Read The Winter Palace Online

Authors: Eva Stachniak

Tags: #Adult, #Historical

The Winter Palace (4 page)

BOOK: The Winter Palace
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“His heart broke,” the priest said, and I imagined my father’s heart shattered into razor-sharp, transparent slivers.

My father’s last words contained no message for me. Instead, he had jotted down some reminders for the following day. Ever since the news of Empress Elizabeth’s patronage of him spread, orders for new bindings had been pouring in. He planned to buy two more jars of glue. His tools needed repairing, knives had to be sharpened. The tip of his favorite polisher was broken. A new place should be found for storing leather, for he spotted signs of mildew on the pigskin.
Sweet almond oil
, he had written,
works best for greasing the surface
.

The priest knelt and intoned the Prayer for the Dead. I too fell to my knees.
Wieczne odpoczywanie
, I tried to repeat after him,
Eternal rest
, but my voice caught on these solemn words and broke.

Useless
, I thought, for on that dark December evening all that mattered were silence and tears.

The new commissions had not been enough. My father had too many debts, I was told. Our house and the contents of his workshop had to be auctioned off. I saw my mother’s favorite carpet rolled and taken away. I saw my father’s books stacked in crates on a wagon. My whole inheritance amounted to a small bundle and a few rubles wrapped in a piece of cloth.

The Empress, I kept thinking, promised to take care of me.

It was February of 1743, the coldest month of the year, when I arrived at the Winter Palace. The footman with sour breath who had brought me told me to wait, leaving me in the servants’ hall. No one took any notice of me but a palace cat, which kept rubbing itself against my ankle. I saw servants scurrying back and forth, chased by fear. I heard slaps, curses, invisible feet pattering up and down service corridors. An icy draft of air touched my cheek. Fear swelled in my throat.

I shrank inside my skin and waited.

When dusk fell, a tall, silvery-blond woman entered the room. Her dress looked heavy and must have been warm, for I caught a pungent whiff of her sweat. She gave me an impatient look. Pushing away the cat, she began complaining of smudged doorways, marks on windowpanes, and fur on the ottomans. The German vowels gave her Russian a sharp, accusatory sound.

“I’m Varvara Nikolayevna,” I ventured. “The Empress sent for me.”

“I know who you are,” the woman snapped, her dark eyebrows drawing together, a dismissive smile on her lips. I decided that her face looked like a turtle’s, far too small for her big body. Later I would learn her name: Madame Kluge, the Chief Maid, charged with my welfare.

“Come, girl,” she ordered, and I followed her, cradling my bundle, noting the worn floorboards under my feet, the chinks in the paneling, the balls of dust gathering in the corners. A thought came that I was nothing but a fly, allowed a few steps before someone would bring down the swatter.

We didn’t go very far. In the palace kitchen I was given a plate of thin gruel and a tin cup of kvass. I was to eat quickly, for Madame Kluge had no time to waste. I was not to speak, for Madame Kluge did not care for what I had to say. When I finished, Madame Kluge led me to the servants’ quarters. There were seventeen of us in a room reeking of chamber pots and mold. Mice scurried under the beds, hid in our shoes. The Empress’s cats, I heard, were fed too well to bother with vermin.

“Be ready when I come for you in the morning,” Madame Kluge told me and was gone.

I sat on the hard, narrow bed, the only empty one in the room. I kissed the Virgin pendant my mother had given me. At first the other girls cast curious glances at me, but when they saw me cross myself the Latin way, they looked right through me.

I slept badly, the noises of the room stealing into my sleep: grinding of teeth, moans, wind smacking the frozen windowpanes. The room was icy. Once I woke startled, feeling someone’s hand sneaking underneath my thin blanket. I sat up in my bed, my heart thumping, and looked around, but everyone in the room seemed sound asleep. I bit myself on the arm to see if I had not dreamed the clammy touch. Next to me, a girl groaned.

When I finally fell into deep sleep my mother came to me and brushed my hand with something wet and warm. “Let’s go, Basieńka. The Empress is waiting for you,” she said, and I followed her ghostly, flickering form through the darkness.

In the morning, when I thought no one was looking, I hid the coins I brought with me under a loose floorboard next to my bed. That evening, when I lifted the floorboard to check on my inheritance, I found the rag limp and empty, my money gone.

