Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (22 page)

 … to Saint Agatha, who protected the tsarina against sterility, to Saint Felicity, who granted her conceiving a boy, to Saint Catherine of Siena, who hadn’t allowed her to suffer a miscarriage, to Ulric, who watched over her labor lest there be a complication, to Giles the Hermit, who summoned her milk to flow, to all the Holy Innocents murdered by Herod who stood guard around his cradle, to Margaret of Antioch, who used her crucifix to prick the insides
of the dragon that had swallowed her, forcing it to vomit her up so she could take her position at the nursery door, still armed with that crucifix, and of course to the Virgin, the Mother of God, whose mercy is without limit: was there a saint Alexandra hadn’t begged, an ikon under whose gilded glassy gaze she hadn’t kneeled?

I wonder if, at the first sight of blood, in that moment when the tsarina saw the future and the trouble it would bring, she contemplated her happiness, if she held it tight and looked at it, the way one does before letting go of a treasured possession. Six weeks without so much as a wisp of a cloud over her head. Just the previous evening she and Nicky were laughing together. Tsar Nikolay had come to the nursery knowing he’d find his wife there, for she could hardly stand to let the baby out of her sight, and, yes, there she was with Alyosha just out of the bath, lying on his back on a towel as she kneeled over him.

“Look,” Alexandra said, and she smiled as no one but her family ever saw her smile, her expression so radiant and unguarded he couldn’t help but take her hand to pull her up into his arms. “See how strong he is!” she said, ducking out from under Nicky’s kiss. The two of them laughed with joy, watching as Alyosha kicked his sturdy legs.

A dot of red, that was all. She tried to brush it away from his blanket. Jam, perhaps, from when his sisters were cooing over him at breakfast. Yes, oh, please let it be, please God, please let it be jam. But it wasn’t the right color, she could see that as it spread, and it wasn’t quite sticky enough, and oh God help me, please God no. But it kept on growing. Not sticky like jam, and getting bigger. Alyosha gurgled as she put him on his back. He waved his fat fists as his mother pulled away the blanket and dress, pushed up the little vest, pulled down the diaper. The violent shock of it, so red, so, so very red, seeping slowly out from the umbilicus, which had healed—she thought it had. She had to put her head down so she
didn’t faint, and still all the world went inside out and black and white as if she was looking at a photographic negative.

For nearly a decade Alexandra had been in a state of constant anxiety, knowing happiness would disappear, knowing it was the nature of happiness to depart, tormenting herself with questions of when and how. But she hadn’t anticipated this. No person was perverse enough, wicked and profane and mean enough, to imagine what she was seeing now, her perfect child, a baby only six weeks old, with blood welling up from his middle. She hadn’t understood the risk she carried. How could she, when no one had ever spoken of its existence?

Yes, there had been rumors about the deaths of young men in Victoria’s family, some of them little boys, some of them babies, but no one knew what had really killed them. Victoria’s son Leopold died after a fall, as did her grandson Leopold. And Alexandra’s own brother, Friedrich, fell on his head when he was three, knocked himself out, and never woke up. To hear people talk, Victoria’s male descendants were afflicted by a terrible clumsiness, a flair for operatic tumbles down stairs and out windows and, when they were old enough to drive, for running off the road straight into the afterlife. But no one ever mentioned anyone bleeding to death. Court physicians were discreet, in caution for their positions and their lives. And so what if the Battenberg branch of the family bundled their princes in padded suits before they were let out to play in a padded park, every tree trunk wrapped in layers of cotton batting, every ball deflated to a disappointing lack of bounce? Who knew what they did in far-off lands or why?

An attenuated and especially deadly game of Russian roulette, played with a pistol bearing only two chambers, one for each X chromosome a mother can bequeath to a child—as a boy receives only one of these, he has half a chance of living a normal life, half of getting the wrong X.

