The Imperial Wife

by Irina Reyn

  “May I ask the reason?” she asked. “Is my name not amenable to the Russian language? I have met several Sophias here.”

  “No need to regale you with the full story,” the empress said, “but that was the name of my father’s half sister, and the less said about her the better. My mother’s name will do quite nicely. She was a marvelous person, matyushka, smart as a whip. I sometimes say my father was truly ‘great’ due to her influence.”

  Ekaterina. The name, spoken aloud now, turns Sophie into a new invention: an Imperial Highness, the Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevna. Even her patronymic is a lie, her father’s name being Christian August, the “Aleksey” chosen for its royal heritage as the patronymic of the empress’s mother. All Catherine knows of the first Catherine, the one responsible for the precious order she wears at all times, was that she was exceedingly beautiful and of a luminous disposition. She had started off as a housemaid, then became Peter the Great’s mistress and wife before becoming empress after his death. Catherine likes that she has landed in a realm where this is possible, the elevation of housemaid to empress.

  Where she and the first Catherine part ways though: she will not be achieving the throne as mistress. She will not be making her Peter a “great man.” His inability to rise to that moniker is apparent already.

  They are now formally engaged to be married. Catherine is vaguely aware of the empress pinning a diamond pin to her shoulder, her very chest glowing with the blue of sapphires.

  * * *

  As soon as the betrothal is over, they are kids again, playing blindman’s bluff. Peter is It. They cannot help laughing at the figure he casts swatting about the apartments in search of victims. His underdeveloped body spasms with laughter; through his uniform, she can make out the ribs of his chest. When he senses someone to tag he pretends to be lost and then lurches forward. But Peter’s talent in the role of It seems to be limited to catching prey, Catherine notes. He is hopeless at properly identifying the person, thus is forced to remain It round after round. Catherine whispers to his equally daft courtiers to give him some kind of hint so the game might finally conclude.

  It is the summer of little oversight, as if the entire palace belongs solely to them and their games, but Catherine never forgets that she is future companion to a king. When the merriment crosses inappropriate boundaries, when they become too loud or disturb the empress during her daytime sleep, everyone relies on Catherine’s discretion.

  “Quiet,” she commands now in a new, imperious tone. The day before, she was on her way to collect portraits of herself and Peter, when she overheard the empress conversing with the doctors.

  “Another year? Are you sure?” The empress was in one of her impatient moods. Catherine could hear her skirts brushing across the floor planks. “But we’ve already done the conversion.”

  Lestocq’s voice, consoling: “A year passes quickly.”

  “But perhaps he can father a child sooner, perhaps the outward signs are deceiving.”

  “It is unlikely. His, how to say this, anatomy, is very much a boy’s…”

  Catherine considers tiptoeing her way back toward her apartments, but Bestuzhev is marching down the hall and he caught her flustered countenance outside the door. His eyes narrowed at her. She rushed away, peeking nervously over her shoulder. For the remainder of the day she rolled the precious word around in her mouth. “Year.” A year is an eternity.

  Now, to bring this silly game to its conclusion, she plants herself directly in Peter’s way in order to finally be caught. He has detected her presence. She notes that the thin threads of his muscles tense, readying for the pounce.

  “What are you doing? Get out of the way!” screeches Evdotya, the least intelligent of her ladies, who, at seventeen, should know better than to squeal at her mistress like that.

  “Got you.” Peter’s hands are on her shoulders. She can smell the wine on his breath, the residue of charred duck he had for supper. Behind him, their group is convulsed in suppressed laughter, waiting for his conjecture. If he guesses correctly, she becomes It. How she wants him to succeed in this moment, to seize this small victory. He feels the contours of her cheeks and chin with his stubby fingers.

  Finally, he says, “I’ve got it. I know who you are. You are Evdotya. Or should I check lower down to be sure?”

  Screaming, gales of it, surrounds her. She pretends to join them in their good humor. Evdotya is clutching her stomach, spasms of laughter convulsing her body. Zhenia wipes her moist face with a handkerchief, the revolving courtiers (what are their names? They are always changing) are patting Peter on the back. She finds none of it funny.

