Название: Enchantments
Автор: Kathryn Harrison
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007467082
isbn:
Even if Varya and I didn’t receive so many invitations to teas and birthday parties as did our schoolmates, a city like St. Petersburg offered endless distractions. Window-shopping was a thing we could do all day, wandering up and down the Nevsky Prospekt with Dunia, who had come from Pokrovskoye to keep house for Father, all of us entranced by objects as ordinary as brooms and washboards so long as they were in a bright window. We had to hurry Dunia past the Singer building, though, as she had a helpless attraction to sewing machines and could stand all day staring at the models on display, and heaven help us if there was a demonstration. For Dunia, that was better than Shakespeare.
Being a crown prince has its rewards, of course, but, like most with royal blood, Alyosha paid with his freedom. There was much of the world, almost all of it, he had never seen. What did he know of his own birthplace? Oh, he’d been taken like a tourist to all the sights, the Bronze Horseman and the Alexander Column and the little cottage from which Peter the Great had issued his decrees while he waited for his metropolis to assume proportions befitting his majesty. Alyosha had slept through a ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre; he’d stuffed his fingers in his ears while one or another of Antonina Nezhdanova’s arias transformed the same theater’s stage lights into a rain of broken glass that fell past the imperial box and, as if it were a planned effect, landed like glittering bits of ice on the proscenium. More than once he’d been allowed to meander among the shops at Gostiny Dvor, as much as a boy accompanied by an imperial guard can meander. In the shining black bombproof carriage presented by Napoleon III to his great-grandfather Alexander II—and what more suitable gift from one tyrant to another?—he’d toured the Nevsky Prospekt and its fine shops filled with pastries and furs and haute couture fashions. With their English governess, he and his sisters had taken tea in a tea shop, just like a more average set of aristocratic siblings, and he’d strolled with their French tutor and repeated after him the word for store (le magasin), for window (la fenêtre), for police (les gendarmes), for cheese (le fromage), for horse (le cheval). (Trés bon! said the tutor.) Under the watch of Derevenko or Nagorny, he’d seen the showrooms of Fabergé. Peter Carl Fabairzhay, who made a fashionable French name of his Russian one and from whose atelier came the jeweled eggs presented by tsars to their tsarinas, each egg worth more than most people’s houses. Fabergé, whose hands had strung the tsarina’s long ropes of pearls. Aloysha’s mother wore her pearls every day.
“They die if you don’t,” Tatiana had told me.
“What do you mean, die?” I said, having no idea they were alive. The ropes moved as the tsarina walked, swayed and tapped against one another, their clicking distinct from the whisper of her slippered feet on the floor.
“They go gray and their luster disappears. All the light goes out of them.”
I nodded, as I always did when Tatiana offered me such splinters of information. They weren’t casual asides. She spoke intently, as if bit by bit she was imparting a kind of code that, with practice, I could use to accomplish great things. I liked it. Not for the wisdom she volunteered—it wasn’t of a type I considered useful—but for the earnestness in her eyes, which was maternal. I could tell she was edifying me as she did her sisters and Varya, out of a sense of duty.
Alyosha had, like me, watched the sun sink over a slow-flowing summer Neva, a few errant beams spraying off the gilded dome of Saint Isaac’s. Whenever it wasn’t frozen, the Neva’s flat surface reflected sunsets of freakish beauty. Fuchsia-pink clouds streaked with violet and orange were a regular occurrence in a city ringed with factories exhaling smoke. Neighborhoods spewed smoke as well, dark plumes rising from fires in the harbor district’s slums, warrens of squalid cells connected by dirty passages so dark they seemed subterranean. Workers, stuporous with exhaustion or drink, or more likely both, dropped their still-burning cigarettes, and whole city blocks discovered the speed with which rotten timbers burst into flame. Across the wide river was the Peter and Paul Fortress, where would-be revolutionaries rotted away in solitary cells infested with rats—at least they did until Alexander II made the mistake of coming out from behind his bombproof carriage door and down its bombproof steps to tread on a grenade. After that, the ministers of his successor, who was Alyosha’s grand father Alexander III, thought it prudent to remove prisoners and the plots they hatched to the old Schlusselburg Fortress, forty miles upstream from Petersburg.
Whenever he was allowed, the tsarevich had stood at his father’s side, staring down from the balcony of the Winter Palace at endless bristling ranks of bayonet-bearing soldiers parading below them to collect their tsar’s—his father’s—blessing before they walked into battle. But that was all Alyosha knew of the city from which, he had been told, he would rule the nation he was to inherit, and for whose future he was being educated.
He’d never seen behind the pink and yellow stuccoed façades of the great avenues, never been to the Haymarket to gasp in wonder at the city’s squalid soul, a tide of beggars, drunkards, and whores washing through the aisles of market stalls like debris loosened by one of the Neva’s dependably imminent floods, each a guaranteed-to-be-pestilential deluge of cholera germs and candelabra, of corsets, croissants, chapbooks, clocks, chopsticks, and—
“Wouldn’t candelabra and clocks be too heavy for water to take away?”
“You’d think so, but I’ve seen both in the street after it receded. As well as a drowned dog with a diamond collar being undone by a drunk Dutchman dancing by.”
“Was that D, then?”
“Yes. Along with doors and dumbwaiters and, um, drawing-room chairs. And dice.”
“Now E.”
“Egrets. Eggs. Electric lamps. Elastic. Epaulets. Elephants.”
“F.”
“Fire screens, feather beds, forks, foxes, anything French.”
“Such as?”
“French beans. French bulldogs. French toast.”
“G.”
“Garters, garden gates, greengages, grandmothers, and grandfathers. Glasses, those for tea and those to look through.” George V, I stopped myself from adding to the list. We’d only just learned that the offer of asylum in the United Kingdom had been rescinded now that King George had given his too hasty invitation enough thought to realize what a mistake it might be to expose his disgruntled populace, also suffering the privations of war, to living proof that emperors could be overthrown. We hadn’t had even a week to enjoy the fantasy of being freed before it evaporated.
The early months of 1917 were the Romanovs’ purgatory, a state somewhere between death and judgment, in which they—we all—entertained hopes of escape from whatever punishment the growing strength and organization of the revolutionaries augured. The possibility of freedom was not much different for us than for souls in purgatory: it would depend upon sacrifices made by those who remained in a world to which we were barred return. Varya and I were never told specifically to avoid the topic of our collective fate, but, living in the home of a tsar, we followed the example of our hosts, and politics wasn’t something I discussed with anyone save Alyosha.
One good thing about the Haymarket, I told the tsarevich: whatever СКАЧАТЬ