Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (7 page)

“Wouldn’t candelabra and clocks be too heavy for water to take away?”

“You’d think so, but I’ve seen both in the street after it receded. As well as a drowned dog with a diamond collar being undone by a drunk Dutchman dancing by.”

“Was that D, then?”

“Yes. Along with doors and dumbwaiters and, um, drawing-room chairs. And dice.”

“Now E.”

“Egrets. Eggs. Electric lamps. Elastic. Epaulets. Elephants.”

“F.”

“Fire screens, feather beds, forks, foxes, anything French.”

“Such as?”

“French beans. French bulldogs. French toast.”

“G.”

“Garters, garden gates, greengages, grandmothers, and grandfathers. Glasses, those for tea and those to look through.” George V, I stopped myself from adding to the list. We’d only just learned that the offer of asylum in the United Kingdom had been rescinded now that King George had given his too hasty invitation enough thought to realize what a mistake it might be to expose his disgruntled populace, also suffering the privations of war, to living proof that emperors could be overthrown. We hadn’t had even a week to enjoy the fantasy of being freed before it evaporated.

The early months of 1917 were the Romanovs’ purgatory, a state somewhere between death and judgment, in which they—we all—entertained hopes of escape from whatever punishment the growing strength and organization of the revolutionaries augured. The possibility of freedom was not much different for us than for souls in purgatory: it would depend upon sacrifices made by those who remained in a world to which we were barred return. Varya
and I were never told specifically to avoid the topic of our collective fate, but, living in the home of a tsar, we followed the example of our hosts, and politics wasn’t something I discussed with anyone save Alyosha.

One good thing about the Haymarket, I told the tsarevich: whatever was stolen on Monday could be found there on Tuesday, displayed among the wares of merchants offering items from an “estate sale,” as their grimy placards announced. Except that the previous owners, generally speaking, weren’t dead. Maybe vendors of apples and cheese and sturgeon didn’t offer purloined goods—maybe—but the dishes and cutlery, the clocks, andirons, samovars, oil paintings, statuary, and lead-crystal stemware, not to mention the odd harp, taxidermied yak, or leopard-upholstered love seat, had been taken from a sleeping or absent owner. Anyone thorough in canvassing the goods on offer would in time come upon something he recognized. “Look,” you might hear someone say, “Aren’t those Great-Uncle Vladimir’s dueling pistols?” Or, “Didn’t that friend of yours, Anna-What’s-her-name, have a silver tea set with this exact pattern? I thought she said it was one of a kind.” And undoubtedly it had been, but, alas, once blue-white cataracts had dimmed Anna-Whoever-she-was’s brown eyes, her groping fingers never guessed that the larcenous servants she trusted had replaced her tableware, her plates and spoons and glasses and bowls, with cheap imitations.

“Why, look over there,” Alyosha said, closing his eyes as he did when pretending. “Father’s favorite shotgun.” He could be the most literal-minded boy, absolutely hemmed in by reality, and the only way he knew how to use his imagination was by closing his eyes to what was in front of them. As for the rest of the family, they seemed well practiced at being blind with their eyes wide open. Either that or they pretended optimism for one another, voicing what they knew were fantasies.

“And your sister Olga’s chess set.”

“Nagorny’s tennis racquet.”

“Botkin’s diamond studs.”

We were so bored locked up at Tsarskoe Selo—and for the tsarevich, every day he was kept in bed was yet another insult added to that of being kept hostage—that Alyosha and I made play of whatever we could and went to any length to invent amusement. Perhaps only they who have endured a similar punishment would understand.

Of course, Alyosha wouldn’t have been confined to bed if he hadn’t tobogganed down the service stairs on a tea tray. But he did, and the day after he did I overheard Botkin tell Nagorny the swelling was so bad, blood was leaking through the pores of his skin.

I’ve never encountered so eccentric and tenacious a passion in another family, but the Romanovs, save the tsarina, were, to hear Alyosha tell it (in an attempt to explain his misadventure), the most unreasonable tea-tray riders, in all seasons, under all circumstances. Were the family to pass a tempting hillock of dry grass or sand dune when they traveled together on the imperial train, Tsar Nikolay would order the locomotive be stopped and the cars backed up to the hillock.

