Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (34 page)

Though I well knew the difference between sleep and death, covering my father’s body with a blanket of dirt, of the soil he loved, felt like pulling up the bedclothes, tucking him in tight. Standing by the grave, watching the progress of the gardeners, seeing the hole as it was filled in, I found relief under my misery. For months I’d worried for the safety of my father, who refused to take even the simple precaution of telling the tsarina’s police where he was headed and whom he planned to see when he left the apartment. He’d predicted his death and left me no choice but to wait for it. Now it was done, his prophecy fulfilled, his body washed and dressed and laid to rest. We watched the gardeners tramp back and forth over the dirt, packing it down with their boots, and then we, too, went back to the palace, where Dunia put me to bed as she
had when I was a little girl. Varya said Dunia stayed only the one night before heading back to Petersburg and from there home to Siberia. Apparently she and Botkin had very different ideas about patients with fevers.

Father remained in his grave for only two and a half months. After midnight on the day Kornilov came to Tsarskoe Selo to inform the tsarina of the Romanovs’ house arrest, the Red Guard smashed Father’s gravestone and dug up his coffin. This must have happened after the Romanov children, Varya, and I had watched the drunken soldiers stumble back to the Alexander Palace after slaughtering the deer, after we went to our beds if not to sleep. It was a gardener perhaps, maybe even one of those who had helped to dig the grave, or some other disgruntled servant who’d abandoned his or her post when Kornilov released the palace staff: whoever it was must have told one of the new guards where the infamous Grigory Rasputin had been buried, and they hadn’t been able to wait until daybreak to dig up his coffin and pry off its lid.

They uncovered his face and body and spread a rumor that he had not decayed—which was possible, of course, and hardly outside the laws of nature, as he’d been buried in ground that quickly refroze. But no one mentioned that fact. Months after his murder he looked and smelled as he had when he was buried, perfumed with laurel, the men who exhumed him said, his flesh as incorruptible as a saint’s. Except he had a mouthful of blood, they said, and other marks of possession by unclean spirits, and they’d had to stake him through the heart. They’d had to drag him into the woods and lay him on a pyre and pour gasoline on him. They’d had to light him on fire, and when they did, they said, he sat up to accuse them, sat up on fire with a stake through his heart.

When I found out what had caused the strange orange glow I’d seen when I got up to see the dead deer in the daylight, I was grateful Dunia had left Petersburg and was safe at home in Pokrovskoye,
with my mother. She would never learn what happened to the body she’d prepared so meticulously—lovingly—for the afterlife. I didn’t care what the soldiers had done so much as that they’d done it without my being there to mark the flight of his ashes on the wind. Someone who loved Father should have been there, with him.

Still, the soldiers had served their purpose. Now all of it had happened as Father had said it would in the letter he dictated before he died.
Bury my body
, he wrote.
It will not be left in peace. My dust, returned to dust, shall be scattered to the winds
.

A Bureaucratic Adventure

“L
IKE BANGING A CORPSE
,” Boris said, rolling off.

“At least it was a warm corpse.”

“You don’t pretend otherwise.”

“Why should I? I told you I didn’t want to.”

“Fair enough.”

He got up, pulled on his trousers, took the tin pot from off the gas ring, and went out the door to the sink at the end of the hall. He came back with it filled with water.

“We don’t have any tea, do we?” he asked, as he did each morning, never looking for himself and implying by his tone that I was deficient in my housekeeping.

“On the sill there, next to the bread.”

He pinched what was left of the loaf. “Hard,” he said.

I shrugged, he shrugged, he broke the bread in half, pushed his finger into the center. I sat up and waited for what he left in me to seep out, onto the sheets, before drawing on my underclothes. Intercourse was a concession to pragmatism, not sentiment, especially on a morning when I was going yet again—this would be my fourth attempt—to apply for an identity card, without which I risked being deported. It had taken me two years to collect all the documents I needed, and if submitting to Boris was yet one more block over which to stumble, so be it.

“Hard all the way through.” He bit off a piece. “Oh, well,” he said, chewing while rereading the previous week’s edition of
Le Canard Enchaîné
, through which, he was convinced, General Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel was sending him encrypted messages from his outpost in Belgrade. The paper was satirical and targeted the French government. I don’t think the leader of the evacuated White Army had ever been mentioned in one of its articles, but this made no difference to Boris. Nights, after he came home from work, he pored over it, circling characters according to a pattern of prime numbers between one and one hundred—first, second, third, fifth, seventh, eleventh, and so forth, on up to the ninety-seventh, at which point he began again with one. Then, as he tried to make me understand, the circled letters and the blanks between words (for he circled those too whenever a prime number landed on them) from the first, second, third, fifth, and so on articles could be arranged by applying a different mathematical code—one I didn’t even try to comprehend—into directives Wrangel sent to Boris to share with his secret squadron of monarchist soldiers.

I washed myself as well as I could in a sink, dressed, and prepared to present myself once again at the préfecture de police. I’d lost my way and as much as an hour on my first pilgrimage to the Île de la Cité, so, although there were more direct routes to the heart of the city, I followed the Seine all the way to the Pont Neuf, keeping the river on my left. That way I didn’t have to pay attention to street signs and the time passed more quickly.

The Pont Neuf crouched over the water in a series of squat arches with crenellations above. Each pier rose out of the Seine like a small bastion, a fitting enough passage to the island and its grim government buildings. The office to which refugees were to apply for identity cards was on the third floor, at the end of a long, ill-lit corridor against whose walls leaned what appeared to be the same hushed queue of foreigners as were there the previous month, and
the one before that. They looked to be almost exclusively Russian and spoke to one another in whispers, like children who had been scolded and warned not to make any more noise. All the snatches of conversation I heard concerned matters of employment: who had gotten a job doing what and for how much and how many hours a week.

