Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (32 page)

He approached a boy with whom he was allowed to socialize to ask a question. It was Kolya, the son of his new physician, for of course wherever Alyosha went, there had to be doctors at hand; old Botkin wasn’t enough. “Didn’t you tell me you had an older sister?” Alyosha asked the boy.

He had said so. Her name was Katya.

K
ATYA WAS DARK
and very small for seventeen. She’d been having intercourse with men for more than a year. Not for money, but
for its own sake. She liked it, but only with patients of her physician father. This quirk in her nature placed Alyosha in the pool of acceptable partners, even if his youth was less than ideal. But, as Alyosha was to discover, the real inducement was that he was the son of the former tsar.

“Where can we do it?” Alyosha asked Kolya.

“It will have to be at our house. She won’t come to you.”

“When?”

“After Mass on Sunday. Father and Mother will be away from home, dining with my grandfather, and Katya and I will be left behind, with the servant. The servant always sleeps after Sunday dinner. She’ll have a skin full of kvass and won’t wake up, not even if Christ himself shakes her shoulder.”

“How do I get there?”

“Well, it’s not me that’s going to fetch you.”

No matter how long he thought, Alyosha couldn’t conceive of a way to leave the house alone. It was impossible. He was allowed off the grounds under Nagorny’s supervision, and that was it. He’d have to convince Nagorny.

“I want to go on an outing with you,” he said. “On Sunday.”

“What outing is that?”

“To Kolya’s. It’s a party. A party for a birthday.”

“Kolya’s?”

“Kolya’s sister.”

“You don’t know Kolya’s sister.”

“I know Kolya.”

Nagorny looked at Alyosha. “All right,” he said, after holding the boy with his eyes, trying to penetrate him, find the truth he wasn’t telling. “What time on Sunday?”

“Two. Two in the afternoon.”

Katya

T
HE DAY WAS DARK
, a moody sky, a sharp wind. Nagorny buttoned “Handsome Alyosha” ’s coat as if he were a child, and “Handsome Alyosha” pushed his big kind hands away.

I wanted to believe that Alyosha’s referring to himself in the third person, as Handsome Alyosha, was proof he’d intended the journal to find its way into my possession, or at least imagined it might. Perhaps, though, he was comforting himself by telling stories in the manner I had told them, and in this one way I remained with him until the end, just as he has remained with me.

“You have a gift for the young lady?” Nagorny asked him.

“Thank you for reminding me,” Alyosha called over his shoulder as he ran back into the house. “I’ll go fetch it.” He went directly to the room his sisters shared. Hairbrushes, ribbons, books. Tatiana’s glass horse. Was there anything they wouldn’t miss? He picked up one object after another: handkerchief, brooch, bottle of toilet water. A tiny rose tree planted in a porcelain pot with matching saucer. That would be missed, but not like a glass animal, and it didn’t require wrapping, like other gifts, which weren’t alive. He took a red grosgrain ribbon—it matched the one tiny bud on the tree—and tied it under the lip of the pot. He hid it inside his jacket, pulling the lapel over it, and ran back downstairs and out into the
wind. “Silly to forget the present,” he said, avoiding Nagorny’s eyes. “Let’s go, shall we?”

The sky was unsettled. The wind pushed the clouds so quickly past the sun that as soon as Alyosha got used to the brightness, it vanished, leaving him in shadows. As the two walked to the home of Katya’s father, Alyosha rehearsed what was to happen. Now that he had a gift, a gift for a birthday that was a lie, he would present it to Katya as a little polite something he’d thought to bring her, the way a young man should when arriving for, say, tea. The little tree would be something to talk about. He’d hand it to her, and she would take it from him and say thank you. She’d notice the ribbon and the bud, how they were the same color, because girls did notice those sorts of peculiar, not-worth-noticing things, and then he’d ask what her favorite color was. And she’d answer and ask him his favorite color, because it was that kind of silly tit-for-tat question that demands a matching one. And by then she’d be looking for the perfect place to put the flower, and the ice would have been broken. They would already be talking with each other.

