In 1745, my thirteenth year, there were three more weddings, but so far as the populace of Petersburg was concerned, only one worthy of mention.
A German princess had been brought to the court the previous year for the purpose of providing Empress Elizabeth’s nephew with a wife. The general opinion was that she was hardly a beauty, but her ingratiating manner and the earnestness with which she applied herself to learning Russian had won her allies. It was hoped she might provide some needed ballast for the queer young man whom Fate had put in line for the throne.
The marriage of Catherine to Grand Duke Peter was to be the first royal wedding ever celebrated in Petersburg, and the Empress was determined it should rival in splendor the recent wedding of the Dauphin at Versailles. To this end, the whole town was cast into a frenzy of preparation. Sergei Naryshkin, it was rumored, had spent seven thousand rubles to refurbish his carriage and inlay its wheels with mirror. Tailors were already at work designing new livery for Leonid Vladimirovich Berevsky’s pages and footmen. Throughout the capital, nobles vied with one another to secure the last good bottles of wine and the services of the best musicians and chefs, and for any of these things the usual currencies of bribery and flattery were much increased.
This spirit of extravagance entered our household as well. Having turned seventeen, Nadya was to be brought out into society that season, and in anticipation of this Aunt Galya had purchased pandoras, little dolls imported from Paris and dressed à la mode so that a dressmaker might copy the fashions. Bolts of fabric were brought to the house for our mothers’ perusal, together with a quantity of ribbons and laces. It was decided between them that one court dress would not be adequate, and then there were further expenses to be incurred for morning dresses, shoes, and fans, and for bribes to arrange invitations.
“Perhaps this is not needed after all?” Aunt Galya handed a card of lace to my mother so that she might be contradicted.
“You might leave the neck plain,” my mother said, “but the dress will not look finished without a bit of lace at the sleeves.” She grew thoughtful. “It’s a pity Dasha is too young to be brought out this year. She might profit by some other occupation for her mind.”
“You mustn’t fret about Dashenka,” Aunt Galya said. “She will make some man a good wife.”
“Only if she can first be cured of her bad habits.”
The habits to which my mother referred were in truth only one, but it was sufficient to be more worrisome to her than many smaller ones. On several occasions, I had been found staring at the pages of the Psalter. At first this had been mistaken for piety and no thought had been given to it, but then I had made the error of confessing to Olga that I was trying to read.
“No, no, kitten.” Olga corrected me gently, and, closing the book, returned it to its place. “You do not want to do that. It makes a woman barren.”
There was no fate so fearful as this, and Olga’s warning should have been sufficient to cure me of my fault, but it was not. I had such a hunger for words that I took to spying on my brother whilst he was at his lessons. Afterwards, I would hide myself in the wardrobe for hours, the Psalter opened on my lap and a candlestick set on the floor beside me. In its flickering light, the strokes and curls on the pages slowly began to yield their mysteries. Then Nadya had found me and reported to my mother. I was whipped not only for my disobedience but also for taking a taper into the wardrobe and thereby endangering the lives of my family.
Now, fingering the lace, my mother lamented, “What man will want a girl who defies her parents to read?”
“I’ve heard that the German princess is fond of books,” Aunt Galya said, but this was no comfort to my mother.
“My daughter can ill afford such quirks.”
Aunt Galya hit upon an inspiration. “Why not bring her out with Nadya? She is young, as you say, but such a season will not come again with all its chances to make a match. And if it happens not this year, she will have that many more years to try.”
My aunt pleased herself further with the argument that in truth it would represent an economy to bring out all three girls at once. We might share dresses and ribbons and whatnot, and the savings from this could even be put towards engaging a French dance master.
On the morning of our first dancing lesson, Olga dressed us in our mothers’ hoops and skirts. We were further outfitted with heeled slippers, fans, and little porcelain bonbonnieres. So attired, we seemed suddenly to outgrow our childhood and the confines of our bedroom as well. With whalebone panniers strapped to our hips, our skirts extended us each to the width of three persons, and we maneuvered in the small room like the square-rigged ships one sees crowding the Neva, under full sail and narrowly avoiding collision at every tack. Only by turning sideways were we able to pass through the door and sidle down the corridor to the drawing room. Though my mother’s slippers were stuffed to hold my foot, and the extra length of her skirt pinned up so that I should not trip, I preened, newly a lady, and anticipated the impression I would make on the dance master.
When finally he was announced, though, it was he who was to be admired, not we. Monsieur La Roche was a knob-kneed man with rotting teeth and a horsehair wig so puny that it rested atop his own hair like a weasel slaughtered and powdered to serve the purpose. But as befitted one who was French, he was full of condescension. As we were introduced, only the languid transfer of his gaze from one of us to the next distinguished him from a portrait. Without breaking his pose, he uttered a few syllables in his native tongue. As Monsieur La Roche spoke no Russian, our instruction was conducted entirely in French, a language known to us formerly only through our mothers speaking the occasional phrase.
Society may be a masquerade, but I discovered that it was not sufficient merely to don the costume. As with any theatrical, there were lines to be learnt and attitudes to be committed to memory, and with them the intricate language of the fan by which such attitudes were signaled. To touch your left cheek with a closed fan meant no, the right cheek meant yes, and if you then unfurled the fan before your face, this signaled to the observer that you wished him to follow you. A dozen different meanings were assigned to fluttering the fan, depending upon rapidity and placement.
It was too much for me to remember, hampered as I was by my great fear of forgetting. Even a curtsy was more exacting than it appeared. I dipped, positioning my foot precisely so and sweeping my arm out slowly, now sliding my fan open and holding it just so, then casting my eyes downwards in a show of modesty. Resting, I then prepared for the final challenge: to undo all I had just done and haul up the anchor of my skirts whilst conveying the impression of floating.
With painstaking slowness, we progressed to the various figures of the minuet, which were a trial to Xenia as well. She had a natural expansiveness of gesture common to tall people and a restlessness particular to her. Though she might tamp down her spirit to fit the small, slow movements that Monsieur dictated, her face reflected like a glass all the effort it cost her, and she instantly undid any success with a burst of jubilation that caused him to chide her again.
Nadya’s talent for imitation answered Monsieur’s haughtiness with her own. She even improved upon it. “Oui, c’est ça exactement!” he exclaimed as she rose from her curtsy. That she did not care if he praised her seemed to please him all the more—she had mastered the aloofness that underpinned every other attitude. From a resting posture of aloofness, one need make only minute adjustments to signal displeasure or its hardly perceptible opposites, approval or amusement.
