Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (15 page)

M
Y MOTHER TOLD ME
the Holy Spirit appeared to her in the form of a raven. That’s what she said, this cosmopolitan woman who scorned country superstitions. She was walking toward the church when she looked up and saw that one of the birds roosting on its cross had separated from the others and flapped down to stand in the road, just in her path. The raven told my mother she was to wed Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, whom some would worship and others revile. In either case, no one would understand him. He would have enemies, the raven said, as holy men always do. He needed a wife to support him in his sorrow as well as his joy.

Well, being a girl who’d gone to school in Yekaterinburg and learned to ride a tram instead of a horse, my mother hardly knew what to think of birds giving people orders. And this Grigory, he didn’t even know how to read or seem to care that he couldn’t. He spent every minute outdoors, so that his skin was as brown as a walnut and his hair needed a good combing. Some people in town described him as a lunatic. But Father spun Mother around and around until every objection had flown out of her head. In a trice they had married, and, in keeping with tradition, my mother moved into the home of my father’s parents, who were proud to have a refined, literate city girl for a daughter-in-law, especially as
her education didn’t seem to have inspired the same disobedience it awakened in so many other young women. But it wasn’t a comfortable beginning for my parents’ life together, as their love was physically passionate and they had little privacy. What choice was there, Mother told me, but to become adept at silent lovemaking?

It wasn’t a year before they’d had their first child. But unwitting Father cursed the boy by giving him the name of his dead brother, and the baby, Misha, died in the middle of his first winter, still a child in arms and unable to crawl when they lost him.

It was a terrible time for my parents, as it would have to have been, but for Father especially. Somehow he’d given himself the idea that the baby Misha was the brother he’d lost six years earlier, the one whose life he’d failed to save, reincarnated and returned to him, and when the baby died Father fell into a despair that lasted many months. How could it be that God hadn’t warned him of this tribulation? How could he have let him raise a goat from the dead and then failed to tell him his own child was sick and needed his help? As Mother told me, Father was unable to understand their son being taken from them as anything other than a punishment. The child had stopped living. That was it, no warning whatsoever. He’d been fine when Mother put him to bed, but by midnight, when she checked to see he hadn’t kicked off his covers, he was cold.

Father raved, my mother told me, it was terrifying to see, and the neighbors heard him and came to the house to ask what was it that made Grigory howl like an animal and tear at his hair. He crawled on his hands and knees and beat his head on the floor and lay facedown on the ground and begged God to smite him. To restore his little boy’s life or, if he wouldn’t, take his own. But God wasn’t listening, or he didn’t care to change his mind.

“Your father didn’t think that perhaps there wasn’t any god at all, if such a thing could happen?” Alyosha asked.

“No. I can see what you mean, of course, and another person might have, but not Father.”

Because the baby died in the night, Father had to wait for the sun to rise and give him light before he could collect wood for the bonfire required to thaw the earth for a burial. They were still talking about it when I was a girl—the size of that fire. It was a spectacle Pokrovskoye never forgot.

“Come away from the fire, Grigory,” my grandfather said, as did everyone who witnessed it—Father Pavel, the village priest; neighbors; and Arkhip Kaledin, the smith who’d pulled my father and his brother from the river, for he was there as well. But they couldn’t dissuade my father from making the blaze even higher. He threw whatever he could get his hands on into the flames: the chairs on which he and my mother had sat to eat their dinner, and the table as well, the few books on the shelf, along with the shelf, the churn and the dash—anything to keep it burning. Because when the fire died out, the grave-digging would begin; he’d have to put his son in the ground and cover him with earth. He seized a lamp and hurled it into the center of the bonfire, where the glass reservoir of kerosene broke, or exploded. Shards of glass sprayed the crowd, cutting people’s faces, their arms and necks and chests—as some had stripped off their winter clothes in the heat from the blaze—and suddenly the roof of the barn was on fire, and then the neighbor’s house, and soon three, four, five buildings were ablaze. And though my father atoned for the destructive nature of his grief and helped rebuild what had burned, still more punishment followed. My parents’ second child, my brother Dimitri, born the year before me, in 1897, survived, but he was simpleminded, physically robust but unable to arrive at two by adding one to one. Only the girls—Varya and I—were sound in both mind and body.

