The sky comes to life, crackling with its own praises. Northern lights perform a symphony of colors, burnt umber and pale green, which cast an added sheen on the city.
The Imperial Couple wave, smile, reach out for each other’s free hands on the blue velvet seat. Their son is in good health. The salon has achieved its purpose. The arts are flourishing. The peasant population has been rendered powerless. The alliance between the peasants and the working class is frayed. Isolated uprisings have been quashed by the loyal army. According to his advisors, the many revolutionary factions—the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, and the violent Maximalists that sprouted like wild weeds all over the country—are in disarray.
The Tsar gazes into the sepia evening. His lips curl into a contented smile. He is looking forward to a few hours of music and ballet. “Nice evening,” he tells his wife.
“Lovely,” she replies, squeezing his hand.
Darya is in the second carriage, holding the Tsarevich in her lap. She is wearing a taffeta gown of deep scarlet, scattered with diamond stars, her hair cascading down her shoulders. A hairpin of pink diamonds from her grandparents’ Corinin mines harness a curl behind her right ear. She presses her cheek against Alexei’s, whispers in his ear to remember this, his third birthday, when all the inhabitants of the city have spilled out into the streets to wish him well. She, too, will remember this night, her attending her first ballet with Avram, who has become far dearer to her than she imagined possible. He is in the Mariinsky auditorium now, having arrived earlier with the other artists, ministers, generals, and royal guests.
Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia are in the third carriage, waving enthusiastically at the crowds that shower their path with snowfalls of rose petals.
Cries of “OTMA! OTMA!” (the first initials of the grand duchesses’ names) rise and swell into a single unified roar of adoration. As certainly as Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich is the future of Russia, the grand duchesses are her heart and soul.
The Imperial Family, Darya, and Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich are led through a separate entrance and up private stairs to the Tsar’s apartment-sized box to the left of the stage. Two cherubs are perched on gilded arches above the imperial box as if to protect the precious Imperial Family in an auditorium already crowded with uniformed and plainclothes security guards.
The Emperor and his brother take their seats on both sides of the Empress. Darya settles Anastasia and the Tsarevich on her right, Olga, Tatiana, and Maria on her left. “Are you all comfortable, my angels,” she asks them each. She kisses the tip of Anastasia’s nose. “Try not to sleep, darling.”
“I won’t let her,” Maria replies, pinching her small sister’s arm.
“I’ll tell Papa,” Anastasia cries.
Darya pulls Anastasia’s favorite doll out of the bag she has filled with all types of diversions for the children. “Here, Anastasia, little Lariska wants to see the ballet too.”
The conductor raises his baton. An enchanting symphony, consonant and deeply introspective, curls up from the orchestra pit to fill the U-shaped auditorium.
The blue stage curtains of velvet and silk and lace rise.
The collective intake of breath can be heard in the auditorium.
The Mariinsky stage is awash in red.
A single aurochs is caged in the limelight.
The ballerino is disguised from head to toe in a shade deeper than the shade of ruby.
Four ballerinas, white and airy and purer than St. Petersburg summer clouds, fence the aurochs, circling and nuzzling, caressing, stroking, flirting with the graceful pliés of their arms, balancing on flat toes, closing on the prey, swirling in an adagio, slow, enfolding, tempting, then twirling into an allegro, light, soothing, curling, as weightless and graceful as the swans inhabiting the artificial lake in the Alexander Park.
Grand Duchess Tatiana whispers in Darya’s ear that the aurochs seems to be swimming in a pool of blood. Darya nods her agreement. It is a chilling scene. But for now, she is basking in the aura of Avram’s attention, who, occupying a seat in the mezzanine right below the royal box, glances up every few moments to find her lorgnettes aimed at him rather than at the stage. He is especially handsome tonight in coattails and brushed back hair with no trace of the stubborn paint that has a way of clinging to him.
She lowers her lorgnettes, rests her elbows on the balcony banister, and leans slightly forward. Their eyes meet. His eyes say, “I want you.” Her eyes reply, “Me too.” “Later tonight,” his eyes say. “Yes,” hers reply. Not a word is spoken.