After several weeks, Monsieur at last satisfied himself. He posed us each with an imagined partner, and taking himself to the rented pianoforte began to plink its keys. This was Xenia’s downfall. She was entranced by the melody: her arms lifted of their own accord, and her head swayed like a daisy in the breezes of the music. Springing off her toes, she gave the impression she might well take flight with the next step.
“Non, non!” Monsieur railed at her to be still, but it did him no good. She was sweeping across the floor, lost to delight.
Exasperated, he sent for baskets, and commanded that they be filled with grain and tied to the tops of our heads like hats. This was to encourage a still bearing. Thus burdened, I felt like one of the little horses one sometimes sees in the country half-buried under sheaves of rye. On my little heeled hooves, any movement threatened to topple the load.
He began to play again. Formerly, I had managed to follow most of Monsieur’s instructions by observing Nadya. Now I could not do even this for fear that in turning my head, I might spill the grain. Paralyzed by apprehension, I lost the power of locomotion. Monsieur barked out my name and, snapping a finger, issued a command. I could only gape. He left the pianoforte and marched towards me, repeating the command in a Gallic crescendo. I tapped my right cheek with my fan—yes?—and then splayed it open rather prettily in the desperate hope this might assuage him. It did not.
“Non, non, non! Le pied gauche!” he raged, this time stamping his buckled shoe and gesturing to it.
I stamped my foot in imitation, and a few grains spilt from my basket to the floor. Forgetting, I looked down, and a shower clattered round me like hail.
“Petite idiote! Pas comme un cheval de fiacre! Avec la délicatesse!”
“No, stop it!” Xenia commanded. “Do not berate her!”
Monsieur La Roche swiveled on his heel, and I thought he might strike her with his stick, but Xenia stood her ground. Chin lifted, she had the regal bearing of an Empress, never mind that no Empress has ever worn so ridiculous a hat.
“Speak to her in Russian. We will not tell.”
His haughty air deflated, and his glance went to Nadya and then round the room to Olga and my brother, Vanya, who sat at the window, and to me again. He looked like a thief who has been caught with his pockets full of his master’s silver.
“With the left foot,” he muttered. His pronunciation exposed him at once as a Russian. “Delicately. As though you are stepping on live coals.”
Twice a week, Empress Elizabeth hosted a lavish ball in the Winter Palace. The smaller one was held for some two hundred of Her Imperial Majesty’s friends and the inner circle of the court, but several times this number might be invited to the larger of the balls, virtually every person of noble rank in the city minus only those who had earned her displeasure. This was to be our proving ground.
As our mothers maneuvered us through the throng, Xenia scanned the room hungrily. “Dasha”—she elbowed me and jutted her chin upwards—“the Kaleidoscope.” Over our heads hung a gilt chandelier, its crystal pendants refracting each flame into a galaxy of lights.
We arrived at a clutch of women on the perimeter, the wives and widows of the Semeonovsky regiment, and our mothers set at once to work, offering commiseration on a husband’s gout, congratulations on a son’s promotion, and so forth. One might have thought they intended no purpose here except to reassure themselves on the health and well-being of each one of the women’s relations. In truth, their goal was this: that one of these women might send a page to retrieve an unattached son or nephew.
“And your youngest,” Aunt Galya inquired, “Grigory Vasilievich, he must be almost grown by now. That is he?” She feigned shock. “In the blue waistcoat? No, it cannot be. But he is a man already! The day is long but a lifetime is short, is it not so? Only yesterday my little Nadya and Xenia were in their smocks, and look at them now.”
Whilst our mothers labored on our behalf, what was required of us was only that we display a quiet demeanor and be at the ready if called upon. But Xenia could not attend to this little task. Her concentration continually reeled out to follow pairs of dancers revolving past us.
“Oh, look!” she cried out. She pointed to a lady’s enormous fan of peacock feathers blooming, eye by eye, with exquisite slowness.
The wives and widows turned as one, first to the spectacle of Xenia’s pointing finger and then to the lady with the peacock fan. Two eyes had been cut out from the feathers, and through these the lady’s own eyes were visible.
The women took note of the fan without wonder.
“It is a poor copy. Princess Dashkova’s had the edges tipped with gold.”
It is a commonplace that few who admire a painting have any acquaintance with a brush. Likewise, those viewing fireworks marvel at the counterfeit of a flaming bird or a flower blooming in the night sky without a notion how the effect is achieved. But here, the spectators were also the actors. There was no ruse of the tailor with which they themselves were unacquainted, no paint they would mistake for a blush. They, too, had bathed themselves in pigeon water and applied to their own skins pomades and powders and patches. They, too, had endured hours at the hands of their hairdressers and slept in chairs to preserve the sticky confection atop their heads. As such, they were severe critics of their fellows. Xenia’s delight showed a lack of discernment, and it made her seem impressionable as a peasant in their eyes.
When a chorister sang for the assemblage, she gaped at him openly in childish wonder. With his last note, she sprang to her feet and began to applaud with such enthusiasm that she drew the amused notice of those within earshot and then the entire room. She alone was on her feet, still clapping. The chorister gave a little bow in our direction, and this only encouraged her further. I blushed for her who had not the sense to blush for herself. Nadya, more quick-thinking, reached up and pinched Xenia hard.
She yelped.
Nadya hissed behind her fan. “Sit. Down.”
If Xenia had forfeited the women’s approbation, Nadya redeemed our mothers’ efforts by behaving precisely as she had been coached. She said little and not a word of it original or sincere, but the airs that she had practiced in our childhood games and perfected under the tutelage of Monsieur La Roche lent her the slightly bored appearance of one far above her rank. She was invited to dance, and when she did the honors and presented herself before the Empress, it was with the ease of one who had at last found her rightful place. As I watched her turn into the figures of the dance, I adjusted my bodice and scratched hungrily. My corset had long since transformed itself into a torture of binding and itches, but Nadya inhabited her own with the seeming disregard of one who had been swaddled in whalebone.
So fine an impression did Nadya make that she was summoned afterwards to be introduced to Countess Chernysheva. By this notice, her value increased again and even spilt over to Xenia and myself. Partners were produced for us as well. It had been decided beforehand that if I were asked to dance I should make a better impression by declining, but Xenia was allowed to be escorted onto the dance floor at the start of a minuet.
