“A poem!” I said. “Nothing but a lark. Still, I would value your opinion.”
He stared at the notebook, making no move to take it in his own hand or read its contents. I pressed forward. “You were once kind enough to write poems in my honor. I thought it appropriate to return the favor.”
I expected him to make a sarcastic comment then about Georges d’Anthès, the same way he would if the tsar had flirted with me over supper, but he remained quiet. I squeezed his hand. He didn’t need to say anything. If only he would squeeze back.
“I did not mean to flirt with Georges,” I said helplessly. The comment about Apollo had not been calculated and he was making me pay too dearly for it.
“Did I say you were flirting?”
“Your silence speaks plainly enough. Now I have something to offer and you refuse. You are angry and you won’t talk to me.”
At that, Alexander put his head in his hands. I saw tears in his eyes and I cast my notebook aside, taking him in my arms. “What is wrong? What can I do to make it better?”
“Do you know what people say about me?” Alexander asked hoarsely.
People said a great many things about my husband, but I chose to focus on the positive. “That you are a titan of Russian literature?”
He flashed a weak smile. “Good effort, but no. They say I am temperamental and hot-blooded, and it is due to my African heritage from Gannibal himself.”
“What nonsense.” I thought a moment and added: “Not that it is nonsense you have hot blood, but what shame is there in that? It is nonsense to think such moods are credited to your African ancestor. Who in St. Petersburg has even traveled to Africa? They speak like provincial girls who pretend to have seen the city.”
At last, he squeezed my hand. “Thank you. My mother has more African blood than I and never even cracks a smile nor makes a joke, let alone loses her temper.”
This was true enough. I didn’t pretend to know Alexander’s family well, but both his mother and father seemed cold fish. Besides, when it came to odd families, I considered myself something of an expert. “We shouldn’t look to our heritage to explain our temperament, but the disposition God granted us.”
“There is more to it than that. I fear I am going mad. As Evgeny did in my poem.”
“Why would you think this?” I kept my tone calm, though I found the words chilling. But I saw no sign of mental illness in Alexander. And after growing up with my father, I thought myself well enough qualified to notice the warning signs.
“I feel my temper sometimes slip from my control. Why, the way that Frenchman looked at you … it is no more than any man would, considering your beauty. It is no more than I would have once upon a time, paying no mind as to whether or not a husband was involved. And yet now … I wished to smash the fellow’s face in for a trifle.”
“I have no need to see Georges again,” I told Alexander. “Ekaterina seems taken with him. He can focus his attention on her. He need not flirt with me.”
“Coquetry certainly does not line the path toward happiness, but neither does that.” Alexander gestured at my notebook.
“Writing? Why not?”
“It causes naught but pain. I cannot even stand my own verse right now.”
I had not thought writing an occupation that would bring sadness to either one of us; I only wanted to grow closer to Alexander by sharing my poetry with him. “Pursuing an artistic talent should be a joy.”
“Writing is truth seeking and the truths of most lives are too terrible to bear. Better to live in happy ignorance. Then again, a happy ignorance is not possible for a writer either, for we always wish to tell our story, and when we can’t, we feel nothing at all. I believe that too is responsible for my failing mental state.”
I pulled him closer and kissed his cheeks. “You will write soon enough, I am sure of it.”
“How wrong I was to think happiness could be mine. My mother always told me I was destined for misery. I should never have expected more.”
My face burned at the thought of yet another cruelty inflicted on Alexander by his own mother, but I kept my own voice calm. “We must both exorcise the voice of our mothers from our heads. But, my darling, what is so terrible in our lives that you cannot bear it?”
He buried his head in the crevice between my shoulders and neck, his shoulders shaking, inhaling deeply while I stroked his black curls.
“That I do not deserve your love,” he whispered quietly in my ear. “And that soon enough I will pay dearly for it.”
