Calligraphy Lesson (17 page)

A fascination with socialist thinking and the allure of all things Russian were intertwined in his feelings for Lydia. “This Russian woman was for me a complete revelation, a bundle of passion, raw emotions and rare power. Our differences showed up everywhere, everyday, in the way we spoke, and thought, in the smallest detail, even how we prepared for exams: the Swiss took this fortress over a long-month's siege, the Russians—in a head-on attack.”

Many years later, when he was trying to make sense of this faith in Socialism gripping the Russian youth, Fritz writes, “For her the people and love of the people was like a religion. But you couldn't say the word ‘religion' in her presence. She longed for martyrdom—to be exiled to Siberia or, better still, end up on the gallows. These young Russians were like the early Christians, marching to their execution with tears of joy.”

Fritz described the ‘altar' in her tiny room—engravings and photographs of revolutionary martyrs such as Countess Sophia Perovskaya, Vera Figner, and other female terrorists.

“Socialism for the Russians,” we read further in his memoirs, “really meant a loss of one's ego through self-abnegation. Everything else was secondary. It was a passion to live for others. Lydia sacrificed her interest in the natural sciences to become a doctor, live among the common people, and devote herself to them. She abhorred tsarism. Her models were the regicides of the Perovskaya circle. This fervor, felt at the core, for self-sacrifice to an idea, this desire to efface her ego confused me and at the same time held something magical for one about whom the world said, ‘Without money, there are no Helvetians.'”

The two were thrust together by their love despite all their emotional and cultural differences.

In her letter of 25 July, 1899 she writes, “Don't worry that I fell in love with you because you became a socialist. If Socialism were all that counted here, I would have fallen in love with some like-minded fellow like Bebel, not you. Your conversion removed any possible obstacle to our love. Ever since you became a socialist I forget you're a socialist and I love you because I love you. I'm so happy.”

And in another letter of the same year, “My sweetheart! I love you precisely because you're not at all like a Swiss! I could never fall in love with one of those philistines who just think of their own little house and vegetable garden! Right away I sensed in you one of us.”

Living in the same city and meeting often, they wrote each other daily, and even several times a day.

Now with a medical degree, Fritz opened a practice in Aussersihl, a working class district of Zurich, and became active politically. The workers elected him their deputy to the city council. Lydia too finished
her university course and it was time to think about their life together.

He proposed marriage, but the young woman had neither the intention nor the wish to tie her fate to Switzerland. She saw herself as a doctor in the Russian backwoods. The two were in a quandary—both wanted to fight for Socialism, he in his homeland among the Zurich workers, she in Russia among the peasants. And yet both wanted to be together.

To make matters worse, Lydia's views on the family as a social institution were unconventional. “The very word marriage disgusts me,” Lydia writes in November 1900. “You and I are a new kind of people, we're the future, and our relations will be the kind these philistines just don't know about. I hate their phony marriage! Everything will be different with us!”

The couple entered into a nuptial agreement that was unusual for its time: they allowed each other the freedom to choose where they wanted to live and agreed not to have children.

“Their marriages are a lie. Our marriage is a protest,” she writes to her fiancé. “We're going against the current. My sweetheart, I'm proud of you! I'm proud of us! Your love is the most wonderful, the most precious thing I have.”

But despite this declaration, she asserts the opposite in the very same letter. “Yet there exists something stronger and greater than love for an individual.”

Her parents' marriage told on Lydia's feelings. “I know the family can destroy the self. My own mother is a great or better still, pitiful example of this. She was crushed by her marriage. A girl with ideals turned into a bourgeois, idle madam, frittering away her life at resorts. Without a higher calling. Her children grew up, went their way, and she was left with an emptiness within and without.

In Lydia's imagination the traditional family presented itself as the source of human unhappiness. “Even as a child I heard my mother say her
marriage made her miserable. Though it was for love, she came to hate her husband, saw in her children the cause of her unhappiness, and felt her spark was snuffed out. She never tired of repeating that her children tied her hands and that because of them she couldn't realize her potential.”

Lydia had strained relations with her mother and brother Vyacheslav. Anastasia Ivanovna lived mostly abroad on funds left by her husband. Lydia branded her a “social wastrel,” although she, in turn, was supported by money her mother sent her regularly. “Sure, she's smart, energetic, and capable. But what use is this to mankind? Sure, she increased the earth's population by two, but that happened against her will. Why did she show up on this planet anyway? Was it for spa treatments?”

And again about her mother. “What terrible words I'm about to write—I find my mother despicable and more than anything in the world don't want to be like her. My poor mama! What happened to you? Why? My life won't be like yours.”

Fritz recalls, “The first male she became aware of was her father, who remained fixed in her mind as a repulsive drunk. Her memories of childhood were of endless family scandals and humiliations of her mother. Lydia cut herself off from her brother Vyacheslav as well, because he didn't share her revolutionary ideals. She saw no good in her family. At bottom she was very lonely.”

In a later letter, sent in December 1913, Lydia writes, “You talk about the importance of love in childhood. That's so true! I never had a loving person by my side. My mama, my brother, the nurse—they never were really close to me. I never had a true friend. All of them were surrogates, people who pretended to be close but who never really were. But I wanted to be loved so much! And no one but you was ever really interested in what was happening to me inside.”

The couple often discussed their decision not to have children.

“Having children,” Lydia argues, “puts an end to all my dreams of a real and productive life. Sooner or later I have to make a choice between children and the realization of my ideals. One or the other must be sacrificed. And besides, if I'm prepared to give my life, how can I leave a child in this world? Who will take care of it?”

