Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (39 page)

I was so eager to discover everything I could about lovemaking, and I liked it as much as I expected I would, but now, here, I’d trade all my afternoons with Katya for one of Masha’s stories.

J
UNE
21

It’s suffocating in this house—at least it is on the second story, because they won’t allow us to open the windows, not even a crack, and the nights have been as hot as the days. We move around the rooms taking care not to brush against one another, that’s how humid and sticky it is. Inasmuch as we move at all. I can’t tell how much of our apathy is in response to the heat, how much a symptom of our waiting for what everyone still refuses to talk about. The condition that used to apply only to me, the tacit agreement that none of us would speak of my dying, has grown to include all of us.

A man named Yacov Yurovsky has replaced Avadyev. Trupp says Yurovsky is a member of the secret police. The courier who brings our meals from the barrack across the street told him so. There’s no kitchen here. There used to be, when Ipatiev lived here, but they’ve turned the entire ground floor into offices, a headquarters of some kind. We all preferred Avadyev. He was not a professional, and this reassured us. He was cruel, but in fits, and seemed incapable of organized action. Spearing meat with his knife, singing
dirty limericks—these demonstrated the caliber of his talents. Yurovsky is different. He is a man who makes his living murdering people. Just as others do plowing fields or mining coal. A job, nothing more, nothing less. He stopped once and stroked my hair, patted my shoulder, and told me he had a boy my age. The unnerving thing is, it wasn’t an act of cruelty. He didn’t do it to remind me that there were other boys in the world who were going to go on living, boys whose fathers could protect them. In order to be cruel you have to possess emotions. What he said—it was something that crossed his mind, that’s all, and he saw no reason not to say it aloud.

Yurovsky has replaced Avadyev’s guards, to whose particular nastiness we had grown accustomed, with a new lot of men, Hungarian prisoners of war. Apparently the Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution determined that Russian guards were too likely to feel a vestigial sympathy for the former tsar and his family. I’m sure the commission considers the replacements ideal. One of them spits at Father.

Be ready
was the message written on a slip of paper rolled up and hidden inside a tube whittled out of a cork. It arrived with supper, stoppering a bottle of milk. When Anastasia found it, I saw a spark of light flicker around the room, through everyone’s eyes, and then go out.

Once rescue was announced, how fine a treat to watch us as we begin, with each hour that passes, to lose hope. Like pulling wings from an insect, or chasing ants with a magnifying glass’s concentrated beam of sunlight, seeing them try to outrun the burning white dot. Little experiments in inhumanity. There is no means of escape, and they know this better than we do, afflicted as we are with hope. So why not have a bit of fun and slip a note inside a milk bottle’s cork, see how the message affects the prisoners’ morale?

J
ULY
14

Bastille Day. Masha took me by surprise, asking if I’d taken the tea tray down the stairs to injure myself on purpose. I might have talked about it with her—I wish I had, maybe it would have helped me understand myself better—but I felt suddenly so naked and read like a book. I’m not sure I convinced Masha it was an accident. More likely, she grew as sick of the topic as I and gave up asking. Once she did, I put it out of my mind. It’s only during the past weeks here in Yekaterinburg, imprisoned and insulted and ordered about as we hadn’t been before, that I’ve found myself puzzling over it.

I didn’t plan to do it, I know that much. I was walking with Nagorny, up and down the corridor, both of us dutifully taking exercise for the benefit of my health. We were talking about the Red Guard. Only hours before, one of them had deliberately knocked my father off his bicycle.

“What happened?” Olga asked when Father came in, but he didn’t answer her; he went straight to his dressing room to change his clothes. I suppose none of us children might have learned the truth had I not badgered poor Nagorny to tell me why Father was upset, why his clothes were torn and dirty. But I did. I always could get him to do as I asked, and on our walk up and down and back and forth I chipped away at his refusal. “Nagy,” I said. “Why should you know something about my father that I don’t? He is my father, after all.” For the first few laps he remained obdurate, his mouth shut tight in a line, shaking his head no. But I wouldn’t leave off until he told me what had happened.

“You’re … you’re not upset, then?” he said, once he had told. I don’t know what he expected. Tears, perhaps.

“I don’t know what I am,” I said, and I didn’t, at least not then.
We had stopped at the service stairs. Nagy asked me to wait there, as he had to use the water closet. “I’ll be back straightaway,” he said, and I nodded. I saw that someone had left a tray on the table near the landing, and as soon as Nagy was out of sight—as soon as I was out of his sight—I picked up the tray, set it on the top stair, sat on it, pushed off, and rode down.

It was just like Masha to believe I’d martyred myself for the rest of the family. She couldn’t help subscribing to the conceit that suffering had ennobled me rather than making me that much more spoiled. I can’t think why else she might conclude I’d hurt myself.

I’ve interrogated myself until I’m dizzy trying to remember what I was thinking. I know it wasn’t that I came up with the idea to shift everyone’s attention off our hopeless situation by creating a new crisis. Nagorny went to the toilet, I picked up the tea tray and rode it down the stairs. I didn’t steer it into the newel post. It was going too fast for that and, anyway, I just—I don’t know, it seemed more that the tray took me than I took it.

I behaved like the stupid child I was, and then Masha made it out to be something noble and manly like she did when I didn’t protest Dina’s mistreating me. Had the tray not been there, had I not grown up begging to join in whenever Father took OTMA tray-riding, I might not have done anything at all. But there it was, a moment’s solace, and I took it without thinking about anything but that. Masha was right about its being a distraction, but I’m afraid it was for myself, not the others.

