The Property of a Lady (22 page)

“Misha had built a schoolhouse and paid the
klassnaya dama
, and he helped the brightest children with scholarships to a school in Moscow; he built them a clinic and paid the doctor, and he fought for the peasants’ rights in the
Duma
, the Parliament. He did his best to convince Tsar Nicholas to do something to help them; he told him that everything he and Tsar Nicholas did for the people on their own estates, the tsar must do for all of Russia.”

Missie shrugged and added with a sigh, “But of course the tsar’s mind was on many other things. His son was desperately ill, and the Tsarina Alexandra believed only the mad monk, Rasputin, could cure him. Would that he could, then the tsar might have been free to devote his time to his country, and the whole history of Russia might have been changed.”

She paused for a minute, thinking about her story, and then went on. “Anouska and Misha adored their children, Alexei and Xenia. By the time he was six, Misha had taught young Alexei to ride and to swim and even how to handle a rifle properly, and Alexei was devoted to him. The children were allowed to come rushing into his study no matter who was there or how important the meeting. If he was too busy, their father would kiss them and give them a piece of candy from the special Fabergé silver dish with the trick lid; it was shaped like a small hill with a palm tree on top and a little monkey hidden in the grass. If they pressed a special button the monkey ran up the tree and when he reached the top the lid opened. I remember Misha loved to watch the amazement on their faces. They could never figure out how it worked and it would always make him laugh.

“Alexei looked like his father: the same eyes, the same dark-blond hair and strong features. And Xenia was a beauty like her mother. Her hair was lighter, flaxen
rather than gold, and her eyes were the bright bronze of enamel: I always thought they looked like the color of tropical butterfly wings. She had Anouska’s lovely golden skin with the faint bloom on it. And she had her mother’s temperament.

“Anouska Ivanoff was never still for a minute. She dashed between Paris and St. Petersburg, Varishnya and Deauville, Monte Carlo, London, and Yalta, as if she were afraid to rest. And whenever she got where she was going, after a few weeks, or even days, she would become bored and off she would go again. The children were used to her absences and she always made a fuss over them when she came back, and of course they loved it because then there were always parties and the house was full of people again.

“Anouska bought all her clothes from Paris couturiers, and in winter she wore sumptuous furs, sable and arctic fox, and her shoes were made specially for her in London and in Rome. In each of the houses she had an enormous safe lined with soft gray suede where she kept all her fabulous jewelry: whole sets of rubies, emeralds, and diamonds like an Aladdin’s cave. She adored violets and the
parfumiers
at Grasse in southern France created a scent especially for her. Of course it was called ‘Anouska,’ and nobody else in the whole world ever used it. And she always wore a bunch of violets pinned to her dress or her furs, so she always seemed to smell of springtime.”

She fell silent, remembering. “Please go on,” Anna urged.

Missie smiled at her and picked up her story again. “Varishnya was especially beautiful in the snow. Guests came on the Ivanoff train to the special little station at Ivanovsk and were picked up by liveried coachmen and driven by dog sled to the house. We always knew they were arriving by the jingling of the sleighbells, and we would rush outside to greet them. And of course the greatest favorite of all with the children and adults alike
was the Dowager Princess Sofia Ivanoff, your great-grandmother.

“It was Princess Sofia who told me the story of your grandfather and grandmother’s marriage. When he met Anouska, Misha was known as ‘the catch of the decade.’ The year was 1908 and he was twenty-four years old with an honors degree in archaeology from Oxford and two years of riotous travel behind him. He was tall and handsome and for some reason that mystified him, the young ladies of Europe and America had told him he was a heartbreaker. He loved all sports and kept his six-foot-five-inch body in peak physical condition, but riding was his favorite and he loved to play polo at Deauville. Anouska Nicholaevna Orloff was just eighteen years old and a niece of the tsar. Her family was a noble one but they were poor, and young Anouska was already a renowned beauty
and
a notorious flirt. Every eligible young man in St. Petersburg was in love with her, and your grandfather was no different. As soon as he met her he fell under the spell of her beauty.”

