The Winter Palace

Cholera did not strike us, as the maids predicted, and there was no epidemic. No one else died in the following month, or the month after that. By mid-summer the talk subsided, yet our fortunes did not improve. Since we could no longer afford tutors, my father made me read passages from his German books as he worked, correcting my pronunciation. I thought them tedious, the descriptions of differences between grades of leather, or types of precision tools, but I didn’t complain. As soon as I had finished reading, he showed me how to keep accounts, and I was glad to be of help.

“A few more lean months, Barbara,” Papa would say, each time I finished adding up his meager commissions. In the evening, sipping his favorite drink, hot milk sweetened with honey, topped with a thick layer of melted butter and sprinkled with crushed garlic, he assured me that soon he would be back on his feet. He had not lost his skills, had he? The new Empress was Peter the Great’s daughter. Soon, in Russia, books would be important again.

One morning in October, after I finished my daily reading, I watched my father bend over his workshop table in silence, to apply gold-leaf lettering to the spine of a book. He had often shown me how a shadow was cast on each side of the spine where it curved to the sides. These shadow lines marked the limits of the space that could be used for the letters. If gold tooling were to reach beyond them, after the book had been held open a few times, the gold would crack.

“I’ve been at the palace,” Papa said. He paused before he continued. “Just as Mama wanted.”

I held my breath.

“There were many petitioners. I lined up for hours before I was allowed into her presence. I didn’t tell you before, for I wasn’t sure it would make any difference. But your mother was right. The Empress had not forgotten the prayer book I restored for her when she was still just a princess.”

He told Elizabeth of Mama’s death, of how cholera had decimated his business and depleted his savings. “But it did not break my spirit, Your Majesty, or my faith in Russia,” he assured her.

The new Empress was pleased. So pleased that she ordered her Quartermaster to send my father the Court Journals to bind. And she had asked about me.

“Bring your daughter here so I can see her,” she had commanded.

My father turned his face away when he said these words, so I could not see the expression on his face, but his movements were unusually hesitant.

I still remember the title of the book my father was working on that day. Tacitus, The Annals and the Histories. It was the only title I ever saw him work on where the letters crossed the shadow lines.

In the middle of November, seven months after my mother died, on a murky day veiled in chimney smoke, my father took me to the palace. The hackney coach took the Isaakovsky pontoon bridge, which—by the end of December—would be replaced by the winter ice road across the river. Nestled against my father’s side, I imagined the Empress smiling at me, extending her hand to be kissed. Inside the carriage, the fur blanket gave off a faint smell of birch tar and kvass.

Before we set off, my father sat me on his lap and kissed the top of my head. He said that he wished to secure my future in case God called him, like Mama, before his time.

“You have no one but me to look after you, my child. I cannot sleep in peace when I think I might die and leave you all alone,” he whispered.

He held me tightly. I breathed in his smell, not the familiar whiff of vinegar and glue but the rare scent of eau de cologne and snuff.

Empress Elizabeth. I thought of angels when I first saw her, of the glittering messengers of God, their winged arms herding lost children to safety. In a silvery dress, a single white feather crowning her forehead, she floated on the aroma of orange blossoms and jasmine.

“Come here, child,” she said, her voice especially sweet as she pronounced that last word.

I hesitated. One does not approach angels without fear.

“Go on,” my father urged me, his hand pushing me forward.

I walked reluctantly toward the Empress of All the Russias, my gaze cast downward, fixed on the hem of her dress sewn with gold thread and pearls. I prayed the curtsy I had practiced for days did not betray my unease.

The Empress took my chin in her hands and raised my eyes to meet hers. “What a pretty smile,” she murmured.

I felt her fingers on my cheeks, a smooth, soft caress. I let her words thicken around me, like the warmth radiating from the white-and-blue-tiled stoves of the palace. My father had told me that the Empress had a good heart, that she, too, knew how it felt to lose a mother and fear the future. Didn’t she bring her sister’s orphaned son to her own court? Hadn’t she just made him Crown Prince?

“What’s your name, child?” she asked.

“Barbara,” I said.

“Varvara Nikolayevna, Your Highness,” my father corrected, offering my name in the Russian way, with his name echoing after mine.

“Your father has asked me to take care of you if he dies, Varvara. Is that what you, too, wish?”

“Yes, Your Highness,” I said.

