Sophie
Voyage of Discovery
January 1744
The icy wind has followed our painful progress north along the Baltic coast. The shoreline is frozen, and beyond, reefs of ice drift in the leaden water. Where in heaven are we? Since passing Danzig a few days ago, we have seen nothing outside our window for miles but lowering sky and ice grey fields. The watery sun has set early, and my stomach complains, and finally, finally we stop in the frozen rutted post road that has shaken us till we are all black and blue. M. de Lattorf opens the door of the carriage. I wish I could move. If I weren’t so keenly anticipating what lies ahead of me, if my destiny did not shine before my eyes like a distant sun, I would weep with misery. We’ve been travelling for more than three weeks, each day more bitterly cold than the last, and all of us are exhausted. Poor de Lattorf hunches his shoulders against the cold and extends his gloved hand to me. But I can no longer feel my feet, they are so swollen. Mama doesn’t concern herself. She has disappeared inside the door of the inn with Fräulein Kayn. At least it’s too cold in the carriage for the elderly fräulein to tell her usual tales about the ghosts she has encountered.
“Mademoiselle,” de Lattorf mutters.
I pull my woolen scarf aside from my eyes a fraction, but I cannot see his windblown face, only the gloved hand that now curves toward me in a question mark.
“I can’t,” I say through chattering teeth. “It’s my feet —”
He ducks his head down through the door to take a look at me huddled beneath my woolen blanket. Apparently he understands since he climbs partway in and picks me up. His fur hat is crusted with beads of ice. He lifts me out through the door of the carriage as if I were an invalid child, and not a girl of fourteen. The way Papa used to carry little Willy. But Willy had a withered leg. It broke Mama’s heart when he died. She wouldn’t cry like that for me, I know.
M. de Lattorf carries me over the threshold of the inn and stops. We both blink and stare at the chaos of the place. Dirty children scramble and shout at each other in German; dogs, hens, a small pig, and an old man smoking a pipe, all settled on layers of filthy straw. On a bench in one corner, another old man, only this one looks clean, dressed in black with a curly grey beard; probably a guest. Two stout women prepare food at the grimy wooden table. Each way station has been worse than the last.
“Pardon,” de Lattorf mutters as he steps gingerly between the bodies. He lowers me onto the dirt floor in front of the earthenware stove almost on top of a little girl with a sooty face. “Pardon,” he says, and she moves her legs aside to make space.
I try to smile in appeasement, but my feet burn inside my boots. No matter. I will survive this. And the remainder of the journey, though the distance will be nearly a thousand miles. I try to picture the Duke’s face when I arrive, but it’s too noisy for imaginings.
Mama glowers at the mess, then at me. “What’s the matter with you, Sophie?”
“My feet are frozen.”
“Hedwig, take off Sophie’s boots and rub her feet.”
Mama stands erect near the table, arguing with one of the women about the accommodation. Apparently the rooms we were to use lie across an icy pasture unreachable by carriage, so we are to sleep in this bedlam with the family.
To her lady-in-waiting she says in French, “Look at the children huddled over there — I’ve never seen anything like it, lying one on top of the other like cabbages and turnips to keep warm.”
Fräulein Kayn clucks in sympathy, then tries to soothe Mama. “Look, there is another guest here.”
Mama turns to scrutinize the bearded old man dressed in black and wearing a broadly brimmed hat. He seems to have brought his own food and is calmly chewing on it in the corner while reading a book. Fräulein Kayn murmurs something to Mama that sounds like “Jew.”
I observe him more carefully, intrigued. I have never seen a Jew before, have only heard them described as avaricious moneylenders. While Mama and Fräulein Kayn divert their attention elsewhere, the Jew’s dark eyes suddenly turn to me, twinkling in the distance as if he has felt me watching. A shiver skips across my back, but I am not afraid.
Mama barks questions about dinner at the proprietress. She is angrier than usual, and I wonder if she is cursing my decision to answer the royal summons and make the journey. But she is just as ambitious for me as I am. My position will reflect on her. Would she believe me if I told her it was not ambition that drew me away from my home forever, but destiny?
The servant tries to rub some life into my swollen feet while I wolf down a stew that a month ago I would have pushed away as barely edible, a preparation of grits and turnips and murky ingredients I dare not guess at.
My only regret is Papa, for I know I shall never see him again. Sweet, honest, good Papa. I think he only let me go because I said I would come back if the situation was not to my liking. It isn’t as though I haven’t met my cousin the Duke, even if I was a mere ten, and he eleven and still called Karl Ulrich. He was good-looking then, if pale, and well-mannered to me, though he was ugly and hot-tempered with his tutors. I heard rumours since that he liked his wine too much and got drunk every night at table. Four years have passed since then, and I feel no aversion to the notion of marrying him, considering his prospects. But I assured Papa that I would only make up my mind once Mama and I had assessed matters.
