Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (19 page)

Between the tables holding the souvenir cups and the tumbrels with their barrels of beer, hundreds died, trampled and suffocated in muddy trenches, and thousands were wounded. By afternoon, hospitals overflowed with bodies crushed by the wild headlong rush of men, women, and children, limbs and ribs broken by the press of countless running feet.

Shocked and sickened by a tragedy that had strangled any celebratory impulse he and Alexandra might have gratified, Nikolay told his mother he planned to forgo the evening’s festivities, but the Meddlesome Four advised against it. Nikolay had chosen a bride who wasn’t French, and still France was sufficiently gracious to host a grand fête for the newly anointed tsar and tsarina. To decorate the ambassador’s ballroom, her government had stripped Versailles of its silver and tapestries. How could he think of making so infelicitous a statement?

“Nicky!” the Meddlesome Four cried. “Our only ally!”

So they went, the two of them doomed to always do wrong no matter how pure their intent. They danced a quadrille, and their guests were offended at how stricken they looked. The tsar was pale and drawn; the tsarina’s eyes were red with weeping.

A thousand rubles to each victim’s family, and a coffin for every corpse. The tsar paid for these condolences out of his own private
pocket, and he and the tsarina visited the wounded, personally, every last one of them. But no sum of tears and rubles and bedside apologies could undo this most dreadful omen of all. From behind one coffin to the purchase of hundreds: the reign of Nikolay II would not be a happy one.

Holy Rollers

“D
O YOU KNOW
what my father loves?” Alyosha said one afternoon. “Do you, Masha? Passing, by train, through a town where all the people turn out to see him—
the tsar
—so near their humble homes. Like an apparition. As if Christ himself had deigned to walk among them, his vassals.

“Great-grandfather Alexander may have freed them fifty—more than fifty—years ago, but they don’t care, or they don’t know it. They regard themselves no differently than they did when they were serfs. There are no revolutionaries outside of Moscow and Petersburg. The people who suffer and starve blame Father’s ministers, who they assume must be incompetent or venal. Who somehow pervert Father’s will. Not one of them believes the tsar makes mistakes.”

“Don’t you think he wants—”

“As long as he can glide through those towns like a god in his chariot, the train moving very slowly, so as to give the populace a good look at him, as long as he can greet every single citizen—for of course no one is too busy, or too sick, no one turns away uninterested—then he’s satisfied. Everyone waves at him standing in his car’s open window, they bend to kiss the earth where his shadow falls, the earth that is Russia, that is the Romanovs, that is the tsar, all of them implicitly kissing his hand when they kiss the
earth. Then Father can believe in the myth of his own making, that all the tsar’s people love him and believe in his goodness as they do their own fathers’.

“Even now he imagines his loyal subjects have united on his account and will storm the palace and rescue him, restore him to his proper throne. He’d trade his flesh-and-blood children for that … that kind of fatherhood.”

“Alyosha. You know that’s untrue. You’re conflating two worlds: the world of your father’s obligation to a role he was born to—not one he chose but one he had no choice but to accept—with the world that is his family. You know it’s unfair to complain he doesn’t care for one as he does the other. He inhabits parallel universes, that’s all. It’s his fate, his misfortune.”

“Masha. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about what makes my father look happy. That’s how to tell what he cares about. It’s the idea of his being the beloved and all-powerful tsar.”

“No, it’s only how to tell what gives him pleasure. You don’t suppose love makes people happy, do you?”

“Sometimes it does.”

“And more often it doesn’t. If all he cared about was his crown, one would think he’d be very unhappy now, deprived of his exalted position, separated from any agency he had, reduced from a tsar to a colonel. And yet he doesn’t look it. He seems almost unburdened. Have you ever seen him like this before? He laughs, enjoys his meals, though they are nothing as rich as they once were. Enjoys his gardens—”

“Don’t you find it maddening how he poses himself by his window?”

“What do you mean?”

“I think he hears a knock at his study’s door, jumps up from his chair, and arranges himself on the windowsill, focusing his eyes on a distant leaf or twig or something, and only then does he ask you in.
Before you’ve had a chance to open your mouth, you’ve gotten the idea that no matter what it was you’d come to speak about, it’s of no importance compared to what preoccupies the tsar. In the end you give up and leave with the impression he’s heard nothing you’ve said and thus has no responsibility to respond to whatever it was.”

“I’ve never knocked on his door,” I said, thinking that if Alyosha was correct then it made little difference that I’d always gone running to the stables rather than petitioning the tsar to arrange for Varya and me to be evacuated from Tsarskoe Selo. Even were the tsar able to help us now, the addled tsarina might forbid it—she would if she still believed I had any ability to heal Alyosha. My company did provide him entertainment, and even a measure of solace, and Dr. Botkin had told her Alyosha was improving steadily. I didn’t know what to hope for: exile or imprisonment. What I felt for Alyosha … the only person who wouldn’t have thought it wrong, who wouldn’t have thought anything of it at all, was dead. Anyone else would judge me to be as immoral as my father had been; in me they’d see his flaws, unmitigated by his gifts.

Alyosha’s arms were rigid at his sides, his fingers curled into fists. Emotion chiseled angles into his ordinarily smooth countenance, and I could see the man who would have emerged from under youth’s softer contours.

“I know things you don’t,” Alyosha said before I could assemble a response to his anger, an emotion he betrayed so seldom I had little practice at placating it. The tyrannical temper-tantrum-thrower had grown up into something more like a yet-to-be-lobbed grenade, its fuse burning. He sat up on his elbows to look me in the eye. “I know about my father, about my mother, about everything. Things other people don’t. You know why? It’s because I’m always listening—I’m never so sick I can’t hear—and even when I’m not out of my head or unconscious or whatever it is they think I am, people say anything in front of me. It’s the greatest proof I
have that everyone expects me to die. Not to be assassinated but to expire. There’s never been a reason to keep state secrets from me. And because Mother’s apartments have always been so close to my own, I know secrets that aren’t about the state.”

