The Imperial Wife (21 page)

“Len'ka, let her alone. That's not what she meant,” Medovsky says. Now for some reason the table is strangely silent, even the lapping water seems to have been muted.

But the woman's voice carries over the music. “Not his ‘scene'? How dare you judge us?”

The world returns to jarring focus. “I'm sorry, Lena, if it came out sounding that way. I really didn't mean anything by it.”

“What do you really know about our scene anyway? You left the country as a child.”

“I think you misunderstood.”

“You see, you don't remember. You grew up in America so now you can look at us from your lofty perch,” Lena says. “Do you know what it's like to be at the mercy of whatever is on the shelves that week? Do you know the feeling of fear that your parents won't be able to feed you? Or the fantasies of wearing a yellow sundress the way they do in the West? Or what about finding out that your favorite pair of shoes, the unique tan ones you splurged your entire paycheck on, were actually shoes they put on dead bodies during funerals?”

“No, she has no idea, she was raised on Cheerios,” someone says in the hopeful way of switching the topic.

Memory wriggles to the surface, from the other place, from my childhood. The sickly green walls of the communal apartment, the long hallway where I tricycled back and forth, the dinner parties on one side of the room, my cot on the other. The ice-skating rink in the back of the building, the feeling of your scarf flying about your cheeks, an adult hand sure in your mitten. The first day of school, a day so glorified in books and on television that I stayed up all night staring at the uniform draped over my chair, half expecting it would come to life.

“I remember my mother coming home with a pile of Swedish bras. That was exciting. She left work early because she heard some lady was selling them out of her house. And she waited on line half a day, spent her whole paycheck. But when she tried them on, they didn't fit. Not a single one of them. She had to give them all away to her friend,” I say. I have no idea why this is the story I tell.

Again, laughter. “I think I bought one of those bras,” says a woman at the other end of the table. Despite the heat, the woman's shoulders are swathed in fur.

“It's funny now, but do you know what it's like when your mother sends you to wait on line for four days because the rumor is they are selling children's coats from Denmark?” Lena says. She gestures to the wine sommelier. “You remember that horrible winter, Ol'ka? We were ordered to buy eight coats when we got to the front of the line. We each got one, and my mother sewed four together to make a single winter coat for herself. Food and clothes, clothes and food, how to get it, trade it. That's all we thought about every day.”

Olya says, “I remember. I remember. Who can forget?”

“Come now, we're depressing our guests.” Medovsky is looking down at his lap, at the starched napkin draped across his knee.

“And what about when there is no milk for your baby? What about when your baby is hoarse from hunger, your breasts are tapped of all its paltry reserves and there is not a single can of condensed milk in the store?” Lena continues. She takes a few gulps of her wine, striking the table with her index finger for emphasis. The women around her are no longer smiling.

Medovsky waves it all away. “Let's talk of something more cheerful.”

“No, she really should know. And what about Sasha? Do you know how he became who he is today?”

“Lena, please forgive me. I didn't mean to offend you.” I'm thoroughly sober now.

“Imagine what a hustler you have to be just to survive. Sasha took great risks with a cooperative business at a time when any whiff of capitalism was treason, the KGB breathing down his neck. He didn't know a damn thing about aluminum or business, nobody did. But Sasha never even got a college degree. He was a construction worker, for God's sake, twelve-hour days building dachas for stinking politburo.”

“Len, what's wrong with you? This is old news. Are you trying to make me some kind of uneducated Soviet hero?” Medovsky says with a forced laugh. He wipes his mouth with a napkin, methodically, as if to shield from view his mouth. I can see the shame in him, the effort of concealing it.

“No, I would like everyone to know.”

“They know, they know.”

“Not her. She thinks we're monsters.”

I rise from my seat and go over to Lena's chair. The glitter from Lena's eye shadow has speckled down, dusting nostrils and her chin with silver.

“Never. I swear to you, you misunderstand me,” I say, searching for the right words. “It's because my Russian is stuck at the seven-year-old level. Can we embrace?”