The walk was too short for Alyosha to perfect the scenario. He’d run through it only twice in his head and made a few improvements, but there they were, walking toward the house; he didn’t have time to change the script now. Nagorny rang the bell, and for some time no one answered. And when someone did answer, it was not a servant but Kolya.

“Goodbye, Nagorny,” Alyosha said, and he slipped into the house and closed the door before Nagorny could follow or even object. Nagorny rang the bell again, and when at last someone answered, it wasn’t Kolya but Alyosha, who poked his head out the second-story window and said the party would last only until four, and Nagorny could come back then to collect him.

Inside, Alyosha followed Kolya, walking mindfully, with his eyes cast down, as he always did when in a new environment, alert
to things over which he might stumble. It was almost as chilly inside the house as it was out, but Kolya was barefoot, the soles of his feet black.

“Katya!” Kolya said when he reached the landing, and Alyosha withdrew the rose in its pot from under his jacket and adjusted the red ribbon. He heard a response that sounded like
mudak
, but that was impossible. It was a word he’d learned only the previous week, when, having heard one of the guards use it, he’d asked Nagorny what it meant until the man blushed and then wrote on piece of paper
asshole
.

“What? You mean the part of the body?”

Nagorny nodded. “It’s not a word used by nice people,” he said.

Kolya rolled his eyes and kicked at the closed door through which the unladylike word had slipped, and Alyosha ran through the conversation he had planned. There was the sound of feet striking the floor as if the person to whom they belonged had been dropped from a height, and then, after a second or two, the door opened. Alyosha stepped forward and immediately forgot what he’d rehearsed. The girl was only partly dressed, wearing a chemise that ought to have been in the care of a laundress and what Alyosha assumed was a petticoat. The skirtlike thing was trimmed in lace that dangled in places where the hem had come unstitched. Her expression wasn’t so much friendly as it was hungry, and she ran her tongue over her front teeth, the top two of which were separated by a gap. After a moment of what appeared to be deliberation, her black eyebrows drawn together, she executed a sulky little curtsy that conveyed more insolence than respect. Watching her, Alyosha felt himself grow immediately aroused, enough to dismiss the awkwardness of the encounter. It was clear to him that nothing he’d learned from observing his mother and sisters applied to this girl. He looked at Kolya, who dipped his head in a tiny bow that echoed his sister’s mocking curtsy.

“I’ll be downstairs,” he said, and he left Alyosha there, on the threshold to Katya’s room.

Alyosha was grateful the girl was so petite. It made him feel less of a boy, less reprehensibly young, to be able to look down on her a little, as he could do with me. Her long hair was dark, almost black—
like Masha’s
, he wrote,
wavy and thick
—and her eyes reminded him of mine also, a greeny blue. Except her left eye had a flare of brown, which gave it a look more knowing than the right’s. She wasn’t pretty—her features were too sharp for prettiness—but it didn’t matter. He wanted to touch her.

“I brought you this,” he said, holding out the flower in its pot, and she took it silently. Without noting the bud, or the ribbon, or anything about the gift, Katya ran a finger lightly along one of its slender stems, skimming its tip over the tiny thorns, and then set it down on a table far from the window. “I expect you should put it nearer the light,” Alyosha said, and she looked at him and crossed her arms. It was a contest of some kind, who would move or speak next, and he wasn’t going to back down. Nor was he going to allow her to touch his face and discover how smooth was his skin.

“If you step in, I can close the door,” Katya said, already bored with what he’d assumed was a standoff. Alyosha stepped forward, just enough to get out of her way, and she closed the door. Her room was tidy, but really there wasn’t much to get out of place, no books, no china dogs or bottles of scent or lacy table coverings. No brush, no mirror, no tortoiseshell hair combs. Nothing at all to suggest the room belonged to a female person. Perhaps it wasn’t even her room but a servant’s or a place for guests. The bed was unmade, and she sat on it, swinging her bare feet, also with dirty black soles.