  “You are mistaken, it is your future wife,” she says. She pretends to be included in the joke, but her whole body flares with shame. Evdotya is not even pretty, with a lumpy, misshapen chin and ruddy claws for hands. So it is as she thought—Catherine has not managed to make him love her and probably never will.

  Tanya

  PRESENT DAY

  Turning the corner with my bag of warm bagels, I see a man sitting on my parents’ front steps. He’s stout and overdressed for the weather, a ribbed sweatshirt zipped to his neck, a pair of wool slacks riding up his calves. Obviously Russian. Beside him rests a frame wrapped in butcher paper. I freeze, but there’s no escape, just a smattering of trees along a long stretch of suburban openness.

  Visiting my parents in northern New Jersey is a minivacation for me and I’d been enjoying a quiet morning stroll through Ramsdale. Panera Bread, Dunkin’ Donuts, Krazy Bagels, Asia Express. Starbucks filled with teenagers, their heads bowed over their cell phones as if in devout prayer. Gas station attendants pumping gas, leaning back against the pumps to count the bills. Here, on the warm pavement, the world reveals its secrets. The Russian pharmacy with its Polish hand creams, Ukrainian homeopathic drugs, intricate Czech perfume bottles glistening in the window. The Soviet souvenir store—bobble heads of Krushchev next to cheap matryoshki in ascending order flashing shellacked gums in their painted-on red kerchiefs. The streets are splashed with young runners, senior citizens pushing before them metal carts. My people everywhere, shifting about with cotton mesh bags, locking SUVs with a decisive beep, lining up for dry cleaning. The spring colors, which glowed dull this morning, now pulse in shades of kaleidoscopic possibility. Ramsdale.

  In the 1990s, leaving Queens for New Jersey was upward mobility for a Russian immigrant. No more tenement apartments riddled with ants and cockroaches and neighbors burning pungent foods, no more lumbering buses emitting gas into your window or the bedroom view of a courtyard with overflowing trash cans. The indignities of the Soviet Union were magnified in New York but New Jersey was America in miniature. The civilization of a house, the private dignity of a car, a mall with its neat, spacious clarity. Costco and its promise of deprivation’s opposite. New York City was always there when you needed it, and when you lacked the energy to battle the traffic to cross the bridge to its cultural institutions, you watched the Russian television program Kultura. (“Our people on the move: Kultura.”)

  The show is anchored by a breathless pixie of a woman who seems to attend every play, opera, and gallery opening in New York City. With textured pleasure, she details to her viewers an unreachable world just over the George Washington Bridge peopled by Russian luminaries: the Misha Baryshnikovs and Anna Netrebkos and Vassily Grigorievs. Her talent is verbal transportation, the dissemination of myth. All of Ramsdale watches the show with bursting pride, the subject always someone’s nephew or cousin or patient who’s made it. Our people on the move.

  A few months into my new job as head of Russian art, I got the call to appear on the show. I was strangely proud of the invitation, as if the entire community were a microcosm of a mother’s pride. My parents alternated between delight and fear. I was somebody now, but for Russians with a long memory, visibility comes with a sheen of danger; I was in the public eye and vulnerable. My parents’ paranoia was not altogether unfounded because after the
show aired, strangers began showing up at my parents’ house with a parade of masterpieces magically unearthed from ancient relatives. And here is another one.

  “If you would just make an appointment at my office,” I plead with the waiting man.

  “I saw you on show.” He’s already unwrapping the painting, peeling off strips of brown paper and twine. I set down the bag and look. The subject is a wooded landscape, a silver brook splitting two rows of trees, the final rays of sunlight receding behind clouds. I move in for a closer inspection.

  The man notices my flicker of interest. “That’s right. I knew if you would only lay eyes on it. Very special Shishkin. You can’t argue with quality.”

  I scan down the canvas for pigment and brushstroke. The first impression is good: it does seem to have age. The painting is typical of the Düsseldorf school, and Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin did study at the Düsseldorf Academy so this type of scene would be typical for him. The front door opens, and my father waves us inside. “Come in, come in. Tea is ready.”

