Blood Red, Snow White (3 page)

The lake froze solid for four weeks on end. Perch were trapped like flies in aspic; they looked dead, but maybe they miraculously came back to life when the steely ice finally thawed. At last the headmaster’s obsession with sport worked in the boy’s favor. Every day the boys would stay out on the ice until dusk, when bonfires were lit on the shores to warm them through. Here, finally, was one thing he could do better than the others. For the rest of his life he remembered the relief of gliding past his tormentors floundering on their backsides while he headed off, the whole glittering world beneath his skates, thanks to Kropotkin.

That’s a tale with a happy ending, and one that shows there is no such thing in life as chance, or luck. There is only fate. Which is why, years later, when the young man walked into Russia, he could have gone nowhere else. It was his fate to go there.

*   *   *

But I was telling you another story, about Ivy, and how the young man ended up in Russia at all.

He grew up. He left school and the Lakes, and, now a man, he moved to the big city in the south. And there he fell in love.

Not once, but hundreds of times. He developed a habit of falling in love at least once a week, and of asking whomever the girl was to marry him.

This went well for a year or so, because all the girls he asked to marry him said no. There were narrow scrapes from time to time; once he thought better of the marriage proposal he’d written in a letter, and traveled a hundred miles to intercept it before the girl could read it. The girls had a fair idea of his nature, that he was young and impetuous, and so they said no, though they did it kindly, and with a quick peck on his cheek.

But then, one day, one of them said yes.

Her name was Ivy, and the young man had fallen in love with her straightaway. It would have been rude not to, because all the other young men in the city also wanted her. She was beautiful and witty, and she was much more fun than other girls. He wrote poems for her and about her, and they got married.

They enjoyed the whole thing so much they got married again two weeks later, on All Fool’s Day.

After their honeymoon was over, they moved out of the city and into a cottage in the countryside, and there they did what comes easily to newlyweds, and the result was a baby. A baby girl. They called her Tabitha.

Then life changed. There never was a story that was happy through and through, and this one is no different. The young man began to realize that he had not married the woman he thought he had.

She began to change, or maybe it’s closer to say that she became herself.

As if he had married an enchantress, a crone who had transformed into a beauty, her true colors began to emerge.

The young man saw that Ivy was like a fairy tale herself. She lived in a world of fantasy. Maybe she had become bored, maybe she missed her life in the city, maybe he and Tabitha weren’t enough for her. So she made up stories of her own. She told him that other men wanted her still. She admitted to having affairs, though all these stories were just fantasies.

The young man worried about her but decided that it was probably best to ignore the tales. Ivy’s stories got worse. She told him that she had discovered a plot against her honor. Three coarse men, she had learned, were planning to kidnap her and hold her against her will (sort of) in a lighthouse. She told him to buy a gun to defend her.

He thought for a while, trying to remember a lighthouse within a hundred miles of where they lived. He didn’t buy a gun.

And the young man, meanwhile, had fallen in love again. This time, however, he’d fallen in love with someone quite unexpected; he had fallen in love with his daughter. This was something he had not been prepared for, as he was swept up by a bond and a yearning and a protectiveness for which he found words were quite inadequate.

Now, after all the marriage proposals he had made, and years with Ivy, he at last understood what love truly is. Love, he decided, is not about how much someone else cares for you, it’s about how much you care for someone else, and he cared for Tabitha very much indeed. He smiled, as if for the first time, with his child’s first smile, and laughed with her first laugh.

Things with Ivy grew bitter, and as each week went by, and the weeks became months, they argued more and more, battles of vicious words that poisoned them both.

Years passed, and the fights continued. As Tabitha grew, and began to walk and talk, the young man feared for her, and the effect that her parents might have on her.

Finally, one day, he knew it had to end, and he made a decision as wise as it was foolish. He left. As Tabitha lay sleeping he kissed her goodbye, and walked from the house to the train.

