The Coronation (14 page)

I have not known love for the female sex. Adoration, though, is a different matter: I experienced that feeling when I was still a youth, and it was so powerful that afterwards I seemed to have no strength left for ordinary love.

From the age of fourteen I was a servant at a certain grandducal house too well known for me to name it. One of the grand princesses, whose name I will also not mention, was the same age as myself, and I often accompanied her when she went riding. In all my life since then I have never met a girl or a lady who could even remotely compare with Her Highness – not in beauty, although the grand princess was quite indescribably lovely, but in that special glow that radiated from her face and her entire person. I cannot explain it any better than that, but I saw that radiance quite clearly, as others see the moon’s rays or the light from a lamp.

I do not recall ever making conversation with Her Highness or asking her a question. I simply dashed to carry out any order that she deigned to give me without saying a word. In those years my life consisted of days that happened and days that somehow didn’t. When I saw her, it was a good day; when I did not see her, it was as if there was no day, nothing but blackness.

She must have thought that I was dumb, and she either pitied or simply grew used to me, but sometimes she would look at me with such an affectionate smile that I simply froze. It happened once during a horse race through the forest. Her Highness looked round at me and then smiled in that way, and in my happiness I let go of my reins. When I came round I was lying on the ground with everything swimming around me and Her Highness’s radiant face bending down over me, with tears in her eyes. I believe that was the happiest moment in my entire life.

I was a boy servant at that court for two years, seven months and four days, and then the grand princess was married to a German prince, and shewent away. It did not happen all at once – in imperial households marriages are arranged slowly – and all that time I had only one dream – to be among the staff of servants that would go to Germany with Her Highness. There was a vacancy for a junior footman.

But it did not happen. My father, the wise man, would not allow it.

I never saw Her Highness again. But at Christmas that year I received a letter she had written to me in her own hand. I still keep it to this day, with my parents’ wedding rings and my bank book, but I never open it to look at it – I know it off by heart in any case. It is not even a letter really, more of a note. Her Highness sent one like it to all her former servants who had stayed at home.

Dear Afanasii

All is well with me, and soon I shall have a little baby – a son or a daughter. I often remember our rides together. Do you remember the time you fell and I thought you had been killed? Not long ago I dreamed of you, and you were not a servant but a prince, and you told me something very happy and very nice, only I don’t remember what it was.

Be happy, Afanasii, and remember me sometimes.

That was the letter that I received from her. But there were no more letters because Her Highness passed away during her first labour and for almost thirty years now she has been with the angels, which is certainly a more suitable place for her than our sinful earth.

And so my father was proved right all round, although for a long time, right up until his death, I was unable to forgive him for not letting me go to Germany. Soon after Her Highness’s departure I turned seventeen, and my parents wished to marry me to the daughter of the senior doorman at the Anichkov Palace. Shewas a fine girl, but Iwould have nothing of it. Despite my equable and accommodating character, I would sometimes be overcome by stubbornness like that. My father struggled and struggled with me, and then finally gave up. He thought that in time I would come to my senses. And so I did, but I never did feel the desire for family life.

And that is the best way for a genuine butler – there is nothing to distract you from serving. Foma Anikeevich is not married either. And as for the legendary Prokop Sviridovich, although he had a wife and children, he kept them in the country and only visited them twice a year – at Christmas and at Easter.

A genuine butler knows that his service is not a duty but away of life. It is not a matter of being a butler from morning until evening and then going home and simply being Afanasii Ziukin. A butler is like a nobleman, they both serve at court, only we are a lot stricter with ourselves than the nobility. That is what makes us worth so much.

Many people would like to lure away a genuine butler from the court of the tsar or a grand duke and they have been known to offer huge amounts of money. Any rich man is flattered to have his own home ordered in the same manner as the imperial palaces. My own brother Frol could not resist the temptation: he felt flattered by a handsome offer . . . Now he serves as a butler – no, they call it a major domo – for a Moscow millionaire, the banker Litvinov, a Jew. Frol was given five thousand for making themove and three thousand a year, all found, with an apartment and gratuities. There was a butler once, but no more.