  My father and the man exchange nods of recognition, of mutual respect. The man, it seems, owns one of the bigger Russian stores in town. He’s a minor celebrity in Ramsdale who refers the occasional customer to my father, which means I have to take him seriously. My mother clears the table. The man and I are alone in the dining room with the painting.

  “It’s not particularly good, is it?” I say, making an effort to camouflage my excitement. Shishkin is a real coup. He is to Russia as Edward Hopper is to America, a painter that can move a true Russian to tears. My clients recall their days as schoolboys when they took excursions to the Tretyakov and encountered their first Shishkin. When I consider quitting my job, I think of what I do as reuniting these men with a dear friend they feared they would never embrace again.

  “I would say it’s a minor work even if authenticated,” I say. Experts must always downplay the work’s importance. A closer examination of the surface confirms it: it is a true nineteenth-century.

  “Okay, so it’s not a masterpiece. Must a genius always make masterpieces? But when I was six years old, I remember it hanging on Tyotya Sonya’s wall. Her grandfather knew Shishkin’s father from the army…”

  The man’s story turns florid around the siege of Leningrad, then flows into a ribald autobiography of three tumultuous marriages, a poet brother arrested by Stalin but then released after interrogation, distinction on a collective farm plucking turkeys, modest fame as a Soviet author of children’s nursery rhymes, and now part owner of a chain of Russian stores in Bergen County. He lifts the painting as I work, tipping its face into the overhead light.

  “Please don’t do that,” I reproach him.

  “It’s a beauty, yes? I spent years adoring this Shishkin hanging on my auntie’s wall, and right before she died, Tyotya Sonya promised to gift me the painting. ‘Save it for a day you need a little extra cash,’ she told me.”

  “If you would allow me to handle the painting myself.” I stare pointedly at his fingers until they let go of the frame.

  In any case, stories like this can never be taken seriously. This kind of seller pulls out almost identical sentimental tales of Soviet wartime. He trots out the same dubious letters from an Aunty Sonya or Aunty Valya dating back to the 1930s that never fail to mention something like, “And by the way, I happened to pick up this special little painting from the studio of a most interesting artist…” By now I know better than to get suckered in. Still, this is no fake. The canvas is not lined, the craquelure is right for the era.

  I’m overjoyed. I picture Vitya, one of my favorite clients, how he asks every time we’re on the phone, “Please, Tan’ka, tell me today is the day you found me a Shishkin.”

  The description of Tyotya Sonya’s final surrender to throat cancer turns gruesome when I interrupt, “Let’s turn off the light and take a better look.” I scoop out the ultraviolet light always in my bag for just these occasions, and examine the pigment more closely.

  The man plucks a chocolate-covered zephyr from the dessert tray and bites down. “From my store,” he says, holding it up. “Am I right or am I right?”

  How this business can always surprise; sometimes, there’s nothing less likely than authenticity. “I’ll need to show it to my restorer but this is looking good.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful, Tanyechka.” He is onto his second zephyr now, praising my mother for the real strength of her brewed tea, none of that weak American crap they call tea. My mother is bustling, blushing with pleasure. The service is set out to perfection, our best tea set, a perfect pyramid of sugar cubes.

  “Your father, Tanyechka, is a perfectionist. My customers always say, ‘he has magic hands,’” the man says. “Your beautiful mother is the queen of the office. Everyone looks forward to simply sitting in the waiting room and staring at her.”

  “Nu, enough already with your flattery. Shall I splash a little?” My father holds up a bottle of cognac.

  “Splash, splash. Who am I to resist?”

  Celebratory glasses are handed out. As I wrap the painting, I notice it in the corner. At first it looks like it could be a root from one of the trees, a brushstroke, a flourish in the earth. I shine the light closer. The Shishkin signature is not embedded in the pigment, it hovers on top of the canvas. On closer inspection, the signature is poppy, pretty, lacking in depth. The mark, then, the errant bark I noticed earlier, must be the original painter’s name scraped away. Of course. The man purchased a Hans-somebody from the Düsseldorf School for five to seven thousand and is now trying to pass it off as a Shishkin.

