“IT’S PECULIARLY UNCOMFORTABLE,” Alyosha said, “imagining Mother as a girl.”
“What do you mean ‘as a girl’?”
“You know what I mean. As the object of … of the attention of a suitor.”
“Oh,” I said, embarrassed enough that I glanced away, out the window. “I’m sorry, Alyosha. You can’t imagine it was my intent to make you uncomfortable.”
“No, but …” He waited, and when I said nothing, continued, “You told the story. I listened. That’s all.” As he was speaking, I noticed that Alyosha’s hand was in my lap, having insinuated itself with exceptional delicacy, so lightly I didn’t feel its arrival so much as I was aware, suddenly, of its intimate placement.
I looked at Alyosha, who opened his large eyes, showing me the thick fringes of his black lashes, black as the ring around each iris, which sparkled in complexity. Storm clouds; the breast feathers of a chimney swift; shadows fading into dusk; a rain of silver coins: every moody, moving, mutable gray was represented. His mother’s eyes. I removed the hand from my lap and replaced it in his. We’d been playing rummy earlier, and a card fell from his lap to the floor. I can picture it still, the three of spades. I remember it as I might a title card between two scenes in a moving picture, announcing intrigue to follow. I bent to retrieve it and then popped back up too quickly, betraying my nervousness. But he hadn’t moved.
“Father was supposed to marry Hélène,” Alyosha said finally, offering me escape. “Wasn’t he?”
“According to the Meddlesome Four.”
NIKOLAY’S UNCLES COMPLAINED VEHEMENTLY when the tsarevich told them he hadn’t any feelings for the daughter of Prince Philippe, Comte de Paris, pretender to the French throne.
“France is a republic,” Nikolay Alexandrovich said. “It doesn’t have anything but a pretend throne.”
“That’s not so,” the Meddlesome Four corrected Nikolay Alexandrovich. “A throne can’t be a pretender. Only a person of high birth can pretend. And Prince Philippe is Louis Philippe’s grandson.”
“And,” Nikolay said, “an ardent democrat who fought for the Union Army in America’s Civil War.”
“That was under the Second Empire,” the Meddlesome Four intoned. “That was under Napoleon the Third.”
“Of course he went to America,” Nikolay’s mother said. “Anyone with the money to do so would have emigrated at a time like that. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Of course it does, Mother. The man is a democrat. It’s only other monarchies that recognize him as a monarch.”
“Nicky! We are a monarchy!” his mother said.
“But France is not.”
“Nicky! Don’t be illogical, don’t be absurd, and don’t try my patience.”
The tsarevich’s first obligation was to the empire, and, republic or not, France had a marriageable princess. As tsarina, Hélène would cement Russia’s relationship with France, and, as Russia’s sole ally, France needed cementing. But the future tsar was no wiser a statesman when choosing a bride than he would prove at placating revolutionaries. Having danced with clumsy, cloudy Alexandra, who had no inclination to make the kind of clever, carbonated conversation for which aristocrats had a thirst as intense as they did for Roederer champagne, he knew it was useless to try to love any of the other princesses, with their perfect manners and empty heads, their eagerness to nod and smile at whatever he might say. The little curl, folded inside his handkerchief and held together with a stolen bit of his mother’s own embroidery floss, was safe in the pocket closest to his heart. Just knowing it was there bolstered his courage, and in a few weeks, as soon as Lent arrived and ended winter’s revelry, he faced down his mother’s disapproval.
“Nicky! The girl has nothing, not one single thing, to recommend her. Doesn’t play cards. Can’t speak French—”
“That’s not fair, she—”
“Don’t interrupt, Nicky. She can’t speak it so anyone understands it. Her accent is absolutely and irredeemably abominable. What is it about the English? They simply can’t, or won’t, speak anything but English, not comprehensibly anyway. No matter how many far-flung colonies they claim, they remain provincial. They insist on seeing every acre as another opportunity to replicate their Englishness. You don’t see the Dutch forcing Indonesians to wear clogs or the French tarting up the Congo in their national dress. But every last maharaja in India covers himself in epaulets and—”
“Mother. Alexandra isn’t English.”
“I know. It’s worse than that! She’s German, and living in England hasn’t made her any less so. And she can’t dance, not even to save her own life. The girl can’t get through a waltz without tripping over her own feet, so we know she doesn’t tango or polka or—”
“Mother.”
