Diamonds and Snow           

 

 

 

            There was a goodhearted Russian farmer named Grigory Grishenko.  He and his wife Sonia worked hard, and kept what their collective allowed them to keep.  They were secretly religious, and prayed each night before the icon of         St. Nicholas that had belonged to Sonia's parents.

            They had a son named Andrei who for years had been in love with a vain and pretty schoolmate, Natasha Ivanovna.  As a child, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Natasha would always reply, "A foreigner."  As a teenager, she sighed out loud for the lives of Westerners and cursed her own land--not for its lack of freedom, but for the lack of luxuries: pretty clothes and trinkets and high society.

            When the Soviet Union disbanded, Natasha was overjoyed. Old Grigory was sad to see the borders of Russia set back. Sonia simply said it was the will of God.  Andrei argued that Russia could no longer attempt to control her neighbors, but he was worried by the new climate of greed and speculation--by people enriching themselves off their naive and eager neighbors.  "We are moving too quickly," he would say, with a shake of the head.  "It is not as if the Western countries are helping us as they promised."

            Natasha Ivanovna dismissed all such concerns. She herself opened a hat shop in town, and did well.  No suppliers tricked her, and no mafiosi muscled in on her shop. Capitalism, she told Andrei over and over, was about focus, dedication--and marketing quality goods.  He was amazed by the wild and ostentatious hats she sold--some created on her own sewing machine--and more amazed at how their poor neighbors would count out long-saved rubles to pay for them. The elderly babushkas in their black wool coats and slipshod rubber shoes were startling, grotesque apparitions as they strolled out of her shop, their wide-brimmed chapeaus flapping in the wind.

            Still, Andrei was impressed by Natasha's success.  She had seemed so scatterbrained when they were schoolchildren--oohing and aahing over the elegant life of the tsars and tsarinas, studying the cut of their clothes and ignoring the details of their flaws and fates.  Reality bewildered her. Once he had seen a picture of Anna Andersen, the foreign woman who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia.  She had had a feverish intensity, a wild-eyed, haunted look that reminded him of his beloved Natasha  . . . but now Natasha appeared practical and hard-headed.

            "I am worried, my darling, that when we marry, the money you make in the shop will be more than I make on the farm.  I would not like for you to have to support me," he told her one day.

            Natasha tossed her head in annoyance.  "Really, Andrei Grigorivich!  I am surprised at you.  You do not expect, when we are married, that we will raise our children on your father's farm?  We must see the world!  We must go someplace --to Moscow, to see the McDonald's, or else to St. Petersburg," (she savored the restored name of the city every time she said it) "to raise our children where there is excitement and beauty."

            Andrei was more troubled still.  The farming life they had grown up with was all he knew, and he feared he should feel very lost in a great city.

            One day, his old mother Sonia rose at dawn as usual to gather eggs.  The henhouse was musty with the suffocating smell of chickens and chicken dung.  The shrewd, bony birds rustled on their roosts, their beady eyes fixed upon her as she moved among them, their sharp beaks pecking viciously at her hand as she slid it beneath them to extract their eggs.

            There was one hen, at the end of the row, that gave her pause.  It was unfamiliar, a truly unusual-looking bird: large, with feathers the color of cream, virtually untouched by the dust and grime of the henhouse.  The chicken fluffed

her wings regally, and cocked her head with a proud air as Sonia's hand groped beneath her and extracted . . . something heavy, and encrusted with jewels! 

            She squinted at it, turning it around in her hand--and her other arm nearly dropped its basket of gathered eggs. This strange object was ovular in shape, but a pale shade of blue.  It was cool to the touch, shining with swirls of sky beneath the enamel sheen, inlaid with bits of mirror--and what looked like real diamonds!  Sonia stumbled with it out of the henhouse, and up to the cottage where her husband and son were just rising.

            Grigory and Andrei exclaimed over the object, while Sonia crossed herself many times.  The old farmer took the sparkling egg in his gnarled, blunt fingers, and caressed it. As if he had touched a secret spring, the top third of the egg sprang open, and more treasures were revealed.

