Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (20 page)

“No.” Alyosha, who had been sitting up on his elbows, dropped back onto the pillows behind him. “Will you?” he asked.

“Of course.” I pulled my chair closer to his bed, slipped my hand in his.

I
N THE CITY OF
K
AZAN
a merchant named Katkoff invited the increasingly acclaimed Father Grigory to dine and sleep in his home, if only the
starets
would try to cure his wife of the arthritis that no doctor had been able to alleviate. Madame Katkoff was “crumpled
up like a discarded piece of paper,” Father said, so that she couldn’t even rise from her chair. Her knuckles had swollen to the point that her hands were unrecognizably deformed and, as her chin was frozen to her breastbone, he had to go down on his knees to look into her eyes.

He closed his own in prayer before reaching out and touching her chin, which he lifted as easily as if her neck were as sound as any other woman’s. From there he went on, down her spine and then onto her crippled limbs. One by one he unlocked every joint, and when he was finished he held out his hand and pulled her to her feet. It wasn’t just that Madame Katkoff could bend her elbows and knees, hips and fingers. Each place he had touched returned to its former appearance, not only her health but also her beauty restored.

“Come,” my father said, and he showed her the mirror.

Rich enough to own a telephone, and so dedicated a gossip that when she was no longer able to hold the receiver herself she had hired a girl to keep it pressed to her ear, Madame Katkoff called everyone she could think of and told them Father Grigory worked miracles. Anyone who doubted her word could come to her home and see for herself.

As for her husband, the rich merchant’s gratitude was such that he presented my father his brand-new motorcar. My father didn’t want to accept so extravagant a gift, but Katkoff insisted. He told Father he’d be insulted if he refused. “At least try it,” he said. “Anyone who sees you on wheels, without a horse to pull them, will know to pay attention, that a healer approaches!” For in those days, in Siberia, who hadn’t seen threadbare holy men wandering the land? But a motorcar—that was a vision of unprecedented power, more mysterious and inspiring of awe than an antiquated old
starets
.

Father refused. “Perhaps they’ll think I’m the devil,” he said.

“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Katkoff answered, pricking Father’s vanity.

“Because, little magpie,” Father said when he told me the story, “you know your papa is not afraid of anything.

“Panhard et Levassor was the maker,” he’d begin when speaking of it. “The upholstery was green leather.”

As there were no other cars on the roads he traveled, no one had the misfortune to encounter him as he taught himself to drive. Like a small child who has just learned to run and therefore never walks, not even to cross a room, Father drove so fast that when he arrived in a town he was followed, like an Old Testament prophet, by a pillar of cloud—funnels of dust twirling heavenward in his wake. By the time he’d parked at a local inn, he’d already caused such a commotion that a queue of supplicants formed immediately, and news of his arrival spread beyond the town’s borders to outlying farms.

“What about praying in the church for a day?” Alyosha wanted to know.

“I asked him the same thing. He said no one needed a church to pray and that the way he drove inspired all who saw him to fall on their knees.” Katkoff had given Father a lot of extra habiliments—pairs of goggles, a long green coat Katkoff called a duster and insisted Father button over his ragged brown robe, green driving gloves the size of gauntlets, a green cap, and green gaiters.

“To match the upholstery,” Father would say, laughing uproariously.

“And then?” I would prompt. “Tell what happened then, Father.”

“Well, the machine came with a windscreen, but that was gone before a month was out. I was so delighted by the speed of the thing, not like a train, nor like horse and buggy, but a different kind of speed, a thing I’d never felt before. Like a fool I tore through
fields of frozen potatoes that bounced up and hit the glass.” Sometimes the bough of a tree hit the windscreen. Sometimes the frozen potatoes were rocks left in a poorly tilled field. The leather covering the seats was so slippery that many times, when he took a sharp turn, anyone unfortunate enough to be his passenger slid out of the vehicle and onto the road.

“Who were they, Masha?” Alyosha asked.

