The Russian Album (5 page)

Above the library, there was a small theatre under the eaves, where the children gave performances in the summer for their parents and guests. They were excused lessons for rehearsals. The hairdresser from the local town came on the day of the performance to make the children up. Everyone from the surrounding villages came and the servants watched from the doorway. Vera and Natasha sat very still in their costumes, while the hairdresser wet his finger with his tongue, dipped it in the pot of rouge and dabbed pink on their cheeks. In the candlelit mirror they watched themselves becoming women.

I search the photographs of Doughino, prowl through the rooms with my magnifying glass. The parquet gleams in the light; a shadow cast by the curtained light from the windows streams across a room. In the corners, floor-to-ceiling Dutch stoves; against the walls, white alabaster statues of the Panins, furniture of the reign of Alexander I, curved armchairs made for leaning back in a tight uniform while playing whist. I see the reflection of a white Corinthian column in the sheen of a mahogany table. At the end of a corridor, a door has been left ajar. In the conservatory, papers have been left on the writing table. A quill pen lies on top of a newspaper on an escritoire. A card table awaits a game of whist after supper. The walls are crowded with portraits of ancestors: the paintings tilt away from the walls, leaving triangles of black shadow behind them. A chandelier hangs from the painted ceiling. Squares of light from the windows slant across the shiny rectangular inlay of the parquet.

In a photo of the conservatory at the edge of the focus I find a statue of Nikita Panin seated in a chair – like Houdon's study of Voltaire – a plump sombre man in a wig, with his legs crossed, one hand gripping the arm of the chair, the other resting on a folder of papers of state. He wears a star-shaped decoration on a sash around his chest. There is a sealed letter sculpted in bronze at his feet, and underneath the chair a pile of books. For someone sculpted at the height of his success, the expression on his worn face is oddly wistful.

His great-great-granddaughter Natasha grew up playing at his feet. The children were all told that if their games got too noisy, he would come down off his chair and kick their backsides with his buckled shoe. Later when they became teenagers, they were told about his moment of disgrace in the Empress's boudoir. Catherine the Great, aged by lust and power, spent hours making herself up in the boudoir. The chancellor, no longer a young man himself, became drowsy in that close, candlelit world of female odours. When at last the Empress strode out from behind the painted Japanese screen, her garter sash of power across her bosom, her cheeks daubed with paint, her eyes waxed with liner, she found her chancellor slumped in his chair asleep. It was one thing to argue with her about affairs of state; quite another to appear insensible to her charms. The family story was that she shook him awake and packed him off to his estates in disgrace.

The old bronze chancellor, wistful and disillusioned, always frightened Natasha when she went into the conservatory at night or passed the conservatory windows when she walked in the gardens on her way to bed. The candles cast their gleam over the fingers gripping the arm of the chair and there were dark shadows in the sockets of his unseeing eyes. She would pull her shawl closer and climb the stairs to her room, feeling the statue's gaze upon her back.

On fair mornings at eleven Fidki the Cossack would wheel Natasha's mother in a wicker Bath chair through the gravel pathways of the parks and gardens. The gardener would lean forward to hear her orders, and
Hofmeister
Bertram the forester would also make an appearance. The Bertrams had served the family as far back as the old Count himself. Brought from Germany in the 1780s to bring European order to the Count's Russian woods, father and son had succeeded each other, serving as both doctor to the trees and doctor to the family. When Natasha's mother called out the
Hofmeister
at night for the children's fevers, they would hear him stumping up the stairs damning ‘
diese verfluchte Familie
' – this accursed family – under his breath. Then he would be at their cots, bending over them and smelling of evergreen.

Gardening was her mother's passion, and the morning meetings with the
Hofmeister
and the gardener were as serious as a staff conference of generals. Natasha's mother would wave her stick about and the
Hofmeister
would grunt and bend over and look in the direction she was pointing. The new redwoods from California were to go there, there was to be a new alley of roses here, and what on earth were those dandelions doing on the English lawn? So seriously did she take her gardening that when her older son Sasha – in his only known gesture of defiance – said that when the estate was his he would like to cut down her favourite alley of cypresses, she disinherited him on the spot. The matter might have ended tragically. He spent weeks pleading with her that he had only been joking.

