Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (37 page)

Servants having to walk out of rooms backward so as to never turn their backs on the tsarevich.

Having a heated indoor saltwater swimming pool, so you could bathe in a summer ocean while a blizzard raged outside.

Almost anything about Tsarskoe Selo fascinated Katya, from the Chinese theater—the whole Chinese village!—to the elephant house to the pyramid and the Turkish bath. Alyosha soon learned that his part of the bargain didn’t have to be any harder than his imagining himself back at home, walking or being pushed along one of the many paths through the grounds, and narrating what he saw as he continued from one marvel to the next. She didn’t even care if they visited a place twice. In fact, she soon developed a preference for some destinations over others.

“Take me back to the Chinese village,” she’d say. “Tell me again what it looks like.”

So he’d begin with a pagoda’s roof, explaining how it was different from the roof over her head, how it wasn’t just one but one, two, three roofs stacked on top of one another, or more if you liked—as many as you liked—and the higher up the smaller they were and each had a little pointed corner, like the shoes worn by Ali Baba. And then of course he’d have to tell Katya the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” because the most interesting thing about Ali Baba was not how the tips of his Arabian slippers curled upward from the ground. This was how Alyosha made the walks through Tsarskoe Selo last so long, because he always digressed off the path and into a story, and at some point he realized he didn’t have to be strictly truthful. Even were Katya to grow up and marry an aristocrat—an outcome that was impossible, as aristocrats had been outlawed—she’d never visit Tsarskoe Selo. The Bolsheviks were probably burning it down even as Alyosha and Katya lay together in her bed.

But in Kubla Khan Selo, as narrated from the smallest bedroom of a physician’s house in Tobolsk, the zookeeper had just taken shipment of a team of pachyderms, and the elephant house was being rehabilitated for its new occupants. Their names were Flora and Belle, and Flora was thirty and Belle was thirty-three, and when the tsarevich came to greet them, they bowed their heads down, then laid their trunks on the ground, each asking to be the first on whom the tsarevich would tread, walking up the trunk and over the huge gray skull and into the howdah.

“What’s a howdah?”

“It’s the saddle an elephant wears, only it’s not a saddle, really, as that would look like a button on anything as enormous as an elephant. It’s a chair for as many as four people. Two face frontward and two face backward, and there’s a canopy above, to keep the heat off their heads. You can get brain fever in the jungle, if you don’t wear a hat and keep out of the sun.”

“Father said you were sick. What’s the matter with you?”

“What did he say was the matter?”

“He didn’t.”

“It’s more that I’m … that I have been ill and now am better, but my mother is a nervous woman; she likes to have physicians look in on me.”

“What was it that was the matter?” Katya asked.

“They don’t know.”

“Well, what did it feel like? Did it have a rash?”

“No. You can’t always see it. I get injured easily, that’s all.”

“Do you fall down?”

“Katya.”

“Do you?”

“Not more than anyone else. Tell me where you want to go, Katya.”

“Where were we?”

“On the roof of the pagoda.”

“Then let’s go back there, Tsarevich.”

“ ‘Let the lion dog be small,’ ” Alyosha quoted. “ ‘Let its face be black, its eyes be large and luminous, its ears like the sails of a war junk. Let it learn to bite the foreign devils instantly. Let—’ ”

“What foreign devils? What are they?”

“It’s how the Chinese refer to people who are not Chinese. Empress Dowager Cixi—she was the one who ruled until 1908—made up a sort of poem about the dogs that guard the temple.” Alyosha closed his eyes while he spoke. Imagining: he could do it, but it wasn’t second nature.

The Window in the Egg

I
F
I
WASN’T UNCONSCIOUS
in the weeks following the bear’s mauling me, I wasn’t more aware of my surroundings than a high fever and a great deal of morphine allowed. The wound in my thigh was reopened and drained three times, infection carrying me off to landscapes both familiar and strange. Often I found myself at Tsarskoe Selo, in the company of the Romanovs. Sometimes it was 1917, and Father was dead. Sometimes it was earlier, and he was still living. Always it was a wrench to be returned to my hospital bed, for when I fell under the influence of morphine, I heard my father’s voice and saw his face as I no longer could in my sober, waking life. Alyosha, too, and all the rest of them—so real, so alive, and I wasn’t dreaming but remembering what I couldn’t, or hadn’t, for many years. Many of these memories evaporated once I recovered, but one remained with me; it continued to preoccupy my thoughts. A memory, not a dream.

