The Winter Palace (11 page)

“Is Varvara the same name as Barbara?” Sophie asked me.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Does it mean anything?”

I told her that in Greek my name meant “a stranger, a foreigner,” but that St. Barbara, my patron saint, was a learned woman who converted to Christianity in spite of her father’s objections. She could protect those who prayed to her from lightning and storms.

“How do you know that?” the Princess asked.

“I read it in one of my father’s books.

“He died,” I added, before she managed to ask.

She raised her blue eyes. I fixed my gaze on the tapestry behind her. It was of a nymph turning into a tree, twigs entangled in her hair, legs fusing into a trunk, already half covered by bark. Behind her, a man tried to grasp her before she escaped.

“I, too, like to read,” the Princess said.

The only book she didn’t like was the Bible, because her teacher at home, a Lutheran pastor, required her to learn passages from it by heart. When she made the tiniest of mistakes in her recitations he slapped her, saying, “The joys of the world are not worth its pains.”

I studied her face as she spoke, the dark smudges under her eyes, the black hair pinned too tight, unpowdered, bare. For a moment I let myself fall into a memory of the cats’ concert and Bairta’s childish joy.

“Will you help me?” I heard, unexpectedly. I made a step back. The heels of my new shoes sank into the thick Turkish carpet that covered the floor.

“With my Russian,” the Princess added hastily, and handed me a sheet of paper. It was a letter. A draft, rather. She had copied sentences from the exercises her Russian tutor gave her to study, but she was sure they still needed correcting.

She was a foreigner and therefore she couldn’t afford errors, she told me. Not in Russian.

Any foreigner who succeeded in Russia, she said, had to be of the highest caliber. The Russians never forgave the slightest transgression by those not of their blood. She had been warned already.

Her voice wavered and hardened.

I didn’t ask who had warned her. I didn’t want to know.

“We are both foreigners here, aren’t we, Varvara Nikolayevna?”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

It was a short letter, a note of thanks to someone yet unnamed for a gift of French wine, a whole case of burgundy from the last shipment before the Baltic shores froze.
A thoughtful gift I will find most useful once Lent is over
, Sophie had written.

The errors she made were slight—a few spelling mistakes, a “soft
znak
” omitted here and there. She handed me her own quill, and I made the necessary corrections in the margins.

Every time I pointed out an error, Sophie made a comic groan. “How silly of me not to notice,” she would exclaim. “How foolish!” When I finished and curtsied, ready to leave, she stopped me.

“I’m sorry to be such a bother,” she said.

I looked at her face, the tensing of her lips. “It’s nothing,” I muttered.

I watched her turn to the mantel for a small package wrapped in yellow cloth. “I hope you’ll accept a gift—a trifle, really.”

“There is no need,” I protested immediately, but she shook her head. I felt her fingers on my arm; I saw her eyes look into mine.

“Please, Varvara Nikolayevna,” she said, handing me the package. “But don’t open it now.” She stopped me from removing the purple ribbon with which it was tied.

Later, alone in my room, I untied the purple ribbon. The yellow cloth slid off, revealing a piece of amber cradled in white satin.

I took it out and raised it to the light. It was a superb piece of amber that must have cost Sophie far more than she could afford. In honey-colored resin, two large bees were entangled in an embrace.

I admired the bent, stick-like legs, the folded wings, the abdomens with invisible stings, curled and bare.

I wondered how the bees had died. Was it duty or hunger that had lured them to the same sticky grave? Or a curious need to explore what was not meant for them at all? The courage of wanting more? A longing to stand by each other even if it meant death?

We are both foreigners here
.

Is that why I did it? My first reckless act of transgression? To hold on to this sweet warmth I had so very nearly forgotten? To make it last for a few more moments, before caution and fear crept back? Or was it mercy, another name for the sin of hubris? A lesson in survival, my gift to her?

For she had been terribly foolish with her writing.

Not with the maxims or ambitious plans for self-improvement, not with her own written portrait in which she called herself a “
Philosophe
at fifteen,” even though her fifteenth birthday would come only in May. But with the page I retrieved from the bottom of her drawer.

