Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (26 page)

I rode every day I could when I was home, in all but the most inclement weather. At the prospect of returning to Siberia, I thought of the horses before I did my mother, who regretted having encouraged what she considered my unnatural fixation on them. Often during the winter when I was a child, even one as young as four or
five, Father found me lying on Valentine’s back, my face buried in his mane, my legs hanging limp—asleep. He didn’t think to lift me off. I was a little girl, but he knew I was safe there. Mother didn’t believe that, though. She hated Valentine, especially after I lost my front teeth, a good year ahead of time, by falling off and hitting my face when he tore across a field. But it was never that he’d thrown me, and he always came back to where I’d fallen, standing guard over me like a warhorse. If I was still lying on the ground catching my breath, he’d push my shoulder with his nose until I got myself up. I was never frightened, and there was never any reason to be. It just didn’t occur to me.

I rode in St. Petersburg, without a saddle or a bridle—much to the astonishment of other riders in Dubki Park. There was a stable there, and horses for hire, and I spent as many as I wanted of the rubles Father kept stuffed in a chamber pot under his desk, much to Dunia and Varya’s disgust. He’d laugh whenever either of them tried to move the bills to a drawer. “No,” he’d say, “that’s the place for it. The root of all evil, with a smell worse than shit.”

Spiderweb

T
HE POLICE CAME
to the apartment on Gorokhovaya Street. It was the first day of the New Year, 1917. They took Varya and me to the Petrovsky Bridge to show us where they’d dragged a body out from under the ice. We hadn’t seen Father for three days—no one had. The night he went out and didn’t return, Varya and I had hidden his boots. It was an old game with us. From the time we came to live in Petersburg, we hid Father’s boots when we wanted him to stay home with us instead of disappearing for hours to dine with his important friends, few of whom genuinely cared for his welfare. That night, it had been Yusupov’s palace to which he’d been headed, and rather than laugh, as he usually did at our childish game—for it was one of those things between a father and his grown daughters, preserved from childhood, a gesture of affection—he grew unexpectedly angry and shouted and cursed us for making him late for a host who might consider tardiness rude. He kicked over the little side table on which Dunia had left her mending basket, scattering pins and spools and scraps of fabric, and we hurried to fetch his boots from where we’d hidden them. He wouldn’t allow me to help him but pulled the boots on by himself, taking the service stairs into the alley to avoid the police stationed in front of the building. I thought to stop him, to alert the police (who were there for his own safety, under orders from the tsarina)
as to where he was headed, but I didn’t. I remember thinking how useless it would be to try to sway my father from his pigheaded course, but I should have tried. I don’t know why I didn’t. I was tired, probably. It was exhausting living with my father. He had no idea how we fretted over him and his recklessness.

Before the collapse of the empire, Felix Yusupov was the richest man in all of Russia, heir to uncountable fortunes made on her fur trade and her mines. Married to Princess Irina, a niece of Tsar Nikolay, he was an eccentric man, by all accounts, with a face of surprising beauty, and he had a passion for dressing in his mother’s gowns and jewels and finding men to tease, rough men he found in places aristocrats generally didn’t visit. Because of this habit and his delicate features, it was said he preferred men to women, sexually. Many times he came to our apartment under the pretense of soliciting help from Father. He complained of headaches and ringing in his ears, and if Father was out he’d wait for him in our parlor, lying on the couch in ladies’ underclothes. When he came home, Father ignored Yusupov’s peculiar attire and took him at his word, holding Yusupov’s head in his hands and praying over it—as if it were the head of an honorable man, even though for months it had been rumored that Yusupov was conspiring to put an end to Father’s influence over the tsarina.

One look at Yusupov was all most people needed to see he was the type who’d rather murder a man than lose his social position. But Father, who could not conceive of killing, not even in the context of war, never understood he had enemies who would resort to murder. His martyrdom had been predicted, he foresaw he would be killed, but for Father this knowledge wasn’t attached to a particular person or persons. Once he’d met a man, he couldn’t imagine that man as a murderer, much less his murderer. He knew Yusupov’s intentions, he always knew what people tried to hide, so he must have trusted he could overcome these by force of will,
naïve enough to believe love could disarm an assassin, that he could rely on summoning that power from on high. Or he was ready for it, perhaps, ready for the end. What I do know is this: my father wasn’t afraid on the night he walked into the trap laid by his enemies. He was angry with us for hiding his boots, but he wasn’t afraid. He never expected to escape his fate. God’s will would, necessarily, be done.

The tsarina, however, was not willing for the prophecy of his martyrdom to be fulfilled. For months we’d lived under police watch. Every time we left the apartment, there they were, in their black automobile. Meant to protect him, all they did was take notes on his comings and goings, fueling rumors. There was no way to prove he hadn’t ravished the tsarina, a mother of five, and neither would there be a means to establish that Father hadn’t had sexual intercourse with her daughters—not after the way their bodies were handled following the execution, thrown into the back of a military truck and taken, before dawn, to an abandoned mine where they were hacked to pieces, doused with gasoline and lit on fire. Whatever wouldn’t burn was thrown down a shaft. But once the Bolsheviks had seized control from the provisional government, their investigation into my father’s influence on the tsar and tsarina forced Anna Vyrubova to go before a physician, who examined her and found her hymen intact. She was a virgin.

My father had intercourse with many women, hundreds of women who threw themselves at him, who, given the chance, searched our apartment for his nail parings or hairs that had fallen from his head, who stole tea glasses bearing smudges in the shape of his lips. But he wouldn’t have touched the tsarina or the Romanov girls or Anna Vyrubova. Often, Anna was the one sent to fetch Father to Tsarskoe Selo, where he would tend to Alyosha and then come to Alexandra Fyodorovna’s private apartments to pray with her before her ikons. That’s why it was rumored he was
Anna’s lover as well as the tsarina’s and her daughters’. Servants knew not to talk about Alyosha’s illness, but they didn’t extend that discretion to my father’s comings and goings.

