The Winter Palace (2 page)

If Chancellor Bestuzhev was disappointed about the imperial decision, he did not show it. I saw him bend to murmur something into Elizabeth’s ear. She smacked him playfully with her folded fan. He took her hand in his and kissed it. Slowly, his lips lingering over her fingertips.

I didn’t look away.

I was sixteen then, rosy-cheeked and nimble, and already stripped of illusions, one of the countless, nameless girls in the Empire of the East. Pretty enough to pinch or pat on her buttocks as she passed by or to whisper lascivious words into her ear. I knew that “a ward of the Crown” was but a fancy name for a beggar whose luck could run out at any time.

So many of us, orphaned or abandoned, were left at the Empress’s feet. Clamoring for a nod of her head or her amused grin. For a chance, however slight, that she might think us worthy of another look. That we could be of use.

Count Razumovsky, a Ukrainian choirboy who had once charmed his Tsarina with his hooded black eyes and rich baritone, cleared his throat. The Emperor of the Night, we called him, the most forgiving of all Elizabeth’s lovers. The thick curtains were drawn, the candles lit. In the flickering light, Elizabeth’s face took on a silvery glow, and the room filled with the soothing, mournful chords of her favorite
duma
.

If you find someone better, you will forget me;
If you find someone worse, your thoughts will bring me back
.

My father was a bookbinder. In Poland, where we came from, there was not enough work for him—a young man with a wife, children, and an ambition to move up in the world.

We would have gone to Berlin, where my father had once been an apprentice, had it not been for Prince Kazimierz Czartoryski, Castellan of Vilnius, who had given him his first commission. Impressed by my father’s craft, the Prince promised to remember him. He kept his word. When Empress Anne of Russia wanted precious old volumes restored, the Prince said, “I know just the man. An artisan of true grace and imagination, especially skilled in gold tooling.”

It was the spring of 1734. I was seven years old and my baby brother had just been born.

“Tell him to come to St. Petersburg,” the Empress said. “Here a good man always has a future.”

A city willed by one man, my father called St. Petersburg. The new capital of Russia, he told me, had been built in defiance of the unruly waves of the Neva and the ruthless darkness of northern winters.

We came by ship in the fall of 1734. Only three of us. My baby brother had been buried in the Warsaw cemetery. Yet another son who would not grow to learn his father’s trade and inherit his father’s business.

“This is our chance,” Papa told us, pointing at the flat line of the land from which, out of the morning haze, I discerned wavering shapes of buildings as if drawn by a child’s hand. Behind us, all I saw was the ship’s foamy wake.

“God willing,” Mama said, her voice softened with hope. In Warsaw, a fortune-teller had told my mother that she would live long enough to see her daughter marry a great and powerful man. “A noble,” the woman had said, giving Mama a lingering look. It was all hidden in the crisscrossing lines of Mama’s palm, loss that would come and go, joy that would shine after a long journey. My father frowned when he heard these predictions, but Mama was so happy that she gave the woman a silver coin.

My mother was of noble blood, although her family was too poor to make much of their status. “A house, a barn, a few cows,” my father used to say and laugh. “You could tell they were not peasants, for before your grandfather set off to plow his few acres, he put on his white gloves and his saber.”

My father liked to talk of the day he surprised my mother in a relative’s parlor, as she was bending over a length of lace, needle in hand. He had been summoned to pick up some old books for binding, and Mama had been sent there by her widowed mother in hope of better prospects. Feeling his eyes on her, she faltered and pricked her finger. “You frightened me,” she exclaimed, and sucked on her wound.

He fell in love that very instant.

When he returned, a few days later, he gave her a book he had bound himself.
La Princesse de Clèves
, Mama told us, teasing him laughingly about his choice, proud of her polished French. The story of a wife in love with another man? A husband spying on his wife? What were you thinking then, she would ask Father.

He wasn’t thinking. He was besotted. He wanted no one else but her.

“A clever girl like you shouldn’t be mending lace,” he had said that day.

