Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (38 page)

Released from their holding cages, the tigers surged through the chutes that delivered them to the fenced center ring. The ripple of muscle under fur, the effortless grace of their leaping onto their platforms. Even their faces—to look at one required something like endurance if I was not to be overwhelmed by its beauty, which, like the tolling of Father’s last funeral bell, reached under my skin and found that place where I couldn’t defend myself, couldn’t withhold what it demanded.

I didn’t see their faces so much as their faces sprang toward my eyes. Their capacity for violence infused their beauty with terror, intensifying it to the point that I felt intoxicated—by color, and by form and depth, by all that creates the image of a thing. I lacked a volume knob, a means of turning myself down; my heart was wrung by love. Each white whisker shimmered. Together they radiated outward from the center of the animal’s face like a spray of spangled sterling wands. The wide nose wrinkled in a snarl of perfect
symmetry, and out from it twirled a living pinwheel of black and orange stripes, the animals’ eyes lost in the pattern of their coats. Their hot breath came at me in waves, rank and moist on my skin, when I gave the audience what it wanted most: my head in the cat’s open mouth.

Each choreographed movement, each flick of the whip and twitch of a tail, each snarl and raised paw with its scimitar claws and black pads creased like the palm of a man but infinitely more complex, not just the animal’s but the whole world’s destiny foretold. In every living thing, in every cell of our beings, was the world’s destiny foretold. I could hear, at last, the tremendous voices in what had once been silence.

Anyone who saw me in the ring assumed my crying was a symptom of stage fright, but that wasn’t it, not at all. I was so alive in those moments it was as if I were burning all over, every nerve awakened, and in that state I couldn’t help but feel my mortality with an equal force. I cried, caught between the knowledge of my life and that of my death—to think I’d one day lose myself, myself and all this splendor, everything I loved. How would I bear it?

With the cats, under the spotlight, I understood what—whom—I’d been waiting my whole life to understand, what I once imagined I’d felt with horses but now knew I never had. I knew what my father felt when he healed. Ecstasy. Of course it had to have been. I’d known that, but I hadn’t yet felt it.

Tickets to an Execution

M
AY
29, 1918, Y
EKATERINBURG

I’ve been here almost a week. (Father, Mother, Maria, and a few servants arrived on April 30, in the vanguard. Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, Nagorny, Botkin, and I followed three weeks later, as I’d bumped my knee on Katya’s bed frame and Botkin wouldn’t allow me to travel before he was certain there would be no further “complications,” as he calls them.)

They’ve painted all the upper story’s windows white so we can’t see beyond the high wood fence around the property. I noted the fence as we were taken to the house from the train station. Clearly they’d only just built it, anticipating our incarceration on the premises, as the lumber was new and yellow. There are few excursions outside for us, who are locked on the second floor, the guards directly below us. Sometimes one will bang the butt of his rifle on the ceiling, just to give us a start. Each day from three until four in the afternoon we are escorted outside to a “garden,” where we may walk and breathe fresh air, Mother and I both in our wheeled invalid chairs. There is no vegetation that hasn’t been trampled underfoot by the guards, a dozen or more of them, each carrying a revolver as well as rifle and bayonet. They enter our quarters whenever they please, without knocking. Already they’ve seen
Olga undressed. There are two machine guns, two that we have seen, one on the balcony outside the room I share with Mother and Father and another on the roof. Across the street is a barrack with one hundred and fifty men inside.

The official name of our lodgings is “The House of Special Purpose.” Rather grand, isn’t it? I wonder if all totalitarian regimes don’t share a fondness for euphemism. A man named Ipatiev used to own the building. I asked our footman, Trupp, what kind of man Ipatiev was, and he said he was a military engineer. I asked again and he said he was a rich Jewish burgher, whatever that means. It wasn’t what I was asking, and I suppose it doesn’t matter, only that a White Army engineer might not like to have his house used for such a “special purpose” as this.