She drew notice round the room, the girl who had applauded the singer. However, I do not think she was aware of it. As she danced, her glance followed the chorister. When her escort whispered something to her shoulder, she startled and looked at him as though trying to place where they had met. At this critical moment, she failed to turn to the left and followed her escort to the right instead. Beside me, Aunt Galya gasped.
The circle of dancers had split into two lines, with Xenia amongst the gentlemen and facing her own sex. Looking up the line, she did some swift mental calculation and then made an ungainly dash across the open field. She wedged herself into the middle of the opposite line and, by so doing, further upset the pattern.
Each dancer was now aligned with a different partner. After the shuffle, Nadya drew an unlucky hand and found herself paired with a rotund courtier old enough to be her grandfather. Stone-eyed, she turned to watch Xenia, happy and oblivious, step out to meet her new partner.
It was this same chorister. He looked at Xenia with the winking amusement he had shown her earlier and made some remark. Her answer caused him to laugh aloud. They stepped forward, and for the remainder of the dance never ceased their bantering. Xenia gazed at him as though he were not a man but some magical being. She forgot her feet, forgot her counting, and as the chorister tipsily wheeled her about the room, they banked like billiard balls off the other dancers. The minuet was too slow to contain them.
At the end of the dance, he delivered Xenia back to us.
“I believe you have lost a daughter?” The chorister bowed low to Aunt Galya with a gallant if unsteady flourish. Recovering his balance, he introduced himself as Colonel Andrei Feodorovich Petrov.
“In truth, I had half a mind to keep her,” he confided, “but I would not want it said I am a thief. I have little but my honesty to recommend me to a mother, but perhaps this may earn me the gift of the daughter’s company again.”
It was a pretty speech, and Aunt Galya and my mother shared the view that there was not such a thing as an innocent remark. They turned their efforts to learning if any merits more than honesty might belong to this Colonel Petrov.
He was from Little Russia and the orphan of a landless noble—not, speaking generally, the lineage of a desirable suitor—but by virtue of his sweet voice Andrei Feodorovich Petrov had been brought as a youth to the Ukrainian chapel choir and there had befriended a fellow chorister.
As my mother was fond of saying, “Tell me who is your friend and I’ll tell you who you are.” Colonel Petrov’s friend was Count Alexi Razumovsky, whom wags called the “Night Emperor.”
Years earlier, when Elizabeth had plucked up the young Razumovsky and made him her favorite, Andrei Feodorovich Petrov had been well placed to catch some of the extravagant droppings that fell from Her Highness’s plate. He received from the Grand Duchess a position in the court choir and, after she assumed the throne, a military rank along with a doubling of his salary.
Not that Petrov lacked merits independent of the Empress and the Count. He was pleasantly featured and had the easy manner of one who desires nothing from his friends but their mirth, and so he had many of these. In fact, he seemed to be so universally well-liked that not even the enemies of his friends would speak a word against him.
In the carriage returning home, I drifted off listening to our mothers speculating whether one who was so well-connected as Colonel Petrov might ever deign to take a bride with little to offer.
“With no family to please, he may indulge his own whim.”
“He could do better.”
“Of course. But there is no law written for fools. Consider the match that Count Sheremetev made for his youngest son last year. She brought nothing but a few sticks of furniture and a pleasing face.”
Once home, I followed Xenia and Nadya to our room at a drowsy distance. Nadya was in a fury, pulling ribbons and combs from her hair and leaving a trail of these obstacles in the darkened passage. “You think only of yourself,” I heard her accuse Xenia. “You set your eye on some drunkard, and when he does not ask you to dance, you make a fool of yourself and spoil both our chances.”
I mewled for Olga to undress me and put me to bed, but she did not heed me.
“What is this, kitten?” she asked Nadya.
Nadya brushed her off like a flea from her bosom and squared off to Xenia. “Admit it. You did it on purpose.”
Xenia did not deny the charge. “I only rearranged the order to put us with our right partners.”
“Right partners!”
“I am going to marry him.”
It irked Nadya beyond endurance when Xenia said things she could not possibly know. “Spare me your drivel. He was amusing himself with you, and you are the only one who did not see it. And what of me? I suppose I am to marry the old man you stuck me with?”
“Yes.”
Nadya sneered. “And how shall you explain this to his wife and children?”
Xenia shook her head, puzzled. “I do not know.”
On a day in April, some months after the Empress’s ball, the house was made ready—we did not know for what, only that the floors were being scrubbed, the carpets beaten, and each window polished inside and out. Lyuba could not be bothered to make our breakfast, and we were given only bread, after which Olga took us to the banya that we might also be scrubbed. It was not our customary day for bathing, and we were eaten by curiosity to find the cause for all this. Olga only shook her head. “Someone is coming to dine, but that is all I shall say.”
“He must be someone of importance,” Nadya prodded. “Is it Uncle Kolya’s commander?”
Olga gave a look that said she knew well enough but not even the torments of the rack would loosen her tongue. “You will know soon.”
“It is your husband,” Xenia said to Nadya.
So far as I knew, our mothers had not yet narrowed to a single person the possible candidates for Nadya’s hand. Still, had Xenia said that the moon was a pancake, I should have believed her.
“How do you know?” Nadya demanded.
“I dreamt last night that an egg rolled in the door. Lyuba picked it up and was going to use it for a cake, but then she gave it to you instead.”
“What piddle!” Nadya said, but she was pale.
Though most of Xenia’s dreams had no more relation to our lives than a hand does to a sack of grain, on some few occasions a remembered dream of hers had replayed itself in our waking lives. Once, she had dreamt of a hare, and the next day a hare had come onto the path where we were walking. It stopped, rose up on its hind legs, and in the manner of a person who sees someone on the street he thinks he may know, it looked at us briefly before springing away. Another time, she dreamt of someone drowning, and a week later a boy in the village fell into the river and was lost. As Nadya had said, even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. Or maybe it was only that Xenia was more attentive to all the minute shifts and eddies in the atmosphere that pass beneath the notice of others—a rustle in the grass, a whisper in the servants’ hall.
Whatever the explanation, Aunt Galya came to our room later that day to oversee our dressing for dinner and instructed Olga to change Nadya’s skirt.
