She had not seen Jack Spencer in two years. He was beginning to show his age. His sandy hair was going gray and there were weary lines around his eyes. Still, he was an unusually handsome man. Tatty had once told him that he would look like God by the time he was sixty. He had replied that, by the time he was sixty, he would look like he had deeply offended God.
They smiled at each other warmly, but he gave no other greeting. Most of the questions were asked by the others. One wanted to know how the Russians had reacted to her, though she had yet to give her first performance. Another didn’t seem to know precisely why she was there. Jack at last came to her rescue, asking if she didn’t think efforts like hers on the cultural front were every bit as important as new trade agreements in improving Soviet-American relations. She was not familiar with new trade agreements, but she said yes. He asked if the Soviets ought not to reciprocate by letting the Bolshoi tour the United States again. Tatty said it would be a lovely idea, realizing without regret that her answer would irritate her Soviet hosts, who had kept a tight grip on the Bolshoi because of all the defections and the hostility arising from the Soviets shooting down a Korean civilian jet. As the other reporters were scribbling in their notebooks, she assumed she had just given them a news story.
The Soviets intervened to bring the conference to an end. Spencer held back as the others walked out of the room.
“Hello, Czarina. We have to stop meeting like this.”
“I was hoping we would meet, but I didn’t expect it to be at a news conference.”
“Dornfeld of Newsweek and I were going to come up by ourselves, but the two wire-service lads then decided to come along for fear they’d miss something. Your Bolshoi remark will probably make their reports.”
“You mean your Bolshoi remark. Will you be in my audience tonight?”
“Yes, but I’ll have to leave immediately afterwards to catch the train. I have travel orders.” Both Raya and Dixon Meadows were approaching. “I have to go. There’s a press luncheon with their culture commissars. We can talk about the Bolshoi.”
He squeezed her hand, then stepped away.
“But when will I see you again?”
He took another step. “In Moscow. We can be free spirits in gay old Moscow.” He smiled and bid farewell with his odd salute, bringing two fingers laconically to his brow.
In the little car, on the way back to the hotel, Raya said, “You know that man?”
“Oh yes. Quite well.”
“He is a foreign correspondent. He does theatrical reviews?”
“No. He’s just someone I’ve known for a few years. I met him in New York.”
She did not want to go through the effort of explaining her relationship with Spencer—that he had married her stepsister, that he was no longer married to her, that Tatty had always thought him more than a brother-in-law, very much more now. Raya would only ask more prying questions. A divorcée herself, Raya had already asked Tatty about her sex life with her ex-husband.
Her Leningrad performances were in the Gorky Drama Theater in the Fontanka Naberezhnaya. The great writer had founded it himself in the first year of the Bolshevik revolution and Tatty felt quite honored. The theater staff was very respectful toward her and unexpectedly helpful and efficient, complete to the fresh flowers in her dressing room. Before the revolution, Raya informed her, such flowers in winter were available only to the nobility. Tatty only smiled.
The lighting, she was assured, was perfect. A small chamber orchestra was on hand to play introductory music and bridges between her readings, mostly Aaron Copland. It worked very well in their one rehearsal.
“You were divine,” Meadows said, at its conclusion. “You will be divine.”
She was nervous, more so than she could remember being at any of her New York performances except her first. She had wondered if the Russians in the audience would understand English. It became clear very quickly that few of them did. They had been given translations of what she was to read and, disconcertingly, not in unison, kept turning the pages. Some read on ahead. Happily, there were some American tourists seated in a group toward the rear, and they followed her rather raptly, if only because they were so glad of English words after having been treated to so much Russian. Tatty tried to play to these American faces as much as possible, but her eyes kept wandering. She was well into her program when she finally caught sight of Jack Spencer, finding him shunted off to bad side seats with his three colleagues. He smiled when he saw her eyes upon him, causing her to flush and falter in her delivery. Later on, in the midst of one of the more moving passages of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, she faltered again, though not because of Spencer. She had let her eyes lift to the boxes. Only the nearest of these were occupied, mostly by older men, though a few had brought their uniformly round and frumpily dressed wives. In the box nearest to her on the right sat a man alone. His somber, staring face and longish white hair caught the light from the stage, but with his dark clothing he was so enveloped by shadows that his head seemed almost disembodied—the head of a ghost. Peter Stolypin, the czar’s reformist prime minister who Mathilde said might have prevented the revolution, had been assassinated in a theater. But it was not here that he had been shot; another city, Kiev perhaps. Good Lord, how had she remembered that? Who was this ghost?