“Will you please stop calling her ‘the girl’?”
“Why should I? She’s seventeen, female. She’s a girl.”
“That’s not why you’re calling her ‘the girl.’ ”
“Nicky! She can’t dance, can’t smile, can’t make conversation. And she certainly can’t preside over the Russian court with that … that … that preposterous emanation, or whatever you call it, over her head. I can’t abide it when a person insists on making her unhappiness everyone else’s burden. I know when a person has potential, and mark my words, Nicky, the girl has none.”
“But—”
“And don’t tell me she’s beautiful. Beautiful girls are dropping out of the trees, or they might as well be, as there are so many of them. Beauty fades. Social skills improve.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything about her beauty.”
“What, then?”
“I love her, that’s all. I didn’t decide to love her, I just do. I’m going to marry her. Anyway, Mother, you’re the one who brings out the cloud. You frighten her. With me, it’s hardly there at all.”
“Oh, tosh! What will your father say? Who cares if you’re in love!”
Unaccountably, his father did. Or if Alexander Alexandrovich didn’t care about love, he did have a weakness for romance. He’d seen his strapping son take the pale girl in his arms. He’d seen him whisper in her ear. He’d seen the girl smile and put her silk-slippered feet on top of Nicky’s. Away they’d waltzed, and the reigning tsar felt a catch in his throat, remembering when he was young and his worries confined to gestures of chivalry.
With his mostly irascible father’s unexpected blessing, Nikolay followed Alexandra back to England, where he began his campaign for her to give up the one thing that prevented his marrying her: the Lutheran Church.
May the good Lord help any man who falls in love with a religious zealot. Days passed, days and weeks and months, and still Nikolay remained on his knees with a proposal that demanded Alexandra be thoroughly and indelibly catechized and converted to the Russian Orthodox faith, all of her private religious history, every last one of her prayers, invalidated. Or so it felt to Alexandra. The girl, and the woman she became, was devout to a fault—at least that was how the aristocracy judged anyone who wouldn’t take up a religion until she’d read every last tome of theology it inspired—and acquiesced only after she and Nikolay had wept themselves blind, nearly, and after he’d chased her from Buckingham Palace to Windsor Castle and from Windsor Castle to Balmoral Castle and from Balmoral to Osborne on the Isle of Wight.
Rain, rain, rain, all spring long, so much it was impossible to judge where Alexandra’s cloud ended and those of the more general weather system began. Russia might allow her princesses to stray unobserved, but Queen Victoria was of a different mind. Every meeting between the granddaughter she raised and the future tsar of Russia unfolded under the close watch of court chaperones, not one of whom approved the love match, because … well, because love matches are necessarily the kind to oppose. But the lovers were as they would always be: willfully if not blissfully oblivious to any opinion that didn’t align with their own.
Once Alexandra had slogged through Macarius’s History of the Russian Church, Levshin’s Exhortation of the Orthodox Eastern Catholic Church of Christ to her former Children, now on the Road to Schism, Saint Innocent of Moscow’s Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven, and every last word by Bishop Theophan the Recluse—she read most of his books twice and his Manual of Spiritual Transformation three times—she at last agreed to be stripped of her Protestant birthright and, in keeping with her nature, pursued her new religion to the point of hysteria, finding altogether too much in Orthodoxy to which she could cling. Over the years, the walls of her bedroom would become encrusted with ikons of one saint or another, some acquired during her years of desperate petitions for a son and heir, and more after those prayers were answered with an invalid.
But that was later. Newly wed, she and Alyosha’s father were preoccupied by one thing only, and very frustrated. Immediately swallowed by their official roles, they had little time to themselves, impossibly little, it seemed to them. So impossibly and unendurably little that some nights, while the rest of the court was sleeping, Nikolay bundled his bride in furs and took her to the stables, where he harnessed horses to a sleigh and drove himself and Alexandra silently over the snow and out of the gates of the Anichkov Palace, where the newlyweds had been forced to make a temporary home with Nikolay’s now permanently disappointed mother.
