Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (28 page)

Now that I’d released her, Varya stepped into the room, her face averted from the table and its occupant. She laid Father’s clothes on the seat of one of the chairs pushed against the wall and crept away. I almost went after her, but there was no way to pity my sister without pitying myself, and that—that wasn’t possible, not now. Dunia said nothing. Standing at the head of the table, one foot braced against its trestle, she took hold of the sheet and pulled Father’s body toward her until his feet slid up onto the table’s other end.

“All right, then,” she said, “water must be hot by now, hot enough.”

He was still frozen, enough that his heavy head didn’t fall back when it was no longer supported by the table, but it looked so unnatural that I couldn’t help but put my hands under it while Dunia placed a basin on the floor below, took the kettle from the gas ring,
and poured water over his hair. Saturated with blood, it spilled down into the basin in steaming red streams. We traded places. She held his head and I unwrapped a cake of imported soap, a gift I’d saved for a special occasion. This wasn’t the one I’d imagined, of course, but I was glad to have something a little ceremonial. I lathered Father’s hair, and then Dunia rinsed away the suds, stained brown, and I soaped the hair again and still once again until, after the third washing, the tinge of blood faded away, the soap foamed up white. There was a long gash in his scalp, and each time Dunia poured water from the kettle’s spout, it lifted the flap of skin, showing me the crushed bone beneath. He’d cheated death so often I’d come to believe he’d never die. But he was mortal after all, my father, made of flesh and bone that could be crushed.

“I think … I think we had better …” I said, staring at the gash and feeling so sick at the sight of it that I failed to say what I meant: that the wound had to be closed somehow, his body made whole, to the degree we could. But when I looked up, I saw that already Dunia had fetched her mending basket and was searching in it for thread the same color as his hair. I pulled the sheet so that once again his head rested on the table and his feet hung off, and Dunia set a lamp next to his head. With her needle and thread she sewed the wound closed with tiny stitches. When she’d finished she bit the thread off and, with her lips so close to the place she’d sewn, kissed Father’s wet head.

I was surprised I could see that and not cry—a measure of my shock. Dunia had done so good a job that even when his hair was combed back from his face, the gash was no longer visible. The soap, made with oil from the laurel plant, had a delicate, astringent smell, and I turned the bar over and over in my wet hands to make the lather to wash his face, his ears, his throat. So strange to push my fingers through his beard and feel lifeless cold skin beneath,
strange to feel his nose and his brow, to wash the crease beside each nostril and wipe the foam away from his lips, as if it mattered. As if he would taste and find it bitter.

Neck, shoulders, chest: we took turns soaping a cloth, running it over his torso, rinsing it, wringing it, washing the skin again. At first Dunia tried to follow and catch the dripping water with her basin, then gave up and set bowls and saucepans on the floor under the table’s edge. But it didn’t matter; everything was wet, slippery with suds.

“Towels,” I said, going to fetch them from the closet.

We worked on, in silence, as night pressed against the windows, and there was peace in the room, a calm that, like the warm soapy water, washed over and over me. Though I’d never before readied a body for burial, it was as if I had rehearsed all these unfamiliar motions, accomplished them so many times I required no direction, and Dunia and I spoke little as we worked.

“Varya?” I called every so often, wanting her with us, not for her help but because I saw how she was hiding from the one thing that could bring her any solace.

The body, doused over and over with hot water, eventually thawed in the warm kitchen, whose walls had begun to sweat and drip. Soon it was possible to flex the elbows, pull his arms far enough from his sides to soap his armpits. I looked at his ragged fingernails, which were unusually clean—from his three days in the river, I guessed. For some time I considered them, then I took Dunia’s sewing scissors from the basket and, careful not to nick the damp, wrinkled tips of his fingers, cut each nail. So many years of city life. My father’s arms were not strong and sunburned as they had been when I was small. The black hairs stood out against skin that was pale, white. Clean and manicured, my father’s graceful hands now looked like a saint’s or a nobleman’s. They looked as if they’d been fashioned to hold a chalice. The only thing to mar
their beauty was the one fingernail that had remained black for years now.

“What happened?” Varya and I had asked, curious to know what an exorcism was, when he came home the night the finger was injured.

“Nothing,” Father said. “She fell asleep and stayed asleep for many hours, and when she woke up she’d forgotten why she’d been put to bed.

“There’s only this.” He showed us the index finger of his right hand, the flesh under the nail bruised.

“What is it?” we asked.

“The devil,” he said, smiling. “He nipped me on the way out.”

I never forgot the girl’s name; it was Elizavetta, and she’d lived in the Convent of the Holy Trinity. The prioress had summoned Father. She said Elizavetta had been visited on eleven consecutive nights by a demon with which she’d had intercourse, and now she was suffering convulsions and vomiting up pins and feathers, buttons, bottle caps. She blasphemed and made lascivious gestures. Her personality changed abruptly from that of a sweetly selfless, shy young woman to a coarsened whore who alluded to sexual behaviors assuredly unknown to a virginal nun in a convent. She told of a fantastic past life in which she had been a temple prostitute who performed intercourse with strangers. She’d lived in ancient Babylon, she said, and to ensure the fertility of crops, she had to open her thighs to anyone who came to worship Astarte.

“Hush, child,” my father had said. He sent the prioress away, pulled the blankets off the girl, bathed her, dressed her in fresh nightclothes, fed her broth, and sat for two days with his hand on her forehead. He allowed her to get up and urinate in a chamber pot, but that was all. If she tried to leave her bed, he held her down. Finally, he told us, the fever broke, and then she had no memory of what had happened to her.

