Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (17 page)

Nikolay entered Red Square alone, on a white horse, far in advance of the ranks of courtiers and foreign princes. He wore a military tunic, the same as an ordinary soldier would. His left hand held the reins; his right was frozen in salute. Far behind him, his mother, the Dowager Empress Marie, and his yet-to-be-crowned wife, Alexandra, rolled forward in separate gilded carriages, almost lost in the ubiquitous glitter.

Nine o’clock in the morning and already men were punching one another over nothing, women were fainting, children were crying, and two unattended urchins had fallen headfirst into a rain barrel and drowned, their thrashing and splashing unnoted. Barricades had been set up to separate the citizenry from the armed forces, as every Russian officer, soldier, and sailor had convened to parade under the eyes of their new commander-in-chief. For days they’d marched and galloped, rolled and sailed into Moscow.

Sailed? Yes, sailed. The Western Fleet cut east from Riga on the Baltic Sea through the marshy plains; the Northern Fleet headed south from Murmansk and Dudinka; the Far East Fleet came west from Port Arthur and Vladivostok: four thousand landlocked miles, and don’t forget the Ural Mountains to cross. It was hardly fair to expect them at all, and yet the westbound ships were not delayed. In all, one hundred and seventy-seven ships dry-docked outside the city’s walls.

How could such things be possible? They happened, Alyosha, that’s all.

Hax pax max Deus adimax!
A flash lit the sky and set the air ablaze. Across Red Square, St. Basil’s shimmered. The Kremlin, too, and the Resurrection Gate, the Nikolskaya and Spasskaya Towers, the Imperial Museum, the market stalls—every wall and rooftop glittered and shone, as it would if seen across a burning lake. In the future, when people talked about that day, they’d tell their grandchildren their ears had popped as if they’d ascended a great height too quickly. And the smell! It was frangipani. It was vanilla. It was honeysuckle. Attar of roses. Jasmine. Ripe peaches. Rain on a summer day. Bread baking. Chocolate warming on the stove. Whatever it was—and no two people agreed—it was the best of all possible smells.

And that’s not all—that was just the beginning. At eleven minutes past eleven—
hocus pocus, tontus talontus!
—every pendulum in every clock case in Moscow stopped, not gradually but right away, as if an invisible hand had reached inside to prevent its movement. A trumpet sounded with a blare so loud it left every ear ringing, and the great doors to the Kazan Cathedral swung open, and those of Saint Basil’s and Iverskaya Chapel as well. And all the parents and grandparents swore to it—on the graves of their mothers and fathers, they swore. With their withered hands on the cover of the family Bible they swore it was the truth, so help them God: the ikons came to life. Unstuck their likenesses from altars and prayer chapels, peeled themselves off walls and ceilings, sprang from two to three dimensions, and headed immediately out of the doors and into the glory of sunlight. From the cathedrals they flowed into Red Square in gilded rivers, chattering excitedly among themselves, giddy with the delight of movement and of sunshine. Imagine, to have known only the inside of a stone cathedral, hundreds of years of dim, drowned light pocked only by candles and only during a service, and to walk out from the shadows into the daylight.

“Too much excitement,” the tsar said to himself, and he took a
deep breath and sat up that much straighter in his saddle, tensing his knees to steady the gait of his horse, which set the pace of all who followed. “Holy Mother of God,” Alexandra whispered, and she made the sign of the cross, moved closer to the carriage window, and peered through her cloud to see if her mother-in-law, the Dowager Empress Marie, had noticed all the goings-on.

Russians, Russians, superstitious to a fault, so eager to find portents that we invent as many as we discern. From the moment the betrothal had been announced, aristocrats and peasants alike searched for ways to predict the success of the union of Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov and Alexandra Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice, Princess of Hesse–Darmstadt, named for her mother, Princess Alice of England, the third of Queen Victoria’s nine children.

