Then she indulged in a unique sort of torture by rereading the telegrams she and Dimitri had exchanged over the years.
Dimitri’s initial messages to her were short and businesslike until the day he alerted her of a slowdown on the construction of a bridge. Natalia asked for a revised timetable and an explanation behind the slowdown.
It should have been a simple question. All she wanted to know was how long the delay would last and if there was anything she could do to get the schedule back on track, but little did she know that she had pricked a sore point that unleashed centuries of ingrained European resentments.
Count Sokolov complained that his German bridge engineer refused to work with French-supplied concrete mix. The engineer insisted on waiting for a costlier mix from Berlin because it was allegedly superior to what the French could produce, which prompted Count Sokolov to rant about German pedantry.
Heaven save us from the German love of rules. The only good thing ever to have come out of Germany is the incomparable music of Johannes Brahms, and this is a verifiable fact.
Natalia telegraphed a one-word reply:Beethoven?
She feared she might have offended the count with her blunt reply. She didn’t know if he had a sense of humor, and communication through a telegraph wire could be so easily misinterpreted. It took a while for his reply to come through, but when it finally arrived, it contained a keen analysis of the difference between Brahms and Beethoven and why he appreciated Brahms’s ability to incorporate the folk traditions of eastern Europe into his symphonies. Of Beethoven, the count was dismissive:
Beethoven’s compositions are generic romanticism. They sound like they could have been composed anywhere: Berlin, London, Paris, or heaven help us all ... New York.
Natalia had burst into laughter. Count Sokolovdidhave a sense of humor, and that day changed the nature of their correspondence forever. The count confessed that he was bored and lonely in Siberia, where most of the workers on the railroad spoke Belarusian, Chinese, or any one of a dozen Mongolian dialects he did not understand. There were a few Russian workers, but most of them were convicts. Those men were glad of the opportunity to knock a few years off their sentences by laboring on the railroad, but their goodwill did not extend to befriending the managers of the construction site, whom they instinctively regarded with hostility.
Count Sokolov’s isolation made him wax poetic over his home not far from Saint Petersburg, and his profound love for the estate was endearing.
I long for the comfort I can find only at Mirosa. The creak of the waterwheel, the fragrance of the apple blossoms on the damp morning air, the golden light over the valley on long summer nights when the sun never fully sets. My grandfather planted a ring of birch trees around the estate because in Russian folklore, birch trees protect against evil. I am a Christian, but still believe those trees have protected Mirosa because the valley seems wondrously suspended in time and preserved like a castle in a snow globe.
She loved Dimitri’s lyrical ramblings, even when they veered into politics. Although love for his homeland came through in almost every message, he was concerned about the continuing decay of the Russian economy, which was mired in natural resources rather than pursuing the opportunities of industrialization. Tensions among the classes grew worse by the year, and he feared for the long-term stability of his family’s investments.
I want to invest outside the country. What do you recommend? Your father is universally famous for his business acumen.
Natalia had been reluctant to suggest any single company for Dimitri to invest his savings and simply said she would trust her father’s bank for its diversified investments.
He took her advice, and over the next few months, Count Sokolov’s secretary in Saint Petersburg began transferring huge sums of money to the Blackstone Bank for investment. Eventually, Count Sokolov acquired a four-percent stake in the bank, which Natalia was pleased to see earned a healthy profit with each quarterly dividend.
Their curious friendship made working with Dimitri a joy. Over time they began calling each other by their first names and engaged in good-natured debates. They both had passionate opinions but could rarely sway the other. The perfect example was Dimitri’s insistence that she readWar and Peace. The novel did not sit well with her, and she unleashed her feelings on Dimitri.
Why did you make me read War and Peace? I foolishly began to love and care for those characters, but Tolstoy seems to enjoy making them suffer and inflicting miserable deaths upon them. I shall never forgive you.
His response was not long in coming.
Dearest Natalia. The history of Russia is a litany of grief and sorrow woven into the fabric of our nation. A Russian novelist must dip his pen in his own blood to write his story. You may avert your American eyes if you choose, but there is glory and valor in suffering that transcends our paltry physical lives. I practice it daily.
That dreary message prompted her to ship a copy ofLittle Womento Dimitri, pronouncing it a faithful representation of real life in all its tragedies, but mostly filled with hope and optimism.
That was last month. She didn’t even know if he’d received it, and now she would never learn what her lonely Russian count thought ofLittle Women.
On the phonograph, the needle had reached the end of the moody Brahms symphony, but the record kept rotating on its turntable, the needle making a rhythmic clicking sound with each rotation. She plodded over to lift off the needle, her spirit heavy. It looked like Dimitri had found his tragic Russian fate, but she could see no glory or valor in it.
4
Dimitri found a sad irony in riding to a penal colony on the same railroad he helped build. The rhythmic clicking of the train wheels had become the background noise of his world as he was transported farther east with each passing day.
At least he was not uncomfortable. Unlike ordinary criminals, political prisoners were afforded a certain amount of respect by the guards, and Dimitri’s title made this especially true. He had been granted the courtesy of “free command,” a status that allowed him to wear his own clothes, move about without shackles, and mingle with whomever he chose. Security was lax because escape meant almost certain death in the vast wilderness.
The guards loved socializing with him. Each night they played poker, drank vodka, and sang bawdy songs. It had always been easy for Dimitri to make friends, and never had that skill been more important than now. He carefully cultivated the image of a bon vivant, carousing with the guards as though indulging in a last great hurrah before his grim imprisonment. The guards peppered him with endless questions. How big was his estate? Had he met the czar? Was the czarina as beautiful as reported? He was able to truthfully report that he’d seen the czar at the Winter Palace. They hadn’t been introduced, but yes,the czarina was as lovely as reported. The guards also wanted to know about Mirosa, Dimitri’s ancestral home.
It was the only topic he was reluctant to discuss. Mirosa was carved on his soul, a two-thousand-acre estate of unspoiled wilderness alive with birch groves, cedar trees, and of course, the apple orchard that perfumed the air. Summers at Mirosa were tragically short, but while they lasted, it was an earthly paradise. As a boy, he used to explore the woods, sometimes stumbling across sunlit clearings where he would lie on the grass to stare up at the cloudless sky and imagine he was speaking directly to God. He only left Mirosa to prove himself by helping build the czar’s ambitious railroad that was supposed to be Russia’s salvation.
Instead, it had been Dimitri’s undoing.
What was it about Siberia that turned minor aristocrats into major revolutionaries? Prince Kropotkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and countless others had been transformed into radicals by the vast Russian landscape. Dimitri didn’t want to be a radical. He only wanted to return to Mirosa, where he could be a guardian of the land, the orchards, and the lake.
He could never return to Mirosa, but he would not meet his end in a prison camp. God had sent him to witness that atrocity for a reason, and Dimitri needed to escape so he could proclaim it to the world.