I carry Papa’s pages of instructions and advice in my bag, but I know what they say. Above all, do not give up your faith, Sophie. Remain Lutheran, no matter what. I promised. What else could I do? It wasn’t until we were leaving that I suddenly saw how old he looked. It was the worst moment of my life, when we parted. I dissolved into tears. Very unlike me.
I observe de Lattorf staring at the compass he uses when we’re on the road. He’s probably half asleep. Out of boredom, I try to engage him in a philosophical discussion begun the previous evening. “Do you still feel that parents ought to teach their children to believe in God?” I ask, amused at the fluttering of his eyelids. I was right; he is near dozing. “Merely to ensure they behave in a moral way?”
We have been debating this topic all week, and de Lattorf sighs. “What else will keep them from stealing from their neighbours and murdering their wives? God is necessary to keep everyone honest.”
“Yes, yes — if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” Voltaire’s phrase has become the catchword of modern society, but I wholeheartedly believe it. “What about the idea of rational thought?” I go on perversely, not yet ready for sleep. “If we replaced ignorance and superstition with knowledge and rational thought, don’t you think some people might behave morally even without believing in God?”
“Some people, perhaps, Mademoiselle. But if you truly believed you would go unpunished after this life, no matter how despicable your actions, would you behave well?”
“Monsieur!” I tease.
I recall a similar conversation not long ago with Frederick of Prussia when he invited our family to his court. None of us suspected his motives at the time. It was an unexpected invitation and Papa was away on command as he often was. While Mama made herself gracious to the ladies in the court, she was shocked to see Frederick summon me to sit beside him at table. He said I was to call him “Fritz.” This King who had shown himself to be courageous, nay, formidable, according to Papa, as soon as the crown fell to him on the death of his father, Frederick William in 1740.
Everyone in Europe had assumed the flute-playing, French-loving prince would be kind and malleable on the throne. But Papa was called away almost immediately to command troops on the border of Silesia. The whole continent in upheaval that year because the Emperor of Austria, Charles VI, also died in 1740, and his daughter, Maria-Theresa, was set to rule. Papa heaped scorn on her silly blonde head. It was the perfect time for Frederick to strike, he said, while Maria-Theresa was sorting out her friends. While her father’s decrepit old generals were trying to decide whether to pledge their allegiance to the pretty young daughter. Frederick had to strike, had to take the opportunity that opened before him to return Silesia to its rightful place. The people there were Protestant, and should be ruled by a Protestant king. Wasn’t that reason enough to remove it from the realm of the Catholic Maria-Theresa? When he’d come back from the campaign, Papa told us Frederick had given a masked ball for everyone’s pleasure, including the Austrians, on an evening in December. The next day he set out at the head of the troops he had ordered built up along the border of Silesia. He met little resistance, especially from those who’d enjoyed themselves at the ball. And Prussia grew.
I was mindful of all this while for the next four hours Frederick and I discussed philosophy and art and compared our appraisals of all manner of things. He was surprised at my education and opinions but pleased that I had them. He sensed my discomfort at the proximity of my mother and ventured a comment about how when he was my age he had hated his father with passion, but now saw that in his single-mindedness his father had built an incomparable army and in his mindless cruelty had made Frederick strong. It had been but a few years since his father’s death and the beginning of his own reign. In this cruelty from a parent, we were linked, and I felt closer to him. I reconciled myself that Mama would never love me, as his father had never loved him.
During this afternoon, which I shall never forget, the people around us must have marvelled at the King of Prussia spending so many hours conversing with a child. Yet I felt I understood him. I sensed the same sadness in him I knew in myself, the same certitude that happiness, the way other people experience it, would always elude me. Nevertheless he was charming and gracious and referred to his own unhappy situation only in the most oblique way.
“Sometimes one must do things one finds abhorrent,” he said. “Take, for instance, marriage. For the likes of us, people in our position, marriage is a means to an end. There is little chance it will result in affection. For that kind of comfort one must turn elsewhere. I am telling you this because you are a spirited, intelligent girl. You remind me of myself at your age: do not develop foolish sentimental notions that will hinder your good judgment. You are young still. You can learn. Never let affection get in the way of your future.”
I know in my bones that this invitation of a thousand miles through the deepest heart of winter is his doing. That he was testing me and that I passed the test.
