Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

Alexandra in Paris
1911
Alexandra sat across the table from a sagging Manovsky at the opulent Tour d’Argent.
She looked onto the Seine and the lighted windows of the houses on the Isle St. Louis
flickering through the plane-trees. A steady stream of droshkis flowed across the Pont de la
Tournelle, and the Bateaux Mouches came and went like fireflies at the Quai below her
window.
She had met Sasha Manovsky two days earlier at a get-together of a group of painters
to which Izabel had taken her. Cheap red wine, conversations on paintings and women
accompanied by eloquent gestures, nostalgic memories of lost homelands, heavy cigarette
smoke filling the room. Except for an intellectual French writer all the men were expatriates: a
short Spaniard with the build of a prizefighter and piercing black eyes, a handsome, boyishlooking
Italian with disheveled locks, an older, deeply depressed Polish sculptor, whom she
avoided, two mistresses of these men, and Manovsky.
Manovsky, his jacket open, dressed in tie and starched shirt, a golden watch chain on
his belly, looked like a sitting bull among these bohémiens. His French was atrocious. When he
discovered that she spoke Russian, he almost clung to her. The young men treated him with
condescension. He was the patron who bought their paintings and paid for their debts. Aloof,
they talked over his head.
She observed Manovsky now. She had agreed to this dinner invitation, because of an
undefined titillating fascination with the brutal power he exuded. He was used to getting what
he wanted. He had promised to show her his collection of paintings.
"My forefathers came from Spain in the seventeenth century." said Manovsky, "I love
Mediterranean women, especially when they are as enigmatic as you are, Princess Dadiani,
with your blue eyes."
His exterior belied his purported Spanish ancestry. Stocky, a few strands of thin white
hair and watery blue eyes. The bags under his eyes, his fleshy nose and mouth made him look
like any other aging Russian Jew. Except for his heavy, brutal hands.
"I have two passions, regal women and paintings which nobody has discovered yet.
Both are high-risk gambles."
She smiled, and to distract him, asked him to tell her his life’s story.
"I come from an impoverished family in the Polish-Russian Pale. To escape the
recurring progroms, tired of my fervently religious environment, I ran away from home when I
was fifteen. I found employment with a Moscow merchant and discovered that I had a talent for
financial speculations. After a few years I became the manager of the man’s firm, he offered
me a partnership and the hand of his daughter. I panicked and quit work. He was a good
Mensch, he paid me off with a handsome sum.
"I invested the money into the booming railroad business, and soon found that I had
accumulated enough to buy a controlling share in a company engaged in building the Trans-
Siberian railroad. That was in the eighties. For a while I worked closely with your cousin Sergei
von Witte, and several times tried to persuade this intelligent and well-connected man to join
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