Though the Russians seemed not to notice, she lost her place. Blushing, holding her hand in front of her mouth as though she had paused to stifle a cough, she finally regained it, proceeding flawlessly enough until her glances caught the man in the box again. His expression was friendlier now, perhaps encouraged by her second direct look, but the face was still disembodied. With his slight grin, he now seemed less a ghost and more the Cheshire cat. She found herself less frightened, vaguely amused.
Not for long. As she let her voice warble on into a melodramatic rendering of “Oh Captain, My Captain,” something began to bother her as might an increasingly perceptible cold draft. Her eyes were attracted to this strange figure because of something inexplicably familiar about him, and it was bringing out the wrong emotions in her.
As the orchestra began the musical bridge that preceded her finale, Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” she stood, head high, waiting, and looked to her right again. The grin had become a fatherly smile, the patriarch observing his favorite daughter. He bowed his head in recognition of her gaze.
Tatty snapped her head back sharply. The feeling of familiarity was now wholly one of fear. He was the man in Ramsey’s photographs. He was Griuchinov. He had come to her already.
As she reached to hold the page she was about to read, that infuriating tremor again ran across the back of her hand. She clenched her fist and began again.
When she finished, she stood with lowered head in a silence that grew embarrassingly long. Then the Russians realized she had concluded the performance and rose to give her thundering applause. Spencer nodded with emphatic approval, then waved farewell again with his two-fingered salute as he followed his colleagues up the aisle as they were led away for their train. She had an impulse to run after them, to cling to Jack, to let him drag her away.
They brought a bouquet of flowers onstage for her, the flowers from her dressing room, to which she hastened as the applause quickly dwindled. There was little for her to do there but put on her coat and hat, but she had to wait for Raya and Meadows. Pacing back and forth, trapped, fearing Griuchinov might enter at any moment, she labored desperately to compose herself, without success. Instead, she began to cry. At the sight of his face, she knew she would scream. Ramsey’s intricate plot, her own revenge, her theatrical tour, it would all be a shambles.
She slumped into the hard wooden chair by her dressing table, choking back sobs, finally regaining control of herself just as someone knocked at the door. It opened, and a man entered.
“Divine,” said Meadows.
They drove in Raya’s little car through surprisingly busy streets. The night air was cold and crisp with a sc
attered flavoring of early snow. Tatty rolled down her window to bring it against her face. When they reached their destination, she stood a moment at the curb, savoring this touch of winter Russia, thinking of droshkies and troikas, of her grandmother and imperial balls. The Friendship and Cultural Union party inside was no such gala. A hundred or more people were crowded into a long narrow room, milling and swarming in a sort of Alice in Wonderland caucus race along and around a long table heaped with food. The room was too hot. In addition to the smell of people were those of fish, cheese, and Russian tobacco. She was given no opportunity to remove her coat, until she almost screamed at Raya to take it from her. She happily accepted a cold glass of vodka some happy-faced Russian pressed upon her.
“Marvelous,” said a tall Russian woman whom a returning Raya introduced as one of the country’s leading stage actresses. “Marvelous. Marvelous, marvelous.” It was apparently her only English word.
