The Winter Palace (47 page)

By November, Catherine began her morning walks along the banks of the Neva to steady her nerves, strengthen her constitution, and escape prying eyes. Winter promised the respite of loose woolen shawls and fur-lined pelisses.
By the time Catherine’s favorite snowdrops come back to the banks of the Neva
, I thought,
it will all be over
.

When we were alone, I told her of the Empress’s bleedings, her fainting spells, the nightmares that made her scream. Of the day when the Empress asked, “Have they burned the stubble in the fields after the harvest already, Varvara?”

“Yes, Your Highness,” I said, but my answer did not satisfy her. “What are these fires, then?” she wanted to know.

I leaned out the window, seeing nothing but the gray waters of the Neva.

“The gardeners, Your Highness,” I lied. “They are burning last year’s leaves.”

She looked at me as if my words made no sense.

“How have I displeased God, Varvara?” she asked.

I hesitated.

If she asks me again
, I thought,
she really wants to know
. But she didn’t.

Princess Dashkova went about St. Petersburg prattling about the need for a new Russia, one no longer ruled by the knout and the Prussian hangman. She was nineteen years old and believed herself Russia’s savior, a young woman leading the Grand Duchess and her people to a glorious revolution. “You have only to give the order and we will enthrone you,” I heard her tell the Grand Duchess. She could not fathom why Catherine, this “best friend” who “trusted” her in everything, begged her to wait.

A royal skill
, I thought with pleasure. Tell them no secrets, but make them think you have.

“That oaf,” Catherine said loudly every time Grigory Orlov’s name was mentioned near her in public. The palms of her hands ran over the folds of her dress. It was still possible to hide her belly, but time was running out.

The Empress could barely make a few steps through the room, grasping the ivory handle of her cane, the tusk of an elephant long dead. There were more and more nights when she would look at me with the searching, bewildered gaze of someone whose thoughts were wandering into the next world, but still she asked me about Catherine.

“Does Count Poniatowski write to her, Varvara? Does she answer?”

“The Count writes. The Grand Duchess answers. But not immediately. She makes him wait for her letters.”

“Does she write about me?”

“No, Your Highness. She tells him that he has to be patient. When the Count writes that he wants to come here, she begs him not to.”

“They tell me she has a new lover. Is it true?”

“Yes, Your Highness. Lieutenant Orlov. He eats pineapple and parsley before coming to her, for he wants his sperm to smell sweet.”

“Does Count Poniatowski know?”

“No, Your Highness. She is afraid he might return here if he hears of it. But she doesn’t want him to stop writing. She doesn’t want Orlov to be too sure of his place.”

Every morning Catherine sent her maids to the Winter Palace to inquire about the Empress’s health and to beg to be allowed to come to her side. Every morning she was thanked for her concern but told to wait.

In the first days of December, Monsieur Rastrelli declared the Young Court quarters in the new Winter Palace finished. The Grand Duke had already set the day of his move, but Catherine did not. The shooting pains in her back, she claimed, would make climbing Monsieur Rastrelli’s grand stairs too difficult.

In the corridors,
Das Fräulein
began to rush past the Grand Duchess with only the slightest bow. The Grand Duke asked Princess Dashkova why she bothered to visit his wife so often. “Does Grand Madame Resourceful make you pray to her icons?” he had asked.

Former Chancellor Bestuzhev, banished to his estate at Goretovo, sent me a crate of honey with a note that he hoped I would pass to Catherine. He signed it:
a man reduced to judging disputes over trodden cabbages and slain sheep
.

The Empress still clung to life—greedily, the way she lived.

“Don’t oppose her,” Doctor Halliday cautioned. “Try anything that calms her down.”

I remember the entertainment summoned to her rooms. The juggler who spun colorful ribbons, a Chechen girl who could bend backward to touch her calves with the top of her head, and a monkey dressed in a pink frock, carrying an umbrella and a pocket watch.

By the second week of December the Empress could no longer keep down the foxglove brew that once relieved the shooting pains in her chest. News of further victories at the Prussian front—news she would have relished even a month before—now brought only a flicker of interest in her distracted eyes.

She pushed away the food the servants brought but emptied glass after glass of cold, frothy kvass.

