enraged Nadya all the more, who struck her again and then again with more force as though to jar loose some response.
I closed my eyes but could not shut out the sound, over and over, of leather on flesh. Then it slowed and stopped.
When I peeked through my fingers, they stood just as they had, Nadya with the shoe raised above her head, and Xenia facing her, but Xenia… How may I tell this? Though her flesh was pocked with welts, she looked as though she had eaten something airy and sweet and was still holding the taste on her tongue.
Nadya’s hand began to tremble, and she could not meet Xenia’s bright gaze without glancing away again. As though Xenia were willing it, she slowly lowered her arm.
I could not see it then, any more than one can see the pattern on the back side of a tapestry. A knight, a swan, a ring of flowers—on the reverse they are only a muddle of color, the woof and warp of tangled threads picked up and then dropped again.
We passed them in the streets, poor senseless wretches talking to the air. These were women without husbands or children, without any history to lend them meaning. So far as we knew, they had always been there. One amongst these, whom Olga called the Blessed One, lived on the steps of the church. She was always in this same place, wrapped in a filthy sheepskin. Olga would bring her a dish of kasha or a sardine and set it at her feet, but the old woman never thanked her or acknowledged by a look that she knew us. She stared straight before her like a horse asleep on its feet, or she ranted to unseen presences whom she accused of terrible crimes. Olga said we must show her pity, but she was terrifying, bedraggled and toothless, and it was like trying to find pity for a toad or a wolf.
As we were coming out of the church one morning, the old woman suddenly reached out and caught hold of Xenia. Pinned, Xenia thrashed and tried to escape her grip, but the old one held fast and, by looking into Xenia’s eyes, seemed to enchant her into stillness.
“This one sees,” the old woman pronounced.
Olga crossed herself. “What? What does she see, Blessed One?”
The old woman released Xenia’s wrist. “Ask her yourself.”
But Xenia was wide-eyed with terror. She stared back at the Blessed One and would not answer.
At the time, I assumed she was afraid of the old woman. Now I wonder if she was not more afraid of what the old woman saw in her.
Chapter Two
It may be that I am among the last persons alive to have seen with my own eyes the palace of Empress Anna Ioannovna’s jester. Even so, everyone knows the story, and in the telling and retelling, from nurse to child, it has acquired the patina of a fairy tale. I have sometimes seen my son, Matvey, smile indulgently when I have said to other guests that I was there and all this is true. I do not fault him. Even to me, the memory seems implausible, but this is just as it happened.
When she was young, the future empress was betrothed to a German duke. Her uncle, the great Tsar Peter, had arranged the marriage and had brought the duke to Russia for a spectacular wedding. There were many weeks of raucous celebration, and on the last night before the new couple were to leave for his homeland, the Tsar challenged the young groom to a drinking contest. Tsar Peter was a man of great appetites, and had the duke known his reputation perhaps he would have declined the challenge. Then again, dukes are not made to be humble. He drank himself into a stupor and fell ill, and on the journey back to Courland with his new wife he died. Though Anna Ioannovna implored her uncle that she be allowed to return to Petersburg, the Tsar wished it otherwise, and so she lived friendless in a foreign country for twenty years until Peter died and she was allowed to return home as Empress of all the Russias.
Because she was cruelly widowed and then prevented by the burdens of state from marrying the man she loved, it became a favorite sport of the Empress’s to arrange the marriages of those beneath her. And thus it was that she contrived to celebrate her birthday and the end of the war with the Turks by marrying her jester to one of her maids.
The nuptials were held at Shrovetide, in the midst of the most brutal winter in memory. People and cattle alike froze on the sides of roads. Birds dropped like stones from out of the sky. Nearly as strange for me, my father returned that winter from the war. I was eight years of age.
It was a shock to have him appear in the flesh. Alongside God, he had been the invisible center of our lives, and in my childish mind my earthly and heavenly fathers had blurred together as one. He looked very much as I imagined God might, tall, with a gray head and barrel chest, very stern and imposing. Even more fearsome, the outer part of his left ear was missing.
He greeted my mother restrainedly, and when she presented him with the son she had borne in his absence, he felt Vanya’s calves and arms, as one might inspect a new horse, and nodded his approval. “He is sturdy.”
My mother drew me forward from behind her skirts. “This is Dasha.” He eyed me solemnly. I was certain he could hear the loud tolling of my heart, and I braced myself to be inspected also, but apparently this was not needed.
“And these are Grigoriy Ivanovich’s daughters, Nadya and Xenia.”
Xenia flew to him, her arms thrown out, and called him Uncle Kolya. Whether surprised or not, pleased or not, the set of his features hardly shifted, but after a moment’s hesitation he obliged her with a kiss and a pat on the head. After this, Nadya also presented her cheek to be kissed. He then turned back to me, expectant. Taking my shoulders in his huge hands, he bent down from his great height. The gash of his ear loomed red and ragged in my vision, and the stubble of his beard raked across my cheek. I burst into tears.
“What is this?” he said.
“She is afraid of everything,” Nadya told him.
I have never forgotten his eye clouding over like a pond with a thin skin of ice. He may have misconstrued my shyness as a want of feeling, but it was not so. I haunted the doorway outside whatever room he was in, held rapt by his voice—a rumble that seemed to begin in the cellar—but if his notice should happen to fall on me, I froze.
Of course, Xenia was not afraid of him. On the contrary, she was rash in her affections and whenever he came home would throw herself at his person with cries of “Uncle Kolya! Uncle Kolya!” Though he was not unkind, I think he was unsure how to answer such insistent affection from one who was, after all, only another dependent. It was Nadya, caring the least, who made herself easiest for him to love. She brought him his slippers and pipe and he rewarded her by absently patting her head and calling her his little lieutenant before turning his attention elsewhere.
With his homecoming, a festive disorder unraveled the quiet habits we had formerly observed. My mother and Aunt Galya, excited to return to society, left us children almost entirely to the care of servants. Meals were arranged round the drills of my father’s regiment, and in the evenings there were suppers and dances that kept them away till morning. Sometimes, though, we were allowed into their rooms as they dressed. We helped to tie their hoops and lace their stays, and we listened to them gossip about who had worn what or danced with whom on the previous night.
For weeks beforehand, much of their talk concerned preparations for the jester’s wedding. As best I could piece together, the jester had formerly been one of the Empress’s advisors but had done something to provoke her displeasure and had been sentenced to death for this. But rather than have him executed, the Empress in her mercy stripped him of his title and made him her jester and cupbearer. Now she was going to marry him off to one of her servants. It was to be a great spectacle. Hundreds of exotic peoples were being brought in from the farthest reaches of the empire to lead the wedding procession. And hidden from view by high wooden barriers, something was being erected on the frozen river for the nuptials.
On the morning of the wedding, Olga took us to watch my father in the parade. A throng, festive in spite of the bitter cold, lined Neva Prospect. From far up the avenue, we could hear cheers and the percussion of military music, and then we saw the approach of the regiments. Mounted officers were flanked six-deep, their red breeches