“She has come to us behind a coffin,” St. Petersburg observed of Alexandra, as the coach carrying Nikolay’s future bride to his father’s funeral had followed that of the dead tsar. Not that there had been any choice in the matter. The affianced hadn’t had but six months—it seemed like fewer—to enjoy their engagement before Alexander’s failing kidneys gave out. And just like that, from one moment to the next, on November 1, 1894, the tsarevich became the one thing he’d prayed he’d never be: tsar. His wedding to Alexandra, hurried forward by the political crisis, was celebrated immediately after the state funeral, which took place eighteen days—two and a half weeks!—after his father’s death. The dead tsar’s royal person lay in state long enough that maggots animated his features, and the stench drove away the same dignitaries whose lengthy pilgrimages to his wake had postponed his burial. But at least they were not, like his widowed wife and fatherless children—Nikolay and his betrothed included—required to kiss Tsar Alexander III’s moldering lips each morning and evening.

She has come to us behind a coffin
, St. Petersburg observed, and
the meaning was clear. True, she’d been decent enough to muster up that mournful-looking shroud or whatever it was—a peculiar foreign custom, perhaps—that hovered over her head, but a coffin was a coffin, and a coffin was a bad beginning.

Our marriage
, the twenty-two-year-old Alexandra wrote her sister Ella,
seemed to me a mere continuation of the masses for the dead
. Though she’d exchanged her black dress for one of silver brocade with an ermine-lined train of gold, and though the official mourning period was lifted for the occasion of the ceremony, their wedding, held in a chapel at the Winter Palace, had been attended by few, over in a trice, and followed by a modest—well, modest for royalty—reception.

Which, Alexandra now understood from her vantage on the coronation ceremonies, had been more of a blessing than a disappointment, given the frenzy with which her populace apparently greeted state celebrations. Safe inside her golden carriage, she reminded herself to breathe and keep her features arranged in the pleasant expression she’d practiced the night before. The cloud couldn’t be depended on to hide her completely. And there was her poor darling Nicky, for whom she’d happily give all she had, her life included, looking even more alone than she felt, sitting up straight as straight on his white horse, as rigid as if he were wearing armor.

Twenty-nine monasteries and sixteen convents. Within the city walls were forty-five renditions of the fourteen Stations of the Cross. Think of it, Alyosha: 675 Jesuses who had taken a day off from the
Via Dolorosa
, of whom 225 were dragging crosses, 135 had fallen and were crawling on their hands and knees, 45 were naked and asking to borrow loincloths, 135 were bleeding from their wounds, and the last 135 were the walking dead. And those 630 weren’t the only Saviors. Underfoot, swaddled, crawling, and toddling
baby Jesuses tripped up a score of angry Christs looking for a temple full of money changers. One pair of Jesuses was dogged by lepers, another by the siblings Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, all twelve disciples in tow. The robes and feet of a baker’s dozen were wet from walking on the storm-swept Sea of Galilee. And then there were the show-offs who stole the attention away from all the rest: those seventeen transfigured Christs seeking higher ground from which to sermonize, leaking enough light to confuse the ikons around them, all of whom were forced to peer through their fingers so as not to stumble as they poured forth from the dark interiors of cathedrals and churches and into the already blinding day.

Behind the Jesuses came corps of angels and saints, enough to inundate the already crowded square. As vain as only the holy can afford to be, and xenophobic through and through, each sought the company of his or her replicas. Before anyone could draw even one breath—for time had stopped, remember?—all the Gabriels had organized into their own battalion, as had the Raphaels and Michaels, their cumbersome wings taking down lampposts and knocking hussars out of their saddles. And, as the mortal crowds soon understood, it was better not to call attention to these mishaps, as every time an archangel turned around, there went someone’s hat, or head.

“Separate!” one of the angry Jesuses said in that no-nonsense, temple-cleansing tone he’d used to terrify the money changers in the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. To prepare unenlightened, sin-soaked Moscow for so august an occasion as the coronation of a tsar, Jesus said, speaking in parables that went over the heads of all but his audience of spitting images, each of his transfigured selves must find his own dark corner of the city to illuminate.

