Authors: Ben Pastor
It will not come again / It’s too grand to be true
sang Lilian Harvey. Lattmann turned the radio off. “Hope I don’t have to tell Benedikta they were your famous last words. How did it go with Larisa?”
“She’s a formidable old woman; I wouldn’t be surprised if she had hexed my inconstant father so he’d die.”
20 MAY, 11.49 A.M., MEREFA KOMBINAT
“It’s a joke, right?” Geko Stark spoke sitting back in his chair, hands on its armrests, spectacles across his smooth forehead. “Throwing a party, or is it for a lady friend?”
“I simply need it, Herr Gebietskommissar.”
“A kilo of butter?”
“Yes. I’m willing to give all these ration cards for it, pay in occupation money or Reichsmarks.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Behind Stark, the wall map of the
Reichskommissariat Ukraine
, conveniently without glass in its frame, showed an update. The addition of the Kharkov region with a dotted line had been coloured in pale orange, and the location of the
Kombinat
marked with a small paper flag. “Why, it
is
a woman!” he added with a mock frown. “I took you to be one of those married fellows who keep abstinence
in venere
while away from home. See, I do know some Latin! What will Standartenführer Schallenberg say?”
“Neither he nor my wife would have anything to say about it.”
“It won’t be easy – it’s an inordinate amount. We have rules.” Stark tapped his fingers on the armrests, pursing his lips. “She must be very special. Not a Russki, either. It’s not allowed to give prized foodstuff to Russkis.”
Bora took the ration cards back. “Never mind, Herr Gebietskommissar. I’ll see to it some other way.”
“There is no other way in this district. So, she’s Russian to boot. Fascinating. Fascinating.” From the upper floor, where one by one offices were being filled, there came frantic clicking and the ding of carriage bells, a duel between typewriters. “I suppose an exception
could
be made, since you’re taking the Karabakh off my hands and out of the stew pot.” He took out a sheet of letterhead and uncapped his fountain pen.
Bora’s hopes were up. “She’s older than my mother, if you must know.”
Stark began to write, smirking. “And has ten children to feed?”
“She eats butter by the mouthful.”
A pause in the writing gave way to a loud burst of laughter. Stark wheeled around in his swivel chair, guffawing with his back to the desk and to the annoyed visitor. He had to wipe the nib and start again on a fresh sheet to continue. “You horse fellows are priceless! Next time you hear from Standartenführer Schallenberg, magnify my generosity to him: he has Bormann’s ear. Your ration cards stay here, along with one thousand
karbovanets.
And no fuel allowance for a month. Turn those ration cards in, as well.”
It was exorbitant, but Bora did as he was told.
Thank God I have Bentivegni’s special signed permit for extra fuel.
“Keep in mind you cannot collect a kilo all in one place, Major. My power doesn’t extend from army stores to divisional commands, which is where there’s a small chance you might find that amount. It’s up to you to figure out how.”
After two disappointing stops at the same number of Kharkov army exchanges, Bora tried his luck with the 161st Division
quartermaster, where a long negotiation obtained him the butter. Also, having refused to part with his Ray-Ban sunglasses, he had to swap his smart British-made cigarette lighter to obtain half a kilo of refined white sugar.
3 P.M., POMORKI
Since his last visit, pomegranate trees had blossomed in Larisa’s overgrown garden. The scarlet buds were unmistakable against the enamelled greenness of their shiny leaves. Trees and fruit of the dead according to myth, notwithstanding their merry colour. Bora acknowledged Nyusha’s greeting (
Another young widow – do I meet anyone but widows in this country?
) and gave her the box of food he’d brought, instructing her to take it at once to Larisa Vasilievna. He’d already put out of his mind that he’d paid the German currency equivalent of a labourer’s monthly pay for it in
karbovanets
.
The room beyond the parlour, where he was received this time, was nothing short of a reliquary, a gleaming box where three walls were covered with icons: brightly coloured, gilded, encased in copper and silvery metal, studded with paste jewels, an icon corner –
beautiful corner
, the Russians called it – gone mad; Bora had seen Orthodox chapels with less than one tenth of the icons Larisa kept in her bedroom.