  I sigh. “Actually, I’m afraid there’s a little problem with this Shishkin.”

  “What problem? What are you talking about?”

  My parents have stopped moving in the kitchen, and the only sound we hear is the sound of a television program upstairs: “Ukrainian siblings Sima and Sonia Dodyk were among thirty-eight Jews who lived in a cave during World War Two for eighteen months, thus surviving the Holocaust.”

  The guy puts down the zephyr, his face gathering color. “I told you, my Tyotya Sonya has owned this painting her entire life. I thought you were this great expert.”

  I think about Carl—on the subway, he would lean back against the door and embrace me through the fits and starts of the train—and a torrent of unexpected sadness overwhelms me. I think I might cry right here, in front of this man and his fake Shishkin. But I swallow. “I know this must be a huge shock. But I’m afraid that although on first inspection it looked so encouraging, you’ll see that under the trunk of that tree, there are the remnants of an original signature.”

  The man meets the eyes of my parents as if to say, Can you believe this? Who does she think she is? He is shrouding the face of the painting in reams of butcher paper, a series of angry strokes. “Five minutes of expertise and it’s already got a problem? That’s all I get? I was just speaking to Nadia Kudrina at Christie’s and she says this is an important work. And come to think of it, did she not sell that record Shishkin last season? I guess I should go and see her after all.”

  The door is slammed shut and we hear the furious roar of an engine blocking our driveway.

  “Are you sure you’re correct?” my father asks. He looks shocked. “Is there any chance it really is a Shishkin?”

  It’s not the constant flood of fakes that get to me in this job; I’m used to them by now. I’ve been shown “early twentieth-century” paintings where the paint was still wet. Respected gallerists thrusting before me canvases baked in an oven to give the impression of age, second cousins at birthday parties asking me to appraise posters sloppily wedged into frames. That doesn’t bother me anymore. It’s the presumption that travels with me everywhere: I don’t deserve my position, my expertise is nothing more than an accident of luck. My parents immigrated with someone who could not rise in the New World. Who is incapable of doing whatever it takes to make something of herself.

  I heave, then the tears come in earnest. “I’
m the specialist!”

  My mother drops the dishes and hurries over. “Come here, hand it to me.”

  She cradles my head in her elbow, thumb working at the muscles in my neck. When as a child I was tormented by a nameless panic, a horror I could not pin down, my mother used to say, Hand it to me. And it always worked; once I voiced my fears to my mother, once I displaced that tumor of confusion from my own mind onto hers, it never failed to vanish. So now, in the pauses between a fresh wave, I hand her all of it: the fear of an incomprehensible new life, losing Carl. And the deepest, unvoiced one of all: that my marriage is falling apart and the fault is mine.

  My mother listens, nods, takes in all my ramblings. I’m impressed that she asks no questions about Carl, offers no advice on what a woman has to do to regain the affections of her husband. She strokes my cheek. “Don’t worry, Tanchik. We won’t be shopping at this man’s store anymore.”

  As if to reinforce the dawning of a new era, my father grabs the entire bowl of chocolate zephyrs, and with the flourish of a former soccer player, flings the contents into the garbage can and slams down the lid.

  Catherine

  FEBRUARY 1745

  Peter’s skin burns to the touch but he refuses to retire to his room. The objective of this particular game is to take turns telling the truth.

  “I hate the empress’s birthday fetes,” he says. He strings up one of his puppets by the neck and hangs him from a bedpost. He is unusually pale and sluggish today. “I find it unbearable the way she outfits herself like a young lady, which she is not. She is old and a whore. Your turn.”

  “You look ill. Get some rest.” Catherine sighs. In the distance, she hears the singing of the matins, probably coming from the ladies in her antechamber. She is not deeply devout, but his complaining on a Sunday is particularly grating. “Please, for the sake of your health.”