And so all seventeen luminous, light-leaking Christs dispersed into the city, seeking out the most squalid and misery-filled locations. The regiment of Saint Georges, meanwhile, was making its own parade of the occasion, each seated on a rearing mount and followed by a dragon that, having been trampled under hoof, slithered along somewhat feebly, oozing black dragon blood. Through which limped all the Naked Blessed Basils, Fools for Christ, dragging chains in eternal rebuke to Ivan the Terrible, putting out fires with prayers just as easily as the rest of us do with water, Alyosha.

For the coronation, the Kremlin and its polychromed cathedrals had been lit with bulbs, not candles or gas, because even if all the other Naked Blessed Basils concentrated on keeping their minds on the procession, one was certain to let his prayers stray into the realm of combustion, and then out they’d all gutter. It had happened before—it happened dependably—and Naked Blessed Basil was always the last to be invited to a party.

Saints Barbara, Alban, Martha, Cisellus, Margaret, Aurea, John the Baptist: all the beheaded saints stayed together, using their hands to carry their unattached heads above their bloody necks, everyone trying to get a good look at everyone else. The Child Martyrs, more childish than they were saintly, ran and shrieked, discernibly different from mortal children only in that they cast no shadows.

Few among the saints levitate or develop stigmata, but as artists tend to prefer flamboyance to modesty in their subjects, for every demure little Monica there was a flock of Christina the Astonishings hovering overhead, high enough to avoid the effluvia of sin that emanated from the crowd. It was not an affectation to prove their delicacy! Really, they could not abide the smell. Anyone eaten by a lion was a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, and a few of the Ignatiuses of Antioch were followed by a predator whose sudden arrival in Red Square, 1,476 miles northeast of the familiar coliseum and
nearly two thousand years past their prime, inspired anxious roars and even a few cowardly squeaks.

These things can’t happen, Alyosha, and yet they did, in front of one million people. If you don’t believe me, just ask anyone who was there. Moscow had invited all of Russia home to meet her new tsar, to see the plain man on the horse dismount, kneel before God, and by the will of God be made Tsar.

Ill Omens

T
URKS
, T
CHERNIGOVIANS
. T
ARTARS
. Tartaruchians. Caucasians. Estonians, Livonians. Kazans and Astrakhans. Azazelians. Abedonians. Semigalians, Samogitians, Siberians. Polodians. Georgians, Lithuanians. Yougourians. Yaroslavians. Bulgarians. Rostovians. Ukranians, Ukeleleans, Uzbekians. Karelians. Kabardinians. Oudourians, Obdorians. Oldenbourgians. Iverians. Lugubrians, Latvians, Leviathans. Condians and Cartalinians. Furfurs. Smolenskis. Belozeros. Samyazas, Sitris, Surgats. Haagenti. Beelzebubbians. Baraqielians. Eligosians. Valefarians. Belphegorians. Malphasians. Ziminiarians. Valacs and Valafars.

And Vulgarians, of course, who always turn out for a parade, not to mention free coronation souvenirs.

Every window was crammed with bodies. Balconies groaned under them. They lined the streets ten, twenty, thirty deep, necks craned so as not to miss even one detail, a sea of wide eyes and open mouths, and anyone who could climb on an ash can or fire escape had done so. Every so often one of these parasites fell, his eaves-hanging grip loosened by a competing spectator’s fingers. So many people had climbed the equestrian statue of Field Marshal Kutuzov that both hero and horse had disappeared, replaced by what appeared to be a teeming larval nest, magnified as many times as it takes to grow a man from a maggot.

Maggots to men—a matter of proportion, that’s all. Who’s to say a maggot doesn’t dream or pray? And its desires: why would they be different from yours or mine or any other creature’s? To love and be loved. To eat, to sleep, to multiply. To build a home where it won’t be swept away, flooded, or burned. To be spared the pain of what you cannot understand.

The God of maggots and of men turned Nikolay into a tsar, cloaked him in a robe and train of ermine so long and heavy it required the support of a dozen pages who walked behind his majesty, and crowned him with nineteen pounds of gold, silver, diamonds, rubies, and pearls, because only a tsar can hold his head up under such a weight of pricelessness. Then the priests blessed the tsar, and the tsar turned from the altar to his people and began the long processional around the square.