Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (10 page)

Mother asked me, one summer when I was home from school, about the women on the stairs. Did he love any of them, she wanted to know.

“I don’t think he even knows their names,” I told her.

A
S A YOUNG MAN IN
P
OKROVSKOYE
, my father had liked to watch the girls in town, especially when they went to the river to bathe and afterward lay their bodies on their discarded clothing to dry in the sun, naked for anyone to see. And he liked taking his father’s cart to the market in Kuban and meeting girls along the way. There were innkeepers’ daughters who were happy to warm a young man’s bed before he went to sleep. By the time my father found the woman who would become his wife, he was well practiced in kissing and probably much more.

In 1888, when the Dubrovins moved from Yekaterinburg to Pokrovskoye, my mother was twenty-three and my father was nineteen. They met during the May Festival, when the people of our village carried ikons down our one street to greet the spring, dragged tables from their houses into the sun, and piled them with food and drink, and there was no one too old or too young to resist the rhythm of the “Kalinka.” My mother was beautiful, even by Petersburg standards, and she was voluptuous and blond and educated. My father could dance like a demon. From the ends of his too-long hair to the cracked leather of his peasant boots, he moved in a way that made people take notice, and once they’d looked they couldn’t stop. He was tall and rawboned, and his long legs stamped and jigged so quickly it was hard to tell what steps they followed—a dance of his own devising, that much was clear.

Whatever my father did betrayed his carnal nature. Not that he made any vulgar movements; he didn’t have to. No one could watch my father do anything physical in the company of a
woman—walk, plow, sweep—without sensing lust and the intent to gratify it. Dancing, he took hold of a girl and led her firmly. One after another he took them, twirled them, wore them out, and left them breathless and clapping among the others in his spellbound audience. He spun my future mother until her cheeks blazed and her skirts flew out, twisting around his legs as well as her own. If I know my father, and I do, he spun every last thought out of her head and left it empty, ready to receive annunciation.

A Stately Pleasure Dome

W
HITE WITH WHITE
. White with black. Black with black. Bay with bay. Dappled gray with silver. There never was a time when the Nevsky Prospekt wasn’t crowded with long queues of fashionable sleighs, each pulled by a team of matching horses whose color complemented or reflected that of the sleigh, all of them moving slowly up and down the avenue and all the beautiful horses exhaling clouds of steaming warm breath. For there was never a temperature so low as to dissuade the vehicles’ occupants from their daily promenade. They weren’t going to wait for a party to show off new furs and jewels. Drivers drove and passengers poured champagne and spooned up caviar while taking in the sights—not architectural but human.

“Go on, Masha, don’t stop now,” Alyosha said. So I took him eavesdropping in our own sleigh.

“Make it black and give it a gold stripe and a lap robe made of monkey skins,” Alyosha said.

“What good are monkey skins? You need a robe made from an animal that lives in the cold.”

“All right, then. Make it a white sleigh with a lap robe made from the skins of white Siberian tigers.”

“White tigers. How extravagant. Everyone who sees us will go green and faint with envy. All right, then, Alexei Nikolaevich, tuck
our tiger-skin robe around your knees and here we go. We have to spy and eavesdrop on everyone, even if we have to stand on the seat of our new white sleigh. We have to see whose diamonds are newer, and whose are bigger. Who’s just arrived in town, and who has departed and why. And you, Alyosha, it’s your job to find out who that ridiculously fabulously blindingly beautiful woman is, the one over there in the carriage in front of the pastry shop. See her? Yes, she’s the one. Have you ever seen eyes so big and so blue? Or diamonds so big and so new? Is she, could she be, unspoken for? Let’s find out her name and invite her to Saturday’s ball. She cannot be interested in that awful man. That one, over there, with those terrible teeth. Look, he’s introducing himself, of all the cheek, he’s practically crawling under her lap robe. You haven’t met him, but I have, and I’m telling you that man is the most fantastic bore. His name is—oh, I don’t know. Simon Someone. I was introduced to him at my cousin’s and he talked and talked and would not shut up, and all about politics. Nothing, I tell you, nothing could stop him; you could have set his clothes on fire and he’d still have gone on about Mensheviks and Trudoviks and how was it no one had read the latest boring dreadful speech given by Kerensky. After all, it was published in three papers, and didn’t everyone understand the necessity of higher taxes on foreign wines and shouldn’t agrarian socialists be manipulated to do … something, I can’t remember what, it had to do with serfs. No, no, not
serf
serfs, of course—I know we haven’t any more of those—but farming people, illiterate country people. Was it necessary, Simon Someone demanded, to represent factions that didn’t know what was best for them? And on and on—he ruined what might otherwise have been a lovely party, and my poor cousin, she can’t say boo to a fly, she just stood there smiling sweetly, the little mouse. I was fit to be tied.”

