The Summer House, Later. Judith Hermann
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on one of the sofas, repeating, ‘Blome Wildnis, Blome Wildnis.’ It sounded like a children’s song, like a lullaby, it sounded nice.
In those years, in addition to foreign businessmen and their families, many Russian artists and scholars lived on Vasilevsky Ostrov. It was inevitable that they would hear of the German woman, the beautiful pale one with the fair hair who was said to live up on Maly Prospekt, almost always by herself and in rooms as dark, soft and cool as the sea. The artists and scholars went to see her. My great-grandmother gestured with her small weary hand, asking them to come in. She spoke little, she scarcely understood anything they said, slowly and dreamily she gazed at them from under heavy eyelids. The artists and scholars sat down on the deep, soft sofas and chairs, sinking into the heavy, dark materials; the maids brought black cinnamoned tea with huckleberry and blackberry jam. My great-grandmother warmed her cold hands on the samovar and felt much too tired to ask the artists and scholars to leave. And so they stayed. And they looked at my great-grandmother, and in the dusk my great-grandmother merged into something melancholy, beautiful and foreign. And since melancholy and beauty and foreignness are essential traits of the Russian soul, the artists and scholars fell in love with my great-grandmother, and my great-grandmother let herself be loved by them.
My great-grandfather stayed away for a long time. And so my great-grandmother let herself be loved for a long time – she did it carefully and circumspectly, and she made hardly any mistakes. Warming her cold hands on the samovar and her chilled soul on the ardent hearts of her lovers, she learned to distinguish – in that strange, soft language of theirs – the words: ‘You are the most tender of all birches.’ She read the letters about the smelting furnaces, the Deville furnaces and the tube furnaces in the narrow chink of daylight and burned them all in the fireplace. She allowed herself to be loved; in the evening before falling asleep she sang the song about the Blome Wildnis, sang it to herself, and when her lovers looked at her inquiringly, she smiled and said nothing.
My great-grandfather promised to come back soon, to take her back to Germany soon. But he did not come.
The first, the second, and then the third St Petersburg winter passed, and still my great-grandfather was busy building furnaces in the Russian vastness, and still my great-grandmother was waiting for the day when she could return home to Germany. She wrote to him in the taiga. He replied that he would come back soon but that he would have to leave again one more time, just one last time – but then, but then, he promised, then they could leave.
The evening of his arrival my great-grandmother was sitting in front of the mirror in her bedroom, combing her fair hair. The gifts from her lovers lay in a little jewellery box before the mirror: the brooch from Grigori, the ring from Nikita, the pearls and velvet ribbons from Alexei, the locks of hair from Jemelyan, the medallions, amulets and silver bracelets from Mikhail and Ilya. The little jewellery box also held the red coral bracelet from Nikolai Sergeyevich. Its six hundred and seventy-five little coral beads were strung onto a silken thread, and they glowed as red as rage. My great-grandmother put the hairbrush down in her lap, and closed her eyes for a long time. Then she opened her eyes again, took the red coral bracelet from the little box and fastened it around her left wrist. Her skin was very white.
That evening, for the first time in three years, she shared a meal with my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather spoke Russian and smiled at my great-grandmother. My great-grandmother folded her hands in her lap and smiled back at him. My great-grandfather talked about the steppes, about the wilderness, about the Russian ‘White Nights’, he talked about the furnaces and called them by their German names, and my great-grandmother nodded as though she understood. My great-grandfather told her in Russian that he had to go once more to Vladivostok, eating pelmeni with his fingers as he said it; he wiped the grease from his lips with his hands. He said that Vladivostok was his last stop, then it would be time to return to Germany. Or would she like to stay longer?
My great-grandmother did not understand what he said, but she recognized the word Vladivostok. She placed her hands on the table, and on her white left wrist the coral bracelet glowed red as rage.
My great-grandfather stared at the coral bracelet. He put what was left of his pelmeni back on his plate, wiped his hands on the linen napkin, and gestured to the maid to leave the room. In German, he said, ‘What’s that?’
My great-grandmother said, ‘A bracelet.’
My great-grandfather said, ‘And where did you get it, if I may ask?’
Very softly and gently my great-grandmother said, ‘You may. I wish you had asked me all along. It’s a present from Nikolai Sergeyevich.’
My great-grandfather called the maid back and sent her to get his friend Isaak Baruw. Isaak Baruw arrived; he was hunchbacked and stooped, and he looked sleepy and confused, it was already late at night and he kept running his fingers through his uncombed hair, embarrassed. My great-grandfather and Isaak Baruw walked around the room, agitated and arguing; in vain Isaak Baruw spoke calming words, words that reminded my great-grandmother of her lovers. Exhausted, my great-grandmother sank into one of the soft easy chairs and put her cold hands on the samovar.
My great-grandfather and Isaak Baruw were speaking Russian, and my great-grandmother didn’t understand much more than the words ‘second’ and ‘Petrovsky Park’. The maid was handed a letter and sent out into the dark. At dawn my great-grandfather and Isaak Baruw left the house. My great-grandmother had fallen asleep in the soft easy chair, her small hand and wrist with the red coral bracelet hanging limply from the arm of the chair. It was as dark and still in the room as the bottom of the sea.
Towards noon Isaak Baruw came back and, amidst much bowing and scraping and many condolences, informed my great-grandmother that my great-grandfather had died at eight o’clock that morning. On the hill in Petrovsky Park, Nikolai Sergeyevich had shot him straight through the heart.
My great-grandmother waited seven months. Then, on 20 January in the year 1905, during the first days of the revolution, she gave birth to my grandmother, packed her suitcases, and returned to Germany. The train to Berlin turned out to be the last one to leave St Petersburg before the railroad workers went on strike and all traffic between Russia and the outside world was halted. As the doors of the train closed and the locomotive blew white steam into the winter air there appeared at the far end of the platform the crooked, hunchbacked figure of Isaak Baruw. My great-grandmother saw him coming and ordered the conductor to wait, so at the last second Isaak Baruw climbed aboard. He accompanied my great-grandmother on the long journey to Berlin, carrying her suitcases and hatboxes and handbags, and he did not miss a chance to assure her repeatedly of his lifelong gratitude. My great-grandmother smiled at him comfortingly but did not speak. She was wearing the red coral bracelet on her left wrist, and even then my tiny grandmother in the willow basket already bore more of a resemblance to Nikolai Sergeyevich than to my great-grandfather.
My first and only visit to a therapist cost me the red coral bracelet and my lover.
My lover was ten years older than I, and he looked like a fish. He had fish-grey eyes and fish-grey skin, and, like a dead fish, lay on his bed all day long, cold and silent; he was in a very bad way, lying around on his bed, and when he said anything at all said only a single sentence: ‘I am not interested in myself.’ Is that the story I want to tell?
I don’t know. I don’t know really—
My lover was Isaak Baruw’s great-grandson, and in his thin veins ran Russian-German blood. Isaak Baruw had remained true to my great-grandmother all his life, but it was her Pomeranian chambermaid that he married. He fathered seven children with her, and these seven children presented him with seven grandchildren, and one of these grandchildren presented him with his only great-grandson – my lover. My lover’s parents drowned in a lake during a summer storm, and my great-grandmother ordered me to go to the funeral – the last witnesses of her St Petersburg past were being lowered into the soil of Brandenburg and with them went the stories she herself no longer wanted to tell. And so I went to the funeral of Isaak Baruw’s grandson and his wife, and my lover stood at their grave and wept three grey tears. I took his cold hand in mine, and when he went home I went with him; I thought I could console him with the St Petersburg stories; I thought that he could then tell