Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (21 page)

“How horrible that must be, to be put on display like an animal at the zoo.”

Alyosha smiled. “You haven’t spent much time at court, have you? Anyway, he said he didn’t mind, as they paid him quite well and all he had to do was stand there in a costume.”

“Ah,” I said. “Good training for the Alexander Palace.”

Alyosha nodded. “He said as much. Although in Chicago, for the exposition, he had a whole native diorama in which to pose, with vegetation that was genuinely from Abyssinia, as were the clothes they dressed him in and the furnishings in his hut. Joseph was the only part that was false. The scholar who presented the exhibit had acquired a real Abyssinian but something happened to him at the last minute, Joseph didn’t know what, and they needed a particular-looking individual, with attributes that Joseph had—his height and the shade of his skin. The anthropologist picked Joseph out of a park. He’d been walking to work—he was a bricklayer—and the man accosted him, inquired what his wages were, and offered him three times that to stand or squat in his little Abyssinia and pretend he spoke no English. All he wore was a striped loincloth, white paint, and a lot of necklaces made of bone.”

I laughed. “People tell you such curious things about themselves, Alyosha. I can’t imagine Joseph telling your sisters that.”

“My English is better than theirs.”

“That’s not it, though.”

“No,” Alyosha agreed. “I’ve wondered if perhaps they don’t feel sorry for me and go out of their way to be friendly and produce a tribulation or two of their own.”

“What will we do in Chicago?” I asked, as Alyosha had fallen silent.

“I’m trying to think.”

“Once we arrive,” I said, “we’ll have to find employment.”

“Right,” Alyosha agreed. “Do you have any skills, Masha? I mean aside from …”

“From what?”

“From whatever ones I already know about.”

“I can perform tricks on horseback,” I said.

“No you can’t.”

“I can.”

“How would a girl learn
dzhigitovka
?”

“A
girl
?” I said.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Yes you did. That’s exactly how you meant it. Lying only makes it worse.”

“All right. I’m sorry—I am, Masha. Please accept my apologies.”

“I suppose you think I should apply for a position as chambermaid just because I know how to make a bed.”

“Masha. Stop it. Tell me about the tricks.”

“They aren’t anything to do with
dzhigitovka
,” I told him.
Dzhigitovka
refers to fancy Cossack cavalry exercises requiring saddles and stirrups. A master of the art can gallop into battle invisibly, hanging from one side of his mount, completely hidden by his horse’s body.

“What are they, then?”

“Stunts I taught myself, that’s all.”

“But how?”

“Well, I did grow up with horses. And you’ll laugh, but my childhood dream was to go to America to become a cowboy. There was an American horseman—they call them cowboys there—who assembled what he called a ‘Congress of Rough Riders.’ He got them from all over the—”

“Buffalo Bill Cody,” Alyosha said. “The Wild West Show. I saw it. Nagorny took me. And Derevenko. They’d cordoned off the Nevsky Prospekt to turn it into a theater for the performance.”

“Yes, that’s the man I’m talking about. He died this past January. I saw it in the paper. January tenth. He died of the same thing that killed your grandfather—kidney failure.”

“I didn’t know he’d died.”

“He did, two weeks after Father.”

The first time Cody came to Europe was for the American exposition, and Edward, the Prince of Wales, took his children to see the show; they all liked it so much Edward asked his mother, Queen Victoria, to see it. “Victoria invited the Congress of Rough Riders for a command performance,” I told Alyosha, “as part of her Golden Jubilee festival. It was 1887. And there were kings and princes and princesses invited from all over, as it was her fiftieth year as empress and she was related to half the kings and queens of Europe. Kaiser Wilhelm was there. He’d just been crowned.”

“Right,” Alyosha said, making a face. “The man at the other end of the wire to Mother’s boudoir. Can you imagine my mother as a German spy? It would be funny if it weren’t so … so …”

“Ludicrous. Poor woman,” I said. “She’d suffer a nervous collapse before she could relay any information whatsoever.”

