Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (27 page)

January 1, 1917. Pokrovskoye would have been invisible from both road and river. After a blizzard or two, not only roofs but also walls were coated with snow, fences buried in drifts. Often the wind was so fierce it snatched away your footprint as soon as you lifted your foot from the ground beneath you. The only evidence of life seemed to suggest arachnid rather than human occupation, as the town was covered by a weblike collection of ropes crisscrossing every which way, from each house to its woodpile and its barn, to the church, the store, the post office. The custom had been adopted generations before, when one of our town’s citizens lost himself on his way to fetch the midwife. Turned around and around by a blinding whirlwind of snow, he must have walked with one hand before his face, protecting his eyes, while the other felt for any recognizable thing, a trough or a gatepost, the side of
a barn. But he never found anything. Tragedy on all fronts: the mother died; the baby died inside her; when the skies cleared, the husband was found kneeling with his forehead frozen to the trunk of a tree not even fifty yards from the midwife’s cottage.

After this, by October all the people of Pokrovskoye had lines tied from their houses to anyplace they were likely to go. Because the church stood in the middle of town, ropes like the radial filaments of a colossal web connected that central structure to each house, as there wasn’t anyone who didn’t go to Mass, not even the village idiot (who was not my brother but a man we called Major General Sweeper, as sweeping was his one consuming vocation. He wore a uniform left him by an uncle who died fighting Napoleon at Smolensk, and he carried his broom like a weapon when he wasn’t furiously chasing dust). The rest of the ropes sprawled out like the spiral produced by an especially untidy race of spider.

“Wait,” Alyosha asked when I told him about the custom, which spread to other towns in the area. “Aren’t all spiders’ webs alike?”

“Of course not. Every spider spins a web particular to its … to its … you know, particular species. Imagine not knowing a thing like that.” That was what happened to people who grew up in cities, I supposed.

Who would deliver a telegram in Pokrovskoye on January 1? There were winter weeks when the postmaster didn’t bother coming to work. But that was before Father, by virtue of his connection to the tsar, puffed up the vanity of our town. I sent word of Father’s death, prepared to receive no reply, and got twenty within an hour, pious wishes, many of them, from those who had openly mocked Father when he was among the living.

Travel impossible
, the one from Mother began.
By the will of God the duties are yours, Masha. Dunia and Varya will help
.

“What is she saying?” Anna Vyrubova asked, when I showed her the message. “What does she mean?”

“She’s talking about the body. Father’s body. It must be prepared for burial. As it’s winter there’s no barge to bring her to the train in Tobolsk, supposing the trains are even running. She cannot come here, and I can’t get Father home to her.”

“But what is she saying? What does she mean?”

“He will have to be brought to me. The police cannot keep my father’s body.” I looked at Anna. She had one of those fleshy faces that are never immobile but always quivering with some unarticulated emotion, whatever it might be.

“What do you mean?” she said again.

“I’m saying it is for us to do. His family must prepare him for burial.”

“Here?” Anna squeaked. “Here at Tsarskoe Selo?” For already my sister and I had been moved to the Alexander Palace, wards of the tsar.

“Yes. If this is where we are to stay. I must—my mother has asked it.

“Although,” I said, seeing Anna’s face crumple at the idea of such an imperative, “perhaps it might be arranged for us to wash and dress Father at home, back on Gorokhovaya Street? His body is in the hands of the Petersburg police, so it is close to the apartment, where his clothes and other things I need are. And Dunia—she’s there as well. She can help.”

Stitches Large and Small

T
WO OFFICERS CARRIED
Father up the building’s back stairs, like a delivery of coal or potatoes. He was frozen again, his body as stiff as rigor mortis could have made it, but by now almost a week had passed since his murder. Once they thawed, his limbs would move; his fingers and his spine as well. He was wrapped in layers of coarse cloth, and the officers, breathing heavily from the climb, set him on end and leaned him against the doorjamb. “Where do—” one said, and I interrupted him, impatient to have them lay his body down.

