. Uncle Sasha told me this morning that he has given her two weeks— two weeks!—in which to make up her mind about Sioma Halperin. She is furious with Sioma, with her father, with the Tzar for making war—and with me, of course, for not being more heroic and sweeping her off her feet. All this makes her angrier than ever with Mother Russia, but don't ask why. She finds you the epitome of what she calls ‘the Russian spirit'—hence, my chap, you're it!”

“I see—only of course, I don't!” his brother replied, sitting down. Sliding a thin cigarette forward in the gold monogrammed case which he now carried everywhere in his waistcoat pocket, Ossip held it toward Gino, who somewhat shyly and clumsily extracted the long white cylinder from the pack. Bending over his desk, Ossip lit it for him, then repeated the process for himself. Finally, he sat back, expectant. The two brothers were on the best of terms, for they were of such different temperaments that they did not have to compete upon a single point.

“So,” Ossip stated, blowing smoke in delicate rings above his head. “Do you come from a class?”

“Better,” Gino replied. He leaned forward in his chair. “I have quit the University. No, no, let me finish, it is too important! I have just enlisted! My only fear is that the damned war will be over too soon, before my training is complete and I can accomplish something. But I'm in. I'm in!”

Ossip's lips parted, and he paled. Then, on a quick intake of breath, he rose and crossed the short distance between him and his brother. Gino stood up and they embraced, their arms tight around each other. “Congratulations, old chum,” Ossip stammered. “But Mama? She so hoped the war would be over before you turned twenty-one!”

“This is not the time to be thinking of our mother,” Gino said quietly. “Tania is right: all I can think of is Russia, and her success!”

When, five weeks later, Mathilde learned of her younger son's enlistment in the Russian army, Gino was already training for the cavalry at the garrison of Pskov. She fell back against the cushions of her sofa, her eyes full of tears. “The Baron has failed you,” Johanna said, bringing over the sachet of smelling salts. “He should have seen to it that the boy listen to reason, and not break your heart.”

But Sonia, thin and white, turned upon her erstwhile governess, and spoke through clenched teeth: “No, Juanita,” she said. “It was you who helped to take the manhood away from my older brother. But this time you were gone, and God protected Gino. He is in God's hands, and no place outranks that.”

She did not feel that this was the right time to divulge the news which she herself had received by the same post: Tania had written to announce her engagement to Solomon Moisseievitch Halperin, the same Sioma who had once filled her with revulsion. While Sonia's heart pounded rapidly with mingled pride and concern for Gino, with pathos for her mother, and with rage toward Johanna, a strange sense of being in a dream-world was taking hold of her senses. I must be unwell, she thought, and touched her temple. There is war, my brother has enlisted—and Tania is marrying that unhealthy upstart from Kiev? To her dismay, she began to laugh, a high-pitched, uncontrolled titter. Tania, for whom Petersburg was démodé, for whom only Paris or London would do, Tania who had so mocked her when she had pledged her troth to Kolya, a mere provincial?

“She can't continue like this,” Mathilde was saying over her head, and Sonia realized that she had fallen across the bed. “The sewing, the long hours at the milk cooperative—and she doesn't eat sufficiently…”

Still Sonia laughed, though tears were streaming down her face. In the same town as he, in the same town: she, Tania, will be in his city, Kiev, she thought. Her heart constricted with pride for Gino, and with numbing fear. She fell into a troubled sleep, and did not know that she was being undressed and laid in bed.

W
hile General Pavel Rennenkampf
attempted his sally against West Prussia on behalf of the Tzar, Baron David, head of the Jewish community of Petrograd, pondered the Russian Pan-Slavic feeling and determined that it had merit both for the Russian people as a nation, and for the Jews of Poland. No matter how constrained the Jews were in Russia, they could not help but fare better than under German and Austrian domination. The Baron gathered his cohorts in his study, and spoke to them of an idea. Russia was already evacuating refugees from the fighting areas. He proposed to send special trains to Poland, to bring the Jews of that country to a better environment. “Once they are here, it will be up to our community to find work and housing for them,” he declared.