MEMOIR
OF AN
ELEPHANT

You come in your finery, you see me and you gasp: “How big he is, how strong and yet how docile.” You think me reconciled with my captive state; you think yourselves grand, for you have enslaved a giant.

You talk of bringing me a wife, you make plans for my unborn children, foolish plans, for a captured elephant will never reproduce for the profit of the tyrant who has taken away his liberty.

You watch me, but I watch you, too, and I find you small and fearful, a pitiable race I offer this warning:

Accept the virtues of a simple life, of modest and natural customs. Bow to reason and not to fear. Bend your knees before kings but not before tyrants.

Such is the wisdom of elephants.

I held the paper in my hands for a long time, studied the elegant, even loops of Sophie’s handwriting, the elongated
f
and
l
. I imagined the Chancellor’s glee, his praise for my skills.

I imagined Elizabeth’s wrath.

On the silver tray where Sophie kept her bottles with barley and lavender water, I lit a candle.

I let the page burn, watching the fire eat the words she should not have written. Then I doused the flame, leaving the remnants of the blackened sheet on the tray.

I hoped Sophie would know what it meant.

I prayed no one was watching me.

“The little
Hausfrau
must be doing something wrong, Varvara,” the Chancellor snapped when I reported how Sophie kept herself awake long into the night to study her Russian vocabulary and Orthodox prayers. “Surely the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst is not a saint.”

I tried not to think how slight and pale she had looked that day when her mother came to scold her, how beseeching her eyes were when she asked me for help. Soon she would make another mistake, write something careless, reveal her disappointment with the Grand Duke or even the Empress herself. And then, bruised and hurting, she would be gone.

I had helped her once, but I could not keep acting against the Chancellor’s wishes. One word of his would crush me, and what could she do to stop him?

I had no illusions. I was like a sea creature clinging to a rock. Over me, storms raged while I held on, hoping that the currents and waves would not sweep me off. If I perished, who would notice?

Once it is all over
, I thought,
she has her father to go to, but I have no one
. The spymaster’s voice in my head warned me to remain indifferent, not to go too far.

Princess Johanna, the Empress declared, had let her daughter grow too thin, too bony. What Sophie needed was the simple goodness of Russian food, the dishes Elizabeth’s own mother fed her when she was a girl, the dark rye bread,
shchi
—the sauerkraut soup thickened with oatmeal—kasha with stewed mushrooms. At mealtimes, the Empress took to summoning Princess Sophie to her side, delighted when, after emptying plate after plate, her young guest called this or that dish her favorite until yet another delicacy was urged upon her.

That, I thought, was a good sign.

At the end of February, the Empress began her preparations for her annual pilgrimage to the monastery of Holy Trinity–St. Sergius. There was no reporting of secrets at this time of year. In these days, Elizabeth preferred stories of noble sons living in poverty, striving for holiness.

At the monastery, the Empress, her head covered in black lace, her stomach racked with hunger pains, would beg the Virgin of Smolensk for forgiveness. For each night of drinking, for every guard she took to her bed, she would kiss the Virgin’s painted hand and offer a prayer. There had been many such nights in a year. There would have to be many such prayers. All matters of this earth must wait for her return.

We all welcomed this time, not only because of her absence.

The days of fasting and praying forced Elizabeth to think of eternity. For the first two days after her return, the Empress of Russia would speak of nothing but mercy and forgiveness. It was the best time for confessions and pleas for clemency, petitions and requests. The servant lucky enough to be in charge of her appointments would double his salary in bribes.

This year, however, the Chancellor of Russia was not considering the benefits of the imperial remorse.

On the day that the Empress left Moscow for the Monastery of St. Sergius, Princess Sophie was allowed to begin her instruction in the Orthodox faith.

The Grand Duke continued his daily visits to his fiancée, but with the Empress’s absence a note of discord appeared between them. Slight, perhaps, easy to ignore, but not to my ear.

It all started when the Princess asked for the Holy Icon to be placed in the corner of her room, the Virgin of Vladimir, which she greeted with a bow every time she entered.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Peter said, giving her a sour look. “You haven’t converted yet.”