Madame Kluge returned later in the morning, just as she had promised. She had found a place for me in the Imperial Wardrobe. She hoped my mother had at least taught me how to sew.

She didn’t even stop to hear my answer.

I walked behind her, her voice a scolding din in my ears. She knew my kind. Stray cats expecting bowls of cream. People were having children right and left, and then wanted others to care for them. Far too many people were taking advantage of the Empress’s good heart. Rubles didn’t grow on trees. Sausages and loaves of bread didn’t fall like rain from the sky.

In the Imperial Wardrobe, Madame Kluge told me to make myself useful. “And don’t let me hear any complaints about you, girl.”

My embroidery brought me no praise. My stitches were crooked, and I mixed up my colors. My mother did not raise me well, I heard. When I was given buttons to sort and sew on, I struggled to thread the needle, making a knot at the end that was too big and did not hold.

No one spoke to me, except to give me orders. The other seamstresses, deft and fast, bent over their work, busy talking of Russia’s new Crown Prince. They pursed their lips and called him a poor orphan deprived of his mother’s love. I heard that he was witty, and kindhearted. That he remembered the name of everyone he had ever met and every tune he had ever heard. Merely a year since he arrived and his Russian was good enough to give orders and understand what people said to him. His Orthodox name, Peter Fyodorovich, fitted him so much better than the German Karl Ulrich. He liked
bliny
and sturgeon soup. He liked kasha and mushrooms. In the Winter Palace the grandson of Peter the Great was growing healthier and stronger with each day.

Now that Russia had an heir to the throne, the seamstresses predicted balls and masquerades. The Empress would need many new outfits and gowns. There would be no idle moments in the Imperial Wardrobe.

By the end of each morning, my feet were numb from the cold, my fingers swollen with needles’ pinpricks. I had but a slice of black bread to eat, with nothing but a weak tea to soften it in my mouth.

“Is that all you’ve accomplished?” Madame Kluge scolded, snatching the dress I had been working on and waving it like a standard to spark a chorus of giggles.

I bent my head and wept quietly. Madame Kluge handed me a knife and watched as I cut off the buttons I had sewn. I would not get my supper that night, I heard. I didn’t deserve a proper meal until I learned to do a proper day’s work.

On my way back to the servants’ room I peered through a small opening in the window glittering with frost. In the palace yard a mule was pulling a big cart filled with slabs of frozen meat, its driver hurrying to make room for an imperial sleigh. As soon as the sleigh stopped, a young man jumped out and rushed inside the palace. I wondered if it could have been the Crown Prince himself, but there was no one I could ask.

I thought of a basket filled with buttons, of rows upon rows of dresses enveloped in lengths of silk and kept in large leather trunks, dresses I would never be allowed to touch. I thought of the web of wrinkles around Madame Kluge’s narrow lips, her sour voice, the drop of yellow pus that gathered in the corner of her right eye.

I slipped into my narrow bed. My stomach rumbled, and I pressed it with my fingertips. A palace cat walked by without casting one look at me. I didn’t think I slept, but I must have, for I dreamed of eating steaming dumplings from a plate as big as the moon.

When the Empress was cold at night, the seamstresses claimed, she summoned twenty guardsmen into her bedroom to warm the air up with their breaths.

When the Empress gave masquerades, all women had to dress in men’s clothes and men had to wear hooped gowns and totter on high heels. And none of the court ladies could match Her Highness for the grace of her shapely legs.

Threading their needles, pinching the folds of the satin trims and frothy lace, the seamstresses gossiped about what would become of the handsome soldier who played a serpent in the palace play. The Empress, they said, asked about him twice already. The cats that slept on her bed wore velvet jackets and hats. They feasted on fried chicken breasts and lapped milk from silver dishes.

I kept my eyes on the sewing, but the basting I was given to do came out crooked. My stitches were too long. I had to rip off everything I did. The dresses were heavy and slid off my lap to the floor, gathering dust. Another sign of my clumsiness.

And I was slow, far too slow.

“Do as you are told,” I heard, when I tried to defend my efforts. “Don’t speak back to your betters.”

