Читать книгу The Truth About Lou - Angela Von der Lippe - Страница 8

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Child of Russia

“Mama, Mama—I wish you would drown, Mama!”

Like a graceful cormorant she dove from the perch on the far ledge of the lake into its darkest pool, disappearing with barely a splash into the deep. The late summer sun was hanging low, squinting its crimson through the trees. The water glimmered like diamonds on onyx and a wind shivered a beam of light across the water’s surface in search of a scurrying presence. The birches leaning into the lake to find Mama sank into the black. She was gone. I was terrified by the power of my own words. Seized by a freedom almost mine. When just as quickly, it was plucked away when she resurfaced and, spewing an arc of water from her mouth, she offered the retort: “Then I would be dead, Louli.” She wasn’t. And I was still miserable.

Without a word she emerged at the shore and rejecting my hand reached for her cotton shawl and wrapping it tightly around her sinewy limbs stippling in the cold air, she let go a sigh of relief. Bending over and wildly shaking off the wetness, she tossed back a cascade of dark eely curls framing her heart-shaped face. The dark orbs of her lavender eyes stood out against almost translucent skin slightly blue from the freezing water.

Yes, my mother was disarmingly beautiful—with the pallor of a statue, smooth and unchanging, exuding a kind of brilliant glare. I could never get close to her; never see myself in her reflection. No, I was gaunt and ugly—ever wanting to shed my skin. I simmered inside to change who I was. But what I remember then is that I could not say I was sorry, could not speak the words, though I so needed her to touch me.

Her look registered the wickedness of my words that day but there amid the embrace of the lapping lake she didn’t chastise me at all, and simply let it go instead. Her imperial way. Shunning shaming silence being a far more effective punishment for my misdeed. She had more on her mind.

So the death wish I had cast on my mother that August day did not succeed in its first attempt but ricocheted back, dropping like a stone into the turmoil of my adolescent soul and welling out far beyond that moment. Never again to be mentioned. That is, til now, of course, when the object of my murderous rage is long gone, no longer a threat, and through no fault of my own, she is finally dead.

I WAS born in 1861 into a turbulent Russia. No sooner had the serfs been freed and a two-year grace period of their liberation from slavery to tenancy expired, than I was born on the family estate in Peterhof—summer residence to the tsar and a host of imperial officers, of which my father was one. Coincident with my arrival, a disquieting sense of a larger social project gone wrong and impending breakdown just outside the gate was beginning to spread like an errant rumor across the land.

I was the sixth child in a long line of boys—my sex a distinct disappointment to my mother. I never quite fathomed her aversion to girls—only that one does not fear what one does not know. And she would meet in me all her fears and then some—the spirit unleashed that she had tried so hard throughout her lifetime to constrain.

Though mother had always thrilled to displays of small rebellion—outfitting the domestics of my childhood with her cast-off finery and insisting in her dotage on being carried in St. Petersburg’s streets during the workers’ uprising—my mother could never stand her own freedom. She drew the line at that. (She was a serf to her own class.) No, that was as unnatural for her as a spirit escaping from its own body, denied a true end, ever questing after imagined origins. All that was as unnatural for her as a daughter—the daughter I most regrettably was.

Strange how destinies, large and small, intertwine. In those years when the serfs were free to reclaim ownership of their own bodies, I was struggling to free myself from my own private bondage—the clutches of my mother. This almost physical need to break free and seize control would follow me for years, flaring up in new relationships, free spirit that I became. But the sensation triggered a strange distrust of my own body. I was uncomfortable in my own skin.

So, you see, my mother never did leave me. She may have wanted to own my body, but her real hold for all those years was on my soul. I gave her that boldly, mirroring an abandon she wished to disown. The daughter she couldn’t bring herself to touch.

THAT late summer afternoon we walked the lake road back to the house through a tangle of huge plain trees and the filigreed canopy of delicate birches. We passed the gazebo playhouse at the corner of the walled garden—a hexagonal structure with two doors, one opening into the colorful ménage of exotics and cultivated flowers within our magic garden, and the other leading out to the gray phalanx of birches and gnarled wood beyond its protective walls.

This little house on the edge of the garden was the sanctuary of my youth—the place where I was safe in my fantasy. I rarely touched the dolls and stuffed animals that lined the window seats (though their locks were often shorn and various appendages torn), but it was here where I created the fantasy of me and the characters and companions that would then keep me company throughout my day of chores, lessons, meals and religious observances. It was a sacred space and I allowed no one to enter it, except for my brother. Evgeny was two years older, but an altogether much more nurturing playmate to the dolls and animals, whom he looked after and ordered, assigning them each individual pillowed surfaces, while I, in turn, looked after Evgeny who with each year seemed only to get weaker. A weakness he never outgrew til one day he traded the brief high fevers of childhood for the chronic consumption that would never leave him, til life did.

