Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (29 page)

“No. But he had the sense to want to protect the people from being slaughtered. And to see that the rioting had more to do with people starving than with political impulse. I heard him tell my father he should fill the troop cars with grain and send them west to the starving cities, rather than east to pour legions of ill-equipped men into battle. You don’t have to be educated to understand that if industry is confined to Moscow and Petersburg and the rest of the country remains as it was in the Dark Ages, Russia will be destroyed. It’s common sense, that’s all.”

“I suppose.”

“Are you going to kiss me, Masha?”

“Yes.”

“And let me undress you?” He began undoing buttons before I had a chance to answer.

“Stop.” My buttoning couldn’t catch up with his unbuttoning, and I turned away, annoyed at his presumption.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s your being imperious. So certain that no one can refuse Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich—”

Whatever he demands
, I was going to say, but Alyosha had
pinned me, without warning, against the glass wall and his tongue was in my mouth, silencing mine. His hand wasn’t in my blouse but under the waistband of my skirt, and my underclothes were as compliant as a prince might expect. The drawstring I thought I’d double-knotted gave way immediately to his seeking hand, as good as inviting it between my legs. The air within the hothouse was so humid on that August morning that enough moisture had condensed on the glass’s surface to prevent anyone seeing through with any clarity. Except that he’d forced me right against the wall.

“Someone will see,” I said, feeling the wet through my blouse and picturing what it must look like from the outside, my silhouette pressed against the glass. “Alyosha, stop.”

But he didn’t, not until he was ready, and when he let me go he brought his hand to his mouth, tasting his fingers that had been between my legs, a gesture I found so outrageous—I did then, at eighteen—I couldn’t speak. I tied what had come undone, buttoned what had been unbuttoned, straightened my blouse, tucked it back into my skirt, and went outside. It was a cool day for August, heralding the approach of fall, and I was glad for the air on my face. Confused as I was by his touching me the way he had, I could still feel his fingers, where they had been and how they’d moved inside me. He’d put his fingers where I’d never even thought to put my own, and I didn’t know which of us to be surprised at—him, for doing such a thing, or me. Was I so innocent, then, to be shocked by what he’d done, and was it shock I felt, or was I running away from what I was afraid I wanted? I was walking—marching—so quickly that by the time I heard Alyosha call my name I was passing the grove of poplar stumps and wondering, as I did whenever I saw them, who would burn the logs that had been cut and stacked by the last tsar of Russia. And then, as I burst though the door, pursued by two guards, I was looking right at him.

“Matryona Grigorievna! Just who I wanted to talk to.” The tsar smiled. “You’re out of breath,” he said. The guards stood, waiting, silent. By now I thought of them as something closer to furniture than people, as they were always there, in uniform, looking bored and rarely initiating eye contact.

“Oh. A little. I was walking outside.” I hoped my face betrayed none of what I felt, because I thought he gave me a look of pointed concern, and I had never before seen any but his habitual expression of hearty, avuncular good spirits. It was Tsar Nikolay’s innate courtesy, I think, and not pride, which inspired his manufacturing an optimism so clearly counterfeit that it had the effect of conveying his misery better than tears might have done.

“Well, then, Masha, catch it, catch it. I’m not in such a hurry that I can’t wait for you to catch your breath.” Hands clasped behind his back, he rocked on his military heels and smiled at me under his mustache. It was uncanny how closely Tsar Nikolay resembled his cousin George V, whose refusal of asylum would end in the murder of the tsar, the tsarina, and the five children she bore him. I’d heard it said that whenever the tsar visited England, friends of King George singled him out to talk intimately to a man they assumed was George but was in fact Nikolay. When they were young, the two went so far as to trade clothes and play the kind of pranks for which identical twins are infamous. I thought of that when I bumped into the tsar in the corridor.

“I wanted to tell you as soon as I knew,” he said. “We—I—have argued successfully for your release.”

“You … I mean, we … Varya and I? We’re to be released? When?”

