by Kim Wright
The first morning, shortly after her marriage, that Tatiana had awakened in the Winter Palace had been very telling. She had risen and, through the most instinctive of habits, made her bed. The maid had entered minutes later, inquiring what she might like for breakfast. When the woman – twice the age of Tatiana, who had been no more than twenty at the time – spied the neatened bed, her mouth had closed into a hard, tight line and Tatiana understood that her error had been grave indeed. The maid had bustled forward and most resolutely mussed the bed, throwing pillows to the floor and crumpling the coverlet in her hands. And then she had made it again.
Tatiana had simply curled up on her chaise and watched. The woman’s gestures could have been interpreted as a slap in the face or were perhaps kindly meant, a silent illustration of how life in the royal palace was intended to work. Tatiana had never made that mistake again. In fact, understanding this new reality in ways she could not have begun to articulate, she often made a point of leaving a bit of a deliberate mess: a napkin dropped to the floor, a bar of soap sent skidding into a corner, a dress with a button dangling, an overturned glass. To create no work for her staff would have been rude, even cruel. It might have cost someone their position and thus left them with no roof over their head or no way to feed their children. Over time Tatiana had slowly but steadily acquired the sort of exaggerated helplessness that always seemed to come with privilege. When she approached a closed door she would simply stand still and wait for someone to open it.
As she now walked through the Palace, navigating from the private wings into the public, the effort gradually calmed her and forced her thoughts into more linear patterns. The dancers who had allegedly killed themselves… Filip had said they were in the ballet, and the ballet troupe was a different entity entirely from the cadre of royal dance masters. Konstantin was in no danger. It was unlikely he had been anywhere near the scene at all. There was no need for her to visit the theater on her own, especially at this hour when there was no logical explanation she might give for why she was there. And yet she walked, hall after hall, room after room, staircase after staircase, passing mirrors and portraits and statues without number, striding beneath grand chandeliers from Italy and across deep carpets from China. Retracing the familiar route as if she were lost in a sort of dream.
At last she reached the theater and slipped through the double doors which led to the performers’ level, where the dressing and rehearsal rooms were located. She found the stage below her flooded with light, each bulb glowing as if the room had been lit for a grand performance. She walked to the top of the staircase and scanned the floor below - the box where the royal family gathered, furs tossed around their feet and legs, the entrance doors, the pulleys with the platforms which raised and lowered props, the stage itself.
No Konstantin.
At the bottom of the staircase lay the lovers, as yet unmoved, although any number of men were buzzing about their bodies, presumably members of the palace police, a separate division from that of her husband. The brains, not the muscle, of the large force which existed solely to protect the imperial family.
“Who are they?” she called.
The theater was acoustically perfect. Although she had barely raised her voice, each man below her turned and stood. She doubted that any among them recognized her face, but something in her clothing, or perhaps her bearing, seemed to convey well enough from which part of the palace she’d come. Thus they were prepared to humor her questions, at least for a few minutes.
“Dancers,” one of the men answered. “Do not come any closer, please. Not until we’ve finished.”
Tatiana gazed down at the bodies. Both slim and fair, the dancers could have passed for siblings as easily as tragic lovers, and they lay in the pose which concluded their scene in the performance. This final bit of juvenile theatricality made their deaths all the sadder, although not for the reasons they’d likely intended.
“I can see that they’re dancers,” she said. “What I’m asking is their names.”
The request, while simple, gave pause to the men beneath her, who clearly did not think of the bodies in such specific terms. If she had ever doubted Konstantin’s claim that the dancers in the royal troupe were all anonymous, interchangeable, as replaceable as flowers in a vase, the reactions of these men were surely proving him right. Even in death these children were not to be granted the dignity of a name.
“Don’t worry,” one of them called back up, a man who had removed his hat to reveal a bald head and heavy-boned face. “We shall all be out of the way far before your rehearsal time. This incident shall not affect the imperial waltz.”
Good god, he thinks I have come here because I’m worried about the waltz scene, Tatiana thought and her eyes swept the room again, more slowly and carefully this time. Konstantin still did not appear. But then again, he did not sleep with a member of the tsar’s private guard. Perhaps he did not yet know that this “incident” had even occurred.
“I believe she asked you for their names,” came a voice behind her. Cold, self-assured. Tatiana turned to see Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, sister-in-law to the tsar, and known as Ella to the court, also making her way down the staircase. Tatiana sank into a curtsy and Ella nodded distractedly. Her focus was on the scene below them.
Everyone claimed that Ella had been the prettiest princess of Europe, courted by royals from every corner of the continent, but Tatiana had never considered the Grand Duchess especially beautiful. Or perhaps it would be better to say that her beauty was not the sort of dainty femininity that Russians men generally admired. There was a stony quality to Ella’s features, which were prominent and even a bit masculine. This severity was echoed in the face of her attendant, another Englishwoman, this one sent by the Queen, presumably to quell her granddaughter’s loneliness in this land so far from her birth. Despite the fact that Ella’s acknowledgment of her curtsy had been perfunctory, Tatiana remained in her pose of supplication, looking up through her eyelashes. The woman above her was born to royalty, married to royalty, and stood far above the wife of a bodyguard by every standard society could apply, and yet there is a meritocracy of nature too, is there not? And in this ranking, Tatiana knew she reigned supreme. There was no denying the doll-like symmetry of her face, the roundness of her breasts, the ringlets which formed, without coaxing, in her hair. Taken in this manner, Tatiana’s deep curtsy might even be seen as ironic.