Although, judging from our reception at the train station, Yekaterinburg is thoroughly Red. Not one of the ten thousand revolutionary soldiers stationed here (that is the number reported by the Reds themselves) made any effort to subdue the mob.

“Show us the Romanovs!” people kept shouting, which, as Mother pointed out, is arguably better than their asking that we be handed over to them to do with what they would, but it made me feel that much more a criminal and a freak to hear people screaming for a look at us. It wasn’t any different from the way crowds flocked to the Kunstkamera’s Cabinet of Curiosities when the Fiji Mermaid came to St. Petersburg. Everyone wanted to see her, even if all she was was the top half of a dead monkey and the bottom half of a dead fish sewn together into a creature that never existed.

That’s exactly what they are,
the Romanovs:
a false family at which to peer and shudder.
The Romanovs
resemble us physically. In fact, they look just like us. But they have nothing to do with us, with the human beings we are. They’re made up—made up by other people, people who don’t know us, who’ve never met us—and the parts they’ve sewn together are worse than dead monkeys
and dead fish.
The Romanovs
are a family about whom horrors are written and illustrated. Drawings of women who look like my mother and sisters fornicating with a satanic rendering of Father Grigory, who drinks blood from a wine bottle he extends to my mother’s lips, and drawings of a man supposed to be my father without any clothes, which doesn’t matter as he hasn’t any private parts to cover. Those are in my mother’s hand; she holds them as if making a toast, blood running down her white wrist.

He’s a good person, Trupp, you can tell from his face. He’s old enough for the lines to have set in their habitual expression, which is one of patience, benign. He reminds me of a squirrel. It’s partly those funny ears, with the reddish hair growing up off them in pointed tufts, but his eyes have a quizzical look, and he moves with sudden energy. He seems unaffected by the situation in which he finds himself, the officers always insulting and high-handed, punishing him for what he can’t help. Ordering him around for the fun of it. When it seems imminent I’ll give him this volume. A shot in the dark, Nagorny would call it, but if anyone can figure out how to smuggle it out, Trupp can.

J
UNE
4

I don’t know why I told Masha that Mother had prostituted herself to Father Grigory. It was disgusting of me. And of course there’s no way to apologize now.

After Dina took my things—as if I cared to keep my toys—I found copies of handbills with dirty pictures in my room. He’d thrown them all over, dozens of them. It’s taken me some time to understand myself (it’s more than fourteen months since Dina left), but it was those pictures that provoked my bad behavior. Saying what I did to Masha—perhaps I was frightened it might be
true, perhaps I was testing her. Or maybe I was just being an idiot out of boredom. Whatever the reason, I am ashamed of myself.

Here in the “House of Special Purpose,” no one escapes humiliation. The guards have drawn pictures of Mother and Father Grigory on the wall inside the water closet we are to use. No one’s allowed to relieve him or herself without accompaniment to the lavatory door. Once whoever it is has gone in, the guard stands outside and waits. “Have a good long look,” he says each time he takes one of my sisters, and he sings lewd songs outside the door or comments on any noise he might hear through the door. He made sure all of us heard his telling Tatiana he’d love to give her “the ride on his pole” she’d “begged for”—speaking in his version of a stage whisper, guttural and almost wet, as if to suggest drooling—but he was “under orders not to fornicate with the prisoners.”

It didn’t matter that the idea was preposterous, that whatever he said reflected only his vice and not hers, as we all knew Tatiana was innocent. Suddenly her ability to perceive every torment as a sacrifice, a thing she could endure for the sake of her faith, for Christ, collapsed, and for two days now she has refused to get out of bed. She pretends she doesn’t hear Father’s cajoling or Mother praying for her. Unless she really doesn’t hear anything. It’s odd to see her, of all my sisters, sinking into apathy. If I’d ever anticipated such a passage as the one we are enduring, I’d have guessed Anastasia would be the first to succumb to despair, but she just goes on reading or sewing or, unaccountably, conjugating Latin verbs.

