I was standing by papa and as soon as the awful thing began to happen he reached for me and held my arms and shielded me and said, “Don’t look, Tania. This is nothing for you to see.”
The entire incident took only a moment to unfold, and right away our guards hurried us back into our carriage and the driver cracked his whip and we sped back toward the palace grounds, the crowd giving way before us as we went.
My shock and surprise were so great that for several minutes I could not speak. I buried my head against papa’s shoulder, feeling the reassuring strength of his arm around me and aware of nothing but the rhythmic jouncing of the carriage and the clopping of the horses’ hooves, the jangling of the harness and the sound of the driver’s cracking whip.
After a while I withdrew my head.
“Who was that, papa? Why did she burn herself?”
“I don’t know, Taniushka. I wish you and your sisters and brother hadn’t seen her. I wish I hadn’t seen her.”
“But that was what she wanted, wasn’t it? That we should see her, and watch her burn herself. That’s why she waited in the square. She must have known we would be coming.”
“Hush, Tania!” It was mama’s voice, unusually stern. “Don’t say such things! Who knows what an unbalanced woman wants? I don’t want to hear you repeat that farfetched idea again.”
But I knew that I was right. The woman’s terrible act had been meant to shock us. To tell us something. But what? For days I pondered the awful deed, the image of the young woman pouring her kerosene and lighting herself afire replaying itself again and again in my mind. At night I dreamed of her, only in my dreams her eyes were not downcast but looking toward me, and I thought I saw, in their dark depths, the fearful glare of blame.
Sixteen
When Daria’s labor pains began it was night and I was awakened by muffled talk in the corridor outside my bedroom. Certain that I was hearing Niuta and Daria’s voices, I quickly got out of bed and put on my plainest gown, not bothering with petticoats or stockings. I fumbled with the fastenings on the gown, I was not accustomed to dressing without help. By the time I had finished my hasty toilette I could no longer hear anyone in the corridor, but I guessed that Niuta would take Daria to the stables and so I went there, as rapidly as I could.
My departure was noticed—there were servants in the corridors, sitting or lying on benches, supposedly on watch but mostly asleep—but no one stopped me. I thought that Sedynov might hear me, if he hadn’t drunk too much vodka the night before, but he didn’t appear.
When I got to the stables Niuta and Daria were already there, along with a Don Cossack guard I had often seen with Niuta, a burly bearded man who was hitching a horse to one of the rubbish carts. As I watched, Niuta and the Cossack helped the complaining Daria get into the back of the cart.
“What is she doing here?” I heard Daria say as she prepared to lie down, her voice weak and scratchy.
Niuta looked over at me. “Go back, Tania,” she told me.
“But I want to help.”
“We don’t need you. Go back.”
“No!” It was the Cossack. “She’ll wake the grooms. They’ll see us. They won’t let us have the cart. Let the girl ride in the back with Daria.”
I climbed up into the flat bed of the cart, where Daria lay on a blanket, doubled over and clutching her distended abdomen, a grimace of pain distorting her features. The cart stank of the garbage it usually carried. I felt nauseous, but tried to ignore my reaction and sat down next to Daria, putting my hand on her shoulder and hoping my touch would soothe her. She moaned.
The Cossack climbed into the front seat and gathered the reins. We left the stable and made our way to the road to the nearby village. Though the Cossack cracked his whip again and again the cart rattled all too slowly along the rutted road as Daria’s moans grew louder and longer. I wished that I had the wonderworking icon of St. Simon Verkhoturie that Father Gregory had given my father to preserve his life. Perhaps there would be icons where we were going. I hoped so.
Suddenly Daria screamed.
“How much farther?” I called out.
“Only a few miles,” Niuta responded, her voice anxious. “We’ll be at the clinic soon.”
“Just a little farther, Daria,” I said to the suffering young woman beside me. But she kept herself turned away from me, alternately moaning and crying out.