If only someone could have done that for Father, I couldn’t help thinking, if only I had been able to keep him home, safe, until the devil had passed him by. I went from fingers to toes, washing between them, cutting their nails as well, and Dunia, seeing I had skirted my father’s private parts, washed these without comment. She soaped his thighs and I his shins; each of us took the knee closer to her own side of the table. We turned him then, and that was difficult. Even with both of us on one side, pulling and lifting the sheet, it was no easy thing to turn Father onto his front so we could soap his back. And no easy thing to discover there were another two bullet holes in the poor man, one just inside his left shoulder blade and another a few inches below it. By the time we had finished washing his body and had turned him back over so he was again faceup, we needed baths ourselves, soaked as we were with perspiration and dirty water. I used my own comb to part his wet hair as he used to do, down the center. My hands were raw and waterlogged, my fingers stung, and my knees shook. I sat in one of the chairs we’d pushed against the wall.

“We’ll take a break?” I said, and Dunia nodded. She looked at me with her hands on her hips.

“You have a fever,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes.” I shrugged. Dunia confirmed her observation by feeling my forehead and declared she was going to brew tea. I tried not to think about what might be in it. Dunia kept a lot of poisonous-looking dried plants in the pantry.

T
HE OPEN EYE
made no difference once Father was dressed, as it is the custom, when preparing a holy man for burial, to put his cloak on backward and cover his face with the hood. Around his head we placed a crown of paper, upon which I had written the proper words:
Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal one
,
have mercy on your servant
. In his right hand went his crucifix, in his left a prayer rope with its knots and beads. We tore two strips from the bottom of his cloak and bound them around his body in the customary manner, crossing over his chest, hips, and legs, and then it was done. We mopped and dried the floor and moved him to his bed by dragging the table through the door of his bedroom, first sliding a carpet beneath the legs of the table so it would travel more easily.

“He is ready, Varya,” I said to my sister, once Dunia and I had moved the body to the bed and returned the dining table to its place, and she came to sit with us beside him, one of his daughters on each side of the bed, Dunia at its foot.

Dunia had forced her foul-tasting medicinal draft on me and, after I vomited in the sink, told me not to complain, because that had been the result she intended. In the hours remaining until morning, when Sergei Gavriilovich, the coffin-maker, would come to measure Father and build him a box, it was our duty to stay with his body, reading from the Psalter, and we did this, taking turns, passing the book back and forth over his corpse.

Hothouse

“M
ASHA CAN STAY
,” Alyosha said to Dr. Botkin, and so I sat in silence, pretending to look out the window while the doctor examined the tsarevich, who answered questions only of a medical nature, and even those with barely a syllable. To sound Alyosha’s lungs, Botkin pulled the tsarevich’s shirt up over his back, showing me its fair, smooth skin, without a single freckle. Hemophilia hadn’t made Alyosha into a boy who looked sickly, and the attitude he maintained when he wasn’t in pain suggested that whatever was wrong with him was nothing serious, nothing that wouldn’t soon go away. Looking at him attended by his physician, I saw no evidence of April’s agonies, when he’d screamed for someone to help him, crying with his head in the tsarina’s lap for however long Dr. Botkin allowed Alexandra Fyodorovna, another ailing patient under his care, to sit with her son.

Alyosha’s suggesting I forget what he refused to talk about had, of course, only fixed my determination to learn whether he’d ridden the tea tray into the newel post on purpose. Over the past months I’d gone out of my way to pass by the service stairway whenever possible. Half the time it wasn’t even conscious, I just found myself there, in the spot from which Alyosha had gone down the stairs, trying to conceive the trajectory that ended in the
post. The steps were steep, their treads polished with wear, and they terminated in a cramped landing that, before it was closed off by the Red Guard, had given onto a corridor immediately to the left. I couldn’t see how, even if he’d missed the post, the tray wouldn’t have carried Alyosha into the wall opposite the last stair. It was only five feet away. One day, I went so far as to reconstruct the accident, with the same tray weighted down with two andirons. But the results weren’t consistent, or conclusive. If the irons stayed on the tray, they sometimes hit the wall with it, and sometimes they didn’t. Was I being an idiot, as Alyosha said, in imagining he’d harm himself to distract his family from their predicament?

Everything in Alyosha’s manner communicated his impatience with Botkin’s ministrations. His lips were drawn tight around the thermometer, his arms were crossed; he tapped one foot against the floor. Still somewhat lame, he looked otherwise well. It had been possible for the Romanovs to hide his illness for as long as they did—and preserve the nation’s faith in the strength of the dynasty, with its single male heir—because the tsarevich was never seen or photographed unless he was well. Should he require his leg brace, it was concealed.

We remained in silence for a few minutes after Botkin’s departure, each of us absorbed in his or her own thoughts, Alyosha imagining exile, no doubt, and the empire’s downfall, and I—what did I think about? As long as I devoted myself to distracting Alyosha, I avoided worrying about my future.

“I’ll tell you what’s mad,” Alyosha said, a few minutes later. Though he limped, he could walk now without crutch or brace, and we were approaching the upper garden and the hothouses. “What’s mad is that your father gave mine sound political advice. He knew a war against the Central Powers, especially Germany and Austria, was foolish, and he told Father not to declare it. But the
Meddlesomes and the ministers insisted Russia had to protect her borders. Without a single munitions plant west of Moscow, without troop transports. All we have are bodies, hundreds of thousands of soldiers to march into Allied fire, with all their factories and their artillery. Before it’s over they’ll bring in their armored fighting vehicles and just roll forward over the Russian infantry. They call the armored cars ‘tanks.’ They pretend they carry water.”

“I’m sure Father didn’t know any of that.” We were in one of the hothouses by now, the door closed behind us, Nagorny in the park outside, the Red Guard uninterested, as it was clear we weren’t going to escape by going for a stroll among the plants.