            Inside were a tiny painted couple, made of silver.  They wore impossibly delicate silver ice skates. They were nestled in folds of blue velvet.  Hardly daring to breathe, Sonia lifted the silver figures and placed them on the largest lake of mirror on the egg, which now lay on its side, in Grigory's wide palm.  The miniature couple stayed upright, and glided across the looking-glass surface, a pair of skaters, while from inside the egg, a fragile music-box melody began to play.  It was the "Waltz of the Flowers," from The Nutcracker, by Tchaikovsky.

            "Ohhhhh," Sonia sighed.  "How lovely."

            Something tugged at Andrei's mind, a fragment from a childhood book on decadence in times of national suffering. His parents could barely read and write; it was up to him to solve this mystery . . . "It's a Fabergé egg!" he cried out all at once.  But as they turned to look at him, he felt no closer to explaining how it had gotten into the family henhouse.

            Andrei and Grigory dressed and went out to the farmyard to retrieve the wondrous bird.  They bundled her up in a blanket, and carried her up to the house, a bitter wind biting them through their coats.  Sonia, who normally would never have allowed such an unclean animal in her kitchen, made a nest for it out of old newspaper, and the cat was banished to Sonia and Grigory's bedroom.  While the family argued over what to do and who to call, the chicken clucked fretfully to herself, and shifted in her makeshift nest.  The men's bickering grew louder and more wild, and Sonia, with soothing clucks, moved toward the bird . . .

            "There¹s another," she said quietly, breaking in on their discussion.

            In her hand she held a larger egg, all rosy and pink.  It was banded with lines of silver, studded with rubies and large pearls, and at the top there was a fine miniature painting of the Kremlin.  As she held it up for Grigory and Andrei's inspection, Sonia let her fingers glide around the egg's midriff, searching for the catch-spring.  As she pressed down on one of the pearls, the lid eased up.  Inside was a curving and cupolaed miniature of the Kremlin, polished out of some pinkish precious stone that none of them could identify.  Perhaps it was pink agate or pink marble?  Perhaps it was rose quartz?

            They were still murmuring over it when Natasha entered. She had been a friend of the family so long she did not need to knock, and often dropped by for breakfast.  She stood in the kitchen doorway, and when she caught sight of something pink and glistening in Old Sonia's palm, and saw the skaters gliding on their sparkling blue egg on the kitchen table, she held onto the doorframe, as if overcome with a wave of hunger.

            "Where did you get those?" she asked hoarsely.

            They went to her and told her everything, and pointed to the chicken on the floor on the corner, roosting on her nest of shredded copies of Pravda.  Natasha examined each egg lovingly, reverentially, tears of joy welling up in her eyes.

            "Father thinks we should tell the authorities about this at once," Andrei said, guessing his sweetheart would be on his side.  "But I am afraid we will be swindled out of what we have found.  It is so hard to trust anyone these days--" 

            "You'll be imprisoned!"  Natasha cut him off.  "If anyone finds out about these, they will assume that you have stolen national treasures."

            "But we didn't!" Sonia cried out.  "God is my witness. The first one is from my henhouse.  And she laid the second one here, in my kitchen."  She pointed down at the contented hen.

            "No one will believe that.  You'd better let me have them.  I'll find something to do with them, and get the money back to you."

            Sonia prised the blue, diamond and mirror-inlaid egg out of the fingers of her son's intended.  "The pink one, perhaps.  But this blue one I would like to keep."

            Rarely did Sonia voice such strong opinions, and they all paused to listen to her, startled.

            "It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life," Sonia continued.  "The music, the skaters . . . I don't want to hand it over to the authorities, and I don't want you selling it, Natasha. I just want this one thing--please!"

            Natasha's mouth became set in a hard line.  "This is foolishness.  I will take care of both these objects, for all of us, and make us all rich.  Otherwise, someone will surely turn you in."   Her ominous tone made them shudder.        

            Her face burned with acquisitiveness, and Andrei stared at her, alarmed.  This was an aspect of his beloved that he

preferred not to see, that he had tried to hide from himself.

