A petition to have an officer husband moved away from the front? He could pack his kit that very day. An introduction to the creative director of the Ballets Russes? What could be easier? To avoid the censure of a man whose wishes were the tsarina’s command, or so it was rumored, a madman who had power over life and death, Mr. Diaghilev would be happy to receive an unexpected guest.
I don’t know that anyone else in my family—or anyone else who knew him, because the poor man had no friends, only those who intended to use his supposed influence over the tsarina—bore witness to the pressures heaped upon my father.
Varya and Dunia lived with us, of course, but I was the one who worried over things my sister never considered, and when Dunia wasn’t out to market or cooking what she’d bought there or washing and ironing clothes or sitting at the kitchen table darning socks, or any of the countless tasks she performed each day, she kept to her room and her Sears, Roebuck catalogue. She couldn’t read it—she couldn’t read any language—and it was several years out of date, but it wasn’t the idea of ordering anything that drew her back to it. She told me she just liked looking at pictures of machines used in the home, that was all. I’ve wondered since if Dunia imagined from the illustrations that there was, or would someday be, another life for wives and servants. I asked her once what she thought of such things as democracy and women’s suffrage, but after I explained them she only shook her head, apparently mystified.
Mother asked me, one summer when I was home from school, about the women on the stairs. Did he love any of them, she wanted to know.
“I don’t think he even knows their names,” I told her.
AS A YOUNG MAN IN POKROVSKOYE, my father had liked to watch the girls in town, especially when they went to the river to bathe and afterward lay their bodies on their discarded clothing to dry in the sun, naked for anyone to see. And he liked taking his father’s cart to the market in Kuban and meeting girls along the way. There were innkeepers’ daughters who were happy to warm a young man’s bed before he went to sleep. By the time my father found the woman who would become his wife, he was well practiced in kissing and probably much more.
In 1888, when the Dubrovins moved from Yekaterinburg to Pokrovskoye, my mother was twenty-three and my father was nineteen. They met during the May Festival, when the people of our village carried ikons down our one street to greet the spring, dragged tables from their houses into the sun, and piled them with food and drink, and there was no one too old or too young to resist the rhythm of the “Kalinka.” My mother was beautiful, even by Petersburg standards, and she was voluptuous and blond and educated. My father could dance like a demon. From the ends of his too-long hair to the cracked leather of his peasant boots, he moved in a way that made people take notice, and once they’d looked they couldn’t stop. He was tall and rawboned, and his long legs stamped and jigged so quickly it was hard to tell what steps they followed—a dance of his own devising, that much was clear.
Whatever my father did betrayed his carnal nature. Not that he made any vulgar movements; he didn’t have to. No one could watch my father do anything physical in the company of a woman—walk, plow, sweep—without sensing lust and the intent to gratify it. Dancing, he took hold of a girl and led her firmly. One after another he took them, twirled them, wore them out, and left them breathless and clapping among the others in his spellbound audience. He spun my future mother until her cheeks blazed and her skirts flew out, twisting around his legs as well as her own. If I know my father, and I do, he spun every last thought out of her head and left it empty, ready to receive annunciation.
A Stately Pleasure Dome
WHITE WITH WHITE. White with black. Black with black. Bay with bay. Dappled gray with silver. There never was a time when the Nevsky Prospekt wasn’t crowded with long queues of fashionable sleighs, each pulled by a team of matching horses whose color complemented or reflected that of the sleigh, all of them moving slowly up and down the avenue and all the beautiful horses exhaling clouds of steaming warm breath. For there was never a temperature so low as to dissuade the vehicles’ occupants from their daily promenade. They weren’t going to wait for a party to show off new furs and jewels. Drivers drove and passengers poured champagne and spooned up caviar while taking in the sights—not architectural but human.
“Go on, Masha, don’t stop now,” Alyosha said. So I took him eavesdropping in our own sleigh.
“Make it black and give it a gold stripe and a lap robe made of monkey skins,” Alyosha said.
“What good are monkey skins? You need a robe made from an animal that lives in the cold.”
“All right, then. Make it a white sleigh with a lap robe made from the skins of white Siberian tigers.”
“White tigers. How extravagant. Everyone who sees us will go green and faint with envy. All right, then, Alexei Nikolaevich, tuck our tiger-skin robe around your knees and here we go. We have to spy and eavesdrop on everyone, even if we have to stand on the seat of our new white sleigh. We have to see whose diamonds are newer, and whose are bigger. Who’s just arrived in town, and who has departed and why. And you, Alyosha, it’s your job to find out who that ridiculously fabulously blindingly beautiful woman is, the one over there in the carriage in front of the pastry shop. See her? Yes, she’s the one. Have you ever seen eyes so big and so blue? Or diamonds so big and so new? Is she, could she be, unspoken for? Let’s find out her name and invite her to Saturday’s ball. She cannot be interested in that awful man. That one, over there, with those terrible teeth. Look, he’s introducing himself, of all the cheek, he’s practically crawling under her lap robe. You haven’t met him, but I have, and I’m telling you that man is the most fantastic bore. His name is—oh, I don’t know. Simon Someone. I was introduced to him at my cousin’s and he talked and talked and would not shut up, and all about politics. Nothing, I tell you, nothing could stop him; you could have set his clothes on fire and he’d still have gone on about Mensheviks and Trudoviks and how was it no one had read the latest boring dreadful speech given by Kerensky. After all, it was published in three papers, and didn’t everyone understand the necessity of higher taxes on foreign wines and shouldn’t agrarian socialists be manipulated to do … something, I can’t remember what, it had to do with serfs. No, no, not serf serfs, of course—I know we haven’t any more of those—but farming people, illiterate country people. Was it necessary, Simon Someone demanded, to represent factions that didn’t know what was best for them? And on and on—he ruined what might otherwise have been a lovely party, and my poor cousin, she can’t say boo to a fly, she just stood there smiling sweetly, the little mouse. I was fit to be tied.”
“Don’t stop, Masha. Please.”
I didn’t. I was only catching my breath. Sitting next to him in the sunroom, where his bed had been moved to allow him more daylight, I told him how we circled together in our sleigh, one among many, a grand cotillion whirling slowly past pastry shops and haberdashers, past the French dressmaker’s, and past jewelers and dealers in spirits and wines, the occasional swain bounding from his conveyance through a merchant’s door to return with proofs of love, a bauble for his inamorata, another bottle of champagne, more costly than the last, or why not both? Flirtations began and engagements broke, love—infatuation, anyway—abandoning one sleigh to alight in another.
But if all this remained as it had been in years before, other things had changed. The last months of empire were as spectacular for deprivation as for giddy excess. As the Great War dragged on, the army had not only conscripted all the workers from the fields and factories but also consumed its lion’s share of food and fuel. Crops went unharvested, and in St. Petersburg, breadlines tangled among sleigh runners. The shortage of coal halted one after another industry, leaving unemployed factory workers to discover new vocations: rioting, looting, sabotage. Once they’d got the tsar to abdicate, the Bolsheviks opened the locks of madhouses and prisons, for their occupants were hungry