Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (35 page)

“Not in as far as the papers—the necessary papers—are concerned.”

The prefect settled his eyeglasses back on the bridge of his nose. “Nothing irregular,” he said once more, still shaking with inaudible laughter.

“In any case,” I said, “my papers—they are in order, no?’

“Yes.” The prefect lowered his chin into his hand. “You can go,” he said to the secretary, waving him away without taking his eyes off me.

“So I may be issued an identity card?”

“What employment does the daughter of Grigory Rasputin expect to find here in Paris?”

“You can see for yourself.” I pointed to the letter from the manager of the equestrian troupe. “I am promised a job where I live, in Billancourt, with my husband.”

“Why, if you have a husband, are you known by your father’s surname?”

“Our marriage document was lost when we fled and, hoping to avoid further confusion, I am using the name on the papers I have.”

The prefect nodded. “And what will you do for a … what is it, an equestrian troupe? Clean stables? Sell cigarettes and confections? Summon the devil?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“Ride.”

“You will ride?”

“Yes.”

The prefect smiled. “So, you are a horsewoman?”

“Yes.”

“You are the star of the show, perhaps?”

“I haven’t begun performing yet. How could I have without a permit?”

“But you have a position?”

“Yes.”

“A position for which you auditioned?”

“That’s correct. May I—”

“And how did it go, your audition for the … um, troupe?”

“It went well, thank you. I—excuse me, but I don’t under—”

“You’re talented, are you?”

“I am good with horses. I grew up with them.”

“How so?” The prefect lifted his shoulders and his eyebrows, both at once, as if those parts of him shared a single marionette string.

“Why are you making sport of me!” I said before I could prevent myself from ruining my appeal. “Why must I be … be persecuted to get my card! This is the fourth time I’ve come here to this office. I am just—all I want is the means to work legally, without being arrested. I am trying to comply with—”

“Who is persecuting you?”

“You. You are, yes. All of you. You make this as difficult as possible. Some of us with our families missing.” I snatched up the authorization paper from the refugee office.

“And my father, my father whom you disrespect with your insinuations—you know nothing of my father. Nothing of what, of who he was. You make judgments without any right. You’re no better than the murderers who put him in the river. Because you kill him also with your slander, your falsifying rumors, and, and …” I was on my toes now, my hands on the desk, my chin thrust over it. The prefect pushed his glasses back up his nose. He looked at me, no longer laughing, and not smiling either.

“I want my papers, my photographs,” I told the prefect.

“And your identity card. You want that as well. It is why you are here, no?”

I nodded, unsure if he was taunting me. But, no, he called to Michel, who crept forward with a card—orange rather than blue,
as Boris had been given for industrial labor. On it was typed my name, Matryona Rasputin, and Billancourt as the subdivision in which I was allowed to seek employment, as well as an expiration date, December 15, 1925—five rather than the standard three years hence. The prefect drew a large envelope out from a drawer. I watched him gather my papers and the new card together, slip them into the envelope, and then, without looking at me, he pushed the envelope toward me and called for the next petitioner to come forward.

After I had walked along the river for some minutes, after I was calm, I realized something. The prefect’s response to my surname, more impertinent than what I’d come to expect, underscored what others’ reactions had tried to teach me since my arrival in Paris. I’d just been too stupid to understand.

The sole thing of value I possessed was my father’s history. His history and his name. Before another year passed I’d be performing as the Daughter of the Mad Monk Rasputin.

That Hollywood Bear

O
NCE
I
JOINED
, I knew I’d never leave, never make a home and live in it. I wouldn’t—nothing could induce me to—step away from what I’d discovered.

In the circus I was no longer part of the strictly mortal world, gray and workaday, the dispiriting, dull, humbling slog of one day into the next that I’d grown to expect living in Paris. Not that it was all luck, all pleasure, all reward. I went to bed exhausted, and my time in front of an audience was a small fraction of the day. Performing before a crowd, I didn’t need to try to synchronize the horses’ movements with my own, it just happened. I felt their legs beneath them as if they were my own, felt the impact of each hoof as it struck the ground. I entered the ring barefoot and bare-legged, on two white horses. Together we appeared as if by magic out of the black night and into the ring’s circle of light. I never rode but stood on the horses’ backs, my left foot planted on the horse to the left, my right foot on the right, as we moved into a canter.

Before the equestrian troupe signed with Barnum, I didn’t wear so vulgar a costume, but circus performers are expected to sparkle, and sparkle I did in a short, spangled red leotard that ended in something like a gash between my legs. The horses’ reins were red and sequined and glittered like my costume. I held them in both hands, slack. They were the same as an aerialist’s net, for use
only when something went wrong. All our communication was through my bare feet, balanced where a saddle would sit, on the horses’ rosined backs. For me it was just our twelve white limbs, the horses’ and mine, moving in a rhythm practice couldn’t deliver. They asked, I answered. I asked, they answered. That was it.

Around, around. Flurries of yellow-white sawdust rising around the blurred hooves, tails rippling like flags in a light wind. Dreamlike, the sound of hooves striking in concert, over and over, incantatory. The orchestra played, but I didn’t hear their music. We went in counterclockwise circles, most of my weight resting on my left leg, flexed as I leaned into the curve. Three loops around the ring and then, before anyone had a chance to see how I’d done it, I was standing backward, looking over the horses’ tails and holding the reins behind my back, and we made another three loops that way. A jump was carried into the ring, a jump four feet in height, and I took it; I took it standing on two horses, I took it facing forward, I took it facing backward. When I got stronger—it took months of training with the floor acrobats—I could do a backbend from one moving horse’s back to the other’s and take a jump with my hands on one horse, my feet on the other, back bowed.