When the men on the stage remained silent, Ella answered her own question. “Their names are Katya Gorbunkova and Yulian Krupin,” she said, the comments presumably directed toward Tatiana, although her eyes had never left the stage below them. “Both of the tsar’s imperial ballet,” Ella continued. “Chosen as leads at an age when their peers are still vying for an invitation to the troupe. Their deaths are a waste of talent as well as youth.”
“We have not formally met,” Tatiana said, rising at last. “But I am Tatiana Orlov and will also dance in the imperial waltz.”
“I may have seen you in the rehearsals,” Ella said, flicking her eyes in Tatiana’s direction then calling out to the men below, a bit more loudly than was necessary, “Are you quite sure it is a suicide?”
“What else should it be?” answered the bald man. “They are peasants by birth, you know. Such violence is common in the youth of their class.” By the brusque tone of his voice it was clear he had not recognized Ella, which was surprising, but perhaps the police, unlike the guard, did not often come in contact with the imperial family. The quality of the women’s clothes had earned them a sliver of civility – had they been dressed as servants it’s unlikely they would have been allowed to remain in the room at all. But the policeman’s tolerance evidently did not stretch so far as to include extended conversation with civilians, especially female ones.
“It’s odd that the knife is in the girl’s hand,” Tatiana ventured quietly.
“I agree,” said Ella. “Cynthia, please retrieve my camera.”
A quic
k nod from the other woman, who had remained further back but who now turned to do her mistress’s bidding. The British had a queer term for such attendants, something like “the women who stand there” although Tatiana could not think of the precise phrase in the tension of the moment. When this particular woman had first arrived from London there had been some speculation she might have been sent by Queen Victoria for purposes of political reconnaissance. Such was the depth of the paranoia in the court of Tsar Alexander III, that a middle-aged British widow with those odd sort of spectacles that split the eye in half, making the bottom look much larger than the top, could be rumored a spy. This reflexive suspicion of outsiders had always struck Tatiana as foolish, but she supposed the overblown fears of the court were why her husband held his present post. Why she slept on feather mattresses instead of straw mats.
“I take photographs,” Ella said to Tatiana, a bit unnecessarily and even a bit defensively. “A camera is a fine way to document the details of one’s own life, is it not? But please, continue with your thoughts. Why do you find it odd that the knife is in the girl’s hand?”
“If it were a suicide pact between lovers,” Tatiana said, “you would think she would die first, and then him, that he would not leave her to…”
“Quite,” said Ella. “And will you come stand beside me?”
She knows the acoustics of this room as well as I do, Tatiana thought, as she swiftly moved closer to Ella. She knows that even a softly spoken conversation between two women on the stairs has the potential to echo through the entire theater. She’s one of the aristocrats who most sincerely support the arts, which is probably why she also knew the name of the dancers.
“I believe your husband is a member of the royal guard?” Ella asked.
“Yes, Your Imperial Highness.”
“And does he ever discuss his work with you?”
The notion was so ludicrous that Tatiana almost laughed. She and Filip did not have discussions of any sort. Their marriage did not take that particular form. Furthermore, even had he been so inclined, there was probably nothing about his work which merited discussion. The grand duchess seemed to be under the impression that Tatiana was married to an inspector or detective, a man with cases which required deduction and analysis. She did not understand that Filip’s primary function was to absorb stray projectiles, nothing more.
“No, Your Imperial Highness.”
“So he is discreet,” Ella said, still misunderstanding. “Which is a good thing, I suppose. But it is obvious that much strikes you as odd about the scene before us.”
“The position…” Tatiana said, tentatively. No one had shown the slightest interest in her opinion about anything since she had moved to the palace and it felt odd to be speaking openly now, especially to a woman of rank.
“The final pose of the ballet,” said Ella, with a nod. “Intended as some sort of message to the survivors, no doubt.”
“I have been trying to envision the sequence of events that would lead them there,” Tatiana said.
“And how might you imagine it? Speak freely.”
Tatiana narrowed her eyes. “They assumed their pose on the floor and then…he cut his throat and then she…took the knife from his hand and cut her own? Something in it all seems terribly wrong, unnecessarily cruel. For if two young lovers were determined to die by the blade of a single knife wouldn’t he do the deed for her and then follow behind himself? And another thing,” she added, gaining confidence as she spoke. “Romeo and Juliet fell on their daggers, which would have been a much easier way to die than the arrangement before us. Faster, more definitive, and one could not change one’s mind half way though, which is an advantage in a method of suicide. But these youngsters must have cut their own throats and inflicting those sort of deep gashes which would have taken nerves of steel. A feat it is hard to picture a young girl performing, even if she was looking into the eyes of her dead lover.”
