Konrad and Alexandra

394 Pages·2011·2.37 MB·English

by  Rolf Gross

1
Konrad and Alexandra
The Chronicle of a Great Love
1898 - 1998

Rolf Gross
.
Second revised and illustrated Edition
Pacific Palisades
2011

2
Table of Contents
Click on the underlined links
1. Konrad's Watch 1969 36.The Summer of 1905 in Ca' Savio
2. Konrad Arrives in Georgia 1898 37.Snowbound in Eydtkuhnen, 1905
3. Tiflis 1898 38.Return to St. Petersburg, 1905
3. Alexandra Dadiani, Tiflis 1898 39.Exploring St. Petersburg 1905
4. Chekhov's "Chaika" Henri the Goldsmith 40.Sophia's Birth
5. Alexandra's Necklace 41.Uncle Mouravi's Benz
6. Georgia on Horseback 42.A Family Reunion, Tiflis 1907
7. The Engagement 43.Niko and Claudia's Wedding, Tiflis 1907
8. A Sufi Sema 44.The Dadiani Castle, Zugdidi 1907
9. Ilia Chavchavadze 45.Strange Happenings, Svaneti 1907
9. New Year 1899 46.Calling the Dead, Svaneti 1907
10. Alexandra's Abduction 47.Adishi, Gocha Teaching Dream Work
11.Easter at Zedazeni 48. Ilia Chavchavadse's Assassination 1907
12.The Last Feudal Wedding 49.Tamara and Vladimir, Alexandra and Helena
13.Venice 1899 50.Konrad Learns Chinese, 1910
14.Fiesole and Florence 1899 51.A Stunning Discovery, Paris 1981
15. St. Petersburg, The Summer Ball 1899 52.Alexandra in Paris, 1911
16 . Alexandra Studies Medicine 53.Konrad in China, 1911-1912
17.Becky's Museum 54.Konrad's Return from China, 1912
18.Otto's Birth 1900 55.Alexandra's Journey to Munich, 1913
19.Vladimir 1904 56.Dahl's Examination of Alexandra, 1913
20. A Theosophists' Reception 1904 57.A visit to Kandinsky in Murnau 1913
21.Berlin 1904 58.Alexandra in Tiflis, Tamara's Quarrel 1913
22.Rheinsberg 1904 59.Revolutionary St. Petersburg, Winter 1913 - 1914
23.Munich 1904 60.The War Years, St. Petersburg 1914 - 1917
3
24.The Dahl's House, Katharina, 1904 61.Their Flight to Georgia, 1918
25.Claudia and Dioskorides, 1904 62.Tbilisi 1918
26.A Pilgrimage to Andechs 63.Alexandra at Forty, Tbilisi 1918
27.Steiner, Schoenberg and Kandinsky at the Dahls 64.German Troops in Tbilisi, 1918 - 1919
28.Music, Painting, and Psychology 65.A Visit to Tbilisi, 1982
29.Fashing, Munich 1905 66.Alexandra's Letters, 1983
30.Walking on Ice 67.A Concert in Kreuth, April 1989
31.Chamber Music 1905 A List of people in “ Konrad and Alexandra ”
32.Alexandra Learns to Drive Italy 1905 Sources
33.Fiesole 1905
34.Alexandra's Time
35.Meeting Clara Westhoff, 1905
4
Konrad's Watch
Moscow, 1969

