Angels and Flies 4: Age of Miracles

“I had prepared to enter a city of scaffolds and small wooden windows with tiled spires and medieval barbicans. But I was not expecting to enter...a wonder of the world.”

Jakob straightened, now enlivened to speak almost greedily, as if he never had the proper opportunity to express any of this to anyone.

“Peter had just returned from apprenticing incognito as a shipbuilder from the west and sat his eyes for a modern city properly his own. 

He walked and walked along the cold Karelia shores until in his lone wanderings found the only warm harbor in a frozen sea. 

He pointed to that stretch of warm mud bank and said he wanting a “true” city. In ten years, it was glittering with monuments and peoples that sparkled under the sun.

When I arrived there were palaces, laboratories, grand assemblies, museums, and winter gardens, all in rich splashes of stucco. 

Each beset by ornate spires of golden domes. Over every stately roof were classical nude statues that I saw for the first time in my life, the kind that I could only imagine in the moonlit dark of my room after reading. 

White sails of painted boats careened along the gridded canals with ladies with parasols, without the presence of a disproving robed fathers-

Catherine looked over her shoulders, Dashkova was nodding to each detail, as a life time lover of history, her friend was greedily conceding every detail that she could only imagine from stale books. 

The young princess elbowed her. “Stop, showing, off.”

“Wha- it was interesting!”

“Oh hush”

Then turned her pretty face back to the old bookeeper like some salon matron excusing her poor choice company. “Please continue.”

She found him smiling an amused smile, she was so regal in her manner it seemed she could be doing this for a life time, almost as if she's made for it, a mistress of the collective Russian estate. 

He was astounded to realize that she is the head of all 20 million Russians.

Then he continued, picking up his pace.

“Everywhere, I mean everywhere in the city's heart was the steaming shining shops, where a loving Italian artisan who spoke not a word of Russian made tall chocolate cakes in a great window before our stunned eyes. Everywhere was the ardent waft of coffee, the liquor of sweet wine, the scent of nutmeg, cinnamon, and chives. An idiot boy from the countryside with a life's allowances can spent all in a week sampling the virgin vibrancy of the world...I...spent half, and wanted ten times more.

At this the ladies burst out laughing. Catherine massaged her tummy-

“Mmmm, that would be me.”

“Was it Vienna? Paris? Or Rome? No, it was greater than all, so great it seemed to have been there for a millennium with all the embellishment of a modern lover. 

Peter, Peter, and Peter. All build out of grounds no more than ten years ago from the mud that had been nothing since Genesis. Here, Peter snaps, and the city- emerged, eagerly came from the roads of all Russia.

It was there I took my first gulp of crisp air and it was then I felt I was alive for the first time. Peter was Grand, more grand than anyone this century. He was the first Russian I felt proud of being a Russian for.

Then I remembered the letter with a surging pride.

There was a little pause as Jakob's excitement tarried down. He cupped his audible heart.

There was...though, despite all the greatness a...strange air of emptiness. 

The palaces were so fresh that amongst a thousand windows only one was lit. At night there was no walkers. In the park, which were stately and constantly gardened with immaculate geometry, none walked.

The snow gathered on all things.

I reported to a Minister of Western Studies, and for the first winter it was but the two of us in a cold library with a hundred rooms. 

I spent most of November watching the ladies, strolling in the latest “French” fashion...and the men with them,” then coughing, realizing that now it was the fashion of norm, as suggested by the ample cleavage and tight corsets of his two listeners, and perhaps the insane risque nature of all such liberal pageantry was lost. 

“I bought a new tailored suit with my first salary and hasted out.”

The royal girls giggled, in Jokob's hastily pronounced syllables they almost tried to imagined the contour of his ancient face and frame it as some apple cheeked youth. Whispering, and nodding, Catherine tried to use her fingers to edit out his beard and mustache.

“What happened next! You must, must not spare any details” and goaded with her fan.

~

He must have forgotten. The ripping motion struck his ancient guts like a cannonball and then, just then, his eyes sank.

“They...they were friendly at first,” he stuttered. “but all eventually insisted on knowing my family's caste and name, all such conversations I eventually realized, usually ends after I gave them...thus. Their eyes would glaze, and they looked as if they had discovered a hidden Jew.”

The old caretaker looked around, unsure, his old eyes ashamed as if he had been naked, myriad of thoughts shuffled trying to explain himself. Perhaps the same way he tried half a century ago, over and over, every time before disgusted eyes.

“Just some educated bourgeois peasant pretending to be someone he's not...the look on their faces as if realizing they have spent effort of being hospitable to...a...a bug.”

The cherry lips of Catherine knotted, she blinked. Dashkova's eyes tightened, indignant as if some cruel phantom hand had just slapped her eager rosy cheeks.

“Um...” silence stretched in minutes, and Catherine sighed.

“I felt like this when I was first brought to the court sir,” spoke Catherine, her voice was so cold it was frigid, much tinged with unjustifiable shame. “All the nobles just said I was some German whore trying to steal the Russian soul with my German pimp, and their naked hate...Excuse me sir, I don't mean to...it's just we have been fighting earlier”

Dashkova too tried hard to gather her thoughts. She had forgot that before coming here she had been fighting with Catherine, over the dangerous boys the Catherine chose to sleep with. And a bitter current re-awoke in her soul, reminding her the cruel gossip about her best friend from people who smiled to her in the face and then trashed her whole existence for sport behind her wake.

“Damn them, sir.”

“Damn them.” He conceded. There was a feeble grin.