Reclining in a wicker chaise longue, she liberally rained sugar over the cardboard vat of butter. “You kept your word,” she said. The sleeveless vest she wore was unmerciful on the loose flesh of her upper arms and neck. Bora did not stare, letting his eyes wander instead over the biblical carousel around her cumbersome person. Our Lady of Kazan, Our Lady of Oseryan, Our Lady of Vladimir – those Bora recognized. The three angels visiting Abraham, the Dormition of the Virgin, all the soldier–saints of the Eastern Church, George, Dmitri, Hadrian… down to the Archangel Michael. With an electric lamp on, or
by candlelight, the gilding and silver-wash of their revetments must shoot reflections back and forth, a mute lightning storm.
On the fourth wall, over the bed, oil portraits and photographs of his own father formed an altar of their own. He’d imagined something of the sort; still, he was taken aback. Not even at Trakhenen, where his parents had made the house into a memorial to the defunct Friedrich von Bora, did one see such a proliferation of likenesses. The trimmed beard, the thoughtful dark eyes some Boras had got from the Salm-Nogendorf line (and presumably what had fascinated his seventeen-year-old mother, along with the conductor’s world fame), stared back at him with the same elegant unconcern he might have exhibited looking at Moscow devotees in the luxury theatre boxes costing fifteen old roubles, or at the zealous waiters of the famed Strelnia restaurant.
Larisa drove a tablespoon into the fat, detaching ivory-coloured lumps which she brought to her mouth and took in whole. The gluttonous half-sucking, half-chewing motion was impossible to ignore. Standing at the edge of a threadbare
kilim
, Bora glanced her way and then had to look elsewhere.
Well, Friedrich
, he told himself,
thank God you’re long dead, and see none of this. That ancient cow a former seductress? My father kissed her, lay with her for seven years. Like Homer’s heroes, he was in her thrall. He’d have given a son by her the name he gave me.
Standing here mortified him, but he hadn’t been asked to leave while she ate, and had come with work to do.
Please let her have enough for now; it sickens me to think of what she was, and what she is now.
Bora forgot about his fit, decent grandfather, his soberly elegant grandmother, his energetic stepfather.
If this is what it’s like, I don’t want to grow old.
When he looked again, the spoon had carved a well in the butter. With her mouth full, the old woman stared at the glass top of her tea table with the fixed, unthinking gaze of a ruminant that savours her feed. Grease lined her lips, turning pink with the rouge she’d hastily layered on them upon his arrival. Only when she was satisfied with her snack did she dab
her chin with a crumpled handkerchief. Other than that her teeth were still slick with fat when she smiled and invited him to sit across from her, she had regained a bearable – and even coquettish – appearance.
Bora saw there was only an ottoman available, or her bed, so he chose to remain standing.
“
Gospozha
, I do need the rest of the information I came for. As you see, I’m upfront about it.”
Without answering him, Larisa ogled the butter. Fortunately she did not reach for it again. Bora risked losing his patience when she wagged a finger at him, reminiscing. “The voice of Felia Litvinne in the body of Ganna Walska. Talent
and
beauty. Do you know who said it of me?”
“No, Larisa Vasilievna, I do not.”
“Khan Tibyetsky. It was the year after I lost Frunzik, whom I’d last seen in the spring of ’24. After I lost Frunzik I wanted to die. Which is less than what happened when your father abandoned me: then, I wanted to do worse than dying – I wanted to die to the world and keep living as a nun. I would have, had the war and the revolution not distracted me. Khan came to visit on Frunzik’s suggestion, and continued even after his mentor’s death. We made merry, and though we were only friends, I loved every minute of his visits. I even put up with Gleb ‘The Contrary’ Platonov.”
Bora was impressed. Bad eating habits aside, she recalled precisely when they’d left off. She spoke about 1926, five years after the events of the civil war in Ukraine. He had to listen to more supplementary details about vigorous guerrilla commanders entering bit by bit into the Soviet political system, building careers. Khan was constantly on the move while in the Kharkov area, Platonov kept his nose to the office grindstone…
Taras Tarasov had implied the same. Bora, too, continued with the question he’d left unanswered the first time. “And did one or the other bring along or travel with someone else, Larisa Vasilievna?”
