Читать книгу Enchantments - Kathryn Harrison, Kathryn Harrison - Страница 9

MASTER EMERITUS OF COURT LIFE, Count Vladimir Fredericks might well have been relieved by the contraction of his demesne. Disoriented by the imminence of a revolution that had declared his worldview not only myopic but also corrupt, for weeks the count had been continually lost in the palace corridors. Sent bearing a message from the tsarina to her confidante, Anna Vyrubova, the count would nod briskly, click his shiny heels, and return to the tsarina’s suite some hours later, his mouth and mustache quivering in anxious confusion and the message still on his salver, envelope unopened.

“Why, Count …” the tsarina would begin, but then she’d trail off and smile. “How debonair you’re looking, dear Vladimir! No wonder poor Anna didn’t read my little note. She must have been overcome with shyness when she saw your new waistcoat. Exquisite! It is new, isn’t it?” The count, who at ninety was at least as vain as he had been at twenty, looked down at his waistcoat (which was certainly not new despite his freshened appreciation) and forgot the shame occasioned by the failure of his errand. No one had the heart to scold him, and he spent his days in perpetual futile perambulation, wandering in and out of one suite of rooms after another until he arrived somewhere he recognized.

It was Count Fredericks who had been in charge of lighting when, in 1873, five electric lamps were installed on Odesskaya Street. The count had been following the announcements of the grim eastward march of progress and was among those who gathered for the lamps’ inaugural illumination. A terrible light, poisonous and green, flickered, strobed the crowd of faces, and flooded their open mouths with something that looked like oil of vitriol. Or so Fredericks reported to Tsar Nikolay’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II. Electricity, he predicted with obvious relief, was too vulgar to catch on. A year passed, and then another, and soon it was five, and there was no further mention of electric lamps. Someone had finally taken down the ones on Odesskaya Street, which had remained lit only as long as their inaugural performance. Fredericks, considering his position secure, celebrated their removal by ordering many times the amount of candles he usually did for a year. But no sooner had the candles been delivered than some infidel greedy industrialist plugged the entire Liteiny Bridge into a sinister smoke-belching generator, and just like that the Neva was showered with diamonds. Transformed into a great glittering serpent, the river turned and twisted under the delighted gaze of the hundreds of technology-mad fools packing the bridge’s span, and the count went back to the Winter Palace and embarked upon an epic bender. By 1889 the palace had its own direct-current generating station, and the ever more forceful incursion of vulgarians denied the count his august position: Bringer of Light to Darkness! For some weeks the count refused to leave his candlelit room or take any nourishment besides that found in Finnish vodka. As a gesture of condolence, Fredericks was promoted from Minister to Master of Court Life, and from that point forward no one ever had the heart to scold him. There are those people who cannot be transplanted from one age to the next.

As luck would have it (ours, not his), the count’s lack of foresight provided those of us now confined to the palace with limitless candles to burn once the electricity and gas were cut off.

The thing to do about the telegram was to get Varya to ask OTMA for help. OTMA was the name the Romanov sisters made up for themselves as a single entity—that’s how close they were to one another. They used the first letter of each of their names and arranged them by birth order: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia. While I know they spoke as individuals, I remember them as a Greek chorus, dressed alike in long white gowns and providing a plaintive, sometimes sighing commentary on our plight. Like their mother, the sisters were devout, given to dropping to their knees and praying in concert. Soon after we moved in with the Romanovs, Varya fell in line behind OTMA, clearly happy to have discovered not just one sister whose company she preferred to mine, but a matched set of four. She was suited to life as a princess—even a deposed one was better than nothing—and granted Tatiana the same role her sisters did. Olga, twenty-one, might have been the eldest, but she happily ceded authority to nineteen-year-old Tatiana, the most efficient and pragmatic sister, on whom the younger two, eighteen and sixteen, depended as a kind of governess. Now that they had been abandoned by the servants, she was the only one they had.

OTMA. If the tsarina wanted something done, she didn’t summon Count Fredericks. It was OTMA she called to her boudoir.

