Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (33 page)

“It doesn’t matter what happened,” she said, seeing his mortification. She stood up and retrieved her camisole from the floor, bending over and lifting her bottom so he could see
everything that was there
, as he described it. She dropped it over her head.

“I bet you could do it again,” she said, looking at him as her hands tied the camisole’s grimy ribbon.

Alyosha said nothing.

“I can make it happen again, if you like.”

“I …”

“Just tell me if you want me to.”

Alyosha nodded.

“All right then, Tsarevich,” she said. “Lie down. On your back. And close your eyes.”

Katya unbuttoned Alyosha’s trousers and pulled them down
around his ankles and right off him entirely, and when his eyes popped open she closed them with her hand. “No,” she said. She climbed on top of him and started kissing him, putting her tongue in his mouth.
The way I wanted Masha to do
, wrote Alyosha, Katya’s
hot, slippery little tongue
exploring his while her hand was on his penis, stroking it.

It appeared the word “penis” was one Alyosha had settled on after much deliberation, as there were other words that had preceded it and had been scratched out so thoroughly I couldn’t read a single letter.

“See,” she said as it lifted under her fingers. “I told you.” She kissed his neck and moved down, kissing his chest, his stomach. At first he couldn’t imagine why she’d left off kissing his mouth—he’d never imagined a girl might kiss him down there. But her lips were on his penis; her tongue licked his testicles (another word on which he had settled after a long inky deliberation). He was so hard, as hard as before, but now he didn’t ejaculate, not yet; he could just lie there and let her do this astonishing thing to him.

Alyosha had died and gone to heaven. They could do anything to him they liked, the Bolsheviks, because there was nothing left on earth that felt better than—or even a fraction as good as—this. Katya had climbed on him and put his penis inside her, and she was moving up and down, very slowly. She seemed to know whenever he began to worry that it would happen again, and it would be over, and then she’d stop moving. She’d wait. She even got back off him, and she put her mouth on his penis again, and with his eyes closed and Katya doing what she was doing, Alyosha had gone to a place he’d never visited before, a landscape pulsing black and red and—

“You can open your eyes now,” she said when it was over. She was wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and Alyosha hadn’t any idea what was proper to say in an improper situation
like this. He couldn’t just say thank you, could he? Thank you for … for what? For allowing me to—

“Won’t you tell me one little thing about it?” Katya said, interrupting his thoughts. “About being a tsarevich. A thing I couldn’t guess for myself.”

Relieved, Alyosha tried to imagine what she might find surprising. “The guards were a different color than you are,” he said, after thinking for a moment. “The ones that stood at the door to the palace.”

“A different color? What do you mean, a different color?”

“Their skin was black.”

“Really black?”

“As black as your hair.”

“Not painted black?”

“Not painted.”

“Are there other colors of people there, in St. Petersburg?”

“No. There are people like you and me, and people who are black, like the palace guards.”

“Were their parents black?”

“I’m sure they must have been.”

“Would they have black babies?”

“Of course.”

Katya lay on the bed pondering this, her eyes closed. “I like that,” she said finally. “That was good. I’ll tell you what, Tsarevich. You can come back, and I’ll do it again, what I just did. But each time you’ll have to tell me a bit more.” She bounced off the bed and pulled on her petticoat. “Kolya will tell you when.” Having buttoned her underclothes, she called her brother’s name.

“I … I’m afraid I told Nagorny not to return until four,” Alyosha said, when the boy stepped into the room.

Kolya shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “He didn’t go anywhere. He’s asleep outside, on the ground.”

“All right, then.” Alyosha stood and quickly drew the sides of his coat together and began buttoning them, not allowing himself to make things even worse by checking the front of his trousers to see if it looked as it felt. Awkwardly, he put his hand out to Katya to bid her goodbye, and when she put her hand in his, he did as he had seen his father do so many times before: he bent his head and kissed her hand.

“You can come back,” she said again. “Kolya will tell you.”

“O
VER SOONER THAN YOU EXPECTED
,” Nagorny observed when Alyosha shook him awake. He got to his feet and brushed a few leaves off his coat.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t see any other guests arrive.”

“No. It was a small party.”

“So that’s it, then?” Nagorny said, his tone suspicious.

“Yes.”

After this unusually terse exchange, Alyosha and Nagorny walked together in silence.

Last Rites

I
T WAS THE TSARINA’S WISH
that Father be laid to rest near her family, at Tsarskoe Selo. It had been my father’s wish to be placed in a simple coffin, a six-sided box made of pine, without ornament.

Sergei Gavriilovich, the coffin-maker, arrived at nine in the morning to measure Father and, made even greedier by the unusual length of Father’s body, tried to convince me to pay for mahogany.

“No,” I said. “Pine.”

“Cherry is nice.” He showed me a varnished sample.

“It is pretty. But I do want pine.”

“Walnut is not so expensive and also a rich grain.”

In a temper by the time he’d forced me to refuse every species of tree he suggested, Sergei banged the rough yellow boards together so hard that each strike of his hammer made the tea glasses jump on the shelf above his head.

“Gentle,” Dunia said to him as we lifted Father into the box, and Sergei Gavriilovich dropped the shoulder he was supporting too soon. “There’s no need to hurry.”

“Please,” I said. “He has been beaten enough, as you see.”

Dunia, Varya, and I followed after Father in a hired droshky, his plain pine box bouncing on the back of a cart from 64 Gorokhovaya
Street to the station, where all three of us boarded a train to Tsarskoe Selo. Two black carriages bearing the Romanov crest were waiting there to take us to the Sophia Cathedral, which marked the center of the tsar’s village, just next door to the police station. It was a pretty church, remarkable for the restraint of its decoration, a place Father had often stopped to pray.

