Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (18 page)

Most of the tsar’s subjects believed he always dressed so richly and elaborately. Certainly they did not imagine Alyosha’s father in the clothes he preferred: the unadorned military uniform issued to every Russian soldier, which was now hidden under layers of finery. No, once the populace had seen the tsar in his coronation finery, they couldn’t call him to mind dressed in any other fashion. They imagined him filling palace corridors as he walked to breakfast—the vastness of the robe and train, and the addition of all the men required to carry it—and they assumed that when he sat down to eat, he did so in a formal dining hall, a cavernous room for entertaining as lavishly as would a … tsar. And as they watched Nikolay II, now seated next to Alexandra in her not-quite-but-almost-as-heavy robe and train and crown, the two of them presented on a gargantuan palanquin carried by a hundred soldiers, fifty on the left and fifty on the right, the people allowed themselves to dream of what they would never possess, wealth and splendor and fine foods, each imagining what he or she would have for breakfast and what it might be like to have such majesty that
soldiers, sailors, angels, saints, and Christ himself, in multiples of forty-five, paid obeisance.

“Don’t stop, Masha.”

I didn’t.

Tsar and populace. Angels and saints. Jesus. Who was missing? Not a one, for the Devil was too curious to stay away any longer. He arrived in Moscow more than fashionably late and dressed as he usually was, like a wealthy European in a Savile Row suit and shoes made by Bally—not ready-made but custom-fitted, because the Devil’s feet are so exquisitely narrow that he can’t wear the clodhoppers that come ready to wear. They’re not cloven, his feet; they’re not even hooves. In fact, it is that particular and infelicitous rumor that inspires the Devil to spend the outlandish sums he does for a mere pair of shoes. Shoes suit the Devil’s vanity, which couldn’t be more different from that of angels or saints, in their barefoot flamboyance. As for Jesus running all over the dusty desert in his contemptibly bohemian sandals filled up with his dirty, unpedicured toes, no matter where he went with his band of deluded disciples, at the end of the day there they were, washing one another’s feet. Now, that was disgusting, and the Devil didn’t care what point Jesus was trying to make. There was no reason to commune with another person’s filthy, vile, and poorly shod feet.

It was in 1851 that the Devil commissioned his first pair of shoes from Carl Franz Bally of Schönenwerd. They’d met the previous year, in Paris. At least, the Devil considered their transaction to have been social in type. He’d been killing the hours blowing cocaine up the nose of a virgin (well, she had been a few hours earlier) who’d strayed from her maman’s side—just for a moment, to talk to a novelist wearing Masonic medals on his watch fob, for that’s what he said he was, a novelist, although his fingernails were too long for a gentleman’s, and yet they weren’t dirty, not at all,
they were filed and buffed, and no sooner had she climbed into his carriage than she noticed—

No, no, the Devil wasn’t obvious; that’s one thing he never was. Obvious is something he left for earnest Jesus. Of course he didn’t pose as a novelist; he made himself look like a respectable young man, his nails cut short and clean, otherwise Maman wouldn’t have let the toothsome creature speak with him. In fact, the girl had hung back, tongue-tied, and her own maman had pushed her toward the young man with the straight part in his brown hair, the one who had a job with the city government as a vice inspector. Maman told her not to be shy, and so she wasn’t. She allowed herself to be treated like a whore by the young man, because her mother had called him respectable and pushed her on him. Her maman had practically delivered her into his arms to be ruined. (Could that have been her maman’s plan? To lure a potentially good-enough catch into a transgression that would end in matrimony?) As she curtsied to the vice inspector, the girl had no idea what her fate might be or what tragedies awaited her. She drank the champagne the Devil kept pushing on her, and she stayed out all night dancing, and then the Devil ravished her in his carriage and infected her with syphilis, which she didn’t yet know. But she knew she’d been ruined and that, for the moment, was bad enough.

“M
ASHA.
”

“Yes.”

“As it turns out, it’s worse when the girl is a stranger.”

“What girl?”

“Whatever girl it is in the suggestive bits.”

I put my hand on his, staying its progress.

“Masha. You said as long as I didn’t unfasten any buttons, and I haven’t. Not even one.”

“Stop. I can’t think when you do that.”

