Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (5 page)

“I’m surprised she didn’t order that Vanka be destroyed,” I said to Alyosha.

“Oh, she did. Of course she did. But Father showed her how Vanka wasn’t afraid to drink water from a bucket, and she had to admit the donkey was only confused.”

“I don’t think she’s confused,” I said. “She’s happy remembering when she was performing, that’s all.”

The tsarina’s voice was too low for me to hear her from behind the door, but Kornilov’s wasn’t. Although he characterized our arrest as precautionary, intended to protect us from the predation of revolutionary soldiers, he asked the tsarina to summon the palace guard and household staff so he could announce that their responsibility to the Romanovs had come to an end. Those who wanted to remain in the deposed tsar’s service, Kornilov explained, would
be held under arrest with his family, confined to one wing of the palace, no longer free to come and go.

Poor Gypsy. She was too small to be a cavalry horse. I imagined myself running to the stable before the Red Guard arrived, opening the doors to all the stalls, and shooing their occupants toward the woods, but the only likely outcome of that was getting myself shot. And it wouldn’t save the horses—even if they left, they’d come straight back. Tsarskoe Selo was the only home they knew.

“What of Varya and me?” I asked the tsarina when Kornilov left the room to address the servants. I was so alarmed by this new turn of events, and by then comfortable enough with the tsarina, that I didn’t bother to conceal or even excuse my eavesdropping. As soon as Kornilov was out of sight, I rushed out from behind the door like a child and burst into the parlor. The tsarina looked at me and smiled, as might a hostess to a guest she didn’t know, a vague, perfunctory expression that betrayed no emotion.

“I’ve spoken with Nikolay Alexandrovich,” she answered, her tone almost serene. “He is confident he can negotiate on your behalf. There are officials who remain faithful to his wishes even if they can no longer be called commands. And remember, Masha, you are a Rasputin. You are God’s chosen, safe in his providence.” I nodded, as I had when she’d said the same thing a week earlier, after we learned the tsar had stepped down.

“May I send my mother word that Varya and I are all right?”

“Of course. You must send her a telegram. I’ll call Fredericks—he’ll help you. It’s all God’s will, Masha. You know that. Nothing comes to pass that isn’t. How could it?”

As I reported to Alyosha when I went back upstairs, only a few loyal and mostly ancient retainers were staying in the Romanovs’ service: two valets, half a dozen chambermaids, ten footmen, the kitchen staff, the butler, and old Count Fredericks, an unlikely source of help of any kind.

The Old Guard and the New

M
ASTER EMERITUS OF COURT LIFE
, Count Vladimir Fredericks might well have been relieved by the contraction of his demesne. Disoriented by the imminence of a revolution that had declared his worldview not only myopic but also corrupt, for weeks the count had been continually lost in the palace corridors. Sent bearing a message from the tsarina to her confidante, Anna Vyrubova, the count would nod briskly, click his shiny heels, and return to the tsarina’s suite some hours later, his mouth and mustache quivering in anxious confusion and the message still on his salver, envelope unopened.

“Why, Count …” the tsarina would begin, but then she’d trail off and smile. “How debonair you’re looking, dear Vladimir! No wonder poor Anna didn’t read my little note. She must have been overcome with shyness when she saw your new waistcoat. Exquisite! It is new, isn’t it?” The count, who at ninety was at least as vain as he had been at twenty, looked down at his waistcoat (which was certainly not new despite his freshened appreciation) and forgot the shame occasioned by the failure of his errand. No one had the heart to scold him, and he spent his days in perpetual futile perambulation, wandering in and out of one suite of rooms after another until he arrived somewhere he recognized.

