The Winter Palace (7 page)

Madame Kluge took a few awkward steps, then turned toward me. Her lips were drawn in a thin, straight line.

There were two other maids of the bedchamber, she informed me, both charged with keeping the Grand Duke’s wardrobe in order. There was hardly enough for them to do, as it was. The maids-of-honor kept their own servants. “You better ask the Grand Duke himself what he wants you to do around here,” she said. “Tomorrow, scrub yourself well, and present yourself to him.”

I could hear the old haughtiness in Madame Kluge’s voice. If I wished her to fumble, lose herself in guessing, to be awed by the outrageous possibilities of my changed position, she refused to oblige me. The Empress wished a Polish stray to serve the Grand Duke. So be it. It was not the first time the Empress had puzzled the Chief Maid with her orders.

Madame Kluge gave me one last look and took her leave.

I wiped off the mouse droppings with a piece of old rag I found under the table. My new bed was as hard and narrow as the one before, the blanket as threadbare.

Squeals of fawning laughter from behind the wall told me that the Grand Duke must have come into the room. The old paneling was loose enough for me to peek through, and I saw him, tall and lanky, in a hooped dress of white silk and a woman’s wig, his lean face powdered and rouged. The maids-of-honor—all in dark-blue Holsteiner uniforms—flocked around him.

He was turning to a round of giddy applause. I saw him curtsy and cover his face with an ostrich feather. I heard him giggle and say something in Russian. His high-pitched voice, I thought, sounded squeaky and very foreign.

When they all left, I wiped the dust off the wooden chest and opened it. It did not smell of mice. I put the few things I owned into it—my mother’s dress, a pair of her shoes, a few books my father had bound. I closed the lid of the chest and looked for the key, but there was none.

In the morning, before I presented myself to Grand Duke Peter, his Blackamoor warned me to be quick; Master was tired after the masquerade and wished to get on with his day.

The Grand Duke had just finished his breakfast. I thought him thinner than he’d been in the rare moments when I had caught sight of him in the hallways. There was a white, pasty smudge on his forehead. His blond hair was heavily powdered in what I heard described as “the Spanish fashion,” and he was reciting Russian place-names, in the girlish voice I had overheard the day before. A list of fortresses, it turned out to be, along the eastern border.

Books full of plans and pictures were spread across the table among the breakfast dishes, and being my father’s child, I flinched at the damage greasy fingers would cause.

“Speak,” the Grand Duke said, lifting his eyes from the map he was studying. In German, his voice sounded less shrill than it was in Russian.

I thought it wise to speak in German, too. I said that it was Her Majesty’s wish that I would make myself useful to him.

“What can you do?”

I didn’t expect to be asked, but seeing the newspapers that lay on the side table, I saw my chance. “I could read from them, Your Highness,” I answered. “To spare your eyes.”

The Duke gave me a curious look and blinked a few times. His eyelashes, I noticed, were oddly pale. He had a milky skin, and later I would see how readily it flamed red with sunburn every time he was exposed to sunlight for too long.

“I have to ask Professor Stehlin,” he answered. “He is my new teacher. From Prussia.”

I expected to be dismissed, but the Grand Duke pointed at one of the maps on the table. His fingernails, I noticed, had been tinted with red oil.

“Do you know where Prussia is on the map?”

I nodded, and saw that it pleased him.

The Grand Duke asked me many questions that morning. He wanted me to tell him where I was born and why my parents had come to Russia. He was disappointed to hear that my father had been a bookbinder, not a soldier. “Don’t the Poles like to fight?” he asked.

When I said I didn’t know, he told me not to worry. Life carried many surprises. He’d always thought he would be the King of Sweden. “You may still marry a soldier,” he said.

This is when I noticed a hoop skirt lying on the carpet, flattened and stained.

To my relief, Professor Stehlin did not object to a reader. And so, every morning, I arrived at the Imperial Study, ready for my new duties. “Keep your eyes opened,” the Chancellor had said. “Remember, you are watching your future Tsar.”

There was a lot to read. Excerpts from foreign dispatches and newspapers, descriptions of fortresses from
Sila Imperii
or from
Galerie Agréable du Monde
. Passages about the habits of various animals, and the anatomy of plants, about the layout of St. Petersburg canals and the treasures of Kunstkamera.