“There is someone coming whom I’m anxious you should impress.”
Outside, there was the rattle of an approaching carriage and horses, and with it the baying of hounds. Aunt Galya sprang to the door. “Nadya, hurry,” she scolded, as though Nadya had been dawdling. “We mustn’t keep him waiting.”
From the window, we watched the carriage clatter into the courtyard, trailed by a roiling pack of dogs. A footman leapt down, opened the carriage’s door, and with difficulty helped to extricate its contents. The low door and narrow step from the carriage necessitated a hazardous shifting and resettling of the occupant’s considerable girth, but once he was aright and rebalanced on his spindly legs, we saw it was the elderly gentleman with whom Nadya had danced at the ball. He made his slow way to the door and was lost to our view.
“Stop looking at me,” Nadya hissed, and when this had no effect, “You don’t know a thing. You cannot.” She bit her lip, turned, and ran after Aunt Galya.
My father and the egg-shaped gentleman were taking their leisure in front of the stove, and after they had finished their vodka we all retired to the dining room and took our customary places round the table, excepting Nadya, who was seated directly across from our guest that he might have an unimpeded view of her. His glass was filled first, and then my father lifted his own.
“My family is honored by your presence, Kuzma Zakharovich. In your long service at court, you must have dined in very auspicious company.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m honored, sir, to have you at my table.”
The good man nodded absently and began to eat, freeing us to follow. At first, I kept my eyes on my plate, stealing only occasional glances by first lifting my napkin to my lips, but each time I looked, Kuzma Zakharovich was so intent on his food that I shortly dispensed with the subterfuge. He worked at the meat, his lower lip thrusting out wetly and then receding, thrusting and receding, and his jowls rolling like a ship in heavy swells. Stopping to wet the mess with a slurp of wine, he then continued until, with a final effort, he swallowed the morsel.
My father was not himself a man given to easy conversation. He tested various themes without success before he hit upon the solitary enthusiasm of Kuzma Zakharovich beyond his digestion.
“Have you had good hunting this season?”
The gentleman’s countenance brightened visibly. “At Peterhof this past month, the Empress’s guests shot three hundred and twelve fowl. A goodly number of them wild geese.”
Between mouthfuls of soup and eggs and pickled cabbage, Kuzma Zakharovich privileged the table with an accounting of various takes, divided by the quantities of each species, and, further, by the individual tallies of each member of the party.
“…of these, Count Betsky shot sixty-eight.” Kuzma Zakharovich paused, allowing us to digest this number and himself a spoonful of mushrooms. “Twenty-seven of them quail,” he added. “However, the official tally counted only twenty-three, as four were winged and not recovered.”
What would it be to sit at breakfast and dinner for the rest of one’s days and listen to a droning recitation of favored personages and the creatures that had fallen for their sport? I watched with horrified fascination a bit of bread wobbling on his lower lip.
“…of course, these numbers are nothing as compared with those of our dear reposed Empress.” Kuzma Zakharovich’s eyes grew rheumy.
The late Empress Anna Ioannovna had been a devoted huntress—she was said to keep loaded guns at various posts throughout the palace so that she might walk down a corridor and shoot at gulls through the windows—and it was she who had made Kuzma Zakharovich Grand Master of the Hunt. So continually had he been at her side—praising her aim and advising her how she might stock her parks next season with tigers from Siberia or peacocks from India—that he was widely thought to have her ear. As a consequence, his company had been sought after and endured, and his first marriage to a niece of Count Peter Saltykov had excited much envy.
His star had fallen somewhat since then: Anna Ioannovna had died, and the new Empress preferred dancing to shooting. Her Imperial Majesty Elizabeth had replaced him as Grand Master with her own Count Razumovsky, who was, according to Kuzma Zakharovich, an indifferent hunter. And now Kuzma Zakharovich’s wife had died in childbirth. But as he said, the Lord had provided comfort for this most recent loss: she had left behind not only a newborn son but six other children as well.
With the mention of his wife and children, his gaze turned to rest on Nadya with the dispassion of a man judging the weight of a doe.
“Does she ride?”
“She has had little opportunity,” my father answered, “but she is teachable.”
“Well, no matter,” Kuzma Zakharovich conceded. “She seems in all other ways adequate.”
With that, our part in the matter was concluded. We were excused so that the gentlemen might discuss the terms of the contract and fix a date for the betrothal dinner.
When the door closed behind us, Mother and Aunt Galya began to chatter about Nadya’s marvelous good fortune.
Nadya herself did not see it.
“You are too innocent to know your own luck, lamb,” Aunt Galya said. “Old men make the best husbands. They are not forever coming to your bed with their needs and when they do, they are more easily satisfied. And think, he has no mother to rule you. You should count yourself lucky.”
“But he is dull,” Nadya objected.
Aunt Galya dismissed her. “He is rich.”
Nadya lifted her head a little. “Is he?”
“Two hundred a year. This in addition to the first wife’s dowry village. And he is on familiar terms with persons of influence.”
Nadya was brought round to recognize the advantages in becoming Kuzma Zakharovich’s wife. Not the least of the persuasions was the silvered hand mirror he presented to her at the betrothal dinner.
It was to the benefit of Xenia that never before or since has the Russian court been so musical. Empress Elizabeth Petrovna’s was the reign of song. On Monday afternoons, there was dance music, on Wednesdays, Italian compositions, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, musical comedies. The evenings were taken up variously with allegories composed in Her Imperial Majesty’s honor, an opera, or the newest play from France. An army of artisans—playwrights and musicians, seamstresses and carpenters—worked by lamplight late into the nights penning and producing new amusements. Companies of dancers and singers, got up in folk costumes and dancing the mazurka one day, were swirling about the stage the next, swathed in the filmy attire of gods and goddesses. At any or all of these entertainments, the members of the court choir might perform, with Colonel Petrov numbered among them.
Our mothers could not gain her entry to the more exclusive amusements of the court, but Xenia became a devotee of the public concerts. She came home after these elated or dejected, depending on whether Colonel Petrov had sung.
How long could it have been before he noticed her, there in every audience and so clearly listening only to him? His eyes met hers and his mouth bowed slightly, not quite a smile but enough for Xenia. He sought her out at the end of the concert, and in the aftermath the exchange between them was studied like egg whites.
