The Winter Palace (3 page)

“Do it for your daughter’s sake,” she replied. “So that we won’t have to worry for her future.”

Papa did not refuse my mother’s bidding, but he always found reasons for the delay. The Empress was getting ready for a pilgrimage. The Empress was weakened by the Lenten fasts. Easter was coming. The court was awaiting the arrival of the Empress’s nephew; the court was too busy with the coronation; too many petitioners were lining up outside the Throne Room.

And then on a bright April morning, when Mama came to my bedroom to wake me, I saw her falter, clutch her hand to her stomach, and wince. “It’s nothing, Basieńka,” she assured me, forcing a smile. “I must’ve eaten a bad oyster.” The whites of her eyes were flecked with red.

“I’m better already,” Mama said, as she helped me put on the morning dress the maid had laid out. “Hurry up, Papa is waiting for us.”

Our Easter had passed, but in the old-style Orthodox calendar, the Holy and Great Friday was still a week away. Our maids were already fasting, while we sat down to our usual breakfasts.

That April morning, the kitchen smelled of fresh coffee and burned bread. The scullery maid, ordered to warm up a loaf on the stove, had left it on for too long, and the thick slice on my breakfast plate had a hard, charcoal crust. Papa told me to scrape the char off with a butter knife. I did, but it still tasted bitter.

After breakfast, my father went downstairs to his workshop and I waited for Mama to ask me to read from one of her favorite French novels while she embroidered my new dress. But she didn’t. A shadow descended on her face. She moaned.

“It’s nothing.” Words broken in mid-breath, clipped with pain.

I remember the faint squeak of doors leading to the room where rows of bottles filled with herbal infusions stood on a shelf, each labeled in my mother’s neat handwriting. I remember the sharp scent of mint on the glass stopper I held as Mama measured out thirty drops that sank into a lump of sugar, staining it green. She let the sugar dissolve in her mouth before swallowing it and then, still trying to smile, she adjusted the golden chain with a Virgin pendant on my neck. As she led me to the parlor, I thought of how soft and warm her hand was, with tapered fingers, just like mine.

In the parlor Mama said that she needed to lie down, for just a short while. I shouldn’t bother Papa, for he had important work to do. Without him, the apprentice would surely damage the bindings.

“I’ll feel better before the cannon is fired at Petropavlovsky Fortress at noon,” she whispered. “I promise.”

“Can I lie beside you?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, and made room for me on the ottoman. I must have looked frightened, for she stroked my cheek and made me swear I would not worry. I was fifteen years old and didn’t know of promises that cannot be kept, of shivers that would not go away.

By the evening she was dead.

In the days after my mother died I tottered through hushed rooms, frightened and lost. Silence rang in them, but I was consumed by a belief that I could still catch her if I hurried. Sometimes I could feel her presence, her silky kiss, the gentle squeeze of her hand. “I have something to tell you, Basieńka,” her soft voice promised. “Something important. Something you need to know.”

I didn’t turn in the direction of the whisper. I didn’t want to see that she was not there.

It was in the long empty days after Mama’s death that I learned to listen.

“Take them,” I heard a servant urge another, pointing at my mother’s knit silk stockings embroidered with roses. “Master won’t know!”

Balls of dust gathered in the corners while the maids gossiped in the alcove as if I was not there. In the street I saw a woman wearing my mother’s bonnet and her sash. Two of Mama’s silver jugs had also disappeared.

People betray themselves so carelessly in front of children. Clues drop like fairy-tale bread crumbs that mark a path through the forest. Sometimes they whisper, but my hearing has always been superb. Sometimes they switch languages, but I have always been clever with words.

“What does it matter?” Papa said, when I begged him to search the maid’s trunk. “It won’t bring your mother back, will it?”

The maid who took the knit stockings sickened first. She complained of pains in her stomach, and her face flushed beet-red with fever. “Nothing good ever comes from working for foreigners,” her father muttered when he came with a hay cart to fetch her body. Before leaving, he spat on the ground and waved a fist at my father and me. Then the butcher’s apprentice, two houses away from us, woke up with his back covered in a red rash, as if the bathhouse demons had flayed his skin.