Everyone loved the Rough Riders. It was the spectacle everyone had to see. Annie Oakley was there too, and she had so many medals she couldn’t pin them to the front of her dress; they went all the way around the back. Wilhelm challenged her to shoot the ash off the end of his cigarette, and she did. The show was invited from one palace to the next, all over the continent.

“Was it—did it go to Moscow or St. Petersburg?” Alyosha wanted to know.

“It didn’t come to Russia, not for that first tour. Just to Rome, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, and Berlin. They stayed for months at the Hohenzollern Castle, and before they went back to America, Cody went looking for Cossacks to add to the show—he’d got the idea from the kaiser, who’d turned cowboys and Indians into a national craze. Cody had come to Europe with ninety-seven red Indians, aside from the white Americans in the show, and nearly two hundred horses. When he went back he had a dozen Cossacks
and their horses as well, and all of them sailed together on a single steamship. I was a little girl, five or six, when Mother told me about it. She knew about it because two of her cousins, two brothers, went back to America with Cody.

“This is silly, I know, but I’d never seen a modern sailing vessel before I come to Petersburg, and I imagined the ship the way Noah’s ark was illustrated in the children’s Bible Mother used to teach me to read—one of those cutaway pictures that show the interior of a thing. Only instead of all different animals in the stalls, my ark was filled with nothing but horses. Every night I fell asleep looking at that picture in my head. Imagining myself going from one stall to the next, saying good night to each horse.

“My poor mother. Once I learned about her cousins, she couldn’t budge me from the idea that I was going to join the Wild West Show too. The brothers’ names were Pyotr and Arkady, and every night when she put me to bed I’d ask her to tell me about them. I wasn’t interested in saying my prayers, only in her Cossack cousins. She soon ran out of things to tell me, so I made up stories for myself and determined to become a trick rider. I was good with horses, and I loved them. The thing they used to say about Father—that he had a way with the beasts—that, anyway, was true of me as well. Long before you were dreaming of Caesar’s Egyptian campaign, I was planning my glorious reign as the queen of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.”

“So. Tell me, Masha. Tell me the tricks.”

“I’m going to.”

We had five horses at home in Pokrovskoye and I tried, as a child, to love them democratically, but my favorite was Valentine. He was half Yakut—the only horse that can survive Siberian winters—and half something else, a bigger animal, with longer legs. Father said the man from whom he’d bought Valentine told him all sorts of rubbish, that he’d been sired by a Cossack cavalry horse, that
he’d been gelded twice and both times everything had grown back. Had revolutionary soldiers attempted to conscript him, they would have discovered his temper, and I liked imagining his big teeth sinking into the meat of a soldier’s arm or buttock. Whatever it was it would go on hurting long after the man pulled away from his bite. Because Valentine bit everyone who came near him. Except for me. He had a wide, smooth, sleek back, with the Yakut’s insulation of fat covered by thick hair. Almost before I could talk, I’d figured out how to climb onto him, using his mane and grabbing the tufts of his chinchilla-colored hair. Anyone who mistook him for a plain animal would change his mind once he pushed his forelock out from before his eyes, which were so dark it was hard to find where pupil stopped and iris began. The shorter hair on his face was more silver than gray, and his black eyes were ringed with black, and his mane, tail, ears, and socks were black too.

“Once I’d resolved to make myself a trick rider, I used pinesap to make Valentine’s back sticky, and I began by teaching myself to stand on his back while he walked, and then while he cantered. Trotting was harder. Valentine almost bounced when he trotted, as if he had springs instead of legs, and I fell and I fell, I can’t tell you how many times. Mother would try to wash the sap and grass and dirt from my hair, and I was so tired after spending all day pursuing my brilliant equestrienne destiny that I’d fall asleep almost as soon as she dipped my head in the warm water.”

“Why did you never tell me about it before?” Alyosha said. “The trick riding?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You knew I went to the stable as often as I was allowed.”

“But I didn’t know you did anything but ride.”