The fault lay within that fearsome fat queen, Victoria. It had to have, because whatever caused Alyosha’s hemophilia was unknown before Victoria’s reign. Unknown before her cloistered childhood, with no companion save her little spaniel. Unknown before her father died and left her prey to her selfish-monster-of-a-mother’s tyrannies, before her mother seized the regency and plotted with a lover to prevent Victoria’s ascending England’s throne. Unknown before Victoria, at last wearing her rightful crown, exiled her cruel mother to a remote tower, though not nearly remote enough to forget her.

Some misfortune, or the sum of her misfortunes: whatever it was, it reached inside Victoria and twisted the stalks of her ovaries, poked at the clabbered pink jelly of her still-sleeping eggs, pinched and popped some and did the rest grave damage.

But no one saw this portent. How could they, hidden as it was deep within her lament?

I
T WENT ON AND ON
, that first slow hemorrhage, almost too slow to call a hemorrhage, had it not continued from one day to the next and the one after that. Alexandra Fyodorovna held Alyosha. She refused to relinquish him to another woman’s arms, not even the steadfast arms of an Experienced, Bonded, and Insured Imperial Baby Nurse, but rocked and paced, and hushed and shushed, all the while weeping silently onto his head, her tears plastering the golden floss to his scalp. And when she saw, in the morning light that streamed through the nursery windows, his heartbeat flicker in that tender dangerous place where the bones of his skull had yet to close over his brain, she cried harder. His first smile inspired a fresh cascade of tears—although it was difficult to tell where one left off and another began—as would his first tooth and first steps and first words.

Once the tsarevich began to bleed, Alexandra wouldn’t let anyone see or touch the umbilicus—no one other than Botkin, sworn to secrecy—and she dressed the wound herself, a wound that wasn’t a wound so much as slow seep of blood that saturated the pad of gauze held in place by a long strip of the stuff she tied gently around his middle. Alyosha didn’t complain. He was the kind of baby mothers call easy. He never cried for long. He wouldn’t, not once he discovered that when he cried he couldn’t hear what he wanted to hear—the sound of his mother’s heart beating on the other side of her skin, on the inside of her, where he’d swum and turned like a fish to the tune of that throb, woke to it and slept to it. What sound did Alyosha know as he did the thumping of his mother’s heart, which had quickened and slowed, quickened and slowed, lapped and tapped at his ears’ tender drums? The sound he’d felt in his fingertips and his spine, the one that animated the walls of the womb in which he’d made himself up out of nothing, inventing two eyes and two ears and two feet with five toes and, when he was done, thought his first thought. A thought that was, more or less,
lub dub, lub dub
. But now, as he heard with his ear pressed to the warm skin of his mother’s chest, the beating of her heart was too fast, much too fast, and because it was too fast it held his attention. So Alyosha rarely cried, as he always had to listen.

Listen past the hundreds of prayers, thousands of prayers, the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Acts of Contrition, and, squeezed among the formal words of the Church, her own increasingly frantic, sometimes nearly incoherent begging, endless help-me-dear-Lords, please-please-pleases, and reflexive bargaining. My life for his, my blood for his, my umbilicus for his, please please please, another blight, anything, gangrene, lightning strikes, burn down the Alexander Palace, the Alexander and the Catherine and the Winter Palaces, burn them all down, Anichkov, Gatchina, the Kremlin, even Livadia with its sunny white walls and hills of flowers, burn
up all seven of the wretched things, cut off my hands, blind me and take my books away, every last one of them, the icons, too; take them, I don’t want them, give me cancer, poison my blood, make me bald, make me stupid—make me anything, my mother-in-law if You like—just punish me, punish me, punish me please and not him. Or take a different child, God forgive me, but please won’t you take one of the girls, not the boy, not the boy, take Olga, she’s sulky and stubborn and intellectually arrogant, or take Tatiana, she broods, forgive me, God, but it’s the truth, take one of the girls, any of the girls, God help me, take two of them but not him, not him, please don’t let him die, don’t, dear God, don’t.

Chicanery

“I
F YOU REFUSE
, we’ll die not knowing what all the fuss is about.”