THE TSARINA DIDN’T RESEMBLE the image her people had formed of her. Despite having been born a German princess, she wasn’t a spy with a private phone line to the kaiser; she wasn’t my father’s mistress; she wasn’t a frigid, humorless termagant who drugged Tsar Nikolay into submission so she could meddle in state affairs. If she could be faulted for anything, aside from religiosity, it was her opaqueness. Alexandra Fyodorovna was clever, far more than her husband, and had discovered how to protect herself from psychic penetration by anyone save her immediate family. Deploying an innate impulse toward generosity and never taken by surprise, as she didn’t receive guests for whom she hadn’t prepared comments, she generally began her delivery of these from yards away, across the room, carried toward her victim on a frothy wave of hyperbolic praise and affection. “How are you? How lovely you look! You’re doing your hair a new way! How elegant it is! What a lovely gown, and only you could wear it so well! You’ve brought the sunshine with you! Really, it’s just come out from behind a cloud! You dance more gracefully than anyone I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe you didn’t grow up in Paris, speaking French as you do, like a Parisian, it’s remarkable.” On and on it went, a panegyric that overwhelmed her listener to the point that he or she would hurry to correct so falsely and flabbergastingly positive an impression, but too late: into his or her hands the tsarina would press a little gift, nothing extravagant but still the thoughtful kind of something that inspired a genuinely grateful response. For how was it that the tsarina, busy as a tsarina must be, had remembered one’s passion for Jordan almonds or the novels of George Eliot? By the time one realized what had happened, the tsarina had done it again: eluded what she considered capture, leaving nothing more tangible than a fading whiff of Guerlain’s Après L’Ondée, the perfume she’d worn every day since the tsar had first given her a bottle, during their courtship.

“As you see,” I said to Varya once we’d lived with the Romanovs for a month or so, “there are ways other than lying to protect oneself.” My sister looked at me. It had been some time since I’d last questioned her about one of her fibs.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “And neither do you.”

THAT AFTERNOON IN THE DRAWING ROOM, Alexandra Fyodorovna treated General Kornilov with a warmth and politeness that confused the man, who kept apologizing and repeating himself, clearly worried that the now former tsarina was failing to understand the reign of terror he’d been dispatched to introduce. Once the old guard and staff had defected—this happened with a bewildering and hurtful swiftness—the Alexander Palace was closed to visitors, its doors not only locked but nailed shut, all but the main entrance and the one through which food was delivered to the kitchen. From that point forward, no package would go unopened or uninspected, no message reach its recipient in an envelope that remained sealed. OTMA could do nothing to facilitate sending a telegram or anything else.

Step by step, each action undertaken in the name of guarding the Romanovs’ safety would undermine their influence and separate them from their supporters, of whom there remained many millions, if not in the city then in the heartland. The peasants—who would become the proletariat—had never considered the tsar responsible for their poverty. The tsar was God’s anointed, just as was Christ, and they questioned the actions of neither. If they suffered, it was because the lot of mankind was to suffer, and if the men who oversaw their labor were corrupt, well, that was the devil’s doing, not the tsar’s. As for Russians who hadn’t been loyal to the tsar, most were riven. They’d worked to end tsarism, they believed absolutely that it must be brought down, but tsarism was an idea, not a man, and their satisfaction had its counterweight of grief. Many who claimed they hated Tsar Nikolay found they didn’t enjoy his mortification.

The new guard was received with no little astonishment by the Romanovs and their remaining staff, as the soldiers were—it was clear from their smell as well as their behavior—drunk. They’d stopped in the village shop that sold wine and spirits, terrorized the proprietor with their shouting and gun-waving, and helped themselves to his wares. All through the palace the soldiers went, shouting, cursing, and singing lewd songs, stabbing their bayonets into the upholstery, slicing up paintings and tapestries, and breaking whatever they didn’t steal.

It was probably inevitable that Varya and I, as daughters of the infamous Father Grigory, became the objects of coarse and sordid taunts. “Put your mouth on this and heal it,” one lout said, backing me into a corner with the front of his trousers unbuttoned and a pistol in hand. My refusal to acknowledge his words made him angry, and he pinned me against the wall. The fumes of his breath should have prepared me for how his tongue would taste. For a moment I thought I was going to be sick, but then my teeth closed down on it, proving what I’d suspected: finishing school had not, by everlastingly underscoring the necessity of a lady mastering her passions, conquered the hot-tempered girl I was. And nothing the health instructor said had warned me that a girl’s initiation into sex—my first kiss!—might be so vile. The guard pulled away, bellowing, as shocked by what I’d done as I, who was gagging on his blood and spitting it out of my mouth even as he opened his and showed me the damage to his tongue.

