The Truth About Lou. Angela Von der Lippe
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