Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (36 page)

I never lied about my abilities. I was a competent trainer of lions, tigers, and leopards, and professed no unusual talents. Whoever hired me lied in my stead, advertising a performer with the power to hypnotize animals, an occult ability illustrated on the midway as blue electricity zigzagging from my eyes. I could almost hear Father laughing. As for me, I found the portrait a little too similar to the cartoons of him and the tsarina plastered over every blank wall in St. Petersburg.

A
N
A
MERICAN AUDIENCE
wasn’t going to be satisfied as easily as those back home—that was clear from the start. The expectation of spectacle added to a name like Rasputin: I couldn’t claim such a heritage without doing something that seemed impossible. As impossible as laying hands on a hemorrhaging hemophiliac and stopping the blood from flowing. Anything less and I’d disappoint. In Europe, people wanted to see me perform because I was a Rasputin. They didn’t care about my proving my expertise. They accorded it to me as a birthright. But Mr. Forepaugh—every time I proposed an act he asked for one more element, one more twist. Lions, tigers, leopards, pumas—I wanted to keep it to cats. I had experience with cats. Two lions, two tigers, two leopards, and two pumas. Not enough.

“A bear,” Mr. Forepaugh said. “A bear maybe could shake things up.”

I agreed: a bear. How different could a bear be from a lion?

“Can’t have just one.”

I said we’d add another. Mr. Forepaugh frowned. “There’s something … Something’s missing.”

Ten animals. What could be missing?

“I know what’s missing—that Hollywood bear,” he said. “That Hannibal bear.”

Hannibal tipped the balance because he had a history, like I did, the kind that seizes hold of people’s imaginations and inspires morbid curiosity. We weren’t even halfway through the off-season before they’d drawn up a new program that included his biography, ginned up to make him seem that much more dangerous, and hired a publicist to plant articles in the papers in Chicago, Detroit, Omaha, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati—anywhere Forepaugh–Sells was scheduled to perform—pitting the Daughter of the Mad Monk against the Man-Eating Hollywood Bear. Which might have been fine, if there hadn’t been ten other animals in the ring. If bears, like cats, had good eyesight and responded to visual cues.

They’d scrapped the jungle picture. It had been one of those blighted ventures, the kind in which everything went wrong—sets flooded, people got sick, the female lead broke her ankle, props burned up in a fire. A biblical onslaught of plagues, one after another, and then Hannibal, without provocation, tore a piece out of an actor’s shoulder, and the general disaster that the project became excused the bear any responsibility for his attack. It was interpreted as a spell of bad behavior generated by the picture’s unbeatable bad luck, something that hadn’t had anything to do with any particular bear; that would have happened no matter what bear, because that was the kind of bad luck it was—pervasive. Circus people are as superstitious as Russians.

•  •  •

N
ERO
. H
ANNIBAL
. T
HE
names seemed taken from an invocation. I never looked at Hannibal without thinking of Alyosha memorizing the Caesars as part of his ill-fated training for leadership—not after Alyosha suddenly returned to me, returned to life, it felt like, in his journal.

The under-trainer, Jim Nelson, and I were blocking out my ridiculous, stunt-packed “exotic extravaganza” on the day I received a thick envelope, much creased and smudged, addressed to Matryona Grigorievna Rasputina, with a series of crossed-out addresses. The idea had been to have two bears doing somersaults while I waltzed with a third, Hannibal, and an assortment of lions, pumas, leopards, and tigers sat on their haunches, looking at us and bringing their front paws together in clumsy, nearly silent applause. Hannibal learned the simple box step quickly. As soon as we played the recording, up he’d go on his hind legs. He couldn’t lead, but he did move in time with the music, and none of us had hoped for that much. It was enough to have a waltzing bear. For the Daughter of the Mad Monk to waltz with a bear to Strauss while a dozen potentially murderous animals watched was enough, even for Americans. He kept his front paws in the right attitude. As long as I did my part, his left paw looked as if it were guiding me at the waist, and he held the right one up for me to hold.

That afternoon, I had my hand on the arm of the phonograph and was about to set the needle on the record when a little man whistled from outside the fenced ring to catch my attention. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, and he looked like a Rumpelstiltskin with his huge ears and nose, his hunched back, and his peculiar black coat with its enormous pockets, out of one of which he drew the thick envelope.

“What is this?” I asked him as he pressed it into my hands.

“A gift from a friend,” he said in Russian.

“Who is this friend?”

“A friend in the old country,” he said, and he gave a deep bow.

The handwriting on the envelope was crabbed. Inside, an unsigned typewritten letter was tucked between the pages of a small black leather-bound book—a journal, written in a hand I knew well, as sometimes when Alyosha wanted me to come to him and tell a story, he sent me a note, usually through Nagorny. The letter explained that the journal had been smuggled out of the house where the family had been executed. As a kind of introductory remark—or perhaps a warning—the note’s author explained that the book contained the tsarevich’s account of his family’s exile, from August 1917, when they left Tsarskoe Selo, until July 17, 1918. I looked up from the letter to ask how the bearer of the envelope had come into its possession, but he had vanished.

T
HREE BEARS, TWO LIONS
, two tigers, two leopards, and two pumas.

“Asking for it,” Jim Nelson said of the act. “Too big for your britches,” he said. But it wasn’t that. I was distracted; I’d lost focus. Having read Alyosha’s journal once, I read it again and again, I don’t know how many times. I had trouble sleeping and couldn’t keep my mind on work. We were rehearsing when Hannibal escaped my control.

Jim shook his head when he visited. He stared morosely at the sheet tented over my leg. I hadn’t seen it. The expression on the face of whoever was unlucky enough to change the dressing told me all I needed to know. At night, with the door to my room open, light entered from the hall, and instead of the sheet I’d see a luminous white blur above my weeping, sutured thigh. What with
morphine and fever dreams, I took this to be the ghost of my leg hovering over its mangled flesh, uncertain as to whether it was to go on to the next world or remain with me in this one.

