The Last Romanov (23 page)

Commandant Vasiliev, the latest revolutionary assigned by the provisional government to watch over the palace, is unable to sleep. His bladder is full, but he is having a hard time giving up his warm spot under his coarse blanket. He checks his platoon of five men, fast asleep under blankets around him. They are volunteers—Chechens, Tatars, and Daghestanis—hard to discipline, but strong, effective fighters, and accustomed to this brutal cold. An unexpected winter snowstorm arrived out of nowhere, taking them all by surprise; snow so heavy, it weighs down his eyelashes.

The commandant inspects the ashen sky, the sinister outline of the Alexander Palace not too far off, the man-made pond, a frozen, dark stain in the distance.

A movement behind bushes catches his attention. He jerks the blanket off, sprints to his feet, his rifle aimed at the snow-covered bushes. He lets loose a volley of bullets.

A family of rabbits scrambles out, dispersing into the night.

His men, awakened by the excitement, burst into laughter that travels through the park and echoes in the grand square, where Catherine II once watched her regiments march in parade.

“Form a line!” Vasiliev shouts. “Follow me! Bring your backpacks. What are you waiting for? It's time to take back what the Romanov bastards stole from us.”

A small, bony man with a skeletal face, Vasiliev twists his handlebar mustache into nervous knots as he reflects upon the treasures these vast imperial gardens might yield, a wealth of forgotten knickknacks that would fetch good money in the market as Tsarist souvenirs.

Their boots crunching on the snow underfoot, the men march deep into the park, across lagoons, inlets, and canals. Occasionally Vasiliev rummages in his backpack, pulls out a bottle of vodka, and takes a swig.

He leads his men across the Marble Bridge with its blue and white balustrades. He touches the tip of his pointy nose, bends it down toward his chin. Which path should he take? He flips a coin, decides to take the narrow path to the left that leads to an arbor with a four-sided granite pyramid. He holds one hand up. Signals to his men to stop behind the pyramid at the bank of a frozen stream.

He bends to brush snow off a marble slab, reads an inscription. He falls on all fours and begins to smash his fists on the marble. “Dogs! Dog tombs! What are you waiting for? Get to it! Destroy them! Bastard Romanov bitches.”

The men attack the tombs with switchblades, rifle butts, and curses. They tie ropes around the broken corners and begin to heave and tug until the slabs break loose from their foundation. The earth underneath is wet and worm-infested. Vasiliev sweeps off a layer of soil with his boot, certain he'll unearth something valuable, a jewel or gold coin left with the dead to pay for transit to the other world. His boot catches upon something hard. He wiggles the tip until it snags the object. He carefully lifts his leg. The toe of his boot is stuck in the socket of a canine skull. He smashes his foot down. The skull shatters. Splinters of bone scatter. A sharp one lodges on the back of Vasiliev's hairy hand. He pulls it out and pins it like a medal of honor to his collar.

They reach the private island with its moving bridge, attack the metal joints, cables, and anchor, and smash the motor, rendering the bridge inoperable. They continue on their quest, deep into the park, leaving behind piles of smashed metal, marble, mud, and bleached dog bones.

Vasiliev's dark eyes narrow into greedy slits. He detects something red and shiny, poking out of the snow. He whistles, narrows his eyes, his mouth watering with anticipation. As silently and as quickly as a slinking cat, he thrusts his hand into the snow, closing his fist over his find. His back turned to his men, he unlocks his hand. On his palm gleams a miniature car, its steering wheels, spokes and studs, a tiny chauffeur, Nicholas and Alexandra in the backseat, everything intact, save for one of Alexandra's pearl earrings. Detached from its gold wire, it is buried in snow under Vasiliev's boot.

“A huge fucking ruby toy,” he mumbles under his breath, dropping it into his coat pocket.

They continue their search, wander around the park, in and out of galleries, around leafless arbors and trellises, snoop into every nook and corner, uproot smaller sculptures, pile up deer carcasses hunted for food, and pilfer lilacs from the Empress's greenhouses to take home to their women.

Deep in the park, Vasiliev gestures for his men to halt again.

They are facing a small chapel.