Natasha turned and approached the hen.  "And you'd better give me the bird for safe-keeping as well," she went on.  The hen clucked anxiously on the newsprint.  "You are lost in this new world."  Natasha was talking more to herself now than to the Grishenkos.  "But I understand it, and it is people like me who will help us get back the world that was lost."

            She reached out her hands to stroke the snowy feathers. The bird started, and moved backwards.  Beneath it lay an egg, large and white and plastic, like a Western panty-hose egg--and with a panty-hose egg seam at the equator.  Natasha grabbed it with both hands, and carefully twisted it open. Inside were sparkling diamond earrings, and folded long white silk gloves for a lady.  The eager girl lifted them out and let them dangle in the air.  Beneath these was a tiny envelope.  She lay the gloves in her lap as she knelt there, and picked the white envelope out of the white plastic egg. She broke the seal, and laughed delightedly at what she read.

            "It's the invitation!" she told them.  "The invitation to the St. Petersburg ball!"

            Before they could even frame a question she told them: how her maternal grandmother had been the minor cousin of a prince, and had been invited to a ball in 1913, but fell ill

and could not attend.  "She showed me the invitation, yellowed with age, when I was a child.  She had hidden it from the Communists--she did not want to be killed as a kulak.  But she had kept it years and years.  And this is it. Andrei--you will take me to this ball!"

            "But--but, my dear," he protested feebly, "this is not 1913--"

            "You will take me to this ball, Andrei," she repeated fiercely.  "This chicken will see to everything."  And her gaze never left that of the regal hen.

            In the days that followed, Natasha threw herself into a flurry of activity--for the ball was less than a week away (and eighty-three years in the past).  She all but moved into the Grishenko house, and dragged over the musty, yellowed satin gown that her grandmother had intended to wear to the event.  "I need kerosene!" she barked, and Old Grigory fetched it for her.  They wondered if she had gone mad, and intended to immolate the gown--but no.  Instead, she poured the kerosene in the bathtub, and laid the gown in to soak. When she brought it forth, hours later, and rinsed it out, it was like a brand new dress--soft and yielding once more, an angelic shade of pink.

            The chicken produced another panty-hose egg, and inside it were silk stockings, and a pendant for Natasha to wear at her throat.  She spent much of the money that she and Andrei

had saved for their wedding on a pair of elegant pink slippers, and consulted a fashion encyclopedia to arrange her

dark hair according to the styles of that time.  The look of 

hair piled high became her.  As for Andrei--she cut him a 1913 suit, a fancy white nylon shirt, and a thick polyester dinner jacket and trousers, sewing them on the machine in her hatshop.  "It doesn't really matter what you wear," she explained to her bewildered fiance.  "We'll explain it away somehow."  She had him rented a pair of good shoes from a shop in town.  And they were ready to go.

            St. Petersburg was a seven-hour drive from Novgorod, where they lived, and they set out early in the day in regular clothes.  They took the old, rusting Soviet Zaporogets, which was Grigory's pride and joy, and an embarrassing, contemptible object to Natasha--an opinion she did little to hide.

            "Be careful, children," Sonia said, handing Andrei a hamper full of food with one hand, and crumpling a  handkerchief with the other.  She kissed her son and hugged him--then touched her future daughter-in-law lightly on the sleeve.  She had grown a little afraid of Natasha in the last few days.  Old Grigory was silent and somber.

            Andrei drove for three hours.  Natasha chattered away about the ball.  "It's at Anichkov Palace, not the Winter Palace," she explained regretfully.  "The last great Winter

Palace ball was in 1903.  After that, the Tsar and his family withdrew during the social season."

            "Mmmm," said Andrei absently.

            "Drive around that diesel!" Natasha snapped.  "It's crawling along at a snail's pace."

            Andrei obediently drove the Zaporogets around the truck ahead of him, narrowly missing being hit by an oncoming car in the lane going the other way.

            "Personally, I blame Tsarina Alexandra," Natasha resumed, "and so did a lot of people.  She was such a dour, fussy German woman.  If she'd only made a bit more of an effort to be popular, who knows?  Who knows . . ." her words drifted off.

