Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (30 page)

As reported by Yakov Yurovsky, the commanding Bolshevik officer and chief executioner, Alyosha had been the last to die, just as he’d feared he would be. A detailed account of the family’s last minutes was made public two years after their murder. Yurovsky woke the Romanovs just after midnight on July 17, 1918. They were being moved, he told them, to a new location, and they were to dress and gather their belongings immediately, which they did. For weeks all the women had been sewing jewels into Alyosha’s sisters’ underclothes. Still hoping for rescue on the night they were shot, the family had decided the girls would carry their remaining fortune secreted under their clothing, and each night the girls took the precaution of wearing their corsets to bed, under their nightdresses, in case of just such a contretemps as this. Forced to dress in front of four armed guards, they didn’t remove any clothing, only added more layers. Once the family had packed, the guards escorted them to the basement, where Yurovsky waited, along with their few retainers: Dr. Botkin, the tsarina’s lady-in-waiting, the cook, and the footman.

“Nikolay Alexandrovich, your friends have tried to save you but they did not succeed.”

Yurovsky read the execution order aloud to the eleven people assembled before him. A few miles away, concealed in the woods, a battalion of White Army soldiers slept, prepared to storm the house at dawn and rescue the tsar and his family. Two officers had been given the express assignment of carrying Alyosha, again bedridden, as he recovered from one injury only to tumble into the next.

“The executive committee of the Ural Soviet has placed its authority in me.”

A line of militia formed behind Yurovsky as he spoke. Eleven targets against one wall of the room, nine rifles pointed from the other. Yurovsky, being in charge, had claimed the privilege of dispatching both the deposed tsar and his son and heir. In his right hand he carried a Nagant M1895 double-action revolver, the standard-issue sidearm for the tsar’s army; his left held the handwritten execution order.

“
Your life is ended
,” he told the deposed tsar.

“What?” Nikolay Alexandrovich asked, rising from the chair in which he’d been sitting, his arm around Alyosha. Yurovsky raised his revolver and shot him between the eyes, and then Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov, the last of the tsars of the Russian Empire, was dead.

Alexandra Fyodorovna made the first three motions of the sign of the cross, right hand moving quickly from head to heart to right shoulder, and then she, too, was dead, along with Botkin, the cook, and the footman. The gunman responsible for eliminating the former tsarina’s lady-in-waiting missed his target. With the militia between her and the door there was no escape possible, and she ran back and forth against the wall, screaming, until the nine executioners advanced, forced her into a corner, and stabbed her with their bayonets, each delivering half a dozen thrusts, many more than necessary to kill the woman.

Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia were shot and bayoneted repeatedly before succumbing to blood loss. What was later estimated to have been nearly twenty pounds of jewels sewn into the linings of their underclothes transformed the sisters’ corsets into what were, in effect, bulletproof vests, protecting their vital organs and prolonging their suffering.

Alyosha: Yurovsky somehow missed.

•  •  •

I
N
P
ARIS, THERE
hadn’t been much work for a penniless spiritualist separated from the tricks of a trade that was all tricks. Boris got his identity card and a job with Renault—which turned out not to be the good luck we first imagined, as most of the Parisians who worked at Renault were socialists, their sympathies aligned with the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, the Russians in Paris, almost exclusively toppled aristocrats forced into menial labor, as only the wealthiest had been able to command the funds necessary to get out, were vengefully opposed to the regime they’d been forced to flee. Every other week, it seemed, the French workers went on strike for one reason or another and the Russian refugees, who would rather pluck out their eyes with sugar tongs than join forces with the Socialist Workers Party, showed up for work on the other side of the line drawn by the trade union. Often Boris came home with stories of altercations, and although he swore he never provoked any attacks, he was beaten himself a few times, once badly enough that he couldn’t work for two weeks.

It made no difference to show him newspaper articles or any of the things a reasonable person might receive as evidence of the Romanovs’ deaths. All of these resulted, Boris said, from Bolshevik control of the press. It was misinformation intended to demoralize the White Army. I admit there were times I cursed my father during the last year of Boris’s life. What was the point of escaping Russia only to make myself the prisoner of a madman?

