Read Online The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak - Free Book Online Page B

Duke jumped up and clapped his hands at Professor Stehlin’s announcement. “Will she come, too?” he asked, pointing at me.
    “If this is Your Highness’s wish.”
    My knees nearly buckled. My hands trembled. Even though the island was easy to spot from the palace windows, I had learned not to look past the waters of the river. It is not that I didn’t remember that I once lived there. The thread that linked me to my memories was always tugging at my heart—if I let it tug any harder, the hurt would choke me.
    My father’s voice came back to me first:
“The power of reason … breaking down fear and superstition … Kunstkamera is a temple of knowledge.”
And then I remembered our maids calling Peter’s museum a cursed place, one that would bring bad luck on our heads. Were they right when they sneered at my father’s words?
    I pushed away these thoughts. I would not cry, I vowed.
    The first thing Professor Stehlin pointed out to the Grand Duke in Kunstkamera was a glass dome covering a hill made of skulls and bones. Two baby skeletons propped on iron poles looked as if they were preparing to climb it. Beside them another skeleton, bow in hand, seemed about to start playing his violin. A wreath made of dried arteries, kidneys, and hearts hung above them, with a calligraphed inscription that said:
Why should I long for things of this world
?
    “Anatomical art,” Professor Stehlin called it. “So why should we think of death when we are still in our prime?” he asked his pupil.
    The Grand Duke rubbed his hands and grinned. He remembered word for word what I had read to him days before.
    To make us aware of the brevity of life. To remind us that we will have to account for our deeds well beyond the moment of death
.
    Professor Stehlin nodded with a smile.
    They were in the next room we entered, motionless creatures with pale, leathery skin, floating in glass jars, their pensive faces suspended in clear liquid. Two heads fused into one, a face lacking eyes, legs locked into a mermaid’s tail. Fetuses with stumps for arms, babies with two faces.
    The dead staring at the living
, the maids in my parents’ house had whispered.
    I tightened the shawl about my shoulders. Beside me, the Grand Duke shuffled his feet.
    “These are deformed fetuses born in Russia from human and animal mothers. Your grandfather ordered them to be collected and brought here,” Professor Stehlin explained, his voice rising in excitement. “Look at them carefully, Your Highness. Ask yourself,
Why?
”
    The Grand Duke was staring at the jar with twins, one reduced to a few folds of shriveled skin clinging, frog-like, to the back of its bloated brother.
    He was silent.
    Professor Stehlin answered his own question. Peter the Great wanted to teach his subjects. Monsters were merely damaged fetuses. “The fruit of illness and abuse,” he said. “Or mother’s fear.” And then he pointed to an inscription on the wall:
For a mother can pass the imprint of her fear to the life she carries in her womb
.
    “Repeat these words, Your Highness,” he said.
    The Grand Duke turned his eyes away from the jar he had been staring at all this time. I saw his lips move, but no words came. And then I heard his scream, piercing, thick and dark, followed by the sounds of his footsteps fading away.
    I looked at the Grand Duke’s tutor. He was blinking, bewildered at the effect his words had.
    “Don’t just stand there, Varvara,” he ordered. “Go after him.”
    I made my way to the bottom of the stairs, where the Grand Duke crouched and shivered. He hid his face in the palms of his hands when he saw me. “They’ll kill me here,” he sobbed. “I know they will.”
    I tried to put my hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off.
    “There have been omens,” I heard him whimper. “Just like when Mama died. They don’t want me to know, but I do.” A rivulet of vomit leaked through his fingers, dripping to the floor.
    I thought of a nestling, its