“Who were who?”

“Who were the passengers?”

“Well, let’s see,” I said. “The usual sorts of disciples and clingers-on. Anyone who asked him for a ride along the roads he traveled. Damsels in distress, of course, and damsels who were happy to trade their favors for the excitement of a motorcar ride. Quite a lot of those, you know, Magdalene types who were willing to mend their ways after a celebratory farewell to carnal pleasures.”

“Ah, yes.” Alyosha smiled. “There would be a few of those, Masha. Tell me what they looked like.”

“Well it’s not as if I was in the automobile with them, you know.”

“Still, you can tell me.”

“Well, one of them was an Arabian princess. But that was later, when he was driving around in the Holy Land.”

The miracle of the motorcar, I told Alyosha, was that it provided my father passage to the Holy Land. A proper
starets
must visit the birthplace of Christ, and, as Father had a car and could drive, more or less, off he went. Around the Black Sea he tore. Odessa to Varna, he sped southward in a cloud of dragonflies the size of hawks. The sky was red, the earth was yellow: three hundred miles without a flat tire. Varna to Istanbul, the Blue Mosque’s swordlike minarets scratching at the heavens: he’d gone another two hundred miles and still he hadn’t stopped to fill the tank with gasoline. Istanbul to Ankara—

“Conquered by Caesar Augustus in 25
B.C.
He—”

“Don’t interrupt. This has nothing to do with your old warmongers.”

Ankara to Adana, not a drop of gasoline to be had, not for any price. He floated on fumes, and thank heavens for goggles, as the Turkish sand blew without cease. Aleppo, Alexandria, Tripoli, Damascus—

“That’s the Silk Road.”

“Alyosha.”

“I’m—”

“You must be feeling better,” I said. “It’s not as if I haven’t read a history book, Mister Know-It-All.”

Aleppo to Damascus, Father flew along the Silk Road, and nothing, nothing could stop the motor built by Panhard et Levassor.

“The will of God carried me to Jerusalem,” Father would say. “Not Panhard et Levassor. When God the Father appointed Solomon king over every living thing, he gave him a green silk carpet, and on it Solomon sat on his throne, and with him were the four princes: Berechiah, the prince of men. Ramirat, the prince of demons. The lion, prince of beasts, and the eagle, prince of birds. Even when Solomon carried an army of four hundred thousand men, his green silk carpet sailed so quickly on the wind’s back that they breakfasted in Damascus and supped in Medina. Now, if such things are commonplace in the Holy Land,” Father said, “who was I to question a car that runs without gasoline?”

No matter what transpired in the Holy Land, Father found it mysterious and wonderful: sandstorms; spitting camels; fruit falling from the date palms; women dancing barefoot, their faces covered and their middles exposed; his hosts, whoever they were, eating with their hands, as Father liked to tell the Petersburg aristocrats.

It meant something to him that he’d seen Gethsemane and
kneeled where Christ prayed on the eve of his crucifixion and that he’d visited the room of the Last Supper, in which God changed wine to blood and bread to flesh. That was as big a trick as walking on water or sermonizing after you’d been crucified.

Jerusalem, Damascus, Tripoli, Alexandria, Aleppo, Adana, Ankara, Istanbul, Varna, Odessa. Back home to Mother Russia, past minarets with pointed hats and skies filled with falling stars, fields of purple thistles rippling under the wind’s invisible touch. No Arabian prince ever got more pleasure from his carpet than my father received from his Panhard et Levassor.

“A
LYOSHA.
” I
TRIED
to pull my hand out of his but he caught me by the wrist, showing me how strong he could be when he wanted.

“Kiss me.” He pulled me toward him. “You’re such a pretty little thing, Masha. Did you know that?”

“Little? I’m almost five years older than you. Besides, pretty is as pretty does, they said at school.”

“Not yet five. And if your schoolmistress was right, the more you kiss me, the prettier you will become.”

