The Winter Palace (55 page)

I even checked the walls for secret doors. I found nothing.

Spiders spin two kinds of threads, I recalled. A smooth one to walk on, a sticky one to trap.

When Darya finally went to bed that night, teary but content, I hurried through the corridors of the Winter Palace, my figure multiplied in the gilded mirrors. I hurried by the still-unfinished wing, rooms left unpainted because Monsieur Rastrelli, offended by Catherine’s order to remove some of the ornate gildings from the Imperial Suite, had departed for Courland.

My heart pounded; I was dizzy with questions.
Does friendship flee from Sovereigns?
I asked myself bitterly.
Or do Sovereigns flee from friendship?

I thought of Catherine in the Moscow cathedral, in her robe of silver trimmed with ermine and embroidered with two-headed eagles. Of Catherine taking the crown in her own hands and placing it on her head.

Bestuzhev’s voice kept encroaching on my thoughts:
She is beginning to think she has done it all by herself.… Are you that sure she trusts you? … Another disposable spy … You believed you were special
.

Darenka’s frightened face flashed through these words, my child in pain, coaxed into a betrayal. An innocent soul blaming herself for the court’s poisonous malice.

Is this what I want for my daughter?

I swept by footmen snoring over tables, guards squabbling over card games. I recalled the talk of vicious fights in the guards’ quarters, smashed skulls, broken limbs, skin slashed with knives. The Orlovs, I’d heard, were on the lookout for any man foolish enough to believe he could replace Grigory in Catherine’s bed.

How long had I been fooling myself?
What else have I missed? What have I already lost forever?

Cats scurried away at the sound of my steps. The maids said that Murka had gone feral. They whispered that they sometimes saw Elizabeth’s old cat roaming through the gardens, stiffening at the sight of a sparrow, disappearing into the hedge if any human moved toward him.

It was almost five o’clock when I returned to our rooms to find Masha waiting for me.

She helped me change my soiled dress, despairing over my crumpled silks. I would catch my death from such running about, she scolded. Drag some misfortune home.

“The Empress must be up already,” she said.

“There you are, Varenka,” Catherine exclaimed when I walked into the Imperial Study, carrying the silver tray. “You’ve never been late before. I’ve been worried. Look at you, your hands are trembling!”

There was so much concern in her voice that for a moment it seemed that all I had learned never happened. That I had to be in the wrong, that Darya must have misunderstood Catherine’s intentions. These thoughts were so tempting, so enticing, that I stood motionless, as if in a haze, the words I had wished to say withering in my throat. “Darya is very unhappy,” I managed. “She doesn’t want to dance in the ballet.”

Catherine pushed aside a pile of papers and motioned for me to sit beside her.

“Is this because of the ending?” she asked, softly, when I hesitated. “But I,
too
, dislike it. Tell poor Darenka I’ve already spoken to Herr Gilferding. Why bring up these sad feelings in a story? I told him. Don’t we have enough problems in our own lives?”

I felt a brief flare of panic. Something was stirring inside me, some dark current of unease, pulling me and repelling at the same time. “It’s not about the ending,” I murmured.

I did not sit down, but Catherine had not noticed. She was outlining the changes to the tale she had made. Hymen would stop Polyphemus at the last moment. Polyphemus, overtaken by remorse, would hide his face with shame until he is forgiven. It would be a comic ballet. Herr Gilferding said her changes were brilliant. And then, realizing that I was still standing, she asked, “But why don’t you sit, Varenka?”

“It’s not about the ballet,” I said.

Catherine put her quill down. “What is it about, then?” Her eyes met mine, still concerned but already urging me to move on.

I blurted them out, if not the words I had wished to say, then their shadowy twins: “Did you really think I could’ve betrayed you? Have I not always been a good friend? How could you ask my daughter such questions about me?” Catherine frowned, but I would not stop. “Darya is not as we used to be at her age. She is still a
child
.”

Catherine stared at me as if I made no sense. No matter how incomprehensible it seems to me now, I still expected her to explain it all away. Tear what had happened, the way I tore the filthy drawing Darya had found. But the words I heard were curt and cold. “Aren’t you forgetting your place, Varvara Nikolayevna? What is it exactly that you mind so much?”

