Tin Sky (32 page)

There wasn’t much that could be done. Doing nothing was not an alternative in view of Tarasov’s brag about having killed Tibyetsky. Bora had the priest’s mother reclothe the miserable Tarasov, and while Father Victor was instructed to
circulate news of the upcoming reprisal, at gunpoint he commandeered the accountant’s neighbours to lay the body out in the street and to set his house on fire. He wouldn’t leave the scene until the building was too far gone for the bystanders to salvage anything. And it was only 9 a.m. by the time he took the road to Kharkov.

Elsewhere
, he told himself as he moodily stopped at the inevitable checkpoint,
they shoot everyone and raze villages to the ground for less than this. So why is it that what I just did doesn’t please me at all?

In Kharkov, at the military exchange, he had to wait for the arrival of a supply mule dray in order to secure what he needed for his visit to Larisa Malinovskaya. Maximizing every moment, he used the unwelcome delay to open Cardinal Hohmann’s letter.

He received a message from his old ethics professor once a month, as other former philosophy students no doubt did. Written in Latin (the Latin of an erudite man, not of a priest), the briefs ideally brought together the university students who now served the Fatherland in different places of the earth: at least, those who hadn’t already fallen in battle. Not that it was the same letter for all: Hohmann was not a man to repeat himself, or, worse, have a secretary compose a single text for everyone. He wrote personally, using a fountain pen, addressing in every officer the boy who had been sitting in front of him in the Leipzig classroom, whose change from those days he could not ignore.

The use of a dead language barely toned down the severity of his moral comments, which were only not directly political because they made use of Gospel quotations: still, he had them hand-delivered by army chaplains, avoiding censorship. Bora sometimes kept the letter sealed for more than a week, irritated at the idea of having to look inside himself from the moment he opened it to read. Then, without exception, he cut the edge of the envelope and took out the two sheets written in a slanted elegant hand, which never asked for a reply: this
because they were lectures, and because answering in writing could endanger young men belonging to an ideological army.

Bora, however, always replied, using if needed the pocket dictionary his family firm had published at the end of the 1800s, the
Lexicon for Latin Correspondence, with Examples from the Classics
. He replied as he’d done in his student days, with logical arguments of an off-putting stubbornness, all the more unshakeable since he felt deep down that Hohmann was right and he was wrong. To the letter he’d received after Stalingrad, exasperated by the cardinal’s anguished appeals to faith, he’d answered by translating into Latin a single lapidary sentence by Oswald Spengler, confident it would irritate:
Factum mutat facientem
. “Every action changes he who commits the action.” And then the signature with his military rank.

This morning, waiting for the mule dray to come clopping down the street from the rail station, he read the cardinal’s words and found them so beautifully irrelevant to his present plight (or perhaps so relevant to it) that he tore the letter to shreds.

Pomorki, 1.45 p.m., north of the Kharkov Aerodrome

Old people’s houses all smell alike. Tolstoy would say something like it. He wrote that it’s happy families that resemble one another: true, but… it’s this odour of dusty carpets, clogged drains and milk that has overflowed while boiling.

The opening of the front door caused a yawn of bright green squares in the twilight of the interior, as glassed-in photographs or paintings reflected the glare from the wild garden behind Bora’s back. He stepped into a small anteroom, wood-panelled like a closet or a bathing hut. The space beyond was the parlour. Bora felt the absurdity of standing here with a pat of butter in his hand eight hours after being shot at at a crossroads by other Germans, and less than five hours after ordering a dead man’s house to be set on fire.

How do we go back to our families after this
, Lattmann had wondered. It was an exercise in rhetoric for Lattmann, and for everyone else. As far as Bora was concerned, Dikta didn’t want to hear about the war, his stepfather knew everything there was to know about it, and from his mother he would intentionally keep all details.
And none of us will really “go back”. It’s someone different and new who returns, if and when he does
.
Factum mutat facientem.

