The Four Winds of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

at baseness and ignored the ordinary.
    Ossip, who had become observant as befits one who does not participate in normal activities, was unduly mature for his age, somewhat of a cynic at eight years old. He had accepted his condition, but the true ebullience of childhood had passed him by, drying out some essential fonts of naiveté in the process. Anna provided him with a vicarious joie de vivre, and with her he could laugh and grow excited. His little sister, Sonia, filled him with all the tenderness of his being. He pitied her exalted emotions, yet also clung to her sweetness. She took care of him, almost as though he were younger than she, and in turn he wanted to shield her from her own vulnerability. Sometimes he thought that Sonia was much like their father, David, whom Ossip admired for his reputation as a statesman and a linguist, but whom he gently despised for his almost childlike passions. For Ossip was above all a small realist, who saw an excess of idealism as a barrier to the process of going from day to day. In this way Ossip most resembled his mother, Mathilde.
    Mathilde, at thirty-one, did not like Mohilna. She did not like its rustic furniture, nor the isolation she felt when she was there. Her gay, elegant friends rarely passed through Podolia, and this summer, heavy with the new baby, she felt particularly languid and exhausted in the Russian heat. She looked forward to this new infant, but more for the relief it could bring to her life than for its own presence. She fervently hoped it would be a boy, for with Ossip’s fragility, she knew that David yearned for the additional security of a second son. If it was a boy, then David’s wish would be fulfilled, and she would no longer need to produce any more children. But she was resolute on one point: she would insist, whatever the baby’s sex, that the family not expand any further. David might not agree, but she had ways of making sure, and she would use them, too.
    With shivers of repulsion, Mathilde would think back on her father, Yuri, who, to amuse himself freely with his fancy ladies, had kept her mother, Ida, constantly with child. Ida had given life to nine children in less than thirteen years. Mathilde did not like anything to do with procreation, and sometimes was sorry that her husband kept himself so occupied with his work. Mistresses, she thought cynically, had their uses—so long as the man was discreet and did not publicly bring shame to his wife, as her father had done with his escapades.
    She had married David for several reasons, but love had not been among them. As a child, she had grown up in a house of discord, for the debonair, flamboyant, charming Yuri had been anything but gentle in his home, terrifying the servants, cowing his wife, and making small Mathilde retreat within herself like a frightened snail. Mathilde had loved her mother, who was a true lady, who demonstrated control in every situation, whom she had never heard raise her voice. At one time she had also loved her father, for who would not succumb to the boyish charm of this man who made virtuous women lose their virtue with laughter? But she had witnessed the results of his rascality, had steeled herself against her love, and had condemned him. In David she saw an earnest man who worshiped her, who gave her blessed security and peace, something unknown in Yuri’s household.
    Mathilde knew that when David had first declared his intention to marry her, Uncle Horace had made some kind of arrangement with his brother. Mathilde had looked at her mother, at her sisters and brothers, and known that if she married David de Gunzberg, they would reap a part of Horace’s bounty. Mathilde believed in duty, in honor. It was her duty to provide what she could for those she loved. And besides, if she had opposed the match, what possible excuse could she have given? That she would rather wait for someone who might never come? That David, who was tall, slender,