Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (16 page)

“Did he ever do it to you?” Alyosha asked.

“Of course he didn’t! What are you talking about?”

“I want to know, did he ever heal you?”

“Oh, that. Yes. Naturally he did. What physician wouldn’t help his own family? He did it for me and for my brother, sister, and mother.”

“Tell me what it was like.”

“You know what it’s like.”

“For me but not for you.”

It was like heat, like thawing. As if illness were its opposite, a deep freezing chill, enough to slowly stop a heart or petrify a pair of lungs. My father’s callused hands, a black crescent under each ragged fingernail, poured heat like a samovar. He kept his fingernails dirty on purpose, to show the aristocracy that cleanliness was not next to godliness. Though Varya and I were made to learn all the proper etiquette for life in a city like Petersburg, my father never relinquished any of his peasant ways. He ate with his hands and wiped them and his mouth on his hosts’ tablecloths. He’d use his fingers to fish in his soup bowl for a morsel he wanted, or he’d take a picked-clean drumstick from his plate and bite the knob of cartilage off its end to reveal the marrow he’d then suck from inside the bone. He didn’t care who watched—he was the man he was, and all his would-be worshippers should know that God cared nothing for pretty ways and pious behavior. Why would God squander his attention on tablecloths and finger bowls? God liked to appear in the guise of a beggar or leper or madman. Little point in emerging from the cultivated mind of a Schopenhauer or a Spinoza. Better to burst forth from a dull, asthmatic shepherdess, like Bernadette of Lourdes, or a ragged muzhik from Siberia, like my father.

“Grigory Yefimovich!” Dunia would say to Father, trying to block his way to the apartment door. “Comb your hair and put on a fresh tunic. See, I have one ready for you, washed and ironed.” Dunia would point out the stains of wine and grease on Father’s
wrinkled clothes, in which he’d undoubtedly slept and for more than one night.

“Stop, Father! Don’t you know what people are saying?” Varya always aligned herself with Dunia in disapproval.

“Let him be,” I’d answer, wondering how it was they couldn’t see that a clean shirt would alter something essential in the father I loved so well.

And Father would kiss my forehead. “Good night, little magpie,” he’d whisper.

“I
T FELT … ORANGE
,” I told Alyosha, “like the color of a flame. But it didn’t burn. It displaced what was sick. Pushed it away. That’s the best I can describe it.”

“I’m always so hot when I’m ill,” Alyosha said. “I think for me it’s—it was—more cool than warm.”

“So perhaps it is different for everyone, as you surmised.”

“Did he tell you to think of something that made you happy?”

“Sometimes he did. I remember him sitting by my bed when I was a little girl. He told me he was carrying me on his shoulders, and he described the field through which he was walking.”

He named all the flowers and every living thing we passed: the trees, the insects, the hares and birds and tiny shrews running through the grass at his feet. Where we lived there was no creature he hadn’t heard calling him, none to whose beckoning he hadn’t listened and taken the trouble to find and study. He described the wings of a dragonfly, how they were transparent and yet had color, a pale green paler even than new grass. He’d say I was growing sleepy on our walk and that I rested my chin on his head. The woods were filled with magic, he’d say. He kept talking until I fell asleep.

•  •  •

M
Y FATHER SAID
all people were his friends, but really there were only two of us in St. Petersburg: Dunia and I. Everyone else wanted something from him. Dunia applied herself to caring for his physical needs. I paid attention to his singular life and its unfolding. No one, not Dunia, Varya, Mother, Dimitri—of course not Dimitri—and not Father himself: none of them seemed to have taken pause even once to consider the life of Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin. It was as if I alone among us understood that just the idea of a person such as Father—an illiterate, unwashed, and exultantly ill-mannered peasant, a bumpkin subject to what most people considered hallucinations—mingling with, and indeed holding more power than, aristocrats and royalty was fantastic, outside anything one might expect to happen in a life.

Once the excitement of moving to a new city wore off, Varya, fixed on our mother the way I was on Father, regarded her years in St. Petersburg as more exile than privilege. Her one effort at making the best of things was to convince Father a piano would assuage her loneliness for home, where our mother had promised to teach her on the one piano in town, in our tiny church, an instrument missing keys, like middle C, which had been struck one time too many. After he bought one for her, she paid attention to it and little else, so consumed by her lessons and hours of practice I never had to compete with her for Father’s attention. I could make myself witness to all the selves my father commanded.

There was the Pokrovskoye peasant, whom my mother married, and the Petersburg mystic, who held the future of the Russian Empire in his hands. The louche merrymaker who stayed out all night, drinking and singing and carrying on until dawn in taverns where gypsy women danced. The satyr who could bed five women a day and another five that night, most often on the parlor couch. The
one whose constitution was so strong he could fast for a month and walk thirty miles a day, day after day. The son of the steppes, for whom happiness lay far from cities and their woes. And under all these was Grigory Yefimovich, who once upon a time had fallen into a fever and woken changed—vulnerable to the anguished cries of every living thing, from the grass blades broken under his boots to the birds overhead, a man who would be visited by the Virgin, not once but several times.

All of life was dull and dark when measured against visionary ecstasy. It took only one exposure to this exaltation for it to become the god my father served. Whatever allowed him a connection to the divine, he knew it wasn’t made as a gift to the virtuous—he was proof of that himself. Only a vain fool, a man who cared for the opinions of others, would cultivate virtue for virtue’s sake. All my father wanted, all he sought, was the next of these rapturous episodes. I think they were the hooks on which he hung the rest of his life; they kept him from falling into despair, especially in a city like Petersburg, where there was so much ugliness and misery.