There was more he disliked. With the Empress away, Sophie didn’t have to ask for rye bread and
bliny
for breakfast. She didn’t have to drink kvass, either. Or try to speak Russian so often.

“Like some simpleton,” he had said.

I often saw tears in her eyes, but she had quickly learned to keep silent. She didn’t complain when Peter taught her to march and present her musket. She never repeated a request for a green Preobrazhensky uniform instead of the blue Holstein one Peter had ordered her to wear as he marched her through the hallways with great vigor. “Higher,” I’d heard the Duke command. “Lift your legs higher, Sophie. Tempo. Tempo.”

She was trying. She stayed up until nearly dawn to study her Russian vocabulary, copy passages from Russian books, pages and pages of them. If there was any time left after her daily lessons, she practiced the loud reading of the Orthodox Creed. I could hear her voice late each night, stumbling over phrases.

On a piece of vellum paper she kept on her escritoire she had written,
Three things are essential. To please the Empress, to please the Grand Duke, and to please the Russian people
.

The Empress had been gone for a week when I heard Princess Johanna screaming at Sophie. “Acting out,” Johanna had called Sophie’s bouts of nausea and the fainting spells. “Stop behaving like a spoiled child,” she scolded when the Princess begged to be excused from her public appearances.

That morning Princess Sophie got out of bed and vomited dark slime into a bowl the maids carried out quickly, covered with white cloth. Her eyes were glassy with fever.

I saw Princess Johanna shake her daughter’s thin body and urge her to sit up in her bed, to stop pampering herself. “Make the Grand Duke see that a daughter of a Prussian officer is not a weakling,” she snapped.

The vomiting went away after a purging and a day of fasting, but the fever was more persistent. The court doctor who examined the Princess was not alarmed at first. Clear skin meant that it was not smallpox. He, too, was sure that a few days of bed rest was all Sophie needed.

My daughter’ll receive Your Highness tomorrow
, Princess Johanna wrote in answer to the Grand Duke’s inquiry.
She has been touched to hear of Your Highness’s concern for her but begs Your Highness not to worry
.

But the bouts of fever continued in spite of ice-cold compresses that the maids changed every hour. On the third day, the Princess did not recognize her mother. “I want to go out,” she insisted. And then she fainted. The best of Moscow doctors summoned for a consultation agreed that bleeding was the only cure.

Princess Johanna called them barbarians, ignorant fools used to treating thick-skinned peasants. Russian doctors had killed her brother, she ranted, pushing them out of Sophie’s room. She would not let them touch her child.

Nothing would change her mind. No pleading, no arguments that bleeding would purify the blood. Her daughter’s constitution had been upset with too much excitement, she insisted, and unfamiliar food. All Sophie needed were a few more days of fasting. She was already feeling better.

Through the spying hole in the service room, I saw little beyond the drawn curtains of the sickbed and the bent figure of the German chambermaid, picking at her fingernails.

The Princess was lucid enough in the mornings, but by the afternoon, the fever returned. The maids whispered that she was too weak to stand on her own. I heard the surgeon declare that soon even a bleeding might be of little use. On the marble floor of the entrance hall, little Bairta was jumping from one square to the next, for hours, trying not to step on a line, for that would bring bad luck.

Days were still frigid, the air brittle with frost. The invitations for the ducal pair to winter sleigh rides had all been politely refused. From its small box I took the amber with the pair of bees imprisoned inside. I turned it in my hands for a long time before returning it to its hiding place.

“What would
you
want with her?” Princess Johanna had shrilled at me when I asked to see Princess Sophie. “You’ve bothered her enough already!”

“What can we, mere mortals, do to change the will of the Lord?” Chancellor Bestuzhev said and sighed as I reported on Princess Johanna’s obstinacy. “The Lord is my witness this is not how I wished the girl to go.”

“The Grand Duke’ll miss her visits,” I said, wishing to believe my own words.

“The Grand Duke will forget her as soon as she is gone,” the Chancellor replied. I must have winced, for the look he gave me was sharp. “You are not sorry for her, are you?”