Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (6 page)

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D
EREVENKO, WHO HAD CARED FOR
A
LYOSHA
for eight years with a devotion that appeared sincere, had either feigned that love or lacked the character to resist what appeared to him as an immediate existential promotion. In the hours before he abandoned the tsarevich, he tested his new agency by sprawling on Alyosha’s bed and ordering him about.

“You!” he barked. “Light my cigarette. Polish my boots and shine my buckle. And when you’ve done that, go to the kitchen and get me something to eat.”

In silence, without betraying any resentment, Alyosha did all these things while his sisters and I looked on, none of us daring to protest. Dina, as Alyosha called him, sprayed crumbs over the bedclothes and wiped his greasy fingers on the satin wall covering while the tsarevich went to find the “good big traveling trunk” the sailor asked for.

“That,” Derevenko said when Alyosha came back. He pointed at Alyosha’s scale model of the family’s yacht,
Standart
, on which they sailed the Baltic Sea each fall. “And that. And all of those. Into the trunk with the rest of it.” Derevenko watched as Alyosha did as he was told, filling the trunk from his shelves and drawers and closets. The railway cars and sailing ships; the battalions of minuscule soldiers that marched—some of these playthings had been made by Peter Carl Fabergé and were worth inestimable rubles; the clothing the tsarevich wore for court appearances; his ikons and saints’ medals; his boots; his hairbrush and comb: whatever the sailor imagined would fetch a good price, especially those things that bore Alyosha’s initials or some other proof of their ownership, went into the trunk. When it was filled, he stood from the bed and brushed the crumbs from his shirt onto the floor.

“There it is,” he said to the tsarevich. He picked up an ornamental
sword, its hilt engraved with the Romanov crest, and used his shirt cuff to polish the ruby set into the pommel. “Severance pay.” He threw the sword back onto the pile of plunder and kicked the trunk’s lid shut.

Perhaps Alyosha’s forbearance had been, as he said when we spoke about it that afternoon, more the result of shock than noblesse oblige, but I saw him differently after Derevenko’s departure; I stopped calling him “your highness.” If the rumors had been true, if he had once been a child who threw tantrums and behaved shamefully, he was no longer that overweening boy, and it was wrong to tease him as if he were.

N
O ONE SLEPT
that first night. The tsarina dismantled Tsar Nikolay’s dressing room and found where he had saved the letters she’d written him during their courtship, and at three in the morning had set to work burning any that seemed prudent to destroy, as her children looked on. They, as well as Varya, gave the impression of being too stupefied to comment, but I was tantalized by the letters, enough that I insinuated myself into a corner from which I could make out the words of the one the tsarina had been reviewing before she turned to poke the fire. “It’s cold, isn’t it?” I said to Tatiana, pretending I’d moved to be closer to the hearth, but neither she nor her sisters gave any indication they noticed my trespass, only a replica of their mother’s vague smile, which they had perhaps been trained to summon in response to any social awkwardness.

I would never be able to summon the tsarina’s face without seeing it as it appeared while she destroyed her own carefully preserved history, letters so passionate I had to remind myself to keep my features composed while I read what I could of them. It was the first time I’d encountered that kind of thing—a love letter. I
hadn’t known they existed outside of novels, and I wondered if my mother would have written such things to my father if he’d known how to read.

That she might have was strangely fascinating to me. I contemplated the idea the way I did the exhibit of birds of the new world at the zoological garden. Here was plumage the color of which I’d never seen before.

The tsarina read quickly, but I could tell she wasn’t skimming the words, she was reading each one, her eyebrows drawn into an anxious V, her lower lip caught between her teeth, and her eyes wholly focused on the work before them, one page after another bearing her excitable penmanship, line after line punctuated by nothing save dashes and exclamation points. In contrast, the tsar’s hand was so regular a typewriter might have produced it.