“That’s the silly thing, actually. I don’t know how. I mean, not as your father or sisters do. I’m sure I could teach myself to ride with a saddle and reins, but I don’t like the idea of having anything
between my body and the horse’s. Tack always seems an encumbrance. Something to inhibit rather than aid communication. And I’d never consider using a bit—that’s just stupid. When a horse and I are used to each other it doesn’t take any steering, only a shift of balance or the touch of an ankle. And if for some reason the horse doesn’t feel like listening, it’s enough to use his mane. But mostly I like doing tricks—somersaults, handsprings, that kind of thing.”

“On the horse’s back, you mean?”

“Or on two at once, when I can match up a pair that are willing to work with each other. Usually it’s enough to hold our three heads together until our breath aligns. Then we’re a team and I can guide them with my feet. I can stand with a foot on either horse. Stand while they run.”

“No you can’t,” Alyosha said. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Of course I can.”

“No. You can’t.”

“What, do you think I’m lying to you?” I looked at Alyosha to read his expression. Usually I did my best to sidestep whatever his health prevented him from doing, and when I mentioned the trick riding I’d intended to speak of it as a fantasy, not admitting it was something I actually did. It was his saying “a girl” in that supercilious way that made me lose my temper.

Buffalo Bill Cody. The obituary was published when I was ill in bed, but Varya saved it for me—I have the notice still. I remember being ashamed to have cried as I did when I learned of his death, to have cried for a stranger as I couldn’t for my own father, facedown on my bed in the palace to smother the sound of that awful, hot, wet, hiccupping, disheveled, childish sobbing. After, when I looked in the mirror, I saw that my nose was as red and swollen as a new potato.

“I suppose I’m to be the ticket-taker?” Alyosha said.

“Don’t be stupid. Once the audience sees your act, they’ll forget
about me. We’ll begin by making a big show of carrying our carpet onstage, unrolling it before the crowd, and flapping it about to exhibit its ordinary appearance. We’ll let people in the audience touch it. Then I’ll set it on the center of the stage and you will sit in the middle, cross-legged, like a swami or yogi or whatever they’re called, and I will ask for silence, as levitation requires absolute concentration. You’ll make terrible faces, so it’s obvious the strain of what you’re doing is nearly unendurable, and slowly slowly slowly the carpet will rise from the stage. You’ll let it go up only a few inches, no more than a foot, and you’ll keep up with the awful faces—you want it to look as if the effort to stay up in the air is practically exterminating you. I’ll pass a cane under—no, I’ll invite people from the audience to come up and investigate. And all along you’ll be gritting your teeth and keeping your eyes shut—I hear it’s quite hot under stage lights, so you’ll be perspiring too—and whoever comes up will see it’s real, there’s no hidden strings or anything like that. At the end, you’ll act as if you have to stop out of exhaustion. You’ll just … I don’t know, go limp or collapse on the floating carpet, and it will drift gently down to the ground. It will be a sensation, much better than any horse nonsense could ever be. Much safer too. You’ll have a career that can’t possibly harm you. We can charge extra to the people who want to come up close and try to figure out how you do it.”

“Why can’t I fly around on the carpet?”

“Because no one would believe that. They’d call it an optical illusion or something. It’s better if they can see it up close. And for it to look as if it’s you who’s keeping the carpet up, rather than the other way around. If they thought it could really fly, it would just frighten them.”

Russian Roulette

S
EPTEMBER
23, 1904. The autumnal equinox. Day and night equal, and in balance. From that day forward the days would grow shorter and the nights longer. The planet had tipped, a degree, no more, but still, harmony was undone, darkness had gained the upper hand.

Alyosha, six weeks old, began bleeding from his navel. No need to try to picture the baby he was, for his father and mother and sisters and grandmother, aunts and great-uncles—yes, even the Meddlesome Four—took photograph after photograph of his gummy wet smile and button nose. They immortalized the fine golden hair that grew on his perfectly formed head, the dimples in his plump arms, and the lashes that curled around his gray eyes—his mother’s eyes, they all said as soon as they saw them. This child, received by his family as its messiah, upon whose life the fate of Russia rested, the answer to countless fervent petitions—