“Did you note how solicitous he was of Xenia?” my mother said. “He asked twice if she enjoyed the concert.”
“He likes to be flattered,” Aunt Galya answered. “It is one thing to be agreeable, daughter, and another to be so eager. You should not give the impression that his attentions matter overly much.”
“But they do.” Xenia said this so simply that Aunt Galya could only sigh and shake her head.
“All the more reason then to be circumspect until you know his intentions.”
My mother intervened. “There’s no need, Galya. These two are berries from the same field. When I let it drop that we sometimes stroll in the Summer Garden, he asked straight out if we would be there tomorrow.”
“You told him yes?” Xenia was desperate.
“I said that we might stroll in the morning, provided it did not rain.”
It didn’t rain and he was there, circling about at the palace entrance. He asked that he might call at the house, and before the day was out he had proposed marriage. Though this relieved our mothers of the burden of feigning happenstance, they had still to slow the galloping pace of the young lovers for the sake of appearances.
I remember one more such afternoon in the garden. Xenia and Andrei were strolling together, and as is the custom during the betrothal, others were in attendance: my mother and aunt, myself and Nadya, and a few other women of our acquaintance who enjoyed being included in the periphery of any courtship. The young couple walked a short distance ahead of their entourage, and this was all the privacy they would be allowed until the wedding night.
Andrei and Xenia were so entirely absorbed by each other that they walked the long avenues without stopping, undiverted by statues or fountains or other whimsies. We in pursuit also made only cursory note of them, watching instead the pantomime before us. Out of earshot, Andrei inclined his head into the space between himself and Xenia and spoke in low tones. We could not hear his words, but such looks of ardor passed from him to her, and even his bearing bespoke the constraints on his liberty. Xenia returned his rapt gaze and nodded in eager agreement to each of his utterances, and this seemed to feed his fervor all the more.
Later, Aunt Galya quizzed Xenia. “What was said between you?”
“He instructed me on the superiority of partes singing.”
“And what else?”
“That is all.”
Apparently, Andrei Feodorovich was quite passionate on the innovation that had come from his native Kiev. Xenia repeated his claim that man was not intended by God to sing all in unison. Just as Christ was both human and divine, the lower voice in partes singing represents the earthly, and the higher voice embodies the spiritual. The ancient chants would deny the physical by bending all registers to one sound. Not so in partes. The two voices each sing their own nature, and the sounds they make when they come together are rapturous and complete. The physical becomes spiritual. Or so was his explanation.
There was something in this our mothers did not quite approve, but they had no talent to parse such a difficult theological argument. “I am not, after all, a student of church music,” Aunt Galya said.
However, Xenia understood his meaning well enough. She whispered to me later, “I think he would teach me to sing in his bed.”
At the close of summer, Grand Duke Peter wed our present Empress, Catherine. A week following the Imperial wedding, Nadya was married, and a fortnight after this, Xenia followed suit.
That He will bless this marriage, as He blessed the marriage in Cana of Galilee, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.
There is a cathedral, wan light falling in dusty shafts from so high up that it dies before reaching the stony depths. There, in the dimness flecked with a thousand candles, a crowd waves like grasses on the floor of a sea. Attached to this impression is the sweetish smell of beeswax and incense and warm bodies. The bee buzz of the crowd.
This is most certainly the Cathedral of Kazan, where the Grand Duke and Duchess wed, for my cousins and their grooms would not have merited such a buzz.
Did you note his condescension to Count Razumovsky?
A woman with a long white face and reddened lips directs her comment to a dowager whose crepey bosom rests atop her corset like two wrinkled peaches. The older woman answers something, but I cannot hear what.
That He will make them glad in the beholding of sons and daughters, let us pray to the Lord.
Ah, well, rooster today, feather duster tomorrow.
Lord, have mercy.
Strange that I cannot entirely tease apart which impression belongs to which day. Perhaps it is that every wedding is so much the same—such endless repetitions and circlings are required to make two persons one. But the more likely explanation is this: though marriage was the end towards which we’d been unspooling since birth, I was stunned by the arrival of it. There is no word in the language to denote being orphaned of sisters by marriage. Did it exist, it would describe my inchoate and confused emotions. Even Nadya’s leaving was so peculiarly painful to me that I recoiled from feeling the greater loss of Xenia. I pretended poorly to the general happiness.
Over the immense royal doors behind the altar, Christ is enthroned and is judging the proceedings. He is flanked by a solemn jury of saints—John the Baptist, Theotokis, the archangels Gabriel and Michael, the apostles Peter and Paul. Thin feet hang beneath their rigid robes; their long fingers gesture stiffly. Their impassive countenances suggest that though they pity the dwarfed creatures below, their thoughts are elsewhere. In orderly rows, their elongated figures tower up and up towards heaven.
That He will grant them and us all our petitions which are for salvation, let us pray to the Lord.
A priest stands beneath the saints. In his stiff-collared stole and miter, he resembles one of their number come to life. He presides with equanimity over the stumbling flock that comes before him in endless, faceless pairs to be joined. Taking their hands into his, he asks them if they wish to have one another and to live together. He asks thrice.
Be exalted, O Bridegroom, like unto Abraham.
He hardly looks the part of the joyous groom.
Do you of a good free and uncoerced will and with good intention take to yourself as wife this woman whom you see here before you?
Kuzma Zakharovich, I see him now, pondering the lit candle grasped in his fat fingers. He turns his face to the priest before him and then to the girl beside him, with the muddled look of a man who finds himself placed in an awkward position.
Do you of a good free and uncoerced will and with good intention take to yourself as wife this woman whom you see here before you?
The Grand Duke’s demeanor is even more strikingly discordant. Though dressed like a monarch, he has the sallow appearance of a sickly child. His recent illness has left him horribly pocked and plucked-looking. He slouches in boyish defiance, makes faces, answers the priest in petulant tones, and pretends to a haughty boredom that he cannot pull off. Every twitch betrays him, as though the clothes are too heavy.
The priest places the crowns upon their heads, he holds out the goblet with the warm red wine for them to drink, and he leads them thrice round the altar table. He beseeches Christ and the saints to bless their goings out and their comings in, and to bless their union with fruitfulness, to increase their numbers.
Bride, be exalted like unto Sarah; and exult, like unto Rebecca: and multiply, like unto Rachel.