“There.” I pointed at the table at which Varya, Dunia, Father, and I had gathered most evenings to eat. We had a bathtub, but Father was at least six feet tall. Even had his limbs been pliable, we’d have had to fold him into it, and once we had it would have been a trial to get him out. The table was long enough to seat four to a side, but when the officers laid him down on it, his feet stuck out over the end.

“Thank you,” Dunia said, and she curtsied as she bid the officers a good day, reflexively polite under even such peculiar circumstances as these. They left through the apartment’s front door, the shorter of the two wiping his palms against the seat of his trousers, as if to rid them of the memory of so distasteful an errand. Whoever had tied Father up in his winding sheet was a
professor of knots, but Dunia, who hated to cut a good length of twine, waved my scissors away and went on picking at them with her fingers. Perhaps it did take, as she said, only minutes to untie them all, but the last of the gray winter daylight was seeping away and it was dusk and time to light the lamps when she coiled the unbroken length of it around her fingers. She put the looped twine in her apron pocket and gave it a pat. I could see it was something she would keep, something she held valuable, whether it was Father who made it so or what she considered the inherent value of a long piece of twine. Dunia’s passions, like her reverence for Singer sewing machines, tended to the pragmatic. Or maybe I wanted to think of her as lacking in romantic attachments. I wanted to believe that her having provided my father sexual relief had been a chore like any other, washing the sheets no more involving than what she’d done while lying on them.

Unwrapping the body was a clumsy operation. To give us enough room to work, Dunia and I pushed all the chairs back from the table and against the wall. I had insisted Varya return with me to the apartment, but as soon as we began she ran away and hid herself in Father’s bedroom. Dunia took hold of the crude winding cloth and pulled, while I made sure Father’s slowly turning body didn’t roll from table to floor. Under the layers of sackcloth was one of linen, stained yellow in places, a long, rust-colored line where the fabric had pressed against the autopsy incision. From the base of his neck down to his groin, he had been cut open and sewn shut with large, clumsy stitches. The incision was a straight line, neatly centered except for the interruption of one small semicircle: a detour around the umbilicus. A coroner, perhaps the same one we saw examining Father after he was pulled from the river, had opened him just as he would his Gladstone bag. He’d cut into his stomach, looking for his last meal of poisoned cakes and wine. For that’s what all the newspapers had reported, how much cyanide
my father had swallowed without its having any effect on him. Dunia took the piece of linen with the long rusty stain, folded it once and then again, until she had pressed it into a small square she set on the shelf where we kept our bowls and dinner plates. To whom did that belong, I wondered? Mother? Me?

The bed where Dunia slept was in an alcove adjoining the kitchen, and off its mattress Dunia pulled a sheet and handed it to me. “Do it as you would if we were changing linen on a sickbed,” she said. She took hold of Father’s arm and cold flank and pulled him onto his side, hauling his body toward her so I could spread the sheet over the part of the table that wasn’t under him. When she let the body go, it rolled back to where it had been. Then we traded sides of the table and repeated the motions, and when we were done he was lying on Dunia’s bedding.

“Won’t it get soiled?” I said stupidly.

“We’ll need it to turn him. After we wash the front, we’ll have to wash the back.”

