Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (25 page)

Militsa had come to Father carrying new clothes for him to wear to his audience with the tsarina. Shoes, trousers, and a long black cassock.

“What do you think?” Father said to her. “You think I want to be confused with a priest who serves the worldly Church? I have nothing to do with those thieves and liars!”

“Of course, Father Grigory. Forgive me, please. It was stupid of me. I suppose I was trying to be helpful,” Militsa said. Inside, below the carefully applied veneer of polite self-deprecation, she silently cursed my father for his pigheadedness. How was she to bring a person like him to a palace? It was one thing to allow him to lounge about her house with his filthy boots on her silk cushions—actually, it made quite a favorable impression on her guests when they saw how their once acquisitive hostess’s attention had moved on from worldly to spiritual inquiries—and another to bring a
genuinely filthy person, a person who smelled as if he didn’t bathe, to meet the tsarina, the most high of the highest echelon of society. Even if she was a completely hopeless, holier-than-thou, stick-in-the-mud killjoy.

Now if she, Militsa, were Alexandra Fyodorovna, she would have turned that silly cloud to an advantage! Everyone wants what the tsarina has, everyone always does; she’s the
tsarina
. It’s a law of physics almost—a force like gravity. Why, after Louis Quatorze had surgery on his rectum to cure a fistula, half the French nobility went clamoring after their physicians to arrange to have their perfectly healthy derrières cut apart with a scalpel, and this was before anesthesia. But in a case like that of the cloud, every woman would be stuck pining for what only the tsarina could have. Other women, rich enough women, could afford jewels as extravagant as a queen’s—after all, Militsa shopped at Fabergé too—and they could wear prim, fusty gowns like hers if they liked, made by the tsarina’s very own dressmaker, whom she happily shared, should anyone want him, which they did not. Fashion had taken a blow when Alexandra Fyodorovna ascended the throne and ushered in the age of dowdy frumpitude.

But who could pull off the trick of her own private weather? If Alexandra Fyodorovna went to balls and enjoyed herself, if she did as she was supposed to do, which was to preside like a fairy godmother over all of society, then she’d be out and about, pulling her cloud behind her up and down the Nevsky Prospekt, in and out of the most recherché shops. She’d dance a quadrille and it would whirl along with her, tango and it would dip daintily, nodding like a flower on a stalk.

Imagine if the Dowager Empress Marie had been the one to arrive in Petersburg with a cloud. Of course, Marie’s would have been a fetching little thing, frothy and bubbly, without that awful, looming, dank, and sodden look of Alexandra Fyodorovna’s.
Within a season of Marie’s arrival in Petersburg as Princess Dagmar of Denmark, affianced to Alexander III, every duchess and grand duchess in the city would have been wearing a cloud-shaped hat. Everywhere one looked there would have been fantastic piles of ostrich or egret dyed a lovely mauve-gray. That sort of hat would require a chassis of wire and tulle to support the feathers; otherwise, it couldn’t be built high enough. But tulle and feathers weren’t even the slightest bit heavy, and that fantastic genius of a modiste, that mad hatter in the shop on the southeast corner of Gostiny Dvor—whatever that man designed was nothing less than exquisite. He’d put diamonds here and there to sparkle like drops of rain. That might even be attractive. Well, of course it would! It didn’t matter if it didn’t flatter your face. A hat like that wasn’t about your face. It was about the
tsarina
.

And now here Militsa was, the one duchess in the history of the Russian Empire unfortunate enough to have to bring a person who didn’t bathe for an audience with a fussbudget of a tsarina! And it was Militsa’s own fault—this was the worst of it. Hadn’t someone once told her it was a lack of hygiene that inspired the creation of perfume, not bathing being the mother of that particular necessity all those centuries ago, when people made a practice of avoiding water? The great unwashed might get used to their own stink, but the stink of others would still be intolerable. It would have to be eclipsed by a better, stronger smell. And here this Father Grigory person was, looking like a thirteenth-century peasant, a man literally from the Dark Ages. Because that was what Siberia was. That was practically its official definition. Dark Ages.

Father smiled at Militsa. He knew her thoughts. And he knew that in this instance, sophisticated as she might be in the ways of society, she was wrong. Father was beyond and apart from society. His value to the tsarina would be the same as it had been for Militsa: that he was an outsider, unapologetically.

