Empress of the Night (17 page)

To serve on the Legislative Commission is an honor. A historic moment for Russia. The beginning of her true Enlightenment.

People give many reasons why the words on paper do not apply to them. Russia lies in the North. Peasants can be made free in warm countries, but here, in the cold of the northern clime, they have to be forced to work. The state cannot do it. Russia is too large. Nobles have to possess the means to rule their serfs. The way they have always had.

Chattel. Slaves who do not own their souls. You rule them by the knout
, Catherine thinks, angrily.
By the rack, and by the gallows
.

They talk of God-given powers. Of preserving what has always been. Sheremetevs. Rumantsevs. Dashkovs. They don’t point out that Catherine is not of their blood, but they imply it. The Germanic need for order and clarity is commendable, but how do you make the same garment fit twenty different peoples with different customs and religious beliefs?

Provinces want more power? Local governments want more autonomy?

Politics is many games. Watch and learn is one of them. Stir the brew and observe what comes floating out with the scum.

All citizens free under the law?

If this is so, then merchants want to own serfs, and landowners object. Or landowners want to trade or start a manufactory, and merchants object. Old nobles wish to be spared the need to rub shoulders with newly minted nobility. Allowed to register their complaints, state peasants get mired in stories of felled fences or a neighbor’s cow eating their hay or some greedy official extending his hand for bigger and bigger bribes.

And on top, throw in a layer of sloth and greed.

Catherine gave every delegate a bound copy of her
nakaz
. By now, so many have lost their copies that half of her commissions do not gather at all, waiting for it to be reprinted. She gave them medals to commemorate their committee participation; they sold the medals and got drunk. As if she paid them to prove that every good thought and idea can be turned into mockery.

Rumors run wild. Why does the Empress want to free the serfs? To undo the canvas of the fabric that has served us well?

To undermine Russia?

Is it foolishness or hubris? Or merely a woman’s reasoning?

Serfs harbor sloth and darkness in their souls. Give them an inch and they will take a whole
verst
and want more. Unchain them and they’ll
slash your throat. Or spill your guts and trample them with their dirty feet.

So far, the only thing the delegates agree on is to offer her the title of Catherine the Great or All Wise Mother of the Fatherland. She says she has been Empress for five years only and hasn’t earned the privilege to be called the Great. The gesture pleases her, though, for one reason. There are no more suggestions that she should be Regent for her son or give up the throne when Paul reaches majority.

At her Moscow residence things go no better. St. Petersburg servants roll their eyes at the Moscow ways. The palace steward has been left too long without supervision. A simple dinner is a battle of wills, a parade of substitutes, flattened cakes, meats suspiciously freely treated with grated nutmeg. Obstacles range from serious—one of the cooks was stabbed by a thief caught pilfering sugar—to ludicrous—a hedgehog was fished out from a jar of cream.

Without vodka, one cannot understand, she hears.

She opens the door of her study—much heavier than the Winter Palace one—and summons the serving boy, whose only job as far as she can tell is to sit cross-legged outside her door.

To hold it so that it would not slam?

The boy looks scared. He casts his eyes about. His ears twitch, like a horse’s.

“No, you have not displeased or disturbed me,” she calms him. “But I would like to learn something about you.”

The boy’s hands tremble.

“What’s your name? Where are you from? Where are your parents?”

His name is Taras. His mama he remembers well. She looked so beautiful in her coffin. Dressed in her best clothes, which she had prepared herself long before she died. Embroidered and ironed. Killed by the evil eye, the boy explains timidly. A neighbor coveted their brown laying hen. His papa died when he was too little to remember.

A Cossack raid, fire, pillage? Was he a victim or perpetrator? Violence in its many forms doesn’t surprise Catherine. The world is a hostile place. Being vast and flat is not an advantage. Russia still remembers the raids of the Tartar hordes. Every seven years, the saying still goes, calves become milk cows, girls grow into maidens. Ripe for Turkish slave bazaars.

“Your mama,” she asks. “Did you help her? Carry water for her? Bring her kindling?” She doesn’t quite know what children of the poor do. In Zerbst, they took care of fowl. Swept the yard with willow brooms. Ran errands, minded the younger ones.

“I helped her cry.” Taras no longer stammers or hesitates in his account of his family’s misfortunes.

“Do you know what freedom means, Taras?” the Empress asks, but this is too abstract a question, and all she gets is an uneasy blink. She has a better idea. “Repeat after me:
I am free to …
”

“I’m-free-to, Your Majesty,” the boy hastily repeats. He is oblivious to the irony of the words he has just said.

“No, no. I want you to finish this sentence,” she explains. “By yourself.”

Taras fidgets. There is a tear at the side of his shoe, flashing a patch of dirty skin. Do Cossacks not wear socks?

Asking the child to finish a sentence like that is not the right way, either. Too much like a confession of sins.

“What are you forbidden to do, Taras?” she asks, instead. This is easier.

“Leave my post, Your Majesty. Let go of the door before a lord or lady passes through. Spit on the floor. Curse.” Judging by the easy flow of the boy’s voice, the list promises to be endless, so she cuts it short.

She inquires instead about the customs of Taras’s village. Witches who poison the wells, devils reincarnated as black cats, curdling the milk in cows’ udders, creating monsters in the mothers’ wombs. Has he ever seen a monster? No. But he has heard of many that were born. A goat with two heads. A child of whom it was said that it was neither a boy nor a girl. Tsar’s men came to take them away. No one has ever seen them again.

Has he ever heard of Peter the Great?

Yes.
Batushka
. Good to his people. Not the Antichrist as some old men call him.