Natasha loved these tours of the garden with her mother, particularly the visit to the greenhouses: vast airy sheds with warm red earth underfoot and blowsy female statuary in the alcoves. In winter, the greenhouses were a lush corner of Crimea in northern Russia. Outside the lawns and the trees were draped with snow; inside, peaches and lemons ripened, warm to her touch.

Between Natasha and her mother there was a screen of nurses, butlers, tutors and gardeners, and older brothers and sisters. Natasha always held back; only when the others had left to start their own families did she find her way to her mother's heart. She remembered herself as being painfully shy; ‘when scarcely out of baby age when meeting strangers I put up my arm to hide my face to the great indignation particularly of my eldest sister who assured me it was an affectation.' Her shyness, she always said, was her great misfortune. Nonsense, said her aunt, your shyness shows your great self-love and pride. If you would realize once and for all you are not even noticed or looked upon all that shyness would be gone. But she could not help it. She hid behind the curtains watching the others play.

The last of the litter, the gawky awkward one, Natasha clung to her older sister, the elegant Sonia, and used to weep when she disappeared to the society balls in Moscow, grazing her little sister with a fragrant kiss. Her sisters crossed the divide into the world of stays and button shoes, corsages and women's problems and left her behind in girlhood. Natasha sat in their boudoirs while they dressed at night and then would be left upstairs, sitting on the topmost step, hidden from view, watching the dancers whirl by the open door of the downstairs dining room. Later, when she was older, while her sisters danced the polka and the quadrille, and the
dirigeur,
the leader of the dance, would bring them a succession of young officers as partners, she played the
bouquetière,
the flower girl, wheeling a small cart of posies around the dance floor, stopping before each table so that the officers could offer their ladies a bouquet. A picture was taken of Natasha standing before her cart in her green pinafore, with a pink cap with ribbons in her curls – and then they packed her up to bed, while the dances surged beneath her in the bright rooms below.

Most of the winter months of her childhood were spent within sight of the Kremlin wall in Moscow in a large house with several adjoining buildings in Nikitskaya opposite the yellow and cream classical porticoes and domes of the university. In the faded photographs, there is an inner garden, laid down in grass, bisected by gravel pathways and on all sides the house rises around it, with awnings over the windows. In the gravel driveway outside a coachman in a full-length cream coat and a top hat sits on his box in the family brougham, holding on to the reins of a piebald mare. He is waiting for his master who is about to appear. The butler stands ready to open the door.

On the nights when all the lamps were lit and guests were expected for dinner, Natasha and Vera would slide down the banisters to the front door and ring the bell which the footman used to announce the arrival of visitors. Her father would appear at the head of the stairs and she and Vera would jump out to surprise him. Just before the visitors would arrive, the butler would go round the rooms with a long censer held on a stick. In the censer was a hot iron plate over which the butler would pour a perfume called Court Water. The sweet humid odour slipped along the hallways, under the doors, into the rooms and suffused the sheets on the beds. It would still be there, a fragrant ghost, when she tucked herself into bed.

