The Winter Palace Read Online Free PDF Page B

Kluge handed me a knife and watched as I cut off the buttons I had sewn. I would not get my supper that night, I heard. I didn’t deserve a proper meal until I learned to do a proper day’s work.
    On my way back to the servants’ room I peered through a small opening in the window glittering with frost. In the palace yard a mule was pulling a big cart filled with slabs of frozen meat, its driver hurrying to make room for an imperial sleigh. As soon as the sleigh stopped, a young man jumped out and rushed inside the palace. I wondered if it could have been the Crown Prince himself, but there was no one I could ask.
    I thought of a basket filled with buttons, of rows upon rows of dresses enveloped in lengths of silk and kept in large leather trunks, dresses I would never be allowed to touch. I thought of the web of wrinkles around Madame Kluge’s narrow lips, her sour voice, the drop of yellow pus that gathered in the corner of her right eye.
    I slipped into my narrow bed. My stomach rumbled, and I pressed it with my fingertips. A palace cat walked by without casting one look at me. I didn’t think I slept, but I must have, for I dreamed of eating steaming dumplings from a plate as big as the moon.
    When the Empress was cold at night, the seamstresses claimed, she summoned twenty guardsmen into her bedroom to warm the air up with their breaths.
    When the Empress gave masquerades, all women had to dress in men’s clothes and men had to wear hooped gowns and totter on high heels. And none of the court ladies could match Her Highness for the grace of her shapely legs.
    Threading their needles, pinching the folds of the satin trims and frothy lace, the seamstresses gossiped about what would become of the handsome soldier who played a serpent in the palace play. The Empress, they said, asked about him twice already. The cats that slept on her bed wore velvet jackets and hats. They feasted on fried chicken breasts and lapped milk from silver dishes.
    I kept my eyes on the sewing, but the basting I was given to do came out crooked. My stitches were too long. I had to rip off everything I did. The dresses were heavy and slid off my lap to the floor, gathering dust. Another sign of my clumsiness.
    And I was slow, far too slow.
    “Do as you are told,” I heard, when I tried to defend my efforts. “Don’t speak back to your betters.”
    This is what they all wanted from me, I thought, bitterness lashing at me like a spring shower. Leave no mark on the sheets I slept on, on the rags that passed for towels in the servants’ room. Shrink so their eyes could slide over me without noting my presence. They wanted me to disappear, to crumble into a handful of dust, so that some maid could brush me off the floor, wipe my traces away, and not even remember she did so.
    Once you are at the Winter Palace, nothing is impossible
. Now that I was an orphan, my mother’s words tormented me. There was nothing frivolous in wishing to advance in the world. It stopped one from becoming invisible.
    Every morning the Mistress of the Wardrobe dressed up wooden dolls for the Empress, clothes dummies, like the ones textile merchants put in their windows to display their wares. At court these dolls were called “pandoras”—little pandoras if they modeled day or informal dresses, big pandoras if they were draped in ceremonial robes and evening gowns. Madame Kluge carried the pandoras to the Imperial Bedroom, for the Empress to decide which outfits she would wear that day.
    I thought of my mother’s aspirations. I thought of what the Empress had promised to my father.
    I gathered my courage and pleaded with Madame Kluge to remind the Empress of my existence when she presented the pandoras. I could read in French and in German. I had a good voice, pleasant and steady. I could sing, too. My hands were clumsy with sewing, but my handwriting was neat and even. Could she not ask the Empress to let me serve her?
    Madame Kluge didn’t even let me finish.