There is Mama. She has laid herself down fully clothed on the bare wooden plank she ordered the innkeeper to bring her. They have installed me and Fräulein Kayn near the stove on an unimaginably filthy featherbed, leaving the children who ordinarily sleep there on the straw-laden floor. The elderly fräulein is snoring quietly when I feel movement near my elbow; I lift my head. Two tiny red eyes are just as startled when I scramble to sit up. The children nearby giggle and throw something at the rat. I gaze around, fully awake. Fräulein Kayn shifts but keeps snoring. In the faint light of the fire, I see, in the corner, the Jew leaning over his book, reading. Everyone else is sleeping.
I get up and manoeuvre through the prone bodies with swollen, painful feet. When I am still at a distance he looks up, smiles with high-coloured cheeks. I stop, suddenly shy. He motions to me with a small wave of his hand, then pats the spot on the bench beside him. I look around to see Mama sleeping fitfully on the wooden plank. I approach and sit down. He puts the black hat on over his skullcap.
“You cannot sleep, child? You are not accustomed to rats in your bed.” His voice hums, like a soft melody. He is robust, his skin ruddy and threaded with tiny veins above the grey beard.
“May I ask what you are reading?” I say, aiming at politeness.
“Why, it is the philosophy of Spinoza, child.”
“Spinoza? I thought I knew the names of all the philosophers. This one is unfamiliar.”
“He was a Jew from Holland, not well known.”
I try to reconcile the image of the Jew before me and the Jew on the page with the references to greedy moneylenders.
“And what distinguishes his philosophy?”
The man observes me, perhaps wondering at this question from a young girl. “Spinoza adopted a geometrical method to study the world.”
“Geometrical?” I ask, perplexed.
“He felt human nature obeys fixed laws no less than do the figures of geometry. Therefore he wrote about human beings as though he were concerned with lines and planes and solids.”
“How extraordinary!” I say. “To think of oneself as a triangle or a circle!” I suddenly feel very childish at this outburst.
“Spinoza wrote that it is the part of the wise man not to bewail nor to deride, but to understand.”
I am chastened, but gently. I steer back toward politeness. “May I ask your name, sir?”
He bows his head with ceremony. “Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, at your service.”
He does not ask mine, but looks into my eyes, searching, searching. When he has satisfied himself that he has found what he is looking for, he says, “Would you like me to tell you a story?”
“I’m too old for stories,” I say, surprised. “I’m not a child. I am on my way to the man I’m going to marry.”
“Ahh.” The rabbi nods. “Then I know just the story for you.” His bushy grey eyebrows arch in a question.
“I can’t sleep anyway,” I say, and wait.
The old man shifts his hips to settle more comfortably on the bench. He takes a breath. “There once were two souls floating far above the earth, one male, one female. Though they were two separate souls, they had found each other eons ago and come together virtually as one, drifting along, outside of time. Finally the day came when they were allotted placements on earth — two families into which they would be born. The two families lived in distant villages, but the souls knew that one day they would meet again, even though as humans they would forget everything that had gone before. The girl was born into a family of craftsmen who fashioned barrels. They were called ‘wet’ barrels since they were used to transport liquid and therefore needed to be meticulously crafted out of dried oak.
“When she was of marriageable age, her parents sent her to a distant village to meet the son of a ‘dry’ cooper whose barrels could be made to less stringent standards because they needed to carry only dry goods. However, he was richer than the wet cooper since it took him less time to make more barrels. She was an adventuresome girl and looked forward to her new surroundings. Also, ever since she could remember, she had felt as if something were missing in her life. She loved her parents and her brothers and yet… there was an empty space in her spirit that she couldn’t explain. So she made the arduous journey and found the prosperous young cooper.” The rabbi pauses.
“Was this the other soul, then?” I ask.
The rabbi’s ruddy cheeks rise in a smile. “Oh, that life was that simple! But alas, the young cooper was as different from that soul as it was possible to be. The girl, however, did not remember how she had joyously drifted above the earth with her soulmate. So she married the young man, thus joining wet barrels with dry, and the business grew. Her husband preferred his wine to anything she or the work could offer, so she became the mistress of the shop.
“One day a young man came to the cooperage and asked for employment. He had left his village in a distant land to seek his fortune. As soon as she saw him, she felt a stirring in her soul, something completely new to her. This young man was just as taken with her. He didn’t understand, himself, the draw he felt. One night when her husband drank himself into a stupor, she came to the young man. During the day they avoided each other. But at night each sought out the other.
“One night when they embraced, her hand brushed by a small bulky object in his breast pocket. She went to reach for it, but he caught her hand.
“‘What are you hiding so close to your heart?’ she asked.