He didn’t leave just the house, he left the country. He caught a train, and a boat and another whole series of trains, and one day he got off a ferry in a harbor in a distant land.

A land called Russia.

And if it seems extreme to go all the way to Russia to get away from someone, he knew it was not.

For ivy clings.

FANCY WOODEN BOX

THE YOUNG MAN STEPPED TIMIDLY
onto the quayside and looked about him, and breathed Russian air for the first time. Did he know then that that air would never leave him? I think he did. I think he did.

You already know what he carried; a battered leather suitcase in one hand, and a small but sturdy wooden box in the other. He had learned something already in the course of his journey. If you carry a closed wooden box, people want to know what is in it. All the way across Europe strangers had laid a hand on his shoulder and asked him in a variety of tongues what he was carrying. He thought how funny that was. No one ever asked him what was in his suitcase, though that was every bit as shut as the box. But they could guess. Clothes. Toothbrush and comb. Razor and pajamas. Tobacco and pipe.

But the box. What the hell was in the box?

Once or twice, he made up something outrageous, just to see their reactions.

A snake. A pair of doves. Pearls and diamonds!

Most of the time, he told the truth, and would even open it to show he wasn’t lying.

There. A typewriter. A portable typewriter.

The young man, you see, was a writer.

The typewriter was a marvel of miniaturization, made from steel and rubber and ivory. A simple enough thing, though to him, a miracle in itself, for in that box was the potential to write everything that could ever be written. Every word, every sentence, every thought that could ever be, was waiting to be made from the machine in the box. Every single idea ever was in there. And that in itself was a wonderful idea.

One day, he thought, I’ll write a story about a closed wooden box.

So it was a woman who sent him to Russia. A woman and fairy tales, both hers and his.

O, RUSSIA

ARTHUR. THAT WAS THE YOUNG WRITER’S NAME
.
If I’m to go anywhere,
Arthur thought,
I’ll go to Russia.
He may have left Ivy in order to escape her stories, but he came to Russia to find stories of another kind.

Fairy tales.

Like all writers, he had been a reader first, and he thought Russian fairy tales were the best in the world. People back home didn’t know these stories, and he wanted to tell them. They might know Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast, and Snow White with her raven-black hair, but he thought they ought to know about the Fool of the World, the Little Silver Saucer, and Baba Yaga, the witch, in her hut with chicken legs.

He came to Russia to find these stories, but before he could, he had to learn Russian. He bought a book, one that a Russian child would learn to read from, and he taught himself to read it. And when he had managed that, he picked a harder one, and learned it, too, and so on and so on, until one day he picked up a Russian newspaper and read as though it was written in English.

It was a clever thing to do, and his new Russian friends were impressed and amused by it all at once.

*   *   *

Arthur came to the city and found himself a job and somewhere to live.

He also found himself in the middle of a story beyond anyone’s imagination.

RESURRECTION

THE BEAR SLEEPS.
Somewhere it lies in the darkness of its cave, its heart almost still, its blood crawling through its veins. If you looked from across the sea, from across the country, from just outside the cave even, you would think it was dead, but it truly is only sleeping, waiting for the time to wake.

The time is not yet. Things have to happen first, before the bear can wake. And while the bear sleeps, the Tsar and the Tsarina worry.

*   *   *

True, the Tsar had quashed the trouble threatened by the upstart priest, but now he turned his gaze inward, inside the palace, to his own family.

His son, Alexei, suffered greatly from his mysterious blood disease. The whole family worried itself sick about the boy, but the effect on the Tsarina was the worst.

At first, she called all the doctors she could find to come and cure her son, Russia’s heir. Medical men came from across the city, and from across the whole great country to the palace, and each examined the Tsarevich.

“His veins are too weak,” said one.

“His blood is too thin,” declared another.

But none of them knew what was really wrong. No one knew then that the disease was caused by the blood not thickening when exposed to air. So the doctors prescribed all sorts of quack remedies, but none of them had the slightest effect.