A heavy downpour drove me into a prominent shop on Moscow’s October Square.
People crowded at the glass display cases behind which robust salesladies dawdled in
socialist apathy. A big English sign said, "Russian Antiques"—a high-brow pawnshop!
A motley array of old and new bric-a-brac filled the shelves, samovars, pots and pans,
Russian lacquer boxes, second-hand clothing, art-nouveau bronzes, a life-sized statue of a
Negro assembled from variously colored marble.
The people stared at the foreigner.
I had no intention of buying anything.
In the back of the store I found a wall covered with amateur paintings: a young woman
reading on the verandah of a dacha, flower arrangements, a stand of white birches, a leaning
peasant hut at the edge of a meadow. A melancholy painting of dappled sunspots under trees,
through which one saw the blue of the sea, brought back long-forgotten memories of the
summers of my childhood on the shores of the languid Baltic Sea, where the shady beech
woods reach to the water’s edge, and one could hear time sigh. This unexpected discovery
became excuse for spending half an hour in the chaotic place.
I was about to leave when my gaze was caught by an antique silver fob-watch lying in a
locked glass case among enameled brooches, amber necklaces, and old jewelry. I don’t know
why this watch attracted my attention. I am not a collector of antique timepieces.
I bent over the case and one of the buxom sales ladies descended upon me. Uncertain,
I asked her to show me the watch. She placed it on a black velveteen cushion. I knew she
would not let me handle it. The watch carried the markings of a renowned Swiss manufacturer.
A lid covered its dial, another its back. In place of a crown it had an ear for a chain. The key to
wind it was missing.The saleslady pressed a pin, and with a click the lid sprang open exposing
an inscription in large, curlicue, German letters:
I stared at the inscription—my grandfather’s name.
Vertigo overcame me, I grasped the counter. The sales lady darted from behind the
table and offered me a chair. "Are you all right? It is terrible how many men die of heart attacks
these days."
The room began to turn, time collapsed. A string of long-suppressed memories ran
through my dizzy mind.

In Mid May 1945 we had fled from the advancing Soviet troops. Father, Mother, and my
three siblings. We walked or hitched rides on the pony carts of the retreating German army.
5
One piece of luggage after another was abandoned. Carrying our heavy possessions had
become impossible in the heat of spring.
All our efforts were in vain. We never reached the West, where we believed the
Americans would protect us from the feared Soviets. On the day after the German surrender,
near the Czechoslovak border, the Soviet Army overtook us.
Red Army men combed the thousands of refugees for German soldiers. They ordered
my father aside. He had his hands up. A Russian soldier pulled the watch, which now lay
before me, from his pocket. The soldier dangled his booty from his left hand. In the other he
held an automatic.
For the first time in my life I heard Father speak Russian. He begged for his watch, then
shouted at the Red Army man. Nervously the soldier threatened him with his automatic. Father
grabbed for his watch. The soldier hit Father’s outstretched arm with the gun and then
continued, mercilessly beating him, to drive him towards a group of POWs by the roadside.
Dissolved in tears, Mother ran after him. Her pleading was futile. Father disappeared down the
road in agroup of POWs.
For two days we hid in the woods and traveled only at night, carefully avoiding
populated areas. Finally Mother and I decided to return home to the house in H— where we
had lived throughout the war.

Grandfather Konrad had given this watch to my father Otto in 1918 when he had sent
him to safety in Germany. I knew the watch well. It used to have a small key, and once in a
while father would let me wind it.
The lady explained that the key no longer existed.
I bought the watch and locked myself into my shabby room at the "Hotel of the
Academics" with my precious treasure. The lady at the shop had polished the slightly tarnished
silver casing. The few minor dents in the lid only enhanced its faded elegance. Its Roman
numerals gave it a most distinguished look, and a small, separate dial in gold and blue showed
the phases of the moon.
I took the watch to a watchmaker in a bleak apartment block in the old part of the city.
The old Jew whom I found in the overstuffed cubicle carefully examined Konrad’s watch
through his eyepiece. He offered to buy it. What would I do with such an antiquated timepiece
in the age of digital watches? He shrugged resignedly when I told him that the watch was not
for sale.
As he opened the lid the crazy idea struck me to invert its mechanism, so it would run
backwards.
The graying watchmaker shot me a puzzled glance. Was I serious? What for would I
want a watch that ran backwards?
"Oh," I told him, "it will count the hours you and I have lost during the last hundred years,
and maybe it will tell me why there was so much suffering in this century."
"Are you one of us?" asked the watchmaker examining me with his sad, inquisitive eyes.
I said no, I was not Jewish, I carried an American passport but had grown up in Germany.
He nodded, spread his hands acknowledging the inevitable and resorted to a mixture of
Yiddish, Russian, and German. He explained that he could make the hands of the watch run
backwards by an exchange of two tiny wheels, but the phases of the moon he could not
reverse.
6
I was content to leave Alexandra’s time untouched.
"Do you understand my German?" asked the old man.
He lamented his relatives lost in the German holocaust and Stalin’s terror. He had lived
through the horrors of the war, "which they call the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in this country." He let
his gray head hang.
Yes, I understood him. I let him finish and then told him of the life of Konrad and
Alexandra, my grandparents, the watch, and Father’s fate.
He peered over his glasses and smiled.
"Now I see why you didn’t want to sell me this watch," and tilting his head,
commiseration in his eyes he continued, "You suffered as much as we did. The world is a cruel
place. Who will tell the story of the people who suffered through this terrible century?"
When I left he hugged and kissed me, Russian style.
"I wish you mazeltov, a long life, and glick in finding your lost people."
A week later I picked up the watch. The watchmaker gave me a small key. As I wound
the watch it chimed! I put it on my bedside table and as its silvery bell counted the hours of the
night, its hands slowly recalled my grandparents’ lives.