“Don’t stop, Masha. Please.”

I didn’t. I was only catching my breath. Sitting next to him in the sunroom, where his bed had been moved to allow him more daylight, I told him how we circled together in our sleigh, one among many, a grand cotillion whirling slowly past pastry shops and haberdashers, past the French dressmaker’s, and past jewelers and dealers in spirits and wines, the occasional swain bounding from his conveyance through a merchant’s door to return with proofs of love, a bauble for his inamorata, another bottle of champagne, more costly than the last, or why not both? Flirtations began and engagements broke, love—infatuation, anyway—abandoning one sleigh to alight in another.

But if all this remained as it had been in years before, other things had changed. The last months of empire were as spectacular for deprivation as for giddy excess. As the Great War dragged on, the army had not only conscripted all the workers from the fields and factories but also consumed its lion’s share of food and fuel. Crops went unharvested, and in St. Petersburg, breadlines tangled among sleigh runners. The shortage of coal halted one after another industry, leaving unemployed factory workers to discover new vocations: rioting, looting, sabotage. Once they’d got the tsar to abdicate, the Bolsheviks opened the locks of madhouses and prisons, for their occupants were hungry too, and it seemed less cruel to allow them to forage than to die in their cells. In any case, a man imprisoned by a tsar might be a hero to the revolution. Yes, people starved and people froze, and not just the poorest. The cost of an egg doubled and doubled and doubled again, until a dozen couldn’t be had for less than a ruble. And as the citizens grew hungrier and hungrier, each day delivered them closer to revolution, something Alyosha seemed to understand better than his father did.

“Perhaps the women will march on Tsarskoe Selo, just as they marched on Versailles,” he said. “Did you know it’s the same
distance between Paris and Versailles as it is between St. Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo? All they wanted was bread, the French women. Their children were starving, just as they are in Petersburg. And because Louis the Sixteenth was hiding in his Hall of Mirrors, the ‘Maenads’—Carlyle calls the women Maenads, isn’t that funny?—anyway, they marched from Paris to Versailles, carrying swords and pulling cannons.” Alyosha smiled. After he’d done with old Gibbon and his
Decline and Fall
(from which he edified me with epigrammatic pronouncements like
The possession and the enjoyment of property are the pledges which bind a civilized people to an improved country
, offered up in a stentorian, lecturing tone), he plunged into Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, which he used like an almanac, predicting storms to come. In defiance of the restrictions imposed on him by Botkin and the others, Alyosha had always been a precocious student. Having spent so many days in bed recovering from one or another mishap, he’d read more widely than most boys his age and liked demonstrating an intelligence that surprised anyone who assumed him to be incapacitated mentally as well as physically.

“There were twenty thousand of the king’s guard and only seven thousand women, but they succeeded anyway. The king went back to the capital, where he belonged, and the National Assembly … Are you even listening, Masha?”

“Of course. Seven thousand women carrying swords. And pulling cannons. To Versailles.”

In preparation for running an empire, Alyosha had studied history with his tutors. His health permitting, he’d been taken daily to the map room and taught how to wage war with more lead foot soldiers and cavalry than could be amassed from all the toy stores in Petersburg, Moscow, and Kazan put together. He could recite, in chronological order, the battles waged and won by Alexander the Great in Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia,
and India, and he had given his first pony, barely twelve hands high, the name Bucephalus, without even the thinnest veneer of sarcasm. He’d memorized the military campaigns by which Julius Caesar had assembled his empire, from the crossing of the Rubicon through every last skirmish in Greece, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain. The tsarevich understood the destiny he was meant to fulfill, but the official history of Russia didn’t include the lives of the tsar’s subjects, and Alyosha had never been told the real story of his birthplace. Neither had I, for the Steblin–Kamensky Academy presented a curriculum intended for girls who would grow up to decorate the court rather than navigate the world beyond it. As my purpose had never been to seduce and capture a husband, once I stopped going to school I found that quite a few gaps remained in my education.