She wet her forefinger with her tongue. Gathering grains of sugar fallen on the surface of the tea table, she crossed her swollen ankles and spread her toes. “If I gave a soiree where I sang or played the violin, Khan would bring engineers, businessmen, capitalists from Europe and America. I never saw someone so capable of making friends. Generous: he brought gifts. We’d drink until the men fell under the table. Khan became too good for words then. Ih, the stories he told, the yarns, the jokes… He talked too much. His guests listened. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them went right to Platonov and added fuel to the fire of their cockfight. In fact, it was Platonov who came one year with some of them – without Khan.”
“Who were these men, do you know?”
She spoke with her finger in her mouth, staring at him. She’d been a dark beauty, with glittering, light blue eyes that now contrasted with the fleshiness and decay of her face. Madame Blavatsky came to mind, with her frog-like magnetic glance. “Foreign carpetbaggers, all of them. They didn’t come for the music but for the caviar and drink. And the salmon
koulibiak
, which Khan had an army courier bring on horseback all the way from Tschuguyev. Men who represented – you name it: buyers interested in the FED camera factory, managers of the Economic Office you called
Wirtschaftskontor
, of the German–Russian Transport Partnership, of American mining concerns… I don’t recall their names, none of which were good Russian names. And with Platonov the Sombre, Platonov the Honest, the Contrary, there wasn’t even drink, much less
koulibiak
or caviar. I see you’re married, Martyn Friderikovich. Are you a faithful husband?”
“Why, yes.”
“You shouldn’t tell her if you’re not.”
“But I am,
gospozha
.”
Whether she disbelieved it or dismissed his loyalty, Larisa shrugged. “Some things you only tell lovers, you know. Anyhow. Then, after Ukraine was no longer independent, the Hunger
Time came. Kiev replaced Kharkov as the capital city. No more salmon pie. No butter, no sugar, no bread. People dropped dead in the street, Martyn Friderikovich. None of the visitors stopped by any more. That was the last of it.”
“This is just incidental, Larisa Vasilievna, but does the expression
Narodnaya Slava
have a meaning that you know of, regarding Khan or Platonov?”
“No. There were too many slogans and bywords those days to remember them all.”
“Did Khan or Platonov ever mention what the ‘funds for the revolution’ consisted of that were taken from Makhno, and what it was that brought about the accusation of ‘thief’s thief’?”
She shook her head. “Women who don’t ask questions meet more favour with men than those who do. The same goes for men, you know.”
As if I cared to meet her favour
. “Sorry if I have to ask so many questions,
gospozha
.”
Nyusha had poured the sugar into a shell-shaped porcelain bowl. “Before I answer anything else,” Larisa said, sticking her forefinger in the bowl, “I’ll give you a sample of the things you only tell lovers. In the late 1870s, when your father was a cadet in Dresden and a pupil of Friedrich Wieck’s, things happened that changed his life.”
Bora was aware of the facts. Clara Schumann’s father, enthused by the young man’s talent, praised him to the great von Bülow, who shortly thereafter, while
Hofkapellmeister
at Meiningen, spoke to Johannes Brahms. “Yes,
gospozha
, but my mother knows this.”
“Wait. Brahms met your father, was impressed. He remembered that a year earlier, while he had conducted the German Requiem for the tenth victory anniversary of the war against the French, your general-rank grandfather was present. He was so moved, he asked Brahms how he could return such a precious homage to the veterans.”
“It was a famous performance, Larisa Vasilievna.”
She silenced him. “Brahms could be witty, at times. He replied, ‘Could I ask for anything?’ and your grandfather said, ‘Anything at all.’ So in 1882 Brahms reminded him of his promise, asking that he release his young son from an army career and let him follow his musical gift. ‘Germany may have in your son another brave officer, but the entire world would lose a unique musician.’ You never heard this story, did you?”
Bora had (it had been a scandal in Leipzig society, until it resulted in unprecedented fame and wealth), but politely said he hadn’t. His eyes lingered on a small icon of Mary the Melter of the Hard Hearts, encased in a gilded
riza
that let only her face and hands show through windows in the chased metal.
Larisa’s father could have parted with these religious knick-knacks before committing suicide in Marienbad
, he reasoned. Even his grandparents had made sacrifices at the expense of their vast collection during the great economic crisis, to keep the family publishing firm going despite the bad times: mostly to retain all the employees in the days when the jobless amounted to six million in Germany. But old man Malinovsky would have got little for the icons; besides, he might have been as excessive (
shirokaya natura
: superabundance of spirit) as his daughter, even, in his attachment to material objects.