The next morning he writes, “Had a terrible night. Lydia’s impossible. I’m impossible. I blame only myself. We’re in heaven, but we feel ourselves banished. She said she wouldn’t be at breakfast. I’m sitting alone on the terrace looking at the lagoon. Some sparrows are going after something on the table. I have to keep waving them away. There’s a dead pigeon on the shore. A gull’s picking at its guts. Why did I expect to find happiness in Venice? With each passing day I love Lydia more and more.”
Out of this trip came a resolve that each would fight for a bright future for their own people, in their own country and, as far as possible, meet every year.
In Petersburg, Lydia passed her State exam, which allowed her to practice medicine throughout the Russian empire. She was sent to the Smolensk region, in the village of Krapivnya, 45 versts from the railway station. Finally her dream of serving the people was about to come true.
But then reality quickly sobered her up.
“40 miserable hovels, cheap vodka that’s government-subsidized, a church, and two peasants dead drunk in a snowdrift. There’s nothing else out here. A doctor’s called only for an autopsy or a recruitment exam. They doctor themselves. It’s barbaric. There’s no concept of hygiene, let alone order and keeping things neat and clean. Everything is swarming with parasites. Fleas, lice, roaches everywhere. You can’t prescribe enemas for children or douches for women because the peasants have neither money nor the desire to buy these things. They’re not even sold at the grocery or the State store that’s only stocked with cheap vodka. No other stores around for a good 100 versts. No one knows about a knife and fork here, and they eat without plates—everyone just spoons out something from a pot at the same time and mothers give their children chewed food from their mouth. No wonder that fighting infections under such conditions turns into a bitter comedy. Syphilis is everywhere. Adults and children, men and women have genital warts. Trachoma is epidemic. Everyone’s infecting each other. It’s impossible to stop it. You can imagine how helpless I feel. Yesterday a peasant came with his son. The boy had chopped off his finger with an axe. Instead of keeping the wound clean, the father wound a spider web from the stove corner around the stump. Now I’m afraid the boy will get blood poisoning.”
Well, very likely the only surprising thing for the readers of today in these letters was how the post office functioned. Letters from St. Petersburg to Zurich arrived in all of three days and from Krapivnya in less than a week.
The Zurich student who dreamed of serving her people met this people head on for the first time and was full of disappointment. Most of all she’s appalled by the coarseness and cruelty of Russian life.
“You put me and my work on a pedestal, because you’re so far away and can’t even imagine what I’m up against every day!” she tells Fritz in the spring of 1903. “Neither civilization nor Christianity has reached these people yet. You should see how savagely they go at each other when they’re drunk. How they beat up their wives and children!”
Once, in a weak moment she writes, “I remember your green lamp, your eyes, beard, your books, your pipe. I see you filling it and blowing smoke at the ceiling. If only I could be with you now. I blame myself for upsetting you instead of being affectionate when we were together.”
At this time Lydia’s mother was living in Lausanne, sending her money and begging her to return to Switzerland. Lydia wouldn’t hear of it. “I’m having a hard time, but that’s exactly why I’ll stay here. To spite her! Leaving, giving up—that’s admitting defeat. I’ll fight on!”
The steady flow of letters with Fritz helped her in this struggle.
In the letters, Fritz gave Lydia full support, but in his diary he was more honest with himself, revealing his doubts.
“There’s theory and then there’s practice. In theory, of course, I’m for sexual equality and independence of partners. I’d even sign that marriage contract of ours again. But how far we are from real life! How painful it is to live apart! I can’t go on this way. It’s night. At night I’m no fighter but the most ordinary fellow. I want a family, a home, a child—only I’m afraid to say it openly. Then, after a sleepless night and a moment’s drifting off before dawn, morning comes. And I take myself in hand. Again I’m ready to push ahead. And my Lydia helps me. Our letters give us both strength.” A few days later there’s another entry on what keeps haunting him. “By day there are my patients. They need me. Then there are meetings, speeches, the city council, time with the workers—I write an article—but in the evening, at night, I sink into a funk. I want so much to press her to me, embrace her, make love to her!”
And again he’s of two minds. “Lydia and I promised each other we’d bear together the whole weight of our common cause, to renounce our petty world for the sake of a greater one, our personal life for the sake of humanity. And I will keep my word.”
Their long separation took its toll. The question of faithfulness crops up.
“The only important thing is whether you love me,” Lydia claims. “Because while you love me, I need you to be faithful. But if you fall out of love with me, then you’re free. I won’t need you to be faithful any longer.”
They kept writing about how they couldn’t wait to see each other and finally, in June 1903, after working a year in the backwoods of Smolensk, Lydia traveled to her husband in Switzerland. However, subsequent letters suggest they both weren’t exactly ecstatic about this long awaited tryst.
En route to Zurich, she sent him a post card from Moscow. “It’s so wonderful I’m on the way to see you! That’s the greatest happiness I can imagine!” Departing Zurich in the fall she writes, “My darling, why are our meetings filled more with sadness than joy? I’m despicable. Just like that I can turn, without knowing why, become vulgar, rigid, even cruel, and all this towards those most close to me. I hurt them for no reason and then I regret it and cry. Forgive me, my beloved! Forgive me!”
Fritz notes in his diary, August 1903: “How can that be? To love someone from afar is one thing, but to love a real person right next to you, that’s something else. It seems like we’re very close in our letters, but when we meet we draw apart. Why is that? I don’t understand. It pains me. We’re better off in letters than in real life. Maybe that’s why she didn’t stay in Zurich and left for a resort in Marbach? Maybe her health was only an excuse? I’m beginning to think we’re actually both afraid of our meetings. We take refuge in our letters. They’re our escape from the impossibility of being either together or apart.”
In the fall Lydia returned to Russia, now settling in as a local doctor in the village of Aleksandrovo, 12 versts from the town of Sudogda in Vladimir Oblast.
The impressions of the new locale and work hardly differed from what was in her letter from Krapivnya. “The outpatient department is past description—cramped, dirty, squalid. I’m here alone for 150 villages in the area. I can’t sleep at night for the hordes of bloodthirsty bugs. A chicken that flew in the window broke the mirror so now I don’t even know what I look like. Maybe that’s for the best. They don’t trust me. An old woman treats a hernia in the old way by biting people. Vodka takes care of all other ills. They pour it on wounds and sores and in the eyes for trachoma.”