The magical notes of flutes and clarinets swirl and rise and bounce like so many embraces, now melancholy, now with unprecedented rhythmic vitality. The audience is on their feet. “Bravo! Bravo!”
Alexei has left his seat and is on his toes, half his small body leaning over the banister. Darya grabs the back of his tuxedo jacket, lifts him up, and drops him in her lap.
“Alyosha!” she whispers, her heart hammering in her ears. “You were about to fall!”
Anastasia, finding her brother’s seat vacant, shifts closer to Darya, rests her curly head of light brown hair on Darya’s shoulder, and dozes off. Olga glances at her parents. Finding them engrossed in the ballet, she slips her hand in Darya’s. Maria and Tatiana, having lost interest in the ballet, are whispering to each other, wondering whether their parents will invite the prima ballerina to have dinner with them. Their grandmother is the grand patron of the theater, after all, her bust exhibited in the formal entryway.
Avram is in a playful mood, now he taps on his wrist, where Darya loves to count his pulse. Now his arms are outstretched as if inviting her to fall into them.
Grand Duke Michael reaches out to touch Darya’s shoulder. “Bensheimer seems more interested in you than the ballet.”
Darya’s cheeks burn. She raises her eyebrows as if she is not certain what the grand duke is referring to. She shifts back into her chair, clutching Alexei to her chest.
Michael winks at her. His tone is cheerful. “Shall we invite Bensheimer to the imperial box?”
“If it pleases Your Majesty,” she replies with a mischievous wink.
The conductor flips his baton and the 150-piece orchestra bursts into a fortississimo of such magnitude, the Tsarevich digs his little hand into Darya’s arm. The trombones, tubas, and horns blare. The trumpets and cymbals blast. The bass drums and tambourines boom. An aggressive war cry transforms the auditorium into a mighty acoustic instrument.
The aurochs is provoked into action! Its powerful right leg is pointing like a weapon at one of the dancers. He is jumping, brisk, lively, leg beating the air as if slicing everything into small pieces. And then an arabesque, then another and another, furious jumps and turns and kicks performed in the midst of a pool of red light.
The white ballerinas seem to fuse into a four-legged arabesque, their unity such that it is hard to tell one from another. But then, with sudden violence, they break apart, a savage battement of kicking that is soon transformed into en arrière, a backward tiptoeing as they sail farther and farther away from the audience, white specters fading into the fringes of darkness.
The strings raise soothing moans. The violins, violas, and violoncellos plead and implore, attempting to lure the dancers back.
But as the curtain falls and the applauding audience rises to its feet, it is the red aurochs who remains solid in the center of the stage.
Nine years from now, Darya will trace her thoughts back, identifying this moment as the instant a tiny seed of suspicion planted itself in back of her mind, a slow-growing seed that will bloom into a malodorous plant she will be forced to acknowledge.
Chapter Twenty-Five
— 1911 —
The Tsar leads his seven-year-old son into Portrait Hall, with its smell of paint and ink and a cloud of stone dust that has settled onto everything. Since its inception six years before, the salon’s fame has spread all around the country, becoming the tal
k of St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, and Moscow, the artists celebrated throughout the country, and the Tsarina admired for promoting the arts. Today, her sciatica having forced her into bed rest, the Tsar is shouldering her responsibility.
Darya follows a step behind. She winces, pressing her hand to her stomach. It has been a painful day, one of those days that pounce on her without warning. For five years now, since she lost Avram’s child, her womb has been twisting and churning every now and then, refusing to settle, a constant reminder of her loss. Their love, hers and Avram’s, has come far in the last six years, deepened and expanded, a wiser relationship. They no longer meet in the park. Count Trebla put an end to that. His blood poisoned with syphilis, his mind gone, he wandered around the park one dusk, grabbing anyone who happened to cross his path, holding the alarmed person hostage, rambling on and on about Darya and Avram, how they meet in the imperial banya, fuck in it, soil it.