A
FTER
B
ORIS DIED
(before he’d turned thirty, just as Father promised), there was nothing to hold me in Paris, and from that point forward I closed every letter asking for information about my family with the request that I be contacted care of whatever show I was traveling with. It made me feel safe, as if the circus were a kind of magic kingdom, impenetrable by outside forces, even Soviet spies eager to punish anyone so cavalier as to ignore an iron curtain.

Months would go by without any answer, but I didn’t stop asking until, bit by bit, I received enough information from enough people to piece together what had happened to my family after I’d
left. Whoever contacted me didn’t do so in writing—that wasn’t safe—but they carried messages, one to another. After the show’s finale, which gathered all of us—aerialists; equestriennes; dancers; clowns; dogs wearing tutus and walking upright; monkeys capering; elephants swaying under sequined headdresses, toenails painted gold; gymnasts doing handsprings; and I in my sparkling tunic and, later, jodhpurs and tailcoat—after we’d taken a final sweeping bow and the orchestra had screeched its goodbye crescendo, the lights would go up and, every few months, a man or woman would break away from the audience and hurry to accost me as I made my way back to my car. Whoever it was had information, a message to whisper in my ear, old news that was, perhaps, no longer true. But by the time I left Europe for the United States, I was able to confirm that Varya and her chaperone had escaped the soldiers who commandeered the train, only to fall prey to another band of predators. She was buried in a communal grave in the city of Perm. Dimitri was conscripted by the Red Army and became something of a legend for what his superiors called valor. I suspect it was the obedience of a hugely strong and stupid boy that made his military career. My mother was still living in her two-story home, alone except for Dunia and the livestock.

Of course, I didn’t have to ask for news of the Romanovs, as their deaths were genuine news, printed in papers all over the world. After the news reports stopped, I never expected to learn any more of Alyosha, but I did. Working for Barnum & Bailey, I toured in Europe until 1935, when I auditioned for a smaller, American company. I imagined I’d be happier in a new world that didn’t hold so many memories, forgetting of course that it isn’t places but people who hold memories. Too, performing in America satisfied a little of my childhood dream, even if I was no longer on horseback but working with cats and bears and had joined the Forepaugh–Sells circus rather than Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.

•  •  •

“T
OO BIG FOR YOUR BRITCHES.
” That’s an American expression for hubris. I hadn’t been traveling with Barnum for long before I’d been seduced, thoroughly and indelibly, by the cats. The horses were my friends, old friends. I knew them inside and out. But the cats—I couldn’t stop looking at them. I wanted to be closer to them, wanted to be the one they watched, the one on whom their eyes remained fixed. It got so that I felt I needed them to recognize me, acknowledge me. I dreamed of touching their faces, made myself a nuisance hanging around their cages. Then I discovered there weren’t any women who tamed lions—not after Claire Heliot retired—and I couldn’t let go of the idea that I could be the next. Either that or it didn’t let go of me.

I knew every minute working with cats would be like that gap in the air between two trapezes, when the aerialist has let go of the first bar and is flying, falling, yet to grab the next bar or catch a partner’s hand. The only thing that gave me any rest from my fantasies of being a lion tamer was becoming one, but it took two years to find someone willing to take on a female apprentice, and the only reason he did was as a parting blow to his rivals. Seventy-five years old, Nero Highgate—Master Nero—was retiring from show business, and leaving all he knew to a woman whose father was an infamous madman: that seemed to him enough like a final triumph over other tamers, in their prime.

It began, like any art, with watching. And it began not with lions but tigers. For a fortnight all I did—all I was allowed to do—was sit outside a tiger’s cage, hour after hour, focusing my every thought on the beast within.

“Banish from your mind,” Master Nero said, punctuating his instructions with snaps of his whip, which I rarely saw out of his hand, “whatever thought does not concern the animal. The animal
has powers of perception you cannot understand. While you will never learn its thoughts, it will always know yours.”

What I’d loved about horses was our shared, silent, almost sacred partnership—we understood one another. It looked hard, but it was easy. Now the inequality, the challenge, the shift of power—all of it was exhilarating. Master Nero brought me a battered red stool and placed it on the ground outside the bars of the tiger’s cage. If I found my attention wavering, I was told I should stop, walk away, take a break. The cage was one of six in the circus’s winter quarters, a run-down compound in a run-down port city in the south of Italy—Brindisi, where the breeze off the water smelled of motor oil and rotting seaweed. My apprenticeship, all said and done, was six months of tedium punctuated by moments of panic.

“Although you will never see into a cat’s head,” Master Nero said day after day after day, “you can memorize its behavior. A cat isn’t like a person, hard to predict. It always responds the same way it responded the time before.” And there was this, his parting caution:

“I’ve seen you on horseback,” he said, “enough that I can guess your weakness with cats.”

“What is it?” I asked him, when he didn’t continue. He’d given me my own whip—never to be used on a cat, only as a visual cue to direct its movements. I’d spent enough time with him that I hadn’t expected a purely celebratory gesture.

“No matter what I tell you, you believe you will establish a sympathy with the cats you train. You’re vain. You think your heritage, your father’s gift, whatever it was,
if
it was, will exempt you from the rules. But mark my words: if you try to push your friendship on the animal, then,
pffft
, you will be done for.” He smiled at the idea. He was a small man with a very large smile filled with tobacco-stained teeth. We shook hands. A year later I heard he’d married for
the seventh time, this time to a pretty gymnast half his age. Apparently he hadn’t been so astute in his estimation of human behavior, because she did to him as she’d done to her first two husbands: run off to Argentina with all his money. She picked men who were old enough that chasing a wayward wife around the globe seemed, in the wake of her departure, not quite worth the trouble.