Because Boris truly had lost his reason. I knew this after the night I bought the chest of drawers from a family down the hall. Desperate to seize on a chance to emigrate to America, they were selling off everything they couldn’t carry, and the bureau cost so little I could tell myself honestly that were I to give up even something
so insignificant as the bread I ate with my tea in the morning, I could pay for it in a matter of months.

“See!” I said to Boris, when he came home. “Drawers!” I slid open the top one so he could see his nightshirt, neatly folded, and next to it my own nightclothes.

Boris didn’t smile, didn’t nod, didn’t say a word—not immediately, anyway. Instead, he held his hands to his head, clutching the hair on either side. His hat fell on the floor behind him and rolled under the table. “What have you done!” he shrieked. “What! What have you done!” He looked around the room, frantic. “Where is it? Where is it?”

“Where is what?” I was looking around too, trying to see what had upset him, but everything was in its place. We had so little it was easy to see that nothing was missing. “It’s all here,” I told him. “Nothing is wrong.”

“My suitcase! Where is my suitcase? What have you done with my suitcase?”

“It’s … it’s with mine, under the bed. Why? What’s the matter, Boris?”

But now he was on his knees before the bed, pulling out the suitcase and opening it on the floor by the new chest of drawers.

“Boris?”

He stood up and yanked the drawers from the bureau one by one, jerking each so violently that they came all the way out and their few contents fell to the floor. Each hung from his hand like a valise, opened and emptied. Once he’d torn all the drawers out and thrown them to one side, he picked furiously among what had been in them, separated his clothing and few possessions from mine, and replaced them in the open suitcase—his razor and strop, a pair of diamond studs and a stopped pocket watch that had once belonged to his grandfather, an Orthodox prayer book, also
his grandfather’s, a short dagger with an engraved silver scabbard. He slipped the prayer book, studs, and watch into the left side pocket, the razor, strop, and dagger into the right. Then he took his Cross of St. George and the two photographs of his parents and brothers from the top of the empty bureau, where I’d arranged them among my photographs, and laid them in the suitcase under the folded nightshirt. He sat back on his heels, looking at the repacked case.

“Boris?” I said after a minute.

But he remained silent, sitting with his back to me. It wasn’t until I picked up one of the drawers and replaced it in the bureau that he spoke.

“Unpacking suggests we intend to remain here, in Paris. And that isn’t true, is it, Masha?”

“I … I don’t understand you, Boris.”

“No,” he said after another pause, one so long I understood its purpose was to punish me. “We can agree on that much, anyway.”

I was still trying to decide if I should speak—if there was something I could say that would not provoke him—when he closed the suitcase and stood up and looked at me. “Boris?” I raised my hand to touch him, to put my hand on his chest, to calm him down, but he pushed it away. Grabbed me by the shoulders.

“It isn’t over!” He said the words so loudly I felt ashamed for the neighbors to hear. And he shook me, hard. Hard enough that my head snapped back and forth with each syllable—
it-is-n’t-o-ver, it-is-n’t-o-ver, it-is-n’t-o-ver
. Finally, he pushed me so hard that I fell backward, tripping over one of the drawers that remained on the floor.

“But—”

He was on me before I could finish a sentence or even assemble the thoughts in my head—too late for that; they were as jumbled as the contents of the bureau, those that belonged to me, strewn
underfoot. He picked me up with a hand under each armpit and threw me onto the bed.

“It is not over!” he screamed, his face inches from mine. “It won’t be over until Russia is liberated!” He had me pinned to the mattress, and his weight held me down in the same hollow that received the thrusts of his forcing intercourse on me. His face was so near to mine and his breath so hot that I closed my eyes. I knew shutting my eyes to his rage would make him that much angrier, but I couldn’t make myself look at him. Not when he was like that, his lips pulled back over his teeth like a dog’s.

“Don’t you understand!” He lifted me from the mattress by my shoulders and held them so tight I cried out.

“Are you so witless that you don’t know we are planning our revenge even now! We will liberate our people from the occupation! Yes! And return to the throne the anointed tsar! The lawful and righteous tsar!”

“Take your hands away.” I could speak calmly from behind my closed eyelids. “Take them off me.”