“So,” she said, “what is it like to be the tsarevich?”

“I’m not the tsarevich. There is no tsarevich anymore.”

The girl laughed, although he hadn’t been making a joke. “Well, then,” she said, “what was it like to be the tsarevich when there was a tsarevich and it was you?”

“I’m not sure if you’re asking me a question or teasing me,” Alyosha said, and Katya, perhaps unused to sincerity, made no answer to this.

“I did want to know,” she said after a moment, frowning at the rose. The bud drooped on its slender green neck. Alyosha wondered if perhaps he’d squashed it on the walk over or if the cold air had gotten to it. Perhaps it wouldn’t open before it fell from its stem.

“It’s a question with a long answer,” he told her.

She nodded.

“Maybe even a disappointing answer, as there’s nothing very surprising in it. A lot of strictures more than any other thing.”

“Strictures?”

“Do’s and don’t’s.”

She nodded, and then, after looking at him, his clothes as much as his face, smiled. “I suppose that’s why you’re here,” she said, and she lifted her camisole over her head and pulled off her petticoat. Naked, she sat on her bed without any indication of shame. “No?”

“And you?” Alyosha said.

“Me?” She laughed, and her small breasts moved up and down with her shoulders. “I live here, remember?”

“I meant why you agreed to … to this.”

“Curious. And even if you think you’re not, you are still the tsarevich, you know.” Alyosha didn’t answer. “The future tsar of Russia. I’ll always have that to remember.”

“Don’t you know …”

“Don’t I know what?”

“There isn’t going to be another tsar of Russia.”

“Of course there will,” Katya said. “There always has been before.”

It would help her get to heaven, a thing like that. That’s what she told Alyosha she believed. She would be forgiven for her lack of modesty with other men. The two would cancel each other out.

“Come here,” Katya said. She patted the bed as if she were calling a dog to her side, and he obeyed. He sat next to her, left his arms limp at his sides while she undid the same buttons Nagorny had done up. Once she had his coat off, she sat in his lap, facing him. “What’s this?” she asked, pulling on the fine gold chain she found inside his collar. On it was a miraculous medal stamped with a likeness of the Virgin, as well as medals for Saints Paul, John the Baptist, and Basil Fool for Christ.

“Something my mother likes me to wear. She thinks it can protect me.” Alyosha could tell by the way Katya touched him, carelessly, as she would anyone else, that she had no idea he was ill, and it was this as much as the sight and feel of her that excited him.

“Oh,” she said, noting immediately that he had grown hard. “What do I feel?” She put her hot little hand over his groin, rubbing him through the fabric of his trousers, and just like that it was over. His erection subsided under her touch. He’d taken less time than a field rabbit. Alyosha felt his face burning as Katya withdrew her hand and climbed off his thighs. He told himself to look at her, to pick up his head and not stare down as if he felt ashamed. But he did feel ashamed, and he couldn’t look at her face.

Her skin was dusky in comparison to his sisters’, at whom he had peeped when he got a chance, now that they were all thrown together, and she had a birthmark, a port-wine stain, splashed across her stomach. It wasn’t so large, but its outline was sufficiently irregular that it looked almost topographical, like a body of water on
a map. As Alyosha couldn’t lift his eyes above it, he stared at the birthmark.

“Lake Baikal,” he said, when the silence had grown long enough that saying something silly seemed better than saying nothing at all. “Only on its side.”

“What?”

“The mark, the one over your navel. Its outline reminds me of the … of how water looks on a map. And it’s … it’s long and it looks like the outline of a particular body of water. Lake Baikal.”

“I was born with a cowl,” Katya said.

“What’s a cowl?”

“It’s when a baby arrives inside the birth sack. It’s very lucky. It means I can’t be drowned, not even if I fall overboard. That must be why the Good Lord put a picture of a lake on me.” She looked down at her own bare body as if she hadn’t seen the stain before. While she inspected it, stretching the skin under her fingers, he managed to lift his head and his red cheeks.