The medium didn’t matter. Fornication, fasting, drunkenness, self-flagellation, holding his hand to a flame, losing himself in the woods, praying on his knees until he swooned: for him there was no distinction to be made among these or any other means that might return him, however briefly, to the Silver Forest or any of the other places in which he’d felt it.

These Things Can’t Happen

“A
LYOSHA.
”

“What?”

“I want to ask you something.”

“Well?” he asked, when I didn’t continue. “What is it?”

“I’m—it’s a thing I’ve been worrying about.”

“What?”

“I have been from the start. Not since the day you did it, but soon after. When you were well enough for visiting and we started spending these afternoons together.”

“Did what?” Alyosha said. “What are you talking about, Masha?”

“I’m just … I want … I don’t want to believe …”

“Masha. Get on with it. You’re torturing both of us.”

“It’s only that I … I’ve tried to come up with a way to explain why an intelligent person of uncertain health, whose injuries and illnesses have always distracted his family from—”

“What are you saying?”

“You know what I’m saying.”

Alyosha flushed. “You think I did it on purpose? To injure myself?”

“To divert their attention. You said so yourself. You said at least you’d
distracted
them.”

“I did not.”

“Yes you did. That was the word you used.”

“But you’re ignoring the context. It was in retro—”

“Distracted them. That’s what you said.”

“I drove into the newel post on purpose? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. I mean, I’m afraid you—”

“For the sake of a father who has made one ruinous decision after another? Destroyed everything given him? No. Not given. Loaned. Loaned to him.”

“For him, yes. And for your mother and sisters as well. Because you’d rather they worry over you than their own predicament.”

“Well. Isn’t that just like a girl to come up with so—”

“Anyway, it’s easier to pretend you’re angry with your father.”

“Easier than what?”

“Than admitting you’re hurt on his behalf. The fact that the political situation is no one person’s fault makes it worse. Your father’s being punished because he hasn’t done what—”

“Stop it, Masha. You’re being silly, sentimental. I did it, that’s all. I was careless, stupid if you like, responding to the claustrophobia of arrest and of—of this illness. That doesn’t mean I intended to make myself hemorrhage.”

“And as you are—no, not
you
but your idea of yourself—too honorable to tell me an outright lie, you keep sidestepping the subject. You don’t actually deny it, you only seem to.”

“He allowed himself to be manipulated by his uncles.”

“How can he oppose everyone? Your mother. His mother. His uncles. It’s too much.”

“It wasn’t too much for his father.”

“His father hadn’t any uncles, and he wasn’t threatened by revolution.”

“His train car was blown up. In 1888, the imperial train was blown up near Kharkov by—”

“Wasn’t it derailed? I don’t remember anything about its being blown up.”

“No, you wouldn’t. It was blown up by an underground proto-Bolshevik group, which is not a fact you can find in a history book. It’s considered the property of military intelligence. Most people don’t know the truth, including Grandmother, who believed what Grandfather intended her to believe: that it was a simple derailment; there was no terrorist involvement. He withheld anything he could from her; he didn’t want her to suffer the anxieties he was forced to bear.

“Granny told me the family was eating cake in the dining car, and Grandfather stood up from the head of the table and, with his shoulders, lifted the collapsed roof of his car, insisting his wife and children be rescued before anyone helped him. They estimated it weighed more than a thousand pounds.”

“How could he have? That seems a—”

“The point is that’s who Grandfather was, invincible not only because he was strong but also because he refused to believe in the possibility of defeat.”

“That was his policy? To keep the truth from his wife? The truth about the nation she served as tsarina?”

“I think it was, yes.”

“No wonder she was always so hard on your father,” I said.

“Why?” Alyosha asked. “In any case, why shouldn’t she have been?”

“Because she had no way of knowing that the people’s unrest had been gathering force for decades. You’ve said as much yourself. Poverty and hunger creating a populace too desperate to consider the political consequences of their actions. The intelligentsia
able to present the example of France to the only audience that would realize a similar revolution for Russia, a vast army of laborers whose children are starving. If your father is unfortunate enough to be the last tsar, it isn’t so much character as timing. The die was cast long before he assumed the throne.”

“That itself was a fiasco.”

“What was?” I asked.

“The coronation.”

“But not of his making.”

“He made it worse,” Alyosha said.

“He was given bad advice.”

“Why do you insist on being his apologist!”

M
OSCOW
. M
AY
26, 1896. A city freshly swept and scrubbed, painted and polished and hung with garlands. It was warm and pleasantly so, a perfect spring day under an aquamarine sky. Whatever the reason—the angle of the sun’s rays? A fluctuation in the atmosphere overhead? A subtly different ratio of gases, as if the very molecules of which Russia and the air above Russia were made had aligned themselves to serve the Romanovs?—well, whatever the reason, on that day the blue over Moscow really was the blue of the pale, clear gem: a literally sparkling sky. Below it, a gentle breeze cooled the cheeks of the people crowding the city. The coronation of Nikolay II had been delayed the full and official eighteen months of national mourning for the death of his father and tsar, Alexander III, and, the ceremonies having been anticipated for so long, the plans for them had grown ever more extravagant: a performance staged not only for the urban aristocracy but for citizens who had traveled to Moscow from every corner of the empire. Moscow because Moscow always has been and always will be Russia’s sacred city. Anyone could invent a Petersburg. All it was was
bits and pieces taken from European capitals, the conceit of a tsar who turned his back on the Kremlin’s fantastic landscape, embarrassed by the whimsy and excess of its blood-red walls and onion domes painted gold or, worse, striped and checked with riotous colors. Green, pink, blue. Yellow, orange. Peter had been determined to hide the Kremlin and its extravagance of Russianness, which made Versailles appear a model of restraint.