“Very well, then,” the Empress said to my father. I saw her folded fan touch his shoulder. “I’ll take good care of her. You have my promise.”

My father stood a little stooped and motionless as the Empress departed, with courtiers crowding upon her, praising her benevolence. He lowered his head when a few of them stopped and inspected me through their monocles, the looks you give a caged bird. His hand when he squeezed mine was cold and moist with sweat.

Did he guess what would happen to me?

I stood by my father’s side, silent and trembling until the last courtier disappeared and the guards closed the gilded doors. I longed to ask which one of them was the Grand Duke Peter, but I didn’t dare.

It was beginning to snow as we left the palace. The hackney carriage was waiting for us, the driver greeting us with a broad smile and vodka breath. By the shore of the Neva, the wind played with stray litter, a torn straw hat, a scrap of burlap, a wooden toy wheel with broken spokes.

Convicts with shaved heads were being marched along the embankment, a whole group of them in shackled pairs. Many had their nostrils slit. Some, with the narrow eyes of Tartars, were missing a nose or an ear. As the soft, wet snow intensified, their bare heads turned white.

Our carriage pulled onto the Isaakovsky bridge. Now that I had seen the inside of the palace, the fur blanket seemed even more threadbare, the smells of birch tar and kvass harder to ignore.

My father said, “It doesn’t mean I’m going to leave you, Barbara. I’m just being prudent.”

This is when I started to cry.

I didn’t see my father die. One evening at the end of December, he pushed away a bowl of kasha and sour cream. He was not hungry. All he asked for was his usual cup of hot milk. He would take it in his bedroom, he said.

We had just had our first Christmas without my mother. Days seemed fragmented, broken into odd pieces, a plate too full, a pinching shoe, an empty chair. The hollow, choking feeling overwhelmed me every time I had to admit that, by then, even the shawls hidden in Mama’s closet smelled of nothing more than dry rosemary.

In a few days we would welcome the new year. The year I would turn sixteen, and would no longer be a child.

The new maid who took the milk upstairs screamed when she opened the door. She wouldn’t let me inside but made the sign of the cross over my head and tried to hold me in her arms, muttering her incantations against fate, as useless as hope. Her apron still smelled of Christmas baking, of raisins, vanilla, and cloves.

“Call your priest, Varvara,” she insisted, barring the door with her body. “For pity’s sake, send someone for your priest!”

I pushed her away.

When our priest arrived with an altar boy, Papa was lying on his bed, his face ashen and still. His fingertips were purple, as if he had bruised them in the last moments of his life. On the desk there was a sheet of paper with his writing on it. A quill lay next to it, the nib chipped.

“His heart broke,” the priest said, and I imagined my father’s heart shattered into razor-sharp, transparent slivers.

My father’s last words contained no message for me. Instead, he had jotted down some reminders for the following day. Ever since the news of Empress Elizabeth’s patronage of him spread, orders for new bindings had been pouring in. He planned to buy two more jars of glue. His tools needed repairing, knives had to be sharpened. The tip of his favorite polisher was broken. A new place should be found for storing leather, for he spotted signs of mildew on the pigskin. Sweet almond oil, he had written, works best for greasing the surface.

The priest knelt and intoned the Prayer for the Dead. I too fell to my knees. Wieczne odpoczywanie, I tried to repeat after him, Eternal rest, but my voice caught on these solemn words and broke.

Useless, I thought, for on that dark December evening all that mattered were silence and tears.

The new commissions had not been enough. My father had too many debts, I was told. Our house and the contents of his workshop had to be auctioned off. I saw my mother’s favorite carpet rolled and taken away. I saw my father’s books stacked in crates on a wagon. My whole inheritance amounted to a small bundle and a few rubles wrapped in a piece of cloth.

The Empress, I kept thinking, promised to take care of me.

It was February of 1743, the coldest month of the year, when I arrived at the Winter Palace. The footman with sour breath who had brought me told me to wait, leaving me in the servants’ hall. No one took any notice of me but a palace cat, which kept rubbing itself against my ankle. I saw servants scurrying back and forth, chased by fear. I heard slaps, curses, invisible feet pattering up and down service corridors. An icy draft of air touched my cheek. Fear swelled in my throat.

I shrank inside my skin and waited.