“Well, what do you expect when you tell me a story about a devil in human form seducing an innocent—”

“It’s not
a
devil, it’s
the
Devil.”

“Masha.”

“Alyosha.”

“Masha.”

“I don’t see how you can go on doing that, Alyosha, when he could turn around and see at any—”

“What do I care what he sees? Isn’t he ruining enough of my life as it is?”

“And what if your mother or father were to find—”

“Do you honestly imagine they’d take the word of a Red Guard over mine?”

S
O THERE THE POOR CHILD WAS
, weeping at the Café Flore, imagining—
knowing
—her life was over, and she was only eighteen! She needed a bit of cheering up before she got maudlin, or else she’d be no fun and just as the Devil was blowing a little sparkle up the prettily formed nostril—such a pity, as all of her was formed for pleasure, and all of it over too quickly, but that’s how the Devil is: wasteful. Prodigal, in fact. And distractible—anyway, just as his attention strayed from the pretty nostril, he spotted Monsieur Bally walking along the boulevard, looking preoccupied, but not so much that he didn’t notice the mischievous breeze that teased open his coat and snatched one and then another hundred-franc note from the billfold in his breast pocket.

The breeze led Bally on a merry chase as the two notes landed on one paving stone and then another, remaining in sight and out of reach and traveling together in a way that was remarkable to
see. At last Monsieur Bally gave up, gasping for air so that he had to bend over, his hands on his knees, for some minutes before he caught his breath. When he stood up he saw he was on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, outside a shoemaker’s showroom. And there it was that haberdashery history was made—you can look it up in any biography of Bally or comprehensive history of footwear. In the window of the shop on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Carl Franz Bally, the son of a weaver of silk ribbons, saw a pair of slippers that would make a perfect gift to bring home to his wife. But the colors they came in were all so pretty, how could he choose one over the others? He bought five pair, one in each color available, and,
spit spot
, just like that, he forgot silk ribbons and went mad for slippers and shoes. He went to bed dreaming of vamps and insoles and calf-hide uppers, of tongues and laces and enameled brass grommets.

By the time the Devil arrived at Bally’s atelier in Switzerland, Carl Franz had contracted with a German shoemaker, installed him in his basement workshop, and was taking orders.

“Hummingbirds, but only their breasts, and only from Panama.”

Bally bowed deeply. What exactly was a hummingbird? Living as he did in the old world, he knew nothing of the birds of America. Could he interest the Devil in peacock-blue patent leather? Touch the stuff; see how unusually supple.

Never mind, the Devil said, he’d have the skins delivered himself. And so he did, packed in snow, because that’s the only way to ship them—you can’t cure the skin of a hummingbird with salt.

And you don’t walk on muddy parade grounds in shoes that cost a fortune, not even if you are the Devil. Who, by the way, had not arrived for the coronation itself, as he found pomp insufferably tedious. Instead, he waited until just before dawn the next day, when the newly crowned tsar was to give the traditional coronation
party for the hoi polloi. The thing about the Devil is this: he enjoys manipulating private citizens, little people without rank or power. The bigwigs who come out to participate in state affairs, mortal and immortal both, don’t need the Devil to lead them astray. By the time the sun rose for the open-air feast for all one million four hundred thousand of Moscow’s citizens, the holy hierarchies were no longer paying attention to the event for which they’d convened.

Levitation, stigmata, speaking in tongues, healing incurables, appearing in more than one place at once: all night the ikons had been arguing over proofs of holiness. What was more to be worshipped—perfect virtue from birth, or turning away from sin? And how could angels lord it over saints when Christ himself had willingly gone slumming not only among but also
as
one of them? No one dreamed of knocking the Trinity from off the top of heaven’s pyramid, but as God is everyone’s witness, and as Dante Alighieri tried to explain, the nine circles of hell are mirrored by concentric celestial spheres. It isn’t a simple hierarchy—how could it be? Wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. Faith, hope, and charity. All of these and more are weighed.

And then, Lord have mercy, there went the Jesuses with all their perplexing blather about first being last and the meek inheriting the earth and little mustard seeds that sprouted versus those that fell by the wayside. They made it just about impossible to decide who was holier.

“But that’s the point!” all the Jesuses cried, except for the baby Jesuses, who were notable for never crying.