That day the gazebo seemed almost transparent in its emptiness—bereft of the fantasy friends I had invented there so long ago. My mother was worried about Evgeny’s persistent cough that now left blood on his handkerchief. She was also furious with me for being cited for insolence during religious instruction—a matter the local pastor had chosen to bring to her attention.

I was sixteen and preparing to be confirmed in the German Reformed Evangelical Church—the pietism that embraced our small foreign enclave of officers and servants of the Imperial Crown in St. Petersburg. My transgression in short was my “insolent” response to our pastor Reverend Dalton’s pronouncement that there was no place imaginable where God was not. First thinking of my gazebo, I thought again and blurted: “Oh yes there is, Hell.”

The good reverend blanched and with eyes squinting like pincers about to extract the thorn of my verbal assault he ordered me to write over and over again in my notebook lines from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians in which Paul, the thunderstruck disciple, quotes the damning admonition of Isaiah: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.” Had that angry prophet been outwitted too?

But that wasn’t all. Lest the lesson be lost on me, I was forced to stand before my classmates and to recite Paul’s lame interpretation of Isaiah: “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” Scripture interpreted, the lesson was delivered. I would never go back there again and that was my mother’s frustration.

Next day my mother, preoccupied with my brother’s illness, entrusted me to my father for a stern talking-to. My father, wanting as much as I to get away from the nervous confusion of my mother’s accusatory gaze, took me into Peterhof where we walked among the high-pitched tents of a touring circus. I thought of my vacant gazebo and the lives that lay dormant under those still sheets. Here among the tightrope dancers, the jugglers and the bears on leashes I imagined escaping with my father to join the caravan and live a life filled with roasted chestnuts, harmonicas and the dancing tunes of gaptoothed gypsies.

I didn’t know then that this tall fair-haired man with emerging paunch, this man whose slate-gray eyes, full lips and lopsided mouth that looked happy and sad at the same time I had inherited, would not live out the year. That his heart would soon give out—from what I in my girlish way thought was a superabundance of life—playful hugs and a hearty laughter that began somewhere in his belly and rumbled through his chest with gentle intensity. Bursting through life’s pretenses.

Though a military man and a strict observer of tradition, my father was never one to stand on ceremony. He had seen too much death on the battlefield and squalor out in the countryside to take too seriously the charge of his daughter’s heresy. So giving no credence to my crime but merely to its consequences, he counseled a practical approach: “Louli, listen my dear Louli. Try not to upset your mother.” Such was my punishment. The rest—how I would keep the peace—was for me to decide.

My father was earthly to the core—he gave me my freedom. And I idolized him for that. And though he left me too soon, he let go with a firm squeeze of my shoulders, implanting a quick kiss on my forehead—the conspiratorial yes that I would never forget.

FATHER would never learn of my solution. A year later when he was taken from us, I remember a sound inappropriate and frantically merry—the squealing of the sleigh carrying his coffin through St. Petersburg’s black iced streets. I breathed a wish, the word “Papa”—warming the frozen tears on the ice-encrusted windows of our carriage that followed in procession—and spying a flickering succession of houses aglow and people drawn to hearths within, I breezed forward. I would never know them.

Yet I had been harboring a secret fire of my own for some time, ever since Aunt Jutta suggested I attend the Dutch Reformed Chapel on the Zogorodny Prospekt not too far from my home. It was there I would see him. That instant those eyes seared slowly into memory and I knew he’d become my beacon. I did not breathe a word to anyone.

This little chapel with its triangular roof and modest spire seeming like two hands folded in prayer stood dwarfed in the shadow of the massive onion-domed Vladimir Cathedral with its huge vaulted stained-glass windows. It had become a popular venue for the restless seekers, followers and leaders alike, and so its shelter provided a breathing space, like a caesura in scriptural law, for the more radical preachers of our church, known to the youth who hungered for their progressive message.

My widowed aunt was advanced in all ways of life and I trusted her implicitly. She had lost her husband early in life and now lived independent of any social expectation. That is, her widowhood had released her of a certain social bondage, and not as fate but as part of the vagaries of life she could now enjoy being a spinster if she wanted.

Jutta was always making fine distinctions between a woman’s “freedom” (finding freedom in a man she could “snuggle up to physically and intellectually and finally adore!”—hardly sounded like freedom to me) and a woman’s “independence” (which seemed the opposite to me, a lonely, self-satisfied lot of having a mind of one’s own). Submitting or settling seemed a dismal choice, but I nodded and listened nonetheless. There was definitely some freedom in Jutta’s lot though—for she told me she accommodated her independence by satisfying what she called her “wild urges,” without ever giving me the details.