“What are you doing that for?” I asked.

“Be quiet, Alyosha,” she said. “Now I have to start over.”

As for Tatiana, she remains curled on her side, her face averted from the doorway, from anyone who speaks to her, and her eyes fixed on one of the painted windows, staring at the white square. She will end in making herself ill by refusing to ask when she needs to go to the water closet. It’s just a matter of time.

At dinner, soldiers walk around the table and spear what they want from off our plates. Especially Father’s. Every time he tries to lift his fork to his mouth, Avadyev—he’s the commanding officer—intercepts it with his dirty-looking pocketknife.

“Haven’t you had enough of the Soviet’s generosity, bloodsucker?” he says, and he laughs as Father replaces his cutlery on his plate and leans back in his chair, tells the man to please help himself.

J
UNE
12

Nagorny has been executed. A guard tried to take my chain with the saints’ medals. I’d left it looped around the bedpost—that rule Mother has about never wearing anything around my neck when I’m sleeping—and had forgotten to put it back on. Nagorny stopped the guard, told him it belonged to me, and took it out of the man’s hands. Within minutes he’d been arrested and taken away in an automobile. The next day Avadyev brought the chain back, its gold links and medals crusted over with blood. “Here,” he said. “Your nanny has paid for your trinkets.”

I didn’t imagine revolutions advanced by subtleties, but I thought it would just be us they shot, not Nagy or anyone who wasn’t a Romanov. Now I’m grateful Masha isn’t here. I like to imagine she’s somewhere wonderful, America perhaps, and that she’s happy and has enough to eat and beautiful dresses to wear and a stable full of horses. Now it’s I who lie in bed at night and imagine her saying good night to them one by one, just the way she used to dream of doing in the ship that carried the Wild West Show. I hope Soloviev isn’t ever unkind to her, but I can’t hope she’s grown to love him.

Their killing Nagorny so unreasonably, for protecting me, for the crime of caring for me, has made me feel that much more friendly to the idea of being dead myself.

The happiest I ever saw Nagorny was on those occasions my health took a turn for the better. When I could walk after a period of lameness, when I could play outside with the dogs, when he was at last allowed to take me into the park—a few times I caught him crying on such occasions. “Why, Nagy,” I’d say, “Nagy! For whom are those tears?” And he would brush me off. “They are nothing,” he’d say, “a bit of soot in my eye.” And I was young enough and ignorant enough to believe him when he told me sailors didn’t cry.

I feel sorry for the rest of us—Father, Mother, my poor pale sisters who sit grimly sewing and sewing, hiding jewels in their corsets. Poor Botkin and Trupp. They aren’t even guilty of being Romanovs. I’ve known I was about to expire ever since I was conscious—really, I have no memory of being without the looming threat of extinction—so this situation, this particular punishment for the rest of the family, is simply more of the same for me. Before Nagorny was killed, the only thing to cause me true unhappiness had been separation from Masha. Even Katya, much as I still long to feel her touching me, was just a pastime.

I think I understand something. If complete enlightenment demands relinquishing the self, then complete enlightenment implies the acceptance of mortality. Not that there isn’t more to being enlightened than accepting that our lives are brief and end when we die. But I do think it’s a requirement. Whether by temperament or circumstance, I am more Buddhist than Orthodox, not that I’d let on to Mother. I admit I felt a flare of hatred for Mother and her religiosity when the chain and medals were returned to me. “Trinkets.” It was the right word for them. I never believed Father Grigory’s
gift had anything to do with God. Not her God anyway. And she doesn’t believe in anything that doesn’t belong to her God. It’s funny—I think I loved my mother better when Masha was with me, when she turned everything into stories. She made all of us more sympathetic. She made us out to be braver and kinder, with flaws that were delightful. Like Mother’s cloud.