Is it any wonder that I took her words more deeply to heart than my mother’s?
When I turned eighteen, I was judged to be ready for my debut — even Eugenia nodded and conceded there was nothing to be gained by delaying it further. I was not so much excited about the balls and the season as I was about getting to visit St. Petersburg again — even though we had an apartment there, we spent all of our time in Trubetskoye, and visited only rarely. I missed the leaden Neva and the spire of the Admiralty piercing the fat low winter clouds, and I could not wait to walk those broad and impossibly straight streets, blown through by the cold autumn winds.
Despite my mother’s predictions, I had not achieved beauty. Rather, my appearance had become stuck between my aunt’s sharp features and my mother’s dainty ones — neither an ugly duck nor a swan, I could only claim awkwardness as one feature that belonged to me and no one else.
Then there was the matter of a dress; my mother fully intended to fret about it until Eugenia rolled her eyes and hired a village seamstress. “Here,” she told the large, red-handed and rough-knuckled woman as she gave her the money. “Make something not embarrassing.” The woman nodded while I secretly doubted the effectiveness of such low-aiming instruction. But to my surprise, the dress turned out to be foam green, simple, and beautiful in a manner of Grecian shifts (if Grecians were to wear corsets and crinolines under theirs.) Thus accoutered, I was ready for anything fine society was prepared to throw at me.
I confess to some anxiety as Eugenia’s carriage left the familiar backwater of Trubetskoye and clanked along the too-wide ruts toward the capital. Squeezed between my mother’s warm soft shawl and my aunt’s sharp elbow, I had all the time in the world to think and fret, even as Miss Chartwell’s fish eyes watched me from the seat opposite ours where she was losing a silent and undignified battle with hat boxes and suitcases that had not fit on the carriage roof.
I felt an impostor, somehow — as if my papa’s sacrifice and service had expired the day he had died, and now my mother and I were nothing, just poor relations leeching off of my aunt’s kindness; as if my family’s past did not entitle me to a place at the emperor’s season; as if I did not stand to inherit two titles. All of that was no more than dust to me, and the closer we got to the icy, stony beauty of St. Petersburg, the more perturbed I felt.
Fortunately, my mother and Eugenia’s exclamations brought me out of the tar pit of excessive self-reflection.
“It changes every time I come by,” Eugenia said. “Every time.”
“Indeed,” my mother said peering through the window on her side of the carriage. “I guess it is a good thing that the emperor is taking care of the roads.” She smiled at me and leaned back into the cushions to allow me a view out of the window.
The road I remembered as being insubstantial and barely passable in the spring floods was being widened — a crew of freedmen labored next to the road, shattering stone with heavy hammers; another crew collected the resulting gravel and loaded it into long, open carts. I surmised the carts would then be sent to pave the road — it was still dirt at our present location, but noises ahead signaled it was paved not too far from there.
Roads and highways and railroads were the emperor’s latest obsession. Eugenia had shrewdly observed he had to do something with all the freedmen, now that the fields were modernized and required fewer workers than before. My mother approved of the emperor’s actions as she approved of everything he did — he was her connection to my dead papa, his protégé of sorts, even though such an imaginary inversion of power was ridiculous.
To Eugenia, the relentless reformism seemed to signal something beyond imperial magnanimity— I swear she could see farther into the future than any of us with her small beady eyes. “I do insist,” she said, and seemed to look past the freedmen on the road’s side and past the stone slabs, past the carts and sharp gravel, “that soon enough St. Petersburg will rival the capitals of Europe — London, Paris, all of them — as a beacon of progress and industry.”
“You do babble so, Genia,” my mother said.
“It’s not babbling,” Eugenia said. “I want to see this country ascend from the mire of poverty and superstition, for us reach for the light of reason… ” She caught herself and let her voice trail off.
My aunt was entirely too infatuated with reason, as my mother used to say. She herself viewed rationality as a masculine domain, and occasionally hinted it was not my aunt’s lack of beauty but her excess of imagination that doomed her to spinsterhood. My mother seemed to think it should be a lesson to me — at least, the specter of remaining an old maid only surfaced in conversation when I was willful or spent too much time catching frogs and climbing trees with the renters’ children. Yet my mother did not seem convinced by her own words — or at least, let them be undermined by the obvious and unrepentant love she had for her sister.
We stopped for the night in the small town of Tosno. At least I remembered it as small from a few summers ago, but soon discovered it had increased considerably in size, not in small measure due to a factory that had sprung up at what had once been its outskirts.
“What does it make?” I asked Eugenia as we watched through the windows of the small hotel at tall smokestacks disgorging clouds of sulfurous steam into the evening sky.
“I am not sure,” Eugenia said. “But we can go and find out.”
My mother begged off the expedition, citing fatigue, but Eugenia and I walked down the winding dirt street past wooden cabins comprising most of the town’s residential buildings. The paint on the dwellings’ walls was peeling and discolored, and the acrid air made my eyes water. Even the trees lining the streets were blackened and mostly dead, their branches twisted like pleading fingers reaching for the sky.
The factory was still spitting out smoke and steam when we arrived at its vast doors. I worried that Eugenia, always keenly interested in things that clanged and were made of metal, would drag me inside the horrid building and make me walk across the floors where, surely, rude men swore at each other and operated dangerous-looking machines.
But she never had a chance, because the gates swung open and out came a throng of bearded, half-naked men who shouted excitedly, and pulled on long metallic ropes. There were dozens of them, all straining against thick twisted cables that sang like strings. Eugenia pulled me out of the way and we watched as the factory groaned and opened its doors wider, allowing the men to drag its strange creation forth into the last burnished rays of a setting sun — not quite a ship but a winged golden balloon as large as a three-storied house.
The egg-shaped balloon strained against the containing net. A basket, woven from strips of birch bark, like the lapti on the workers’ feet — dangled under it. Tall wings rose from its sides, bracketing both the balloon and a metal cage containing a chugging smoking engine that clung to the basket like a fungal growth.
“It doesn’t look like it needs an engine,” I whispered to Eugenia.
She shook her head. “Don’t be a fool, Sasha, of course everything needs an engine. How will it be propelled, change direction? A balloon is just the wind’s toy. An airship has its own mind, though this one could be a tad more balanced.”
A few of the men jumped into the dangerously swaying basket, the sweet aroma of birch sap mixing with the noxious smell of sweat and burning peat. The rest let go of some of the ropes, pulling the net off the airship, and the contraption soared. The basket hung lopsided, but this did not deter the men inside it. They operated the iron levers sticking through the bars of the cage that contained the engine, making it chug faster. Other levers lifted and lowered the golden wings allowing the airship to execute slow, swooping turns.