It was April of 1909. I’d turned eleven in March. Alyosha was recovering nicely from an injury, and Father and I had been invited to tea at the Alexander Palace. My first real visit, as I thought of it, in which people seemed to actually see me, as they hadn’t on those occasions when I’d accompanied Father to an emergency because he hadn’t had time to take me home to Dunia. It was a new experience for me, being corporeal in the palace.

The Romanov girls, given the chore of entertaining me while my father and their mother were with Alyosha, asked would I like to see the imperial Easter eggs?

“Oh, thank you,” I said, and I said, “Yes, please,” as I would have to any suggestion made by a quartet of princesses. Tatiana took my hand and led me down a shining marble-floored corridor that seemed, as I walked with the sisters, to stretch longer and longer. At last we reached the end of it, a door to a room filled with glass cabinets lit from within by concealed electrical lights. Inside them were the imperial Easter eggs.

Many of the eggs were clocks, which I found surprising and even sinister, perhaps because they were all wound, and ticking. One wasn’t an egg at all but a tree with a songbird made of sapphires, which burst out from under emerald leaves to mark each hour with a song. Another had a serpent’s tongue pointing to the time. An egg with a white top and gold bottom balanced on the spires of the Kremlin. And—Tatiana pointed to each in turn—there were the tsar’s gold-coronation-coach egg, and the Romanov yacht,
Standart
, floating on an egg-shaped crystal sea, and a tourmaline egg containing an easel bearing miniature framed portraits of all the members of the family.

“The pelican is a symbol for Christ,” Tatiana said. She reached into one of the cabinets and touched a white bird with an unusually large and pendulous beak, perched with its young in a golden nest on top of a golden egg. “The children of the pelican won’t ever starve. When there are no fish, their mother or father tears open its own breast to feed them with its blood.”

I couldn’t think of what to say to this, so I was silent as Tatiana moved on to the next egg, a deep-purple one that opened to show me a swan. “Look,” she said. She showed me that under the bird’s wing was a little key. She turned it and the swan moved its head and spread its wings, separating its feathers. They were no longer
than matchsticks and so intricately wrought I could see the barbs that made up each one. When she took my hand and unfolded its fingers to set the swan on my palm, my hand dropped under its surprising weight.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked. I nodded and returned it to her.

“Here we are praying, all four of us girls, at a little temple of love. And here, on top, that’s Alyosha. He’s made to look like Cupid, but you can see it’s him. And it’s a clock too, so the twig he’s holding—see there—that’s what points to the hour.

“Do you want to see my favorite?” Tatiana said. Only a year older than I, she betrayed no strain at having to make conversation with a child too overwhelmed to speak. From a new cabinet she withdrew a large egg cut from translucent pink jade and decorated on the outside with a lattice of diamonds. When she set it on a table, I saw that the narrow end of the egg held a tiny window.

“Look inside,” Tatiana told me, and I hesitated, and again she said, “Look.”

I knelt before the table, my eye level with a circle of glass about the size of a monocle. Inside the egg was a park and trees and a white-and-yellow palace so detailed I almost had to believe I was seeing a real building, only through the wrong end of a telescope. There were balustrades and balconies, patios, windows, arched porticoes, a man-made pond and grotto, a Chinese village, a marble bridge, and an elephant house. The longer I looked, the longer I had to go on looking.

It was Tsarskoe Selo. It was where we had been walking, the Romanov girls and I, before we were called in for tea. I saw the path we’d taken from the greenhouses to the palace.