St. Petersburg began as a marsh. Every year for a dozen years, tens of thousands of serfs and criminals and prisoners of war were marched under order of Peter the Great to a cluster of sodden, scrub-covered little islands, where the forced laborers died as they arrived, by the thousands. Given no spades, they dug with bare hands, struggling to walk as the oozing sludge held tight to their bare heels, or their shoes if they had any. And their corpses sank in mass graves without so much as a prayer, their anonymous bones melting into the city’s foundation. In a certain foggy light—just as the sun was setting, or before it rose—St. Petersburg could still appear no more substantial than a shimmering mirage, the conceit of a westward-gazing tsar floating above the confluence of the Neva and her handmaidens, the Fontanka and Moika tributaries. Long before the city was habitable, it had been washed away many times over.

Nearly every other fall, the Neva overflowed her pink-granite-lined banks and tried to scrub a layer or two of the city’s populace off her dirty face. The previous October, having doused the
streetlamps, she’d made off with all the shutters and awnings from the buildings on Galernaya Street. She washed, dried, and then buckled the floor of every street-level ballroom within a mile of her banks. She pushed open the front door of the Steblin–Kamensky Academy and made off with our desks and all their contents—notebooks and pencils and an assignment on the colonization of the Americas, over which I’d slaved for weeks and earned the highest marks for content, organization, spelling, and penmanship. I never had a chance to bring it home and collect my illiterate father’s praises, God rest him.

Into the public library’s main entry she surged and split into channels, spilling out the back and side doors, carrying off histories and dictionaries and novels whose authors’ last names sentenced their titles to shelves below the high-water mark. B, F, K, M, P, S, and Y: all were lost.

“What was left?” I asked Alyosha.

“Well, Dostoevsky, for one. Dickens. Turgenev.”

“Tolstoy,” I said. “And Gogol.”

“William. Makepeace. Thackeray,” Alyosha produced with evident pleasure.

“Very good. Anthony Trollope.”

“Do we have to give first names too now?”

“Don’t ask me,” I said. “You started it with Thackeray.” It took a while for him to answer, and I couldn’t be sure if he was suffering physically or just bored. By the time he said “William Shakespeare,” I’d drifted away entirely and forgotten what game it was we were playing. The thaw had begun; what had been silence was filled with the sound of dripping coming from the park outside, the occasional thump as a heavy cake of snow slid from a bough to the ground below.

“That’s S,” I said after a moment. “S washed away. Anyway, Shakespeare wrote plays, not novels.”

“Right, of course,” Alyosha said, and then he smiled. “Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

“Ooh, an American. Nice. Very nice.”

I
T HAD BEEN
the demand for secrecy about Alyosha’s illness that originally inspired his mother and father to remove the imperial family from St. Petersburg—where they might be scrutinized by aristocracy and proletariat alike—to Tsarskoe Selo. There, no one could note the comings and goings of doctors or watch the children taking their exercise, the tsarevich carried in a sailor’s strong arms. Self-sufficient behind its walls, Tsarskoe Selo protected the family’s privacy, kept its dreadful secret, and—though the Romanovs could not or would not acknowledge this—increased the scorn and even hatred of those citizens who blamed the tsar for remoteness, for avoiding the populace his coffers drained. As not one member of the court, let alone the rest of the citizenry, understood what had demanded the Romanovs’ isolation, no one pitied or even suspected their plight. And, isolated in their enclave, the tsar and tsarina were granted an ignorance that proved fatal. Away from Petersburg in the early months of 1917, they heard stories of riots and looting in the capital, but they couldn’t see, or understand, what was happening. Perhaps the tsar’s ministers confined their observations to parts of the city that weren’t under siege. Or maybe he didn’t believe their reports.