“You’re not even fourteen, Alyosha.”

“I am, almost. And you’re just eighteen.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I haven’t had any experience either.”

“But that’s what I’m saying, Masha. We don’t have time to waste.”

On the afternoon of the day the Romanovs learned they were to be exiled east, over and beyond the Urals, Alyosha and I began an argument we wouldn’t resolve before we were separated. It was about sex, of course.

Alyosha put my hand on the “ache in his lap” so I could feel how hard was the torment I caused him. “It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong under ordinary circumstances,” he said. “As we’re going to be murdered, we’re excused from conventional morality.”

“You think virtue is relative? That it isn’t absolute?”

“Naturally I do. There are no virtues other than those we invent and manipulate to suit our needs.” He was sitting up in bed, his leg free from its brace, and he had his arms crossed and wore his most patronizing expression. “An obvious example,” he went on, “is our executing murderers at home while we decorate those soldiers who are the most prolific murderers when we wage war.
How can you reconcile those two facts without a moral code that’s relative?”

It was the end of July. Alyosha was well enough to be allowed out of bed for most of the day, and we were sitting together in one of the few rooms allotted the imperial family, under the guard of two humorless soldiers in gray woolen uniforms, bayonets at the ready. The announcement of imminent exile was accompanied by a doubling of our “protective” security, whose drabness made it hard to remember the tall glossy Abyssinians dressed in red and gold as anything other than a quaint decoration. I couldn’t imagine how or where Alyosha thought we could be alone with each other, and I said so.

“Outdoors, in the Chinese theater, or one of the hothouses.”

“Nagorny,” I said. “You can’t go outside without him.”

“I can get rid of Nagorny.”

“How?”

“He does anything I say, as long as I don’t run about and risk falling down. Haven’t I managed to banish him almost entirely from our afternoons together? I’ll tell him we’re reading and that he’s to leave us alone. He can sit on a bench. Smoke. Drink tea. It doesn’t matter what.”

“I don’t think Nagorny likes me,” I said, changing the subject.

“He’s jealous, that’s all.”

“What does he have to be jealous of?”

“The time we spend together. Remember, he stayed when Dina left. He chose me over his freedom. Come on, Masha,” he said, when I was silent. “We’ll be careful. We’ll bring our books and sit and read and they’ll get bored and fall asleep just as they always do.”

As grim as they looked, the new guard of revolutionary soldiers had turned out to be as lax in discipline when sober as they were when drunk. After all, as any of them would happily tell you, there
was no incentive to behave any better than they did. Guarding that Bastard Decadent Tsar and his Shamelessly Corrupt Family wasn’t the appointment they wanted—not if they weren’t allowed to maim and murder them—so what were they to do but smoke, drink, play cards, and break things? No excitement whatsoever, as the fools weren’t going to try to escape. To hear the family members talk, they didn’t even know they were going to be assassinated—a thing as simple as that, a thing anyone could have guessed. If that didn’t prove they were fools, what would?

And what hoity-toity toplofty fools, too good to fight back, too polite to object to being mistreated. Really, they didn’t seem to be proper adults, even. Why, hadn’t Nikolay Alexandrovich celebrated the thaw by pedaling out of his castle on a bicycle? Consider a thing like that, a tsar on a bicycle. No wonder Russia had come upon such dire times, when tsars went around on bicycles. Just like a little boy he was, in his cap and coat, following the path, when one of the guards thrust his bayonet forward.

It could just as well have been a branch, because all the man did was stick it through the spokes of the back wheel. The bicycle came to a sudden halt, and the tsar in his little-boy cap flew over the handlebars and landed on the path.

He wasn’t tall, the tsar, so perhaps that was some of it, but God have mercy—well, there’s no God anymore, there’s only the Soviet, so mercy upon him, whatever the source of that mercy. Although perhaps it was a thing of the past: mercy. Certainly it was in short supply. Anyway, mercy on us, the tsar looked about ten years old. Even a mustache and beard couldn’t disguise the friendly innocence in his eyes.