Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (8 page)

The tsarina stayed and listened to Alyosha’s agonies to punish herself. Not that another mother wouldn’t have kept vigil by her child, but a different woman might have done it in a spirit other than guilt. Alexandra Fyodorovna behaved as one who had administered a slow poison to her best beloved, immediately regretting her rash and wicked act and remaining with her victim, sometimes
even writhing with him in anguish. When I saw this, so eerie and distorted a mirror of Ivan cradling his poor murdered son, I felt a shudder crawl up my neck.

The tsarina never left Alyosha’s side without being physically pulled away by Dr. Botkin or her husband. To give Alyosha aspirin for the fever that attended a hemorrhage would make the bleeding even worse, and, without the release of morphine, all Alyosha could do was lie as still as possible, his temperature so high that Botkin had no recourse but to drench him in rubbing alcohol, summoning whimpers more awful than screams for their ability to communicate a kind of exhausted resignation, noises like those I’ve heard from dogs as they slink, subjugated and beseeching, toward the hand that whips them.

Handsome Alyosha

T
HE FIRST TIME
Alyosha and I spoke after his accident, we were as awkward with each other as if we hadn’t yet met.

“Masha,” he said when I hesitated in the doorway of his room. “Aren’t you going to come in?”

“Of course I am,” I said, and when I got to his bed I asked him how he was feeling.

“Very well, thank you.”

I hope I managed to close my open mouth upon hearing so preposterous an answer. He was drawn and pale and every so often visibly braced himself against pain, holding his breath or holding tight to the side of the bed.

“Are you sure?” I asked stupidly, and we looked at each other. He smiled at me then, after we’d done staring.

“Well, I’ve been better, perhaps,” he said, “but I’m on the mend. Botkin said—”

“I’m so sorry, Alyosha,” I interrupted. “I wish I …”

“Masha. I didn’t think you—”

“No, no, I know you didn’t. But I’m sorry I can’t. Had I known what … what … I never would have made light of it, not even in jest.”

Alyosha shook his head. “I don’t remember your making light
of anything,” he said. With his cheeks so white, the thick black lashes around each gray eye were that much more striking.

“I’m—I’m terribly sorry, Alyosha. Please forgive me. I was flippant when we—”

“Masha.”

“No, listen. All the while you’ve been ill, I’ve felt so ashamed. Over and over I heard myself say I supposed I would be tested when the time came and then we’d discover if I was of any use to you. And, of course, I wasn’t. Not that I was vain enough to imagine I would be, only that I didn’t understand what your mother wanted me to do for you. I didn’t imagine a person could go through anything as horrible as … as you have. Now that I know, I’m even sorrier to be so useless. I’ve been hiding in my room, praying she won’t summon me.”

Alyosha laughed, and winced because it hurt him. “I don’t doubt you have,” he said.

“Please. I’m talking to you in earnest, Alyosha.”

“Stop fretting. I told you, or I tried to. I’m past the crisis, or whatever Botkin calls it. I’ll tell Mother I’m sure it’s your doing.”

“No, no, don’t. Don’t, Alyosha. Please don’t. She knows I’m useless.”

He looked at me, his arms crossed over his chest, smiling at my using my hands to beseech him. “At least I’ve distracted everyone for a bit,” he said, “given Mother and Father something else to think about, other than …” He trailed off, frowning at me. “You like me now,” he said after a minute. “You like me better than you did before. Why?

“It’s true, isn’t it?” he went on when I was silent. “If it wasn’t, you’d have disagreed with me.”

“You make it sound as if I didn’t like you before.”

“Perhaps you didn’t. Oh, Masha, don’t look so—”

“I never didn’t like you. I just … now I see how preoccupied with myself I’ve been, with Father’s death. It came between me and … and everything. Between me and the rest of life.”

Alyosha nodded. “Are you afraid?” he asked after a moment.

“Of what?”