“Such as?”

“About your father and my mother.”

“What about them?”

“The joke is, after all the poisonous gossip, your father was innocent. With respect to my mother, he was. She offered herself to him. She knew the sort of … of … of currency he could expect to receive outside Tsarskoe Selo, and she didn’t want to take any chances. She still believes your father was a direct connection to God, like a human telephone wire. She prostituted herself for me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“And your father, the most talked-about lothario in the history of the empire, he bowed and kissed her hand. He said he was unworthy.”

“You heard this?”

“I saw it.”

“This … this scene played out before your eyes?”

“I told you, anyone who notices me assumes I am witless from pain, and the rest of them don’t see me at all. From the time I was aware of the world around me, I’ve observed that I manage to be both invisible and the focus of all attention. Remarkable, really. It must be a talent of some kind. Oh, Masha, don’t look at me like that. You know your father.”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.” I’d never known Alyosha to lie—he was too proud for that—and yet there was something in his face or his voice, something that suggested he wasn’t telling the truth. Or perhaps I just couldn’t imagine such a thing as Alexandra Fyodorovna, at least the version of her I’d invented, offering herself to any man other than her husband, not even Grigory Rasputin.

•  •  •

H
OME IN
P
OKROVSKOYE
, my young father had suffered periods of despondency. He loved my mother, but he wanted to leave home and take up the life of an itinerant healer. Every day that he didn’t go, he paced, he raged, he broke down and cried with his head in Mother’s lap. If his vocation was genuine, why was he torn by such guilt? Why such anguish at the idea of leaving his wife and children? He spent hours in prayer, remaining on his knees long enough to cause a man to faint, and at last he received the answer he sought. The problem was one of identity. When he was doing God’s will, healing the sick, he was no longer Grigory Yefimovich but the force that moved through Grigory, the force that claimed him as its servant. Grigory was no more and no less than the conduit of God’s will. Grigory’s hopes and fears, his woes—none of these mattered. Grigory, the individual, was beside the point. Had the prophet Isaiah not proclaimed it? More than once, more than ten, twenty times, he’d quoted the passage for me:

“All flesh is grass and all its beauty like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.”

As my mother understood Father’s vocation as absolute, an expression of unalterable divine will, she told Father there was no choice in the matter, that was that, they would embark on a life of separation, and we, their children, would soon learn not to expect to see our father. He’d come and he’d go according to his own lights. He was en route from here to there. He was stopping at a house where lived an ailing child. Having healed the child, he was overwhelmed, intoxicated, by the gratitude he received from his or her parents. From one sickbed to the next he went, restoring happiness—that thing we recognize in retrospect, after we’ve
lost it—carried forward on a warm tide of goodwill. Never staying anywhere longer than a night or two, unattached to any one human being, he was free and he was flooded with love. I think that must have been a form of rapture too.

It was then, after years of being received as a holy man, of having people prostrate themselves before him, kiss his fingers, his feet, the hem of his blouse, I think it must have been then that my father began to imagine himself as having become one with God, and therefore a god himself.

He forgot the man who had discarded the idea of a particular individual named Grigory Yefimovich.

And something else happened, something equally dangerous. The heightened assurance he projected in the aftermath of a healing changed the way women responded to him. No longer did he need to pursue them. Women were drawn to him now, as they hadn’t been before. He had always possessed sexual magnetism; now it had intensified. He told himself women were no different from children, who were to be loved and who were to receive proof of his love’s impartiality. And how does a man demonstrate love to a woman, other than with his body?

Dressed in the simple clothes of a monk, Father walked from one town to the next. He carried few provisions, ate fish if he caught any, went hungry when he didn’t, and grew as thin as an El Greco. In those days, when I was five or six, he looked like a man without home or hearth, a mendicant, holy. People began to speak of a new
starets
, a messianic healer who had walked out of the wilderness, a mysterious Father Grigory, of humble origins yet possessed of a transcendent force that allowed him to heal the sick.

When he came upon a town, he’d go first to the church to pray, lying on the stone floor, facedown and arms spread like a crucified Christ before the iconostasis. Exhausted by his endless pilgrimage, or immobilized by a force no one could see, he was able to remain
motionless, his breathing imperceptible, for as long as a day. By the time he’d resurrected himself, enough of the town’s inhabitants had seen and spoken of his saintly prostration that when he appeared in the marketplace a throng had gathered, eager to feed him in recompense for his healing touch.

“He could walk and walk from morning until night, day after day?” Alyosha asked, his face tight with pain. I hated seeing evidence of his suffering—hated both the fact of it and that I couldn’t banish it. Too, it returned me to my preoccupation with the accident that caused so dangerous an injury. The topic was one Alyosha refused to revisit, sullen and silent at any mention of tea trays or staircases or newel posts.

“Let’s loosen the brace, just for a bit.”

“No, no. Botkin will come running. He has some preternatural connection to the beastly thing. As soon as I touch it, he appears.”

“Well, let me, then. I’ll take the blame if he catches us.” I was as gentle as possible, but still Alyosha panted through his nostrils, teeth clenched behind his closed lips, for as long as it took me to unbuckle the straps. Even in his suffering he had to be careful not to bite his lip or his knuckle or do any of the thoughtless little things another person might do to distract himself. “Did I tell you what happened in Kazan?” I asked when I’d finished adjusting the brace.