The Winter Palace (23 page)

I recognized the room we were ushered to, the cedar panels that could be easily washed with water, the seats, perched on a platform, forming a semicircle against the back wall, turning it into a stage. “The mad room,” the Empress used to call it, her own private asylum, where the insane were brought for her to watch. Pictures and ornaments were hung high so that the madmen couldn’t reach for them in their thrashings. Elizabeth came here often in the first months of her rule. The whisperings of the bad blood, she liked to say, can be quite instructive. God speaks to us through strange channels, so we have to listen to the most puzzling of words.

There were only a few of us present, faces invisible in the darkness, muffled mutterings broken up by nervous giggles. Outside, in the streets banked with snow, the crowds were cheering Elizabeth Petrovna’s glorious reign, wishing her a long life and God’s protection. St. Petersburg taverns were serving free vodka and
bliny
.

On the stage the footmen lowered large wooden planks suspended from the ceiling and lit the candles. Now there was enough light to see the stage and the first row, where Catherine and Peter, their absence so jarring in the crowded festivities of the Throne Room, sat. Beside them were the Empress and her Gentleman of the Bedchamber.

From where I was, Catherine’s face looked small and narrow, like her waist. I recalled the letter that told me of mysterious pains in her joints. Oranienbaum’s climate was not healthy, she’d written.

The Empress clapped her hands. A door, deftly hidden in the paneling, opened. They were led in, her madmen: the monk who cut off his genitals with a razor to purify himself from desire and who insisted that only castrated humanity could build a true Kingdom of God; a valet who foamed at the mouth and claimed he had seen a demon woman undress herself before him and call him toward her.

“She had black teeth and big breasts. She had snakes and twigs in her hair,” he announced when the Empress asked him how he could tell that she was truly a demon. “The snakes moved and the twigs did not.” He snapped his fingers and smacked his lips. And then he wiped them with the back of his hand.

The doors opened again and two guards entered, gripping a tall, beefy youth by the arms. His complexion was ashen, his eyes haggard. He couldn’t keep them still but looked around as if something could jump out of the shadows at any moment and attack him.

The youth was dressed in a dirty sailor’s uniform, torn at the sleeves. He was barefoot, his feet callused and filthy with mud. When the guards released his arms, he made a circle around the room, shouting. “Make room for Ivanushka! Make room for Ivanushka!”

He came to a stop, raised his fists to the heavens, and screamed. The guards stepped back.

Beside me, I saw Egor’s hand fly to his heart and pause there.

Was it really him? Prince Ivan, the baby Tsar who had vanished on that November night more than nine years before when Elizabeth went to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Grenadiers, beseeching them to help her? Or did the Empress of Russia trust the power of illusion?

“What is your name?” she asked the youth now.

“Ivan.”

“Who are you, Ivan?”

“A prince.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“No.”

“You are in the Imperial Palace.”

“Yes. A prince lives in a palace.”

“But you don’t live here. We’ve brought you here.”

“I live here. This is my room.”

“If you are a prince, then where is your court?”

“Here. These people are my court. There are more of them. You don’t see them, but there are more. Lots of people. I can hear them. You can hear them, too. They call me Ivanushka. They know.”

“What do they know?”

“That God loves me.”

“What do you want to do now?”

The youth paused for a moment, troubled by the question. His fingers rose to his lips, and he sucked on them loudly. One of the guards moved forward as if to push him, but he swirled back and thumped his foot. The guard lunged forward. The Empress raised her hand to restrain him.

“What do you want to do, Ivanushka?” she repeated.

“I want to eat.”

“Are you hungry?”

He nodded.

“What do you like to eat?”

“Meat. Eggs. More eggs. Give me more eggs!”

“You shall have eggs.”

Another signal, and with a squeak the door in the back wall opened again. Three footmen carried in a small table, a chair, and a platter piled with food. Hard-boiled eggs, a whole roasted pheasant, a loaf of dark peasant bread.

Ivanushka did not bother sitting down. He flung himself on the food, ravenous and insatiable. He stuffed it inside his mouth, licking his fingers; he broke chunks of bread from the loaf and dipped them in the sauce. Drippings from the pheasant stained his sailor’s uniform; grease clung to his hair. But when an attendant approached with a towel, he shoved him away with a force that was astounding. The attendant was hurled against the wall; the bowl of water smashed on the floor.