According to the calendar hung on the wall opposite my bed—“To help orient you,” the nurse explained—it was nearly May. I’d slept through half of April. Well, not slept exactly. The last thing I remembered, Hannibal was on my chest. He’d pinned my shoulders to the ground and was licking my temple. I was laughing. I thought he was kissing me.

“How many stitches?” I asked the nurse unwrapping my thigh.

“Do you have any idea what lives in the mouth of a bear?” she answered, as if to imply I’d been careless in choosing a means of injuring myself. I did know, actually, as the pathology report was clipped under the fever chart at the foot of my bed and I’d got the night nurse to show it to me.
Staphylococcus epidermidis, Streptococcus, Escherichia coli, Serratia fonticola, Serratia marcescens, Aeromonas hydrophila, Bacillus cereus, Enterococcus durans
.

Jim visited with a photographer from a local paper and two panther cubs. “Borrowed from the zoo,” he said. “Mr. Forepaugh wants a little good publicity.”

“We see a lot of circus people,” the nurse told the photographer. “And there are accidents. There are always accidents. Rasputin,” she said, shaking her head. “Can you imagine?” She talked about me as if I weren’t there or couldn’t understand English, and I was reminded of Alyosha’s telling me that was how he knew he wasn’t expected to live, the way no one ever bothered to keep anything from him.

She cranked up the bed so the photographer could pose me with the under-trainer and the cubs.
Miss Rasputin being comforted by her lifesaver, Jim Nelson, who brought the cheerful cubs to her bedside at the Dukes Co. Hospital
. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes, but it exhausted me. All the articles I saw lauded
Jim for his courage in pulling the bear off me. A lot of telegrams, mostly from people I didn’t know.

I waited until the nurse left the room to ask if Hannibal had been put down.

“I’m sorry,” Jim said. And then the nurse came back in; he slipped away. Poor Hannibal.

I had the most peculiar dreams. Even when I thought I was awake. I’d look up and there Alyosha would be, sitting not just on the bed but on my injured leg. “Well,” he’d say, “this is unexpected—you bleeding to death for a change,” and he’d laugh as if it were a fine joke on me. Apparently I very nearly had. Bled to death, I mean.

It Was Magic

A
LREADY AS HE WALKED HOME
with Nagorny, Alyosha was beset by images of Katya’s naked body—plagued by suggestive and even outright wanton visions, which would be enjoyable to a degree, but that was just it. There was no degree, no gradual anything. All he could think of was her nakedness, the dusky pink and brown of her nipples. And her thinness, her ribs and her collarbones—so different from the women he was used to seeing. She looked that much more naked, sharpened by leanness. The hair between her legs was thick, dark. It was curly and silky at the same time. He’d imagined it would be coarse in texture. How could he think about anything else when he was vulnerable to visions like that? Katya’s body, the slightly acrid smell of her hair, the birthmark—these eclipsed every other thing. He couldn’t even see Lake Baikal represented on a map without becoming aroused.

Aware that Katya was doing something illicit, that she should not, at seventeen, sit astride him and rub him so confidently, betraying this as something she’d done many times before, Alyosha knew he should feel disgusted by her. He’d been raised to find such gestures too vulgar to succeed in exciting his attention. Instead, he itched with lust. No sooner had he ejaculated than he wanted to be doing whatever would lead to that feeling again. And if Katya’s knowingness about intercourse made her a wicked girl,
it also made her a powerful kind of goddess; the two coexisted. Not a deity he’d been raised to worship, that was true, but he was learning the world was big, so very big, and filled with many different kinds of women to admire, to want to see naked and hold in one’s arms. Anyway, he hadn’t time to waste on waiting for the right kind.

He had to see her again, as many times as possible. And Nagorny would have to help him. Nagorny would have to understand that this was not the kind of thing that should be denied to a person. Especially not to a person whose days were numbered—it might be all right to deny it to another boy, under other circumstances, but Alyosha wasn’t that other, theoretical boy. He was the one being shipped off to his death, one way or another. He was the one who deserved Katya.

“Nagorny,” he said. “I’d like it very much if we could do this again.”

“Visit Kolya?”

“I want to go to Kolya’s house. I want to go as often as I can. But I want … Here’s what I’m asking you, Nagy. I’m asking you to tell Father and Mother that we are going out for walks. Say it’s for strengthening my leg. I want to go whenever the weather permits.”

Nagorny looked at him.

“Please, Nagy,” he said, and Nagorny, knowing what he was being asked, agreed.

I
T WAS
MAGIC
. The skies remained a clear sparkling blue; the temperature never dipped uncomfortably low. Reason suggested it would be difficult if not impossible to arrange even a few meetings between Alyosha and Katya, what with the presence of Katya’s family in the house as well as her father’s medical practice. But one opportunity after another presented itself. The mother had gone to
the market in Medyanki Tatarskie; the father was at an old man’s deathbed; the maid, asleep. The maid had woken up and gone to help her seamstress sister, who had fallen behind in filling orders; the father had been summoned to attend to a birth in Savina; the mother, having eaten some bad meat, was ill and confined to her room. The mother had recovered and was in her garden, pulling all the weeds that had sprung up while she was ill; the father was closeted in his examining room with a difficult case; the maid had taken the carpet down to the river to wash, as it was too large to wash at home.

Handsome Alyosha, he wrote in his journal, was astonished by his good luck—it was even better than winning a bicycle race against Hermes and Chronos. He was able to be with Katya almost as often as he cared to be.

At night, lying in bed, he sorted through the details of “being a tsarevich,” as she called it, to come up with the most amusing among them.