“Just an hour,” he’d tell the engineer. “Once we’re rolling again, we’ll make it up easily.” And then he and all four girls and Alyosha (if he was well and both his bodyguards were present to run on either side of him, and if the tsarina allowed it) would tear out of the cars with serving trays and dedicate themselves to making as many trips down the slope as they possibly could within the time allotted.

Winters at Tsarskoe Selo, the tsar built a mountain of snow on the park lawn. He shoveled and shoved from all directions, the girls helping with their own smaller shovels, until he and the children agreed it was high enough. Then they all rushed in and out of
the palace with kettles of water to pour over the packed snow, until their little Matterhorn developed a slick glazing of ice on one side. Up the snowy side they filed, taking turns shooting down the icy track until they were too tired to stand. Not Alyosha, of course, as mishaps were guaranteed on so hard and fast a surface. All winter long, his sisters’ shins were black and blue and covered with lumps under their wool tights, while poor Alyosha sat at a window and watched, or sat outside on a bench and watched, or, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, perpetrated some act of tomfoolery like the one that had recently lamed him. I hoped it was tomfoolery. When I looked at the stairs Alyosha had ridden down, I couldn’t see how he might have thought to avoid an accident. But if he had hurt himself on purpose, then why? What motive might excuse his courting disaster, plunging into it?

It hurt him horribly, especially when Botkin forced the leg into its brace, but he never complained. Not to me. The only people he showed his tears were his mother and Nagorny, who had been relieving himself when Alyosha snuck away and boarded the tray. When he learned what had happened, the big man wept and wrung his hands. He went before the tsar and tsarina, and on his knees he begged to be allowed to keep his position as Alyosha’s protector. As if, trapped as we were under house arrest, there were a queue of applicants waiting for the job.

O
NLY THOSE WHO LIVED
at Tsarskoe Selo, within the walls of the Romanovs’ carefully guarded privacy, could understand how suffocating was the pall of dread that descended in the wake of one of Alyosha’s injuries. No one raised a blind or pulled open the drapes; every light was left burning all night. Minutes, hours, days: they had significance only insofar as they tracked the progress of the tsarevich’s suffering. Servants walked hurriedly, wordlessly, with
downcast eyes. To an unknowing observer it would seem each had a dire piece of business to accomplish, and yet nothing happened when Alyosha was bleeding, nothing of consequence. His sisters played cards, not with one another but each with her own deck, laying out game after game of solitaire. No record on the gramophone, no fingers on the piano keys, no sound other than the ticking of clocks and the whisper of cards being laid down or picked up. And the screams, muted by closed doors and long corridors but still audible, as if the walls themselves were crying out.

The tsar, who couldn’t sit still under benign circumstances, launched himself at one unnecessary physical task after another, chopping and riding, marching and drilling, inspecting and cleaning and firing his shotguns, bringing down game that would go uneaten. The tsarina wept desperate, guilty tears for the curse she’d unwittingly bestowed on the son she loved better than herself. She prostrated herself before her hundreds of ikons and begged God’s forgiveness. What had she done to deserve such a punishment?

Knee or kidney or big toe: whatever Alyosha had bumped filled with blood that, unable to clot, went on flowing until the hemorrhage created enough pressure to stop itself. Until the blood had no place left to go. The result of an injury could happen quickly, as when larger vessels were involved, or it could manifest itself with insidious slow stealth, hours or even days after he’d tripped and fallen or stumbled accidentally in play, as much as he was allowed to play. Applying ice might slow the bleeding, but in the end the hemorrhage would still cripple the joint or, worse, engorge the organ to the point of rupture. Grave results from something as small as a burst capillary, no thicker than a strand of hair. And no matter how dreadful his pain (and it was bad enough some days that we all prayed he’d faint, and sometimes he did), Alyosha wasn’t allowed morphine—a precaution lest the crown prince develop a dependence on opiates.