Tears stung my eyes. “You wanted my daughter to
spy
on me!”

“I merely asked her to tell me what had happened. For
you
did not!”

There was so much force in her voice that, to my astonishment, I began to defend myself, explaining the innocuous circumstances of my silence. “Grigory is jealous of Stanislav. He drank too much, and he came by to ask me if Stanislav was still writing to you. He fell asleep in my parlor. When he awoke, he apologized and begged me to keep his visit a secret. He was ashamed.”

“Do you have the note he wrote?” Catherine leaned toward me. Her eyes never left my face.

“I didn’t keep it. I didn’t think it was important.”

“I told you once to let me be the judge of what is important, Varenka.”

The memory that came to me then was that of a whip lashing my calves, sharp, biting, cutting the skin. And the bitter taste of my own impotence.

“You are the Empress,” I retorted. “You do what suits you.”

Catherine sighed, a mother despairing over her recalcitrant child yet ultimately sure of her own victory. “I don’t have time for accusations. I know you’ve not always been happy here. But there is no need for scenes of injured pride. Let’s not mention this again. Tell Darenka she will be a wonderful nymph.”

“She is not going to dance,” I heard myself say.

Catherine gave me an impatient look.

“Very well, Varenka,” she said. “Darya won’t dance in the ballet, if this is what you both wish. And now, I have important business to attend to, and you need to calm down before we speak again.”

I made a step toward the door. Then I could not resist.

“How many did you have?” I asked, gruffly.

She raised her head.

“How many what?” she asked.

“Tongues. In Elizabeth’s bedroom. How many besides me?”

I saw her expression, a smile tinged with pity. I fumbled for the door.

Moments later, I was rushing blindly down the wide marble stairs of the Winter Palace, cursing my own tears.

I
t is well past midnight, my Duval watch confirms, its case covered with clusters of diamond petals, one of Catherine’s gifts to me.

Dear Varenka
, Catherine wrote in her last letter to me.
When are you coming back?
I picture her at her writing desk at dawn, with a steaming coffeepot on a silver tray.

The candle wavers and hisses. A moth has singed its wings and lies writhing in a pool of molten wax. I make sure the quills are sharp, the ink not too thick, and that I have enough plain paper, for I find the glazed one hard on my eyes. The ink gives off a sweet yet slightly sickening smell. Outside, the November darkness is impenetrable, broken at times by the lantern of a passerby and the howling of dogs. In St. Petersburg, Stanislav used to call such time “unguarded.” It was during the northern winters, when the nights came early and stayed long, that confessions came and secrets were revealed.

“This unfortunate outburst of yours, Varenka,” Catherine had said when she’d summoned me to the Imperial Bedroom later that day. “I won’t let it destroy years of friendship.”

Her silk skirts rustled as she paced the room; the hem of her golden court gown swept the floor.

I watched her face as she spoke. Her blue eyes were sparkling. Her smile was warm. As if nothing had happened, as if I’d imagined it all.

“What you need is a journey, Varenka. One I would’ve liked to make myself. Take Darya to Paris, to Berlin, to Warsaw. She should see the world and be away from this place for a while. Let your daughter come back to court in full bloom.”

“Maman, what are you writing?” Darya asked me this morning. Darya’s Polish is too rolling, too melodious, so clearly touched by the Russian.

She speaks French to me.

I recalled the time when my daughter was five or six, armed with a sack filled with morsels of bread and asking to be taken to the canal by the Summer Palace to feed the ducks. It was November, and the edges of the water were already frozen and slippery. Darya threw bread to make the ducks slide and slither as they rushed greedily over the ice. She thought all these antics were performed for her amusement.

“My thoughts,” I answered.

“What kind of thoughts?” she asked.

“Thoughts I do not want to forget.”

We went to Paris and to Vienna. We walked along wide boulevards, saw glorious paintings, palaces of immense splendor where we were received with courtesy and curiosity. The rumors about me made me smile. A widowed Russian Countess and her lovely daughter, a close friend of the Russian Empress, for signs of imperial favor are not easy to hide.