“Of living without him.”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know what I thought it was before—someone dying. Someone who isn’t a stranger but a person you love. Now that I do, it’s … Nothing’s the same. Or it’s me that’s not the same. No matter what I’m doing, or even if I’m doing nothing, it’s like looking at a picture hanging on the wall and seeing it’s crooked. In my mind, I keep trying to adjust it, whatever it is, and stepping back to consider. But it’s me that’s the problem. I’m listing in some way I can’t correct.” I stopped talking, surprised to have found myself confiding in Alyosha, who nodded slowly as I spoke.

“I think I understand,” he said. “As much as I can, anyway. Actually, I probably can’t imagine at all what you’re suffering. That was a presumptuous thing to say. I just meant I wished I could.”

“Could what?”

“Understand. I want to understand. I realized, but not in time to shut up, that I was talking about myself when I asked if you were afraid. Do you know, this is the first time in my life I’ve had an accident without his coming to my rescue? Now I … well, now I know.”

“Know what?” I asked.

“What it’s like when he isn’t here,” he said, after I’d given up waiting for any answer at all.

“Oh, Alyosha. I’m so—”

“Please don’t tell me you’re sorry again.”

“But I—”

“It’s only Mother who’s unreasonable enough to expect you to help. Masha. Masha, please don’t,” he said.

“It’s nothing.”

“You’re crying.”

“No I’m not.”

“You look like you’re crying.”

“Don’t you know,” I asked, after drying my eyes on my sleeve, “that when someone says she isn’t crying, you’re not supposed to argue with her?”

B
EFORE MY FATHER
died and I came to live with the Romanovs, most of my visits to the Alexander Palace had been accidental, a matter of my being with Father when he was called to tend to an emergency. Most often I was left in the blue-and-gold parlor, and sometimes a lady-in-waiting offered me a book or a paint box and paper. Once, the children’s governess collected and deposited me in the nursery playroom, where I saw something I’d never seen before: a wheeled chair for invalids but made small, for a child. There was a wagon in the playroom too, and a plump little horse covered in real horse hair, with a real mane and wheels where its hooves should be and a saddle big enough to sit on, and I looked at the three things, each with its four wheels, and felt what I couldn’t yet identify as pity. I was so overwhelmed by all of what was around me—the riches, the servants, the vast number of rooms—I had no idea what I felt, other than outrage at the wanton wickedness of taking pieces of a real horse to make a plaything. What kind of family would provide a child such a toy? I missed my horses back home—I think I missed them more than I did my mother—but I wouldn’t have touched that false steed, not if it had been the last suggestion of an equine specimen on earth.

In truth, I didn’t dare touch any of the toys. Not while the screaming continued. The longer it went on, the younger I became, whittled down from ten to a baby of five or six, prey to morbid imaginings and sure such sounds could only be the work of malevolent Ivan, who had bewitched the nursery, stunned and stilled each toy. Any doll that could lie down and close her eyes had done just that. The ball and hoop rolled back to their places in the cupboard, and the mechanical wonders that entertained the tsarevich—railways and factories, fleets of ships that sailed, battalions of minuscule soldiers that marched—remained motionless, waiting on the fate of their bedridden owner, a boy who would have traded everything he owned for the one pleasure denied him, the gift for which he begged every Christmas and every birthday: a bicycle.

So I gave one to Handsome Alyosha.

“What color is it?” Alyosha wanted to know.

“Red, of course.”

“Tell me what it looks like.”

“You know what a bicycle looks like.”

“I want to know what
his
looks like.”

“Handsome Alyosha’s bicycle is red,” I told Alyosha, “but the handlebars are chrome.”

“Does it have mudguards over the tires?”

“It does.”

“Well, why aren’t they chrome too?”

“Who said they aren’t?”

“Is it a Raleigh or a Triumph?”

“Neither.”

“Royal Enfield?”

“No.”

“It has to be an English bicycle.”

“Says who?”

“I don’t like American ones as well as I do English.”