My father tried to settle down and make himself into the husband and farmer he promised my mother he would become, but
when he wasn’t sunk in misery, he was tormented by restlessness. He’d lie in bed for weeks at a time, and no one could budge him. He’d make a trip to the market in Tobolsk, get sidetracked, and find his way home a month after he was expected. It got so my mother and grandparents no longer waited for him but went about their business and managed without his help.

As for Father, he was waiting for his destiny to announce itself to him. In Yarkovo, a town on the road to Tobolsk, he made the acquaintance of a nobleman who offered to pay him twenty-five gold rubles to take his son to the monastery in Verkhoturye, which lay just east of the Urals, on the left bank of the Tura. It was a long journey by wagon, more than four days, and en route my father and the young man argued about how to get to heaven, a topic that had consumed my father’s attention since the loss of his brother. What existed on the other side of death? The young man, a novice, intended to seal himself away from the world and hide in a life of prayer. My father said enlightenment was to be found out in the world, in the midst of God’s creation, not by running from it.

When they arrived in Verkhoturye, the novice introduced my father to the monastery’s abbot, who invited him to stay as long as he wished. But after a few days spent cloistered behind the order’s thick walls, Father left the monastery, bored by what he called endless “talk talk talk about nothing,” and walked deep into the woods to seek the council of the
starets
, or holy man, Makary, whose name had surfaced in almost every conversation he’d had with the brothers. In his youth, Makary had been an officer in the tsar’s army and had gained a reputation for dueling, drinking, and seducing the wives of other men. It was a lost wager that had sent him to live in a hut in the forest. Makary told my father it had been God’s will that he lose the bet, to introduce him to the woods and his vocation as a hermit. Furthermore, Makary
said, God had planned a singular fate for Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin as well.

The life of my father would be entwined with that of Russia’s rulers, Makary prophesied. He would go to St. Petersburg and there he would die, a martyr.

Father returned to Pokrovskoye intoxicated by visions of his glorious future. He was twenty-nine, and although he had healed many animals—“Grigory has a way with the beasts” was how it was explained by those who brought him their lamed horses and moribund cows—he had yet to save a human life. That winter, he was given the opportunity by Timofei, the innkeeper’s son, whose dog he had saved only a week earlier, when the animal was savaged by a wolf. Timofei was married to a girl who appeared mature for her fifteen years and physically strong, but, alas, things are not always as they seem. After the arrival of their baby girl, born dead after a labor that lasted three days, Timofei’s wife succumbed to childbed fever, which killed many women in that part of the world, most of them so far from a physician’s hand that a midwinter trip to the hospital would have finished them off faster than the plague. In the middle of a frigid January night, Timofei woke my father and mother, hammering with his fists on the door.

“Nadia is dying,” he said, and it was true. Father followed the man home and stood over the young woman’s bed. Her face was flushed and she moved her head from side to side, as people do when delirious. A basin of bile stood on the floor by the side of the bed, streaked red from the girl’s retching.

“Why did you wait so long?” Father asked, and Timofei began to cry so that he couldn’t make words to answer. Father nodded. “You didn’t understand,” he said. “That’s all.” He put his hand on Timofei’s shoulder.

“Timofei,” he said, when the man just stood there, “you must go into the other room now.” But Timofei could not be persuaded
to leave Nadia. “You won’t like what you see, Timofei,” Father said. Still the young man shook his head. “I cannot help your wife without putting my hand inside her.”

Timofei nodded; Father rolled up his sleeves and asked for a basin of soap and water so as to make one hand slippery enough to ease its passage inside the girl. He pulled off Nadia’s covers and pushed up her nightdress. Once he’d introduced the soapy hand into her burning flesh and found the entrance to her womb, he knew what to do. As he withdrew his hand, she labored again, straining and screaming as she hadn’t when he put it inside her, screaming as if she were being murdered, until whatever had been inside her was delivered.