The Tea-Tray Toboggan

V
ARYA, OUR BROTHER
D
IMITRI
, and I grew up as Father had done, in that part of Siberia where spirits walk the forests and swim the rivers and apparitions of the Holy Mother are not unheard of. Our flesh-and-blood mother, Praskovia Fedorovna Dubrovina, hailed from Yekaterinburg. A city girl when she arrived, the daughter of a merchant who retired to the country, Mother didn’t believe in what she called country superstitions, the kind held by people who lived in a town like Pokrovskoye, little more than the intersection of two roads, one to Tyumen, the other into the wild.

I spent my childhood in Pokrovskoye, knowing nothing of cities, until Father told Mother about the young ladies he met at court and she responded as if to a direction from on high. Providence had arranged a means of securing an education for her daughters, one we could never receive at home, and so I was enrolled in the Steblin–Kamensky Academy for Girls and sent to Father in St. Petersburg, labeled by my mother like a package to be handed from wagon to barge to train. Varya came two years later, when she turned ten. I was excited to be in so grand and important a place, where I could hardly sleep at night for all the carriages and automobiles I heard in the street, their wheels turning over the cobbles. My father might know the future, but I did not, and I
welcomed what appeared to be good fortune without wondering the cost.

Some of the girls at the academy were not allowed to speak to us. Their parents thought Grigory Rasputin a charlatan, either that or the devil. Because no one knew what it was that Father did, that it was he who stood between the tsarevich and death, and because Father was so often closeted with Alyosha and his mother while Tsar Nikolay was off waging war, gossip had it that he and the tsarina were lovers, that he and the tsar’s daughters were lovers, that he and the tsarina’s ugly confidante, Anna Vyrubova, were lovers. What else could explain the frequency of his visits to Tsarskoe Selo? Rasputin had mesmerized all the women around the tsar; the tsarina herself was his puppet; the two of them conspired to lead the tsar to make disastrous decisions. Father Grigory was the Antichrist in disguise, the skin hidden under his tunic bearing occult letters and symbols—Marks of the Beast—and he intended to destroy the motherland. Some days we would walk to school and, alert to such things, I’d see that a new inflammatory drawing had been printed and plastered on one wall after another we were forced to pass. Most were cartoons of Father and the tsarina, usually unclothed and locked together in positions that defied human anatomy if not some scoundrel’s filthy imagination.

“Keep your eyes down,” I told Varya. “You walk. I’ll hold your hand and guide you.”

And so we made our way to the academy, with obedient Varya’s innocence intact. Varya was like that when she was younger, untroubled by the kind of curiosity that forced me to look at everything, no matter how gruesome or depraved. There was never a month without a rumor, often printed by what pretended to be a reputable newspaper, about my father’s demonic control over the fate of Russia. Political power, rather than the tsar’s daughters or their mother, was the prize he allegedly sought. The ludicrous nature
of such reports had one benefit, in that I never worried any of them might be true. My father might have been a libidinous man who took every opportunity to gratify his desires, but he wasn’t so brazenly disrespectful, or such a fool, as to cuckold the tsar.

Even if Varya and I didn’t receive so many invitations to teas and birthday parties as did our schoolmates, a city like St. Petersburg offered endless distractions. Window-shopping was a thing we could do all day, wandering up and down the Nevsky Prospekt with Dunia, who had come from Pokrovskoye to keep house for Father, all of us entranced by objects as ordinary as brooms and washboards so long as they were in a bright window. We had to hurry Dunia past the Singer building, though, as she had a helpless attraction to sewing machines and could stand all day staring at the models on display, and heaven help us if there was a demonstration. For Dunia, that was better than Shakespeare.

