A city built as quickly as Petersburg, and built to the plans of so forceful a character as Tsar Pyetr, appeared to me to be precisely what it was – synthetic. Moscow was created over centuries by people who built what they needed to live. Petersburg was built to emulate the great cities of Europe, and so it would always seem counterfeit – only slightly more real than the cardboard frontages of the villages erected by Potemkin to give Tsarina Yekaterina a more picturesque view as she toured the backwaters of her empire. But Petersburg was the capital, and society adored it. Society had moved to Petersburg, but life remained in Moscow.
My wife, Marfa Mihailovna, loved Petersburg in a way I never could. She was just as familiar with it and used that intimacy as the basis for seeing a depth that I could never perceive. Our young son seemed to love it too, but at five years old, nothing was yet familiar to him; everything was a new adventure. So Marfa stayed in Petersburg and, however far I travelled, returning to one meant returning to the other. Returning to either or to both felt the same – comfortable.
As I meandered through the Moscow streets, I drank in each of the great sights of the city. I walked along the embankment of the river Moskva, looking up at the towers that punctuated the walls of the Kremlin. I turned north, passing beneath the lofty onion domes of Saint Vasily's and then across Red Square, thronged with Muscovites going about their lives. Then I continued northwards, back into the maze of tiny streets in Tverskaya.
But perhaps I was fooling myself. Perhaps I was wandering around the streets of Moscow, marvelling at its people and its buildings, in order only to tease myself before I headed for my true destination, like a man who eats all his vegetables first, praising their subtle flavour while really trying to leave his plate empty of everything but the steak that is the only part of the meal he ever wanted. Or was I like a drunk who wakes early and realizes that there are times when it is too early in the day even for him and so kills time, trying to keep his mind off that first sharp, sweet drink?
It was almost midday when I reached the corner of Degtyarny Lane and sat down again on the bench where I'd first sat the previous December.
Back in the winter of 1811, I'd been there with Dmitry and Maks. Vadim had been home in Petersburg for his daughter's wedding. I'd been at the wedding too, but had returned to Moscow almost straight after, countering my guilt at the look on Marfa's face with the strange anticipation that something would happen, had to happen, once I got back to a city as vibrant as the old capital.
But little had seemed to be going on and so the three of us had, before long and for whatever reason, found ourselves sat on that bench in the quiet, snow-covered square exchanging jokes and watching the men (and occasional women) entering and leaving the building opposite.
There had been a moment of silence as our eyes were all taken by a particularly fine-looking young lady who was leaving the building, a silence which Maks filled with an announcement made in the voice he usually reserved for describing the political affairs of nations.
'It's a brothel!'
'Of course it's a brothel,' laughed Dmitry. To be honest, I hadn't noticed, but thinking about it, it seemed pretty obvious. Dmitry may have been bluffing too, but it always seemed best to appear worldly-wise in front of a young soldier like Maksim, so I laughed along with Dmitry.
'You want to go in?' Dmitry asked Maks. 'It looks like it's something of a military establishment.' And indeed most of the clientele did seem to be cavalry officers, just like ourselves.
'No thanks,' Maks had replied, in a voice that made me wonder whether he had any human desires at all.
Dmitry turned to me. 'Aleksei? Ah no. You've got the loving wife and family.'
'How about you?' I asked Dmitry.
'Me? No. I don't like to play the field either.' He winked at no one in particular. 'There's a little place I use on the other side of Nikitskiy Street. Cheap and clean. I'll stick with that.'
The girl who had caught our attention earlier soon returned, clutching tight to her body the basket of fruit and other foods she had gone out to buy. She was astonishing. Her large eyes sloped slightly upwards away from her nose and her rich lips were pressed tightly shut against the wind-blown snow through which she struggled.
I felt I had seen her before. Suddenly, it dawned on me.
'She looks like Marie-Louise.'
'Who?' snorted Dmitry.
'The new empress of France,' explained Maks.
'The new Madame Bonaparte,' was my description.
'Ah! The old Austrian whore,' was Dmitry's.
All of our comments were to a reasonable degree true. In 1810, Bonaparte had divorced his first wife, Josephine, and wed Marie-Louise, the daughter of the Austrian emperor, Francis the Second. Josephine had been unable to provide Bonaparte with children and the emperor needed an heir. How quickly the French had forgotten what they did to their last Austrian queen.
'She looks a bit like her, but not much,' said Maks.
'Who knows?' I replied. 'I've only ever seen one picture, but they are similar.'
The picture I had seen enchanted me. It was just a print based on a portrait of her, but she seemed to me truly beautiful – much better than Josephine. But then, they said Bonaparte loved Josephine. That's why they had stayed together even without children.
'Better have him bed some Austrian harlot than touch the tsar's sister,' said Dmitry. 'She was too young. Very wise of Tsar Aleksandr to tell Napoleon to wait until she was eighteen.'
Dmitry raised his arm. I looked up and noticed that he had made a snowball, which he was preparing to throw at the girl as she trudged her way back to the door of the brothel. However minor it was, it seemed so needlessly cruel that I shoved at his arm with my own as he threw. He was an excellent shot and, even with my hindrance, the snowball hit the wall just inches in front of her face.
She glanced towards us and, because my arm was raised, assumed that I had been the thrower. The look she gave had such a combination of anger and pride, of asking why I presumed to treat her in such a way, that I felt almost compelled to go and apologize, not just to tell her that it hadn't been me, but to explain why I hadn't tried harder to prevent it, to be forgiven for even knowing the man who had thrown the snowball.
Dmitry chuckled to himself. 'Did you hear what she said to him on their wedding night?'
'Who?' I asked.
'Marie-Louise. To Bonaparte,' replied Dmitry, revealing a greater knowledge of French royal marriages than he had previously shown. 'After he'd screwed her for the first time, she liked it so much she said, "Do it again."'
I joined in Dmitry's raucous laughter, even though I'd heard the story before. Maksim didn't laugh. At the time, I'd presumed that he simply didn't get it.
'You know what she'd say?' continued Dmitry through his laughter, indicating the young 'lady' whose resemblance to Marie-Louise had started the whole conversation. 'She'd say "Do it again – second time is half price."'
This time both Dmitry and Maks laughed, but I didn't. It's one thing to insult a French empress, another to insult a Russian whore.
As it turned out, she charged by the hour.
CHAPTER II
TWO HOURS LATER I HAD BEEN LYING ON HER BED, WATCHING her from behind as she sat at the dressing table, brushing her long dark hair. Her name was Dominique.
'So, why did you throw the snowball at me?'
'I didn't,' I replied with a self-assurance that I couldn't have expressed to her before. 'My friend did. I was trying to stop him. I wanted to apologize.'