When dusk fell, a tall, silvery-blond woman entered the room. Her dress looked heavy and must have been warm, for I caught a pungent whiff of her sweat. She gave me an impatient look. Pushing away the cat, she began complaining of smudged doorways, marks on windowpanes, and fur on the ottomans. The German vowels gave her Russian a sharp, accusatory sound.

“I’m Varvara Nikolayevna,” I ventured. “The Empress sent for me.”

“I know who you are,” the woman snapped, her dark eyebrows drawing together, a dismissive smile on her lips. I decided that her face looked like a turtle’s, far too small for her big body. Later I would learn her name: Madame Kluge, the Chief Maid, charged with my welfare.

“Come, girl,” she ordered, and I followed her, cradling my bundle, noting the worn floorboards under my feet, the chinks in the paneling, the balls of dust gathering in the corners. A thought came that I was nothing but a fly, allowed a few steps before someone would bring down the swatter.

We didn’t go very far. In the palace kitchen I was given a plate of thin gruel and a tin cup of kvass. I was to eat quickly, for Madame Kluge had no time to waste. I was not to speak, for Madame Kluge did not care for what I had to say. When I finished, Madame Kluge led me to the servants’ quarters. There were seventeen of us in a room reeking of chamber pots and mold. Mice scurried under the beds, hid in our shoes. The Empress’s cats, I heard, were fed too well to bother with vermin.

“Be ready when I come for you in the morning,” Madame Kluge told me and was gone.

I sat on the hard, narrow bed, the only empty one in the room. I kissed the Virgin pendant my mother had given me. At first the other girls cast curious glances at me, but when they saw me cross myself the Latin way, they looked right through me.

I slept badly, the noises of the room stealing into my sleep: grinding of teeth, moans, wind smacking the frozen windowpanes. The room was icy. Once I woke startled, feeling someone’s hand sneaking underneath my thin blanket. I sat up in my bed, my heart thumping, and looked around, but everyone in the room seemed sound asleep. I bit myself on the arm to see if I had not dreamed the clammy touch. Next to me, a girl groaned.

When I finally fell into deep sleep my mother came to me and brushed my hand with something wet and warm. “Let’s go, Basieńka. The Empress is waiting for you,” she said, and I followed her ghostly, flickering form through the darkness.

In the morning, when I thought no one was looking, I hid the coins I brought with me under a loose floorboard next to my bed. That evening, when I lifted the floorboard to check on my inheritance, I found the rag limp and empty, my money gone.

Madame Kluge returned later in the morning, just as she had promised. She had found a place for me in the Imperial Wardrobe. She hoped my mother had at least taught me how to sew.

She didn’t even stop to hear my answer.

I walked behind her, her voice a scolding din in my ears. She knew my kind. Stray cats expecting bowls of cream. People were having children right and left, and then wanted others to care for them. Far too many people were taking advantage of the Empress’s good heart. Rubles didn’t grow on trees. Sausages and loaves of bread didn’t fall like rain from the sky.

In the Imperial Wardrobe, Madame Kluge told me to make myself useful. “And don’t let me hear any complaints about you, girl.”

My embroidery brought me no praise. My stitches were crooked, and I mixed up my colors. My mother did not raise me well, I heard. When I was given buttons to sort and sew on, I struggled to thread the needle, making a knot at the end that was too big and did not hold.

No one spoke to me, except to give me orders. The other seamstresses, deft and fast, bent over their work, busy talking of Russia’s new Crown Prince. They pursed their lips and called him a poor orphan deprived of his mother’s love. I heard that he was witty, and kindhearted. That he remembered the name of everyone he had ever met and every tune he had ever heard. Merely a year since he arrived and his Russian was good enough to give orders and understand what people said to him. His Orthodox name, Peter Fyodorovich, fitted him so much better than the German Karl Ulrich. He liked bliny and sturgeon soup. He liked kasha and mushrooms. In the Winter Palace the grandson of Peter the Great was growing healthier and stronger with each day.

Now that Russia had an heir to the throne, the seamstresses predicted balls and masquerades. The Empress would need many new outfits and gowns. There would be no idle moments in the Imperial Wardrobe.

By the end of each morning, my feet were numb from the cold, my fingers swollen with needles’ pinpricks. I had but a slice of black bread to eat, with nothing but a weak tea to soften it in my mouth.

“Is that all you’ve accomplished?” Madame Kluge scolded, snatching the dress I had been working on and waving it like a standard to spark a chorus of giggles.