In Paris, being Catherine’s friend is a coveted distinction. Monsieur Voltaire is trying his best to be considered as such. His letters to Catherine, copied and circulated widely, call her a Philosopher Queen, the Semiramis of the North, the Northern Star that always shows the travelers the right way.

Monsieur Voltaire is besotted by the notion that Catherine is turning barbaric Russia around, undoing decades of
unprecedented neglect and corruption
, as if France knew no vices of the heart. Catherine drains the Russian marshes by digging canals and cutting down the pine forests, he announces. She has opened a hospital and a foundling home. The Russian Senators have never worked so hard in their lives. “Her motto is
Useful
,” he tells those who trail behind him in awe. “Her emblem is a bee.”

I was in Paris when the news appeared in all the papers. On July 4, Ivan VI—once the baby Emperor, and for decades Prisoner Number One at the Schlüsselburg Fortress—had been found dead in a pool of blood. I read Catherine’s words quoted in every paper. The
serious and dangerous conspiracy was nipped in the bud
. The pamphlets that the scrawny printers’ boys pushed into the hands of passersby were less forgiving.
Another Emperor so conveniently dead merely a year since the last one died. How many tragic “accidents” can possibly happen at the Russian court?
Anonymous writers aired more sinister suspicions.
Philosopher Queen, or Messalina who kills and betrays when it suits her?

“I don’t know the Empress that well,” I answered when anyone asked me.

Soon other news from Russia overwhelmed these speculations, for Catherine began buying paintings. Whole collections that had been sitting idly in dilapidated castles could suddenly be sold for ready money. The Empress’s agent paid very well and asked few questions. His only reservation was that Catherine, His Sovereign, endowed with a woman’s soft heart, wouldn’t like anything that suggested death or loss.

How touching
, I heard.
And how very Russian
.

I reminded myself:
To govern is to understand the weaknesses of the human heart. And to use such weakness to your own advantage
.

I told myself:
You have no right to expect anything else
.

Have you not called yourself her friend, too? Were you not a shrewd keeper of her secrets?

We arrived here in Warsaw in the first week of September, right after the royal election that—just as Catherine had desired—made Stanislav the King of Poland.

A blue, frosty afternoon darkened slowly as we approached the Vistula River through a maze of twisted streets. As I opened the coach window to let in some air, I heard the buzz of voices outside but couldn’t make out what they said.

I had been away for almost thirty years, but as we approached the center of the city I was able to point out to my daughter the cathedral spires against the reddening sky, the roof of the royal castle. I was amazed by how much smaller everything seemed. By the time we reached Senatorska Street, where I had rented an apartment, the darkness was broken only by the lights of lanterns, flickering like fireflies.

“The streets are so muddy,” Darya complained.

Now, a month later, she is still not impressed by Warsaw. Palaces here do not stretch for the whole block; there are no canals. Parks are shabby and crowded, bridges narrow.

I’ve heard the two of them whisper in Russian. Masha, trusting my daughter with stories of her longing.

Not for St. Petersburg, not for the life at the court, but for Russia, where the northern wind blows over expanses of dark green forests. For January nights, white not from the sun that refuses to set but from the silver light of the moon. For ice floes screeching as they rub against one another, for rocks in which precious stones look like frozen drops of blood. For sacred places from where, in a solemn moment that comes when you least expect it, you can peek into the other world.

Masha’s good eye is sad and empty; her breath carries the sweet scent of vodka. She defends herself against my questioning with a grimace of denial.

“When are we going back?” she wants to know.

I tell her I don’t know, and my old servant walks away unhappily, shuffling her feet.

“She wants to die in Russia,” Darya tells me. “She wants to be buried in the village where she grew up. Next to her mother.”

Masha speaks of death as if it were a return from some long journey. She wants to be buried with her face turned to the sea in the sandy land of the north, where bodies do not rot. She longs for a simple grave with freshly cut branches of fir on the bottom to make the rope slide from under the coffin with greater ease. A grave on which old women from her village would scatter bread crumbs, and where they would come to sit and wonder to what distant roads Masha’s life took her and if she ever peeked into that other world.