Empress of the Night (19 page)

Give what’s not yours.

Grow deadlier with each promise.

Lieutenant-General Potemkin is back in St. Petersburg, but he doesn’t appear at court.

Why?

If Her Imperial Highness wishes to know, her faithful subject slave has to oblige. Potemkin has removed himself from court because he is in despair. The one he loves with all his soul doesn’t return his passion. Only in a monk’s cell, where he can contemplate eternity, can he find consolation. He will pray for his beloved every minute of his life.

He is back
, she thinks.

He is back
, she repeats to the mirrors that reflect her face, suddenly too round, too manly. The gold-framed mirrors nestled between giant windows or fluted columns. In front of which she stops to adjust pearls in her hair or the fichu around her neck.

On even the busiest of days, flashes of him take her by surprise. The muscular arm of an ancient hero might catch her eye on one of the new paintings that have arrived from Paris. Or someone might mention Lieutenant-General Potemkin’s bravery at the front. The taking of Bucharest.

From the Nevsky monastery, messages come every day. His unfortunate and violent passion has reduced his soul to despair. This is why he had to flee the object of his torment. Even the most fleeting glimpse of his Empress aggravates his suffering, which is already intolerable. He has put all his feelings into a song:

As soon as I beheld thee, I thought of thee alone

But oh Heavens, what torment to love one to whom I dare not declare it!

One who can never be mine! Cruel gods!

Why have you given her such charms? And why did you exalt her so high?

Lieutenant-General Potemkin looks so gaunt, the messenger friend tells her, taller somehow, and yet diminished. He has grown a long beard, which he won’t even trim. He lies prostrated in his cell for hours. Drinks nothing but well water. Eats nothing but coarse black bread and raw turnips.

Hasn’t he done this once before?

“The man is declaring his love
and
telling me he doesn’t dare to do it?” Catherine asks, laughing. “Both at the same time?”

“True love makes no sense, Your Majesty. True love is madness.”

“Are these Lieutenant-General Potemkin’s words?”

“Yes, but I’m not supposed to admit it.”

“What are you supposed to say, then?” she teases.

Lieutenant-General Potemkin has visions. In one, he walks through
the steppe and picks up words. The words are like dewdrops, clinging to the blades of tall grass. He shakes them into a golden chalice and then, when he is too tired to take another step, he drinks them.

“These are
her
words,” he says.

“The words of my beloved.

“They restore my strength so that I can walk again.”

Time can be portioned, cordoned off. That much for the affairs of state. That much for the affairs of the heart. The line can be drawn in between. If it is not enough, she will dig a trench. Flood it, if necessary.

My wasted years
, Lieutenant-General Potemkin writes in the latest note the messenger friend delivers from the monastery.
Foolish with earthly hope, with dreams of impossible happiness clouding the visions of eternal love, the source of all feelings. Why would I wish to return to such anguish?

She picks a new sheet of thick, ivory paper.

Because your Empress needs you
, she writes.
Isn’t that enough?

The messenger friend comes back from the monastery and reports: “There is no reply, Your Majesty.”

That night she walks, candle in hand. The corridors of the Winter Palace are wide and long. The floors are made of many kinds of wood arranged into squares. Sometimes the squares are adorned with petals or stars. Her heels make a staccato sound. She is wearing red stockings, embroidered with black tulips. She has let her hair loose.

New paintings have already been hung on the palace walls. Each a trophy. She stops by the
scènes galantes:
A stolen kiss. A capricious woman scorning her turbaned lover. The legacy of French or English generations now adorns the walls of a Russian palace.

I made you look east
, she reminds those who call her insatiable.
Hungry Russia cannot be ignored. Russia must be fed
.

But there is a chink in these thoughts. Through it Catherine sees a dusty monastery cell with its hard, narrow bed and creaky floorboards, the flickering lamp under the Icon of Saint Grigory, who believed that a
limited human mind cannot comprehend the unlimited God.
This is my whole life now
, one of Potemkin’s notes ended.
The only happiness allowed to me, since what I desire can never be
.

From outside the palace windows come the steady steps of the night watchman, echoed by the warning barks of the dogs.

Grisha?

Her feet are sore from walking. One of the red stockings is torn at the toe. In the long corridors she discovers all manner of surprises. A servant snoring on a windowsill. Another one curled in a corner like a dog, mumbling. She leans over him, then hastily withdraws, for he reeks of vodka and vomit. On the ground floor, right beside the palace kitchen, an old toothless woman is looking for something. She bends and picks up an invisible speck, a piece of black thread, it turns out, for she is willing to show her treasures: a toothpick, a flake of sawdust, a broken ebony button. “Things disappear,” she whispers in warning. “They are all thieves here.”

Back in the Imperial Bedroom, Catherine tousles the bed to make it look like she has slept in it, although she knows that the maids will not be fooled.

Grisha, Grishenka, Grishenok
. She catches herself mouthing his name, thankful that Russian allows for so many transformations: every one a sweet promise of tenderness.

A quill is in her hands; the amber lid of her crystal inkwell snaps open.

Come to me
, she writes.
Please
.

“Place it in his own hands only,” she orders the messenger friend, fighting an urge to kiss the seal, the wax still warm from candle flame. “Don’t trust it to anyone else.”

“Yes or no,” they ask her.

“About what?”

“On the subject of love.”

“I can’t lie.”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

My darling soul. My heart. Batenka. Grisha. Grishenka. Grishenok. Giaour. Moscovite. Golden pheasant. Tonton. Twin soul. Little parrot
.

My beloved husband
.