The American consul general was there, and she was glad of the familiar face, though it was quickly lost to her in the moving crowd. A troupe of ballet dancers was introduced to her, and seemed to dance by, one by one, as she shook their hands. A military man with enormous amounts of braid and medals came up and stood talking to her in Russian, gripping her hand. At length she was able to turn gratefully away in response to someone tapping her shoulder. It was a woman in Russian evening clothes, a slender and perfect blonde with wonderfully large blue eyes and one of the most beautiful if gaunt and tragic faces Tatty had ever seen, a face not greatly unlike that of her mother, Chloe. Without the slightest change in her sad, sad expression, the woman stood on tiptoe to kiss Tatty slowly on both cheeks, then stood back and slipped away, as much into the vapors as into the crowd.
The human crush was becoming oppressive. Raya stuck close by, though Meadows had disappeared somewhere back by the door and none of the other Americans was in reach. A number of Russians were obviously and ardently trying to reach her, but their efforts to do so only pressed the crowd more thickly around her. One big bulging-eyed aspirant was struggling forward much like an American football player, but the strength of his effort ultimately undid him as people to her left gave way and he was carried off obliquely by his own momentum. Another Russian man, a small, round, cheery, and quite drunken fellow with a bright red nose and shiny bald head, was able to move to her from the table with little effort at all. Very politely, he placed a small smoked fish in her hand and, nodding enthusiastically, said, “Pokushyte.” Eat.
She shrank back, flustered. Not for anything would she put tongue or teeth to the thing, which still bore its little head. Yet she dared not drop it on the floor for fear that she might offend the little man, or worse, that he might simply pick it up and hand it to her again. The table was beyond her reach. She could give it to Raya, but then there would still be her greasy hand, and she had nothing on which to wipe it but her evening dress.
“Tatty.”
Meadows had at last rejoined her, but he had brought a guest. The somber ghost, the Cheshire cat, and the kindly father now had a body, an older man’s body, to be sure, but taller and trimmer than most Russians’. She looked into his dark, glittering eyes, so close now, and the fear came back to her in a great rush.
“Tatty,” said Meadows. “I should like you to meet Mr. Griuchinov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers.”
The crush of people around Tatty evaporated, leaving her alone and exposed. She worried about what must be the cold look on her face, for she could no longer control it. Without a word, he reached to take her hand as though to kiss it, like some damned Prussian count, but abruptly halted when he found it full of fish. His quizzical look turned to humor. Impulsively, he brought her hand, fish and all, to his lips, then gently lowered it, standing erect. He began to laugh. Trembling, her lips quivering, she began to do the same, a nervous, faltering laugh that uncontrollably began to rise higher in pitch and volume. Soon everyone around them was laughing. In a moment, the entire room was laughing. She let the fish fall to the floor.
When the din subsided, he spoke at last, a surprisingly mellow and cheerful voice.
“Miss Chase,” he said, pronouncing it “Meese Chess.” “On behalf of our government and Soviet people, I welcome you to our country and say that you are very beautiful and talented person and that we are very, very grateful that you have come to read to us these beautiful writings of your countymen.”
The laughter had vented her fear and nervousness. She found herself the mannerly person she had always been. She even smiled, though no more than diplomatically.
“I am very grateful for your having me,” she said, wanting to say it in Russian, but not quite certain of enough of the words.
“We shall look forward to seeing you again while you are here,” he said.
Still smiling, she stared hard into his eyes.
“That would give me great pleasure, Mr. Chairman.”
He left her less the admiring father and more the Cheshire cat. With Raya gobbling food behind her, Tatty hastily departed as soon as Meadows said it was acceptable to do so.
Back in the hotel, alone in her suite, the Winter Palace the centerpiece of her view, she drank herself to sleep with three large vodkas.
“I want to go to Czarskoe Selo today,” she said to Raya at breakfast the next morning.
“The town is called now Pushkin. He came from there.”
“I don’t want to see the town. I want to see the palace.”
“There are two palaces.”