“Stupid slut,” he said, or something like it. The injury slurred his speech to the point that I hardly knew what he said.

For a week or more, Varya and I both endured insults and threats, but she was as good as I at acting deaf, dull, and stubborn. The Red Guard were under orders (at that point, anyway) to restrict their once-exalted prisoners without touching their persons, so once the soldiers had corralled all of us onto one floor of the family’s private apartments, they no longer could take any liberties requiring privacy. Cramped as we were, there was that to be grateful for.

DEREVENKO, WHO HAD CARED FOR ALYOSHA for eight years with a devotion that appeared sincere, had either feigned that love or lacked the character to resist what appeared to him as an immediate existential promotion. In the hours before he abandoned the tsarevich, he tested his new agency by sprawling on Alyosha’s bed and ordering him about.

“You!” he barked. “Light my cigarette. Polish my boots and shine my buckle. And when you’ve done that, go to the kitchen and get me something to eat.”

In silence, without betraying any resentment, Alyosha did all these things while his sisters and I looked on, none of us daring to protest. Dina, as Alyosha called him, sprayed crumbs over the bedclothes and wiped his greasy fingers on the satin wall covering while the tsarevich went to find the “good big traveling trunk” the sailor asked for.

“That,” Derevenko said when Alyosha came back. He pointed at Alyosha’s scale model of the family’s yacht, Standart, on which they sailed the Baltic Sea each fall. “And that. And all of those. Into the trunk with the rest of it.” Derevenko watched as Alyosha did as he was told, filling the trunk from his shelves and drawers and closets. The railway cars and sailing ships; the battalions of minuscule soldiers that marched—some of these playthings had been made by Peter Carl Fabergé and were worth inestimable rubles; the clothing the tsarevich wore for court appearances; his ikons and saints’ medals; his boots; his hairbrush and comb: whatever the sailor imagined would fetch a good price, especially those things that bore Alyosha’s initials or some other proof of their ownership, went into the trunk. When it was filled, he stood from the bed and brushed the crumbs from his shirt onto the floor.

“There it is,” he said to the tsarevich. He picked up an ornamental sword, its hilt engraved with the Romanov crest, and used his shirt cuff to polish the ruby set into the pommel. “Severance pay.” He threw the sword back onto the pile of plunder and kicked the trunk’s lid shut.

Perhaps Alyosha’s forbearance had been, as he said when we spoke about it that afternoon, more the result of shock than noblesse oblige, but I saw him differently after Derevenko’s departure; I stopped calling him “your highness.” If the rumors had been true, if he had once been a child who threw tantrums and behaved shamefully, he was no longer that overweening boy, and it was wrong to tease him as if he were.

NO ONE SLEPT that first night. The tsarina dismantled Tsar Nikolay’s dressing room and found where he had saved the letters she’d written him during their courtship, and at three in the morning had set to work burning any that seemed prudent to destroy, as her children looked on. They, as well as Varya, gave the impression of being too stupefied to comment, but I was tantalized by the letters, enough that I insinuated myself into a corner from which I could make out the words of the one the tsarina had been reviewing before she turned to poke the fire. “It’s cold, isn’t it?” I said to Tatiana, pretending I’d moved to be closer to the hearth, but neither she nor her sisters gave any indication they noticed my trespass, only a replica of their mother’s vague smile, which they had perhaps been trained to summon in response to any social awkwardness.

I would never be able to summon the tsarina’s face without seeing it as it appeared while she destroyed her own carefully preserved history, letters so passionate I had to remind myself to keep my features composed while I read what I could of them. It was the first time I’d encountered that kind of thing—a love letter. I hadn’t known they existed outside of novels, and I wondered if my mother would have written such things to my father if he’d known how to read.

That she might have was strangely fascinating to me. I contemplated the idea the way I did the exhibit of birds of the new world at the zoological garden. Here was plumage the color of which I’d never seen before.

The tsarina read quickly, but I could tell she wasn’t skimming the words, she was reading each one, her eyebrows drawn into an anxious V, her lower lip caught between her teeth, and her eyes wholly focused on the work before them, one page after another bearing her excitable penmanship, line after line punctuated by nothing save dashes and exclamation points. In contrast, the tsar’s hand was so regular a typewriter might have produced it.