January, and the streetlamps stood at attention like soldiers buried to the knees in ice, every building frosted into anonymity, the signs for the jeweler, the baker, the butcher, the barrister—all of them hidden under layers of white. Once they were on the Nevsky Prospekt, Nikolay whipped the horses up and down the avenue. A city without color but splendid in its sparkle, austere in its silence, as if subzero temperatures had the power to stop not just trains and trolleys but sound itself from traveling. The sleigh’s lamp cast its beams over the frozen path before them, and each ice crystal caught a needle-narrow ray of light and sent it arrowing back, one glint multiplied by infinity, the lovers gliding forward in a curtain of light. Already Alexandra was imagining their return to their suite, when Nikolay would have begun to shiver and she to burn under too many layers of furs. They would fall into bed then, flesh shocked by flesh, his cold, hers hot, each seeking the other.
Sometimes, while I was talking, Alyosha coughed or cleared his throat. But it was true what I said to him: when I told a story, I didn’t steer so much as follow it.
When they tired of the city’s streets, Nikolay took their sleigh onto the frozen Neva. East from the delta, toward Lake Ladoga, the river branched once and then three times more, each arm dull and dead and gray as lead until the April thaw. West was the Gulf of Finland, where the salt sea was frozen into stillness, where waves that had swelled and churned and beat restless, restless, against the shore were now motionless, as if sculpted.
West it was, toward the frozen sea. White horses, white sleigh, white ermine, and the pelts of polar bears: they’d broken through the veil of tedium that smothered each hour of the day, Nikolay trapped behind doors with the Meddlesome Four and the minister of this, the minister of that, and the minister of this and that as well—how could there be so many ministers? He was battered by lessons of statecraft he never wanted to learn, while Alexandra endured the dutiful, affectionless attentions of the Dowager Empress Marie. The apprentice tsarina’s head began to ache and her cloud to gather after only a few minutes under the skewering eyes of her mother-in-law; she was as overwhelmed by the endless tedious rules of Russian court etiquette as was her husband by politics. Excellent student of history and of German and English literature though she was, and quick to memorize music for the piano—an instrument she played with a brilliance that could have elevated a commoner to fame—Alexandra couldn’t tell a savory fork from the one meant for salad.
Seventeen pieces of silverware. How difficult could it be? Marie’s own children could do it at the age of three. The dowager empress was at a loss. That her daughter-in-law had none of the graces or skills to preside over the highest of St. Petersburg’s aristocratic circles was a scandal; that she didn’t care to learn any, an inexplicable offense.
“What of it?” Marie snapped when Alexandra inquired about the style of Russian gowns. Was it true they were cut so drastically low to expose as much flesh as they could, to provide a backdrop for more diamonds (the Russian understanding of decency being quite different from the English)?
Marie had savored her reign over society’s highest echelon. She loved jewels and the endless occasions offered to display them. For, as every imported princess quickly learned, the Russian court was like no other with respect to jewels. Diamonds especially, but also pearls, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. Décolleté on top and, well, not much on the bottom. Sometimes nothing at all.
“Dear me,” she’d say to anyone who took exception to the idea, “why do you think ball gowns are so long?”
Tiaras. Ermine. Taffeta. Champagne. Banter. Small talk. Sweet talk. Innuendo. Gossip. Scandal. Dancing and flirting and flaunting. Matchmaking and match breaking. Marie loved everything Alexandra disdained. She could tolerate Nikolay’s marrying a woman she disliked—of course she could, she’d endured worse hardships. Back when she was Princess Dagmar of Denmark, her first Russian tsarevich had died and, it became clear, bequeathed her, pre-wooed, to his brother. She’d been a good sport about that, and she’d accepted the burdens of being a tsarina—a job at least as demanding as a tsar’s, when done correctly. Having protected and refined the duties of her station, Marie found it hard to stomach a girl who refused to admit her responsibility to Petersburg society. She felt as if she’d spent the past thirty years building an elegant and seaworthy yacht, a perfect vessel, only to have it taken from her and given to a know-nothing who refused to learn to sail it.