In accordance with Orthodox tradition, all of us gathered before his coffin and held a lighted candle throughout the Mass. The priest recited the requiem liturgy, and a deacon walked around and around the open casket, all the time swinging his censer until we could barely make out my father’s face through the clouds of smoke, the cowl of his backward cloak pulled down by the priest so he could peer out of the slit in his eye and not miss any of the exequies. Mass over, we followed the coffin, without its lid, and Father’s face still uncovered, out of the cathedral. To ensure no one fell, boards had been laid over the snow. They formed a long yellow path from the cathedral to the spot the tsarina had chosen for Father to be buried.

Just as Father had had to build a bonfire to thaw the earth to bury his firstborn, so had the imperial park gardeners had to thaw the ground before any of them could force the blade of a shovel into it. While Dunia and I were preparing my father’s body, the gardeners were building a fire and feeding the flames until they had done their work and a man could dig.

As we walked behind the priest and the coffin to the open grave, the traditional bells were tolled. Slowly, from the smallest to the largest, from highest to lowest in pitch, each bell was struck, each given its voice. I’d heard them before—who hadn’t?—but it wasn’t until I heard them while walking behind my father’s coffin that I understood what they were saying. The first rang out with the high clear tone of a very young child, as did the second, only a little lower than the first, the voice of a slightly older child. The
third was older still, and so the bells went, on through the chapters of a human life, until the lowest one, with the deepest voice, called out so forcefully it shook the loose snow from the pine boughs. I felt it reverberate through my chest, as if I had opened my own mouth to speak its message: a human life, how brief it was, over and done with as quickly as a handful of notes.

When we reached the hole in the ground, all the bells rang out together, and as they did the priest stepped forward. “By the grace of the risen Lord, which has been transmitted to me, Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, your sins, whether they be word or deed or thought, are all absolved.”

Varya and I stood still, our backs straight and our eyes forward, practicing the good posture and silent poise the Steblin–Kamensky Academy had taught us to maintain at events, such as funerals, that would have summoned wailing and wild keening and even falling on the ground were we home in Pokrovskoye. By now Dunia’s potion, which had at least held my fever at bay, had worn off, and I had to clench my teeth to keep them from chattering. Only Alexandra Fyodorovna wept, but her grief was soundless. Already, at forty-four, she looked far older than her years, her red-gold hair faded and her face etched with worry. I watched her, wondering at the conversation, now three days past, in which she’d charged me to guard the health of her son, who stood beside her, his face pinched and white. Alyosha had been trained, I saw immediately, in the behavior befitting a tsarevich. His back was straight, his shoulders squared, and he offered his arm to his mother, so she could lean on him as well as on her husband, but his stoicism conveyed misery nonetheless and I felt, with a sudden jolt, not only the weight of his mother’s expectations but also his own attachment to—indeed, dependence upon—my father.

The priest rolled up the paper from which he had been reading and placed it in Father’s right hand: a ticket for the boatman who
ferried souls across the River Styx. Charon in his loincloth. I’d always been able to picture him so clearly, his scrawny shoulders bent as he hunched over the river pole, naked except for the loincloth. He didn’t speak. You gave him either your absolution ticket or the coins that had closed your dead eyes, whatever currency he would accept, or he left you on the riverbank. And there you sat until the living you left behind on earth paid for enough novenas and did enough acts of charity for the repose of your soul, depending on how many sins you needed absolved when you died. You might never escape purgatory. Most people don’t.

T
HE TSAR AND TSARINA
and all their children came one by one to the side of the coffin, leaned in, and kissed Father’s forehead, his rolled-up absolution, and his crucifix. Then it was Anna Vyrubova’s turn, and then Dunia’s, Varya’s, and last of all mine. When I looked into the coffin, I saw that the rolled-up absolution had pushed aside Father’s prayer rope, and I reached in and took the rope for myself. The priest looked disapproving, but poor dead Father would have been happy for me to have it. Then all of us around the coffin took hold of the hem of his cowl and pulled it up over his face, and the priest took a handful from the mound of black earth and with it made a cross on my father’s chest. At last the pine box could be closed, its lid nailed on.

“Open wide,” we sang to the silent earth as the gardeners used ropes to lower the coffin into the hole they’d dug. “Open,” we sang, “for he returneth again unto thee that gave him birth.”

The priest took a shovelful of dirt and made another sign of the cross, this time on the lid of the coffin, and then he passed the spade to me, and after I dropped a shovelful on the coffin, everyone else took a turn. It was over. I watched the family, as well as Anna and Varya, walk up the hill to the palace, out of the cold. They went silently,
in single file, along a second path of yellow boards laid over white snow. Their breath rose over their heads as they walked, and for a moment it appeared that each of them, not only the tsarina, moved under his or her own cloud.

Even through the yellow boards the cold penetrated the soles of my shoes, and my feet and ankles ached, but I stayed with Dunia, who pulled me into her fur coat and encouraged me to lean against her as we watched the gardeners fill the grave. We didn’t say anything to each other, but I knew that she, like me, wouldn’t leave until the job had been completed. The men worked in unconscious harmony, each of their spades entering the mound of dirt with a scrape and then dropping the cold clods on the pine lid. The four sets of the two sounds aligned and then diverged, over and over, and I thought of how farmers mowed a field together, each swinging a scythe, the arcs of their curved blades synchronizing and then diverging. Once the lid was no longer visible, the falling clods made less and less noise, and finally all I could hear was the scraping of the four spades and the call of an owl, already hunting on a day when the sun set by three in the afternoon.