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The palace smells of beeswax and chrysanthemums. Russia hates it. He stands at the tall window of one of the lesser sitting rooms - one of those rooms that exists not to be used but merely to demonstrate that a thing could exist, that space itself is something the Romanovs own in excess - and watches the snow fall over Saint Petersburg. It falls the way it always falls here: without apology, without pause, as though the sky has decided long ago that this land will never fully know warmth, and has simply committed to the cruelty of it.
He has watched snow fall for centuries. He is, in some ways, made of it.
"You're doing it again."
He turns. Anastasia stands in the doorway with paint on her fingers and a stubborn crease between her brows, the look she wears whenever she feels that the world is arranging itself in a manner that does not suit her. She is perhaps nine years old, perhaps ten; Ivan has lost precise count, children growing in the strange, sudden way they do - how many children will not reach her age, dying with this winter? - and she wears a dress the color of winter sky, and she is looking at him with the frank, fearless assessment that only children and very old people that have seen too much to care have in common.
"Doing what?" he says.
"The sad window thing," she steps into the room uninvited, which is how Anastasia enters every room, "You lean against the glass and your eyes go far away and you look like someone told you something awful happened a long time ago and you're still not done being upset about it."
Russia is quiet for a moment. Outside, the Neva lies iron-grey and patient beneath its skin of ice.
"You are very observant," he says, at last.
"Mama says it's impertinent," she comes to stand beside him, barely reaching his elbow, and presses her nose to the cold glass. Her breath makes a circle of fog. With one paint-stained finger she draws a small sun in it - eight rays, childishly symmetrical - and then watches it fade.
"Is it true that you've been coming here since before Papa was born?"
"Before his father. Before his father's father."
"That's so long," she says it with genuine wonder rather than unease, the way she says everything, as though the world is a series of extraordinary gifts she is unwrapping one by one. "Doesn't it get lonely? Being that old?"
Russia looks down at her, at the copper gleam of her hair, the unguarded brightness of her face, and feels something shift in his chest, like ice shifting on the river in spring: a great slow groan of pressure seeking release.
"Sometimes," he says, which is the most honest thing he has told anyone in years.
She accepts this with a nod, as though loneliness is simply a weather condition one plans for.
"I drew you something. That's why I came. I left it in the other room, wait here."
And she is gone, slippered feet quick on the parquet, before he can form a response.
He turns back to the window.
Below the palace, beyond the gilded gates, beyond the long straight avenues that the tsars have drawn across the land like signatures, beyond all of that, Russia waits. Not the idea of Russia, not the Russia of sleigh rides and court balls and amber-lit ballrooms, but the real one. The one with the hollow cheeks and the cracked hands and the children who die quietly in winter so as not to trouble anyone. The Russia of the zemstvos and the bread queues and the men who gather in smoky rooms with pamphlets and burning eyes, who speak of history as something that can be broken open, that has a seam running through it you can find if you press hard enough.
Ivan presses his palm flat against the glass. The cold comes through immediately, filling his hand.
He thinks of the factory workers in Putilov, eleven thousand of them, who have walked off the floor in January and whose hunger is not a metaphor but a physical presence in the city now, a fifth season settling over everything. He thinks of the priest Gapon and his petition - We, the workers of Saint Petersburg, our wives, our children, and our helpless aged parents, come to you, Sire, to seek justice and protection - and how the petition has been answered. He knows how it has been answered. He has been there, standing in the snow of the Palace Square and he has felt, for the first time in a long while, something older and colder than grief.
The people are his people. They are him, in the way that he can never fully explain to anyone who has not lived as he has lived - not merely governing a land but being it, carrying it in the marrow, dreaming in the cadence of its rivers. When they starve, there is a quality to his hunger that no court banquet has ever touched. When they bleed-
"Here."
Anastasia has returned. She holds out a small square of paper, and when he takes it, he sees that she has painted him: an enormous figure in a long coat, standing in snow, with a purple scarf and large violet eyes, and beside him, much smaller, a figure with red hair who is presumably herself. Both figures are smiling. Above them, in careful childish lettering: Россия и я.
Russia and me.
He stares at it for a long time.
"I made your eyes the right color," she says, watching his face with the measuring look she cannot quite suppress, "Olga says they're gray but I think they're more like lavender. Like the lavender in the south garden, after rain."
She pauses. "Do you like it?"
"It is the finest portrait I have ever received," he says, and means it.
She beams - that sudden, whole-body brightness, nothing held in reserve. Here is the thing that breaks him. Not the poverty. Not the petitions. Not the blood on winter cobblestones.
This. This particular brightness, unearned and freely given, the way a child loves a country without yet knowing what it has done.
He folds the paper very carefully and places it inside his coat.
"You should go and find your sisters," he says, gently.
"Why? It's boring with my sisters."
"I know. Go anyway."
She looks at him - that measuring look again, too old for her face - and for a moment he thinks she might press further. But children can feel, sometimes, when an adult is holding something they are not ready to share, and Anastasia, for all her audacity, is not unkind.
"You'll come back?" she asks.
"I always come back," he says.
Which is true. Which is the most terrible thing about him.
She leaves him then, and Russia stands alone with the snow and the gray river and the distant, patient weight of everything that is coming.
He doesn't let himself think it, most days. He is good at not thinking it, centuries of practice, the discipline of a mind that has learned to survive by never arriving too early at certain destinations. But standing there in the amber quiet of that useless, beautiful room, with the child's painting warm inside his coat and the cold burning through his palms…
He sees it the way you see a thing that has not yet happened but that exists already, fully formed, in the place where the future pools before it breaks into the present. He sees the October that has not yet come. He sees the red. He sees the banners over the same avenues where the Romanov processions move today, and they are not the same banners. He sees the palace empty, no beeswax, no chrysanthemums, only the smell of dust and decisions made quickly by men who have stopped sleeping.
He sees the end of a dynasty. He sees his people, finally, terrifyingly, awake.
And he feels - God help him, God forgive him - he feels both things at once and cannot separate them. He feels the grief that is already his, has been his for years, for the copper-haired child who will not see forty. And beneath it, alongside it, impossibly concurrent: something that is not quite joy and not quite righteousness but is adjacent to both. The feeling of a land that has held its breath for so long it has forgotten breathing is something you choose.
The snow falls.
Ivan presses his forehead against the glass, and the cold receives him the way it always has, without comfort, without cruelty, simply as a fact.
He is Russia.
He will outlive this palace, this dynasty, this particular variety of terrible beauty. He will outlive the revolution too, and the one after that, and the silence that comes in the wake of great noise.
But he will not outlive the weight of having loved, briefly and impossibly, a girl who draws small suns in foggy windows and paints his eyes the color of rain-wet lavender.
That is the thing about being a nation.
The people are always dying.
And he is always, always staying.