The commandant aims his rifle ahead, taking a long time to assess the situation. He does not like the sense of eerie forlornness hovering over the place, the way steam curls out of its windows, the relentless way all types of hard-shelled and spike-legged insects hit themselves against the few intact windowpanes.

“What are you waiting for?” he yells to his men. “Come in!”

They are confronted by sad, condemning eyes in the damp chapel. Icons on shelves, on walls, painted on the ceiling. Sad eyes everywhere. A ghostly shaft of moonlight cuts a path through the broken glass of an upper window, illuminating a block of marble at their feet. Set flat in the ground in the center of the chapel.

The men are silent, paralyzed, afraid to breathe. They pull up the collars of their coats to shield their ears from the howling wind that forces its way inside. They do not fear God, or His saints, whose presence they certainly feel in this chapel. They are terrified of the mysterious man whose incriminating gaze is boring through layers of earth and stone, drilling its way into their chests.

They look down at Grigori Rasputin's grave.

Vasiliev yanks at his mustache. “What are you waiting for? Get to work.”

The puzzled men shuffle in place. What is the order? What does their leader expect of them?

They have all heard about Rasputin's death. They know the Tsar's cousin murdered the monk, heard about the monk's prophetic letter. Like all Russians, they have lived to see his prophesies come true. They're afraid to disturb his grave, fearful that to do so might unleash his vengeance.

Vasiliev aims his rifle at the dark marble at his feet and fires round after round.

The men jump out of the way of bullets that ricochet off the headstone. They position themselves against a wall and continue to fire. One bullet after another pockmarks the marble slab.

Slowly, leisurely, like a geographical phenomenon that might take centuries to transform the shape of nature, veinlike fissures appear in the headstone and widen into arteries. A colossal groan shakes the small chapel and the arteries split to reveal an oak coffin in the ground.

“Pull his fucking body out!” Vasiliev shouts. “What are you waiting for?”

They jump into the grave. Struggle under the unexpected weight of the coffin. Curse with every unsuccessful attempt to haul it out of the hole.

“There's a rotting corpse inside, for heaven's sake, not lead,” Vasiliev hollers.

More men step down to help. But the coffin refuses to budge.

Vasiliev jumps down to lend a hand.

As if Rasputin has been waiting for the commandant himself, the winds settle outside, the coffin shudders and sighs and reluctantly yields, at last, and is successfully raised and rolled out of the grave.

Covered with sweat and grime, the exhausted commandant sits on the coffin to catch his breath. He pulls out a nail clipper from his pocket and trims his nails. He is in a nasty mood. Why, he is not certain. It might be the cold. It might be the mere existence of the Romanovs. He licks his chapped lips and continues snipping his nails. He drops the clipper in his pocket, unfastens the dog bone and digs it between his teeth to dislodge leftovers. The wooden planks under him shift, a series of dry crackling pops. The coffin collapses.

Vasiliev falls into Grigori Rasputin's putrefied remains.

The men recoil from the stench, from the bones, some still sheathed in flesh. The matted long hair, the bared teeth in the grinning skull.

An ooze of indescribable color is bubbling out of the coffin.

Vasiliev crouches down, retching all over himself, drenching his coat with vomit. The stench is awful.

He straightens up, draws in a big gulp of air, wipes his mouth with his sleeve. He reaches out for an icon and a note tucked between the corpse's thighbones. He checks the icon, turns it around. It is signed by the Empress, a farewell gift to the monk:

My
dear
martyr, give me thy blessing that it may follow me always on the sad and dreary path I have yet to follow here below. And remember us from on high in your holy prayer. Alexandra.

Vasiliev crumbles the note and tosses it back into the grave with the icon. “Go outside! Now! Find logs to start a fire!”

The men spill out of the chapel. The cold is a welcome change from the putrid air inside. They scramble to fashion makeshift thongs from branches to gather a few of the scattered disintegrating remains in the chapel and pile them next to Rasputin on an intact slab of the coffin. They carry the plank with its load out and toss it on pine logs they gather from the many stacks around the park used for the palace fireplaces. Vasiliev empties his vodka onto the tinder. He tosses one match, then another, into the weak fire. The men step back. They wait. Fan the fire with their coats. The blaze will gather force.

But the instant the flames hit the wooden slab they sputter and die.

