Читать книгу Enchantments - Kathryn Harrison, Kathryn Harrison - Страница 13

WHITE WITH WHITE. White with black. Black with black. Bay with bay. Dappled gray with silver. There never was a time when the Nevsky Prospekt wasn’t crowded with long queues of fashionable sleighs, each pulled by a team of matching horses whose color complemented or reflected that of the sleigh, all of them moving slowly up and down the avenue and all the beautiful horses exhaling clouds of steaming warm breath. For there was never a temperature so low as to dissuade the vehicles’ occupants from their daily promenade. They weren’t going to wait for a party to show off new furs and jewels. Drivers drove and passengers poured champagne and spooned up caviar while taking in the sights—not architectural but human.

“Go on, Masha, don’t stop now,” Alyosha said. So I took him eavesdropping in our own sleigh.

“Make it black and give it a gold stripe and a lap robe made of monkey skins,” Alyosha said.

“What good are monkey skins? You need a robe made from an animal that lives in the cold.”

“All right, then. Make it a white sleigh with a lap robe made from the skins of white Siberian tigers.”

“White tigers. How extravagant. Everyone who sees us will go green and faint with envy. All right, then, Alexei Nikolaevich, tuck our tiger-skin robe around your knees and here we go. We have to spy and eavesdrop on everyone, even if we have to stand on the seat of our new white sleigh. We have to see whose diamonds are newer, and whose are bigger. Who’s just arrived in town, and who has departed and why. And you, Alyosha, it’s your job to find out who that ridiculously fabulously blindingly beautiful woman is, the one over there in the carriage in front of the pastry shop. See her? Yes, she’s the one. Have you ever seen eyes so big and so blue? Or diamonds so big and so new? Is she, could she be, unspoken for? Let’s find out her name and invite her to Saturday’s ball. She cannot be interested in that awful man. That one, over there, with those terrible teeth. Look, he’s introducing himself, of all the cheek, he’s practically crawling under her lap robe. You haven’t met him, but I have, and I’m telling you that man is the most fantastic bore. His name is—oh, I don’t know. Simon Someone. I was introduced to him at my cousin’s and he talked and talked and would not shut up, and all about politics. Nothing, I tell you, nothing could stop him; you could have set his clothes on fire and he’d still have gone on about Mensheviks and Trudoviks and how was it no one had read the latest boring dreadful speech given by Kerensky. After all, it was published in three papers, and didn’t everyone understand the necessity of higher taxes on foreign wines and shouldn’t agrarian socialists be manipulated to do … something, I can’t remember what, it had to do with serfs. No, no, not serf serfs, of course—I know we haven’t any more of those—but farming people, illiterate country people. Was it necessary, Simon Someone demanded, to represent factions that didn’t know what was best for them? And on and on—he ruined what might otherwise have been a lovely party, and my poor cousin, she can’t say boo to a fly, she just stood there smiling sweetly, the little mouse. I was fit to be tied.”

“Don’t stop, Masha. Please.”

I didn’t. I was only catching my breath. Sitting next to him in the sunroom, where his bed had been moved to allow him more daylight, I told him how we circled together in our sleigh, one among many, a grand cotillion whirling slowly past pastry shops and haberdashers, past the French dressmaker’s, and past jewelers and dealers in spirits and wines, the occasional swain bounding from his conveyance through a merchant’s door to return with proofs of love, a bauble for his inamorata, another bottle of champagne, more costly than the last, or why not both? Flirtations began and engagements broke, love—infatuation, anyway—abandoning one sleigh to alight in another.

But if all this remained as it had been in years before, other things had changed. The last months of empire were as spectacular for deprivation as for giddy excess. As the Great War dragged on, the army had not only conscripted all the workers from the fields and factories but also consumed its lion’s share of food and fuel. Crops went unharvested, and in St. Petersburg, breadlines tangled among sleigh runners. The shortage of coal halted one after another industry, leaving unemployed factory workers to discover new vocations: rioting, looting, sabotage. Once they’d got the tsar to abdicate, the Bolsheviks opened the locks of madhouses and prisons, for their occupants were hungry too, and it seemed less cruel to allow them to forage than to die in their cells. In any case, a man imprisoned by a tsar might be a hero to the revolution. Yes, people starved and people froze, and not just the poorest. The cost of an egg doubled and doubled and doubled again, until a dozen couldn’t be had for less than a ruble. And as the citizens grew hungrier and hungrier, each day delivered them closer to revolution, something Alyosha seemed to understand better than his father did.

“Perhaps the women will march on Tsarskoe Selo, just as they marched on Versailles,” he said. “Did you know it’s the same distance between Paris and Versailles as it is between St. Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo? All they wanted was bread, the French women. Their children were starving, just as they are in Petersburg. And because Louis the Sixteenth was hiding in his Hall of Mirrors, the ‘Maenads’—Carlyle calls the women Maenads, isn’t that funny?—anyway, they marched from Paris to Versailles, carrying swords and pulling cannons.” Alyosha smiled. After he’d done with old Gibbon and his Decline and Fall (from which he edified me with epigrammatic pronouncements like The possession and the enjoyment of property are the pledges which bind a civilized people to an improved country, offered up in a stentorian, lecturing tone), he plunged into Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, which he used like an almanac, predicting storms to come. In defiance of the restrictions imposed on him by Botkin and the others, Alyosha had always been a precocious student. Having spent so many days in bed recovering from one or another mishap, he’d read more widely than most boys his age and liked demonstrating an intelligence that surprised anyone who assumed him to be incapacitated mentally as well as physically.