Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (12 page)

The tsar made the first notch quickly, chopping with controlled ferocity. Each time the blade bit into the wood, the trunk shivered, the twigs and new pale leaves at the top shook. The second notch, opposite the first, required a more measured attack, as even a novice woodsman knows it is imperative to leave exactly the right width of wood for a hinge, that narrow bit of trunk that gives way with a crack as the tree starts to come down.

I’d forgotten how eerie and mournful are the keening sounds that come from a falling tree, the whining cries that follow the crack. Once, they had been familiar. My father said it was the grieving of the tree and her sisters, crying as her spirit was forced to separate from her wood. “Look,” he said to me, when I was a little girl. “Do you see there, how her spirit remains with all her branches and just as tall as before?” And I would nod, believing I saw it too, even though such things were invisible to anyone who wasn’t my father.

By the time the tree hit the ground with a jolt we felt through the soles of our shoes, Tsar Nikolay had stepped away from any chance of being struck by its butt, should it kick back. He buried
the blade in a stump and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to blot his red face before walking out to where the newly downed poplar lay on the lawn.

“He did it!” Varya said. She squeezed Olga’s hand. “He hit the stake.” And he had. I watched as he searched among the leaves and branches to check his accuracy.

Olga showed my sister more affection than I could, for if Varya’s lies protected her from my prying into her soul, they made us more strangers than sisters. I felt sorry for my sister, orphaned and prevented from returning to our mother, as she may have felt for me, but we looked at each other now from a distance. I suppose her hiding herself from me inspired my hiding from her. The separation between us did allow me room to observe how our father’s murder had diminished Varya, who looked slighter and younger than she had before and behaved more like a child than a young lady of sixteen. It was the opposite of Alyosha’s response to the changes forced coincidentally upon him, as if my sister and the tsarevich were balanced on either side of a celestial fulcrum, allowing them a mysterious transference that gave him the years she’d lost. Under house arrest, my sister and I shared a bedroom with the four Romanov sisters, a bedroom far too small for six. Still, I saw little of Varya during the day, as she was always with Olga and the others, while together Alyosha and I killed the hours leading to what he anticipated would be our deaths.

“How do you think they’ll do it?” I’d ask him when he was too morbid to be diverted from his imaginings—from the astute analysis and prediction I mistook for imaginings.

“Well, it isn’t as if they’ve exhibited any originality, not with respect to violence, anyway. I guess they’ll shoot us.”

“It’s fast,” I said, “being shot to death.” In the silence, Alyosha looked at me searchingly. Finally I added, “At least it is if you’re not Grigory Rasputin.”

“Yes. I imagine it will be. Fast, I mean, for the individual. I hope they have the decency to kill us all at once. It’s the only thing I worry about, really, the idea of one of us having to watch while the others die.”

“You think they’d save you for last?”

“Not necessarily. But I wouldn’t want that for any of us.”

“O
F THE FOUR
,” Alyosha told me, after Tsar Nikolay had left his ax buried in a stump and come in for supper, “Father’s brother George was the tallest. More physically imposing. More intelligent. Grandmother’s favorite. ‘Tall, handsome, and full of fun,’ she always said. He died before I was born. In the arms of a peasant woman in Abbas-Tuman, where his physician sent him to take the waters.” Given his own precarious health, Alyosha was understandably enthralled by the medical crises of others, especially those that involved bleeding.

“He was weary of being a prisoner of tuberculosis and so he took his motorcycle out for a ride, but then he collapsed on the road and the peasant woman saw and tried to help him. He coughed up blood all over her skirts.”

“I suppose,” I said, “the not-so-hidden message of the story is that Alexei Nikolaevich is tired of being a prisoner of hemophilia and looks forward to adventures of his own, even if they are to kill him.”

Alyosha said nothing but looked, without expression, at the foot sticking out from the bottom of the leg brace. There were sounds other than those of trees being murdered he wanted drowned out.