Ella nodded slowly, but did not add any observations of her own. “And can you tell me, Tatiana Orlov, why it does not disturb you to look so directly upon blood and death?”
“My father is a butcher.”
It was a confession Tatiana rarely made, but it was true. From earliest childhood she had been trained to look upon flesh as a type of currency. The guard below them who had dismissed the dancers as peasants hadn’t known he was speaking to a peasant himself, a woman only twenty-seven months out of poverty, a woman whose pretty face was a type of currency too. Tatiana had never, not for a single day, forgotten it.
“And so you believe,” Ella asked, in a flat tone which did not make the question a question at all, “that they were likely murdered?”
Tatiana nodded. One did not merely nod at a grand duchess, even Filip would have known better than that, but she seemed to have momentarily lost her ability to speak. Ella nodded too and turned toward the sound of her attendant who was marching steadily down the steps with a box in her hands, as well as some sort of device which looked like a collection of canes tucked under her armpit. She is a lady-in-waiting, Tatiana suddenly remembered. That was what the British called them. A foolish phrase. What were all those ladies waiting for?
“Very well,” said Ella. “Let us set it up near the railing.” The woman handed Ella the box, which Tatiana supposed was the camera. She had never seen one, only finished photographs, and it seemed nearly unbelievable that this square black case, no larger than a hatbox, should hold within the power to freeze history, to doom human faces to remain forever suspended in time. The attendant snapped the group of canes and they fell into a sort of stand upon which Ella placed the camera. She stooped to look through an aperture in the box. Whatever she saw must have displeased her, for she stood and moved the camera and its stand to another part of the railing and then looked again.
“Pardon me,” Ella said, rising up and calling down to the men on the floor. “I must request that you all stand back.”
“Stand back?” The bald man now looked up at the three women with open annoyance. It was one thing for the ladies of the court to come here out of curiosity, rising early from their beds to gape and stare. One thing for them to wish to witness the scene, for death is exciting, even a bit sexual, and sometimes the most unlikely of people are drawn to stand witness to its power. God knows, he had felt the pull himself. But it was entirely a different matter for one of these women, no matter how well dressed, to order him to stand back.
“I intend to take a photograph,” she said.
“For what?”
“For my own edification,” she said icily and then, just before he gave way to a sputter she added, “and of course my husband the Grand Duke Serge also takes an interest in my photography.”
At the words “my husband the Grand Duke Serge,” the entire scene before them changed. The officers on the floor stood, looked up, took a beat to absorb the identity of the woman above them with her camera, and then, to a man, leapt back. The two bodies on the floor suddenly lay in the center of an empty circle, looking small and pitifully alone.
Ella lowered her head and looked through the lens. “It would be better if I had my cloth,” she murmured, “but this will do,” and then there was the loud pop of a shutter closing, followed by another. With a satisfied sigh, Ella carefully lifted the camera from the triangular stand.
“Thank you,” she said to the men below. “You may carry on now.”
She is the kind of woman, Tatiana thought, who says phrases like “Pardon me” or “thank you” in a tone of voice that makes even words of supplication sound like an order. The men below seemed somehow shamed by her surface politeness. They moved back around the body but silently, almost furtively. What would it be like, Tatiana thought, to have that sort of power? To be able to not only change people’s behavior but to change how they feel about themselves, to level the proud and correct the arrogant, all with a few casually spoken words?
The grand duchess and her lady in waiting proceeded up the staircase, Ell
a carrying the camera and the woman carrying the stand. As she reached the step where Tatiana waited, Ella paused.
“Our discussion has captured my interest, Tatiana Orlov,” she said. “I believe we shall meet again, very soon.”
Tatiana curtsied and the two women swept past her, Ella holding the camera out in front of her as if it were a crown, the lady in waiting clumsily banging each step with the wooden stand as they ascended. Tatiana waited until she was sure they were gone to slip the rest of the way down the stairs to the railing.
“Will there be an investigation?” she called to the bald man.
With Ella gone from the room, his attitude had reverted back to its previous level of charm. “An investigation of what?” he asked roughly.
No one will ask about these dancers, Tatiana thought sadly. No one will wonder why the knife lies in the girl’s hand and not the boy’s, or why they would kill themselves when the ballet will be over by the end of next week and presumably they could renew their courtship then. No one will ponder if they knew each other before they came here, to the Winter Palace, or what their futures might have held. The tsar’s guard and the palace police, for all their differences, exist to protect the imperial family. If a crime is not directed toward them, it is not a crime at all.
The stretchers were moved in. The girl was lifted to one, the boy to the other. Carried away, Tatiana supposed, to some cool place, most likely a part of the kitchen, to await the arrival of their families, come in grief from a great distance to claim their children’s bodies. And then what? She did not suppose Katya and Yulian qualified for burial in the Winter Palace cemetery, even the section reserved for loyal servants, those who had dedicated their lives to the court within. More likely Katya and Yulian would be carted away, each to their separate village, moldering more with each slow, rutted mile, until even the most devoted of parents would begin to question the wisdom of such a journey.