J
ULY
15

I’m of two minds about having pushed myself on Masha the day we said goodbye. I was glad to have had that little bit more of her,
but it’s hardly the parting I would have chosen. She told me she liked our kissing, and she did allow me to take liberties with her, but she was capable of lying out of generosity.

Although maybe it was better to be spared that kind of thing—a private goodbye fraught with worry and grief. I couldn’t stand to see her cry, and I know she hated it when I did. And what if she didn’t cry? What if I cried and she didn’t and we both learned that I didn’t have the kind of hold over Masha that she did on me?

The Four Brothers and the Four Sisters

Y
UROVSKY HAD RETURNED
his Nagant M1895 revolver to its holster when he saw Alyosha’s hand stir among the tangle of dead limbs, reaching for his mother. His executioners were rolling the family’s bodies up in sheets pulled from their still-warm beds. He pulled the revolver back out as he walked toward the former tsarevich, put its barrel to Alyosha’s left ear, and, as he reported to his superiors, discharged it twice.

T
HE EXECUTIONERS STACKED
the corpses like logs on the back of a truck and drove them to the place chosen for their dismemberment. Weeks before Yurovsky was given the order for execution, he and his militia had anticipated needing a discreet spot in which to hack up bodies, and they’d scoured the woods around Yekaterinburg for a safe place to hide evidence of any murder they might be called on to commit. They found an abandoned mine shaft near a village fourteen miles outside of Yekaterinburg. On maps the village was called Koptyaki, but no local people used that name. They called the place the Four Brothers, as the shaft opened in the shadows cast by four immense and ancient pines that had stood and witnessed the folly of mankind for a thousand or more years.

One hundred and fifty gallons of gasoline. Four hundred pounds
of sulfuric acid. Totalitarian regimes do have a fondness for euphemism, as Alyosha observed, and for keeping exact records of their crimes.

Yurovsky’s crew threw the larger bones and anything else that had withstood the fire down the shaft to be melted away with acid. “The world will never know what we did to them,” the guard who bought the gasoline assured whomever it was Lenin sent to inquire.

Six months later, in January of 1919, an investigation undertaken by the White Army in Siberia, yet to fall to the Red, searched every inch within fifty miles of the House of Special Purpose and found the Four Brothers and the mine shaft they protected. At the bottom, under a foot of ice, were Alyosha’s belt buckle and fragments of the military caps he and Tsar Nikolay had been wearing when they died, as well as a pearl earring and an emerald cross recognized as having belonged to Alexandra Fyodorovna, buckles from all four sisters’ shoes, 119 blobs of lead—revolver bullets that had melted in the pyre, which burned for three days—and a few ambiguous bits and pieces.

As it happened, Alyosha was mistaken. Letters were found—not forgeries but genuine letters written by people who admitted authorship—promising rescue and asking for details about the House of Special Purpose. Were any windows ever left open or unlocked? Was it possible for Nikolay Alexandrovich or one of his family to unlock a window? How well armed were the guards and how many were there altogether? Could Nikolay Alexandrovich provide a plan of the floor on which he and his family were being held? Either these were intercepted or the Bolsheviks got wind of the number of White Army soldiers hidden in the woods and decided to shoot the whole family all right away. They’d kill them when the townsfolk were sleeping, dispose of the bodies, and get the place cleaned up before dawn.

•  •  •

I
HAD A DREAM LAST NIGHT
. Remarkable for its persuasiveness, it returned me to Tsarskoe Selo and to the company of those who live only in memory and dreams. I was sorry to wake up.

Once again, I’d accompanied my father to tea at the Alexander Palace, but the Romanov girls were no longer children. They were grown women now and had already been murdered. I could see holes in their heads, their bodices, their necks—everywhere—and yet they weren’t bleeding; they didn’t seem to be suffering in any way. When they moved, jewels fell from their sides to the floor, spilling from where their gowns had been rent by bayonets.

“Come,” Tatiana said to me. She took my hand and all five of us entered the wide marble corridor, walking abreast until we arrived at the door to the room of glass cabinets, inside which were the imperial Easter eggs. “I want to show you my favorite,” she said, taking the lead and pulling me into the room behind her. “The one with the window.

“Come,” Tatiana said again, when I balked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t think I want to.”

“But you must,” she pressed.

Though I was no longer a child, and though I had lived so intimately with them for so many months, in my dream to disobey one of the tsar’s daughters required fortitude, and Tatiana had always been the most imperious among the Romanov girls. More beautiful than the others, she was tall and slender and carried herself in a manner that was genuinely queenly. It was apparent that her determination had not been diminished by her new circumstances.

“But I know what’s inside,” I said. “I don’t need to see it again.” At this, Tatiana and her sisters looked at one another and began laughing, so overcome by mirth they couldn’t speak.

“Of course you don’t know what’s inside!” Tatiana said when she’d recovered her breath.

“But I do. I remember it in detail.”

“You can’t know,” she said. “No one can. It’s never the same twice.”

“But how can that be?” I asked.

She turned up her empty palms. “It is,” she said, “that’s all.”

Behind Tatiana, her sisters nodded, and I understood that the situation offered me no choice. We would stand there for eternity, Tatiana and I, disagreeing, until I gave in.

“All right,” I said.

Again—as she had when I was a child—Tatiana opened the glass door to one of the cabinets lining the walls of the room. The egg cut from pink jade was larger than I’d remembered, and Tatiana struggled to lift it from the shelf. Once she had, she held it in her arms like a real burden, pressed close to her breast. When she placed it on the table, I saw, as I hadn’t before, that it was a pink so luminous it appeared that light emanated from within its jade shell rather than from without.

“You can’t delay looking forever,” Tatiana told me when I was slow to move, and I nodded, then kneeled before it. “Remember,” she said as I put my eye to the glass. “It magnifies.”