“Immediately.”

“Today?”

“Yes. We will all leave today, as soon as we are packed.”

“All of us?” I said, momentarily astonished by what I hoped I’d heard. “We’re all to be released, all of us together?”

“No,” Tsar Nikolay said. “My family and I are going east. Comrade Kerensky has generously provided for our safety by offering us transport to Tobolsk.”

“Tobolsk! Good heavens, that’s Siberia,” I said, like a simpleton, and I burst into tears.

“Oh, no, Masha.” The tsar pulled me into an awkward embrace, which only made me cry harder. “There’s no need to worry. You’ll see. Everything is going to be fine for us once we’re out of the capital. Why, as Alex said, the people of Siberia are your father’s people and will be more friendly to … to the idea of us.”

“But where will you live?” I asked. “How?”

“I’m told the governor’s mansion has been barricaded, and some of its grounds as well. We’ll be able to plant things there. Vegetables.” He said this with a wondering tone, as if surprised by his good fortune. And I nodded, struck dumb at the thought that the tsar had—or imagined he had—been given what he’d wanted all along: a little farm.

I wanted to talk to Alyosha before I told Varya, but I couldn’t find him.

“I don’t know what you’re crying for, Masha,” she said as we packed. “We’re going to get out of here.”

“You won’t miss OTMA? Tatiana? All of them?”

“Well, yes, of course. But all the worry is over—they’re not going to be harmed, only exiled. And only for as long as the war goes on. Once the Reds are defeated, OTMA and everyone will come back home, here.”

“Don’t tell me you believe that.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s a lie.”

•  •  •

B
Y THE TIME
Alyosha and his family, along with Botkin and Nagorny, were ready to leave for Tsarskoe Selo’s station, we still hadn’t had a chance to exchange any words in private.

Alyosha was dressed for the trip east in his military uniform, as was his father. Both were of green wool and included a line of medals pinned under the collar. He put his hand out as if to shake mine, and his sisters laughed. Wasn’t he going to kiss me? they wanted to know.

But he didn’t, he just stood, and we held hands in front of everyone, looking into each other’s eyes for a long moment, enough that I sensed restlessness on the periphery of our locked gaze. I gave him the gift I’d been saving for the goodbye I’d been dreading. It was a pocket-sized sailor doll that I’d found among the children’s old toys. I’d replaced his uniform with one I’d made from the same fabric as Alyosha’s, and I gave him a little sword, which I bound to his hand with thread.
For Handsome Alyosha
, I’d written on the box I’d put it in and tied with ribbon.

“Don’t open it now,” I said, “please,” and he nodded. Neither of us cried, not then or there, in front of so many eyes.

T
HAT NIGHT
, Alyosha and the rest of his family boarded a train disguised as a Red Cross foreign-aid vehicle bristling with Japanese flags. They went with two valets, six chambermaids, ten footmen, three cooks, four assistant cooks, a butler, a sommelier, a nurse, a clerk, and their two spaniels, Joy and Jimmy. Within a year they’d all be dead, all except one of the dogs, the one named Joy, of all things. I’d never see any of them again. Not in my waking life.

Anna Vyrubova escorted Varya and me to 24 Nikolaevskaya Street, the villa of the tsar’s brother Michael, but we saw neither
the prince nor his family, only servants. Michael, in whose favor Nikolay had abdicated, was tsar for only one day before abdicating in hope of saving his life. Later, I’d learn he’d been exiled to Siberia as well, but to Perm, where he was executed, alone, on June 12, 1918. Nathalie, his wife, and their son, George, escaped to Paris.

