Free The Four Winds of Heaven by Monique Raphel High Page A

call her ‘Titiné,’ because that is our love-name for her.”
    The eyes of blue crystal gleamed, but without warmth. “A love-name? Well then, Sonia, how about a love-name for me, something very different and exciting?” She pointed to the Spanish doll on the small girl’s lap. “I have it! My name in Spain would be ‘Juanita,’ and I always preferred it to Johanna. You will call me Juanita, and you may even say ‘tu’ to me, since we are on our way to this great Russia, where formality seems to be out of fashion.”
    Sonia clapped her hands, and Ossip smiled. But Anna, her brown eyes solemn, commented softly: “Not out of fashion, Juanita. Just—different.”
    Sonia turned to her sister, and did not understand the sudden darkness which shadowed her face. Her own bright joy shook within her, and suddenly she missed her mother.
    But she continued to smile, her hand on the Spanish doll, her eyes abstracted. She snuggled against her brother and fell asleep.
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    T he patriarch of the Gunzburg clan, Baron Horace, had three sons: the youngest, Mikhail, who did not reside in the Russian capital, and his two other sons, David and Alexander, “Sasha” to his intimates. Horace, since the death of his beloved wife, Anna Rosenberg, was not given to much joie de vivre. It had been she whose liveliness and femininity had brightened his serious temperament. A stately man, his elegance was somber, and he occupied himself solely with matters of import. He was still the head of his bank, the Maison Gunzburg, which his father Ossip had founded in the late ‘50s; and he was also the most well-known shtadlan in Russia, a mediator between the government and the Jewish population. Horace was still Consul of Hesse, and now a Hessian princess, Alix, had become the Tzarina Alexandra Feodorovna; her father had granted the Gunzburgs their title. Horace, as his own father before him, found it his honored duty to attempt, little by little, to ease the burdens carried by his fellow Jews. He was proud of the fact that because of his intervention, St. Petersburg was now open to Jews of means and education, as well as to artisans contributing to the national economy. These were the members of the exalted First and most useful Second Guilds. When poorer men complained that he thought only of his own kind, he would reply: “Give the government time. Our Tzars have always been anti-Semitic. Now, at least, they have made a first step.” The difference, he might have pointed out, lay between the Gunzburgs and the inhabitants of Hashchévato.
    Between Horace and David, his first son, empathy existed. It was David who now took over the major part of Horace’s charitable work. Passionate where his father was gloomy, sinewy where the older man was massive, David nevertheless believed in his heart that the Jews of Russia belonged in Russia, soon to obtain their deserved full citizenship, and should not escape to the haven promised by the growing number of Zionists. But Sasha, younger than David by seven years, was only amused by his kinsmen’s zeal. His principal concerns were with his own position in the social circles of the capital, where he seconded his father at the bank.
    Sasha, whose brooding good looks Mathilde had once so admired, was the most striking of the Gunzburgs. He was the tallest one, and sported a black beard and a large shoulder span. He possessed the Gunzburg eyes, set close together, and his were brilliant blue, like Mathilde’s. But he had married a woman who was anything but his equal in looks, for, like some extraordinarily handsome men who are somewhat insecure at heart, he had chosen a wife who showed off his own splendor, and whom he need not fear would ever cease her adoration of him. Rosa Warburg de Gunzburg was all angles and bones, a small brown bird of a woman, and although she did indeed admire her husband beyond words, she was as shrewd as