“The young man wanted to have no secrets between them, since he loved her as he had never loved another. So he withdrew the tiny wooden box from his pocket and watched her lovely eyes cloud over with confusion as she lifted the lid and looked upon a single grain of wheat.
“‘My father passed it on to me as his father passed it on to him and his father’s father before him.’
“She moved her fingers toward the grain, preparing to lift it from its velvet lining. The young man, alarmed, snapped the lid shut. The puzzlement in her eyes became anger.
“‘You have so little trust in me?’
“‘It is a magic grain,’ he said. ‘We don’t touch it. We revere it. We honour it from the depths of our hearts.’
“‘I don’t understand.’
“‘It is a sign between us and the land, handed down through the centuries. We honour it because it has fed us and kept us alive, our entire family and all those dependent upon us.’
“‘This tiny grain?’ she said, as she lifted the lid again.
“‘You must never touch it. My life, the lives of all my family, depend upon it.’
“Her face became absorbed in it, searching for the magic, so he put it away.
“One day a message arrived from the young man’s village that his father was ill and he had to go home. He begged her to come with him, but they both knew that was impossible. She wept large tears and accused him of wanting to leave her.
“‘You will never come back!’ she cried. ‘You’ve become tired of me!’
“He was beside himself with dismay, that he was the cause of grief to the only woman he had ever loved. ‘How can I prove my devotion to you?’ he asked.
“With tear-stained eyes she placed her hand on his breast pocket. His heart skipped. But he trusted her with his life. He handed her the tiny box, content that he could leave a part of himself with her. He made her promise that she would never touch it.
“When he had gone, she became busy with her work. More and more barrels were being made to fill the orders from far and wide. Many coopers now worked for her. Business was good; her customers trusted her. The tiny wooden box containing the magic grain she kept in her skirt pocket, a part of her love always near.
“The young man sent her letters begging her to leave her husband and come to him. His father was gravely ill and the young man was needed to run the large farm. He still loved and yearned for her, and when would she come?
“But how could she leave the cooperage that she had built up with her own two hands? He had no right, she thought, to ask her to leave behind the staves, the hoops, the oak that had to be dried just so. He sent her letters stained with his tears; she added them to her growing pile.
“One day when she had received the latest of a long line of letters begging her to leave everything she knew and loved, she despaired of seeing him again. She cursed the distance between them and his family obligations, and finally the magic of the grain in the tiny wooden box. Plucking the box from her pocket she stood there glaring at it. If it were magic, why didn’t it stop her? If it were magic, why didn’t it strike her dead? Gingerly she lifted the lid. The grain lay there, tiny, inconsequential, exactly like all the other grains she had ever seen in her life. It had been a lie like everything else he had told her. This grain was no more magic than the grains the farmers planted in the fields beyond the cooperage.
“She stepped outside into the yard. It was no use wasting it. At least in his absence, she might make use of the grain to grow some food for her workers. She held the box in her hand, waiting for the grain to speak to her. It was silent. Nor did it strike her down when she lifted it from its velvet lining. She held it between two fingers: it didn’t feel like a magic grain. But she would test it. Bending over, she scooped up a handful of earth and deposited the grain beneath. She patted the soil down around it and marked the spot with a twig.
“The next day she looked out her window and was amazed to find that her yard had become a field of wheat swaying in the sun. No matter how much she harvested, more grew in its place the next day. She began to fill barrels with it and became even more prosperous.
“In the next letter she received from the young man, he wrote that his father had died. He was desperate to see her but he couldn’t leave since now the entire burden of running the farm fell to him. In the next letter his writing had changed into a smaller, tighter script. He said a disease was attacking their crops and the future of the farm was uncertain. In his last letter the writing had become crabbed and splotchy. Locusts had eaten what little was left of their crops. All had been lost, his family scattered. What, he asked her, had become of his magic grain? She received no more letters.
“When he died, his soul did not seek out his long-lost love, and when she died, her soul could not find his. For the rest of eternity her soul searched and searched for him in vain.”
The rabbi leans back on the bench, tired.
“What an unhappy tale!” I say. “She destroyed the man she loved and lost both their souls.”
He observes me with mischievous eyes. “What would you have done?”
I am startled by his question. I would like to think I would have kept the grain safe forever, but that would not have brought the young man back. “I don’t know,” I say.
His eyes darken, but he says no more. I realize he wanted to hear something different from me, and I regret disappointing him. I have not yet learned to conceal my thoughts.
The story has affected me in a way I do not understand, and I am curious about the storyteller. “Forgive me, but you are an unusual visitor in such a place. To where do you travel?”
“Back to my home. A little town in the Carpathians.”
“Why did you come here?”