Being a crown prince has its rewards, of course, but, like most with royal blood, Alyosha paid with his freedom. There was much of the world, almost all of it, he had never seen. What did he know of his own birthplace? Oh, he’d been taken like a tourist to all the sights, the Bronze Horseman and the Alexander Column and the little cottage from which Peter the Great had issued his decrees while he waited for his metropolis to assume proportions befitting his majesty. Alyosha had slept through a ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre; he’d stuffed his fingers in his ears while one or another of Antonina Nezhdanova’s arias transformed the same theater’s stage lights into a rain of broken glass that fell past the imperial box and, as if it were a planned effect, landed like glittering bits of ice on the proscenium. More than once he’d been allowed to meander among the shops at Gostiny Dvor, as much as a boy accompanied by an imperial guard can meander. In the shining black bombproof carriage presented by Napoleon III to his great-grandfather Alexander II—and what more suitable gift from one
tyrant to another?—he’d toured the Nevsky Prospekt and its fine shops filled with pastries and furs and haute couture fashions. With their English governess, he and his sisters had taken tea in a tea shop, just like a more average set of aristocratic siblings, and he’d strolled with their French tutor and repeated after him the word for store (
le magasin
), for window (
la fenêtre
), for police (
les gendarmes
), for cheese (
le fromage
), for horse (
le cheval
). (
Trés bon!
said the tutor.) Under the watch of Derevenko or Nagorny, he’d seen the showrooms of Fabergé. Peter Carl Fabairzhay, who made a fashionable French name of his Russian one and from whose atelier came the jeweled eggs presented by tsars to their tsarinas, each egg worth more than most people’s houses. Fabergé, whose hands had strung the tsarina’s long ropes of pearls. Aloysha’s mother wore her pearls every day.

“They die if you don’t,” Tatiana had told me.

“What do you mean, die?” I said, having no idea they were alive. The ropes moved as the tsarina walked, swayed and tapped against one another, their clicking distinct from the whisper of her slippered feet on the floor.

“They go gray and their luster disappears. All the light goes out of them.”

I nodded, as I always did when Tatiana offered me such splinters of information. They weren’t casual asides. She spoke intently, as if bit by bit she was imparting a kind of code that, with practice, I could use to accomplish great things. I liked it. Not for the wisdom she volunteered—it wasn’t of a type I considered useful—but for the earnestness in her eyes, which was maternal. I could tell she was edifying me as she did her sisters and Varya, out of a sense of duty.

Alyosha had, like me, watched the sun sink over a slow-flowing summer Neva, a few errant beams spraying off the gilded dome of Saint Isaac’s. Whenever it wasn’t frozen, the Neva’s flat surface
reflected sunsets of freakish beauty. Fuchsia-pink clouds streaked with violet and orange were a regular occurrence in a city ringed with factories exhaling smoke. Neighborhoods spewed smoke as well, dark plumes rising from fires in the harbor district’s slums, warrens of squalid cells connected by dirty passages so dark they seemed subterranean. Workers, stuporous with exhaustion or drink, or more likely both, dropped their still-burning cigarettes, and whole city blocks discovered the speed with which rotten timbers burst into flame. Across the wide river was the Peter and Paul Fortress, where would-be revolutionaries rotted away in solitary cells infested with rats—at least they did until Alexander II made the mistake of coming out from behind his bombproof carriage door and down its bombproof steps to tread on a grenade. After that, the ministers of his successor, who was Alyosha’s grandfather Alexander III, thought it prudent to remove prisoners and the plots they hatched to the old Schlusselburg Fortress, forty miles upstream from Petersburg.

Whenever he was allowed, the tsarevich had stood at his father’s side, staring down from the balcony of the Winter Palace at endless bristling ranks of bayonet-bearing soldiers parading below them to collect their tsar’s—his father’s—blessing before they walked into battle. But that was all Alyosha knew of the city from which, he had been told, he would rule the nation he was to inherit, and for whose future he was being educated.

He’d never seen behind the pink and yellow stuccoed façades of the great avenues, never been to the Haymarket to gasp in wonder at the city’s squalid soul, a tide of beggars, drunkards, and whores washing through the aisles of market stalls like debris loosened by one of the Neva’s dependably imminent floods, each a guaranteed-to-be-pestilential deluge of cholera germs and candelabra, of corsets, croissants, chapbooks, clocks, chopsticks, and—