Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

Sisakians, she found, disconcerted, how strongly she was after all still tied to inherited
convention. She—who had always been proud of being the rebel.
Konrad sensed what was going on in Alexandra’s mind and kept quiet.
East of Berlin they passed through the northern German plains: endless pine woods,
sandy potato fields, moors and swamps, an occasional lake. Half-timbered, reed-thatched
houses ducked from the wintry winds in impoverished villages. The long slanted beam of the
village well like a gallows at their center. Here and there a modest manor house hidden in a
stand of oaks, the residences of the Prussian gentry who owned the land and the peasants.
The few small towns huddled at the feet of mighty Gothic brick cathedrals and castles, the last
remains of the unlucky Germanic Knights, who had reclaimed the land and Christianized its
Slavic tribes in the thirteenth century. The train stopped for a quarter of an hour in the
Hanseatic Danzig and in Königsberg, the city of Kant and the Prussian Kings.
Three hours later they reached Eydtkuhnen and the Russian border. They were
searched for two hours. Every suitcase was inspected for political and religious literature,
"pornographic" pictures, and other "subversive" pamphlets.
Meanwhile the undercarriages of the Wagon-Lits cars were exchanged for the larger
Russian gauge, the locomotive from coal to wood. Then the dark woods of Lithuanian Russia
engulfed them.
Alexandra had fallen into melancholy silence. A great longing for her sunny homeland
overcame her. As the last night fell she sank of into a restless sleep, dreaming that she was
about to give birth to her child alone in an endless, snowbound, northern wilderness.
St. Petersburg came as a shock to Alexandra. Walking through the station in the early
morning hour of their arrival, she had to step across a bunch of homeless drunks who had
spent the night among the droves of stranded travelers waiting for their connections. Sacks
and luggage, packages, bedding, crying children huddling with their mothers wrapped in
shawls. The bearded men from the villages, smoking and drinking, leered at her. A sea of
humanity. The stupor and resignation of this mass of people struck her—and the filth! Nowhere
in Western Europe had she come across anything comparable.
Niko and Otar awaited them. They took a droshki to the place Konrad’s institute had
rented for them. A spacious apartment on the second floor in the Litenaya Quartier: four highceilinged
rooms, a large, live-in kitchen, a small maid’s room, and a modern bath. Their district,
bordered by hospital foundations, the barracks of the Imperial Guard, and the Neva, was
inhabited by the professional, bourgeois intelligentsia, professors, physicians, lawyers mixed in
with the villas of a few rich merchants. One of the most desirable districts of town. A preferred
location for preferred people. She could not have wished for anything better.
Konrad disappeared to his institute. The semester would start in a month. Meanwhile he
was overwhelmed by bureaucratic work. He had to organize the annual summer ball at the
botanical gardens, his obligation. Department meetings, the curricula needed to be worked out,
the students had to be selected and registered in the courses the department offered. She saw
him only at night.
For a few weeks she kept busy making the apartment livable. For the time being they
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