awkward position.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chapter Four
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
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, moire 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