But he didn’t. He stopped shaking me, but he did not let me go. Instead, he straddled my legs and held me in the position into which he’d pulled me, half lying, half sitting on the sagging bed. “Let go of me,” I told him for a third time, bracing myself for what I expected, that he’d force himself on me in anger, bruise and subjugate me to remind me who was boss. But he didn’t. He dropped me. Backed off my body and off the bed where I lay with my eyes still closed, listening as he moved about the room.

The door slammed and I waited for his footfalls to reach the landing and for the slam of the second door, the door to the street. Then, when I was sure he was out of the building, I got up to retrieve my trampled nightgown and shawl, the few keepsakes I’d saved from the apartment on Gorokhovaya Street, and put them back in my suitcase. I didn’t feel afraid. I felt, perhaps, a little sorry
for Boris, knowing how he would loathe himself for losing control, for behaving like the kind of man he said he despised. On the other hand, it served him right. I loathed him too. I put on my shoes and went out, leaving the bureau as he’d left it, drawers empty and lying on the floor, their contents reclaimed.

I walked. Walked, walked, walked. Was this the glorious future you saw for me, Father? I was asking him the question—talking to him in my head, as I sometimes found myself doing—when I came upon the advertisement. It was plastered to a corner kiosk, just near the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne.
Acrobatic Champions on Horseback—A Startling Divertissement of Difficult Drills in Galloping Unison
. The words appeared below an illustration in the style of Lautrec, a line of dancers performing on the backs of horses, one girl per horse. I pulled the bill off the kiosk to which it had been tacked, folded it, and put it in my pocket. The following day, after Boris had left for work, I dressed to ride and went straight to the address printed on the bottom of the bill.

The manager of the
Startling Divertissement
wasn’t looking to hire another performer. “I’ll watch,” he said when I asked to audition. “But I got all the girls I need.

“When can you start?” he said after I dismounted. He’d put me through every test and discovered the only thing I didn’t have was the vocabulary to go with the tricks. “Feet jump-in!” he barked when he wanted me to jump from what he called a “teeterboard” onto the back of a running horse. Roman riding. Flag. Half-flag. Vault. Milling. It was a good thing he had that board, as it was balanced over a spring so that it took less effort to jump up from it onto the animal. Unused to vigorous exercise, I was out of breath by the time I’d run through all I knew.

But God in heaven, it felt so good I nearly hugged the manager and kissed his pockmarked cheek after I dismounted. Every inch of my skin was tingling with gooseflesh—just the feel of a horse’s
back, warm and alive, under my feet, and the smell of the animal, the sting of his mane flicking against my shins when he cantered. How was it that I’d left this behind? Why had I settled as long as I had for a life that didn’t include any of what I loved? My body in harmony with an animal as it would never be with a human being. It might have been, with Alyosha, had we been given more time. Although it is difficult to know how much of our heat was created by circumstance. As it’s turned out, I’ve chosen animals over people. Falling in love with a man—if I’d had the knack, I’d lost it. But it wasn’t only me. No one escaped Russia with his or her heart intact.

“Can you start next week?” the manager pressed.

“Yes, yes—as soon as I get my identification card. I’ll go right away.”

On the way home, I ran into a few Russian women from the neighborhood, one of whom observed that I had a bit of hay in my hair. “Look at that,” I said, running my fingers through the rest of it to check for more. “I go to the market for tea and come home with straw on my head!”

As soon as I asked for news of home, they forgot me and shared what they’d received from family in Kiev and Petersburg and Moscow and Minsk. In St. Petersburg, it was said, the lines for bread, for meat, for anything edible, were so long that it was possible to wait all day and not reach the front of the queue. The poor people slept in the street to hold their places. The rich sent servants to sleep in line.

B
ORIS’S DELUSIONS DIDN’T FADE
. He nursed them with vodka and they grew stronger and more florid. After months of his feverish rants and nights spent trying to get him to sleep rather than carry on banging his fists on the walls, I resolved to leave him. But on the eve of the very day I’d decided to walk out, Boris announced he had tuberculosis. Perhaps he’d experienced his first
genuine moment of telepathy and guessed my intentions, for, as he admitted, he’d known he was ill for some time, hiding his bloody handkerchiefs from me and complaining that fumes from the plant had brought on a respiratory catarrh.