It was all our fault, I would overhear in the days that followed. Poisonous, hushed voices stalked me in the kitchen, the alcove, our garden with its flimsy fence.

We were foreigners. Roman Catholics, Poles. We didn’t eat carrion or beaver tails as other Latins had done, but we were up to no good. We had come to Russia with falseness in our hearts, wishing to convert Russians to our Latin faith.

The maids recalled my mother’s sins. Hadn’t she said that there was nothing wrong in depicting the face of God the Father? Hadn’t she scolded me when—in my innocence—I crossed myself in the Orthodox way like them, with three fingers touching, from left to right? Was it a wonder that she was struck dead? “Just as she reached for bread,” I heard the maids gossip. “On the day of
our
fast.”

I do not recall when I heard the word
cholera
first, but suddenly everyone repeated it. A furtive, menacing word I thought it, like a curse, drawing a circle around Papa and me that few dared to cross. Before leaving, the cook asked to have her last month’s wages forwarded to her brother-in-law. A footman packed his trunk and departed the same day. Two of the maids followed. Then the oldest and most experienced of Papa’s apprentices disappeared. Deliveries were left at our doorstep; people crossed to the other side of the street at the sight of us. Many of Papa’s clients avoided us, too, and soon my father had to let the remaining apprentice go.

“It’s nothing but fear,” Papa kept telling me. “We have to be strong, Barbara. This will pass.”

I tried to believe him.

Cholera did not strike us, as the maids predicted, and there was no epidemic. No one else died in the following month, or the month after that. By mid-summer the talk subsided, yet our fortunes did not improve. Since we could no longer afford tutors, my father made me read passages from his German books as he worked, correcting my pronunciation. I thought them tedious, the descriptions of differences between grades of leather, or types of precision tools, but I didn’t complain. As soon as I had finished reading, he showed me how to keep accounts, and I was glad to be of help.

“A few more lean months, Barbara,” Papa would say, each time I finished adding up his meager commissions. In the evening, sipping his favorite drink, hot milk sweetened with honey, topped with a thick layer of melted butter and sprinkled with crushed garlic, he assured me that soon he would be back on his feet. He had not lost his skills, had he? The new Empress was Peter the Great’s daughter. Soon, in Russia, books would be important again.

One morning in October, after I finished my daily reading, I watched my father bend over his workshop table in silence, to apply gold-leaf lettering to the spine of a book. He had often shown me how a shadow was cast on each side of the spine where it curved to the sides. These shadow lines marked the limits of the space that could be used for the letters. If gold tooling were to reach beyond them, after the book had been held open a few times, the gold would crack.

“I’ve been at the palace,” Papa said. He paused before he continued. “Just as Mama wanted.”

I held my breath.

“There were many petitioners. I lined up for hours before I was allowed into her presence. I didn’t tell you before, for I wasn’t sure it would make any difference. But your mother was right. The Empress had not forgotten the prayer book I restored for her when she was still just a princess.”

He told Elizabeth of Mama’s death, of how cholera had decimated his business and depleted his savings. “But it did not break my spirit, Your Majesty, or my faith in Russia,” he assured her.

The new Empress was pleased. So pleased that she ordered her Quartermaster to send my father the Court Journals to bind. And she had asked about me.

“Bring your daughter here so I can see her,” she had commanded.

My father turned his face away when he said these words, so I could not see the expression on his face, but his movements were unusually hesitant.

I still remember the title of the book my father was working on that day. Tacitus,
The Annals and the Histories
. It was the only title I ever saw him work on where the letters crossed the shadow lines.

In the middle of November, seven months after my mother died, on a murky day veiled in chimney smoke, my father took me to the palace. The hackney coach took the Isaakovsky pontoon bridge, which—by the end of December—would be replaced by the winter ice road across the river. Nestled against my father’s side, I imagined the Empress smiling at me, extending her hand to be kissed. Inside the carriage, the fur blanket gave off a faint smell of birch tar and kvass.

Before we set off, my father sat me on his lap and kissed the top of my head. He said that he wished to secure my future in case God called him, like Mama, before his time.

“You have no one but me to look after you, my child. I cannot sleep in peace when I think I might die and leave you all alone,” he whispered.