The empire was crumbling, and a few monarchists decided there was no hope of saving it without first removing my father from what they mistook as a position of political power. Yusupov and his accomplices—three other aristocrats who dreamed of the glory that would be theirs once they snuffed out the pernicious influence of the sinister Father Grigory—lured my father to a late supper at Yusupov’s palace on the Fontanka Canal. There, they promised, he would at last meet Yusupov’s wife, the beautiful Irina, who was hosting a private party and would come for an audience with the famous
starets
as soon as her guests departed. In fact, Irina was far away, at the Yusupov’s villa in the Crimea, the party nothing more than a cranked-up Victrola playing at top volume. While Father waited downstairs for Irina, his assassins fed him cakes poisoned with cyanide and glass after glass of wine with more cyanide. It was enough, the coroner said, to kill a team of horses, but it had no effects on Father. Yusupov and his accomplices shot him in the head and in the back, and still he escaped. They chased him, still upright and lurching forward into the snowy night, to shoot him once more, bind his wrists and ankles with rope, and drop him through a hole in the frozen river.

T
HE DIVER WHO FOUND
F
ATHER
was still there when Varya and I arrived. He was a huge man, his furred chest caked with white grease—it looked like lard—to keep the cold water from killing him. He’d swum under the ice, breathing air through a tube, until he encountered the body of a man drifting slowly toward the frozen sea, his sleeve caught on a set of springs from a bed or couch someone had dropped in the Neva. Or maybe it had fallen in from the
back of a truck passing over the Petrovsky Bridge. The drowned man wore a wool coat and boots and had a long beard and long hair that floated up from his skull. The diver tied a rope around the man’s chest, high up under his armpits, tore his sleeve away from the wire that held it, and then climbed up out of the hole and gave the other end of the rope to the police. Wrapped in a bearskin, the diver drank from a steaming glass of tea while the police pulled on the rope. He’d never searched for a corpse before, only for lost objects, and his encounter with Father under the ice seemed to have unnerved him. He kept shaking his head from side to side, slowly, as if registering a mute refusal.

It was snowing when they brought us to the river, nine in the morning and still dark. Already a circle of onlookers had gathered—nothing like what was to come, but a crowd nonetheless, growing bigger. Father’s body had been carried to a small wooden structure on the bank, a shed of some kind, where he’d been stripped naked and laid out on a bench. A physician was present, inspecting his wounds and dictating to an assistant.

“Do you know this person?” the police inspector asked. Poor Varya: for all her pretensions at adulthood, she was only sixteen and seeing what no child at any age should ever be forced to see, her father dead and wearing nothing more than his wounds. They had a brazier going and his frozen body was thawing. The water that ran from his hair was stained with blood and dripped red on the floor; little rivulets ran toward our feet. Varya kept backing up to avoid the blood touching her shoes, but I left my feet where they were. I kept those shoes and wore them with their stains until they fell into pieces, and then I kept the pieces. I have them with me even now.

There was a hole where a bullet had entered the very center of Father’s forehead. I remember noting how perfectly placed was the
hole and thinking, of course, Yusupov would shoot a gun that way, as straight as the nose he looked down when he was aiming. He was incapable of untidiness or asymmetry. Aside from the bullet hole, Father’s skull had been broken with an ax or a boot, his poor head with its beautiful thoughts. No one understood what was in him. The intelligentsia, they were too stupid to recognize simplicity. I signed a paper of some sort, testifying to the body being that of my father, and Varya and I were taken back to Gorokhovaya Street. We didn’t imagine we’d ever return to the apartment, so we gathered our belongings.

I kept a few drawings my father had made, any I could lay my hands on: the one of the Virgin in the silver forest, and a few of animals and birds. We divided the photographs. A few included Father with a member of the imperial family, as the Romanovs, every one of them, were camera mad. Even under arrest, they took pleasure in posing and photographing one another. I packed my clothes, an ikon my mother had given me when I first left home for Petersburg, a shirt belonging to Father, the cross he always wore and that the police had allowed me to take from around his neck, his Bible, which he knew by heart but couldn’t read. I’d unpack and repack those few things a half dozen times before Boris and I reached Paris.

Belgrade. Budapest. Prague. Berlin. Frankfurt. Though I know it can’t have been so, my memories of each of the cities, of two years spent in a succession of cities, all take place in the same one-room apartment, unheated and unplumbed, a dirty communal toilet and sink at the end of a long, drafty corridor paved with broken tiles. One window, its cracks stuffed with rags and paper, admitting the cold. At night, in bed, Boris and I were forced to lie so as to align as much flesh as possible and thus hold on to the warmth of our bodies.

•  •  •

“W
HO WILL TELL
M
OTHER
?” I asked Dunia, whom we found sitting on a stool before the fire, chewing on her apron strings.

“I cannot,” she said, shaking and shaking her head after she’d spat out the strings. “Please, Masha, I cannot.”

So it was I who called Anna Vyrubova to ask her assistance in sending a telegram to Pokrovskoye. She was the only one I could think to ask for help. Assuming such a thing as a telegram was even possible in January, when the town lay unconscious as a bear during winter’s deepest cold. Mother and poor dull-witted Dimitri in their chairs before the hearth, eating and sleeping there as well, as the rest of the rooms were sealed off until the April thaw made them habitable once again. In winter we kept the samovar in the middle of the one upstairs room, opposite the fire, and if you put yourself between samovar and hearth, it was warm enough to remove your coat, and your fingers were not too numb and stiff to mend clothes or turn the pages of a book.