“We are going now, Ivanushka. Is there anything else you want to tell us?” Elizabeth asked.

He didn’t hear. He had bitten a hard-boiled egg in half, and was plucking out the yolk with his fingers.

Was this public display of madness the Shuvalovs’ idea? I wondered. A warning not to pin one’s hopes on the ousted Tsar? What were they hoping for? Triumph over Elizabeth’s terror of a palace coup? Or a display of their own power?

The Empress rose and turned to the Grand Duchess.

“His mother may be dead.” Her lips sucked the words she spoke, the sound of bones emptied of their marrow. “But she had two more children after him. Plenty of heirs, if you don’t have one.”

Catherine rose from her seat. I couldn’t see her face as she walked out.
How easy it could be to get rid of her
, I thought. There was no need for crude methods, such as a thick pillow to cut off her breath. An innocent visit to a house where someone had just died of smallpox could be so easily arranged, a place offered on the ottoman where the sick person had just sat, a gift of a fan that had soothed the fever, or a cup touched by the lips of the sick.

Who would ask what had happened to a barren wife with no friends? Wasn’t the first wife of Peter the Great forced to renounce the world? Hadn’t she spent her days in a convent, watched at all hours, her guards given orders to slash her throat if anyone tried to free her?

There was no mention of that evening in the mad room in the next letter that arrived from Oranienbaum. Instead, Catherine wrote of the marionettes the Grand Duke had bought from a street troupe, an entire cast of wooden puppets, which he stripped of their rags and decked in the costumes he had designed himself. The play he wrote for his new toys was about a certain Faust, a charlatan, a drunken vagabond who tried to pass for a learned man and a great magician.

The Soldier has ordered a new carpentry tool set and has had long consultations with puppeteers. As a result of his tinkering with the backbones, joints, and pulleys, the Faust marionette can twitch its nose, scratch its head, and move its cheeks in a rather clever fashion
.

I told him that I thought it a diversion far better than others
.

I sat at my escritoire and took out a fresh quill. With the Shuvalovs growing in influence, with the Grand Duke flattered out of the little sense he still possessed, Catherine needed her allies. The guards? True, they were not happy with the Shuvalovs’ ascension. Ivan Ivanovich strutted the corridors like a peacock, I heard them grumble. His hands, so dainty and soft, would not hold a horse. But the guards were in the Winter Palace, not in Oranienbaum.

Only the Chancellor could help her now. As long as she would be careful not to trust him.

“I do not choose my friends by what they can do for me,” I had told him that evening.
But I also do not abandon them when they need me
, I thought now.

This necessary new alliance
, I wrote to Catherine,
will buy you time in these trying times
.

That night, I dreamed of Madame Kluge, the exiled Chief Maid.

I saw her at the end of some long winding road, alone, a black shawl around her shoulders, walking.

I stopped my carriage and asked her to step inside. “I’ll take you where you want to go,” I offered.

She gave me a look of great sadness. Then she shook her head.

“I don’t want to go where you are going,” she told me.

I closed the carriage door and moved on into the darkness, tormented by questions I had pushed away long enough. Had I truly been a mere child led astray? Had I not willingly listened to the spymaster’s voice? Had I not touched his flesh again and again?

When I woke, I was choking with tears. Egor was tossing in his sleep, muttering. The sheets were twisted, damp with sweat.

Suddenly I was struck by a terror that Darya might die, her death a punishment for my sins. The fear pierced me with such force that I got out of bed. I bent over my sleeping child. Her cheeks were warm, her breath even.

I knelt beside her cradle. I prayed until daylight spilled into the room.

I
n the first days of the new year, when Egor and his fellow officers came to our parlor for a late-night faro game, I retired to my bedroom.
Lean young dogs
, I called them in my thoughts. Ruffling up their fur, baring their fangs. All muscle and speed, eager for a fight.

Government and the army
, I’d hear their voices,
the backbone of empires
. And who does Russia have? Bestuzhev and his protégé Apraxin. Chancellor and Field Marshal. Two old farts, missing their birds at a hunt, growing too fat to mount a horse by themselves, fainting in the heat of
banya
. And trailing behind their backs, rooting in their waste, come the Shuvalovs. They have already pushed Ivan into the Imperial Bed. Now they are eyeing the future Emperor, slobbering at his feet.