Fourteen
ST. PETERSBURG
NOVEMBER 1834–MARCH 1836
Despite Alexander’s troubling words, I tried to maintain a happy face in our domestic life over the coming months for the sake of our children and my sisters. My husband paced restlessly upstairs in his study, still unable to put pen to paper, while over supper, Azya tried every means of flattery to encourage him to write again. Meanwhile Ekaterina—Koko—asked about Georges so often I wanted to slap her. To avoid a scene that might upset Alexander, I smiled and assured her we would see him often enough at winter balls.
This turned out to be the truth, though it was difficult for Ekaterina to spend more than a few minutes at a stretch alone with Georges, for women were drawn to him like hummingbirds to a flower. Even so, Georges seemed willing enough to entertain my sister with his jolly stories. Yet even as Georges held Ekaterina’s hand, his gaze followed me.
I kept my promise to Alexander, and steered clear of him. For a time.
In May of 1835, Grisha, our third child, was born. Alexander’s mood improved at once, for he enjoyed having babies about the house almost as much as he enjoyed the process of creating them. I tried to share in his happiness, but felt unaccountably morose. It had nothing to do with Grisha, a darling baby with a mop of thick black hair. It was only that I didn’t sleep well and took to crying for no reason, sometimes in the middle of the night, and did not want to bother Alexander with my problems. Were I granted a wish to return to those days, I would handle matters differently. At the time, I worried over Alexander’s mental state. Not wishing to diminish the obvious joy of his second son’s arrival, I kept my mounting sadness and frustrations to myself until they reached a tipping point.
One afternoon, after I had just put Grisha down for a nap and hoped to snatch a bit of sleep myself, Ekaterina returned from a shopping trip on Nevsky Prospect with gifts for the children: a soldier’s drum for Masha and a pair of cymbals for Sasha, which he immediately began to clang together, waking Grisha, who began to wail. Bestowing these gifts and accepting kisses as reward, Ekaterina announced she had made plans with a new friend to tour the gardens at Tauride Palace and flitted away once more, leaving me to deal with the aftermath.
I already suffered from aches in my head, and the noise made the pain nearly unbearable. All I wanted was to lie abed for an hour. I threatened to withhold the gooseberry preserves that Masha loved almost as much as her father did. Still, she banged her drum and made her new baby brother cry even more.
“Take them outside!” The nanny was taking afternoon tea in town with a friend. So I shouted at my darling Liza, something I never did, shoving Grisha into her arms, grabbing Masha’s blue down coat from the wardrobe in the nursery, and snatching Sasha’s cymbals from his hands. “I can’t stand it any longer.”
Liza’s mouth moved helplessly, but she had nothing to say at the sight of the wild children suddenly in her charge, while Sasha gave me a woeful look that made me feel like a monster. With an apologetic glance, I softened my tone as I kissed Sasha’s head. “I will return them when you’re back home. Mamma only needs some rest.”
Once poor Liza had herded the children’s army away, I flounced upstairs, thinking I should like to punch a hole in the wall and not even sure why. I only knew I needed a good night’s sleep, and a brief nap would have to do.
As I walked to my room, I passed Alexander’s study. A high feminine voice chatted gaily inside. I caught a li
ght vanilla scent in the air. For a moment, I was convinced Alix Rosset—now Alexandra Smirnova—had found her way to our flat. The thought of Alix in the house with us made my head pound even worse than the cymbals and drums. The door had been left ajar and I shoved it open.
“Of course, our grandfather always spoke of the visit Catherine had planned to make to our family estate.” Azya lounged on Alexander’s leather couch. Her feet dipped off the ends and one slipper dangled from her toes so that her stockinged heel was exposed. The room smelled of vanilla-tinged oil. I quickly realized she’d dabbed her neck with cologne. “He hoped Catherine would rise from the grave and somehow her spirit would find her way to Kaluga. I think he felt our family’s fortunes were forever damaged after Catherine’s snub.”
“Is that a fact?” I said, too loudly. “I never heard Grandfather say such a thing.”
