The Imperial Wife (16 page)

In the 1990s, leaving Queens for New Jersey was upward mobility for a Russian immigrant. No more tenement apartments riddled with ants and cockroaches and neighbors burning pungent foods, no more lumbering buses emitting gas into your window or the bedroom view of a courtyard with overflowing trash cans. The indignities of the Soviet Union were magnified in New York but New Jersey was America in miniature. The civilization of a house, the private dignity of a car, a mall with its neat, spacious clarity. Costco and its promise of deprivation's opposite. New York City was always there when you needed it, and when you lacked the energy to battle the traffic to cross the bridge to its cultural institutions, you watched the Russian television program
Kultura.
(“Our people on the move:
Kultura
.”)

The show is anchored by a breathless pixie of a woman who seems to attend every play, opera, and gallery opening in New York City. With textured pleasure, she details to her viewers an unreachable world just over the George Washington Bridge peopled by Russian luminaries: the Misha Baryshnikovs and Anna Netrebkos and Vassily Grigorievs. Her talent is verbal transportation, the dissemination of myth. All of Ramsdale watches the show with bursting pride, the subject always someone's nephew or cousin or patient who's made it.
Our people on the move.

A few months into my new job as head of Russian art, I got the call to appear on the show. I was strangely proud of the invitation, as if the entire community were a microcosm of a mother's pride. My parents alternated between delight and fear. I was somebody now, but for Russians with a long memory, visibility comes with a sheen of danger; I was in the public eye and vulnerable. My parents' paranoia was not altogether unfounded because after the show aired, strangers began showing up at my parents' house with a parade of masterpieces magically unearthed from ancient relatives. And here is another one.

“If you would just make an appointment at my office,” I plead with the waiting man.

“I saw you on show.” He's already unwrapping the painting, peeling off strips of brown paper and twine. I set down the bag and look. The subject is a wooded landscape, a silver brook splitting two rows of trees, the final rays of sunlight receding behind clouds. I move in for a closer inspection.

The man notices my flicker of interest. “That's right. I knew if you would only lay eyes on it. Very special Shishkin. You can't argue with quality.”

I scan down the canvas for pigment and brushstroke. The first impression is good: it does seem to have age. The painting is typical of the Düsseldorf school, and Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin did study at the Düsseldorf Academy so this type of scene would be typical for him. The front door opens, and my father waves us inside. “Come in, come in. Tea is ready.”

My father and the man exchange nods of recognition, of mutual respect. The man, it seems, owns one of the bigger Russian stores in town. He's a minor celebrity in Ramsdale who refers the occasional customer to my father, which means I have to take him seriously. My mother clears the table. The man and I are alone in the dining room with the painting.

“It's not particularly good, is it?” I say, making an effort to camouflage my excitement. Shishkin is a real coup. He is to Russia as Edward Hopper is to America, a painter that can move a true Russian to tears. My clients recall their days as schoolboys when they took excursions to the Tretyakov and encountered their first Shishkin. When I consider quitting my job, I think of what I do as reuniting these men with a dear friend they feared they would never embrace again.

“I would say it's a minor work even if authenticated,” I say. Experts must always downplay the work's importance. A closer examination of the surface confirms it: it is a true nineteenth-century.

“Okay, so it's not a masterpiece. Must a genius always make masterpieces? But when I was six years old, I remember it hanging on Tyotya Sonya's wall. Her grandfather knew Shishkin's father from the army…”

The man's story turns florid around the siege of Leningrad, then flows into a ribald autobiography of three tumultuous marriages, a poet brother arrested by Stalin but then released after interrogation, distinction on a collective farm plucking turkeys, modest fame as a Soviet author of children's nursery rhymes, and now part owner of a chain of Russian stores in Bergen County. He lifts the painting as I work, tipping its face into the overhead light.

“Please don't do that,” I reproach him.

“It's a beauty, yes? I spent years adoring this Shishkin hanging on my auntie's wall, and right before she died, Tyotya Sonya promised to gift me the painting. ‘Save it for a day you need a little extra cash,' she told me.”