She took the book he’d brought. He watched how reverently she opened the gilded pages. How she raised her eyes to take in his smart figure, compact and fine-boned, his brown, determined eyes. The silver buttons he had polished. The hands that knew how to give a new life to a tattered volume eaten with mold. She listened when he told her of Berlin, where he had seen his first cameo bindings and where he had heard his first opera.

“A bookbinder’s wife,” my grandmother said and sighed when, a few weeks later, my father asked her for my mother’s hand. My grandmother didn’t care for my father’s learning, or his skills. He was in trade. Her only daughter was going down in the world. It was to appease her that my parents named me after her. She died before my first birthday.

Barbara
, or
Basieńka
, my mother called me. In Polish, as in Russian, a name has many transformations. It can expand or contract, sound official and hard or soft and playful. Its shifting shape can turn its bearer into a helpless child or a woman in charge. A lover or a lady, a friend or a foe.

In Russian, I became
Varvara
.

Days after we arrived in St. Petersburg, my father began working for the Imperial Library. “The writings of wise and learned men,” he called it. “A collection worthy of a great monarch.” Peter the Great had amassed fifteen thousand books during his grand tour of Europe; many of them were now in dire need of my father’s skills.

My mother was beaming with pride. Her mother had been wrong. She had chosen her husband well. What was impossible in Poland would be possible here in Russia. Empress Anna had asked to see the new bindings as soon as they were finished, and in her mind’s eye Mama already saw me at court, catching the eye of some noble.

“She is still a child,” my father protested.

“More time for you, to make a name for yourself,” Mama would retort. For her the tattered, moldy volumes from the Imperial Library were a promise, a sign of future favors, so richly deserved.

By the end of our second year in St. Petersburg, we were living in our own house. True, it was on Vasilevsky Island with its long-abandoned, silt-choked canals, with its brush-covered fields where wolves still roamed at night, but it was far better than what we had in Warsaw.

The house was wooden but spacious, with a cellar for my father’s workshop. He took on apprentices. We had maids and footmen, a cook, a carriage and a sleigh. My mother hired a French and a German tutor for me, and then a dancing and deportment master who assured her that he had once taught Countess Vorontzova’s niece. When the time came, Mama was determined her daughter would be ready for a good marriage.

Every day, as soon as my lessons ended, I sneaked into my father’s workshop. Seated on a small stool in a corner, I watched the slow, deliberate movements of Papa’s hands as he chose the right piece of leather from the pile he kept by the door. “The best part of a skin is near the backbone,” he would tell me. “The rest is not as even in color.” I loved watching when he placed the pattern for the binding on the leather, moved it so as to avoid imperfections, and, using the softest parts of the skin, finally cut it.

He had shown me books touched by lesser craftsmen, books he was now obliged to repair. “This should never have happened,” he would say, shaking his head and pointing to where gold leaf had come unglued or had tarnished from too much heat. His secrets were simple. The sharpness of a paring knife, he would tell me, was far more important than the strength of the hands. Like his apprentices, I was to learn that forcing a dull knife would only damage the leather.

“Will you remember what I’m teaching you, Barbara?” he wondered.

Breathing in the workshop odors of vinegar and soot and glue, I promised that I would.

“Having aspirations,” my mother called it. She was a practical woman. Her dreams were always rooted in possibility. Wasn’t her husband a man of exceptional talents? Empress Anna had not yet received him, but hadn’t a princess of the court summoned him to the Winter Palace once already?

It was Mama’s favorite story. In a small garret room in the upper reaches of the palace, Princess Elizabeth had handed my father her treasure, a tattered prayer book with large letters that did not strain her eyes. “A gift from someone dear to me,” she’d told him. “I don’t even know if it can be repaired.”

Gingerly, my father took the book and caressed the cracked leather of its cover. He examined the rubies and sapphires that made the shape of a cross, pleased that none were missing. He took note of the loose pages and thinning stitches.

“Yes,” he told Princess Elizabeth. “It can.”

She kept looking at him.

“Not a speck will be lost,” he promised the Princess, extracting a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wrapping the book.