Lena's jaw loosens somewhat but her eyes remain hard.

“My wife, friends. How did I get so lucky?” Medovsky raises a glass. His face is flushed with wine. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, a dangerous storm has bypassed us. “To wives. We do not deserve them. I would like to quote a little man you may have heard of. His name was Vladimir Vysotsky. He was an okay singer and songwriter. We all know this personage, I presume?

“Just do it already,” people call out. “Turn down the music.” Someone whispers into Itzhak Perlman's ear and he lowers his violin. They all strain against the sound of the tide sweeping the shore, and Lena turns to her husband, expectant, a kind of hopeful weariness in her features as if daring him to surprise her after all this time, to gladden her.

“Here we go.” He strums an air guitar, affects a growl. He launches into Vysotsky's famous song “I Love You Here and Now.”

I do not want the past, the future I don't know.

I love you here and now, with tears and with laughter.

“Beautiful, not half bad,” the men exclaim, palms pounding on tables.
“Gor'ko!”

The staff rush to refill glasses while Medovsky and Lena's kiss unites in the middle of the table.

“We say
gor'ko
—bitter—so the kiss turns it to sweet,” Oleg explains, unnecessarily, as if to a foreigner.

My throat feels full. I'm overcome with something I can't pin down—nostalgia, longing, anticipation of loss? “Excuse me a moment.”

I lean over the stainless steel of the yacht's railing. Here, away from the stare of the company, the breeze floats cool, the moon shaved to rind. Water laps against the swimming platform at the stern. Up on the sundeck, the glass-walled gym is illuminated, the outline of a man in a very different kind of tracksuit than my father's is walking the treadmill. I'm not sure I've ever felt this alone in the world.

The band, without warning, bursts back into song, Itzhak Perlman's fiddle reverberating up to the heavens. The sea is draped with night, patches of water illuminated by yachts like this one. “Tanya! Tanyusha!”—I'm being called.
Time for dancing!

 

Catherine

AUGUST 1745

The empress barges in during Catherine's bath. The water is calm, warm, floating just above the surface of her skin. She has allowed herself to doze. The sun has barely hoisted itself past the horizon, the room still bathed with chill. But the empress's face extends toward her, demonlike. Catherine feels her prune-skinned body examined for flaws or bruises, her collarbone, neck, and, finally, behind the ears. She is deemed satisfactory.

When the two of them move to the settee, the empress takes her hand. She thinks the woman might finally instruct her on what a man and wife do in the privacy of their bedroom. The morning of the wedding seems the ideal time for the conversation. So far, no one else knows or takes the time to tell her what will be expected of her. Katya has no insights, nor do the other ladies. They predict it an act of nature that overtakes you when the two of you lie in bed, naked. Her mother tells her to follow instructions, that men's knowledge of these things is innate. Catherine imagines that if any man has no innate knowledge of such things, it is Peter. Daylight scissors its way into the room, lending the surfaces a feathery sheen of citrus.

“Everything will be wonderful,” the empress says at last. She places two jeweled portraits in Catherine's hand, of the empress and Peter. They are miniatures, Peter's small enough to burnish the reality of his features. “Hold on to these. You need not look at them, but they may be useful someday.”

Catherine cannot imagine what use she will ever have of them. As soon as the wedding is over, she will relegate them to her deepest chest. “You have been more than a mother to me.”

The empress smiles, the one that accompanies her generous mood. In this humor, her cheeks blushing like peaches, Catherine thinks the empress must be the most beautiful woman in the world. “I hope we have not disappointed you. Marriage can certainly be trying, but husbands can be managed.”

“Yet I am so fortunate.”

“Not in everything, surely. Peter, for one. His conduct is not always exemplary. I thought he would be a true heir, but his character is not suited to reign. Perhaps with time.”

“He is young still.”

“Yes, of course. One still hopes he will rise to the task. His mother was so different, I still cannot believe they are of one blood.” The empress's periwinkle eyes are moist and Catherine wonders if she was close to this deceased sister. She imagines a young Elizabeth exchanging confidences with Peter's mother against the flicker of candlelight. The way she does with Katya.