From inside the parlour, he heard a sonorous, trained female voice saying, “So, you’re Friderik Vilgemovitch Bora’s son, Martyn Friderikovich. You don’t look at all like him. I was hoping you would.”

“Good afternoon,
gospozha
.”

“Ah, you speak Russian. Enter.”

As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness of the house, Bora realized that no one was in the cluttered parlour; or rather that the woman addressing him sat behind a folding screen. The cloth-covered paper of the screen showed Japanese cranes in flight on a gilded background.

“You must be five
pud
in weight,” she observed, unseen. “And tall: how much?”

She was right about his weight, three kilos below the norm after Stalingrad and pneumonia. “One ninety-two last time I checked,” Bora said to the screen.

“Your father didn’t come quite to that, but the weight is the same. Eyes?”

“Green.”

“Green. From The Little One, your mother. Ih. Not dark like your father’s. Dark eyes – more passion in them. I’m not one of those Russians who mistrust dark eyes. But I should have mistrusted them. Without a moustache, without a beard, you all look like boys. Come forward, Martyn Friderikovich: stand where I can see you.”

There was a hole in the eye of one of the painted cranes, about the size of a coin. She must be sitting to peep through
it. Having come not knowing what to expect, Bora took every moment as it came. “I brought you butter,
gospozha
.”

Some agitation behind the screen; a small stubby hand in a lace glove extended from behind it. “Give here. Give here.”

Bora took a step forward, and the hand grasped the waxed paper wrap.

“Nyusha! Nyusha!”

The summons was to the florid girl in a white kerchief, whom Bora had met three days earlier to ask what he might bring to please Larisa Malinovskaya. The same girl who today, while Bora was parting trailing branches and creepers to walk up to the house, had opened the door to him and touched her temple with a smile of understanding.

Nyusha came rushing in.

“Plate, Nyusha. Quick.”

The girl followed a maze through the furniture-crowded room to a glass cabinet, from which she took a dessert plate. She handed it to the woman behind the screen and walked back outside.

An interval followed, during which the small, impatient sounds of unwrapping were all that came from the paper and silk barrier. Bora waited. He’d meant ever since 1941 to meet his father’s old lover, and now that he finally was there, impulsiveness would not do.

He looked around the parlour, taking in details. As if ranked in order of importance, furniture and many odds and ends clustered around a concert piano, like huts around a cathedral. Draped with shawls, congested with framed images of all sizes, it had caught Bora’s attention from the moment he walked in. A glory of redundancy everywhere he looked. Disguised as it was, the piano stood for his father, for his link with the invisible old woman; it beckoned from within the reef of small tables and stands, chalk genre figures, houseplants that obliterated corners and reduced the floor space. Not a square inch of the papered walls was unoccupied, either. Old studio portraits
pictured Larisa as the buxom beauty once so prized by male admirers, especially turn-of-the-century opera enthusiasts. The Edwardian-fashion blouses made her look all breast, like a handsome pigeon, small-headed and with an egret plume in her dark hair. In fact, all about her in those fading likenesses resembled a glorious bird. She’d been thirty-six in 1911, when Friedrich von Bora had left Russia after a seven-year affair. A much-reproduced (and scarcely credible) Karl Bulla studio portrait of herself in the garb of an Orthodox nun with a skull in her hands, taken shortly after the conductor’s death in 1914, exceeded all the rest in size.

Bora looked without judging; he expected theatricality in her on- and off-stage poses and expressions, whether she wore braids as Wagner’s Isolde, or a lace cap as
Faust
’s Margaret. There she was, Amelia in
Simon Boccanegra
, Chimène in Massenet’s
Le Cid,
possibly Natasha in
Rusalka
and more, in other chief roles from lesser-known operas (Rubinstein’s? Tchaikovsky’s?) unfamiliar to him. And then the later Malinovskaya, violinist and revolutionary, with Frunze and without Frunze, with Trotsky and without Trotsky, and eventually without male companions at all, portrayed with her instrument against a watercolour backdrop of moonlight on the sea.