While the discussions took place, Ossip sat quietly in the background. The capital was rapidly emptying of all the men he knew, and business was slow. When David said that he would need leaders to escort the refugees on the trains, he felt his father's pale blue eyes resting upon him, and he chewed the tip of his fountain pen. An ironic smile glittered on his face. “Yes, I shall go,” he answered. “I may as well make myself useful. Somehow, there is little glamor in being the only available bachelor remaining in town.” But his father did not laugh. He merely nodded, and addressed another aspect of the problem.

So, while Ludendorff drove the Russian soldiers from East Prussia, Ossip took several days off from the bank. He did not relish his task, and in his heart he did not even find it necessary. The Jews were always being maligned; how would Russia, with its inherent anti-Semitism, help them? The economy was going downhill: it would be no easy job to feed these new mouths, to find work for these displaced people. But he was past caring, and certainly did not care enough to oppose his father. He flicked an ash with a measure of bitterness, and was surprised at his own emotion.

He was lonely. He had always preferred the company of women to that of men, perhaps out of an inbred fear that men might hurt him physically. The single exception had been Volodia, whose loss he had deeply mourned. Now, during the early part of the war, Ossip frequently found himself wondering what might have impelled his stolid, reflective young friend to enlist in such a rash expedition. Volodia had never confided in him affairs of the heart: Could it be that a woman had hurt him by sending him away? His own sister, Sonia? No, thought Ossip: impossible! For while he had seen Sonia with the painting of his schoolmates, and wondered about her feelings for Volodia, surely she would have kept her feelings secret. It was inconceivable to think that Volodia would have returned such a love, to the point of risking his life… Yet, Ossip now recalled certain fleeting glimpses of his friend, which in hindsight were like a revelation. At the time they had occurred, Ossip had been too engrossed in his own problems with Natasha to notice. He remembered the summer at the Tagantsev estate, the piano sessions. His sister's luminous gray eyes, Volodia's soft words. No, it was all too fantastic!

Perhaps it was Gino's resemblance to Volodia, both physical and mental, that had drawn Ossip to his young brother now that he was a man. Ossip missed Gino. His good nature, his unthreatening manhood, were gone from the Gunzburg house. Ossip worried about his trusting young brother. He truly was touched by him, as few individuals touched his cynical soul. He did not feel, as Gino did, that Russia had a mission, that its citizens should accept war simply to be patriotic. In fact, he was totally opposed to violence of any kind. And Tania was right, he thought. The Germans were no worse than anyone else. This war was absurd, as were all wars and all prejudices. Gino's problem, thought Ossip, was that he never questioned anything or anyone he loved; whereas his own problem was that he questioned altogether too much, and accepted nothing whatsoever on faith.

D
avid's
librarian and private secretary, Alexei Fliederbaum, who had served the Baron in the Uhlans at Lomzha, had a son, Dmitri, known to all as Mitya, and whom David had sent to the Conservatory of Music. Sometimes this amusing young man accompanied Ossip on the convoy trains. They would sit together on the way to Poland, smoking elongated cigarettes and speaking of the arts. Ossip found Mitya cultured and agreeable, although his emulation of Ossip was obvious. It seemed ludicrous that these two calm young men in their fitted coats discussed literature and opera on their way to gather hundreds of ill-clad, frightened refugees in a blighted, warring territory. But Ossip had few people with whom to speak, and although Mitya was not of his class, Ossip accepted him in an easy manner.

It was not so when Mitya's older brother, Shura, accompanied him. Shura was an embittered, sour-faced man, for whom the world was a place of evil. Ossip kept his distance from him, and Shura stared down his long, thin nose at this young master with his dandified airs.

Because he was unhampered by pity or anything more than a vague compassion, Ossip's feelings hardly came into play during the organization of the refugees, and so he managed his job quite well and with expediency. He was a gentleman, and treated his charges with quiet if sometimes urgent courtesy. He was like a conscientious shepherd with a flock that he intended to deliver promptly and without mishap, but which did not trouble his state of mind. What would happen to these people afterward was not part of his concern.