My great-grandfather Gymnasial Professor Julius Rost had died prematurely in 1890,
leaving his wife and two sons behind. Money was short and as soon as his son Konrad had
finished his degree in botany in 1895, he decided to accept the offer of a good position at the
Caucasian Department of the Imperial Botanical Gardens in St. Petersburg. It came with
Russian citizenship and a contract allowing him to spend a sabbatical leave every few years to
teach in Tiflis, Georgia.
There Konrad had met Alexandra Dadiani. She came from an aristocratic Georgian
family who owned large tracts of land in Western Georgia. They got married in 1899. My father
Otto was born in 1900.
In 1918, when the Soviet terror threatened to flood Georgia, my grandparents sent Otto
to Germany. They remained in Tbilisi. My father never saw his parents again. The outbreak of
World War II put an end to a sporadic exchange of letters. A postcard mailed in 1943 through
the Red Cross in Geneva signed "In Liebe Konrad und Alexandra," no date, no address, was
the last message that reached us. The only tangible remains of his parents were Konrad’s
watch, a bundle of letters, and a portrait of Alexandra.
The portrait hung in Father’s study in H—. It showed Alexandra at the height of her life.
The head slightly turned, her deep-blue eyes fixed the viewer with an inquisitive, taunting look,
which together with an ironic smile around her generous mouth, gave the impression of a
sharp, possibly dangerous intelligence. She had an elongated face, with strongly-modeled
cheekbones, finely delineated eyebrows, a prominent, aristocratic nose and dark hair: A
formidable woman.
Her décolleté exposed her long, elegant neck, a charming clavicle depression, and an
unusual necklace of omega-shaped gold links.
The painting cast a magical spell on my childhood. I imagined that her eyes followed
me, and in unobserved moments she would talk to me.
I never met my grandmother.
Yet, before any other woman I fell in love with Alexandra.
7
I sank into a restless sleep and the ticking of the old watch spun me into a sequence of
hopeless muddle dreams, mixing Alexandra’s picture, our flight from the Russians, and my
father’s life.
I was back in the hot days of May 1945 fleeing from the Soviet armies. Mother had
allowed each of us to take along one personal souvenir. Father had removed Alexandra’s
portrait from its frame and packed it in the suitcase now lying in the ditch beside the road.
Mother was trying to flag a ride on a German military convoy. In that unobserved
moment I dashed back, opened Father’s suitcase, dumped its contents, and rescued
Alexandra’s painting. I hid the canvas under my clothes and told nobody of the painting I wore.
The dream changed to the summer of 1945.
I was sitting at my father’s hospital bed chasing the flies from his face. Father drifted in
and out of awareness. He had contracted typhoid in the Russian POW camp. In a panic the
Russians had sent him to this German hospital. It was very hot and the windows were open.
The country was covered by a thick, brown smog reeking of burnt corpses. He was very ill but
immensely lucky.
My dream shifted again. In August father came home from the hospital. Mother and I
were suppporting him from both sides, half-carrying the emaciated, hairless man into our
house in H—. He saw Alexandra’s portrait in the old frame hanging on the wall. I told him how I
had saved it. Father smiled wanly. This smile on his gaunt face will forever remain
superimposed on Alexandra’s haunting portrait.

