Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (11 page)

Kubla Khan’s Selo. That’s what Alyosha and I called it. Kubla Khan’s village.
A miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
Sometimes, when I was too tired to think up a story, I recited Coleridge. As a token of his grandiosity, Peter the Great had given his wife Catherine a village for her own amusement. Like the panorama inside a sugar Easter egg, her utopia was circumscribed, and its limits allowed her to create perfection, or the
closest thing to it. St. Petersburg would have the ills of a city that existed in the real world, but Tsarskoe Selo, the arena in which her every wish was realized, would not. Her first desire was that a palace be built in her name, and so it was—a comparatively modest structure, compared to what it became. Catherine and Peter’s extravagance, united in their offspring, continued unalloyed through generations—perhaps it even intensified—the original stone building rebuilt and remodeled until it was quadruple the size of the one in which we were held. With rooms of amber and of malachite, of lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl, with gilded corridors and solid-gold sconces, it demanded a setting far grander than a Versailles, with its tedious vistas of topiary.
A stately pleasure dome
, decreed the Romanovs, more and more loudly as the centuries unfolded until, presto, so it was: a heaven made by human hands. Under a sky forbidden to cloud appeared concert halls and conservatories, stables—gorgeous stables, the likes of which I’d never seen or even imagined, with three tack rooms and hot and cold running water and polished brass hinges on every stable door—a pheasantry and hunting lodge, train and police stations, a slaughterhouse. Post office, cathedral, a parish school for girls, a block of shops, and a town hall. Two hospitals, a mountain named Parnassus, an obelisk and a Chinese village with a Chinese theater and an English garden. And a French garden. A lyceum, a pond and another pond and between them canals and a marble bridge. All of it as extravagant and fantastic as a poet’s pipe dream, and Catherine, like Kubla Khan, decreed that all of it be walled, and Tsar Peter decreed it be protected by his own guard of hussars, housed in barracks within the royal compound.

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

•  •  •

A
S ABOVE, SO BELOW
. Once the heavens hear of a prophecy, they do their utmost to fulfill it. Planets align, constellations spin; if need be, the sun can hold its golden self on the horizon for an extra eleven minutes.

The first to die were the tamed deer that roamed the tamed forest. It was over before we knew what had happened, a single volley of shots on the night Kornilov and his soldiers arrived at Tsarskoe Selo. Alyosha and I and our sisters ran to the window. The night was cloudless, the moon providing more than enough light for us to see how the snow-covered lawn was painted with the poplars’ long blue shadows, and we watched as the band of soldiers of the new guard tramped back through them, singing and cursing. There had been a blizzard the previous week, and as soon as the skies cleared, Olga and Tatiana did as they’d always done during the winter. They set out hay for the deer, just as the younger girls, Maria and Anastasia, who worried the songbirds might starve before spring, hung pinecones spread with suet from the limbs of the park trees. I can’t imagine what sport there can be in taking aim at a tame animal, but the soldiers had shot the deer nonetheless, all of them, leaving their bodies to bleed on the white snow.

The Romanov children were as unnaturally stoic about this as they would continue to be about all the cruelties to which they’d be subjected. Varya gave a little bleat, then covered her mouth and looked to Tatiana, but none of the Romanovs flinched. All five stared expressionless at the slaughter. Faces immobile, they bore witness to the murder of their pets, animals so used to the kindness of humans that they’d probably walked forward into the spray of bullets, expecting a caress or a treat. From the window we watched the soldiers make their way back to the palace, exhaling plumes of
steam as they walked through the cold. Intoxicated, a few of them lurched and fell into the snow; one dropped to his hands and knees and vomited. The Romanov children turned from the windows, drew the curtains, and went back to their beds.

Ignored, for once, by OTMA, who tucked themselves tidily back under their covers, white nightgowns slipping between white sheets like letters into envelopes, Varya came to me as I brushed and braided my hair before bed. “What should we do?” she wanted to know.

“Nothing,” I said. “There is nothing to be done for this.”

Not without Father, anyway. From the day he died, things had spun more and more violently out of control. My sister and I were under arrest, not benefiting from our connection to the Romanovs, perhaps even tarred by the same brush that had painted them enemies of the state. Long after the others had fallen to sleep, I was awake and worrying. I think I didn’t sleep at all. The next morning, I got up before dawn. I’d been waiting for enough light to look for the deer, hoping what I’d seen had been a nightmare, that all of the preceding day, month, year, had been a nightmare.

But when I put my lips to the windowpane and breathed on it until I’d melted a hole in the morning frost, there they were, as we’d seen them last, lying on the reddened snow. Behind them, in the woods, there was an orange light, and for a moment I stared through the hole I’d made, trying to imagine what could have caused the strange glow. Something was burning, I couldn’t see what.

The Poplar Grove

“W
HAT IS THAT NOISE
?” Alyosha asked, not on the first or even the second day we heard the sharp cracks that echoed so they seemed to come from all directions at once, but after it had gone on for more than a week.

“Don’t move it,” I said. For several hours a day, Alyosha’s leg was forcibly straightened and strapped into a brace to keep the swelling from crippling his knee. It was on a Monday that he’d hurt it. April 2, 1917. I know because he recorded such events in a journal, which came into my possession after his death.

“I’m not moving.”

“You are. I’m not blind, you know.”

“What difference does it make? We’ll all be dead in a month. I don’t know why they don’t kill us now. Shoot us all and confiscate every last trapping of decadent tsarist rule. Get it over with, why don’t they?”