Jutta had a life of her own in Berlin. But she knew that for her young niece to escape the narrow confines of St. Petersburg’s imperial court, I would have to undergo certain prescribed rites of passage—and above all, stay on the straight and narrow. I would need quite literally the passport of confirmation in the Reformed Evangelical Church, for without proof of these papers conferred through this Christian rite I could neither travel nor pursue studies abroad. And what with my heresy and my public humiliation setting me at odds with my family, I was at an impasse.

Mine would surely be a difficult course, but Jutta, my confidante from afar (though she came to us for father’s funeral), would be a trusted guide, experienced in social diplomacy and that sleight-of-hand psychological strategy of getting what she wanted no matter what.

Jutta knew all of the significant stumbling blocks, the hidden family ghosts that lay in the path to my freedom. She knew for instance that her father, a butcher and draft dodger in Germany turned sugar-refinery magnate in Russia, had spent his very last years closeted in a back room, off the pantry of their family residence, under the watchful gaze of the cook, butler and countless dispensable maidservants.

Apparently in a fit of obvious religious hysteria, my grandfather had taken a knife to his own son’s throat, following instructions from on high to kill all the survivors of the Neva flood. “As God is my witness, I must take you, my son.” A mere teen herself, Jutta came upon the scene of my grandfather out back by the water trough, cuffing his young son by the neck, about to butcher him with the same deliberate speed that he sectioned the wild boar and drained its blood each year for Christmas dinner. According to Jutta, my mother—just twelve—cowered paralyzed in the woodshed, unable to do anything or even utter a sound, watching her father about to do the unimaginable.

Jutta, always fleet of mind, screamed at the top of her lungs that he stop listening to demons and invoked a controversial article of our pietist faith—that he “could not impress God with idle action” but “should ‘know’ he need only believe.” She grabbed the knife from her father’s hand and the livery men came running to restrain him. And though God did not need my grandfather’s good work or any of our efforts for salvation for that matter, my uncle did definitely benefit from my aunt’s quick-thinking action that day.

The family decided to closet “Opa” under full watch in that small back room looking out to the stables, where the Neva’s constant overflowing would never provoke him to act again. There he sat alone with his faith for the rest of his days, receiving daily messages from a wife who no longer visited him, who would remarry and send word of her deed in the same dutiful way. He took in none of this. There he sat with furrowed brow and the bewildered look of one who has lost his moorings and forgotten the tether, the why or the wherefore. And through no effort of his own, he slipped into a curious bliss of forgetting, absolving him of all his transgressions.

I remembered this man I never knew, my lost grandfather, many years later when the great philosopher Nietzsche delivered to me an apt description, “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better of their infirmities.”

My grandfather’s aberration was never to be mentioned again, til one blizzard-swept night during winter holiday in Peterhof when he wandered away from his kitchen refuge through an open door and the next morning was found frozen in a snow bank on the path to the gazebo. So like the snowman of my youth melting away outside my playhouse into the oblivion, was he real, was he not? No matter. My family with their wits about them consigned my very real grandfather to a similar fate.

Just how my mother derived from that trauma her favoring of boys (out of protective guilt, perhaps), I do not know. And still how after that incident my family professed an even deeper pietistic faith is simply beyond my understanding. Faith alone might save them. From their own fear perhaps. But the menace of life was another matter. The meaning of that violent event was closeted away as swiftly and surely as my grandfather had been, into some forgotten corner of the mind, made harmless by virtue of its neglect. It was just another locked door. But how many stood between me and my mother, I didn’t even question. I just knew I was shut out.

My mother had learned to look away quite early. And much later she would give herself into the protective custody of my father—a military officer no less. But Jutta was not one to let fear get the better of her. Just as she back in their childhood had saved her sister and brother from harm’s way, years later she would become once again a guardian angel, this time negotiating my safe passage through the second coming of the flood, having nothing to do with the tides of the Neva but the moods of my headstrong adolescence. And while Jutta would become the navigator, commanding the vessel that delivered me to the safe port of my independence, the pastor Hendrik Gillot would become my very own savior, redeeming me from my loneliness—heaven and earth in one—my man-God. Or so I thought.

INTERLUDE

She lost her father too early. I lost mine so late, lived most of my adult life with him so indomitably there. Never get used to him being a memory. But to have lived so much of life with only a memory of a father—indomitably not there—as Lou did, well, that seems hardly imaginable. Did she look for him everywhere, every step of the way—that man who in his prime fell from his horse—her real toy soldier? Did she think she could find him, resurrect him again, all those years searching for the spirit of a memory no mortal man could embody? Like a prayer to an idol.

There’s that old cardinal at the feeder again—dad’s favorite bird. ... Huh, blood red, tufted rust crown, a real loner always surveying his landscape, sends the tits and goldfinches aflutter, stranger to these parts though, regal, commanding, expanding into space.