The Cossack began to sing in a hearty baritone. His rich, resonant voice rang out in a folk song, and Niuta slapped her knee in time with his singing. The sound was so compelling that I began to hum along. My spirits lifted. It seemed as though Daria’s contorted body relaxed slightly and I imagined that the Cossack’s lusty voice gave her courage.
The music made the last few miles go by faster and presently we came to a small wooden building with a sign in the window that read WORKERS’ CLINIC. Though it was barely dawn, far too early for much activity in the streets, lights gleamed from all the windows of the clinic and people were going in and out of the front door.
Niuta and the Cossack managed to lift the sobbing Daria down from the cart and half-carry her inside, where almost at once a serious-looking tall young man with reddish-blond hair came forward to attend to her. He looked too young to be a doctor, I thought, yet his earnestness more than made up for his youth.
I was struck at once by the intense expression of concern on his face, his high domed forehead creased as he focused on Daria and lifted her onto a table against one wall, drawing a screen around the table for privacy. I could hear him talking reassuringly to Daria and asking her questions.
He soon called for nurses and also beckoned for Niuta to join him behind the screen where, to judge from the sound of Daria’s higher and higher-pitched cries and the young doctor’s sharply-delivered instructions, her baby was swiftly coming into the world.
I sat in the large room, listening to the activity behind the screen while watching what was going on around me. Old people with canes, middle-aged men with sour expressions, tired-looking women with children holding on to them, people with bandaged limbs and blisters, swollen feet or vacant, lost expressions waited to be helped. Several drunks were lying stretched out on the hard floor, reeking of alcohol and stale sweat. While I sat there a boy was brought in, his arm bleeding, and was attended to right away. I noticed that there were no icons on the walls.
Nearly everyone in the room was alert to Daria’s screams and as they reached their climax the tension grew, as if everyone was holding his or her breath.
“Here it comes now,” the doctor’s voice rang out from behind the screen. “Bear down, Daria. Bear down hard!” Grunts and groans told us she was obeying the order.
Then—silence—and following it, a baby’s cry. Not a lusty cry, but the unmistakable thin gasping wail of a newborn.
Those around me who were able stood, and shouted and applauded.
Before long the doctor, with the swaddled baby in his arms, pushed aside the screen and brought the infant out into the room.
“A new little worker! A little girl!”
Blessings were called out, and good wishes for a long life. I went over to the doctor and the baby and he held her toward me so that I could see her small face, the tiny eyes shut, the curved red mouth pursed. I looked up at him and smiled.
“And are you the godmother?” he asked me teasingly.
“I am Tania—Daria’s friend.” I realized as I said it that Daria would snort in derision to hear me describe us as friends. “And Niuta”—I nodded toward the screen—“is her sister.”
The doctor went back to his patient and I sat down once again amid the sick and injured. I was beginning to feel sleepy. Where was the Cossack, I wondered. And what had he done with the cart? How was I going to get back to the palace?
Lately I had begun to make lists of my worst faults and my best virtues. On the list of my faults I wrote, “Has a tendency to act without forethought.” I liked that phrase, “without forethought.” It sounded so
much better than “rashly.” I had left the palace that morning without giving any thought to how I was going to get back. Now I would pay the price.
After an hour’s uncomfortable wait Niuta came to get me. She took me into the back of the clinic where there were half a dozen small rooms, each with an occupied bed. Daria was in one of the beds, with her little one in her arms. Both looked as sleepy as I felt.
“How are you, Daria?” I asked.
“How do you think? I’m sore. I’m tired.”
“And you are a mother,” I said, leaning over and kissing the baby on her forehead.
“What is her name?”
“She wants to call her Iskra,” Niuta told me. “The spark. So foolish!”
“Why foolish?”
“Because, as you would know if you read the revolutionaries’ rubbishy literature, Iskra is the name of a newspaper. A workers’ newspaper.”
“A progressive newspaper,” Daria said, her voice almost a whisper. “The spark is the hope of change.”