Every passage I read became the theme of a lesson. A military fortress called for an explanation of a mathematical formula, a dispatch for tracing the boundaries of foreign lands and positions of various countries on the map. And—if the Grand Duke became restless or tired—Professor Stehlin ordered a walk: to the gardens, to the streets of St. Petersburg, the city his famous grandfather Peter had coaxed out of the marshes and the sea.

The future Tsar, I thought, had a wise teacher.

“Speak,” the Empress commanded the night when I was summoned into the Imperial Bedroom. On my way there I had seen a sobbing maid, her arms huddling her thin body. The door through which I entered was hidden in the carved paneling; it opened without a sound. A tongue was not to be seen.

Her Majesty was lying on her bed, poultices on her eyelids. Two cats stretched beside her, fast asleep. I seated myself beside the bed on a small embroidered footstool. “Flatter her. Tell her stories she wants to hear,” the Chancellor had urged me. “Make her wish you hadn’t stopped talking.”

“Professor Stehlin said Your Majesty looked ravishing in the Preobrazhensky uniform at the last masquerade,” I began.

“To whom?” She did not remove the poultices from her eyes.

“To Count Lestocq. It made him bite his lips.”

It seemed easy enough, the fine curl of Elizabeth’s smile urging me on.

From behind the door came the shuffling of feet. Elizabeth’s courtiers were eagerly awaiting their turn.

“Is my nephew making good progress at his lessons?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Does he fancy any of his maids-of-honor?”

“No. He never singles out any of them over another. But they imagine that he does. Especially Mademoiselle Gagarina.”

There would be no dearth of stories. From my tiny nook of a room with its flimsy wall, I had spied on the maids-of-honor and heard their foolish chatter. In the Grand Duke’s rooms, their eyes slid over me as if I were made of air, but their thoughts were already mine. This one tried to tempt the Grand Duke with the sight of her bare breast. That one sulked, for the Grand Duke complained she couldn’t sing a note. I had heard their childish confessions of first kisses and secret vows; I had carefully weighed their desires and their fears.

They were such easy prey. Too pampered to watch behind their backs, too sure of themselves to take note of anyone not like them.

The Empress sat upright, wiping the poultices off her eyes. “Light another candle, Varvara. It’s too dark in here.”

I rose from the footstool. I lit a new candle from the old one and placed it on a side table right beside the Imperial Bed. I heard a cat’s husky purr. The Empress was running her long, tapered fingers through its coppery fur.

“Mademoiselle Gagarina, Varvara?” she said, chuckling. “Tell me: What does the silly goose want?”

The Grand Duke had many visitors, I told the Chancellor.

Prince Lev Naryshkin made the Grand Duke titter with his loud farts and imitations of street whores. Count Vorontzov had presented him with a silver traveling set, encrusted with tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl. “Fit for the best of soldiers,” he said. Madame Kluge was inventing excuses to visit. She was finding fault with chambermaids, making them scrub the grate of the fireplace over and over again. Always managing to appear when the Grand Duke was alone, speaking of Eutin to him, telling him she had been born there.

The Empress came, too. She’d watched as the Grand Duke busied himself with his maps, patted his head when he explained to her the movements of troops in some obscure battle. “Your grandfather would have been proud,” she told him. I told the Chancellor of the promised spring bear hunt, with the trackers and running hounds. And of the teasing. About Mademoiselle Gagarina, her prancing about, her mincing steps. “I’m looking for a bride for you,” the Empress had said, pinching her nephew’s cheek. “I have to, before it’s too late.”

At the word
bride
, the Chancellor bristled. I took note of the sharp twist of his head, the tightening of his lips. I thought of a bird, swooping.

“Has she mentioned anyone yet?”

“Princess Marianna of Saxony, a few times. But the Grand Duke doesn’t like hearing about her.
Horseface
, he calls her. So now the Empress mostly speaks of the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst.”

“As if we needed another German! As if the one we have was not trouble enough. Does he still wet his bed?”

“Yes. The maids complain of washing his sheets.”

