You brought my thumb to your mouth and suckled off the blood, as gently as a mother might bandage her child’s bruised knee.
“Love makes monsters of us, Constanta, and not everyone is cut out for monstrosity. My other lovers went mad, they railed against me and rebuffed my affections, they endangered our lives with foolish trysts with humans and they betrayed my trust. They had to be put down, my love, like a horse with a broken leg. It was a mercy. I swear to you. Do you understand?”
I nodded slowly, every appendage heavy and numb. I could barely breathe. Put down , you had said. Like an animal.
You swept a strand of my hair behind my ear and rubbed the line of worry from between my brows, rearranging my face into a picture that pleased you.
Then you took my jaw in your hand and squeezed so hard that tears sprang to my eyes.
“Good,” you said, your voice suddenly dark. “Now stay out of my room.”
That was your final word on the matter. You left me alone in the living room, shaken and on the verge of tears. I pressed my hand to my mouth to smother a shriek of horror. I knew then I was truly trapped with you, and any pipe dream of running away was nothing more than a flight of fancy. If I ran, you would track me down, and you would do to me what you had done to those other husbands and wives. I shuddered at the thought, sobs threatening to tear out of my chest.
I was shackled to you by iron bonds, and so was my darling Magdalena. There was no way for me to wriggle away without damning her to your anger, and so I resolved to stay. To watch and to listen, and to wait for a perfect moment sometime in the future where Magdalena and I could breathe the free air together.
You ushered us out of Berlin quickly after that, as though the whole city had been spoiled by Magdalena’s continued illness. She sat at the divan and stared out the window, sallow and wan, as you ordered the house to be packed up with utmost expediency. I found myself powerless, wringing my hands while you brooded and Magdalena languished and strange men took my paintings down from the wall. I had no idea how to help either of you. The best I could do was quietly crawl into Magdalena’s bed and nuzzle her nearly-comatose form for an hour or so each day, and to sit with you as you took your fill of the morning news, listening to you read interesting headlines aloud. Neither of you would be consoled back into a smile. I learned to be content with my own company, to not take Magdalena’s every dark mood as mine to fix. She had an illness, the doctor you hired had said. A feminine hysteria resulting in listlessness and ennui.
I thought, perhaps, it was simpler than that. I thought that she was simply fading the way flowers denied sunlight droop and die. Magdalena lived for her freedom, and with it taken away from her, life lost its luster.
You never were able to give her her beloved freedom, since letting her roam freely was strictly against the design you had for our lives. But you were able to augment her joy for a time with a force so powerful it may as well have been the sunshine and free air she gave up to be one with you. A force of pure, unfettered joy.
I just never expected to have to travel all the way to the cold reaches of Russia to find him.
PART THREE
Alexi, our sunlight, our destroyer. My prince cast in marble and gold. We could have endured a hundred years more, clinging to each other even as we tore each other’s throats out, had it not been for Alexi. He was the antidote to our miseries, a short-lived splash of sweetness in our bitter lives. With Alexi in the mix, our household knew levity again. At least for a short while.
He was as inevitable as a revolution, and heralded in just as much violence.
It was autumn in Petrograd, in the heady October of 1919. The Tsar had been shot dead by the Bolsheviks only a year prior, and the vast Russian empire had fallen into civil war just as rebuilding efforts had begun to get underway. The nation wrestled with itself, struggling to define itself in a fast-changing world hurtling towards an ever-shifting destiny. But, despite her wartime scars and explosive temper, Russia was still a beautiful, mysterious ideal in your mind, the source of so much of your beloved philosophy and literature. You wanted to study the intricacies of all the political schools and systems battling for dominance. You believed that strife brought the soul of mankind to the surface of society, and you wished to chart the height and breadth of it for your studies.
“Are you sure it’s safe for us here?” I asked as we stepped off the steaming train. The Petrograd station was a swirling watercolor of browns and brass, echoing with the shouts of newspaper sellers and merchant women.
I breathed in the scent of the city deeply. I tasted hot bread, oiled machinery, and the tang of fresh blood ground into the cobblestones. This was a city on the edge of self-realization, or of dissolution. No wonder you were drawn irresistibly into her milieu.