“What was it, Father?” I asked when he told the story, imagining a demon with a black lashing tail, or a few toads and snakes, as victims of fairy tales are made to vomit up.

But Father never told me what it was.

Father and Timofei bathed the girl and stripped the soiled linens off her bed. Timofei held her up and Father put a clean nightdress on her. They left a towel between her legs to catch whatever bleeding continued, and Father told Timofei to watch over her and to make sure she ate nothing and drank as much water as she could keep down.

Word spread, and by the time it had, the things Father had pulled out of that poor girl: imps and demons and lizards and slimy black eels, chains with links made of sin, and hobnails from a witch’s boot. Soon everyone was coming to Father, asking him to cure whatever ailed them, from boils to broken bones, knocking at the door at all hours. And then Yuri Yurivich’s mother came to Father. Yuri was spitting blood, she told him, not just a little. He was hemorrhaging, and Father had to hurry.

As Yuri’s mother told everyone in our town and the next, Grigory Yefimovich had taken her son’s face in his hands and, after what
she assumed was a prayer (as Grigory’s eyes were closed and his body motionless for some minutes), opened his mouth wide and sealed it over Yuri’s nose and lips. He didn’t even care that Yuri’s face was covered in blood, that he was taking the contagion into his mouth. She watched Father blow his own breath into the child’s tubercular lungs, and when Father took his mouth away, Yuri—who’d been half dead, barely conscious—began laughing, a sound his mother hadn’t heard for months, because the child hadn’t had breath to speak let alone laugh. Yuri’s mother’s relief was so great, as great as the fear that preceded it, that she began to weep, and she went down on her knees and kissed the hem of my father’s tunic.

My father told me that when he healed he felt it physically: A rush of energy from deep within himself, as if he were exhaling his soul rather than a breath of mere air. A strange taste in his mouth, like iron and ash, as if he’d licked a pair of fire tongs. A disturbed sense of equilibrium that wasn’t dizziness so much as the conviction that he was no longer standing on earth; he’d transcended gravity, atmosphere, mortality.

Yuri’s mother was poor. She had nothing to offer my father in payment for restoring her son to life—only herself. What was Father to do? Without him, Yuri would have died, probably that very day, and it was as the woman said: she had only the one means of expressing her gratitude. Father’s ability to cure bodily illness, the illustrious future predicted for him: did these not excuse him from conventions others felt they must obey? If a woman gave herself to him freely—and why shouldn’t she, as healing required my father to use every power he had, all his faith, concentration, and physical vigor—was it wrong to take the recompense she suggested?

Neither of my parents believed it was. Mother knew from her own experience, when she was in the last months of pregnancy, that without the release of intercourse my father grew irritable and unable to concentrate. Later, when he first moved to Petersburg,
she sent Dunia with him so that he should never be without a woman close at hand. If the tsar and tsarina depended on my father to preserve the life of the heir to three centuries of Romanov rule—if they needed him to preserve their hold over Russia—then who was Praskovia Fedorovna to stand in the way of the empire? Besides, she said to anyone impertinent enough to ask, he had “enough for everyone.”

“Y
OU TOLD ME
you wanted to know everything about him,” I reminded Alyosha when he made a face. “You made me promise to share everything I knew.”

Sometimes I imagined we’d get out of this together. We’d escape Tsarskoe Selo with a purse full of jewels and we’d bribe our way out of Russia. I’d help him as my father had done. I’d stop the bleeding and the fevers and the pain. He was young to be a husband, but then, so had my father been when he married my mother. He was four years younger than she.

If only I could have done what my father did. As it was, I worried I might become my father’s daughter in the one way I dreaded. I was afraid to touch the body I couldn’t mend, and when Alyosha touched me I was struck still, frozen. Too scared to move. Not of him, of myself. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted him to put his tongue inside my mouth and make me forget what the guard had done, to put his hands on my body and make me forget every bad thing that had ever happened. But Alyosha was not yet fourteen. There had to be something wrong with me to feel what I did for a boy rather than a man, and I didn’t have to give in to desire to fear it was something that would, were I to satisfy it once, make me its prisoner.