Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (23 page)

But wait, surely that was the affectation of a clever manipulator. All the world knew he was a bloodthirsty savage who cared nothing for the suffering of his people. The savage picked up his cap, dusted it off, picked up his bicycle, dusted it off, and he smiled.
Perhaps he intended this to be disarming, but it wasn’t as if smiling proved his forbearance, or his virtue, or even his manners. It didn’t admit to any of the countless crimes he had perpetrated against the proletariat. All it proved was deceit. Either that or weakness. That turning-the-other-cheek shit, it was exactly that: shit. A fairy tale the moneyed class fed the workers to make them humble, to make them believe there was a world-to-come after they’d been trodden down, broken, and exploited in this one.

The tsar got back on his bicycle, tried to ride off to the left, and, when the guards closed ranks before him, tried to go right. But the guards opposed him at every turn, and he dismounted and wheeled the bicycle back to the Alexander Palace. The tsar could do nothing without half a dozen guards following him. When he did, at long last, receive permission to ride on his bicycle, the sound of armed soldiers running behind him, jackboots crunching on the path, killed whatever pleasure he might have taken in the excursion, and he didn’t ride it again.

T
HE REST OF
us were not so unfortunate. We were watched, but by fewer guards and from a greater distance. So Alyosha could assume the guards wouldn’t pose a problem. But what of ignorance? It’s always a problem.

“What then?” I said to Alyosha. “Neither of us knows … knows how.”

“I do. I mean, I think I know enough.”

Perhaps he did. The kiss he gave me before we parted, the one that turned out to be our last, was unexpectedly adult, as if I were kissing a man rather than a boy. And, while we did not sacrifice our innocence, over the next weeks I allowed Alyosha’s hands into my blouse, as I might not have had he not begun to convince me that
what he feared was true: he and his family, and perhaps the rest of us as well, would be killed. It was a matter of time, that was all.

“Don’t you see?” he said. “It’s the first step. Removing us from the capital, sending us out of sight and out of the public’s mind.”

“They’ll probably take us too,” I said. “Technically, as wards of your father, we are part of the family.”

“Technically, your blood isn’t Romanov. It isn’t flowing through decadent tsarist veins.”

“Technically, I’m the daughter of a man assassinated for his alleged deviltry.”

“Assassinated by monarchists determined to save the faltering empire. As it’s generally assumed your father helped topple centuries of depraved Romanov rule, the revolutionaries may ask you to accept a medal in his stead. Have you asked what will happen to you and Varya?”

“No. If there was anything—any definitive thing, like a decision one way or another—I’m sure your mother would tell me.”

“Unless she had a choice in the matter and could have let you go but didn’t, on my account. Then she might feel guilty and avoid telling you.”

“But, Alyosha, there’s nothing I’ve done to help you. Just seeing me makes her cry.”

“Oh, she cries all the time anyway, Masha, you know that. I wonder if it isn’t a nervous affliction. Really I do, don’t look at me that way. Besides, you’ve been my friend, kept me company.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“You’re the first I’ve ever had, Masha. Don’t you know that?”

“No, I …” With all of us locked up together as Russia descended into anarchy, no one had seen any friends. Not that this was an excuse, and I didn’t offer it as one. “I should have,” I said.

“Because,” he went on, “the secret had to be kept. And even if
it could have been told, Mother thought it was asking for me to be injured, there being no way to prevent boys from being boys. Oh, Masha, don’t look like that. There were adults who befriended me. Nagorny. And Derevenko. I considered him my friend before he … before he left. But, other than my sisters, there’s never been anyone remotely near my age. That’s why you seem not so much older than I. That and your height.”

“You mean my lack of height.” I was small enough that by the time Varya was twelve, she got the new dresses and handed them up to me. “Anyway, Alyosha, you know what’s to happen if we are left behind. I’m to be foisted on that charlatan.” And at that we both fell silent.