It was Count Fredericks who had been in charge of lighting
when, in 1873, five electric lamps were installed on Odesskaya Street. The count had been following the announcements of the grim eastward march of progress and was among those who gathered for the lamps’ inaugural illumination. A terrible light, poisonous and green, flickered, strobed the crowd of faces, and flooded their open mouths with something that looked like oil of vitriol. Or so Fredericks reported to Tsar Nikolay’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II. Electricity, he predicted with obvious relief, was too vulgar to catch on. A year passed, and then another, and soon it was five, and there was no further mention of electric lamps. Someone had finally taken down the ones on Odesskaya Street, which had remained lit only as long as their inaugural performance. Fredericks, considering his position secure, celebrated their removal by ordering many times the amount of candles he usually did for a year. But no sooner had the candles been delivered than some infidel greedy industrialist plugged the entire Liteiny Bridge into a sinister smoke-belching generator, and just like that the Neva was showered with diamonds. Transformed into a great glittering serpent, the river turned and twisted under the delighted gaze of the hundreds of technology-mad fools packing the bridge’s span, and the count went back to the Winter Palace and embarked upon an epic bender. By 1889 the palace had its own direct-current generating station, and the ever more forceful incursion of vulgarians denied the count his august position: Bringer of Light to Darkness! For some weeks the count refused to leave his candlelit room or take any nourishment besides that found in Finnish vodka. As a gesture of condolence, Fredericks was promoted from Minister to Master of Court Life, and from that point forward no one ever had the heart to scold him. There are those people who cannot be transplanted from one age to the next.

As luck would have it (ours, not his), the count’s lack of foresight
provided those of us now confined to the palace with limitless candles to burn once the electricity and gas were cut off.

The thing to do about the telegram was to get Varya to ask OTMA for help. OTMA was the name the Romanov sisters made up for themselves as a single entity—that’s how close they were to one another. They used the first letter of each of their names and arranged them by birth order: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia. While I know they spoke as individuals, I remember them as a Greek chorus, dressed alike in long white gowns and providing a plaintive, sometimes sighing commentary on our plight. Like their mother, the sisters were devout, given to dropping to their knees and praying in concert. Soon after we moved in with the Romanovs, Varya fell in line behind OTMA, clearly happy to have discovered not just one sister whose company she preferred to mine, but a matched set of four. She was suited to life as a princess—even a deposed one was better than nothing—and granted Tatiana the same role her sisters did. Olga, twenty-one, might have been the eldest, but she happily ceded authority to nineteen-year-old Tatiana, the most efficient and pragmatic sister, on whom the younger two, eighteen and sixteen, depended as a kind of governess. Now that they had been abandoned by the servants, she was the only one they had.

OTMA. If the tsarina wanted something done, she didn’t summon Count Fredericks. It was OTMA she called to her boudoir.

T
HE TSARINA DIDN’T RESEMBLE
the image her people had formed of her. Despite having been born a German princess, she wasn’t a spy with a private phone line to the kaiser; she wasn’t my father’s mistress; she wasn’t a frigid, humorless termagant who drugged Tsar Nikolay into submission so she could meddle in state affairs. If she could be faulted for anything, aside from religiosity, it was
her opaqueness. Alexandra Fyodorovna was clever, far more than her husband, and had discovered how to protect herself from psychic penetration by anyone save her immediate family. Deploying an innate impulse toward generosity and never taken by surprise, as she didn’t receive guests for whom she hadn’t prepared comments, she generally began her delivery of these from yards away, across the room, carried toward her victim on a frothy wave of hyperbolic praise and affection. “How are you? How lovely you look! You’re doing your hair a new way! How elegant it is! What a lovely gown, and only you could wear it so well! You’ve brought the sunshine with you! Really, it’s just come out from behind a cloud! You dance more gracefully than anyone I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe you didn’t grow up in Paris, speaking French as you do, like a Parisian, it’s remarkable.” On and on it went, a panegyric that overwhelmed her listener to the point that he or she would hurry to correct so falsely and flabbergastingly positive an impression, but too late: into his or her hands the tsarina would press a little gift, nothing extravagant but still the thoughtful kind of something that inspired a genuinely grateful response. For how was it that the tsarina, busy as a tsarina must be, had remembered one’s passion for Jordan almonds or the novels of George Eliot? By the time one realized what had happened, the tsarina had done it again: eluded what she considered capture, leaving nothing more tangible than a fading whiff of Guerlain’s Après L’Ondée, the perfume she’d worn every day since the tsar had first given her a bottle, during their courtship.

