An only daughter with six brothers, much older than she, descended from nobility, Cristina had been educated by governesses brought from Germany. During the maudlin afternoons, these women would usually stroll among the pines on the estate, stomachs swollen from the rape by her father Ivan, a hunchbacked widower who could not restrain himself when drunk. After a few months, a black carriage would bring a new governess and carry away the old one, who was never seen again. She had fifteen governesses in ten years.
In that isolated place, more than thirty miles from Minsk, with her brothers in the army and a father who never spoke, the only entertainment possible was beating the maids — for any conceivable reason. She pulled up their skirts, pulled down their linen underwear, and with her short, hard whip she left garnet furrows on their milky buttocks. In her family, there were only invisible women and dead soldiers to defend Peter the Great, Catherine I, Ivan VI, Paul I, Peter III, and other czars in their wars with France, Turkey, Sweden, Great Britain, and many other nations. Her grandfathers, her uncles, and her brothers all gradually metamorphosed into portraits, medals, and posthumous decoration that covered the walls in the enormous hall. Only her father, stinking of vodka, urine, and vomit, would walk there, ashamed of his monstrous body, which would not allow him to take part in the continuous massacre.
When Cristina was fifteen, the French governess, imported as a birthday present, was raped the night she arrived. Ivan, poisoned by alcohol, his buttocks filthy with excrement, howling like a dog, smashed the door down with an ax, threw himself on top of the young woman, squeezed her breasts until they burst, and, at the moment he achieved his orgasm, bit off her nose. The piece of flesh choked him to death. The governess’ heart stopped, and Ivan suffocated. Cristina was left alone, surrounded by myriad attendants, servants, and serfs.
Her father was buried in the family mausoleum and the governess next to some boulders in the forest. That year, the winter was harsher than ever. On three occasions, the wolves dug up the victim’s body. In the long corridors of the manor house, Cristina saw the noseless woman move along, floating like a silent ship. She was beginning to bite her nails to the point of ripping off bits of flesh when the message inviting her to the coronation of Alexander I arrived.
She wasn’t even aware of the assassination of the previous emperor. In the governess’ trunk, she found a nightgown whose stylish European cut excused the modest quality of the fabric. Her grandmothers’ jewels more than made up for whatever was lacking in her costume. During the entire voyage, dressed up like a lady, in that Spartan coach built to carry military men, she — accustomed to letting the days pass without bathing, clad in the trousers and boots of her brother, killed in the Swiss Alps fighting the French — felt strange.
As the strong horses carried her toward Moscow, she had the feeling that those bracelets, necklaces, and earrings, that light cloth, those silk undergarments were awakening her body. She began the journey flat-chested, and now her breasts were growing, hard, big, with nipples so sensitive that the rubbing of her brassiere with each lurch of the carriage gave her a pleasure she had to admit, though she was distracted with shame. The pores of her pubis opened to make way for an exuberant triangle of hair, and for the first time she felt the heat from her labia. She slowly spread her legs, and with her face red and her eyes tight, she understood that she was going to the Czar’s coronation in search of a man.
Cristina’s virginal beauty dazzled the court. That petite, delicate princess whose eyes radiated a savage power attracted a flock of nobles prepared to love her unto death. She remained unmoved. None made her flutter. There were young men as handsome as battle stallions, intelligent and possessive forty-year-olds, august old men willing to offer the intoxication of power. They seemed paltry. Her newborn femininity wanted a total lover, perfection incarnate.
When the bells rang, when the trumpets blared, when the coronation began, Cristina saw the object of her desire enter in the person of Alexander I. He was an impossible ideal, but her heart would hear no objections. She pledged her hymen to the emperor — or to no one. Standing before that adolescent Christ, delicate and tense, much more shadow than body, unfettered like all peaceful hearts but also an implacable warrior capable of transforming his soul into a sabre of ice, all other men became mere cadavers.
As soon as they approached, the stench that arose from their mouths turned her deaf to their advances. She saw them eaten by invisible worms. The Russian nobility was a charnel house sustained by a living fountain. She knew that loving the Czar was like loving the Sun: a consuming dream. She didn’t care. She stretched her soul until it became a thread wrapped around Alexander’s ring finger, like a wedding band. She left the court knowing she was forever married to the emperor. She forced her driver to wear out several horses because she wanted to reach her estates as quickly as possible. There she would begin to share, isolated from the world, the life of her beloved.
She had the portraits of her ancestors taken down and burned along with their uniforms, diplomas, medals, letters, and any other document that might preserve the slightest particle of their existence in her memory. “When you know the ocean, you’re not interested in the rivers flowing into it.” Every night, without exception, for years, she dreamed the Czar came and took her from her bedroom, carried her through the air to the top of a century-old oak tree and there, in a nightingale nest, possessed her, depositing in the depth of her vagina a gold coin bearing his bearded likeness.
Following the axiom of a Chinese sage, taught to her by one of her many governesses, “The well-ordered desk of a good notary is worth as much as the well-ordered country of a good Emperor,” she began to follow, on her estates, the policies of the Czar. When Alexander I saw the ignorance of the Russian people he put education at the forefront of government programs, she transformed the right wing of her mansion into a school and forced her servants to learn Greek and Latin. She struggled, not sparing the whip, but the brutes were incapable of learning more than three words. Then, when the Czar’s councilors thought of creating a new constitution, she spent whole months dictating laws. She wanted the servants to learn self-government. To give them a taste for freedom, she decreed two days of independence per week, when her employees could make decisions as they thought proper. As a result, they all got drunk, fornicated, fought, and burned down a few cottages. Cristina felt lost. She lacked her idol’s wisdom in solving social problems.
Where her property ended began the vast hunting grounds of the imperial family. To reach that borderland, she had to gallop nine miles, which is what she did every morning, hoping to see the Czar in person. Her desire was never satisfied. Occasionally she would hear the barking of a distant pack of dogs, but nothing more. She had to accept the nocturnal lover who filled her womb with gold coins.
Napoleon’s invasion created a better opportunity to commingle with the Emperor. The night of the battle of Borodino, Alexander I visited her, accompanied by 42,000 dead Russians. Her bedroom had to expand a few miles in length and breadth to accommodate them all. On their knees, the dead observed their habitual coitus, whining like pathetic dogs. The Czar tossed his gold coin into her weakly, and within her his image looked blurry. Cristina begged him not to lose faith, to never give in to the enemy. She arose from the bed and used her whip to cast out the tearful ghosts. Her beloved swore to carry on the struggle. Then Cristina spread her legs and let fall into those noble hands a stream of coins, all she’d accumulated on those conjugal nights. That was her contribution to the Emperor’s war effort.