“Come,” Father said, and he stood up from the couch and opened his arms. “Come, little one, don’t cry.”

Militsa put down the clothing and walked toward the open arms. Through his stained and unwashed blouse, his armpits smelled like onions, and like onions they made her eyes water. “Look at me, child,” he said, and she tipped her face up and he tipped his down and then she was looking into his eyes. Or he was looking into hers. In either case, the result was the same. Militsa breathed through her mouth while she unbuttoned her dress. It was possible to will yourself not to smell something unpleasant. No doubt doctors had to do it all the time. In a minute he would be on her, and in her, and he’d make her cry out.

Oh, she’d cried plenty of times with other lovers, but this wouldn’t be crying. This would be crying out.

“I
TAKE IT YOU’VE FORGIVEN ME
,” Militsa said in the carriage on the way to the palace.

“I take it you’ve forgiven me,” Father answered.

The decorative Abyssinian guards at the door to the royal apartments stood aside and bowed. My father looked the one on the left up, and he looked him down.

“Heavens above,” he said. “You’re as black as my boot.”

“Ssssst!” Militsa spat like a cat, trying to hush him.

“Yes,” the man agreed.

“Where are you from?”

“Chicago.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s in Illinois. The United States. Of America.”

“America! Heavens be praised!” Father clapped his hands together and whistled with appreciation. By the time he was introduced to the tsarina, he was laughing raucously, jigging down the
halls, pinching the fabric of the servants’ uniforms with his dirty fingers, touching all the bibelots and weighing them in his hands to know their value.

“Alexandra Fyodorovna, may I present to you Father Grigory, about whom you’ve heard so many wondrous things.” Militsa curtsied deeply, and Father went down on his knees like a child, bowing his head.

“Mamochka,” Father said.

When he didn’t get up, Alexandra looked at Militsa, who shrugged and made a face that said, as clearly as if she’d uttered the words,
That man is beyond anyone’s ken
.

“Father Grigory?” Alexandra said.

“Mamochka.”

“Wouldn’t you like to … I mean, it would be lovely if … I do hope you don’t think you ought to remain kneeling.”

A
FTER THE AUDIENCE
, the tsarina went to her mauve boudoir and wrote something on a slip of paper that she folded and slipped between the Old and New Testaments of her Bible. Then she took it out and gently kissed it and put it at the feet of her largest Virgin, the one that had no baby in her arms. But that wasn’t right, perhaps. She tried one of the ones holding the Christ Child and then put it back between the Testaments. She felt breathless; her heart was beating too quickly.

She wasn’t going to share the date with Nicky or even tell him about the meeting with Father Grigory. Not that Nicky would doubt Father Grigory, not after he met him. There wasn’t a person on earth who could meet that man and doubt his goodness. But Nicky would worry about the strain on her nerves that hope represented. He’d start watching her that way he did, peering up under his eyebrows with a diagnostic intent he could never disguise.
After he’d done it enough times, she’d feel as if there really was something wrong with her, and then it would all begin again; she’d end up having to lie down for a month.

So she kept it hidden until September 23, 1904. And when Alyosha began to bleed and no doctor could stop it, she showed the paper to Nikolay Alexandrovich.

“Alyosha’s birthday,” the tsar said when he saw it. “You can’t think I’ve forgotten that.”

“No no. Of course not. It’s just that … Nicky, listen to me. I wanted you to see the paper because I wrote that date down more than a year ago. The
starets
Militsa brought to see me, Father Grigory—”

“Someone else was telling me about a Father Grigory. A sort of peasant madman. He’s taken over my cousin’s house entirely.

He’s—”

“Nicky.”

“What?”

“Listen to me, Nicky.”

“I am, dearest. Tell me.”

“Father Grigory gave me the date. He asked God, and God told him we would have a son on that date. And we did. Alyosha was born on the day Father Grigory said he would be.” Alexandra held the paper out to her husband, who looked at it again without taking it from her hand. It was hard to read his expression under his beard. “You don’t think I’m imagining things, do you, Nicky?” she asked.