            "It was more than that," Andrei began.  "There was cholera and tuberculosis and indescribable poverty and suffering, while the bourgeoisie--"

            "Oh, give it a rest," she sighed.  "The Party did a job on you, but good.  Didn't they, my love."

            They pulled over and had lunch, cheese and black bread sandwiches, and Natasha took over the driving for a spell, blasting Western pop music on the staticky radio.  "At any rate, this ball is being given by the Dowager Empress Marie

Feodorovna.  It's to bring out her two eldest granddaughters, Olga and Tatiana.  It's their very first ball--and their last," she added tearfully.

            Andrei shut his ears to such babbling.  He would not think on it, as he would not think on this insane mission they were embarked upon.  Reality would hit Natasha soon

enough, and she would learn her lesson.

            When the sun set, they rested again on the shoulder, munched at the last sandwiches in the hamper, finished the last of the cold cabbage, and then Andrei drove the farting, chugging Zaporogets back onto the highway, and into the magnificent city he had called Leningrad since his childhood.

            "Park here," Natasha told him.  She led him into a modest hotel and took a room, so that they could bathe and change for the ball.  Despite his new misgivings about his sweetheart, about this whole venture, Andrei drew in           

his breath sharply when he saw her turned out for the   

evening.  Natasha had subtly altered the pink dress on her hatshop sewing machine so that it fit her perfectly.  The earrings and slippers and gloves all matched it like a dream, her coiffeur was exquisitely done and held in place by modern gels--and her modern makeup was discreetly applied so as not to be noticeable.  Her neck was long, and her shoulders white and fine.  She truly looked like a vision from another time, another world.  She carried the invitation in a beaded bag that had also once belonged to her grandmother.

            She gave Andrei's outfit the once-over.  "You'll do," she pronounced.  She carefully covered her gown with an old shawl, and worried over her slippers as they made their way to the car in the snow--for it was now snowing heavily.

            Nevertheless, she made him park the car several blocks from the Anichkov Palace.  "We can't let anyone see this old thing," she told him, her voice dripping with scorn.  "You'll just have to carry me there, that's all."

            And so Andrei stumbled through the snow, while she huddled in his arms to protect the gown and the expensive new slippers.  The flakes as they fell in the moonlight looked like lace, and then like pale, hard jewels, where the streetlights shone through them.  He made his way uncertainly, half-blinded--and then when they reached the palace, by the Neva River, he saw that it was brilliantly lit from within.  Violins were playing a light melody, and a plush red carpet meandered down the steps.  Liveried footmen were helping elegant ladies wrapped in furs out of sleighs and troikas and sleek black early automobiles, and gentlemen with impressive beards stared about themselves through monocles, and proffered their arms to the womenfolk. Dumbfounded, Andrei let Natasha sink down out of his arms.

            "My slippers, be careful, you oaf!" she scolded.  And then, catching sight of something flashing in the moonlit snow: "Oh! Did you see that man's cigarette case?"  And she was already making her way up the steps.  At a loss for what to do, Andrei followed.

            He had never entered such a place before.  The chandeliers glittered, the ladies glittered, the music hummed

with the subtlety and quickness of insects, and courtesies

and tinkling laughs rained down upon the floor of polished       

marble.  Andrei's shiny synthetic clothes drew a few curious stares, but Natasha headed off all inquiries with an airy remark: "We had the fabrics imported from America."  She spoke in a well-bred, fancy manner he had never known her to use.  The dancers twirled and circled and changed partners   . . . and after one clumsy turn with Natasha in his arms, he lost her in the throng.

            The younger women wore dresses that fell long and straight.  Their necklines plunged daringly, as did Natasha's.  The older women, such as the Tsarina and the Dowager Empress, wore dresses that bunched and whooshed and rustled and suggested the previous century--and the gowns of the young grand duchesses, the Tsar's eldest daughters Olga and Tatiana, were also modest and rather quaint.  The band struck up a wild tango, and a murmur of approval rippled through the young people on the dance floor.  ³Tres tropicale!² a woman near Andrei murmured.  The royals looked alarmed, but went along with it.  Natasha strode by, her arm thrown around the waist of some young swain, and Andrei did not even feel jealous, just tired and bewildered.

