The Truth About Lou. Angela Von der Lippe
rooms.
Gillot had come to present his case. Spying through the keyhole, I saw my mother, more animated and articulate than she ever was with me, accuse him of seeing her daughter in private without her permission. Gillot was seated in formal dress, in waistcoat no less, on a sage-green velvet sofa before the raging hearth, and my mother in a chair opposite him that she ascended from in her apoplexy to declare that all further studies would be purely catechistic. That she could not abide by the lies of her daughter’s fantasies and he was not to encourage them.
“She must be confirmed. If you are the one to accomplish that, then so be it,” she paused. “But I do not trust your intentions, Pastor Gillot. Given this year of clandestine meetings and what I know of my daughter’s wild imagination, I can only question in the name of her dear departed father your proposition.”
Gillot rose from the sofa and holding her in his mesmerizing gaze and extending his hands for hers to fall into (I must say, I was annoyed by this), he said in a gesture of utter peace: “Madame Salomé, Louisa is but a child. I want to have her in my tutelage only through her confirmation. Your child is now mine.” My mother’s hands that had rested in his but for a second now thrust him off and she announced: “Pastor Gillot, hear me out. It is my daughter’s soul you will shepherd and nothing more.” She knew it all. She knew and yet she let go. Again.
Seized by a sense of sad elation, I fell back into the center of the room and found myself looking at a painting. Amongst the iconic faces of archdukes, princesses and imperial guardsmen claiming space on these walls was the one face not immediately known to me, and as fate would have it, the only one to whom I was related. The matronly looking woman in the portrait, braced with an Elizabethan collar and a restrained smile, was my father’s mother—frozen in the eloquent silent stare of the dead, the painted dead who never look at you but only through you.
I wondered what she thought of her son’s choice back then—my mother—and what she would think of that daughter-in-law’s choice now. My mother’s “yes” had been so unlike my father’s. Hers, even when she was giving in, was full of bitter recrimination and I found myself wishing for anything, yes, even for music itself, to drown her out.
There is an old Russian saying that goes: Liubov’ ne kartoshka, ne vykinesh’ za okoshko—“Love isn’t a potato. You can’t throw it out the window.” And I used to delight in imparting this bit of wisdom to friends who viewed it as evidence of the essential peasant core of the Russian soul.
Who knows, maybe there was some truth to that. But if so, this particular measure for calibrating the affairs of the heart, with its raw, common taste, had also found its way into the ranks of the imperial aristocracy, for whom a potato was slang for a sexual adventure with no consequences. It was known even to those of us who lived in the outermost circumference of the crown’s inner circle that “potatoes” had become a staple not only of the archdukes’ but indeed the emperor’s diet. Fresh from “potato parties” in the country they would return to their palaces along the Nevsky Prospekt, to the royal ties that truly bound, and they approached their prescribed mates with the same knowledgeable palate they brought to a good vintage wine. There was bouquet, age, nose, and certainly aftertaste to that consecrated union but never the mundane pleasurable moment of the potato.
Our emperor Alexander II, known within the family as Sasha, was a chief offender in this regard but I liked him nonetheless. As a child, I used to think that his silver mustached tusks actually meant that he had been sired by a white elephant. Supreme animal. Supreme man. Our emperor would oddly sacrifice his life trying to reconcile these polar sides of his character, his peasant desires with his imperial duty.
This man who in his public life had freed the serfs and then flirted with the anarchy of a constitution had in his private life installed his mistress (Ekaterina, the nameless one) and three illegitimate children in a palace apartment just above that of his wife, the empress Maria Alexandrovna. He wanted to bring the outside inside, to bring the hidden out into the open. He was famous for having said: “We must liberate from above before they liberate themselves from below.” And he tried to do this in his own household; he tried to contain two rivaling forces—mind and heart, duty and passion, wife and mistress—and though these women could not abide one another, he forced them to live under each other’s noses, thereby neutralizing any threat to life and limb that might be hatched from their private plots of revenge.
In the end, though, it was the bigger contradiction that proved his downfall. He could not reconcile the folk with the crown. Sasha the indomitable, Sasha the fallible, would fall victim of his own magnanimous heart. And as fate would have it, it ended up exploding on him literally, when one day in an excursion outside the palace grounds he was attacked with a grenade thrown by one of the very subjects he had tried to free.
VIOLATING moral standards, in the Orthodox or Lutheran traditions, was a nasty business but not hard to do in my native Russia. After all, what was it to be Russian, if not to rise above or fall below? And just who the ultimate arbiter was, was a moving target: the god of the land or the god of the imperial altar.
There was some pull fomenting in those years to declare one’s allegiance to Mother Russia, to embrace the distant expanse of the tundra as well as the crown. And that requirement sent my mother into fits of anxiety. As a widow now she was feeling the social pressure to withdraw from the cosmopolitan circles of St. Petersburg and retire to the countryside surrounded by the mystical alchemy of the masses—a prospect that was clearly out of the question and far too Russian for her.
She had already seen my cousin Emma fall prey to just such fateful choices. Emma, who was my age and my father’s sister’s daughter, had as a young girl fallen under the treacherous spell of religious orthodoxy, the mighty Russian church. As she relinquished her doubting Lutheran pietist faith, she gave herself over completely to the mystical séances and visionary practices of that special brand of orthodoxy festering in the countryside. Coincident with her spiritual conversion, my cousin fell in love with a young Russian cadet in the corps whom she would later marry and thereby surrender both body and soul to Mother Russia.
Poor Emma—she was the only girlfriend I had in those days—she was robust in every way, full bodied, and I envied her for that. In fact her physical maturity made me painfully aware of my lanky lateblooming boyish build that I compensated for by stuffing handkerchiefs under my modest breasts to give them the lift and curvature that were the style of the day.
Emma knew of my private lessons with Gillot (she had covered for me with my family more than a few times) and I knew of her flirtation with mysticism from her frequent excursions to the countryside. I also knew enough not to inquire and kept mum. But I didn’t understand the full extent of her conversion until one day in a history of religion class in the English Private School that we both attended, Emma rose from her desk to have her say in the middle of a lesson on the cleric Martin Luther and his many reforms, not the least of which was the insistence on the right of each and every one of us to interpret scripture.
And Emma, my sweet ordinary cousin, stood there with eyes unblinking and a look of terror contorting her face, one fist tightly grabbing the side of her skirt, as if trying to hold down whatever was agitating her, and the other hand, outstretched, pointing to the park outside our classroom window. Bells began tolling from the onion dome of the nearby cathedral as if enunciating this moment and Emma declared she saw him burning out there by the linden tree.
While the girls hovered around her and a teacher ran to calm her, I peered out the window and saw not so much as a brush fire. But Emma screamed that he, that he was burning—he was burning—that his body slathered with animal fat was propped up on a pike and suspended over hot coals that toasted him slowly to a crisp black—that a lion lay inert in death’s sleep beside him with a crown of fire raging around him, fueled by ancient scrolls, books and his beloved scripture. It was all going up in smoke.
Alas it wasn’t Luther, thank God for that, and it certainly was not a Grigory or a Basil too close to the Russian heart. No, it was poor Jerome, that saint of old in ragtag frock and bald pate.