Author’s note:
Some voices won’t be spoken in.
Anyone can put makeup on a corpse,
stuff wads of silk in a scarecrow’s mouth,
play the saint, trace the graceful decay
of empires and republics with a gloved finger.
Europe is full of sick men,
like a National Theater overflowing
with angry drunks in the nosebleed seats.
I’ve tried and tried to trick myself
into a more Napoleonic mindset, but each time
the illusion dissolves and I’m left
alone onstage, uncomfortable in uniform—
judge for yourselves the effect this produces.
Please excuse me for writing in English.
Try to ignore my female voice.
Pavel Petrovich, we’ve never met, but this is for you.
Ekaterina Ivanovna once suggested to me
that I should have been an actor. This is what she said:
Remember that time you recited Hamlet. And Julius Caesar.
Remember how you reconciled the King of France
to Beaumarchais (who at the time was living penniless on stale bread
in some lightless attic—the price one paid in those days for wit)
by reading from one of the Figaro plays, I forget which,
and how pretty your gestures were, how unaffected your voice.
You didn’t yet know me then; I was only an ugly little lady-in-waiting.
But it was then that I fell in love with you—you’d no idea!
I say, you should’ve been the star of some Viennese or Parisian troupe.
And I would willingly squander all my father’s money
on ticket after ticket just to see you. And I’d throw oh so many roses.
But an actor, I think, is not someone to be envied.
He is always talking but never in his own voice.
He is continually transfixed by ghosts, shadows, knives.
And, worst of all, he is prey to all manner of nasty surprises
lurking just offstage. No, such a life wouldn’t suit me—
by closing night I would have gone quite mad!
I’d babble of murder in the dressing room,
rose petals would remind me of pools of blood,
I’d imagine myself Caesar risen from the dead,
I’d mistake every light fixture for my own head on a platter.
In the weekly gazette, heroic obituaries and doomed love affairs
would whisper at me from the front page. Eventually I’d drown myself
in the Seine or the Danube (but not the Neva, never the Neva)
and the curtain would fall without me. Cue raucous applause.
Fifty years later, some hack with a sick mind
would write a play about me. Five acts plus a prologue,
the whole thing in verse except for a comic interlude
in prose, ample space for moralizing to the audience,
the crowning glory of its age. So it’s just as well
that I am not an actor. You see, I hardly know myself as it is.
It’s important to cultivate habits.
A proper routine locks unruly life into place
like a stiff collar—or a tight corset, if you like.
I always get up before dawn, drink black coffee,
make the most of the few minutes
of solitude that I am afforded each morning.
Sometimes I sit in my shirtsleeves
and stare at the wall. Sometimes I pull on my boots
very slowly, listening to the clock.
Sometimes I drink a second cup of coffee,
this one stronger than the first—but I never
allow myself more than two,
so as not to upset the army of clocks
in my head. And I never talk to myself
in the morning. Because self-control
is imperative; it’s the only thing that keeps
the back straight, the steps even,
the mind safely leashed and caged.
In the savage hour just before daybreak,
the wild empty moment between Thought and Action,
this is all you can count on.
By six o’clock I receive the daily report
of the governor-general, and go out
for the changing of the guard.
Little pictures, scrawled notes,
half-melted snow.
Life’s deft caricatures of itself.
Brief as a single breath: in, out.
Everyone knows
you don’t read the stage directions.
(A string snaps on a violin.)
Official poets always write
in the third person;
court painters are always looking at you
from far away.
A waltzing ballroom and a marching regiment
eventually blur into each other.
(I enter from stage left and bow to the audience.)
Even when expressing emotions
you must follow a script,
no matter how violent
the feeling.
Anger looks and sounds a certain way;
so does grief.
(Laertes leaps into the grave.)
You can’t ever scrub a bookshelf clean
of Voltaire and Diderot,
but you can put Marcus Aurelius
in their place.
I keep telling myself
to follow his advice.
(I kiss her hand, and hers, and hers, and yours.)
Literature these days
tends toward the lurid.
The mystical writings of Swedenborg
are very popular.
Even the astronomer William Herschel admits that
“seeing is [...] an art, which must be learnt.”
(Night falls and leaves the door unlocked.)
At this point in the narrative, it’s unclear
in whose voice I’m speaking. The costumed actress
has begun to rave about Jacobins and regicides,
while the emperor smokes a pipe just offstage,
thinks about God, runs his fingers through his white hair.
A mad monk makes bleak predictions
based on the trajectory of a shooting star.
Long years in a monastery will do that to you.
Emperor Paul and I are the same height:
we both stand at a boyish five feet, three inches.
Eye to exalted eye, we can talk to each other
about myths and history, we can pretend to be knights
(I’m unconvincing as a damsel),
we can switch places for a day like in folktales.
I tell him that I admire him, in French,
but I get the word wrong and instead
he thinks I’ve said I love you. I try again, in Russian:
this time I really do say I love you. He hears I’ll kill you.
I beg him to steal me away to the eighteenth century.
No, he says, you will be miserable. You will refuse
to wear a white dress; the labor camps
will appal you; the courtiers will laugh at you.
Besides, you will have to live in the Pale of Settlement.
I ask him if he would at least write me a letter.
For a moment his blue eyes are very kind.
Very well, but are you familiar with the old-fashioned orthography?
Can you make head or tail, for instance, of Ѣ and Ѳ?
I almost reply. Suddenly I remember
I’m only talking to myself.