Trebla was sent to the infirmary where, hands and feet bound, he was injected with malaria to induce a high fever to cure his syphilis. The treatment assaulted his nerves, rendering him numb from the waist down. The household officer in charge of the kennels released Count Trebla of his duty as veterinarian, but he was not banished from the court. His wife’s miniatures have become too valuable, especially to the Tsarevich who can’t wait to open the lacquered box he receives twice a year to discover yet another miracle to add to his collection.
Since the day her husband became housebound, Tamara is becoming more reclusive, dwindling in her skin. Her miniatures too are shrinking in size, so much so that details of some are invisible to everyone save the artist herself.
Now, she stands up with the other artists, abandoning her tiny tools—inspection loupe, mallet, file, hammer, tweezers, blade shears—rearranging her face and bowing low.
Hands clasped behind, the Emperor ambles from one station to another, lingering to take a better look at works in progress, nodding his head with approval, surprise, or a gesture of indifference. His temples are grayer, as if overnight. The dark circles under his eyes have turned soft with surrender, his broad chest a reminder of the numerous times he is forced to carry his incapacitated six-year-old son in his arms.
Darya is attentive, her gaze pouncing ahead of the Tsar, checking every station before he comes to it. Following the country’s far-left tendencies, the political atmosphere of the salon has been shifting. Years of turmoil have emboldened certain artists, so that ballets and caricatures, once carefully designed to disguise antimonarchist messages, seem to be changing shape. The artists are shedding their masks and allowing themselves some liberties. Something must be done before they become too radical.
But the Empress is in denial; she does not want to see this change. What she chooses to see and relay to the Emperor is the extraordinary work that continues to be born in Portrait Hall: paintings, sculptures, miniatures, ballets, and caricatures.
In Germany, Igor’s ballet about the Tsar and the kaiser won him both a knighthood and the honorary title of Ritter. The aristocracy, taken by Belkin’s morbid paintings, is ready to pay exorbitant prices for his work. Dimitri Markowitz’s caricatures express the impotence of the first and second Dumas and fetch high prices in the black market. His most popular caricature, The Duma of Public Anger, as the first meeting of the Duma came to be known, depicts moderate socialists, social democrats, and social revolutionaries hanging one another with their own cravats while the Tsar and Tsarina sunbathe on their yacht. In a show of blatant defiance, the caricature was purchased by none other than the minister of finance himself.
Darya brought this matter to the Emperor’s attention. He raised his cane and pointed it at her as if to say she was too naïve to understand. “I admire Markowitz’s caricature,” the Emperor announced. “It depicts members of the Duma exactly as they are. A bunch of worthless idiots!”
Now, despite Darya’s earlier warnings to the artists that the Tsar was on his way, she is not certain how the afternoon will unfold. Rosa scrambles down from her scaffolding and stands at the foot in case the Tsar has questions. She opens her mouth to greet the Tsar, but the marble dust in her lungs has taken a toll, and she doubles over coughing. The Tsar quickly guides his son out of harm’s way and toward Igor’s station.
Igor buttons his shirt and stands back with lowered head.
Darya directs an angry look at him. The sheets spread around his work area, renditions of dancers in different moves, are so poorly disguised that any attentive observer would recognize the underlying truth: a series of vignettes based on the 1904 Russo-Japan War that ended in an embarrassing defeat for Russia.
“Quite impressive,” the monarch says. “Is this the norm? To test the ballet movements on paper first? And the rhythms and emotions, how do they come to life on stage?”
“Every artist has a different style, Your Majesty,” Igor replies. “My preference is to test the entire dance on paper before transferring it to the stage. And as to Your Majesty’s second question, the rhythms and emotions are added at different stages of practice.”
In truth, these renderings were created for the sole benefit of the Empress, to be pulled out of Igor’s briefcase and displayed whenever the Tsarina visits. Otherwise, Igor’s choreography—concept, space, visualization, and so much more—is strictly born and shaped in his head. So today, having been forewarned of the Tsar’s visit, he had dismissed the dancer who impersonates the Japanese Emperor Meiji and spread out the renderings, albeit with a few minor adjustments to reflect a measure of progress.