Missie paused for a moment and then added, “You have to understand that flawless beauty like Anouska’s is compelling: You just couldn’t take your eyes off her; she was like a living work of art. Sofia said it didn’t matter that Anouska was not well educated; she had a quick mind that picked up on all the latest happenings, and she would talk about the theater and the latest plays and novels as easily as she would the latest dressmaker or fashionable jeweler. And she was a wonderful dancer and always the star of any party. It didn’t matter that she was selfish and petulant, and that sometimes she behaved strangely, not showing up at dinner parties arranged especially in her honor or simply disappearing for days on end. The young men still showered her with bouquets of flowers and love poems, as well as jewelry, which her mother always scrupulously returned. She had her daughter’s reputation to
think of, and the stakes were higher than a mere diamond bracelet.

“Misha could think of nothing else and for weeks she kept him dangling, playing him like a fish on a line. Sometimes she would see him, sometimes she wouldn’t, and he was crazy with jealousy thinking some rival was going to snatch her from him. He proposed and after a week’s consideration, when she left him to cool his heels alone in St. Petersburg while she went to stay with friends in the country, she finally consented to be his wife.

“Sofia told me their wedding was the grandest seen in Russia for many years. Anouska wore a cloth-of-gold train over cream satin and the great Ivanoff tiara with the huge ninety-carat maharaja’s emerald that had been reset specially for her by Cartier in Paris. The tsar and all his family came to the wedding, and the ceremony was held in St. Isaac’s Cathedral with its golden domes and columns of malachite and lazurite, but huge as it was, it was too small to accommodate all their guests. Afterward a lavish reception was held for everyone at the mansion overlooking the river Neva.

“Misha took his bride to America for a three-month honeymoon, and Anouska insisted on lingering in Europe on their way back. She needed more new clothes, more jewels. Misha was young and in love; he indulged her. Anything Anouska wanted, she could have. When she finally grew bored with shopping, she summoned her friends to the Ivanoff yacht and they all cruised through the Mediterranean, up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea, and back home to Russia.

“Sofia said that even then Misha knew there were problems. There were days when Anouska would refuse to get out of bed; her face lost all its color and her eyes looked far away. Sometimes she would just cry, not hysterically, just endlessly. The tears would run down her white, pinched face and Misha didn’t know how to stop them no matter how he tried to comfort her, to coax her, to bribe
her with the promise of presents. She just could not stop crying. Back in St. Petersburg things got suddenly worse: Anouska locked her bedroom door and refused to let anyone in. Misha summoned Sofia and she called Anouska’s mother.

“Ilona Orloff told them Anouska was highly strung; she always pushed herself to the limits of her strength with endless parties and entertaining, and then she would just crash into this great depression for a while. The best thing was simply to leave her alone and wait for her to come out of it. But Sofia was worried and summoned an eminent psychiatrist from Switzerland. He told them that Anouska was manic depressive; he also said she was young and that a course of treatments would help her. So the young couple spent three months at a sanatorium in the Swiss mountains while Anouska underwent her treatment. When they returned she seemed better, and she plunged back into her old way of life as hectically as before.

“Now, Misha was a quiet man who enjoyed country life. In winter he liked nothing more than to sit by the fire at Varishnya, reading books on history or pursuing country sports, hunting wolves with his borzois and shooting in the season. Anouska only liked Varishnya when she could throw extravagant parties and fill it with friends from the world of the theater and the international riffraff she seemed to collect on her travels. She was the most popular hostess and still the most beautiful woman in St. Petersburg. Gradually their lives began to take separate courses, and gradually too Anouska became more and more unpredictable in her actions.

“Alexei was born three years after their marriage, and for a time she was transformed: She doted on her baby son and took him everywhere with her, showing him off at every opportunity. But after a few months she was back to her old ways. Xenia came along three years after that in a desperate attempt by Misha to get his young wife
back into his life, but she grew more and more erratic, and soon her behavior was causing gossip. There were rumors that Anouska had grown reckless, that flirtations had grown into affairs. Names were mentioned and the gossip swelled. But Anouska was so beautiful nobody minded her wild behavior, they forgave her anything. They said that every man in St. Petersburg was in love with Anouska Ivanoff. Except her husband.