The Chancellor did not hide his irritation with Peter the Great’s grandson. The world was not a plaything of Dukes. Russia needed an alliance with Saxony or Austria. The Prussian King was getting too strong. It would be better for everyone if the heir to the throne understood that much.

There was weariness in his voice. On his desk, papers were turned facedown, arranged in clusters of two so that none could be removed unnoticed.

The Chancellor sighed. “Am I asking too much of him, Varvara?”

A spy does not need to answer such questions.

A spy needs to speak of the letter hidden in the secret drawer that opens only when the carved column on the right is pushed. A letter calling Frederick of Prussia the cleverest monarch in history. A letter complaining that Russia is a barbarian land where people worship idols and kiss their pictures hoping they would cure them from all ills. A letter in which the heir to the Russian throne writes:
If I had not left Holstein, I would by now serve in Your Majesty’s army and learn what being a true soldier is all about
.

A letter Madame Kluge agreed to put in the right hands.

In the first days of October, Professor Stehlin began marking passages from the history of Russia for me to read to the Grand Duke. The description of the Grand Embassy of 1697, Peter the Great’s European journey, where the Tsar learned the intricacies of shipbuilding and during which he bought his books and treasures. The Battle of Poltava of 1709, where the Russian troops defeated the King of Sweden and captured the land that gave Russia precious access to the sea.

Look at him
, I read,
this God-like man, now enveloped in a cloud of dust, of smoke, of flame, now bathed in sweat at the end of strenuous toil. Through God and Tsar, Russia is strong. For the Sovereign is the father of all people, like the Earth is their Mother
.

“With Peter the Great,” Professor Stehlin told the Grand Duke, “nothing was ever left to chance.”

The Grand Duke did not roll his eyes.

The visit to Kunstkamera—Peter the Great’s famous museum on Vasilevsky Island—was to be like a puzzle the Grand Duke was to solve by himself. Why had his grandfather opened it? Why make people come and study his famous collections? What did Russia’s greatest Tsar wish his people to learn?

The Grand Duke jumped up and clapped his hands at Professor Stehlin’s announcement. “Will she come, too?” he asked, pointing at me.

“If this is Your Highness’s wish.”

My knees nearly buckled. My hands trembled. Even though the island was easy to spot from the palace windows, I had learned not to look past the waters of the river. It is not that I didn’t remember that I once lived there. The thread that linked me to my memories was always tugging at my heart—if I let it tug any harder, the hurt would choke me.

My father’s voice came back to me first:
“The power of reason … breaking down fear and superstition … Kunstkamera is a temple of knowledge.”
And then I remembered our maids calling Peter’s museum a cursed place, one that would bring bad luck on our heads. Were they right when they sneered at my father’s words?

I pushed away these thoughts. I would not cry, I vowed.

The first thing Professor Stehlin pointed out to the Grand Duke in Kunstkamera was a glass dome covering a hill made of skulls and bones. Two baby skeletons propped on iron poles looked as if they were preparing to climb it. Beside them another skeleton, bow in hand, seemed about to start playing his violin. A wreath made of dried arteries, kidneys, and hearts hung above them, with a calligraphed inscription that said:
Why should I long for things of this world
?

“Anatomical art,” Professor Stehlin called it. “So why should we think of death when we are still in our prime?” he asked his pupil.

The Grand Duke rubbed his hands and grinned. He remembered word for word what I had read to him days before.

To make us aware of the brevity of life. To remind us that we will have to account for our deeds well beyond the moment of death
.

Professor Stehlin nodded with a smile.

They were in the next room we entered, motionless creatures with pale, leathery skin, floating in glass jars, their pensive faces suspended in clear liquid. Two heads fused into one, a face lacking eyes, legs locked into a mermaid’s tail. Fetuses with stumps for arms, babies with two faces.

The dead staring at the living
, the maids in my parents’ house had whispered.

I tightened the shawl about my shoulders. Beside me, the Grand Duke shuffled his feet.

“These are deformed fetuses born in Russia from human and animal mothers. Your grandfather ordered them to be collected and brought here,” Professor Stehlin explained, his voice rising in excitement. “Look at them carefully, Your Highness. Ask yourself,
Why?
”