“To see if you were real, my child. To see if my dream was true.”
A shiver skips across my back, the kind Fräulein Kayn would describe as death. “And what did you dream?” I ask, though I am uneasy.
His eyes, which seem to see everything, close in order to see what isn’t there.
“I dreamt you stood in an opulent room with velvet draperies hung over the windows and gilded portraits on the walls. You were surrounded by documents — they fluttered around you like birds, pleading with you to let them go. Once, you would have. But now, you caught each one and signed it, and with your signature you took away the freedom of my people. With one stroke of your quill you punished a nation.”
I let out my breath, relieved. “But this cannot be true — I don’t know your people.”
“When you travel this week, look up into the night sky for a sign. You will know when you see it.”
I hear a gurgle from the direction of the fire and turn to see Fräulein Kayn sitting up, fixing huge eyes on the rabbi. The fräulein, with her nonsensical belief in spirits, will devour these stories whole.
By the time I awake the following morning, he has vanished. “Did you see the rabbi leave?” I ask Mama who is already up.
“What rabbi?”
“The old man in the black hat sitting in that corner last night.” We both look up to find the corner filled with straw and chickens strutting about.
Mama turns irritated eyes on me. “Between you and Fräulein Kayn I am surrounded by phantoms on this journey.”
“The fräulein will remember,” I say, puzzled.
The older woman watches the scowl on Mama’s face and shakes her head.
For the next few days we travel long miles north along the Latvian coast. Mist shrouds the luminous grey marshes that surround us on all sides. We pass a few godforsaken hamlets where the beggarly villagers come to their doors wrapped in layers of rags. At the sight of our three unlikely carriages rolling through the ice in this bitter January, they all cross themselves and mutter prayers as if we are dead already. Each night as outriders lead us to our next lodgings, Fräulein Kayn peers up at the sky through the window of the carriage. She must have a crick in her neck by now.
On the third night we must stop in a village since inns and post houses have long disappeared. I am bracing myself for another night of fighting for space with dogs and rats, when, on alighting from the carriage, Fräulein Kayn gasps. I follow her gaze toward the clear black sky. There, high above us, a ball of fire streaks across the bowl of the heavens, its blue trail of stars flashing behind it, electrifying the night. I cannot take my eyes off it, even when the blazing tail fades into the pale stars of the night sky.
“A portent of evil!” Fräulein Kayn whispers.
“It’s a comet!” I cry. “No more evil than the moon and stars.”
“The devil is behind this, I tell you.”
I don’t believe in signs, yet I am troubled at the memory of the rabbi and his people and a future that seems incomprehensible to me.
We have been travelling for nearly five weeks now and I have quite forgotten what it feels like to not be frozen or jostled for endless hours over icy ruts that the roads have become. My visions of the Duke have evaporated into the dreary pall that passes for day in these parts, and for the first time I begin, myself, to wonder whether I have lost my senses coming on this journey. Mama sits across from me with her scarf pulled over her nose and cheeks, red and swollen from the cold, her eyes painfully closed.
My eyes fix on the silver expanse of marsh and I fear my brain is frozen as well. I have not the energy to put two thoughts together. A movement in the distance coaxes my eyes to shift into focus. What a sight! A rider is galloping towards us. He exchanges words with one of the servants in the first carriage, then turns around and gallops back the way he came. My heart begins to beat again as if there is a possibility that I might thaw out.
Within the hour another rider approaches. Our coach stops and a Colonel Vokheikov introduces himself. He has been sent to escort us across the frontier and on to the city of Riga. Mama sits up straighter as the handsome young officer rides beside us, warm steam expanding from his horse’s nostrils. Blood begins to course through my body, slowly warming it from the inside out. I wonder if the ringing is in my ears, but Mama looks up at the same time. Yes, somewhere bells are pealing. And a sound like thunder. As we get closer I realize it is the sound of cannons. I am puzzled, but Mama’s shoulders lift and she lets the scarf fall around her neck. She nods at me with a tight smile.
I am astonished at the people lining the road as we pass through. The whole town has come out to wave at us and cheer. Mama’s smile loosens. Her neck becomes regal and bows benevolently to all admirers.
The empress has sent us warm sable coats with gold brocade and fur collars. But these are nothing compared to the apparition that lies before us: a fur-lined sleigh that contains not only a stove, but mattresses, and is so large a dozen horses must pull it. If this is a dream, I hope never to awaken. The comet was indeed an omen, but one of good. The rabbi’s story of tragedy comes rushing to mind, but I can no longer recall the anxiety I felt earlier; it has faded like the cold. All I can remember is the fortunate girl, the heights she flew to, the power of her signature.