“It magnifies. The little window does,” Tatiana said, and, as if she had uttered a spell, something happened to me while I was on my knees, my left eye closed and my right pressed close to the circle of glass. I no longer knew which side of the window I was
on. I remained there, kneeling, my eye to the window in the egg, for what must have seemed a peculiarly long time to my hostesses, because, the next thing I knew, Father was coming to fetch me, and when I felt his hand on my shoulder I jumped right up, turned around, and hid my face in his coat.

“Why, Masha,” Father said, and he went down on his knees too. I felt his coat moving against my face as he descended, and I kept my eyes tightly shut; I put my hands over them. “Did something frighten you?”

I shook my head no, but I didn’t take my hands away from my face, and when he asked would I please open my eyes, I shook my head again to tell him I could not.

“Why?” Father said, but I had no answer to give him. “All right, then,” he said. “Masha will have to agree that her papa can carry her.”

I nodded. He picked me up. He carried me back to the room where he had been drinking tea with Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna and sat down with me in his lap. I listened to them talk on the outside of my closed eyelids.

“Is everything all right, Father Grigory?” the tsarina said. “Would you like to take Matryona Grigorievna home?” And he said, no, no, Masha is fine, only a bit tired, and they went on talking and talking of things that bored me and, my head resting against my father, I fell asleep.

Later, at home with Dunia, Father asked what had frightened me. “Were the princesses unkind?”

“Oh, no. They were friendly.”

“What, then?”

But I couldn’t explain it even to myself. I tried all night to come up with a way to make it make sense. I saw into the egg, all the way in, and not only did I see the tiny palace’s rooms but I entered them, and there were people inside, not people made of jewels but
real people, and the people were us. I was in the palace in the egg and in the palace the egg was in, and one was the same as the other, and I didn’t know who was the real me—the one who sparkled inside the egg, or the one kneeling to watch her. I didn’t want to let go of either one of us, and what would happen if I were to close my eyes? Perhaps we might both disappear.

“Fever,” Dunia said, putting her hand on my forehead. “It’s too much for her, that place. Remember last time? I had her in bed for three days. Three days of fancy school wasted.”

T
WENTY YEARS LATER
, 1929, in Vienna, I made my debut with the big cats:
The Daughter of the Mad Monk Whose Feats in Russia Astonished the World in an Unparalleled Risk to Life and Limb Against Jungle Claw and Fang!

I wasn’t frightened once I entered the ring. I had been nervous; all winter, as I rehearsed, I was consumed by equal measures of excitement and panic. I slept poorly, dreamed my horses had died and I was washing and preparing them for burial. I dreamed of Orthodox priests and tolling bells and of having to thaw the frozen earth to dig their huge graves in Tsarskoe Selo’s equine cemetery. I never imagined it would go badly—I was sure I would succeed—so the panic had nothing to do with that. I knew I was waiting for something, expecting some tremendous something, but I didn’t know what it was until the show began and it fell on me.

The beam of light from above. How was it I’d never before seen that under it everyone was beautiful? The acrobats, the trapeze artists, the ringmaster in his top hat and tails, the clowns in their fantastic makeup and ridiculous clothes, even the boy who followed the elephants and picked up their dung. Each fragment of sawdust sparkled. The center pole, the aerialists’ platforms, the nets, the bleachers, the buckets, the bales of hay, the rope ladders
and the clown car and the cats’ bloody meat as bright as garnets, the coarse hair on the elephant’s head standing up straight in a luminous corona, and all around me diamonds the size of pinpricks falling through the air.

I’d been returned to the window in the egg, but I was no longer a child and I wasn’t frightened. I saw the world I inhabited transfigured, as if it were on the other side of the egg’s glass portal, a lens that magnified by bending light. Dust motes on one side of the window, and diamonds on the other. Colors I’d never known existed, colors for which I had no names. I was as close as I could be to the threshold of the world as God must see it, as my father had sometimes seen it—not every blight erased, not even one erased, only revealed by a different light, a light that bestowed beauty on withered leaves and broken twigs, on lepers, drunks, and criminals, on people who were sick and those who were well. A convergence of light and love.