Either Alyosha—it must have been the nickname, Sunbeam, that led me to mistake him for an optimist, before fate threw us so continually together—was a secret cynic or his father’s forced abdication had turned him into one. Preoccupied by a crisis no adult could manage, asking every day—when he wasn’t too sick to care—for news of the provisional government’s success in holding revolution at bay, Alyosha seemed far older than his years, and he spoke his
mind without regard to what his audience might think. I liked his refusal to euphemize as the rest of his family did, pretending our incarceration in the Alexander Palace was something akin to a pause between acts. As if we were taking a break backstage, changing our costumes as the props were adjusted, practicing lines for an upcoming scene. The arrival of the White Army, for example.

“Matryona Grigorievna! What is making that noise?” Alyosha said. “You hear it, don’t you? Yes, I see by your face that you hear it.”

“Your father chopping, that’s all.”

“Father chopping what?”

“Wood, of course,” I said. “What else?”

Tsar Nikolay was finishing what he’d started the day after Alyosha’s fall and the bleeding it caused: cutting down a grove of poplars. Trees he’d planted himself, as a boy, on the periphery of the horse cemetery where Alyosha’s pony, Bucephalus, had been laid to rest like all faithful servants of the Romanovs, under a proper headstone carved with his name and the dates of his birth and his death.

Tsar Nikolay—we were to call him “Colonel Romanov” now—wasn’t felling trees wildly, as if in a rage. That would have been less unnerving. In this, as in all else, he was his methodical self. He used an ax to take down a single tree, directing its fall away from the grove and onto the adjacent park lawn, where he sawed off its branches, cut them and its trunk into logs of a uniform length, and split those whose circumference might prove unwieldy for whoever tended hearth the following winter. Dogged by two guards, he carried wood by the armload and stacked it neatly near one of the palace’s sealed-off service entrances, and he gathered the smallest branches into tidy bundles of kindling, which he tied with twine. Only when he had dismantled all of one tree into firewood, delivered it to the woodpile, and raked away the remaining litter
of twigs and leaves did he turn his attention to the next. He walked among the trees in the grove, took a cigarette from the case he carried in his right pocket, and lit it while looking at their boughs, peeling a bit of bark away from a trunk with his thumbnail, deciding which, after the cigarette was smoked away, would be the next to go under his ax.

All of us held at Tsarskoe Selo—everyone except for Alyosha and the tsarina, who had begun her months of prostration—had ventured outside, under guard, to learn what was causing the noise. The four Romanov girls; Dr. Botkin and Anna Vyrubova; Nagorny; my sister, Varya, and I; the two valets and six chambermaids, the footmen and the cooks, the butler and the laundress; the grooms and the stable boys; old Count Fredericks, who discomfited everyone with his silent weeping: eventually everyone found a discreet vantage from which to watch the former tsar of the Russian Empire work away at killing his trees with a deliberation that seemed to imply he anticipated a use for the wood they’d yield. Did he picture the fires it would afford those living there the following winter? Could he have imagined he and his family would remain in the Alexander Palace for that many more months? Guests of the Bolsheviks? Perhaps he thought we’d all be preserved as an exhibit, like the panorama of savages at Petersburg’s Kunstkamera or, better yet, on the midway of a traveling circus, with a banner over our heads that proclaimed,
The Romanovs and their Two Wards, Matryona and Varvara Rasputin, Daughters of the Mad Monk Grigory Rasputin
. Newly minted Soviets would pass before us, thrilled and disgusted by the decadence of monarchists who extracted their lavish comforts from the suffering of the proletariat. Until the Soviets became not so newly minted and found themselves jealous, a credible response from a worker dressed in drab, with an apartment upholstered in drab, who ate drab food and rinsed it down with cheap vodka.

“Perhaps it is hard,” I said to Olga, who was standing one afternoon with Varya and me, where her father couldn’t see us if he happened to look up from his chopping and sawing. “Perhaps it is unsettling, not to have governing to do.”

“He planted those trees with his brothers,” Olga offered by way of an answer. “They are nearly forty years old.”

Forty isn’t old for a tree, but poplars grow quickly. These were taller than the Alexander Palace by now, spaced evenly and well apart, as if they’d been planted with an eye to felling them, the space required to swing an ax. After the tsar chose a tree, he stood beneath it for a moment, looking up into its branches. Then he pulled his ax from where he’d left it, the blade sunk into one of the fresh stumps, and paced out the direction of the fall he’d planned for the tree, starting with his back at the base of its trunk and setting the heel of one boot immediately before the toe of the other, close enough to touch, heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, his eyes cast down as he walked, watching his feet.

“What is he doing?” I asked Olga.

“Thirty-five paces. I’ve been counting and it’s always thirty-five.”

“But for what?”

“For the stake.” Olga stood with her arms crossed before her, frowning.

“The stake?”

“Yes, to test himself.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling dim-witted but no closer to understanding. We were far enough away that the precaution was unnecessary, but the two of us spoke in whispers. Something in the tsar’s manner, in what appeared, even from a distance, to be an occupation demanding the focus of a surgeon, kept us standing at attention, absolutely still, our voices hushed.

“Watch,” Olga said. “See, there, he’s planting it.” I nodded, still mystified, as he took a piece of wood from his pocket and drove its point into the ground with the ax head. “A skilled woodsman can fell a tree with precision enough to drive a stake into the earth. Each time, after Father picks a tree, he plants a stake he cut from the previous one.”

“Did the tsar and his brothers grow up here, at Tsarskoe Selo?” I asked, wondering at the education such an expertise implied.

“No, at Gatchina Palace, where they were raised like little soldiers. They slept on camp beds and had no hot water for bathing and ate black bread without jam. I guess they must have spent a summer here.”