“If you would allow me to handle the painting myself.” I stare pointedly at his fingers until they let go of the frame.

In any case, stories like this can never be taken seriously. This kind of seller pulls out almost identical sentimental tales of Soviet wartime. He trots out the same dubious letters from an Aunty Sonya or Aunty Valya dating back to the 1930s that never fail to mention something like, “And by the way, I happened to pick up this special little painting from the studio of a most interesting artist…” By now I know better than to get suckered in. Still, this is no fake. The canvas is not lined, the craquelure is right for the era.

I'm overjoyed. I picture Vitya, one of my favorite clients, how he asks every time we're on the phone, “Please, Tan'ka, tell me today is the day you found me a Shishkin.”

The description of Tyotya Sonya's final surrender to throat cancer turns gruesome when I interrupt, “Let's turn off the light and take a better look.” I scoop out the ultraviolet light always in my bag for just these occasions, and examine the pigment more closely.

The man plucks a chocolate-covered
zephyr
from the dessert tray and bites down. “From my store,” he says, holding it up. “Am I right or am I right?”

How this business can always surprise; sometimes, there's nothing less likely than authenticity. “I'll need to show it to my restorer but this is looking good.”

“Wonderful, wonderful, Tanyechka.” He is onto his second
zephyr
now, praising my mother for the real strength of her brewed tea, none of that weak American crap they call tea. My mother is bustling, blushing with pleasure. The service is set out to perfection, our best tea set, a perfect pyramid of sugar cubes.

“Your father, Tanyechka, is a perfectionist. My customers always say, ‘he has magic hands,'” the man says. “Your beautiful mother is the queen of the office. Everyone looks forward to simply sitting in the waiting room and staring at her.”

“
Nu,
enough already with your flattery. Shall I splash a little?” My father holds up a bottle of cognac.

“Splash, splash. Who am I to resist?”

Celebratory glasses are handed out. As I wrap the painting, I notice it in the corner. At first it looks like it could be a root from one of the trees, a brushstroke, a flourish in the earth. I shine the light closer. The Shishkin signature is not embedded in the pigment, it hovers on top of the canvas. On closer inspection, the signature is poppy, pretty, lacking in depth. The mark, then, the errant bark I noticed earlier, must be the original painter's name scraped away. Of course. The man purchased a Hans-somebody from the Düsseldorf School for five to seven thousand and is now trying to pass it off as a Shishkin.

I sigh. “Actually, I'm afraid there's a little problem with this Shishkin.”

“What problem? What are you talking about?”

My parents have stopped moving in the kitchen, and the only sound we hear is the sound of a television program upstairs: “Ukrainian siblings Sima and Sonia Dodyk were among thirty-eight Jews who lived in a cave during World War Two for eighteen months, thus surviving the Holocaust.”

The guy puts down the
zephyr,
his face gathering color. “I told you, my Tyotya Sonya has owned this painting her entire life. I thought you were this great expert.”

I think about Carl—on the subway, he would lean back against the door and embrace me through the fits and starts of the train—and a torrent of unexpected sadness overwhelms me. I think I might cry right here, in front of this man and his fake Shishkin. But I swallow. “I know this must be a huge shock. But I'm afraid that although on first inspection it looked so encouraging, you'll see that under the trunk of that tree, there are the remnants of an original signature.”

The man meets the eyes of my parents as if to say,
Can you believe this? Who does she think she is?
He is shrouding the face of the painting in reams of butcher paper, a series of angry strokes. “Five minutes of expertise and it's already got a problem? That's all I get? I was just speaking to Nadia Kudrina at Christie's and she says this is an important work. And come to think of it, did she not sell that record Shishkin last season? I guess I should go and see her after all.”

The door is slammed shut and we hear the furious roar of an engine blocking our driveway.

“Are you sure you're correct?” my father asks. He looks shocked. “Is there any chance it really is a Shishkin?”