The Blessed Ksenia was seen back on the city streets, telling everyone to make
bliny
and pots of sweet
kissiel
for a big funeral.

On one of these December nights, when the winds blew over the frozen Neva, raising a misty dust of powdery snow, I saw the Empress of All the Russias lift her reddened hands to her eyes. She moved them to the right, then left, but her eyes did not follow.

As if she were going blind, I realized.

The hands fell down on the bed. Pushok, the white tomcat who slept settled in the crook of her neck, began to snore. I moved him gently, and the snoring stopped. The room seemed deeply cold, in spite of the well-stoked stove and thick curtains. I bent over her to adjust her pillow.

“Do you hate me, Varvara?” the Empress asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Hate, Your Majesty?”

“Stop repeating my words.”

“I do not hate Your Highness.”

“Because I’m dying?”

“Your Highness is not dying.”

“Don’t lie to me, Varvara. I know what you think. That I married you off to a guard. That you deserved better.”

“It’s all in the past now,” I said, taking a breath to calm my racing heart.

“The past doesn’t let go of the present that easily.…”

A fit of coughing overtook her, and she could not finish. I fetched a glass with water for her to sip from. I held her shoulders as she shook, flustered and grimacing with pain. I wiped her mouth with a handkerchief.

Hate can be as brittle as a wishbone.

By the time the coughing stopped, I could no longer hold on to the memories of her anger, her vanity, the searing pain of her dismissals. My resentment crumbled.
An old woman facing death
, I thought, as she fell back into her pillow. In the end we are all alone with fear.

She knew. She saw it on my face, the yielding of compassion. In the silence that followed, Elizabeth pointed at the wall where her oldest portrait hung, that little naked Princess in her father’s court.

“They wanted to kill me, but I lived. I want him to live, too. You have to promise me that you’ll keep my grandnephew safe. Swear to me that when I die you won’t let anyone harm him.”

I moved uncomfortably. “Who am I to make such a promise?”

“You are her tongue.”

I began to protest, but the Empress silenced me with an impatient wave of her hand.

I still wonder what she knew in these last days of her life. Had her spies told her of the plot to overthrow Peter? Of Catherine’s pregnancy?

“Give me the icon, Varvara.”

I put the Holy Icon of Our Lady of Kazan in her hands. “Will you swear on your daughter’s life that you will keep him safe?” Her faded blue eyes were pleading.

I kissed the Holy Icon. I promised to protect Grand Duke Paul Petrovich.

Exhausted, the Empress closed her eyes. When she extended her hand again, I felt her hot, swollen fingers touch my cheek, slide down toward my chin, a phantom of caress.

“Tell the Grand Duchess I’ll see her now,” she muttered.

No one was allowed to stay in the Imperial Bedroom after Catherine arrived. Before the doors closed behind me—wide, gilded doors crowned with the double-headed Russian eagle—I caught a glimpse of Catherine’s bending figure and Elizabeth’s hand raised in a blessing.

When the Grand Duchess opened the doors an hour later, her eyes were red from crying.

I wondered if she, too, had sworn to keep her son safe.

From that day on, Catherine refused to leave the Imperial Bedroom, even for an instant. “My place is at Her Majesty’s side,” she’d say when we urged her to rest. Sometimes I was able to persuade her to doze on the chaise, but she would not go back to her rooms in the temporary palace. When the priest came to say his prayers, she knelt with all of us on the floor, clustered around the Empress’s bed.

The Grand Duke arrived each morning, stood by his aunt’s bedside for a short while, listening to the doctor’s report, and hurried out.

From the anterooms came the sounds of raised voices. The Shuvalovs had settled themselves there already, receiving petitioners eager for new positions. Through the prayers that filled Elizabeth’s room, we heard the sounds of bargaining. Someone called for more food, glass shattered, a kicked dog wailed.

There is but a thin line
, I thought,
that separates an Emperor from a fool
.

The end, when it finally came, was bathed in blood.

First a thick, red stream appeared under the Empress’s nose and wouldn’t stop. Father Theodorsky intoned a prayer. He was asking God to be merciful to His daughter, to deliver her from the pain of this earth. A moment later the Empress was suffocating, coughing up blood, gasping desperately for a drop of air, her face, breasts, all splattered, stained, reddened.

