Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (31 page)

It’s said consumptives become libidinous toward the end, and I mistook Boris’s lust as a harbinger of his death. How much longer until he succumbed, I asked myself each time he used one knee to force my two apart? I owed him my escape from the Bolsheviks. The honorable thing was to stay with him until the very end. Which had to come sooner rather than later, didn’t it? His thirtieth birthday would be upon us in less than two years.

“You like it.”

“So you say.” If I resisted, he pushed himself that much more insistently on me.

“You want it,” he said.

“And then I say don’t and you do it again.”

“You can’t refuse a dying man his last pleasures.”

“Why not?”

“A black mark on your soul.”

“Who says I have one?” I felt my husband as hard as a pointing finger, but blind, missing the mark. “Stop. I don’t want to. Whether you’re living or dying, I don’t want to.”

“Masha.” He reached down to guide himself between my legs.

“Don’t.”

“Masha.”

“Don’t say my name like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know.”

“Masha.”

“Like that.”

Easier to give in than to refuse. Easier and over and done with more quickly.

Exile

A
S SOON AS
you cross over the Urals, I told Alyosha, the temperature drops and the world appears unlike any you’ve seen. Sky and earth: each holding a mirror to the other, stretching without limit in every direction. The wind moves over the steppes as it does over water; the grasses ripple at its passing, they lean this way and that. Sometimes it looks as if the land under your feet is racing toward the horizon, and then the wind dies, it eddies back. If you think you don’t have time to waste on watching, the wind will show you otherwise. You feel it in your chest the first time you understand, as you never have before, how wide is the world and how small a creature you are. That’s what the steppes teach you: how finite is a human life. Like a struck match, it burns and goes out, and the knowledge doesn’t inspire what you might imagine. It isn’t fearsome; it’s reassuring. It’s terrible to live believing everything you do is of the utmost importance.

The first thing Father always said when asked about Siberia was how beautiful it was, how vast and empty the land, how little touched by industry. A village like Pokrovskoye had only the one street, and it was unpaved. We walked on ice in January, mud in May, and by August dust boiled up from under the wheels of a passing wagon. As there were no lumber mills within a hundred miles, each home was hand-hewn, as was our tiny general store,
our post office, and our church with its Orthodox cross on top. The cross’s three bars offered the highest vantage in town and drew ravens and jackdaws by the score, as if they were perches designed expressly for the birds’ pleasure. Were an errand to take you by our church, you might catch the village priest as he tore out of his lodgings next door, his cassock tangling around his ankles as he crashed pot lids together like cymbals. Up flapped the birds, cawing and raucous and black as black, but as soon as priest and pot lids went back inside, down they dropped, just as many if not more than before. And all the while, from noon until its setting, the sun pushed the cross’s lengthening shadow over the graveyard, so we could see how it scraped the tombstones and the pretty blank-faced Madonnas. Some years there was talk of buying the church a bell, but bells were costly and the congregants poor. A village like Pokrovskoye, it could dry up like a scab and crumble away, and who would take note? The deer would trample what was left of our gardens, the snow cock roost among the tumbled chimney stones.

The sky we saw when we looked up was bluer than the one over St. Petersburg, smudged as it was with factory smoke, and our clouds were more beautiful too. They rode high in the sky like ships with gray hulls, bright sails lined with silver. Winters, our snow-covered fields remained as white as a swan’s back. Then came the thaw, pale grasses poking through the melting drifts and rivers running like mercury, they were that silver and quick. And our woods: so dark, alive with unfamiliar sounds, the restless air whispering to the pine tree and shaking her needles. Every so often someone walked into the forest and didn’t walk out. For if you heard the wood folk summon you, you couldn’t not obey their song, as powerful as that of the sirens, and then no one could help you.

Each fall came a night when the wind grew so impatient it stripped every last golden leaf from every last birch tree. I’d lie in
my bed and listen as they skittered over the roof, watch them fly fast past the window as if some great being—the Christ himself perhaps, a thousand feet tall in his cape of sweeping black sky—hurled fistfuls of yellow coins into the night. In the morning the whole village looked dull and that much more impoverished, nothing left but ghost-gray trunks, their branches clacking and chattering together. Evergreens kept their needles, of course, when all the other trees were bare, and then the forest looked black and forbidding, as if the pines had closed ranks and pinched off every path we’d worn through them.

While I was learning the secrets of married life, Alyosha was with his family in Tobolsk, living in the governor’s mansion. The Romanovs were to stay there for the better part of a year, long enough to plant a garden on the grounds but not to harvest the fruits of their labor. Not a happy time, but neither was it as unhappy as I imagined before reading Alyosha’s account of those days, nearly twenty years ago. Should he have lived, Alyosha would be a man of thirty-one years. But that’s unlikely, I tell myself, as thirty-one would be something of a record for a hemophiliac.

In Tobolsk the family was together longer than it had ever been before. As tsar, Nikolay Alexandrovich had been away from Tsarskoe Selo more often than not. Now husband and father was present week after week, and this was an unknown luxury for Alexandra and their children, who found a good deal of contentment in these circumstances, which they believed to be a temporary interruption of their real lives. Only Alyosha expected the worst, and he kept his apprehensions to himself. On those nights that he lay awake, alone with his thoughts, he crept from his bed to the table that served as his desk and, wrapped in his blanket, wrote until he grew tired enough to return to bed and sleep.

Kerensky had been honorable and had done what he’d said he would do. He’d evacuated the Romanovs for their own safety, but
Kerensky was no longer in power. In October, the provisional government had collapsed in less than twenty hours, and then Russia belonged to the Bolsheviks. More blood would be shed, but most of the aristocracy had already abandoned their homes; the contest was over, the story as well, with this farcical epilogue: Felix Yusupov became the proprietor of a salon in Paris where ladies went to get their nails varnished. The women he employed there had been princesses in Russia. Better to paint women’s fingernails than to be shot for the crime of possessing too much power and too many jewels. Even if individual Bolsheviks didn’t necessarily want the former tsar and tsarina and their blameless children murdered, the Soviet had declared God’s death and its own apotheosis, and the Romanovs were the sacrifice it demanded.

