The Truth About Lou. Angela Von der Lippe

       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