Vasiliev yanks down his pants. He aims a strong stream of urine at the fire. “What are you waiting for?” he shouts at his comrades. “Feed Rasputin! Feed him crude gasoline!”

The men hesitate, glance at each other, check their surroundings. Finding no other course but to follow orders, they aim their penises at the fire, attempting to encourage the flames with jets of urine the winds blow back in their faces.

A raging hiss rises from somewhere underground. Tongues of fire explode. Livid blue tips sparkle into millions of furious darts that bloom into a grand display of fireworks.

Rasputin is coming to life, his waist doubling over. He is sitting in the fire. His legs straighten, and what is left of his arms jerk down to propel him upright, his bottomless eye sockets aimed their way.

The terrified men spring away, scrambling to take refuge behind the trees.

“Come back!” Vasiliev orders. “Rasputin is dead! His tendons are shrinking in the heat, contracting his body.”

One by one, the men reappear from behind the trees, their stares glued to Rasputin's corpse, which is recoiling and melting into itself. The relieved men pull up their pants, lock arms, and dance around the fire as it devours what the worms have left of the monk—hair, flesh, and bone—until nothing is left.

The commandant spits into the blaze, wipes his soot-blackened face. He is pleased. The mad monk is silenced, at last. “Well done!” he encourages his men. “Get the hoses and put the fire out.”

The men scrabble around the park, collect hoses the gardeners have left unattended, and attach them to faucets. They attack the flames with powerful streams of water.

But rather than extinguish the fire, the water seems to feed it. They attempt to stifle the flames with snow and mud, then with their coats. But the inferno gains strength and momentum, climbing beyond the treetops and blinding them with ash and smoke.

An hour passes, and the priest in a neighboring chapel is awakened by the roar of fire and the wafting stench. Afraid that an unfortunate mishap might have struck the Romanovs, he drags himself out of bed.

Disheveled, the smell of mothballs emanating from his faded habit, a container of holy water in one hand and the holy book in another, he makes his way into the park.

“How can I help?” the priest asks in a birdlike stutter. “Is the Imperial Family safe?”

The commandant checks the priest's pockets to make sure he is not carrying a weapon. “They won't be,” he says, “if you don't send up some prayers, do something, anything to put out this hell.”

The priest retrieves a container from a paper bag, dips his hand in holy water, and sprinkles the flames, reciting the requiem once, then again and again, the repetitive act of a desperate man.

“Don't you see it's not working?” Vasiliev shouts. “Do something else!”

“And if thy hand offends thee, cut if off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched.” Having said his piece, the priest hurls the container of holy water into the fire, turns around, and runs toward the palace.

An oily residue bubbles up from under the fire, a slimy liquid meandering around snow-heavy trees and bushes, slinking under thickets and dormant flower beds, snaking its way toward the Alexander Palace.

A sudden sense of horror, an unfamiliar emotion, shakes Vasiliev into action. He scrambles to gather his men and move them out of harm's way.

Darya is assaulted by the rising stench of burning flesh. A pillar of putrid smoke can be seen from every window, sulfuric plumes that spiral up and erase any demarcation between earth and sky.

She runs down the stairs and crosses the lower hall toward Count Benckendorff's bedroom. She bangs on the door. “Wake up, sir! You must call for help!”

A large squadron of fire fighters arrives at midnight. They toil for hours to smother the flames with water, salt, soil, and all manner of chemicals. With four-meter-long pikes they attempt to separate the fire into smaller, more manageable fires. But the flames join back like magnetic curtains. At dawn, defeated and drenched in sweat and soot, the firemen gather their hoses and tools. “The palace is in danger,” one says quietly. “Evacuate the family.”

A ghostly figure materializes from behind the forest of trees, ethereal in a sheer nightgown the shade of her pale face, her glowing eye cutting a path in the dark. She walks toward a petrified fireman, seizes his water hose with one hand, and waves him away with the other. Her hair darker than night, she secures herself against a tree trunk, the outline of her thighs fluid under her breezy gown. Hose anchored between her legs, she aims a strong jet of water at the fire, the hose twisting like a tortured being, the force thrusting her from side to side, her wet gown swirling around her slender figure, her hair flapping about her shoulders like so many raven wings.