I heard my husband’s voice rise above the din in an imitation of Countess Shuvalova’s syrupy praise:
No one is more generous or more kind, Your Highness. Your memory is astounding. Your military interests a true sign of the Romanov blood. If it weren’t for your barren German wife, all would be well
.

I got up and crept to the adjacent room where Darya slept, now that she had outgrown her cradle. Barefoot, for I didn’t want to wake her.

That afternoon Egor had brought her a fistful of last year’s chestnuts he had saved for her, glossy and plump inside prickly shells. They were now beside her bed, turned into fiery brown horses and soldiers marching to a battle that would vanquish Russia’s enemies.

“What kind of games are being played behind our backs?” I heard my husband continue a little drunkenly. “Does anyone at the palace care for Russia’s future?”

Darya stirred in her sleep. I opened the curtains and put my forehead against the cold glass. My breath misted the pane. Outside, on the Apothecary Lane, snow drifted.

There is regret in the memory of this moment. Regret that I did not hear the bitterness in my husband’s voice.

One moment my daughter was learning to take her first wobbly steps, grasping my hand, steadying herself as she clung to the folds of my dress. Next, she’d run to me giggling when I clapped my hands.

So hopeful, I thought, when I watched her, happily welcoming anyone she saw, a stranger or a friend. Toward her comes the world with all its cruelties and horrors. How can I protect her, teach her to know whom to trust?

Egor warmed to the slightest mention of Darenka. He marveled at the easy grace of her steps, the fierce energy with which she hurled herself into his arms. “Up,” she squealed, “up,” until he lifted her into the air. It was for her that he turned into a bear lumbering from the forest to snatch the dinner she didn’t want to eat, or to conjure up angels from shadows on the walls.

“You stole your Papa’s heart,” Masha would tell her in the months to come.

“How?”

“Like a thief does. Before he had the time to turn around and catch you.”

Children know that to bring people together one has to seduce them, just like one seduces a lover, slowly, patiently, with stories and secrets. Nestled on my lap, my daughter would call for Egor to sit beside us. Carried in his arms, she stretched her hands to hold on to me.

At night, she demanded stories of a little girl who came to St. Petersburg with her parents from far, far away, and of a little boy who built fortresses out of snow and who ate a bowl of his mother’s
bliny
dipped in sour cream until he got sick. She wanted to hear my mother’s Polish songs and Egor’s
dumy
about the wind in the steppes and the Cossack riding away from home.

I recall Masha asking her once, “Whom do you love more, Darenka—your Mama or your Papa?”

Her little face had reddened, and she burst into tears.

But children do not know that some secrets are too terrible to share and some dreams too powerful to die.

“What kind of future do you have in mind for her?” I’d ask Egor, standing in his path, holding another unpaid bill to his face. Loving a child meant more than spoiling her with gifts she didn’t yet need: a dress, a guitar, a set of tiny china cups for a dolls’ house, a telescope.

In a year or so a governess would have to be hired, a music teacher, a dancemaster. With what? Empty promises? More talk of yet another country estate we cannot afford?

I could hear it in my own voice, the cold, insidious anger of that first night of our marriage when I envied the death maidens, their bodies laced with poison.

“Do you ever worry what would become of her if you died? What can we count on then? Mercy? Charity?”

He’d stare at me, with Darya’s black eyes, before turning on his heel and stalking out.

Do not ask me about the “awaited news,” please
, and so I didn’t. It had to suffice that in January of 1752 the Chancellor had relaxed his rules, that Catherine could write of sleigh rides and new ball gowns. The Grand Duke was busy training hunting dogs and made a terrible racket, but—Catherine wrote—Peter also presented her with a small English poodle dressed up in petticoats. They went to a wedding and danced rather awkwardly but together. The Empress invited them to her masquerade, and Catherine had a green Preobrazhensky uniform with red facings made for the occasion. One of the court fools handed the Empress a hedgehog she mistook for a mouse, and she almost fainted with fright. A country house collapsed moments after Catherine fled from it. Later she was told that some incompetent foreman had removed a supporting beam. She complained of a toothache, and then—when her tooth had been extracted, together with a piece of her lower jaw—she described how the surgeon’s five fingers had imprinted blue-and-yellow marks on her cheeks.