I
DID MARRY THE CHARLATAN
Boris Soloviev, as my father told me I would. Boris had made a career of conducting séances in St. Petersburg, bilking women of their jewels in return for messages from their departed.

“Oh, Father, honestly!” I’d said when he told me, and I laughed, thinking he was teasing. I jumped up from where I was sitting and dropped into his lap, tweaking his beard to tell him what a fine joke he’d made, even if it was at my expense. But he took my hand away from his face and held it.

“Masha. He is a wealthy man. Tsar Nikolay will make sure that—”

“He’s a fraud! How can you suggest something so … so … so obscene as to shackle me to such a person!”

Father’s grasp tightened, so that I had to pull my hand away, he held it so tightly. “I am telling you, Masha—”

“I know what you’re doing. I know very well. You’re making sure I understand there is no other Grigory Yefimovich by foisting me off on the adult equivalent of a conjurer hired for a child’s
birthday. You think I don’t know a shameless mountebank when I see one? You think I don’t know there is no other like you?”

“Masha,” Father said again. I closed my eyes; Father took my face in his hands. I covered my ears; he pulled my hands away from them. He wouldn’t allow me to avoid hearing what he had to say and what I always denied because I couldn’t bear to listen.

“Masha, child. My death is foretold. I am dead already. I won’t live to see the coming year. And Russia will descend into civil war, brothers killing brothers, women fighting like men, bearing arms. You’ll need help if you are to escape.”

Seventeen is too old to stamp your feet and bury your head in your father’s chest and cry the way little girls do. But he waited until I’d stopped, until I’d gone to the sink and washed my face and smoothed my hair, before he asked me to write a letter for him, one he would give Tsar Nikolay to be opened on the occasion of his death.

“Thank you,” he said when I handed him the page to sign. He pulled me into a hug and kissed the top of my head. “Don’t fret, Masha,” Father said. “He won’t live to be thirty.”

“How old is he now?” I asked, and he laughed and I tried to laugh. But to leave my father’s home and make one with Boris—it didn’t seem possible to endure such a punishment. I never could decide whether or not to mention the letter to the tsar; that was one reason I’d avoided inquiring about my fate. For Varya to go home to Siberia in the care of a chaperone while I was to be traded away like chattel didn’t seem any fairer now than it had when I wrote out my father’s wishes.

“Why can’t I go home with Varya?” I asked Father.

“Because,” he said.

“Because what? I’m not a child, to be given an answer like that.”

“Because your destiny is not in Russia.”

“Not if I’m to be dragged off by … by that … that … illusionist!”

“Masha.”

“What?”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“You know I do. But it isn’t so easy for those of us who can’t see into the future.”

“Is that what you think?” he said. I shook my head. His was, of course, the harder vision, including, as it must have, the ends of all of us, his son and daughters and the wife he loved, the homeland for which he died.

“Isn’t there something, please?” I asked. “Any little thing you might tell me? A tiny hint?” Father was strict about his ability to prophesy. He wasn’t, he’d tell anyone who asked, a fortune-teller. The heavens would close before his eyes, he’d say, refuse to reveal another thing to a man who squandered a gift of the Spirit, and if anyone argued he’d quote First Corinthians straight on to Second until that person gave up and went away.

“No hints. Only this: you will, like your father, use the talents the Good Lord gave you.”

“What talents? I don’t have any talents!”

“Of course you do.”

“No I don’t. Tricks on horses, that’s all. Somersaults. Riding backward. What’s the use of that?”

But Father had said all he would say.

Y
EARS LATER
, during one of our fiercer fights, Boris asked me why I hadn’t written my own intentions into the letter, if I’d been opposed to the idea of marrying him. It took me a minute to understand so preposterous a question. What answer did I have for my husband, other than the truth?

“If you imagine I’d consider such a thing,” I told him, “you have no idea who I am or who my father was to me. Even now,
years after his death and married to you, my allegiance is to him, not you. He told me what I was to do and, trusting in his wisdom, I am doing it.”