While the heavenly host argued and complained, the Devil and his entourage surveyed Khodynka Meadow, a vast training ground for Moscow’s troops, complete with trenches. At the sight of so much mud, the Devil’s cat, Behemoth, black as a rook, tall as a man, and standing upright on his hind legs, washed his whiskers furiously. Azazel, holding tight to the red string he’d tied to his
scapegoat’s horns, let out a high-pitched giggle, joining Thanatos and his sisters, the Keres, in mirth. Suddenly all of them understood what high jinks the Devil had planned. A queue of tumbrels on the eastern border of the grounds held hundreds of barrels of beer, and at the opposite, western border were the tables on which the souvenirs had been displayed—enameled commemorative cups bearing the imperial crest. The sun was yet below the horizon, and hundreds of thousands of those intent on making merry lay sleeping between the cups and the beer, each having arrived the previous day to claim a choice spot in the meadow. The crowds who squandered their time watching the coronation would have to squeeze in where they could.

“That one,” Behemoth said to the Devil, and, still busy with his whiskers, he used the tip of his unusually long and prehensile tail to point to a man with sand-colored hair and a doughy face. The man looked innocuous, perhaps because he was sleeping on his back with his mouth open.

“Are you sure?” the Devil asked.

“Positive,” Behemoth said. He’d chosen Volodya—that was his name—because Volodya’s wife had demanded he go without beer for a week to prove he could, and he’d gone three days so far. And today was a holiday.

“All right, then.” The Devil snapped his fingers and Azazel gave his little black goat’s red string to one of the Keres to hold. He fell on his knees and fastened the Devil’s galoshes over his hummingbird brogues, careful not to muss their double-knotted silk laces. With the one outlandish part of the Devil’s attire covered, his looks weren’t the kind to attract attention—for the most part. The pupils of his yellow eyes were the rectangular kind found in goats—while, curiously, Azazel’s scapegoat had the round ones of a human—so he had no choice but to hide them behind dark glasses. He carried a long walking stick and poked it gingerly into
ruts and holes, picking his way carefully across the field, as if he were blind.

“Bloody fucking cunt, watch what you’re doing,” Volodya yelled, woken by a stab in the groin, not so shy of his left testicle that the Devil’s stick hadn’t grazed its tender skin.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the Devil said. “I’m afraid I can’t …” He trailed off and made an abbreviated bow.

“Volodya!” the wife said to the husband, sitting up and collecting her long hair in her hands. She twisted it into a knot, through which she drove a twig to secure it, stood, and brushed at the chaff clinging to her skirts.

“Listen,” the Devil said. “I heard it said there wasn’t enough beer ordered.”

“Just as well,” the wife said, now shaking her skirts vigorously to rid them of the last bits of dry grass still clinging to the fabric.

“What’s that?” Volodya said. “What’d you say?”

“I don’t know that it’s true,” the Devil said, “as I can’t see for myself. But there’s talk of only enough beer for the first in line.”
And look at the size of this crowd
, he whispered directly into Volodya’s addled brain.
This isn’t loaves and fishes, Volodya. This isn’t Jesus’s party, it’s the tsar’s
.

Just like that it was done: the sun popped above the horizon, everyone woke up stiff and cranky, and the Devil moved out of the way to watch the fun from where his entourage waited, having made themselves comfortable on a red-and-purple Turkish rug Azazel pinched from one of the Kremlin’s guest rooms and spread on a current of air a hundred or so feet above the crowd. They might have caused their own stampede, had anyone looked up and seen anything as astonishing as a man-sized black cat jigging with delight on a floating carpet. But no one did look up.

“Am I not the shit!” Behemoth crowed. “Christ on a cracker, will you look at them go!”

The Devil smiled as Azazel removed the galoshes, and his smile wasn’t terrible; it was the kind of smile that said everything was going to be fine. Below the Devil’s narrow, narrow, three times narrow, elegant feather-shod feet, Volodya was leading the stampede, which had progressed already too far to control or even limit its destruction. From on high he looked like a whirligig beetle moving swiftly over the surface of a pond, his charging head the point of a great V drawn in the crowd. Behemoth smiled, and his smile was filled with sharp teeth and said everything was going to turn out badly.