I severed all relations with my brother. And he does not bother me either – he understands the sin he has committed. And never mind millionaires, I would not even go to Prince Borontsov, although he offered me everything you could possibly imagine. One can only serve someone with whom one will not compare oneself. Distance is required. Because on one side there is the human, and on the other side the divine. Distance will always help to maintain respect. Even when one discovers Georgii Alexandrovich in the black chef Manefa’s little room or when Pavel Georgievich, unconscious and covered in vomit, is delivered home by cab in the middle of the night. But who is Prince Borontsov – merely a noble, and what is so special about that? Even we Ziukins were nobles once, although not for long.

This is an unusual story concerning one of our ancestors, my great-grandfather Emelyan Ziukin. I think it is probably worth telling – it is highly edifying, since it demonstrates once again that the foundation of the world is the established order, and God forbid that one should disrupt this order – no good will ever come of it in any case.

The Ziukins have their origins among the serfs of the Zvenigorod district of the province of Moscow. My ancestor, Emelyan Silantievich – at that time simply Emelka – was taken as a child to serve the master and his family, and his quick wit and efficiency made him well-liked, so that after a while they began treating him specially: they dressed him in clean clothes, kept him away from dirty work and taught him to read and write. He was attached to the young master as a kind of play friend. He read a lot of books, picked up some manners and even learned a certain amount of French, but the worst thing was that he started to feel ashamed of being a serf. And I believe that is why he started looking at the young lady of the house, the landowner’s daughter, not as one looks at a grand princess, with reverential devotion, but with the most audacious of intentions: he was determined to marry the object of his interest. You might think, who has ever heard of a peasant boy marrying a noblewoman? Anyone else would have dreamed for a while and then given up, but Emelyanwas a stubborn character – he thought a lot and planned a long way ahead and, as they would say nowadays, he believed in his star.

He did not tell a single living soul about his dream (although one could call it a plan, not a dream), especially not the young lady, but when recruits were being enlisted – they were fighting the French at the time – he suddenly asked to go for a soldier instead of the miller’s son, whose name had been drawn in the lottery. Emelyan was not yet old enough, but he was a fine strapping lad, and he added a year or two to his age. He was willingly let go, because by that time he had become insolent and disobedient – the master and his family no longer knewwhat to do with him.

So my great-grandfather put on a soldier’s uniform and took a payment in compensation from the miller, the richest man in the village, of seven hundred roubles in paper money, which he didn’t give to his father but put in the bank in his own name. That was in order to carry out his plan.

Emelyan was sent straight to the war, to fight in the Austrian campaign, and he fought for seven or eight years without a break – against the French and the Persians and the Swedes and the Turks and then the French again. He found his way into the very hottest spots and always volunteered for every desperate adventure. He was wounded many times and awarded medals, won a corporal’s stripes, and still that was not enough for him. And in the campaign of 1812, at the battle of Smolensk, when all the commanders in his company were killed, Emelyan won his cherished reward: General Bagration himself kissed him and promoted him to officer’s rank, something that almost never happened in those times.

After that Emelyan Ziukin fought for another two years and went as far as Paris with the army, but as soon as the armistice came, he asked for extended leave, although he was regarded most highly by his superiors and could have hoped for further advancement in the army. But my great-grandfather wanted something else – his impossibly bold plan was finally coming close to fulfilment.

Emelyan returned to his native parts not simply as a nobleman and a lieutenant in the grenadiers, he also had his own small capital, because in all those years he had not spent his pay, and when he was discharged he received bonuses and medical payments, and his initial seven hundred roubles had also almost doubled owing to accrued interest.