His bare feet step softly on the green carpet that covers the spiral staircase leading up to her bedroom. There is a pink bandanna ’round his head. He is chewing on a raw turnip and he is laughing. There is mischief and joy in Grisha’s laughter. He tells her some delicious gossip, something funny and intriguing and utterly outrageous. At Prince Yusupov’s party, naked serf girls stood on pedestals like statues, holding trays with grapes, while the guests walked by, tasting the sweet offerings.

“Imagine this, Katinka,” Grisha says and laughs.

“You are such a Cossack at heart.” She laughs back at him. “Look at your bare feet. A Prince with calluses.”

“Am I?” he asks, and his good eye flashes her a sly glance. A Cyclops biting his nails to the quick. If there are no more nails left to bite, he will chew on a quill, a comb, her jewels. She has seen him crush a pearl in his mouth.

He cannot be tamed. She knew it even then, when he first lay with her in the palace
banya
, her eyes taking in the glitter of gold and silver, the sheen of precious stones.

There he was pouring wine into crystal goblets, peeling peaches, feeding her with his fingers, sweet juice dripping down her chin. She was forty-five, ten years older than he. Her three children had stretched her skin and her insides. But when he pulled her toward him onto the leather bench, it felt wrong to have anything separate their bodies. Hooks, ruffles, buttons, cloth.

It’s all here, with her, the memory of this evening. His face full of wonder, his belly trembling under her fingers. The soft velvet satin of his skin. His hand traveling down her naked back. His lips grazing her skin. A tangle of arms and legs. The thrumming of desire. The sensation of hearing him with her bones.

The sweet murmurings of love:
beloved, most desired, mine. For what I feel for you, no words have yet been found. The alphabet is short and the letters few. Could I love anyone after you?

There was no timidity in him when he gave her pleasure. No shyness when he took pleasure for himself. And when she was still nestling in his arms, her lover, her Cossack, her wolf clapped his hands and a Gypsy band began playing right outside the
banya
’s door.

How bad it is to love so extraordinarily! It is an illness, you know
.

Grisha has refused to take the rooms vacated by the timid lover, so she has given him an apartment directly below hers, linked by a private staircase.

He comes up when it suits him. He may choose to be witty and ebullient, or silent and morose. He may lie at her feet and call her his goddess or walk into the room without even acknowledging her presence.

Or point at the map of divided Poland and ask: “Why did you agree to give up so much?”

“I had no choice.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What would you’ve done?”

“Wait. Call Prussia’s bluff. It would’ve worked.”

“Perhaps.”

“It would.”

He doesn’t mince words. Catherine has let herself be bullied. She gave up too much. A fox will come back to the chicken coop. Feathers will fly. “I’d have made a great King of Poland,” Grisha says, and on his lips this is neither a boast nor a joke.

His mind is never still. The plans it churns glitter. He could rule Poland or take her army south and smash what’s left of the Ottoman Empire. He draws new maps for her, each bolder than the last.

“I want you here, with me,” she protests. “We’ve wasted enough time.”

“Not because of me,” he says. “Admit that, at least.”

“Not because of you, Grishenka.”

When he is not spinning his visions for Russia, he wants to know everything about her. Old lovers and dreams, abandoned plans and festering regrets.

He is jealous of every man she has ever let into her bed. He wants to eradicate their traces, erase their memory.

He wants to be her hero, her king, her admiral, her lover. He torments her with his questions until she finds herself writing sincere confessions:

Serge Saltykov: dire necessity

… the present Polish King … loving and loved … but a three-year absence …

Prince Grigory Grigoryevich Orlov … would have remained for life had he himself not grown bored …

… that, out of desperation, forced me to make some sort of choice, one which grieved me then and still does more than I can say …

… then came a certain knight …

His lovemaking is stormy, moody. He may devote himself solely to her pleasure. Play her like a harp, bring forth a cascade of shivers. Or he may push her head down, bury her face in his loins. Make her earn her turn.

When he draws away, she grips him and pulls him tighter. As if, without him, some calamity would surely strike.

Runaway serfs and other rabble who have gathered around Pugachev are drunk on victories. The ragtag army sweeps on, pillaging, raping, burning. They’ve seized scythes, sickles, hammers, pickaxes for weapons. Men, women, children have been skinned alive, hung upside down, their feet and heads cut off. Towns have fallen to peasant rage.

The messengers bob and cringe when they repeat Pugachev’s drivel: Catherine stole the throne of Good Father Peter III because he wished to free the serfs and
she
didn’t.

Pinpricks of ingratitude?

Stings! Lashes!

Pugachev is a shrewd foe. His promises—fattened on vodka and greed—are as vast as the Russian steppes: freedom from all masters, riches without end. What fodder for weak minds!

As long as she is fighting the Ottoman Porte she doesn’t have enough troops to send against him. But once she signs a peace treaty with the Turks, vodka-crazed rebels are no match for the Imperial Army.

A few days later, Pugachev is on the run.

After Pugachev’s final defeat, the Imperial Commission delivers elaborate reports. The Empress’s questions have been straightforward. Was anyone behind the traitor? A foreign power? The Ottoman Porte? France? Poland?

The traitor falls on his knees, acknowledges he is an impostor, begs for mercy for his sins. No evidence points to foreign instigations. The rebellion is Russian, bred in the bones of disgruntled serfs. The nobles nod knowingly. Serfs obey nothing but the knout. We told Your Majesty so, didn’t we?

Such are her thoughts when she reads the Commission’s reports. Arranged in folders, the way she requested. Interrogation reports of the perpetrators, testimonials from victims, descriptions of damage to towns her troops have liberated from the rebels.