The Tsar nods, taps on one of the drawings. “Well done! We will eagerly follow your success.”
Eyes downcast, Igor Vasiliev stands at attention, his respectful stance contradicting his utter contempt for the Romanovs. The salon has altered the public’s perception of the Imperial Family’s indifference to the arts. Despite that, Igor bristles, this is only the Tsar’s third visit in six years, and even now his expression of boredom is quite insulting.
The photographer Joseph wants nothing more than to raise his camera, now that the Emperor is here in person, and capture the gray hairs in his beard, the strong jawline, the uneven teeth that he is known to neglect, the slightly large ears that speak of his intelligence, the dreamy blue-gray eyes, but most of all the shape of his head, a valuable supplement to his ongoing project. Despite years of grueling research, the photographer has yet to prove that head shape does not evidence madness, as claimed by some therapists, who themselves lack a single sensible cell in their brains. At the Tsar’s perplexed expression at the scatter of photographs on the table, Joseph attempts to explain his project, name the many asylums he visited, the numerous madmen and women he photographed, the comparison he continues to make between the shape of their heads and those of supposedly sane people. But the Emperor has lost interest and moves on to Belkin’s station.
The Tsar is confronted by a morbid painting—a coffin studded with copper nails and heavy bolts, as if to contain a dangerous living beast, rather than the bearded, long-haired corpse that rests inside. Nearby, lightning from an arid sky strikes a gaping grave from which emerges the painter’s skeletal hand, holding up a decree.
Darya steps closer. “Perhaps Your Majesty might want to skip this station. The Tsarevich is too young to be introduced to such morbid painting.”
Darya recognizes the corpse in the painting as Rasputin’s. When his name first appeared in the press some months ago, opposing his influence on the Romanovs, the Tsar’s primary reaction was to punish those who spoke out against the Imperial Couple for supporting a humble peasant who was known for his involvement with all types of questionable women he led into his bedroom, which he considered “the Holy of Holies.” Their Majesties continued to lavish him with elegant garments and expensive gifts, welcoming him into their palace, allowing him to spend time with the grand duchesses, even late at night after they had changed. The governess to the grand duchesses had suggested Rasputin be barred from entering the girls’ quarters.
The enraged Empress discharged the governess. But lately, due to tremendous pressure, the reluctant Tsar has temporarily banished Rasputin from the court. And the decree held up in the painting is none other than the Tsar’s decree, influenced by Rasputin, that appointed the controversial Vladimir Karlovich Sabler as minister for church affairs.
The Tsar slaps his cane against his leather boot. “Yes, let us move on, son. Mr. Bensheimer’s work seems less gloomy.”
The Emperor lingers in front of the portrait Avram is painting of Darya, her face filling the entire canvas.
A marvel of creation, the Emperor muses, admirable how the artist has rendered his model’s every eccentricity, the emotional depth of her eyes in which her unquenchable curiosity blazes. Despite his talent and his portraits, which could have been valuable additions to the imperial collection, Bensheimer is a Jew, alas, and as such, a stain on his court. Yet his wife will not hear of dismissing him. That, she believes, is nothing short of tempting bad luck. She has become dependent on the portrait of the Tsarevich in the arms of the Madonna. She holds it dear, a talisman on which their son’s health depends.
Avram stands silent by the easel. His portrait speaks for itself. The sensuality in his model’s features is undeniable, the plump mouth, the flushed cheeks, the dreamy gaze. His eyes rest on Darya, studying her with the tentative gaze of a lover. There is concern in her veiled expression.
The Tsar turns his back to Bensheimer. “Come, son, let us visit our favorite artist. See what gifts she may have in store for us today. What tiny secrets they might conceal.”
“How are you doing, Tamara Sheremetev?” he asks the Creator of Miniatures. “What are you working on today?”
She is blushing, her hand covering something. Despite having been in the service of the court for years, she has never become used to such attention. Her voice is gentle. “Perhaps you might raise your hand, Your Majesty.”
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