8
Konrad arrives in Georgia
1898
On a cold evening in May 1898, a tall, slender man in his thirties with dark-brown hair, a
copious, untrimmed, reddish beard, and gray eyes got off the Moscow train at the forlorn
station at Vladikavkas in the northern foothills of the Great Caucasus. For the first time Konrad
Rost traveled to Tiflis to teach for a year at the Gymnasium of the Georgian Nobility. He had
decided to exchange the dreary train ride via Baku for the Georgian Military Road across the
mountains. It would be a strenuous journey but much more beautiful and shorter than the
railway to Tiflis.
He had spent the night in the only guesthouse in the dusty garrison town and now
waited in the dark of a cold morning for the postal carriage to arrive. He could barely make out
the snow-capped mountains of the High Caucasus towards the south in the darkness. The
carriage, drawn by four horses, rolled up: a box covered with black oilcloth which swayed on
immense springs and high wheels. If the passengers squeezed, the carriage offered room for
six.
Luckily there were only four other passengers that morning: an Armenian matron with
her demure teenage daughter, a German professor who had introduced himself as Arthur Leist
the previous evening, and an elegantly dressed young man on his way to buy Caucasian
carpets in Tiflis .
The dashing rug dealer cut by far the most elegant figure. About Konrad’s age, he wore
a perfectly tailored white suit, a black kerchief in its breast pocket, matching spotless shoes,
and an English bowler hat. He twirled a patent umbrella nervously in the air, which he let pop
several times to frighten the young daughter of the Armenian lady, who giggling took cover
behind her mother.
The Armenian lady, in her thirties, had already
acquired a respectable figure. Dressed in the
conventional costume of the merchant middle class, a
long, black dress held together by an embroidered belt
under which she wore a white, high-collared blouse
with long sleeves and a flat cap on her high hairdo, she
constantly corrected her daughter’s manners. Although
she pretended to ignore her three male fellow travelers,
she stole curious glances from under long eyelashes at
Konrad and Leist, the two foreigners.
Konrad had met Leist over supper. An unpretentious
bachelor, Leist spoke, in addition to a charming
Silesian, German, Russian and Georgian fluently. In his
forties he stood a head shorter than Konrad. A well-
trimmed, graying beard fringed his face. Contradicting
his bourgeois appearance, he was vivacious, and loved to season his didactic remarks with
9
jokes.
Fifteen years ago Leist had come to Tiflis as a young man, learned Georgian, and with
Ilia Chavchavadze’s help, had translated Shota Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther Skin, the
Georgian national epos, into German. On a subsequent sojourn he had hopelessly fallen in
love with Georgia, had decided to settle in Tiflis permanently and devote himself entirely to the
translation of Georgian classical literature and to studies of the Georgian languages and
customs. Konrad was completely taken in by this congenial man. He could not have found a
better guide and teacher.
As the coach rattled south the entire chain of the Caucasus, of which Konrad had
dreamed for years, lit up. For a few minutes the icy peaks topped by the mighty cap of Mt.
Kazbeg rose cold, pink and lemon-yellow before a turquoise sky. The rising sun quickly
extinguished the colors and flooded the glaciers with a blinding, white light. The icy peaks
seemed to float on thin transparent clouds above the dark-blue hills.
The Caucasus rose like a wall, five-thousand meters high, directly from the Southern-
Russian plains. Between Mt. Kazbeg, higher than Montblanc, and the peaks of Khevsureti
further east, only one road crossed the range, the Caucasian Military Road.
The rug merchant, obviously a veteran of many such trips, had pulled his bowler hat
over his eyes and slept soundly in his corner of the carriage, undaunted by the shaking and
rocking on the rutted road. Leist read a time-worn Alexander Dumas novel. The child had put
her head into her napping mother’s lap.
Mail coach on the Georgian Military Road, 1896 (Ermakov/Wiki)
The carriage labored up the Terek Valley. Numerous medieval watchtowers crowned
the bare rocks on both sides, and after an hour the coach and the roaring river disappeared
between steep rock walls.
Leist put down his book, waved his hand at the passing scenery, and said. "Now begins
10