Catherine did not recoil. Her hands and her dress spattered with blood, she ordered more candles, water, rags. She asked the surgeon to give the Empress another sip of laudanum. I watched her for any sign of faintness, but there was none.

An hour passed, and Elizabeth was still fighting. She tore out the dressing from her nose, upset the bowl filled with blood and bile, spilling its contents on the carpet.

Dying is not easy
, I remember thinking. The mighty Empress of All the Russias, her hands restless, grasped everything—the doctor’s arm, the towel, the sheets. She was growing weaker, slumping back on the pillows, staring at us as if we were all strangers, a pale, livid, blotched face with stricken eyes.

Then, after the frenzied rush of the last efforts to bring Elizabeth some comfort, the room fell silent. Someone ran to fetch the Crown Prince. I rushed to the window to let in some fresh air. I meant to open it just a crack, but the window frame swung out of my hand. A freezing gust extinguished the candles.

“Close it!” I heard Peter’s piercing voice. “Do you want me to catch my death from cold?”

He was rubbing his hands like a merchant closing a long-anticipated deal.

I closed the window and drew back the curtains.

Peter leaned over the bed. The muscles in his pockmarked face twitched. “Is she really dead?” he asked, giggling nervously, as everyone in the room, including Catherine, fell to their knees before him. In the corner of my eye I saw one of the cats arch its back and rub its cheek against his leg.

It was four o’clock on Christmas Day, 1761, when Prince Trubetskoy, the Procurator-General, with tears on his wrinkled and powdered face, threw open the doors to the antechamber to announce: “Her Imperial Majesty has fallen asleep in God. God save Our Most Gracious Sovereign the Emperor Peter
III
.”

In that stifling death chamber, I felt a strange longing to run out into the freezing cold of the streets. It was not the Great Perspective Road that beckoned me but the backstreets and out-of-the-way lanes of clay houses where animals lowed after the day’s labor. Where people huddled behind their thin walls and groaned.

This is her route
, I thought, my mind racing past the dingy taverns by the Fontanka River where the fiddles ruled; where Cossacks danced, jutting out their legs in a show of prowess; where old men told stories of Mongol horses whose nostrils were slit to make them breathe easier. This was the route the soul of the Empress surely wandered before leaving this world, while, on her bed, she lay with eyes closed, hands folded, a stiffening body, absent and indifferent at last.

In the Grand Throne Room of the Winter Palace, Peter—in the green uniform of the Preobrazhensky Guards—received homage from the Archbishop of Novgorod, who invited him to ascend the Romanovs’ ancestral throne. No one had been sent to fetch Grand Duke Paul from the nursery; no one had brought Catherine from Elizabeth’s deathbed.

The new Emperor was going to rule alone.

Inside the palace, courtiers thronged and lined up to pay their tributes. Outside, all regiments of the guards gathered in the torch-lit courtyard, waiting for their turn to swear their allegiance, to lower their standards in salutes and cheers.

On the morning of December 26, at the stroke of six o’clock, the thunder of cannons from the Petropavlovsky Fortress proclaimed the beginning of new Russia.

T
he dead come back, brush against me, thieves breaking into my nights, waking me up with a jolt of my heart, knocking about in the chimney. The wrong dead, unwelcome, unwanted, while those whom I love stay away.
Go back to eternity
, I say to their shadows.

But they do not leave. They know that I cannot bear their pleading. That my skin is too raw, my own doubts too grave, that I, too, am suspicious of the betrayals we who called ourselves Catherine’s friends delivered in these first six months after Elizabeth’s death.

In the corridors of the Winter Palace, where Elizabeth’s embalmed body lay in state, clothed in silver and crowned in gold, as her weeping subjects passed by the open casket, I felt like a gambler who had bet everything on one throw of dice:
Let it be fast, so that what is new can begin
.

But it didn’t begin, not for an agonizingly tense while. Those who had shrieked in horror at Peter’s antics when he was the Grand Duke were now fawning over him. After thirty-seven years, Russia was again ruled by a man! As if all that had gone wrong with Russia could be blamed on women and their whims.