Happy and delighted—such words are too much employed for frivolous emotions. The bride is called to be exultant. Xenia has such a look. Her profile is radiant, she is so entranced by her beloved that she might be on an island and he the only other inhabitant. She is very far away.
And rejoice in your husband, fulfilling the conditions of the law: for so is it well-pleasing unto God.
Tears are streaming down my cheeks.
Of Nadya, my only memory is the moment when the priest placed the wedding crown upon her head. It might have been made of thorns. I watch her lift her chin slightly, her throat pulling into taut lines. Her features, set in an attitude of resignation, stiffen. And then she reaches up with one hand to straighten the crown on her hair, and I gasp, thinking of grain clattering onto the floor.
But no, this must be the Grand Duchess, after all, for the sleeve that lifts to adjust the crown is of richly embroidered silver cloth and is slit open to reveal a lining of white swan’s down.
Replenish their life with good things. Receive their crowns into Thy kingdom, preserving them spotless, blameless, and without reproach, unto ages of ages.
Afterwards, in a shower of hemp seed, Xenia ducks her head into Andrei’s shoulder, and he covers her protectively. I am bereft. When the wedding party tries to pull apart the bride and groom, I forget the spirit of the game and tug at Xenia with childish, heartsick ferocity. Dazed with joy and clinging to Andrei, she smiles straight through me.
Later, her bridal sheets are brought to the wedding banquet and hung so all can see the bloody stains on them. A cheer goes up, and there is much laughter. Love is brutal.
I am conscious that I have violated a tradition of storytelling: a wedding shall signal the happy close to a tale. At this moment, any couple may yet stand in for every other; they are the blank slate on which are chalked our hopeful expectations.
What comes after the wedding, this is the province of nurses and mothers. They lay bare the mystery with commonplaces. Love and eggs are best when they are fresh. The wife who invites her husband to visit her while she is dressing invites his eventual disinterest. Take your thoughts to bed with you, they intone, for the morning is wiser than the evening.
For all this common wisdom, though, the heart of each particular marriage remains hidden. While sorting my mother’s effects after her death, I found the packet of letters my father had sent her so many years earlier from the front. They bore no relation to the heartsick professions Nadya had improvised in our games but were, instead, the most conventional of exchanges concerning the progress of the war and the management of my father’s estate and household. Try as I might, I could parse no feeling in them. Each was signed “Your husband, Nikolai Feodosievich,” as though she might not otherwise have known him. And yet she kept these letters until the end of her days. I am desirous to think that my mother and father may yet have loved each other, but their true feelings were so commingled with obligation that it is impossible to know. My father would not have known even how to frame such a question. He was a soldier and hence disposed to thinking not in terms of affection but only in terms of duty.
For her part, my mother was probably more alike him than he suspected, the chief difference being that showing her husband affection was among her duties. Though she might harshly reprimand a servant or child, in his presence she was always soft-spoken and demure. She deferred to his opinions, flattered his vanities, and endured his rebukes with meekness. Love was a choice she made, and then made again daily for the remainder of her life. From her I learnt that a woman should not expect her happiness to come from the man himself, but from those acts of devotion she showed to him.
Nadya did not learn this lesson. As Aunt Galya had predicted, Kuzma Zakharovich demanded little of her, but she found married life trying nonetheless. Chief amongst her complaints was Kuzma Zakharovich’s eldest daughter, at seventeen only two years younger than Nadya herself.
“She conspires to turn my husband against me,” Nadya complained. “She even allows the servants to be insolent. I ring and ring and no one will bring my coffee. They pretend they do not hear me, but I am ringing loudly enough.”
Nadya even insisted that the girl was trying to kill her. Her proof of this charge was that the daughter had insisted on cooking mutton in the house though Nadya was by then expecting a child and the smells of food made her ill. When the baby came, Nadya claimed to see Kuzma Zakharovich’s daughter give the infant the evil eye. “She denied it, of course, but I know what I saw. If this child dies, it will be on her head.”
Kuzma Zakharovich declined to be drawn into these quarrels and went hunting instead. Nor could Nadya find a sympathetic ear in her own family. Her mother emptily counseled patience, a game for which Nadya had no talent. More maddening, her own sister could not even be made to see the difficulty. Xenia could not conceive that one whom God had blessed with a mate might have any cause to be discontented. Nadya retorted that Xenia would not be so blithe had God dealt her Kuzma Zakharovich and his daughter. “Your happiness blinds you to the suffering of others.”
It was true that Xenia seemed uniquely blessed in her match. Andrei treated her with tenderness, and she returned his affection with adoration. A mention of him was sufficient to make her eyes soften, and if he was in the room, though she might seem engaged in conversation and give the outward appearance of attention, I could see that she was wholly preoccupied with him and he with her as well. Without a glance, much less a word or touch, they vibrated as though an invisible string stretched taut between them.
He spoilt her by buying for her whatever thing she fancied, with no eye to the cost. When she admired in passing Anna Vorontsovskaya’s Chinese fan, he ordered a copy made for her. Her delight in this gift so pleased him that after this he was continually looking for some new thing that should please her. She returned his extravagance. That Andrei might be proud of his table, she stocked the larder with rich foods—ducks and cheeses and kegs of beer—and their house became known for its hospitality. That he might be proud of her as well, she gave attention to her dress and hair. Once, he failed to compliment her on a new skirt and bodice, and at last she got it from him that he did not like her as much in muted hues. It was a beautiful dress, moiré silk the color of dried lavender, but no matter. She gave it straightaway to me and had another made just like it but in bright yellow.
Because it was her nature to be generous, she was intent that I, too, should know this happiness. As yet, no one had shown an inclination to deprive my family of me. My mother and aunt reasoned that a sixteen-year-old had two or three more seasons of bloom yet, but they did not seem hopeful of my prospects. Xenia took it upon herself to find me a husband. She applied to this task all her customary energies, attaching me to guest lists, lending me dresses from her wardrobe, and counseling me. Once, when I expressed a desire to stay home, she said, “Once you are married, you need never go out again. But if you will only pretend to a little gaiety tonight, perhaps you will feel it, too.”
We were going that evening to the home of Leonid Vladimirovich Berevsky. In his day, he kept an open house where anyone might come and dine at his table, and on a given evening he might feed the Empress and fifty of her courtiers or no one at all. His chef was famously inventive, for one supper creating a flotilla of ships carved from pineapples, for another decorating cakes with trellises of spun sugar and candied violets. Many went there only to sample what new novelty would be presented.