“It’s not American or English or French or anything else. It’s magic. Handsome Alyosha can pedal it on water and above the clouds. He’s ridden it through the heavens. Every new moon there’s a race around the largest of Saturn’s rings, and Handsome Alyosha always wins.”

“Who else is in the race? Who comes in second and third?”

“Hermes and Chronos. God of travel and god of time.”

“What about Zeus?”

“He watches. The race is meant to entertain him.”

“How can it be entertaining if it always turns out the same?”

“Because Zeus and all the others never believe Handsome Alyosha will win. No matter how many times he comes in first, they think it will be different the next time. After all, they’re gods. They don’t understand how a boy on a red bicycle can win, especially not against Chronos, who can slow the hand of a stopwatch, or Hermes, with his winged sandals.”

“Are all the gods there watching?”

“The men, yes, but not all the women. There’s a grandstand and clubhouse built on one of Saturn’s inside rings, just as at a horse race. Dionysus runs the concession and all he serves is champagne, fois gras, and caviar. Toast points, of course, for the pâté and the caviar. Demeter won’t come, because she’s always quarreling with her father—he’s Chronos. And Artemis hates cycling. She disapproves of everything except bows and arrows. That’s as much technological advancement as she tolerates. But Hera and Aphrodite are there, and Athena, of course. Hestia sometimes, but she’s a homebody. She never feels she has the right clothes for going to the races.”

Sitting by Alyosha’s bed, I could invent this kind of nonsense for hours, so Handsome Alyosha never lacked for adventures, but the beginning of his story, the part Alyosha asked for more often than any of the others, was the story of Handsome Alyosha and Baba Yaga.

Handsome Alyosha had a cruel stepfather who made him do all the most menial chores while he and his ugly sons lazed about. But Handsome Alyosha had a secret. Before his real father died, he had called his son to his bedside and from under his pillow he pulled a little soldier doll.
Keep him with you wherever you go, Alyosha
, his real father said,
and never let anyone see him. If you get into trouble, give him a morsel of food and ask his help
.

And so he did. The stepfather thought he could destroy Handsome Alyosha’s health and good looks by working him to death in the cold while he and the louts who were his sons warmed themselves by the hearth, but it was the soldier doll who chopped wood and drew water from the well. Since the wicked ones made no effort to help Handsome Alyosha, they never saw how it was that the brave doll hunted and dressed the game he killed.
Be sharp, little sword
, said the doll to his knife,
be swift
, and so it was.

One day, when his useless lazybones stepbrothers allowed the fire to go out, Handsome Alyosha’s stepfather sent him to Baba Yaga to fetch a light, and the doll told the boy to be brave and do as he was asked. As long as he kept the doll in his pocket, no witch could harm him. But Handsome Alyosha couldn’t help but feel frightened, for, as everyone knows, Baba Yaga eats children. She flies through the night in a mortar, using the pestle as a rudder and a broom to sweep away the traces.

“What traces can she make if she flies?” Alyosha asked.

“Why, the bits of hair and gristle she spits out. The fingernails and the teeth.”

Handsome Alyosha could hardly speak for fear when he found that the hut was made of human bones. But,
Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest, your front to me
, he said when he reached its door.

Naturally, Baba Yaga didn’t give a boy what he asked for until he had performed the usual sorts of terrible tasks witches impose
on children. Baba Yaga flew off in her mortar and left Handsome Alyosha behind to kill the thousand snakes in her corncrib and to fill her wood box with tinder gathered on a distant mountaintop, and all the while the hut’s frightful scaly legs went on dancing so wildly the furniture flew about the room. But with the help of the soldier doll, Alyosha accomplished his impossible chores easily. He even bridled Baba Yaga’s three bewitched horses, red for the sun, white for the day, and black for the night.

How did you!
Baba Yaga screamed, when she flew home and found she couldn’t punish the boy.

My father’s blessing
, Handsome Alyosha answered, as he knew this was the one magic Baba Yaga could not overcome. She had to give the boy fire as well as a skull in which to carry it home.