“But Misha still looked after her; he cared for her as if she were a fragile porcelain doll who might break any minute, because he understood that the way she was was not what she wanted to be. Poor Anouska had no control over her emotions and actions; she was like a straw, drifting with the wind whichever way it blew. But when the great depressions came over her, she always came home to Misha.”

“Oh, Missie,” Anna whispered, and in the moonlight Leyla could see she was crying. “Oh, Missie,
now I understand.”

Missie reached out her hand and stroked Anna’s soft, fair hair tenderly. “There’s something else I should tell you, Anna, now that you are old enough.” She hesitated as if thinking how to say it, and then said quickly, “Your grandfather and I were in love with each other.”

Anna’s blue eyes opened wider and Leyla sat up straight, listening eagerly: It all sounded like a story from the Arabian Nights, jewels and princes and intrigue … Was Misha going to strangle his wayward wife with a silken cord, the way they had in the harem at Topkapi Palace?

“Missie?” Tariq said warningly, but she smiled and shook her head.

“Anna must know everything now,” she said. “It is her right.” And Anna reached up and took her hand as she went on.

“Even though I was only sixteen when I first saw Misha, it was love at first sight. And even though he was so handsome
and a prince, and I was young and impressionable, I knew it wasn’t just infatuation. It was like … like coming home, finding the one person in the world who is exactly right for you. Of course, he said nothing: It would have been wrong. But I knew he felt it too. My father had just died and Misha went out of his way to be kind to me, to try not to let me dwell on things. Anouska was away a great deal, and he took me to the opera and the ballet, always in a group of course, and to dinner parties at his friends’ houses. And of course he showed me his beloved Varishnya. We rode around the estate together, visiting the school and the clinic, and dropping in on the workers and their families to take a glass of tea and see a new baby or even a new calf. I could see they loved him by the way they looked at him and the respect they offered. It wasn’t smarmy or obsequious because
batiushka
was condescending to visit. He talked to them as equals, human beings with as many rights as he had, and they trusted him to look after them. The village children would rush to meet him, the boys competing to lead his horse and the girls dancing around in their swirling embroidered skirts and little scarlet felt boots. They were so pretty, so sweet then….”

Missie sighed and Anna gripped her hand tighter. “Misha and I were growing closer, but it was a meeting of the minds, you understand. We never spoke of ‘love.’ That is, until my seventeenth birthday when he gave me a present, a jeweled brooch in the shape of the Ivanoff crest, and then he kissed me and said he loved me. How can I tell you what it felt like, to be in his arms? I can only say that I knew it was where I was meant to be. He told me he had not meant to say it, that he was married and anyway I was too young, but that if I went away his life would be empty.

“The war with Germany was going badly. Misha was an officer in the Chevalier Guards and he was often away at the front, and Anouska was away staying with friends;
she spent more time at other people’s houses than at her own. I wrote every day to Misha and sometimes I would get a reply, short, quick notes telling me he was well and missed his children and Varishnya and me, and always signed just ‘Love, Misha.’

“I was alone in St. Petersburg with just the children and the servants for company. Of course by now I knew a lot of young people, but without Misha around somehow I felt as if I didn’t belong and, anyway, I was in no mood for parties when young men were being killed at the front. One day I took Alexei for a walk. St. Petersburg was like Venice, built on an estuary with lots of little bridges connecting the islands, and this day we went to
Novoya Derenya
, the gypsies’ island: It was Alexei’s favorite and mine too. All the famous gypsy families lived there, and many years before an ancestor of Princess Sofia’s had married a gypsy girl from the Shishken Tabor family. They were tall, good-looking people, with flashing dark eyes. All the men had big mustaches and the girls had long curly dark hair covered with gaily colored kerchiefs, and they wore huge earrings like gold circles. The men would play their balalaikas and guitars and sing and the girls would dance those wild stamping dances; they looked wonderful in their swirling skirts with scarlet sashes at their tiny waists, and we would toss a coin into the tambourine brought round by a swarthy, bold-eyed young gypsy.