But Alyosha’s parents and sisters continued to speak to one another of their imminent rescue by loyal monarchists conspiring to free them. If Nikolay Alexandrovich’s supporters couldn’t reinstate him on the throne, they’d manage to arrange for his and his family’s safe passage out of Russia. True, George V had refused them asylum, but the Hesses were not the only rulers to whom the Romanovs were related. The Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg branch of the family might be extinct, but Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburgs occupied the thrones of Denmark, Norway, and Greece.

It was a matter of arranging safe passage, that was all, and how difficult could that be?

It was impossible. Kerensky and his ministers had been too naïve—too civilized—to imagine it was necessary to hide the deposed tsar and his family. They’d had no choice but to set the Romanovs out of the way of harm until they could safely export them, and as Tobolsk was a backwater—far from Moscow and Petersburg, where radical elements might plot to harm the former royal family—it seemed an ideal place. But after October 1917, Kerensky himself
had been forced to escape to Paris and Bolsheviks had surrounded Tobolsk. There were no roads on which the Romanovs wouldn’t be ambushed, no train that would transport them to any destination other than Yekaterinburg, the city chosen for their execution.

Confined to the governor’s mansion and its cramped garden, around which a high wall of logs had been hurriedly hammered together both to protect the family from voyeurs’ hungry eyes and to discourage misguided monarchists from making a Quixotic rescue attempt, the Romanovs continued on as they always had, according to rigid schedule. Raised by British governesses, themselves governed by Routine, highest among the nursery gods, and by now steeped—thoroughly pickled—in the tradition of the Orthodox Church, Alexandra Fyodorovna applied the punctiliousness of a mother superior to her family, which convened according to her version of the Divine Office: breakfast at eight; coffee at ten; luncheon at one; tea at five; dinner at eight. Every day, no matter where or under what circumstances, celebratory, mundane, or dire, Nikolay Alexandrovich, Alexandra Fyodorovna, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alyosha, assuming he was well enough to join them, gathered around a table, ate, drank, and prayed together.

Perhaps there wasn’t so much to do in Tobolsk besides eat and pray. Alexandra Fyodorovna and the four girls read and knitted. Nikolay Alexandrovich persuaded the guard to give him work to do—chopping firewood. Alyosha wrote that the members of the family had devoted themselves to simple tasks they’d never performed before, tending their vegetable garden, for example. They discovered there was pleasure in digging on their hands and knees, feeling the spring sun on their backs as they dropped seeds in the soil they’d prepared. Each member of the family had his or her own row of beets or cabbages or carrots, and every morning each hurried to inspect its progress. To see how sunlight passed through the tiny red-veined leaves of new beets and set them aglow, like
jewels, in colors no jewels possess, to thin the seedlings, to sacrifice one life and not another, to weed and water—for the Romanovs these represented a whole new arena of entertainment.
Better than theater
, Alyosha wrote.

Old enough to dream of future husbands, and young enough to remain in the thrall of romance, thrilled at the idea of being so poor and unknown they’d have to learn to cook, Tatiana and Olga asked permission to help the kitchen staff prepare meals. It was only Alyosha who suffered from terrible restlessness, to judge from the complaints that filled his journal. He did until the day he made himself a promise and wrote it down. He would die a young man with a sexual history, no matter how truncated. He set to work searching for what he called a
paramour
, a girl he could possess by the divine right of princes. Not that he believed in that right, he wrote, but if other people did, it would be useful in his quest.

When I came across the word “paramour,” I recognized it. It wasn’t borrowed from an adventure novel—Alyosha didn’t read those. It was taken from one of our games, the one about the Neva overflowing. With each retelling, the story of the flood and what it had carried off grew that much longer, until it had become a kind of memory game, P representing “pocketknives, pencils, presumptuous politicians, parboiled potatoes, pachyderms, pots, pans, partridge pie, pickles, plums, peaches, pork, porridge, pale princes, and persistent paramours.” Afterward, neither of us could say the word “paramour” without falling into a laughing fit. It must have been my having put the word after “prince,” and Alyosha’s being a prince, and the fact that he’d had to ask me the definition. I knew he couldn’t have written that word, “paramour,” without thinking of me, and I tried to remember where I was on that date, December 8, 1917. Having the breath squeezed out of me by Boris in Budapest, perhaps, or Berlin, one of the cities we tried before Paris.

My father and mother had been physically passionate—this wasn’t something that could be hidden in a house with as few rooms as ours—and had I grown up in Siberia I might have become a woman like my mother, a woman who never worried over what she did or didn’t do with a man. Intercourse wasn’t painful, it didn’t disgust me, and I fulfilled the obligations of marriage, in my case to a husband who took his pleasure from me without considering mine. Not that I complained. I was sitting across the room from Boris when, in reading, I came across the word and looked up its meaning.
La nymphomanie
. So it had a name. If such a fixation lay dormant within me, might not its expression be provoked by a man’s touch, like a seed germinating after being watered?

I set myself against it. Avoided any touch that might awaken what I was determined to keep at bay and asleep.

For Alyosha it was different. At his age, he didn’t need to discover his sexual nature; it owned him. Alyosha could arouse himself, of course, but he wanted more than the company of his hands. He wanted a girl’s hands, and he wanted her mouth and all the rest of her. He wanted to touch her and put himself inside her. Until he figured out a way to satisfy it, his journal was filled with that hunger, the one I, out of fear, had frustrated.