Not yet eleven when Father told me about this so-called precaution, I understood it as one of the routine cruelties adults commit against children in the stated interest of strengthening their characters while succeeding only in damaging certain individuals beyond repair. Even as a child I knew that to allow such agony to go unassuaged was barbaric, and on those few occasions when I happened to accompany my father on a visit to the Alexander Palace, I was frightened in a way that had nothing to do with shyness—I’ve never been shy—or the proximity of the demigods we like to make of royalty. I’d gotten it into my head that the Romanovs were a monstrous kind of family, insensible to the suffering of their most vulnerable member. I must have jumbled up what little I knew about them with stories from history books. My years of formal schooling had only just begun, and we’d been instructed to memorize the succession of all the tsars back to Mikhail of
Rus
, the name Mikhail gave the piece of land he’d carved away from the Golden Horde and taken for himself.
Rus
. And he called himself
Tsar
, for Caesar, as it was his intention to make Moscow a new Rome and from it rule his empire.

It’s Ivan the Terrible, of course, who seizes hold of a child’s imagination, and I fell prey to dark fantasies of his hiding somewhere in the Alexander Palace. Ivan, who suffered seizures of rage and used his scepter to bludgeon the son he loved, only to fall to his knees, howling in anguish, while he rocked the murdered boy and cradled his broken head. Who other than Terrible Ivan could have summoned such noises from a tsarevich?

The first time I heard Alyosha’s screaming, I was ten and a half years old and new to city life. Waiting for my father in the blue-and-gold parlor, I went down on the palace floor. Not that I keeled over, I just bent my body into the shape it demanded—folded my legs under me, pressed my face into my knees, and shut my eyes tight. I remained like that for I don’t know how long, learning
what it means to be scared stiff. I heard footsteps in the corridor, servants passing, but no one inquired about my peculiar position there on the blue-and-gold carpet. Or perhaps no one noticed me. Perhaps whoever glanced inside the parlor mistook me for an ottoman.

I never got used to Alyosha’s screams, not ever. When I was eighteen and heard them and remained on my feet, still I folded up inside. On nights I can’t sleep for thinking, my attention called back to the past, I hear those screams. Whose decision was it to give him no morphine? Why didn’t anyone prevail upon Tsar Nikolay, or the physicians, to revisit the question of drugging the boy, rescuing him from a torture he endured not once but over and over? What loving mother could have borne witness to her child’s begging for help, for release, for death even, and not insist he be given whatever it took to alleviate his pain?

I was a coward. Tsarina or no tsarina, I fled at the sight of Alyosha’s face gone gray with pain and slick with the perspiration that soaked his hair and the nightshirt no one dared change, because at the touch of anyone’s hand his screams grew louder. His eyes were sunken and ringed with black circles, and he had the peculiar and pathetic ability to keep his leg absolutely still while the rest of him writhed. What answer did I have to so grave an injury as this? From the moment Alyosha had driven his knee into the newel post, blood flowed into the joint, until the swelling bent and paralyzed his leg, stretching the skin until it shone and, yes, wept red tears. The blood that no longer circulated died, and its cells broke down and flooded his body with chemicals that drove his temperature up. He vomited from the fever and the pain and screamed when the act of vomiting jarred his leg. So this was what my father had been summoned to treat. I hadn’t known such tortures existed. I might have heard the tsarevich scream when I was a child, but I’d seen him only when he was well, from a distance, and
whatever Father told me of Alyosha’s illness didn’t prepare me for what it was—how could it have?

I think I might have stood it if he hadn’t screamed so. But I couldn’t stay by his side when he screamed, I couldn’t. Especially as there was nothing I could do to stop it. Suddenly, my failure to take any of the Neva’s water seemed exactly that: a failure. What if it had absorbed some aspect of my father and could have granted Alyosha even a little watered-down relief? Pilgrims had left their canes and bandages around the hole in the river’s ice. They believed in it, whatever it was the river carried away and swept into the Gulf of Finland, from which no one could retrieve it. A minute, even less, of Alyosha’s screams was all that was required to strip away my enlightened education and reveal me to be as superstitious as an ignorant peasant.

I knew my father had sometimes remained with the tsarevich hour upon hour, but under his hands Alyosha’s tortures, and his screams, would have diminished. I’d never known of anyone, not even people with legs crushed by logs or eyes pierced by porcupine quills or appendixes on the verge of bursting, who didn’t eventually fall silent under my father’s hands.

“So much vital energy wasted on protest,” he’d complain, falling into his armchair so I could pull off his boots while Dunia brought him his slippers and a glass of Madeira. “And not one of them able to direct even a fraction of it to any purpose. I have to do it for them.” His eyes, at the end of a long day, showed me what other people’s pain did to him.