“Without the firm hand of a tsarina at its helm,” she told Alexandra, “court life will lose its focus. Guests will devolve into mere revelers. They will sink into debauchery, and political maneuvering will become impossible. Ab. So. Lute. Ly. Im. Poss. Ible. Don’t you understand? You will be cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
Marie stared at the girl. Why was it that intellectuals were always so stupid? If only Victoria, the old she-devil, had managed to pass even a fraction of her political canniness on to her granddaughter, but, no, here Marie was, stuck with a lost cause. Disgraceful how fat Victoria let herself get. Forty years of widow’s weeds. And that was a disgrace as well, such an ostentatious display of grief. The single thing she’d imparted to her damp granddaughter, apparently. Forty years of black, and quite a lot of it, given the yardage required by a woman of her girth. Black silk organza. Black broadcloth. Black serge. Black challis. Black twill. Black vicuna. Black poplin. Black damask. Whatever it was, there’d have to be at least fifteen yards for the skirt, another eight for the bodice, and five for each sleeve.
What was the girl thinking in her stubborn silence? Marie’s palms itched with the desire to slap her silly sullen face and send that farcical cloud straight to the stratosphere, where it would burn up like the pretentious puffery it was. So what if she was as well read as an Oxford don? Alexandra was too dense to understand that the glittering whirl had a purpose, and she a duty to perform. And it wasn’t as if Marie hadn’t approached the problem from every angle she could think of.
“You want to be liked, don’t you?” she said. Growing desperate, running out of angles, she’d thrust a box of marrons glacés at Alexandra and was watching the girl chew the sweet behind her raised hand. What on earth was wrong with her? Did she fancy herself a geisha or some other ridiculous character from the backward kind of nation that told women to be as lifeless as statues? When at last the girl swallowed and spoke, Marie could barely hear her.
Of course Alexandra wanted to be liked. Or at least she didn’t want to be disliked. But dancing made her back ache. She didn’t remember what gossip she was told. She hadn’t mastered even one of the repertoire of witticisms and risqué anecdotes Marie had suggested she apply as necessary to a halting conversation.
“There was a young lady from Thrace,” Marie tried again, having explained that currently everyone was mad for limericks. She raised her voice and enunciated each syllable with hostile precision, as if speaking to a deaf person, or to a nitwit, or to a doubly afflicted deaf nitwit, and was determined to make her way past this and any other obstacle. “Whose corsets grew too tight to lace.”
“Please. I’ve—I can’t.”
“Of course you can. The rhyme makes it easy to remember.”
“Oh, dear. I just—”
“Alexandra Fyodorovna. If you won’t think of Russia, think of yourself. You can’t afford to make an unfortunate first impression. It’s the courtiers whose favor will determine your political success. Or failure. And mark my words: they will make life very unpleasant for a woman they don’t like, even if she is the tsarina.”
“I’m … I’m afraid I’m a bit … Granny always says. I’m. The fact is. I see how inconvenient it is, but I’m afraid they say I’m shy.”
“Shy! Shy is for little girls. Shy is for spinsters. Shy is … shy is … shy is not for the tsarina of Russia!”
BUT ALEXANDRA WAS SHY—not coyly shy but terror-struck by the demands of public life. She couldn’t imagine sharing her cleavage with anyone save her husband, and as for using cocaine to overcome her reluctance to tango, as one successful ball-goer took her aside to suggest, she certainly wasn’t going to do anything like that. Her heart fluttered and raced horribly enough as it was; its damaged valves leaked and its ventricles quivered. It mattered nothing to Alexandra that the tango was the newest rage and therefore de rigueur. All her happiness, and every smile, would be as private as those fragile hours before dawn, when she and Nicky streaked over the frozen river and past its banks and discovered a rent in the workaday shroud life casts over fairy tales.
White horses, white sleigh, white ermine, the pelts of polar bears, and water frozen white—they’d acted out an incantation. The sky was black above the snow-covered river, and the sleigh’s runners moved as though on air, without the slightest bump or vibration. Along the banks, great snow-cloaked pines stood like sentinels. The Gulf of Finland should have terrified the driver, wind tearing over its surface and lifting fallen snow back into the air, crystalline flakes trembling in the strange northern sky, flakes like stars and stars like flakes, the sky twirling as if it meant to brighten. Did he hope to lose them in the snow before they were ensnared in what he knew they’d grow to abhor? He’d allowed himself to believe his father was immortal, behaved like a man who expected to avoid becoming tsar. He knew nothing of ruling the millions of people he’d inherited.
It’s said freezing is a gentle way to die. Their lives would end right there, in happiness.