The voice from behind the screen came out sticky, as if the woman were chewing a large mouthful. “Yes, you’re taller – and you look
modern
. Only your hands are like his. Your father was an intellectual, for an aristocrat. And he was exceedingly talented. Are you talented?”

“Not really.”

“And do you have brothers or sisters?”

“Not by him,
gospozha
. I have a younger brother by my stepfather.”

“How could La Petite, your mother, remarry after
him
?”

“Well, she was widowed at twenty, and my stepfather had sought her hand before Father did.”

“Is he an artist, at least?”

Generaloberst Sickingen? The thought of it! Bora smiled inwardly. “He’s a soldier. A very good husband to my mother, and a good father to me.”

“Of course it’s much easier to claim a
soldier
as a father than a genius. Your mother should have remained faithful to his memory, as I did.”

Bora didn’t show what he was thinking: every opera aficionado knew Larisa Malinovskaya had counted sexual partners before and after his father: Debussy, Mucha… Mikhail Frunze, for example. As for the exclusivity of that love affair, the Maestro might have lived for years with his premier soprano, but in the end had gone back to Germany and married his young cousin. Pretensions to loyalty on the part of a forsaken lover were touching, but altogether unnecessary.

She didn’t even ask for a spoon
.
Is she gobbling butter back there
? It seemed so plain that she was, Bora didn’t know what to make of it. War drove people to desperate cravings, he was aware, but the oddity of this reception, the vanity of a screen set between them, and now the greedy smacking sounds from behind it, threw him off-balance. He’d entered, not for the first time, a space suspended from daily experience, a dimension dangerously close to normality, where daily rules, however, did not apply.

“You remind me of Frunze,” the sticky voice said.

“The founder of the Red Army,
gospozha
? I hope not.”

“Not your features. The glance, the way you hold your head.
Frunzik
was outrageously handsome.”

Ah yes, there it was. One of the portraits on the concert piano was of the young Russo-Romanian firebrand, a bright-eyed and moustached disciplinarian. Bora had studied Mikhail Frunze’s campaigns and innovations (“The Red Army was created by the workers and peasants and is led by the will of the working class. That will is being carried out by the Communist Party…”) It made sense, if she could capture his fancy, that a soprano compromised with the old regime should seek a relationship with Frunze to prove her change of heart. But for
all his valour and organizing virtues, Frunze had run afoul of Stalin and officially succumbed to an ulcer, although
Abwehr
operatives knew for a fact he’d been purposely administered an excess of anaesthetic before surgery. If Frunze had been Larisa Malinovskaya’s protector in the early 1920s, one had to wonder how she’d managed to survive his disgrace. Had she distanced herself from him towards the end, or had she found other supporters within the Party? Most of all, had she known Khan Tibyetsky in Kharkov? It was this consideration that had most influenced Bora’s choice to visit her now.

“And so you’re called Martyn, yourself. Martynka the Widow’s Son, like the character in the Russian fairy tale. Your father wrote a
Lied
for me by that title. A triumph. He was thinking of
me
when he named you.”

Bora spoke to the hole in the screen. “I was coincidentally born on Martinmas.”

“In the old days only illegitimate children and foundlings were named after the saint of the day. Your father was thinking of
me
when he baptized you Martyn, which was the name we planned to give our son, should we have one. Naturally, for us, it would have been bourgeois to marry. We both thought so.
I
thought so. And then he returned to Germany in 1911 after his father’s death. And there he met his little cousin, his young cousin, La Petite, who could have been his daughter in age. She was a child when he left for Russia. She was seventeen when he returned. What do you want from me, Martyn Friderikovich? You Bora males don’t come to a woman without wanting something.”

“Forgive me for protecting my father’s good name, Larisa Vasilievna. I don’t believe he sought anything of you, apart from your affection. Which I understand he reciprocated.”