“Oh! Natalya! Natasha! Natalie!” My sister jumped to her feet. I wish she had remained seated. It would have made her seem less guilty. “I didn’t hear you come in. Alexander was just sharing new verse. He has asked me to transcribe his drafts.”
I surveyed the notes on Alexander’s desk and the sheepish look on his face. I thought then of our cozy house at Tsarskoye Selo, when I spent my mornings happily copying Alexander’s rough drafts into more legible work. Why had we ever left that happy place? Why had I ever agreed to share my home with my sisters?
“When do you intend to do this?” My calmness must have scared Azya, for she stepped back, nearly falling over the sofa behind her.
“Why in the mornings … I suppose … perhaps after breakfast … should it matter?”
I faced Alexander. “Are you not happy with my work, sir? I thought I did a fine job with your transcriptions.”
“Of course you did, Natasha … my Tasha…” Alexander had adopted this informal endearment permanently now that both the tsar and Georges referred to me as Natalie. “Yet we have a third child now. I thought you needed rest.”
“I’m fine. Azya should be too busy for such matters.”
“It is only a trifle…” my sister began.
“You need to make new friends of your own, as Ekaterina is doing. You cannot remain trapped in this house all day waiting to die an old maid.”
Azya’s wide eyes, which had looked on me with love so often, brimmed with hurt. I had put those tears there, a monster once more, and yet I had said no more than the truth. But she was not the only culprit. All of the frustration of the past weeks had been churning inside, waiting to reach a head, alongside my physical discomfort and lack of sleep. “You shouldn’t encourage her,” I told Alexander. “It isn’t fair.”
My husband still attempted to make light of the situation. “Your sister merely takes an interest in the arts, as you once did.”
“As I once did?” I had not helped Alexander with any further poems only because he had not asked me to do so. Besides, he didn’t think to ask again about my writing. Rather, he wanted to keep me like a prized bird in a cage. It seemed to me in that moment life was always about him: his feelings, his work, his ownership of me.
Even then a small voice inside my head said Azya likely had nothing more than a harmless schoolgirl’s crush on my husband, and Alexander had not asked about my poems because he suffered from the same melancholy that now had me in its clutches. Still, I could not bear that my favorite sister should swoop in with her unseemly affections.
“You were the one who didn’t even want my sisters here in the first place,” I told Alexander. “You thought they needed husbands and lives of their own rather than to leech off ours. Why would you ask my sister to behave now as your personal secretary? If you are in need of someone to transcribe your work, I’m sure we could sell more possessions to a moneylender and you could hire a fellow. Or do you wish to keep my sister at your beck and call?”
I would not look at Azya but heard the heartbreak in her voice as she addressed my husband. “You do not want us here?”
I spoke before Alexander had a chance to answer. “You need to find a husband of your own. You wouldn’t want to live on our charity forever. You’re here only because I allow it. Never forget that.”
* * *
After behaving so terribly to my sister, I found my own company intolerable. More and more, I sought escape from our little family dramas in masquerades. When I was not working on costumes, I thought about them or made lists of materials, addicted to the thrill of fashioning a new identity. I riffled through the books in Alexander’s voluminous library, searching for ideas. When I wore my costumes, I was no longer a wife and mother with debts and a distracted husband, but a character from a fairy tale, a figure from history—a goddess. Once a group approached me at a ball to tell me how fine I looked, I longed for more people to do so. I was no longer the decorative poet’s wife. For once in my life, I felt valued for myself, not for how well my presence reflected someone else’s glory.
I was working through the first steps for a costume of Queen Esther, and instructing Liza to tighten my corsets accordingly, when someone rapped on my boudoir door. Irritated and assuming one of the children was playing a joke, I called: “Come in only if someone is afire.”
Alexander stuck his head through the door. “In your presence, I am always afire.”
“Alexander!” I motioned for him to enter. “I have an idea for a costume from the Bible … Esther from the book of that name. Do you know her?”