She tried to find reasons for not having children and she succeeded: “How can we bring them into the world the way it is. We'll be ashamed to look them in the eye. First the world needs to be changed. Fritz, my love, I so want to be a mother, but I can't even consider it. I must say no to it and sacrifice a child to something far more significant.”

Physical intimacy too was troublesome. She confesses her fear of the carnal. “My dear, I love you but I can't open up to you. Each time something stops me. I want to hold you close, but something keeps me back. I implore you to be patient!”

Typically, Fritz reined in his feelings, but an Amsterdam archive contains his diary with his innermost thoughts, as in the entry of 30 June, 1901. “This is insane. I can't live without her any more. Lydia's my future, my life. Without her my whole existence counts for nothing. I never knew what love was before. Being intimate is a big problem for us, but I'm ready to wait as long as it takes to help her. She's tormented. She recoils from the physical. She hates ‘human flesh.' She hinted that something terrible had happened to her, perhaps when she was growing up, something connected to a man's violence. Today she said it's hard to overcome what she sees as man's animal nature, but she'll make an effort for my sake. I want this too but I'm afraid I'll turn out to be for her this very same animal. And that's exactly what I don't want!”

The discussion on physical intimacy went on for months, but they couldn't come to a decision. Over and over again she writes, “It's just instinct. We must suppress the animal in us, because we're people and not animals.
But I love you and see how you're suffering. What you want will definitely happen, just give me time, my beloved!”

The moment came when she had to decide whether to stay with Fritz or leave for Russia to fulfill her dream. She vacillates. “My sweetheart! I feel love for you in every cell of my body! Sometimes such a wave of feeling sweeps over me I could give up everything that was important to me and become your wife, give you children, look after the house, make sure your shirts are clean and ironed! But then suddenly I'll realize, as if doused with a bucket of ice water, that it's you who'll fall out of love with me first because it won't be me anymore.”

The couple was officially married in the Zurich town hall and her final decision about leaving was delayed until their honeymoon. In July, 1902, they left for Italy. From Milan they went on to Venice. Fritz hoped the very atmosphere of this city of lovers would help them.

On 14 July, the day before their arrival, the Bell Tower of San Marco, the famous tower on the Piazza San Marco, symbol of Venice, collapsed. Fritz notes in his diary, “Should I take this as a sign? As a bad omen of our family life for the century to come? Maybe the 20
^th
century really began with this catastrophe and not with a calendar date. It's amazing no one was hurt. Maybe that's a sign too! If only this century goes down as the happiest for mankind!”

They would return to this trip often in their letters.

Among Fritz's writings in the Amsterdam archive is a manuscript of an unfinished, 25 page novel,
The Bell Tower of San Marco.
The main characters, a young couple, journey to Venice, a city which should become their paradise, but where they land in the hell of a tangled relationship.

Fritz's diary entries express despair. “What terrible words—wife, husband. Newlyweds. Can this be us? It's like we're actors in some trashy play. Venice! It's the fashion for newlyweds to come here and swoon
at these elegant decorations. Suddenly I'm sick of everything, most of all these masked gondoliers! This place was invented so that visitors pretend they're happy just because they came here. But the locals sell them this happiness. It's disgusting!”

The next morning he writes, “Had a terrible night. Lydia's impossible. I'm impossible. I blame only myself. We're in heaven, but we feel ourselves banished. She said she wouldn't be at breakfast. I'm sitting alone on the terrace looking at the lagoon. Some sparrows are going after something on the table. I have to keep waving them away. There's a dead pigeon on the shore. A gull's picking at its guts. Why did I expect to find happiness in Venice? With each passing day I love Lydia more and more.”

Out of this trip came a resolve that each would fight for a bright future for their own people, in their own country and, as far as possible, meet every year.

In Petersburg, Lydia passed her State exam, which allowed her to practice medicine throughout the Russian empire. She was sent to the Smolensk region, in the village of Krapivnya, 45 versts from the railway station. Finally her dream of serving the people was about to come true.

But then reality quickly sobered her up.

“40 miserable hovels, cheap vodka that's government-subsidized, a church, and two peasants dead drunk in a snowdrift. There's nothing else out here. A doctor's called only for an autopsy or a recruitment exam. They doctor themselves. It's barbaric. There's no concept of hygiene, let alone order and keeping things neat and clean. Everything is swarming with parasites. Fleas, lice, roaches everywhere. You can't prescribe enemas for children or douches for women because the peasants have neither money nor the desire to buy these things. They're not even sold at the grocery or the State store that's only stocked with cheap vodka. No other stores around for a good 100 versts. No one knows about a knife
and fork here, and they eat without plates—everyone just spoons out something from a pot at the same time and mothers give their children chewed food from their mouth. No wonder that fighting infections under such conditions turns into a bitter comedy. Syphilis is everywhere. Adults and children, men and women have genital warts. Trachoma is epidemic. Everyone's infecting each other. It's impossible to stop it. You can imagine how helpless I feel. Yesterday a peasant came with his son. The boy had chopped off his finger with an axe. Instead of keeping the wound clean, the father wound a spider web from the stove corner around the stump. Now I'm afraid the boy will get blood poisoning.”

Well, very likely the only surprising thing for the readers of today in these letters was how the post office functioned. Letters from St. Petersburg to Zurich arrived in all of three days and from Krapivnya in less than a week.

The Zurich student who dreamed of serving her people met this people head on for the first time and was full of disappointment. Most of all she's appalled by the coarseness and cruelty of Russian life.

“You put me and my work on a pedestal, because you're so far away and can't even imagine what I'm up against every day!” she tells Fritz in the spring of 1903. “Neither civilization nor Christianity has reached these people yet. You should see how savagely they go at each other when they're drunk. How they beat up their wives and children!”