And in his home village everything could not have gone better. The estate had been burned by the French, so that the master and his familywere absolutely ruined and nowlived in the priest’s house. The young master, Emelyan’s former playmate, had been killed at Borodino, and the maiden who had inspired my great-grandfather to play his desperate game with fate had been left without a bridegroom, for he had laid down his life at Leipzig. All in all, Emelyan appeared to the object of his dreams almost in the guise of an angel sent to rescue her.

He presented himself at the priest’s log-built village but in his dress uniform, wearing his medals. The young lady came out in an old patched dress, and the trials she had suffered had spoiled her looks, so that he did not recognise her immediately. But that did not matter to him, because itwas not the young lady he loved but his own impossible dream.

Only nothing came of it. The young lady greeted him affectionately enough at first – she was delighted to see an old acquaintance – but she replied to the offer of his hand and his heart with an insulting amazement, and said she would rather live under sufferance with her relatives than ever become ‘Mrs Ziukin’.

These words clouded Emelyan’s reason. He had never drunk intoxicating liquor before in his life, but now he launched into a wild binge, and it ended very badly. In his drunken state he tore off his epaulettes and medals in public and trampled them into the ground, all the while bawling out an incoherent stream of words. He was tried for bringing disgrace on the uniform, stripped of his officer’s rank and expelled from the nobility. He would have been completely destroyed by drink but, by a fortunate chance, he was spotted by his former regimental commander, Prince Drubetskoi, who took pity on the down-and-out and for the sake of his former meritorious services found him a place as a manservant at Tsarskoe Selo.

And so the fate of our family line was decided.

When an individual of loworigins cherishes inadmissible dreams regarding a person of higher standing, this is deplorable and even perhaps outrageous, but not really so very dangerous for, as they say, a wicked cow has short horns. But an infatuation that runs in the opposite direction, not up from below but down from above, is fraught with far-reaching consequences. The case of Grand Duke Dmitrii Nikolaevich is still fresh in everyone’s memory. He defied the tsar’s will and married a divorced lady, for which he was banished from the empire. And we court servants also know that when the present tsar was still the tsarevich, he begged his august father with tears in his eyes to release him from succeeding to the throne and allowa marriage beneath his station to the ballerina Snezhnevskaya. That had everybody trembling, but any damage was prevented by the grace of the Lord and the abrupt temperament of the late tsar.

Therefore, the sense of alarm that came over me following that infamous game of tennis is entirely understandable, especially since Xenia Georgievna already had a fiancé in the shape of a Scandinavian prince with good prospects of becoming king (everybody knew that his elder brother, the heir to the throne, had consumption).

I needed urgently to consult someone who understood the workings of a young girl’s emotions, for I myself, as must be clear from what has already been said, can not consider myself an authority in such matters. After long hesitation, I decided to take Mademoiselle Declique into my confidence and I informed her of my apprehensions in the most general and delicate of terms. Mademoiselle nonetheless understood me perfectly well and – to my dismay – was not at all surprised, indeed she took what I said in a spirit of quite incredible frivolity.

‘Yes, yes,’ she said, nodding absent-mindedly. ‘I noticed that too. He is a handsome man, and she is at that age. It is all right. Let Xenia know a little love before they put her in a glass case.’

‘How can you say such a thing!’ I exclaimed in horror. ‘Her Highness is already engaged!’

‘Ah, Monsieur Ziukin, I saw her fiancé Prince Olaf, in Vienna,’ Mademoiselle said, wrinkling up her nose. ‘What was that folk saying you taught me . . . one of God’s own fools, yes?’

‘But if the elder brother should die – and everyone knows that he is consumptive – Prince Olaf will be first in line to inherit the throne. Which means that Xenia Georgievna could be a queen!’

Of course, the governess’s remark that I found so jarring should be attributed to her state of dejection. I had noticed that Mademoiselle was absent that morning and believed I had guessed why. No doubt, with her active and energetic temperament, she had been unable simply to do nothing and had attempted to undertake some searches of her own. But what could she do in a foreign country and an unfamiliar city when even the police felt helpless?