Konrad and Alexandra (PDF) - Rolf Gross

March, a Tuscan child!" She smiled. "It will remind us of olive trees and the beginning of the Renaissance! Oh, how I amlonging for him!"He embraced her. "My numinous Georgian Goddess bears Brimus, her other."15.St. Petersburg and Konrad's Summer Ball1899After two days on the train from Florence to Berlin they changed to the Paris-to-St. Petersburg Nord-Express and foundthemselves surrounded by Russian upper class families returning from vacations in Paris, the Côte d’Azur, Italy. For fiveweeks they had not spoken Russian. To be suddenly submerged in this over-familiar culture evoked mixed feelings inAlexandra. The flocks of well-bred children supervised by French and German governesses, the overbearing, elegantladies in their fashionable corsets, the boring cliques of arrogant gentlemen passing the time at playing cards for highstakes and drinking French cognac irritated her. Why? She could not say. Memories? Prejudices? Her apprehension ofhaving to live in St. Petersburg?Luckily they shared a four-bed compartment with a French-Armenian couple. Izabel and Martiros Sisakian had grown upin Istanbul. Because of the increasing harassment of Armenians in Turkey they had fled to Paris. A few months ago theyfinally decided to settle in St. Petersburg. Alexandra felt this decision difficult to understand—they carried Frenchpassports—but Martiros Sisakian explained that it was a personal decision, they had many close friends in St.Petersburg. He was a painter, and Izabel, an intelligent, lively young woman, supported him by working as an interpreter.Izabel, supporting her husband? Alexandra could see herself pursuing painting or weaving rugs, but a wife supportingher husband was a startling idea.Izabel nodded. "My family thought so too. To judge by your name, you come from an aristocratic Georgian family.Imagine how conservative our bourgeois Armenian society is! At home it would have been impossible, but in Paris wemet many women who worked to make it possible for their men to pursue an artistic career. It takes a long time for apainter to become sufficiently established to earn regular money. I love this man and that made it easy."Martiros smiled embarrassed. "In the beginning it was not easy to let Izabel do what she had set her mind on. We gotmarried, because we were tired of the bohemian arrangement of lover and mistress in which most of our friends lived.Maybe the twentieth century will remove the social dogma which decrees that a married woman should remain at homeand tend the hearth. Besides, I do sell a painting every so often. Izabel is a gregarious person, she enjoys other people. Iguess my modern, Socialist friends in Paris gave me the courage to break with our obsolete Armenian customs."Alexandra pensively traced her lips with her finger and looked at Izabel. "And what about children?"Martiros nodded and opened his hands in resignation. "I would love to have a child, and maybe that is the main reasonfor the patriarchal men wanting their wivee to stay home. But obviously having children will remain impossible for awhile."Izabel’s large, dark eyes returned Alexandra’s questioning look. "I am still young. I have not given up hope that I will havea child in a few years."Alexandra did not say so, but this price for freedom appeared too high. Or was it not freedom the two sought, was it justlove? Mulling over the marital arrangement of the Sisakians, she found, disconcerted, how strongly she was after all stilltied 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 andswamps, 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 astand of oaks, the residences of the Prussian gentry who owned the land and the peasants. The few small towns huddledat the feet of mighty Gothic brick cathedrals and castles, the last remains of the unlucky Germanic Knights, who hadreclaimed the land and Christianized its Slavic tribes in the thirteenth century. The train stopped for a quarter of an hourin 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 suitcasewas 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 fromcoal to wood. Then the dark woods of Lithuanian Russia engulfed them.52