This is what they all wanted from me, I thought, bitterness lashing at me like a spring shower. Leave no mark on the sheets I slept on, on the rags that passed for towels in the servants’ room. Shrink so their eyes could slide over me without noting my presence. They wanted me to disappear, to crumble into a handful of dust, so that some maid could brush me off the floor, wipe my traces away, and not even remember she did so.

Once you are at the Winter Palace, nothing is impossible
. Now that I was an orphan, my mother’s words tormented me. There was nothing frivolous in wishing to advance in the world. It stopped one from becoming invisible.

Every morning the Mistress of the Wardrobe dressed up wooden dolls for the Empress, clothes dummies, like the ones textile merchants put in their windows to display their wares. At court these dolls were called “pandoras”—little pandoras if they modeled day or informal dresses, big pandoras if they were draped in ceremonial robes and evening gowns. Madame Kluge carried the pandoras to the Imperial Bedroom, for the Empress to decide which outfits she would wear that day.

I thought of my mother’s aspirations. I thought of what the Empress had promised to my father.

I gathered my courage and pleaded with Madame Kluge to remind the Empress of my existence when she presented the pandoras. I could read in French and in German. I had a good voice, pleasant and steady. I could sing, too. My hands were clumsy with sewing, but my handwriting was neat and even. Could she not ask the Empress to let me serve her?

Madame Kluge didn’t even let me finish. I saw her hand rise, I felt the stinging pain of her slap across my cheek.

“You are a nobody, girl. This is who you are. A
nobody
. And a nobody is who you’ll always be.”

I didn’t wait for another slap. I hurried back to my place and picked up the dress I was working on. My cheek stung, and I pricked my finger, drawing a bead of blood.

Behind me I heard other seamstresses mutter about how the Empress didn’t care much about either books or writing. And even if she cared, didn’t she have more important people than a Polish stray to assist her?

I could feel my heart harden. I knew myself smarter than Madame Kluge, smarter than the maids who were now laughing at me. I imagined the Empress coming in and seeing me bent over her gown. As beautiful as I remembered her from that first day I’d seen her, smelling of orange blossom, a feather in her powdered hair.

“What are you doing here, Varvara Nikolayevna?” she would ask. “Why has no one brought you to me? What fool gave you this sewing to do?”

I imagined Madame Kluge’s unease, her lips stammering apologies and pleas for forgiveness. “She is my ward,” the Empress would dismiss it all in anger, “and I shall take care of her, just as I promised her father.”

Madame Kluge, the color drained from her face, her eyes cast low, would bend her head. And then her turtle’s face would flush with fear, as the Empress ordered her out of her sight.

My own fate would be assured. I would wear silk dresses with wide sleeves that made my hands look slender. I would sleep in the alcove by the Imperial Bedroom. No one, ever, would pass me by without seeing me.

Weeks went by, and in the Imperial Wardrobe I found myself more and more awkward and slow. The blisters on my fingers never got a chance to heal; my shoulders ached from constant bending. Other seamstresses were praised for their stitches, while my efforts were never noticed. Each time Madame Kluge saw me, she gave me a haughty look of scorn.

The daily bowl of kasha with a thin sauce kept the worst of hunger away, I had a roof over my head, and yet none of it mattered. I was an orphan at the mercy of strangers who kept me away from the Empress. If I was able to talk to her, remind her who I was and what she had promised my father, my luck would surely change.

One raw April day, emboldened by despair, I wrote a note to the Empress and pinned it inside the shawl wrapped over the big pandora’s dress. I reminded Her Imperial Highness of the prayer book my father had restored for her and of her promise to assure my future. I wrote,
I lie awake, day and night, thinking of the day Your Majesty touched my face
.

Madame Kluge brought the note back with a triumphant smirk. She made me read my own words aloud to the titters of other seamstresses. The bit about my father, especially.
An artisan of true grace and imagination
, I had written,
a man who had always believed in the greatness of the Russian heart
.

“We like big, fancy words, don’t we?” she said and sneered, before tearing my note to pieces.

I didn’t answer.

“A stray will always be a stray,” she hissed. If I persisted in my underhanded ways, she predicted a future collecting horses’ dung in the street. “Which your illustrious father would be doing now, had he not hurried out of this world.”

I did not know how to hide the hatred in my eyes.

BOOK: The Winter Palace
2.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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