We could hear the tsar in his study during the evenings, alone and laughing. For years he’d kept a little wood box in which he saved jokes his brother George had told him when they were boys. In his deliberate and meticulous hand, Nikolay copied each one out on a
scrap of paper, perhaps planning to commit them to memory and then use them himself on an audience for whom the jokes would be unfamiliar. Or maybe Nikolay Alexandrovich preserved them as a solace he guessed he’d need: the voice of his brother encouraging him to laugh no matter how dire were his circumstances.

“I think he must ration out the pathetic old things,” Alyosha said, “so they last him longer.”

“You’re hard on your father,” I said.

“He’s weak. Not like yours.” Once again, Alyosha recited what had already—instantly—become the last act of my father’s hagiography. His voice was steady but I thought his eyes looked bright. “Enough cyanide to finish off ten horses. A dozen bullets. An ax to the head. And still they had to drown him.”

A Sunny Child

“W
HAT COULD HAVE PREPARED
your mother for life with a family like the Romanovs?” I asked Alyosha, who, in compulsively sorting through the catalysts for his family’s disgrace, had arrived at the tsarina’s political naïveté and what his grandmother—the ever-disapproving dowager empress—had complained was her daughter-in-law’s blind indifference to Russian society.

Although Alexandra Fyodorovna had embraced the faith of her adoptive nation to the point of transforming herself into a Russian Orthodox fanatic—just as she had previously been a fanatical Lutheran—this was the extent of her exploring her new homeland. (She’d read about it in books, of course. She’d read scores more Russian histories than had most literate Russians.) To the aristocrats she remained the aloof young woman she’d been when she and Nikolay Alexandrovich were betrothed, a girl who lived in an idea more than a place. One part obligations of royalty; one part romance; the rest that particular haze to which intellectuals are susceptible: it was an idea that allowed Alexandra Fyodorovna’s life to unfold in a continuum of castles, from that of her birth, in Darmstadt, to those of her grandmother Victoria in England, and on to those she inherited by marriage, in Moscow and in Petersburg, in Kazan, Gatchina, and Livadia. Time stretched like
a catwalk connecting one to the next; her feet never touched the ground. When she put on the uniform of a Red Cross nurse and attended to wounded soldiers, that, too, bore the mark of heraldry, the bosom of her bride-white dress emblazoned with a blood-red cross.

Perhaps nothing could have helped Alyosha’s mother understand the Romanovs. Anti-intellectuals, they took what must have seemed to Alexandra Fyodorovna a perverse delight, even pride, in childish passions another family might have tried to squelch—tea-tray riding, for example—and that the Romanovs pursued as though they were sports closed to all but those of Romanov blood. The Meddlesome Four, as the tsarina called her husband’s uncles, left toads tucked under pillows, filled bathtubs with carp, switched the sugar and the salt, reset clocks while the rest of the court was sleeping, glued coins to the floor in busy corridors. They sewed the legs of underwear closed, balanced cups of horse urine on top of doors they left ajar, tripped waiters carrying trays of glasses filled with champagne.

She’d seen that happen, not once but over and over, when her older sister Ella married Tsar Nikolay’s Uncle Sergei. Because it was when twelve-year-old Alexandra Fyodorovna attended Ella’s wedding to Sergei Alexandrovich that she met Nikolay. Sixteen, handsome, and athletic, the tsarevich was already an accomplished horseman and an enviably accurate shot.

“And, as you yourself know, your father was a wonderful dancer,” I told Alyosha. “Not like my father—not inspired, intoxicated, spontaneous jigging about—but like … like a prince.”

Nikolay had found his eyes drawn to his new aunt’s sister. During the interminable Orthodox wedding ceremony, he occupied himself by watching her. Alexandra wore a simple white dress and a wreath of pink roses in her red-gold hair and sat unnaturally still for a child of twelve, for any living creature. All the cousins
told him she’d been a sunny child, enough that she’d earned that term of endearment, Sunny, which, in turn, had inspired Alyosha’s being called Sunbeam. But, as most sensible persons agree, this is just the kind of nickname to invite ill fortune, showing the gods a bright target to strike. When Alexandra was six, her mother died of diphtheria, and from that time forward, as anyone could see, a dark cloud held the girl captive.