Over the next two weeks my father polished and secured each jewel, glued in loose pages, and stiffened the fragile covers. When the layer of grime was wiped off, the leather turned out to be mostly undamaged. Good calfskin, the color of rust, he would say, needed but a touch of birch oil to last forever. In the end it was the prayer book’s gilding that suffered the most from time and touch, but gold tooling was my father’s greatest skill. When he finished, no one could tell where old pattern ended and new began.

Elizabeth took her prayer book in her hands, turning the pages, carefully at first, marveling at how sturdy they were. The daughter of Peter the Great put her hand on Papa’s shoulder and let him see the tears of gratitude that shone in her eyes.

It had happened before, Mama reminded us. Serve the Tsar well, and you can rise through the Russian Table of Ranks. Promoted to the fourteenth grade, a commoner becomes a noble. A minor noble at first, but when he reaches the eighth grade, his noble status extends to his wife and children.

“And then?” I’d ask.

“A princess of the court always needs beautiful and clever girls to serve her, Barbara. Once you are at the Winter Palace, nothing is impossible.”

The Imperial Library was housed in the west wing of Kunstkamera, the Tsar’s museum, for it was not just learned books that Peter the Great wanted to display but also his curiosities. There were precious stones and fossils, herbaria with plants from the New World, and his collection of monsters: glass jars with specimens of human and animal deformities the Tsar had ordered his officials to bring him from all across Russia.

“A museum is a temple of knowledge,” my father told me, “a lit lamp that sends its rays into the darkness, the proof of the infinite variety of life.”

For Peter the Great had a mission—to enlighten his people. There was no evil eye, no spells capable of transforming a healthy fetus into a monster, because, as the Tsar’s words inscribed on a Kunstkamera wall declared,
The Creator alone is the God of all creatures, not the Devil
.

“A cursed place,” our maids called the museum, crossing themselves every time they passed the Kunstkamera’s heavy doors. They spoke of rooms in which eyes of the dead stared at the living, where body parts were waiting for their rightful owners, who would—they believed—come to fetch them and give them the burial they deserved.

Year after year, every Monday morning, my father went to Kunstkamera to select the books he would work on that week. When he returned home, his garments smelled of mold and dust. The maids soaked them overnight before washing, and said that they still stained the water black. I saw them cross themselves the Orthodox way, with three fingers touching, left shoulder first, before they picked up my father’s clothes. “The Devil’s work,” they said, “never brought anything good.”

“Are you not afraid of monsters?” I asked my father once.

Papa answered with his own question. “How can anything on this earth be unnatural, excluded from the laws of creation?” In his eyes I saw a flicker of disappointment in me. “You should never say the word
monster
, Barbara.”

I thought about this a lot. I still do. I watch for words that shape our thoughts, our destiny.

A tongue.

A gazette.

An Empress.

A spy.

Six years after we arrived in St. Petersburg, Empress Anne died, having named baby Ivan VI her successor and her German minister, Biron, Regent. The Palace Guards did not approve. Scheming foreigners, they muttered, were taking hold of Russia, grabbing what wasn’t theirs. What would they do next? Strike out at the Orthodox faith? The Regency swiftly passed from Biron to the baby’s mother, Anna Leopoldovna, but the rumors of foreign masters did not stop. When a year later, on November 25 of 1741, Princess Elizabeth, the only surviving child of Peter the Great, stormed the Winter Palace, Russia rejoiced. It was high time, everyone said, for a wholly Russian princess to claim what was still left of her inheritance.

As soon as Princess Elizabeth seized the throne she had exiled the German advisers. A triumphant decree announced the end of “degrading foreign oppression.” Another imperial ukase forbade anyone to mention Ivan VI’s name. All coins with his image had to be returned to the mint and exchanged for new ones. Anyone defying Elizabeth’s order would have their right hand cut off. By April of 1742, the princess who once asked my father to bind her precious prayer book was crowned the Empress of All the Russias.

“Go to her,” my mother urged my father. “Remind her who you are. Offer your services at her court.”

My father hesitated. Even though the work at the Imperial Library ended with Empress Anne’s death, he had built up enough of a reputation to get plenty of private commissions. “We are doing fine,” I would hear him tell Mama. “We are happy. What else do we need?”