The Tsarina worried. She appointed a sailor, a good strong Russian, loyal, not too young and not too old, to be the boy’s protector. The sailor went with Alexei wherever he went, and when the boy was too weak to walk, the sailor carried him.

It was no good, Alexei still managed to hurt himself, as small boys do, and each time there would be an agony of waiting as his body refused to heal itself properly.

Alix, the Tsarina, had had enough. She became convinced that only a miracle from God could save her son, and so, to earn God’s favor, she donated large sums of money to the church, and spent hours in prayer.

From time to time she would think her prayers had been answered, as she saw the color in Alexei’s cheeks improve, or watched him playing cards with his sailor, laughing and happy. But then the illness would return, and snatching Alexei up by the scruff of his neck, would gallop away to the very gates of death.

The Tsarina gave more money to the church, and spent even more hours in fervent prayer, her rich velvet gown growing dusty as she knelt on the cold marble floor in the chapel.

And then, one day, into the royal court walked a monk.

He was wild-looking and fearsome. He had a long beard, unkempt and dirty, and long matted hair to match. His eyes burned under dark brows. There was a commotion in court and someone ordered that he be thrown out, but the Tsarina raised her hand.

“No,” she said, her heart already willing to give thanks to God. “Let him speak.”

He said he had walked from Siberia to come to the palace. He had come to heal the boy, who at that very moment lay perilously ill in bed.

He was taken to Alexei, the Tsarina close behind, the Tsar and his advisors behind them, muttering and prophesying dire consequences.

He sat on the edge of the bed, and the Tsar stepped forward, one hand on his sword, but the Tsarina stopped him with a look.

The monk put his hand on the cover, where the boy slept fitfully, in a sick peace, and then Alexei opened his eyes.

He sat up, and smiled brightly.

“Hello, Mother,” he said. “Who are all these people?”

The Tsarina began to weep, and put her hand out to stroke her son’s hair. She thanked God in her heart, and then the monk spoke.

“The boy will not die,” he said. “And when he is thirteen, his disease will be taken from him, forever.”

GOD’S INSTRUMENT

OF COURSE,
he wasn’t a monk at all. And his religion was not what the Tsar would have called Orthodox. His was a strange mixture of mysticism and sin.

His name was Rasputin, a name he was given as a boy in the village where he grew up, far away, in Western Siberia. Just as other children were called by their nicknames—Clever, Wolf, Big Heart—this dirty scamp took the name meaning “naughty child.”

The naughty child grew into a vile young man, a drunkard and a lecher. A horse thief. One day, however, this all changed.

A vision of Mary, the Holy Mother, appeared to him. The apparition said not a word, but he fell on his face in shame and fear. He knew what it meant, and on the spot he repented his wicked ways. Or so he said.

He went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, though he never got there, joining the streams of other holy men and wandering prophets who trailed from one corner of Russia to another, each seeking some hidden goal known only to them.

Until, finally, he walked into this story and into the heart of the Tsarina.

*   *   *

Now the Tsar was more worried than ever.

Rasputin was wild. He was illiterate, he was unwashed and smelled like a goat, and a dirty one at that. He dressed in a peasant’s baggy trousers and loose shirt, and his greasy beard was always speckled with bits of food, or crusted soup. His only redeeming feature, it seemed, were his eyes, which could still a room of a hundred voices.

The salons and drawing rooms of the wealthy were already drenched in bizarre practices, occult dabblings, theosophy, and spiritualism. Séances were all the rage; the Tsar even suspected the Tsarina had toyed with a Ouija board in an attempt to obtain supernatural aid for her son. And now a wild monk had set up home under his very nose, and there was nothing he could do about it, for Alexandra insisted that God had sent Rasputin to cure her son, as no one else had been able to do.

And even the Tsar had to admit that there was something in it. Whenever the boy grew ill, or hurt himself, Rasputin was called for, and the bleeding would stop, or slow much quicker than usual.