            He hung about the samovar and punch bowl along the wall, murmuring grunts in response to some vapid young grand duke

who was nattering away, in a nasal voice and stuffy accent, about how everything had gone wrong since the serfs were

freed.  The grand duke passed on gossip about the dancers, and Andrei nodded uncomprehendingly.

            "Not bad-looking girls, now that they're out in public," he said, indicating the grand duchesses.  "Shame the little boy's so very sickly.  And you'll note the way the Tsarina stays out of the way of her mother-in-law," he chuckled, with a nod at the imperious Dowager Empress.  "They don't even bother to hide the dislike, do they?"

            "Mmmm," Andrei replied, much as he had earlier, in the car, to Natasha's chattering, and nibbled on the most heavenly blintz he had ever tasted.

            Abruptly, the music stopped and there was a buzz among the people who stood on the sides.

            "What is it?  What's happened?" Andrei asked, pronouncing his words carefully, to conceal his peasant roots.

            "This is unusual," the grand duke replied.  "It appears Her Majesty has asked to have that young lady introduced.  The nemka isn't usually so friendly."

            Tsarina Alexandra made her way forward, a handsomely preserved, tremulous woman in a somewhat ostentatious gown. Natasha curtsied deeply.  She gave her name, and it was whispered among the throng; in fact, it was the name and the patronymic Andrei knew had been her grandmother's.  She held

out something to the Tsarina--and from his place by the wall, Andrei could see that it was the pink enameled egg his

family's chicken had produced.  He had not seen Natasha steal it; perhaps she had slipped it into the beaded purse when he wasn't looking.  As for the blue one with the skaters, his mother had hidden that somewhere where no one would be able to find it.

            "What is this?" asked the Tsarina, enchanted.

            "A surprise gift, Your Highness," Natasha replied.  "From the House of Fabergé."  Whatever dislike she felt for the Tsarina, it was not visible on her radiant face.

            There were exclamations among the throng, and a smattering of applause.  The grand duchesses came forward to have a look.  One of them held the egg, the other lifted out the tiny Kremlin, and they marveled at it.

            "Oh, how cunning!  How marvelously wrought!  And of pink amethyst quartz!"  The older girl pressed the hand of the bearer of the gift.  "And you! You are as lovely to look upon.  Why, Mama, does she not even look a bit like our Anastasia?"

            "Perhaps she does, Olga, at that."  The Tsarina smiled indulgently.

            "Let her come and stay with us awhile, as our companion? Please, Mama?" the younger girl begged.

            "I can deny you nothing," her mother said, laughing.  She caught the eye of her husband, and Nicholas II, his beard trimmed like that of his cousin George V, his mustachioes

carefully waxed and twirled, detached himself from the

cluster of dignitaries with whom he was chatting and made his way toward the family group.

            Andrei suddenly felt sick, and overwhelmed.  Perhaps he had drunk too much punch and champagne or eaten too much rich caviar . . . He stumbled out of the mirrored ballroom, and into a corridor outside, drawing in harsh breaths.  The music within the chamber resumed, another throbbing tango, and he backed away from it--and into another person.

            He turned, and saw a ferocious figure looming over him. The beard was long and the hair was wild.  The frame was huge and it would (literally) take many men to kill him.  But it was the eyes that were arresting.  They were eyes that could hypnotize, eyes that could stop the little hemophiliac tsarevich from bleeding with the intensity of their gaze. They bore into Andrei now, exposing his soul, stripping him naked.

            "You," Rasputin exploded at him, pointing an accusing finger.  "You do not belong here!"

            Terrified, Andrei wheeled down the corridor and fled.  He clattered down the palace steps, and out in to the bracing snow.  He felt his way along the guard rail by the Neva.  The

wind rose off the water and whipped at him and he was blinded, and as he ran every breath he sucked in was icy 

cold, but he ran and gasped until he was blocks away and fell into a snowbank.