Punishment enough to have lost one’s mother. To that grave injury add this insult: every object from which the child might have drawn comfort, every doll, book, and toy, was taken from her room and burned for fear of contagion. Only one of these losses troubled Alexandra—for what toy can assuage the wound of being orphaned?—but it was a loss she regarded as tantamount to murder.

They told Alexandra it was for her own good. Her mother would have wanted them to burn Anne, they said, and that was how Alexandra knew they were wicked. Because Alexandra’s mother had told Alexandra how important it was that nothing bad happen to Anne—the only relic of childhood her mother had cared to preserve—how Alexandra was never to drop Anne, because Anne’s porcelain face could chip. Alexandra had been careful. She knew Anne was not a toy but a talisman, a holy object infused with her mother’s love. If Anne wasn’t human, she was better than human. Not alive, she would never die.

But then, as soon as Alexandra had no mother to protect her, they threw Anne in the incinerator.

I
T WAS HARDER TO SEE IT INDOORS
, especially in a church, given the way Orthodox priests swung their censers for a wedding, wafting great billows of frankincense over the crowd packed in the sanctuary—eyes and noses streaming from the tickle and sting of
it, and incessant sneezing drowning out the liturgy—but it was there, all right, sometimes smaller, more often larger, and thank heavens Alexandra was born in an age that worshipped pallor, for outdoors in the light of day it was revealed as one of those very dense clouds, gray and purple and threatening to burst.

Cumulus fractus humilis
, Nikolay found listed among the other cloud formations in
Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary: Precipitated by a rising current of moist warm air that, having cooled to the dew point, condenses overhead
.

“When things are dire enough for a real crying jag—when, for example, it looks like you’re dying sooner rather than later,” I told Alyosha, “then it trends into
cumulus congestus.
” I pointed to the next drawing.

“A relatively flat base and rounded top, with a well-defined outline,” Alyosha read from the caption below the illustration. “I don’t imagine it’s a common manifestation.”

“Probably not. Completely psychosomatic, as I’m sure you understand. And, like any weather system, something of a vicious circle.”

In either case,
cumulus fractus humilis
or
cumulus congestus
, when Alexandra was outside, the sun could not get through to her, not enough to provoke even one freckle or warm her cold cheeks and mauve lips, but at least she didn’t have a governess running after her all day with a hat, as did her cloudless cousins.

Twelve was too young a girl for Nikolay to speak of his intentions—too young to properly inspire such thoughts—but surely there was no harm in declaring affection for his aunt’s young sister. Before Alexandra went home to her grandmother’s castle in England, the tsarevich had given her a gold brooch, which, as a properly brought-up princess who did not accept costly gifts from young men (flowers and sweets were allowed), she refused. But she wrote about Nikolay in her diary, as he did about her in his.

We love each other
, he concluded after a week spent with the solemn girl. What would it be like to press his lips on hers, his big body against her smaller one? Her features were, as everyone said, beautiful, but truth to tell it was the cloud he found irresistible: the fact that he could burn a wisp of it away with a joke or lift her onto his horse and, after a good gallop, leave it looking more cirrus than cumulus, edges tattered, a bit of blue showing through here and there.

S
EVENTEEN WHEN SHE RETURNED
to Petersburg—not to visit Nikolay but to flee the awkwardness at court caused when she rejected the proposal of Prince Albert, heir to the British throne—Alexandra stayed with her sister Ella for the entire winter season. Night after night she attended balls, dinners, theater, and ballet, the kind of social flurry she despised—at least she did until the night she allowed herself to be persuaded to attend
La Traviata
and found herself seated in the imperial box, next to the tsarevich.