Aside from that, only a stupid person would try to deceive someone who could hear her thinking.

I guessed Boris was a bona fide fake the moment Father introduced me to him. The next moment I knew it. Too proud of his chicanery to keep the details of its accomplishment secret from the woman he expected to become his wife and whose pedigree—the daughter of Rasputin!—would enhance his ridiculous enterprise, Boris gave me a tour of his tricks. The switch on which he stepped to produce rapping noises across the parlor from where he sat receiving news from the beyond. The darkroom where he made the “documentary” photographs cherished by his bereaved patrons, the ones he took of them sitting alone on a velvet-upholstered love seat, unaware of the proximity of a ghost—the evocative white blur Boris added when making the prints.

“See how simple!” he said. He showed me what looked like a tiny flyswatter, demonstrating how he waved it between the negative and the photographic paper, preventing light from darkening part of the paper’s coating of emulsion. The print this produced revealed a “ghost” sitting or hovering next to the widow. She might not feel his presence, but her husband was there at her side just as he had always been. Though she was lonely without him, missed his physical being, she need not feel bereft—for he hadn’t left her after all. Whoever she was, when she left Boris’s séance parlor and “World Famous Photography Studio,” she felt an emanation, an ectoplasmic hovering, a cold draft or a phantom hand at her waist, even a cool kiss upon her lips as she fell to sleep that night.

“I’m giving them what they want, Masha,” Boris said when I asked if he wasn’t troubled by being dishonest about so serious a matter. “I’m providing solace. Proofs of the afterlife. Even the
Christ hasn’t done that—not for nearly two thousand years, anyway. Ha!”

What point was there in arguing with such an egoist? Crystal balls were for women, Boris thought. He had his monocle, his cape, and carried a cane with Anubis, Egyptian god of the dead, for a handle. The top half of Anubis was a jackal and the bottom half a man, and before the dead could enter the underworld he weighed their hearts to determine their worthiness.

In the years before the Bolsheviks seized the city, St. Petersburg was a playground in the throes of the kind of decadence—determined, desperate—that presages collapse. As if the aristocracy knew apocalypse was imminent and, also knowing there was nothing to prevent its arrival, stayed up drinking and dancing and inhaling cocaine when they could get their hands on any, distracting themselves by whatever means they found. Spending money in a frenzy on champagne, caviar, jewels, gowns. On parties with full orchestras, themed costume balls excusing all manner of ostentation: hostesses riding through ballrooms on gilded elephants, servants dressed up like gondoliers or Vikings or pharaohs. Spiritualism was the fiercest rage, with a choice of séances to attend on any given night, but only Boris happily took advantage of mothers who’d lost sons at war or stripped a widow of her savings in trade for a message from her dead husband.

I didn’t like the idea of being joined until death divided us to a man whose métier was equal parts deception and self-importance. But by the time an Orthodox priest had muttered his shibboleths over our heads, splashed us with holy water, and ordered us to kiss, Russia was dying, my father had been murdered, my mother, sister, and brother were lost, and Alyosha and his family were a few thousand miles closer to their deaths. Petersburg had been looted and burned. As Father foresaw, the jewels Boris had amassed proved useful for bribing border-control agents and all the other
opportunists and thieves lying in wait at the countless stumbling blocks en route to freedom. As the gods in heaven could see from on high, we left a glittering trail behind us, and I thanked him—Father, I mean—each time Boris handed over another bracelet or earring he’d earned with his lies.

Travel by Combustion

U
PON HIS ARRIVAL
back in Russia—because he did truly go to the Holy Land—my father discovered how hard it was to attend to one sick person after another, how physically and mentally exhausting it was to be the instrument of a power outside himself. After a morning spent with supplicants, he spent the afternoon lying flat on his back, not asleep but blank with weariness.