“Very funny.” I stopped resisting and let him pull me onto the couch next to him. “Am I not pretty enough, then?”

“Of course you are. Nothing is prettier than blue eyes and black hair, and your mouth is …” He put his finger on my lips, as if to part them. “We could pretend you’re one of those Magdalene types.”

“Alyosha—” But that was as far as I got before his mouth was on mine and I was feeling things I’d only heard described, feeling them exactly, my pulse throbbing even in my—

No I didn’t feel any of that. Having wondered and worried over what it might be like, being kissed by someone I wanted to kiss me, I was clumsy with nerves, and in my attempt to keep clear of
his bad knee I fell forward into the kiss, knocking our front teeth together. Sure that I’d cut his lip and killed him, I pulled away, ducked out of his arms, and burst into tears.

“What is it?” Alyosha said, after what must have been the longest and most awkward silence in the whole history of love. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Something.”

“I’m afraid,” I told him.

“Of what?”

“I don’t know.” I think he knew I was lying. But the truth—that it wasn’t only my anxiety about being touched but that his illness had stolen something else from him—seemed worse.

“Didn’t you … didn’t you like it?”

“It doesn’t matter if I liked it.”

“Of course it does. It’s the only thing that does matter, whether or not you liked it.”

“To you.”

“What are you talking about, Masha?”

“Just that there are other things to think about.”

“What other things?”

But I didn’t answer. Instead, like a child I covered my face with my hands, and I remained like that, blind as well as mute, until he let the matter go.

The Wild West Show

“T
HAT’S WHAT WE NEED
,” Alyosha said, once I’d finally taken my hands away from my face.

“What?”

“A magic carpet. Woven of all dark colors, blue and purple and black. We’ll ride it only at night, so if anyone were to look up, all he’d see was the dark sky; we’d blend right in. No one could apprehend us.”

“Where will we go?” I asked, praying he wouldn’t return us to the midnight sleigh rides over the Neva. Not that I didn’t deserve it, teasing him by telling stories that implied I might like to be ravished like the heroine of a romance and then behaving as I had.

“Australia,” he said, and then shook his head. “No, America.”

“Do you think it’s wise to take a flying carpet that far, over an ocean?”

“Of course, Masha. It’s the safest way to go. It can’t sink or run aground or collide with an iceberg.”

“I suppose not. Where in America?”

“Chicago.”

“Why Chicago?”

“It’s the only American city I know anything about. Do you remember Joseph?”

“The Abyssinian guard?”

Before the tsar abdicated, two tall men with shining black skin had guarded the family’s private apartments in the Alexander Palace. Their scarlet uniform jackets were trimmed with gold braid and epaulets and buttoned over voluminous blue silk trousers that looked like those in the color plates accompanying Alyosha’s edition of
The Arabian Nights
. Whoever had designed the uniform must have considered Arabia close enough to Abyssinia to excuse poetic license, or ignorance. Turbans, scimitars, jeweled slippers with upturned toes—having been imported as objects of curiosity from an exotic land, the pair of Abyssinian guards appeared more ridiculous than imposing, just as did, to my mind, gondoliers with striped shirts and red-ribbonned hats on the canal or Mandarins in the Chinese theater, dressed in coats of stiff, quilted silk, with red pom-poms on their heads and extravagantly long mustaches dropping from their jowls …

“One was from Addis Ababa,” Alyosha said. “The other, Joseph, came here from Chicago. He said the city had a river going right through it, like Petersburg, and that the winters were cold, with a lot of snow. He told me about the World’s Fair in 1893. He’d been an Abyssinian there too, in one of the exhibits. Only they called it by another name. Ethiopian, I think it was.”

“What, for an anthropology exhibit, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand. Is he an Abyssinian, then, or not?”

“He isn’t. There were also Esquimau and Argentinean vaqueros and a replica of a Viking ship that sailed to America from Norway. Japanese geishas. It was all in a great hall constructed for the purpose. You know, to edify onlookers.”