“Of course not. Why would I? Some people do have … what do you call them? Premonitions. He had a premonition, and because he’s a simple sort of person he calls it God, but it’s—”

“Nicky. You have to have him brought here, for the baby. Please, Nicky, I beg you, please—please do it for me. Indulge me, Nicky. Please.”

“My poor dear girl,” he said. “Let me hold you.”

“Nicky, Nicky, please. Please, Nicky. What harm could it do? If you don’t believe in Father Grigory, or in the idea of a person like him, that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. I don’t care.”

“Alex—”

“I’m suffering so terribly. Please, Nicky. I think he’s dying. He will if the bleeding doesn’t stop, and it doesn’t. It just goes on and—”

“Darling girl, my poor darling girl. Alex, you haven’t slept. You’ll soon be ill if you don’t sleep. You have to leave him with the nurse for at least a few hours a night.”

“Are you even listening to me, Nicky? Our son is going to die. He will bleed to death.
Our son
. Father Grigory can help him. Please, he’s—Nicky, he isn’t even two months old.”

“Alex!”

“Nicky!”

“M
ASHA
!” A
LYOSHA PATTED THE CUSHION
on the divan. “We’ve got another hour before dinner,” he said, lying back, pulling me on top of him. “And, look, the guard is at it again, his finger in his ear.”

“There must be something stuck in there, the way it commands his attention.”

“I hope it’s poisonous, whatever it is. I hope it’s a venomous spider, and that it’s made its—”

“Stop. You promised, Alyosha.”

“Promised what?”

“You know. Nothing below the waist.”

“Ah, yes. The Marchioness of Queensberry strikes again.”

“Who?”

“ ‘That no person is to hit his adversary when he is down,’ ” he
recited. “ ‘Or seize him by the ham, the breeches, or any part below the waist.’ It’s one of the rules governing boxing matches only it was established by the Marquess, not the Marchioness, of Queensberry. Well, actually, before the marquess revised the rules they were called the London Prize—”

“I’m not your adversary, Alyosha.”

“You are when you refuse me what I want.” I pulled my hand away, and he took it back. “Just your hand, Masha. Only your hand. Please.” I pulled it away again.

“Oh, fine. Tell me a story about someone else. I’m sick of hearing about myself.”

“I can’t. You’ve driven them all out of my head with your … your …”

“Well, tell me something. I’m so bored. I know, tell me the first thing you remember.”

“A horse,” I said without hesitation. I don’t think I have any childhood memories that don’t include horses.

“Really? Not your mother or father?”

“I suppose the horses made a bigger impression.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“They would have to have, right there in the house.” Alyosha looked so astonished I began to laugh. “Where I come from, all but the wealthiest landowners live with their animals. For most of the year we need the heat of their bodies near our own. Why would we live separately and less comfortably than we could when we slept in the same room with the livestock?”

“You’re serious? You’re not teasing me?”

“I swear it,” I said.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I don’t know—probably because it seems so natural to me. It would have felt like announcing we had mice in the woodpile or icicles hanging from the eaves in the winter.”

My life began with horses as much as with humans. As soon as I could stand, I was walking under their great bellies and between their stamping feet. I don’t remember ever being afraid of their size. Money changed things, though. Once Father had become an established celebrity, half of Petersburg had paid him for one favor or another. Almost all of it he gave away, to those who were destitute, to the nuns who cared for the indigent, and, really, to anyone who asked for it. He didn’t like to have to use it or even to touch it, muttering about God and mammon and serving the right master. Still, each time he arrived home after a spell away, he’d take off his overcoat and the rubles—paper money and coins as well—would pour out of his pockets, all of it jumbled up and most of the bills crumpled together into wads that Dimitri took great delight in smoothing out. Dimitri didn’t understand much about money, but something inspired him to handle each bill with a care approaching reverence, and he was especially pleased—so much that he had to run in circles around the ironing board—if Mother would allow him to watch as she ironed the bills flat before putting them away. She was saving them for something: a second story on the house, and a stone chimney with hearths on both floors.

I didn’t care for the new story on the house. I saw no reason our mother shouldn’t make herself happy, but I missed the horses when I came home in the summer. I wouldn’t have wanted them with me in an apartment in St. Petersburg, but in Pokrovskoye it felt unnatural to be separated. Especially at night, after I had gone to bed and could hear them whickering and sighing a floor below and out of reach.