Eavesdropping in the corridor of the préfecture had already afforded me a wealth of necessary information. The ubiquitous handbills announcing, in Russian, free medical care at Salpêtrière, des Invalides, Val-de-Grâce, even the Institut Pasteur, were not the charitable offers they appeared but purposefully misleading solicitations designed to lure refugees into medical experiments. All the trade unions that might protect a refugee from employers eager to underpay or otherwise exploit him or her were avowedly pro-Bolshevik and therefore closed to any White Russian who, after all, had arrived in Paris because of his monarchist sympathies. Gendarmes were eager to arrest Russians on any pretext, especially insolence, and were particularly vindictive to readers of
Zveno
, for its suspected ties to Bulgarian anarchists. Really, it was best to never carry any Russian language publication at all. For those unfortunate enough to be arrested, political asylum would be withdrawn. It was a one-way ticket to the Soviet Union and execution for defecting in the first place. In such a world, taxi driving was considered a plum career, as was carpentry, hairdressing, waiting tables, and laundering hotel sheets. Anyone who had been a physician or professor or lawyer back home couldn’t work in France without French citizenship, and he would be required to pass French exams and obtain French diplomas.

The building was unheated; I kept my coat pulled tight around me. Each time I’d come to the préfecture I brought a book with me, but the light was poor and the atmosphere so permeated by
anxiety and discomfort that, even when I wasn’t actively gathering information from other people’s conversations, I read the same paragraph over and over without noticing. There were no placards announcing that eating and smoking were forbidden, but whenever a uniformed official walked past, anyone with a crust or a cigarette hastily hid or extinguished it. The place conveyed the pessimism and hopelessness of an internment camp.

I waited, that morning, two hours and fifty minutes for my turn before the prefect. There was a different one each time, so I hadn’t seen this one before, wearing a stole of white fur to complement his black robe. He held out his hand, the flesh of its smallest finger squeezed by a signet ring.

“Are they in order?” he demanded in French, speaking quickly as if he hoped to force me to ask him to repeat the question, giving him license for intensified impatience and further impoliteness. “Your papers—are they in order?”

The authentication from the Office of Russian Refugee Affairs. A letter promising employment as an equestrienne. A letter of permission from the labor ministry. A permit from the Billancourt police station. I put them all on the high desk, all they’d asked for the last time, when I’d come without the letter promising employment. “I wondered why you didn’t ask for one,” the manager said when I returned, “but not until after you left.”

The prefect looked at the documents slowly, squinting at each as if it were in a foreign language, and then returned to the authentication from the refugee office. “Matryona Grigorievna Rasputina. Praskovia Fedorovna Rasputina. Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, deceased. Which are you?”

“Matryona Grigorievna.”

“Born 1898. Pokrovskoye. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Where is Pok—Pokrovskey—sko? Where is it?”

“Siberia. The closest large city is Tobolsk. But before Paris I lived in St. Petersburg.”

“For how long?”

“From 1908 until 1917.”

“Paskrovia, this is your mother?”

“Yes. Praskovia.”

“And this … this deceased Grigory Rasputin, he is your father?”

“Yes.”

“You are the child of Grigory Rasputin?”

“Yes.”

“
The
Grigory Rasputin? The infamous monk Rasputin?”

“Yes.”

The prefect gathered my papers together, placed them on his desk, and folded his plump hands on them.

“I have other documents,” I told him after his silence grew pointed. “If you wish to see them.”

“What are they?”

“A letter. Two photographs. One of my father, my sister, Varvara, and myself, standing before a fountain at Tsarskoe Selo. And one of my father and myself in the company of the late Alexandra Romanov. This is me, here.” I pointed to the girl in the picture, the one seated to the right of the tsarina. The prefect held out his hand and I gave him the envelope containing the letter.

“The letter was written by the late tsar to my father. You can see”—I showed him the crest on the paper—“it is official.”

For what seemed a long while the prefect gazed at the photographs and the letter. He removed a magnifying glass from a drawer and held it to his eye. “Michel,” he called, “come look at this.” A thin man with a tic in his right cheek came out from behind
a screen where he’d been typing, and the prefect handed him the forms, the photographs, and the letter.

“You speak French fluently,” the prefect observed.

“Yes. My sister, Varvara, and I attended Steblin–Kamensky Academy in St. Petersburg.”

“Steblin–Kamensky Academy?”

“Yes, my father—”

“Your father.”

“Yes.”

“Your father, Grigory Rasputin, the same Rasputin who brought down the Russian Empire.”

“My father, Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, who was a devout man and a healer. A person misunderstood. Not a person of … of official status. It was our mother’s wish that her daughters be educated in the European style, like the young ladies Father encountered in the city, girls who had gone to finishing schools. Educated, as the simple people in our village were not. In 1908 I traveled west by rail to live with my father and attend school in St. Petersburg. I learned the usual things—languages, history, elocution, and deportment.”

The man the prefect called Michel looked up from the documents. “Extraordinary,” he said.

“Indeed,” said the prefect.

“But there isn’t any … There’s nothing irregular.” The secretary handed the papers back to the prefect.

“Nothing irregular!” The prefect pushed his thumb and forefinger under the lenses of his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Mouth closed, he laughed, expelling little gusts of air through his nostrils, which were very narrow, as if pinched by invisible fingers.