That evening we were served a dish of roast suckling pig stuffed with quails, these in turn stuffed with mushrooms. Leonid Vladimirovich’s daughter sat at table with her little pug dog seated on a chair next to her. Eufimia, short-limbed and fat, bore an unhappy resemblance to the bug-eyed little beast, a likeness she had witlessly enhanced by dressing the dog in a collar of the same gold lace that trimmed her own bodice.
“He is very clever,” Eufimia said. “Observe this.” Pulling the leg off a quail, she held the tiny drumstick just above the dog’s nose. “Didi, demonstrate how Mademoiselle Talyzina danced the mazurka at court.” She waggled the drumstick just out of its reach, and it rose onto its hind legs, tottering and spinning. Everyone laughed and applauded. Someone hummed a tune to accompany the dog, and others began to call out the names of various persons for Didi to imitate.
Count Razumovsky whispered, “Would that the mistress had the charms of her pet.” I could think of no witty answer but smiled encouragingly. Gospodin Chogalovsky on my left repeated the remark to the person on his left and I watched it circle the table, a discreet whisper, a titter, a shared glance, until it reached Xenia. Inclining her head towards her neighbor, she listened, but her fierce eyes remained fixed on the dog. By now, it was wheezing desperately from its exertions. It collapsed onto its haunches but then struggled back up when Eufimia dangled the drumstick in front of its nose.
Xenia rose. “May I try?” she asked Eufimia. She waited, holding out a hand.
Reluctantly, Eufimia passed her the drumstick. “Hold it just above his snout,” she instructed.
“Like so?” Xenia held out the drumstick but so low that the dog lunged and snatched a bit of greasy meat from the bone. She feigned surprise and dropped the drumstick to the floor, whereupon the dog fell off its chair and began to devour it.
“Oh, dear.” She could not keep from laughing. “Good boy, Didi! Look with what relish he enjoys his meat.”
“I can’t think who he puts me in mind of,” said Gospodin Chogalovsky. Someone volunteered the name of an Austrian attaché with famously bad table manners.
“Yes, that’s him exactly!”
The game turned to one in which Didi was encouraged to eat in the manner of various people we did not like. Scraps of food were tossed on the floor, and the dog happily snuffled them up.
Eufimia pouted. “No, make him dance.” She held up another drumstick but could no longer engage her dog’s attention.
One of Eufimia’s several suitors—she might be unattractive, but she stood to inherit much charm—volunteered that he would happily dance if he might feed from her hand. With a simper, Eufimia held up the drumstick and requested the figures of a sarabande. He obliged, to more laughter. Such was the nature of our amusement most evenings.
Andrei, being attached to the court, was compelled to move in its seasonal cycles, quitting Petersburg in the spring for more hospitable climates. From Petersburg to Moscow, to Oranienbaum and the summer palace at Tsarskoye Selo, to monasteries and country estates and back again—the Empress was a restless traveler, and wherever she went an endless line of carriages and carts snaked behind her carrying all her furniture and her several thousand dresses and shoes, and behind them her vast retinue, often nearly a quarter of the populace of Petersburg, a moveable city of pilgrims journeying endlessly from shrine to shrine, seeking some new diversion.
Because Xenia could not bear to be apart from her husband, she often numbered amongst these travelers. Even I, who had no relation to the court, was brought along on one such journey, an Imperial pilgrimage to Lake Svetloyar. Xenia had arranged it. A pilgrimage, she reasoned, would provide opportunities for informal meetings and conversation. And I should not have to dance.
The court left Tsarskoye Selo after the roads were dry and traveled first to Prince Merchersky’s estate near Nizhny Novgorod. After a week of the Prince’s hospitality, the vast machine of the Empress’s retinue set out on foot for the lake.
Within two hours of our departing, word came back through the line that Her Imperial Majesty was fatigued. We were compelled to stop then and there and await carriages to convey us the remaining nine or ten versts to our lodgings. The next day, the carriages returned us to the exact spot where we had previously left off, and we continued walking from there. That afternoon, we made little more progress before the Empress suffered a blister on her heel. Again, we waited for carriages to shuttle us forward in small groups, a tedious process that took longer than it would have to walk the same distance. And so it went. Each day, the carriages deposited us on this same stretch of road and then picked us up again some incremental distance farther on. It was three days before we passed our lodgings on foot and four days before the tail of the line accomplished this same feat.
Xenia did not forget her purpose in bringing me along, and contrived each day to put us in the company of various unattached men. Into the second week, we stood one afternoon by the side of the road watching the procession of pilgrims pass, until she spotted a page she had met the previous evening. My first thought was that Xenia had misjudged: I had seen this same young man seated at supper next to one of the Shuvalov brothers.
“Yes, he is their nephew,” she answered.
“He is too far above me.” I did not add that he was too pretty as well.
“The heart does not know its station.”
She took me by the arm and fell in just ahead of the page. When he caught sight of her, she expressed delight at the happy accident of meeting again.
“This is my cousin Daria Nikolayevna of whom I spoke. Dasha, this is Ivan Ivanovich. He is a great lover of books. I told him last evening that you read.”
He expressed his pleasure at making my acquaintance and asked if I might commend any books to him. I had read the whole of what was available to me—the Psalter, the domestic rules of the Domostroi, and a pamphlet condemning the aggressions of the former King of Sweden—in short, nothing I might recommend. I returned the question. He recommended a book of lives by a Roman called Plutarch and described to me its virtues. He then kindly offered to lend me his volume.
Had we more time, we might have gotten on well, for he was frank and intelligent and fond of ideas. But our walk was cut short by a pebble in the Empress’s slipper.
We did not see Ivan Ivanovich again over the next several days. After Xenia asked Andrei to make inquiries, we learnt that the page had been moved to the head of the procession and was now walking in the company of the Empress herself.
“I fear the Shuvalovs have designs for him.” Andrei was grim. It seemed the brothers, dangerous and tireless schemers both, had brought their nephew on the pilgrimage with the purpose of introducing him to the Empress. By all appearances, they had calculated rightly the particular weakness of their sovereign. This young man, twenty-seven years her junior, had caught the Empress’s fancy, and the enemies of Razumovsky were gleefully predicting that the Count would be out on his ear soon.