“I would have thought you had enough of sparks, Daria, with that awful fire you ran away from, that could have killed you and your baby too.”
But Daria had fallen asleep.
Niuta sat down on a chair beside Daria’s bed. “I’ll stay with her.”
“Where is the Cossack?” I asked.
“Nikandr went back to the palace. Guard duty.”
My spirits fell. “If I don’t get back, I’ll be missed.”
“You can just say you had to go to dancing class, like you always do when you go out with Avdokia.”
I shook my head. “There is no dancing class on Wednesdays. This is Wednesday.”
Niuta waved me away. “Then go.”
“But I—” I began to protest, then saw that it was useless. I went back out into the main room and sat down. What was I to do? Before long I saw the tall, redheaded young doctor come striding by and I called out to him.
“Excuse me sir, could I ask you, is there a way I could get back to Tsarskoe Selo? The Cossack who brought us all in his cart has left, and I have no way—”
He looked down at me searchingly.
“I’ve seen you before,” he said.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Your picture. I’ve seen your picture.”
The newspapers often printed pictures of all of us in the imperial family. Our likenesses were not unfamiliar to the literate citizens of Petersburg.
“Your aunt keeps your portrait in her salon. Not only yours, but portraits of your sisters and brother too.”
“My aunt?”
“Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, who is married to my mother’s distant cousin Petya.”
Ah, I thought. So this young doctor, who works in the Workers’ Clinic, had an aristocratic mother and was allied with my father’s family by marriage.
“I see. Olenka is my favorite aunt.”
“And Petya? Is he your favorite uncle?”
“He never talks to me. I barely know him. He and Aunt Olenka haven’t been married very long, have they?”
He smiled. “Such candor! I admire it. And you are right, they haven’t been married very long. Petya is an odd duck, as the English say.”
“Yes! I heard the king say that, at Cowes during the yacht racing. He said, ‘That Willy, he’s an odd duck.’ ”
As I spoke the doctor was glancing around the room, taking in the sick and injured people waiting there, the drunks lying on the floor, the crying babies and one snoring grandmother who sat slumped against the wall, her head on her chest.
“I must go home and eat soon. I can take you to Tsarskoe Selo myself. It is out of my way, but—” He shrugged. “Just be good enough to wait and I will be back shortly.”
Before long he returned, no longer wearing the black coat of a physician but a workman’s loose white shirt and jacket. In the black coat he had looked, to my thirteen-year-old eyes, like a man in his twenties; in his shirt and jacket he looked much more boyish. He led me outside and down the street. Presently we entered a courtyard where an ornate coach waited. My companion helped me up into the coach, calling out to the driver that we wanted to go to Tsarskoe Selo. In a moment we were off.
“Constantin Melnikov, at your service, Your Imperial Highness,” he said, reaching for my hand to kiss. I settled myself in the soft padded seat of the coach and regarded Constantin as he went on. “My father is a surgeon at the St. Mary of Mercy hospital. I am a physician in training. Not a real one yet.”
“How is it you are not in training at your father’s hospital?”
“Because I am needed here, at this clinic. I intend to go on serving the workers when I complete my studies.”
I had a sudden frightening thought. “You are not a bomb-thrower, are you?”
He threw back his head and laughed heartily. I liked the way his eyes crinkled at the corners.
“No. But then, if I were, I would hardly confess it, would I?”
“We have had some narrow escapes.”
“I know. I don’t mean to make light of your danger. But please be assured that not everyone with progressive ideas is a dangerous radical. Some of us believe in equality and fairness, and democratic government. We even believe in votes for women.”
“Votes for women! Now, that would astonish my Grandma Minnie.”
“You mean the dowager empress?”
I nodded. “Grandma Minnie thinks she ought to rule our family, and dominate everybody, even my father, but she would be horrified at the thought that women might ever vote.”