Taras is not quite at ease, but clearly elated. Will he remember this conversation with fondness? Tell his children about it, if he has any? He is bright, in spite of his fearful glances. About fourteen? A bit older than
Paul? But Taras’s sense of time is fluid. He does not know the year of his birth.

“Go now,” she says, searching for a gift she could give him. A few coins? A ring? It would only be stolen or coaxed away. So she takes a clean page and makes a drawing. An Empress with a big crown, seated. In front of her stands a skinny boy, holding a door.
For Taras, in memory of our conversation
, she writes underneath, and signs it
Ekaterina Imperatritsa. Moscow, August 1767
.

Taras takes the paper from her with such joy on his face that her heart lifts. She watches as he folds it gingerly and slips it into his breast pocket. She shall leave instructions with the Moscow steward that this boy be taught something useful. Something that will let him earn his keep. Advance him, too. Read and write. Accounts. Calculations and measurements, if he has any aptitude for them. A growing empire will always need surveyors.

The world is filled with what is forbidden. By the mother, the priest, the master or mistress. Elders and betters. The dead and the living. Do not kill, steal, lie. Unless in battle. Unless in war. Unless God or your monarch orders you.

How do you herd cats? Sail in a sieve?

If you are Empress, you try.

It is his absence she registers. His exuberant laughter. His theatrical gestures. The witticisms only Grisha Potemkin would dare to lay at her feet. Like when she asked him a question in French, and he replied in Russian, for “a subject should answer in a language in which he can best express his thoughts, and I’ve been studying Russian for more than twenty years.”

His palace quarters have been emptied in haste, leaving dust dancing in the sunlight. An iron bed stripped of linen. A washstand with a porcelain basin wiped dry. Nothing on the floor but crumpled pages of unfinished love poems, a whalebone button, a few broken quills. If she didn’t know her
cavaliere valante
better, she would order a recount of her silver. Only thieves leave like that.

Grigory Orlov shrugs. There is no figuring out Potemkin. Like cats,
Potemkin has his own, mysterious ways. Here today, gone tomorrow. Chased, perhaps? “By a woman bent on marriage vows?” he offers. “A bad debt?”

Her spies are more forthcoming. Grisha Potemkin has withdrawn from all earthly pursuits. He lives alone, just outside St. Petersburg. He sees no one, studies religious books, prays for hours, meditates. He has grown a long beard.

Why?

There has been an accident. He has lost his left eye. Now he thinks himself odious.

Rumors have it that the Orlovs had had enough of Potemkin’s impertinence. That they lured him into a tavern for a game of billiards, beat him senseless. Shaved his hair. Plucked his eye out. Told him to stay away from her.

“Nonsense, Katinka.” Grigory Orlov’s nose wrinkles as if he smelled something rotting. There is no darkness in her Favorite’s eyes. No layer of ice in his voice. “Life has been good to me. Why would I wish revenge? Don’t I have you? The Cyclops, Katinka, is not that important.”

The Cyclops? A one-eyed giant? Strong, stubborn, and abrupt of emotion. Forging thunderbolts for Zeus, arrows of moonlight for Artemis?

Apt
, Catherine thinks.

Soon other rumors come flying. A whack of a tennis ball started an infection. It turned bad. A peasant quack was allowed to treat Grisha with his remedies. The eye isn’t lost, merely blinded. Hiding in the folds of flesh.

She sends a messenger friend to his house with a basket of presents and a note:
It’s a great pity that a person of such rare merits is lost from society, the Motherland
,
and those who value him and are sincerely well disposed to him
.

She knows Grisha Potemkin won’t resist a well-staged return, a black patch over his bad eye, a look of suffering on his long face. Slowly he will fill up the emptiness of his absence. Still reckless, still impatient, still dissatisfied with what she has offered him.

Waiting for the wheel of fortune to turn, make the impossible possible.

For some time now, the Ottoman Sultan has looked north with fear. He has sought allies in Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin, trading promises for support. In the secret backrooms of Europe, maps are redrawn almost daily, at Russia’s cost. Does Maria Theresa of Austria deserve access to the Black Sea? What might Prussian Frederick consider a worthy compensation for his change of heart?

In 1768, when Russian troops are still fighting the Polish rebels, the Ottoman Porte declares war on Russia.

At the War Council, even the Empress is only a woman. To be advised, persuaded, cajoled. Urged to listen to those who know their trade. Catherine can negotiate with Prussia and Austria, buy their support with treaties or concessions. They, her Generals, Field Marshals, even her Lieutenants and Privates, will ride into battlefields, taste gunpowder when they tear musket cartridges with their teeth, dip their sabers in blood. Freeze in the winter trenches or bake in the summer heat. Turn the Turkish fleet into a ball of fire, storm fortresses, claim whole regions of fertile land.

They will come back heroes.

There is new sprightliness to Grigory Orlov’s steps, a new assurance to his voice. He wakes at dawn and rushes to the stables. His horse is harnessed, ready for the morning ride. In the antechambers, a small army of petitioners wait for his return. Young, bold men with dreams of conquest. Eager to try their luck.

Monsieur Pompadour in pink slippers? A mighty eagle locked in a golden cage? How Orlov laughs when Catherine reminds him how he used to berate himself. It’s all so simple, after all. A soldier is not a courtier. A soldier needs the thrill of battle, the challenge of a fight.

He will be gone
, Catherine thinks, and wonders why there is so little sadness in this thought.
A separation will do us both good
.

Grisha Potemkin, she notes, has also requested to be sent to the Turkish front.
The only way I can express my gratitude to Your Majesty is to shed my blood for your glory … I cannot live in idleness
.

“What I desire more than life itself I cannot have,” her spies report Potemkin saying. “Men court death for lesser reasons.”