            Now 1990s cars crawled past him cautiously in the storm.  The streetlights cast a neon glare on the grubby scene.  A sign overhead advertised a lottery.  Andrei got up and shook himself off, still fighting to breathe normally.  He turned around and headed back to the palace.  But it was just a sealed-up museum now.

             He circled the building, until he earned himself a questioning by the night watchman.  He somehow found his way back to where he had parked the car, and the keys were still in his pocket.  He was not aware of driving back to the hotel Natasha had chosen, but once there, he collapsed on the bed in his old-fashioned party clothes and cried himself to sleep.

            In the morning, he went back to the palace-turned-museum.  An efficient guide took him and the rest of his group on a tour of the premises.  Opulent bric-a-brac from another world.  Andrei tanked up on petrol with his last few rubles, and began the long drive home.  It was only as he was entering the outskirts of his village that he admitted to himself that he was relieved to be returning without Natasha.

            His parents greeted the news of her disappearance without concern.  They barely listened to his halting, incoherent tale.

            "We have a surprise for you," Grigory told him, and Sonia led him by the hand into the kitchen.

            The chicken sat in her corner, plump and preening--and three new Fabergé eggs lay on the table.  Andrei walked over to examine them.

            One was speckled white and red, bedecked with seed pearl flowers, and had pictures of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin rising out of the top on graceful stems. The surprise inside was a miniature map of Russia, carved in smooth green stone, jade, perhaps, or nephrite, with the country's current borders clearly defined.  There was also a hulking black Russian bear--of bloodstone or obsidian, with rubies for eyes.

            The next egg Andrei lifted had jagged stalagmites of silver and rock crystal projecting from it, which gave it the appearance of the original Sputnik satellite.  Andrei opened it and turned it upside down--and a more modern Soviet spaceship, carved from ivory, with a tiny blue lapis lazuli cosmonaut attached by an umblical cord of silver, fell into his palm.

            The last egg was covered with jeweled hoops of different colors--which, Andrei slowly realized as he turned it around

in his hand, represented the interlocking circles of the Olympic games.  At the top of the egg, the date 1996 was spelled out in diamond chips.  Nestled in the white velvet inside were an ivory hockey stick, a silver discus, and a

pair of tiny marble sneakers, with laces of gold.

            "So, you see," Grigory said, his voice trembling, "No one can accuse us of stealing old national treasures now. These cannot be missing eggs.  These can only be new!  You, Andrei!  You will help us figure out what to do with them!"

            Andrei agreed.  They bought Natasha's hatshop in town, and turned it into a museum, displaying the eggs, as new ones appeared beneath the miraculous chicken which sat on a wide blue velvet cushion.  They sold a few eggs to the government and grew rich--and sold some to collectors abroad, and invested the money in their region.  Only the egg with the figure skaters remained up at the house; now that Sonia had to spend less time on household chores, she would sit for hours by the window, marveling at its beauty.

            And Natasha, meanwhile, thrived in the palatial homes of Nicholas and Alexandra.  She lost herself in their world, all but forgetting her own.  As the Russian people starved and froze and died by the millions in World War I, she remained as comfortable and oblivious as the imperial family.  When they were rounded up by the Bolsheviks and taken to the House of Special Purpose at Ekaterinberg, she went with them,

traveling as something in between a family member and a lady in waiting to the grand duchesses: Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia.

            When the imperial family descended to the cellar to be photographed, she went with them, and when they were instead shot by a line of men, she was a part of that nightmare, one of the ladies with bullets bouncing off their whalebone girdles and the jewels secretly sewn into the folds of their dresses.  She fainted from pain and horror--and awoke to find herself buried alive, amongst the mangled remains of the Romanovs.

            She clawed her way up out of that hell, fled the country and took a foreign name.  For years she wandered through Europe, a haunted amnesiac, disoriented by the ghosts of different worlds.  At last, she went public, declaring that she was really the lost Grand Duchess Anastasia, and believing it to be true.  And she went on believing it with all her heart, until the day she died.