“You mark my words, Tania—I mean Your Highness—”
“Tania is fine,” I said, interrupting him.
“Well then, Tania, you mark my words, that little girl I helped to deliver today will one day vote, and maybe even run for office, the way women are doing in Britain.”
We talked on, of Constantin’s political beliefs and of his ambitions to become a surgeon like his father. I told him about our trip to Cowes and my impressions of mama’s Uncle Bertie and cousin Willy, how much I liked England and enjoyed the bracing air off the Solent. He talked with zest and vigor, his shining face with its high forehead alight with intelligence, like our tutor Monsieur Gilliard. The conversation made our trip to Tsarskoe Selo go quickly, and I was sorry when the coach drew up before the tall main gates of the imperial compound.
“Your Aunt Olga is a patroness of our clinic, you know,” Constantin told me as he helped me down out of the coach. “She is giving a charity ball soon to raise funds for our work. Perhaps you could persuade your mother to subscribe as well.”
“I will ask her.”
“Au revoir, Your Highness—Tania.” He took my hand and kissed it.
“Au revoir, Constantin.”
I went on thinking of our pleasant conversation, and of his crinkly eyes and hearty laughter, long after the clopping of the coach horses died away.
Seventeen
I must now write about something I feel ashamed of, not ashamed for myself, but for my father.
He began drinking more, and staying up all night, so that his eyes were always red-rimmed and bleary, and when Olga or I talked to him he looked as though his thoughts were far away and he didn’t answer us.
At first I thought it was because he was having to make more speeches than usual—he always dreaded making speeches, especially before the Duma, the new Russian Parliament, and usually drank a lot to calm his nerves—but I soon realized that it wasn’t his dread of speeches that was causing him to get so little sleep.
In fact it was a woman. Mathilde Kchessinsky, the ballerina Professor Leitfelter was always praising for her elegant extensions and her lightning-quick pirouettes. I had seen her dance, we all had, I suppose everyone of consequence in Petersburg had, as she was quite celebrated. She was not only agile, but very pretty, with a small figure and a girlish face and tight brown curls.
The ballet audiences loved Mathilde, but socially she was in disgrace, she belonged to th
at class of women Grandma Minnie never allowed to be mentioned in her presence and mama grew tight-lipped and flushed when anyone indiscreetly blurted out her name. She was living with Uncle Vladimir’s son Andrew, or so my sister Olga told me. But she was going every night to Cubat’s, the Cuban restaurant that mama called a den of vice and Grandma Minnie said should be blown up and demolished. And my father was meeting her there.
I did not like to think of my father going with his rowdy highborn friends to a place where they knew they could act as wildly as they liked, for as long as they liked, though I understood such things had been going on ever since papa’s grandfather’s time. “It is the way of the world,” I told myself, echoing an expression Monsieur Gilliard often used. Just as at Cowes Uncle Bertie caroused all night with his wilder companions, so in Petersburg my father did the same. Kings and emperors could not very well bring their mistresses into the palace, or have drunken all-night parties there with naked or half-naked dancers, loud music and an endless supply of drink. So they went to special restaurants and night clubs—everyone knew which ones they were. At that time Cubat’s was the most notorious place in Petersburg.
Papa, I knew, was always weak when he had drunk a lot. Anyone could persuade him to do anything. In his youth, Chemodurov told Olga, he had been in love with Mathilde and she had been his mistress for several years. He still had some keepsakes from those times that he kept in a locked metal box. Now he was spending time with her again, and sometimes he did not come home until after breakfast. There were some mornings, Chemodurov said, when his eyes were mere slits and his face was so flushed with vodka and lack of sleep that Chemodurov had to put stage makeup on his flushed cheeks and powder on his red nose just to disguise the effects of his debauchery.
Knowing this, I was embarrassed and ashamed when I saw him in the mornings. I did not like to meet his eyes.
There had been a change in our family, but the change did not come just from papa. Mama changed too.
The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold) Page 9