“I want to see the main one, where the czar and his family spent their summers, where they were kept under arrest after the revolution.”
“The main one is the Catherine Palace. Is closed now, for renovation project. You would like better the town of Petrodvorets. It was called Peterhof when czars went there. It is on the sea and has two beautiful parks. There is also there the Mon Plaisir palace of Peter the Great. We can go there tomorrow, or next day.”
“Fine. Today I want to go to Czarskoe Selo and see the Catherine Palace, where Nicholas and Alexandra stayed.”
“Why?”
“I want to make sure I see it. Something came up the last time I was here and I missed it.”
“Is not on the schedule.”
“Raya, I don’t have a schedule, except for my performances.”
“I have made a schedule for you. Today you are to see Smolny Institute, where Lenin planned the revolution.”
“I’ll see the Smolny some other time. Tomorrow, if you like, instead of Peterhof. But today I want to see Czarskoe Selo. It’s such a lovely day, Raya.”
Tatty had awakened to find a night’s fall of snow on the ground and old women with brooms and shovels clearing the sidewalks. The overcast had broken and all of Leningrad glittered in the morning sunlight.
“Is closed. I am sorry.”
“Raya, you said you were a party member, that you could do anything. Prove it.”
Raya lighted a cigarette and made a face, coughing.
“Okay,” she said. “We go to Pushkin. But we must be back in afternoon so you will not be late for performance.”
“My performance is not until eight o’clock.”
“We must not have you stranded out in countryside. Soviet government is being very careful of you, Miss Chase, to make sure nothing goes wrong for you. It is not well that you make surprise.”
Tatty reached and patted Raya’s hand. “Somehow I think that your thoughtful Soviet government shall not lose track of me.”
Czarskoe Selo turned out to be only some fifteen miles from Leningrad, less than an hour’s drive. Raya had to show a uniformed guard identification, and she added to it a very official-looking letter that Tatty presumed was a temporary grant of special privileges. It commanded instant respect from the soldier, who shouted something to a comrade and then bade her enter the grounds with much deference. Raya grunted.
Mathilde had always spoken of Czarskoe Selo as the Romanovs’ country place and Tatty expecte
d exactly that, a country house, something along the lines of a hunting lodge. What she found seemed almost to eclipse the Winter Palace, an awesomely grand Russian version of Versailles. The further Raya drove onto the grounds, the wider they seemed to extend, almost to every horizon. They parked directly in front of the wide entrance steps of the Catherine Palace without challenge, as might the czar’s chauffeur have done seventy years before. Tatty got out, still awestruck, and a little troubled. The Winter Palace had been what amounted to the seat of government, and its immensity a justifiable extravagance. This monstrosity was a creature comfort, just for one family. A railroad from the city had been built—solely for the family’s use. She had thought it good fortune that the Romanovs had been caught by the revolution in this place, and not in the city; that they had had their interlude in this warm, familiar home before their removal to Siberia and its horrible consequences. But now it seemed the worst luck of all, to be held here in this mammoth symbol of all their indulgences while the revolution boiled and festered around them. No wonder the revolutionary soldiers assigned as their guards were so brutish.
“What do you want to see?” said Raya.
Tatty looked up at the three balconies above the grand portico, and the four grotesque statues bordering the three front doors.
“They have restored the Great Hall,” Raya said. “It is worth seeing.”
To rub the capitalist lady’s nose in it, Tatty thought.
“There were family quarters,” she said. “A private wing. Where they were kept during the first days of the revolution. It was near a park, where the czar cut wood. I would like to see that.”
Raya huffed and grimaced. “That is at the Alexander Palace. It is a long walk.”
It was a walk through the pristine snow, red vinyl boots trudging to the fore, plowing a path for Tatty’s black leather ones. Raya seen from behind looked a very strong woman. Tatty had an impulse to pound her back, to hear the muscles thump.
Blood of the Czars Page 11