Long before she was murdered, the tsarina’s sister Ella (at whose wedding Alexandra met Nikolay) had been widowed, her beloved Sergei dispatched in 1905 by an assassin’s bomb. Ella, who crawled over the snow on her hands and knees to collect what bleeding bits she could of her dead husband—a foot still in its boot, a piece of skull, one arm, half a torso—never remarried but abandoned court life for that of a nun and, ultimately, an abbess. She and a handful of other Romanovs were transported to Alapayevsk, Siberia, where, on July 18, 1918, they were blindfolded and ordered to walk the length of a log placed over an abandoned mine shaft, sixty feet deep. Anyone who refused was shot, and the rest all fell off the log before they reached the other side. According to the officer in charge of the massacre, Ella was still singing Orthodox hymns after he’d thrown two grenades down after her; he’d had no choice but to fill the shaft with brush and debris, which, just to be safe, he doused with gasoline and set on fire.

As for Vladimir, Alexei, and Paul, the remaining three of the Meddlesome Four, they were held in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petersburg, where they lived off rats and rainwater until January 28, 1919, a Tuesday. Ordered to strip to the waist before being taken out to the frozen courtyard, they waited, chained and shivering, for nearly an hour before a firing squad arrived and put a stop to their chattering teeth.

City of Light

I
T WAS 1926
, Boris had died, and I had left Paris, by the time I learned that Varya’s train, the one she had taken home to Pokrovskoye under the care of a paid chaperone, was shunted off the rails just west of Kazan. Soldiers boarded the cars to requisition anything of value. They were Bolsheviks, or they were base persons, rapacious and villainous, who called themselves Bolsheviks to excuse their wickedness—for such things were commonplace during those years of spreading anarchy—and they took jewels, billfolds, firearms. They raped whom they pleased, who pleased them, I suppose, and murdered anyone who didn’t escape.

I didn’t learn all the details at once. A letter was passed from hand to hand until, at last, the hand it reached was mine. Varya had never arrived in Pokrovskoye, it said, in my mother’s painstaking script. It had been more than five years since I’d seen or heard from her, and the sight of those carefully formed letters was enough of a shock that I stared at them for a few moments before opening the envelope. They summoned a clear vision of my mother sitting at the table, the lamp to her left, and the inkwell to her right, her head bent in concentration.

Writing a letter was not a casual undertaking for my mother. Always, she prepared for it as if for a sacred project. If her hair had grown untidy while she did chores, she’d comb it out and put it up
again. She’d clear the table and run a damp rag over its surface, wash and dry her hands, before opening the drawer that held her pen and paper.

From 1926 to 1929 I wrote hundreds of letters to dozens of people, to anyone who might know anything and whose address I had. Somehow, until the day I saw my mother’s handwriting, I’d managed to keep my face set forward, away from the past, focused on the future. But the letter acted on me like a spell. Consumed by my need to know what had happened to my family, I wrote whomever I could think of, and I asked each person I wrote to make inquiries on my behalf; I asked for the address of anyone who might have information or be able to help me in some other way. Hundreds of messages that never found their way to their intended recipients. I’d lie in bed at night and try to imagine the fate of those letters. Did the Soviets seize and destroy them? Did they keep them in a growing file labeled
Matryona Grigorievna Rasputina
? Did they use them as a justification—not that they seemed to require such a thing—to investigate the persons to whom they were addressed? I had no idea and, really, I didn’t care. I knew I should care if my inquiries brought harm to anyone, but I didn’t. After years of determined avoidance, a kind of protective carapace that shattered at the sight of my mother’s letter, I was so fixed on finding out what had happened to my family that I couldn’t care about anything else.

B
Y 1919, EVERYONE KNEW
the Romanovs had been executed—everyone except my husband. We hadn’t lived in Paris for even a year before Boris had organized a secret ragtag society of rabid anti-revolutionaries plotting from afar to restore the tsar to his throne.

“Clever Papa has hidden himself,” Boris would say as he paced the apartment, referring to Nikolay Alexandrovich, what little was left of him jumbled among the remains of his wife and children at
the bottom of a mine shaft—not the one in which Ella sang her last hymn but another of the countless deep graves left conveniently open after the miners had exhausted the earth’s ore and moved on to dig other holes in which to drop the bodies of other enemies of the revolution.