He held me tightly. I breathed in his smell, not the familiar whiff of vinegar and glue but the rare scent of eau de cologne and snuff.

Empress Elizabeth. I thought of angels when I first saw her, of the glittering messengers of God, their winged arms herding lost children to safety. In a silvery dress, a single white feather crowning her forehead, she floated on the aroma of orange blossoms and jasmine.

“Come here, child,” she said, her voice especially sweet as she pronounced that last word.

I hesitated. One does not approach angels without fear.

“Go on,” my father urged me, his hand pushing me forward.

I walked reluctantly toward the Empress of All the Russias, my gaze cast downward, fixed on the hem of her dress sewn with gold thread and pearls. I prayed the curtsy I had practiced for days did not betray my unease.

The Empress took my chin in her hands and raised my eyes to meet hers. “What a pretty smile,” she murmured.

I felt her fingers on my cheeks, a smooth, soft caress. I let her words thicken around me, like the warmth radiating from the white-and-blue-tiled stoves of the palace. My father had told me that the Empress had a good heart, that she, too, knew how it felt to lose a mother and fear the future. Didn’t she bring her sister’s orphaned son to her own court? Hadn’t she just made him Crown Prince?

“What’s your name, child?” she asked.

“Barbara,” I said.

“Varvara Nikolayevna, Your Highness,” my father corrected, offering my name in the Russian way, with his name echoing after mine.

“Your father has asked me to take care of you if he dies, Varvara. Is that what you, too, wish?”

“Yes, Your Highness,” I said.

“Very well, then,” the Empress said to my father. I saw her folded fan touch his shoulder. “I’ll take good care of her. You have my promise.”

My father stood a little stooped and motionless as the Empress departed, with courtiers crowding upon her, praising her benevolence. He lowered his head when a few of them stopped and inspected me through their monocles, the looks you give a caged bird. His hand when he squeezed mine was cold and moist with sweat.

Did he guess what would happen to me?

I stood by my father’s side, silent and trembling until the last courtier disappeared and the guards closed the gilded doors. I longed to ask which one of them was the Grand Duke Peter, but I didn’t dare.

It was beginning to snow as we left the palace. The hackney carriage was waiting for us, the driver greeting us with a broad smile and vodka breath. By the shore of the Neva, the wind played with stray litter, a torn straw hat, a scrap of burlap, a wooden toy wheel with broken spokes.

Convicts with shaved heads were being marched along the embankment, a whole group of them in shackled pairs. Many had their nostrils slit. Some, with the narrow eyes of Tartars, were missing a nose or an ear. As the soft, wet snow intensified, their bare heads turned white.

Our carriage pulled onto the Isaakovsky bridge. Now that I had seen the inside of the palace, the fur blanket seemed even more threadbare, the smells of birch tar and kvass harder to ignore.

My father said, “It doesn’t mean I’m going to leave you, Barbara. I’m just being prudent.”

This is when I started to cry.

I didn’t see my father die. One evening at the end of December, he pushed away a bowl of kasha and sour cream. He was not hungry. All he asked for was his usual cup of hot milk. He would take it in his bedroom, he said.

We had just had our first Christmas without my mother. Days seemed fragmented, broken into odd pieces, a plate too full, a pinching shoe, an empty chair. The hollow, choking feeling overwhelmed me every time I had to admit that, by then, even the shawls hidden in Mama’s closet smelled of nothing more than dry rosemary.

In a few days we would welcome the new year. The year I would turn sixteen, and would no longer be a child.

The new maid who took the milk upstairs screamed when she opened the door. She wouldn’t let me inside but made the sign of the cross over my head and tried to hold me in her arms, muttering her incantations against fate, as useless as hope. Her apron still smelled of Christmas baking, of raisins, vanilla, and cloves.

“Call your priest, Varvara,” she insisted, barring the door with her body. “For pity’s sake, send someone for your priest!”

I pushed her away.

When our priest arrived with an altar boy, Papa was lying on his bed, his face ashen and still. His fingertips were purple, as if he had bruised them in the last moments of his life. On the desk there was a sheet of paper with his writing on it. A quill lay next to it, the nib chipped.