I nodded. The two of us stood, each on one side of the table, and looked at the body between us. The scar on my father’s flank gave me a turn. I knew what it was, but I hadn’t remembered its size. June 28, 1914. The Romanovs were on holiday, in the Crimea; Alyosha was in good health; Father, Varya, and I had gone home to Pokrovskoye, unaware we’d been followed by a woman from Petersburg. Spring was short that year, and the summer days were long and already uncomfortably hot. The horses slept fitfully downstairs, swishing their tails in the heat. Fruit on the trees ripened early and fell before it could be picked. As I lay in my bed at night, I’d hear the thud of plums dropping from their branches onto the ground below. Used to the bustle of the city, I found it too quiet to sleep after dusk and had fallen into the habit of reading all night and sleeping during days that were too hot to enjoy on the prickly back of a sweating, lethargic horse. That’s what I was
doing when Father was attacked—sleeping. Having received a telegram from an acquaintance asking his help in securing a political appointment, he was walking to the post office to send his reply. But the telegram had been a ruse; the conspirator who followed us home was lying in wait for Father and accosted him in the street outside the door to the post office. No sooner had Father put a coin in the left hand of what appeared to be a beggar than Khionya Gusyeva—for that was the name of the wicked woman who was said to have been a prostitute back in Petersburg—stabbed him with the right, dragging her knife upward and nearly disemboweling him on the street. He walked, staggered, back home, holding his intestines so they wouldn’t spill out from his side, and I woke during the ensuing commotion, one neighbor screaming for a doctor, others running in and out the front door, my brother covering his eyes and bellowing the way he did when frightened, Varya whimpering and wringing her hands.

Mother and the doctor laid Father on the kitchen table, cut off his blood-soaked trousers, and found a wound the length of his forearm, from it protruding wet pink bubbles of flesh. Surgeries, one and then another and another, were required to prevent peritonitis. It took many months for Father to improve, and he never recovered completely. He was in pain for the remaining two and a half years of his life; he slept poorly and grew to depend on tinctures of opium or chloral hydrate added to his glass of Madeira for the few hours of oblivion they promised.

“Come, light the stove,” Dunia said as she filled a kettle.

“Varya,” I called down the corridor, and, noting how it hurt my throat to raise my voice, “find his cloak and prayer rope.” No answer. “Varya!” I said, louder. I knew I was coming down with something worse than a cold.

“Shouldn’t he … don’t you think he might want to wear his better clothes?” Varya answered after a silence, referring to the
chest filled with blouses he had been given over the past years, gifts he never wore, in every color of silk, with collars, cuffs, and hems embroidered by his admirers, a few by the tsarina herself, whose needle produced work as subtle as an artist’s brush, motifs of flowers, vines, birds.

“No,” I said. “It has to be the cloak.” For I intended to return Father to the days when he had no enemies, before he ever set foot in Petersburg. To a time when none of us could have imagined that anyone would ever bear him malice, much less find reason to kill him. “On the top shelf, Varya. You’ll need a step stool. It’s all there—the cloak, his plain blouse, the old tunic and trousers.” With tattered hems and holes at the knees. Everything washed and folded and set carefully aside and out of reach, as if he’d planned for the day when he would once again put them on and leave this city. At last it had arrived.

Varya came back with the clothing and stopped at the kitchen door, her face averted.

“What are you waiting for?” I said, annoyed by her hesitating, her tendency to do any chore in twice the time it would have taken me.

“His eyes,” she said.

“What about them?”

“Are they closed?”

“What does it matter?” I said. “He can’t see you, you know.”

“I won’t come in unless they’re closed. I won’t, Masha. You can’t make me.”

I pushed the hair up off his brow, where it was matted, half-stuck there with blood. I swallowed. “The left is swollen shut and the right is half open, no more,” I told her.

Varya began to cry. It wasn’t the sound to which I objected but the way she tried to stop it, holding her breath and then, when she couldn’t hold it any longer, letting it out with a rush and the bleat
of an inadequately swallowed sob. “All right,” I said, “all right.” I tried to gently force the parted eyelids together, but as soon as I took my fingers away, the lids returned to where they had been, revealing a sliver of pupil and a bit of blue. The white was red, completely shot with blood.

I don’t know that there is anything more unsettling than the open dead eyes of a person you love, eyes that can no longer return your gaze. Back home, in Siberia, it was said that if you were to look into the eyes of a corpse, you would see your own death reflected back at you. Looking at Father, the only thing I understood was why people covered the dead’s faces, blindfolded them, weighed their eyelids down with coins—whatever it took to stop the devil from speaking through their silence, from telling you you were looking at yourself. Although I don’t know why people said it was the devil talking. God would say the same thing, I think. “Never mind, Varya,” I said. “This isn’t—don’t do anything you don’t want.”