It's not the constant flood of fakes that get to me in this job; I'm used to them by now. I've been shown “early twentieth-century” paintings where the paint was still wet. Respected gallerists thrusting before me canvases baked in an oven to give the impression of age, second cousins at birthday parties asking me to appraise posters sloppily wedged into frames. That doesn't bother me anymore. It's the presumption that travels with me everywhere: I don't deserve my position, my expertise is nothing more than an accident of luck. My parents immigrated with someone who could not rise in the New World. Who is incapable of doing whatever it takes to make something of herself.

I heave, then the tears come in earnest. “I'm the specialist!”

My mother drops the dishes and hurries over. “Come here, hand it to me.”

She cradles my head in her elbow, thumb working at the muscles in my neck. When as a child I was tormented by a nameless panic, a horror I could not pin down, my mother used to say,
Hand it to me.
And it always worked; once I voiced my fears to my mother, once I displaced that tumor of confusion from my own mind onto hers, it never failed to vanish. So now, in the pauses between a fresh wave, I hand her all of it: the fear of an incomprehensible new life, losing Carl. And the deepest, unvoiced one of all: that my marriage is falling apart and the fault is mine.

My mother listens, nods, takes in all my ramblings. I'm impressed that she asks no questions about Carl, offers no advice on what a woman has to do to regain the affections of her husband. She strokes my cheek. “Don't worry, Tanchik. We won't be shopping at this man's store anymore.”

As if to reinforce the dawning of a new era, my father grabs the entire bowl of chocolate
zephyrs,
and with the flourish of a former soccer player, flings the contents into the garbage can and slams down the lid.

 

Catherine

FEBRUARY 1745

Peter's skin burns to the touch but he refuses to retire to his room. The objective of this particular game is to take turns telling the truth.

“I hate the empress's birthday fetes,” he says. He strings up one of his puppets by the neck and hangs him from a bedpost. He is unusually pale and sluggish today. “I find it unbearable the way she outfits herself like a young lady, which she is not. She is old and a whore. Your turn.”

“You look ill. Get some rest.” Catherine sighs. In the distance, she hears the singing of the matins, probably coming from the ladies in her antechamber. She is not deeply devout, but his complaining on a Sunday is particularly grating. “Please, for the sake of your health.”

“Must I? But I'm so bored,” he says, then, brightening, “Did I tell you I retained a dwarf? He's extremely loyal to me.”

She feels the plane of his forehead, then pulls back. “You are burning with fever. I will send for Lestocq. Now go.”

At last, he shuffles off to his chambers, and she is left alone. She tries to practice the harpsichord but manages only a few halfhearted notes before worries engulf her. How sick is he? Should he be truly ill, her situation would be shaky. As it is, the long engagement is making everyone impatient, her role not yet cemented. A year, the empress said. What seemed before like freedom is now an extended purgatory.

She bursts into her mother's rooms. Johanna is in the middle of writing letters, but puts down her quill. These days, this is where mother and daughter are in unison. Their heads are bowed together on the settee, fingers clasped. They whisper a mutual language of comets and plans, their breath warm, intermingling.

“Let us change you into one of your more somber gowns and inquire after the grand duke,” Johanna suggests. Once Catherine has on her gray daytime dress, they rush down the hallways of the wooden palace. At the door to Peter's room stands Count Brummer. He is blocking the entrance, and they can hear a flurry of agitated voices on the other side of the door.

“We are here to inquire after the health of the grand duke,” her mother says.

The past year has brought a new imperiousness to her tone, an imitation of the empress's. She pushes their way forward but Brummer holds his place. A rivulet of sweat runs down each temple. If the grand duke dies, Catherine supposes he too will be sent back to Germany.

“Please, no farther,” Brummer says in that thin, whiny way of his. “Smallpox sores have appeared on the body of the grand duke.”

There is an intake of breath. Catherine comes forward. “Can I see him?”

“No, Figgy, are you mad? No!” Her mother pulls her away. “Death is looking him over. We must get out of its way.” This is not the friend of the settee, but a frenzied creature dragging her away by the hand.