Andrei reflected the gradual darkening of the courtiers’ mood. The lake lay no more than one hundred and twenty versts to the east of our starting point, but it had taken us nearly a fortnight to cover half that distance, for we could walk at best an hour a day before Her Majesty became winded or footsore. Prince Merchersky remarked that the early fathers might never have made it to the Holy Land had they been obliged to wear corsets and slippers. It began to seem we should be on that road forever, and the prospect bred a restive ill-temper which spread like disease in the close quarters. However various were our lodgings en route, they shared the quality of being overcrowded. Xenia and I were compelled one night to lie in a doorsill and were woken a dozen times by people stepping over us. On another night, we slept seated in a long queue of carriages parked before the inn where the Empress and her ladies were bedded.
Xenia, however, remained cheerful. She liked being out of doors and relished every aspect of travel. As we walked, each new prospect excited her, though its only virtue might seem to be that it was unfamiliar. Even the small hardships, she insisted cheerily, were a diversion from one’s daily routines and familiar discomforts. Why, she might even become a wandering monk. Andrei replied that she would make a terrible monk. “How would you manage without your dresses and baubles? Besides, you have no gift for being alone.” She snugged her arm into the crook of his and said that he was right. Though she could live without her worldly possessions, she would die if deprived of his company.
At last our caravan reached the lake. There being no suitable lodgings in the vicinity, scores of tents had been erected in a meadow overlooking the water. Our spirits were lifted to have finally reached our destination and to find it equal to all that had been said of it. The lake, glassy and round as a mirror, looked like a circle cut from the sky and set down there. Cottony clouds floated on the still blue surface, and lily pads and cattails garlanded the rim. Andrei jested that the city of Kitezh had risen again.
The legend goes that five hundred years ago, a city of golden-domed churches stood there. This was in the time of Batu Khan, when his barbarous warriors swarmed across the land, setting fire to every village and town, slaying without mercy old men and mothers, and sweeping up children onto the backs of their horses to be sold into slavery. Even the great Kiev was laid waste, its churches and libraries burnt, its streets turned to rivers of blood, and not a single person spared to mourn the dead. Then Batu Khan turned his army towards the city of Kitezh. In anticipation of the coming terror, the people built no fortifications and made no preparations to defend their city but instead prayed fervently to God to spare them.
It is said that as the Mongol horde approached the walls of the city, fountains of water sprouted from the ground around them. Khan’s army retreated and watched from a remove as God caused the city to be swallowed into a deep lake.
Many pilgrim to Lake Svetloyar to pray and to drink from these waters. Holy persons have sometimes reported seeing the lights of the invisible city glimmering in the black depths or hearing, faintly, the tolling of bells and the murmured prayers of the ancient inhabitants. There are even stories of pilgrims who have gone there and never returned, or they have disappeared for a time and then reappeared on the banks of the lake with no memory of where they have been.
That evening, we processed down to the water, where hundreds of candles had been set adrift and twinkled in the summer dusk. We knelt in the damp grasses and turned to watch Her Imperial Majesty take the final steps of the pilgrimage. On her left was Count Razumovsky and close by, Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov. At the edge of the water, Razumovsky helped the Empress to kneel onto a carpet. Her confessor said the prayers and then, dipping a goblet into the lake, held it for her to drink. When she had drunk, she held a plump hand out, not to Razumovsky but to Ivan Ivanovich. He handed her onto her throne, which had been carried from Petersburg, and she rested her tired feet on a stool.
Across the dark water came the high note of a hand bell, icy and ethereal. Then another bell and another, and beneath these sounds, a slow, upwelling chant. The hum of whispers occasioned by Her Imperial Majesty’s slighting of her favorite fell away, and all eyes turned towards the water. The Empress had commissioned a song to be written for the occasion of our arrival. I knew that Andrei, with the choir, was installed on a barge tethered somewhere off the shore to sing it, but peering into the gloaming I could not discern the source of the music. It was as though a fissure had opened up, sonorous and deep, and was breathing out the sounds of the ancient city, and the even more ancient sounds of the earth itself. Whales and beetles, grass pushing up through the soil, the slow exhalation of mountains and tides, the buzz of everything, living or not, swelling and contracting and pulling the soul down into its music.
A chorus of supplications rose to the heavens. Save us, O merciful Lord, they sang, in this our time of trouble. And the waters began to rise and to turn back the barbarians, who fell away in fear and awe. The waters filled the streets and crept up the walls of the houses, rising above the roofs, and still the voices could be heard praising God. One by one, the domes of the many churches disappeared until the Mongol’s last sight of the city was a gold cross hovering above the water. The voice of the choir grew triumphant. It extolled the long line of holy ones from Kitezh to our present mother, Elizabeth, whose prayers had sheltered Russia from its enemies. At the end of time, the choir sang, this golden-domed city would rise up again, a new kingdom on earth. The hand bells accompanying the choir rang out and then died. We on the banks strained to hear the last tones melting into the silence.
As the choir sang, Xenia had clasped my hand hard. Tears had shone in her eyes, and they had a bright, ecstatic look. Now, the courtiers stirred to life and began to talk amongst themselves, but she remained still and as vacant in aspect as one in a trance.
“The choir sang as I have never heard them,” I said to her.
She did not answer, though she was usually happy to hear the choir praised, making no distinction between this and praise of Andrei in particular. People hurried past us, heading back up the rise to where a supper had been laid on long tables in the open air. At long last, like a person returning from a great distance, she blinked and her eyes took in her surroundings.
“The choir sang as I have never heard them,” I repeated. Still caught in reverie, she nodded.
She was uncommonly quiet for the remainder of the evening, and not even Andrei’s merriness roused her from her distraction. He expressed concern that the journey had overtaxed her. “Are you unwell?” he asked.
“No, no, I am fine. It is…” She scanned the air for more words but did not find them. “Do you not feel it?”
“What?”
“That our lives are shadows. You, me, all this, it does not mean a thing.”
He was at a loss how to answer.
“No, that sounds horrible, I am not expressing it well. What if the lake, the trees, the heavens, everything we can see, is a forgery, like painted scenery? Lovely as it is, what if it is not real and there is something else?”
With a little shake of her head, she fell back into silence. She was quiet and more distractible the next day, but she gradually returned to herself once we had left Lake Svetloyar and come home again.