But then the doors fling open, and in fly everyone at once. Johanna, the hairdresser, the seamstress, her ladies. They are discussing the best style to hold the crown in place, where to pin the lace cloak at her shoulders. Should her hair be allowed its natural state or should it be curled? Where precisely will the tiara be tucked? Her body is jostled around according to their will, held in place while the gown is draped over her head. She was prepared for its heft but the combination of brocade and lace and the diamond crown affixed to her scalp is like a full suit of armor. It makes her neck throb immediately. They are all admiring her fashionable short sleeves, the rouged sheen of her cheeks, the silver roses woven into the fabric with silver thread. They are deeming her quite lovely, really, as though the observation is one of pleasant surprise.

I am to be queen,
she reminds herself. She can hear the metallic sound of muskets, probably the formation of soldiers creating a path to the cathedral. And in that moment, infused by the presence of the empress, by Saint Catherine staring up at her among red ribbon and diamond from the surface of the bureau, Catherine
is
queen. Not someone's wife, or consort or regent, but singular, enlightened monarch. Reader of Plato and the nine volumes of the canon of Saint Genevieve, and
The History of Germany
. Friend to Gyllenborg and Frederick of Prussia. The kind of queen who knows everything pertinent about the Colley Cibbers of the world. It is the role she was fated for, the precocious one in the room, so different than the others, singled out against all odds.

The knock arrives when she is not sure she can tolerate more people around her. She feels the first rumble of hunger from fasting, which she will have to tolerate until the ceremony ends. On the other side of the door stands the grand duke looking equally strangled by his costume. His pocked face is flared with red, fingers dotted with enormous rings. The sword handle at his hip is gleaming with diamonds. The two of them are matching in fabric, and for some reason this realization frightens her, this idea of being draped in identical material.

The ladies coo around him, not entirely convincingly. He blushes deeply at their flattery.

“Take her hand,” the empress urges him. His fingers remind Catherine of denuded branches in winter.

“Must I do it now?”

“It's time,” one of his men calls out. Brummer? Bestuzhev? The grand duke is shoved toward her.

Peter turns gray with panic. She tries to throw him an encouraging look but he is frozen before the empress's command.

“My hand,” she hisses, capturing that branch in her own and the two of them manage, despite her wide hoop skirt, to exit the room. One foot after another, as somnolent as a death march. Somehow they make it out of the palace and into the white heat of morning. A circle of generals surround them, erecting a silver canopy over their heads.

Once seated in the coach, she and Peter stare at the empress across from them, at her purple and gold gown, the sapphires and emeralds cosseting her neck, the candles, the icons. They examine everything but each other. The entire passage to the cathedral takes no more than half an hour by foot, but they are crawling among a hundred carriages, a slow procession that will probably add up to two hours or more. The crown is digging into her skull; she can feel its laceration at the place where hair meets skin. She knows the ceremony will last at least three hours, then there is the banquet, the ball, the dignitaries who will expect dances. She suddenly feels exhausted with the day's requirements.

Soldiers are staring at them with their impassive faces.

“Smile,” the empress orders them. “The people expect a little joyfulness from you two.”

The horses begin their clop. Soon the carriage is swarmed with people, whistling and calling after them. Catherine does not hear a single utterance of her future husband's name, only the reverberations of her own. Ekaterina! She gathers the strength to do what the empress requests of her. She fixes the crowd with a smile that she hopes is warm and genuine. A little girl perched on a man's shoulders stretches out her hands for connection. Soon, the joy that floods her is authentic, the simple sensation of belonging to others. She reaches to touch the girl's fingers.

“I touched her, Mama,” the girl cries.

Her destiny is fractured in two, Catherine realizes. There are the people out there who need her and then the boy at her side, slumped back in his seat in a dramatic pose of resignation. Once he was a being that dictated her unhappiness. Now he may as well be inscribed and embalmed onto that miniature canvas. The empress has aired her doubts about him, which means she is looking into the future toward Catherine.