“Of course I know her.” He seemed in a good mood, yet he was rubbing his hands together. “Intent on saving your people, are you?”
I bowed low, in mock subservience. “Ever at the command of my people.”
“Perhaps you might start with your own husband.”
I smiled coyly, thinking he meant to take me to his bed that afternoon. “Liza, why don’t we get back to this later … perhaps you could check on the children for me.”
Liza gave a quick curtsy, and left the room, giggling.
“Alexander, you know it is not a matter of me not wishing it, but the doctor said to wait. Still, I think there are other ways we might express our love for each other…”
“Don’t put ideas in my head!” He sat at the foot of my bed and I took a seat on his lap. “You see, I have a gentleman coming this afternoon to pick up a new manuscript.”
“That’s wonderful!”
He made a dismissive motion. “Only a few verses, but I have given thought to our finances and wonder if it might make sense to start asking for more money for my work.”
“I have said as much.”
“Yes … but you see I already agreed to a sum with this fellow, in gold rubles of course. It would not seem gentlemanly to ask for more when we already came to terms. I had not the foresight to think of the expenses we might incur after Grisha’s birth.”
“You will ask for more next time,” I assured him.
“Or…” He hesitated. “I can’t ask for more money, but you know when a fellow’s wife asks something of him? Most gentlemen understand there is little that man can do.”
I pulled back, searching Alexander’s seemingly innocent expression. “You wish to tell him I am making you back down from the original agreement and ask for more money.”
Alexander grinned. “Or better yet—you might ask him.”
I dropped my hands and made my way to my feet as best I could, my body still sore from carrying Grisha. “What?”
“Think of the boon to our accounts. How can he resist the plea of a ravishing woman?”
I sighed and moved back to my chair in front of the vanity looking glass. I looked a fright, but knew Alexander was correct in saying a gentleman would be unwilling to refuse a lady. Considering how my stomach twisted into knots when I considered our accounts, and how I had already offered several items of jewelry to pawnshops, I can’t say the thought of a financial windfall didn’t appeal to me. “How much were you thinking?”
“We had originally settled on fifty.”
I flinched, for th
e amount was far too low. I wish Alexander had thought to ask for more when selling his work in the first place, instead of having me come to clean up the mess later.
“Now I am thinking one hundred.”
“Twice the original price!” Still, I thought how far an additional fifty gold rubles would go to paying our expenses.
“He will not complain should the request come from you.”
So that’s what all this was about. I sighed, too exhausted even to protest the outlandish plan. “Fine. When am I to meet with this gentleman?”
Alexander consulted the pocket watch he kept chained to his trousers. “In ten minutes.”
“I’m not even dressed.”
“Not to worry. You need only pull on an appropriate day gown. He is coming here.”
“Alexander!” I said, exasperated.
“It will be fine.”
The doorbell rang. “He’s early. Let me just go to talk to the fellow. It will all be over soon.” Alexander squeezed my shoulders. “Remember, you are a woman of business.”
I looked back in the mirror. I had played with arranging my hair in black curls framing my face to assume the role of Esther. I supposed a woman of business was yet another role to play, so I practiced a pleading but formidable expression. I only wished I might lose the feeling I had been reduced to beggary. Our family’s precarious financial situation made me think I had lost grip of the very world beneath my feet, and that my own husband could neither save me, nor even see the indignity of our situation.
I longed for escape.
* * *
With such disloyal thoughts running through my head, I didn’t dare tell Alexander about the notes.
They came infrequently at first, slipped into my hand discreetly by Liza, and smelling strongly of a woodland-scented French cologne I had come to know well. The romantic words of Georges d’Anthès seemed harmless at first, praising my beauty in simple but earnest language, the effect my presence had on him, and how the world seemed a better place for me being in it. Nothing more than he might have copied word for word from a French journal for gentlemen. And certainly nothing more than one might expect from the courtly flirtations that were common enough occurrences in those days.
The Lost Season of Love and Snow Page 19