On Easter Saturday night Natasha would sit in her best dress at the open window waiting for the Kremlin bells to sound. All day the cooks had been making
koulitch
and
paska
and the house smelled of sweet dough, raisins and almonds. By early evening, the Easter feast was ready in the dining room: the white dome of the
paska
stood in the centre of the long trestle table; there were bowls full of the dyed eggs with ‘
XB
' – for ‘Christ is Risen' – on each of them; and she had stained her hands green and blue from dipping the eggs in the dye in the pantry with her sister. At midnight the Kremlin bells would begin to boom out through the night air and the tolling and pealing would be taken up by church bells all around her, the white domed church at the top of the street where Pushkin had got married, the red brick one down the alley, the chapels in all the side streets, the sound rising to a crescendo of celebration. Then she would leap down from the window casement and run to the family chapel on the third floor where the choir – nuns from a neighbouring convent, house servants, soloists from the Choudofskoy choir – and her older sisters were already singing. The butler came up the stairs spreading the Court Water and calling out on each floor, ‘Service is commencing,' and the servants and governesses and sisters and brothers would rush to take their places. Behind the butler came the priest and his acolytes in a procession up the winding red-carpeted stairs. And when the clergy in their white robes had exclaimed, ‘Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed,' and everyone in the chapel had lit their candles and embraced each other three times, they went out in the dawn air, to feel the breath of spring and the promise of resurrection from winter. And then they were back inside the dining room to feast on
paska
and
koulitch
and taste the abundance of the Easter feast after the fasting of Lent.

There were always jokes at the dinner table in the Moscow house. One which she was to tell her children was about the gentleman who peed in his top hat in a railway compartment, emptied it out of the window, bowed stiffly to the ladies present, placed the top hat back on his head and sat down in the seat opposite and resumed reading his newspaper. Minutes later, he unwrapped a cigar and, after bowing to the ladies, asked if he had their permission to smoke. When one of them replied that he had not bothered to ask their permission on a previous occasion, the gentleman replied, ‘
Ah, madame, ça c'était la nécessité, mais ceci'
–pointing to the cigar – ‘
c'est le plaisir.
'

There was another one about the old priest who had to marry an exceedingly ugly couple and who when the time came to give a homily could only grumble in French: ‘
Aimez-vous l'un l'autre, parce que si non, que Diable vous aimera.
'

The most reliable object of family jokes was the boys' tutor, Mr Bachinsky, who was a Pole and spoke Russian badly. When he wanted to tell Natasha's mother how close he felt to her, he said with a thick accent, ‘I feel myself with you, Princess, as if in my own shirt.' Natasha and Vera continually teased Mr Bachinsky that he was getting old and must get married or he would be lonely. They would force him down on one knee in front of them, put his hand on his heart and make him practise his speech of proposal. He blushed marvellously.

Poor Mr Bachinsky. He was not only the boys' tutor, but also in charge of the family finances. He came to believe economies were called for. So an estate in the southern province of Voronezh was sold at a swindler's price. Mr Bachinsky was so distressed at being swindled that he returned to Poland. There he fell into a garden well and drowned.

Years later, Natasha would say to her sons, ‘
Racontez-moi quelque chose,
' when they came back to her from far away. Tell me a story. She loved a story, the more ‘far-fetched' the better and when it amused her, she would put her hands to her face and laugh soundlessly, rocking back and forth.

Peter, her youngest brother, was a ‘specialist of silly inventions, an insipid fellow, really' – she couldn't understand what the girls saw in him – but he knew how to make her laugh. She would sit with him late at night when he was on leave from his cavalry regiment and listen to his stories while he polished his riding boots. He would start some long tale about his fiancée's family and get her laughing so hard that he would have to carry her upstairs to bed.

She was happiest in early childhood when her brothers and sisters were all still at home and she could run in their wake. At her ‘buckfish changing age' – that phrase of hers for puberty – she stopped eating and began to fade away in mute resistance before the onset of womanhood. The professors were called, one so eminent he sent along an assistant beforehand to test the chairs he was to sit on. The professors prescribed the Riviera and she was despatched with her mother to the Grand Hotel Cannet in Cannes, where a lugubrious Baltic woman made her fatten up on
poudre de viandes
sandwiches. The French doctors were less deferential: a spoiled child, said Professor Cazalis of Nice; he packed her off to Aix les Bains. Water cures, eating cures, rest cures – she slipped into that archipelago of white hotels and sanatoria where some of her class seemed to spend their entire lives. When she came out she had recovered her appetite, but there remained a memory of the escape that could be hers if she just stopped eating. As the last one to leave home, the daughter most subjugated to her mother's love, she was also the daughter for whom the passage to womanhood was most regretfully embarked upon.