“As you see,” I said to Varya once we’d lived with the Romanovs for a month or so, “there are ways other than lying to protect oneself.” My sister looked at me. It had been some time since I’d last questioned her about one of her fibs.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “And neither do you.”

•  •  •

T
HAT AFTERNOON IN THE DRAWING ROOM
, Alexandra Fyodorovna treated General Kornilov with a warmth and politeness that confused the man, who kept apologizing and repeating himself, clearly worried that the now former tsarina was failing to understand the reign of terror he’d been dispatched to introduce. Once the old guard and staff had defected—this happened with a bewildering and hurtful swiftness—the Alexander Palace was closed to visitors, its doors not only locked but nailed shut, all but the main entrance and the one through which food was delivered to the kitchen. From that point forward, no package would go unopened or uninspected, no message reach its recipient in an envelope that remained sealed. OTMA could do nothing to facilitate sending a telegram or anything else.

Step by step, each action undertaken in the name of guarding the Romanovs’ safety would undermine their influence and separate them from their supporters, of whom there remained many millions, if not in the city then in the heartland. The peasants—who would become the proletariat—had never considered the tsar responsible for their poverty. The tsar was God’s anointed, just as was Christ, and they questioned the actions of neither. If they suffered, it was because the lot of mankind was to suffer, and if the men who oversaw their labor were corrupt, well, that was the devil’s doing, not the tsar’s. As for Russians who hadn’t been loyal to the tsar, most were riven. They’d worked to end tsarism, they believed absolutely that it must be brought down, but tsarism was an idea, not a man, and their satisfaction had its counterweight of grief. Many who claimed they hated Tsar Nikolay found they didn’t enjoy his mortification.

The new guard was received with no little astonishment by the Romanovs and their remaining staff, as the soldiers were—it was
clear from their smell as well as their behavior—drunk. They’d stopped in the village shop that sold wine and spirits, terrorized the proprietor with their shouting and gun-waving, and helped themselves to his wares. All through the palace the soldiers went, shouting, cursing, and singing lewd songs, stabbing their bayonets into the upholstery, slicing up paintings and tapestries, and breaking whatever they didn’t steal.

It was probably inevitable that Varya and I, as daughters of the infamous Father Grigory, became the objects of coarse and sordid taunts. “Put your mouth on this and heal it,” one lout said, backing me into a corner with the front of his trousers unbuttoned and a pistol in hand. My refusal to acknowledge his words made him angry, and he pinned me against the wall. The fumes of his breath should have prepared me for how his tongue would taste. For a moment I thought I was going to be sick, but then my teeth closed down on it, proving what I’d suspected: finishing school had not, by everlastingly underscoring the necessity of a lady mastering her passions, conquered the hot-tempered girl I was. And nothing the health instructor said had warned me that a girl’s initiation into sex—my first kiss!—might be so vile. The guard pulled away, bellowing, as shocked by what I’d done as I, who was gagging on his blood and spitting it out of my mouth even as he opened his and showed me the damage to his tongue.

“Stupid slut,” he said, or something like it. The injury slurred his speech to the point that I hardly knew what he said.

For a week or more, Varya and I both endured insults and threats, but she was as good as I at acting deaf, dull, and stubborn. The Red Guard were under orders (at that point, anyway) to restrict their once-exalted prisoners without touching their persons, so once the soldiers had corralled all of us onto one floor of the family’s private apartments, they no longer could take any liberties requiring privacy. Cramped as we were, there was that to be grateful for.