Rasputin's Daughter (23 page)

Behind me I heard the distinct squeak of a floorboard, and I spun around in absolute terror. Varya, dressed in her nightgown, was making her way toward me. I nearly slammed my father’s door.

“Is Papa still up?” asked my sister. “I want to kiss him good night.”

In total panic, I held my fingers to my lips. “Shh! He’s asleep!”

Hurrying toward Varya, I grabbed her by the arm and spun her around. What had I just seen? My heart pounding, the only thing I knew for certain was that tonight was not the time for my younger sister to learn what I now knew, that our dear housekeeper, who was like our second mother, was in reality just that.

“We can’t disturb Papa,” I snapped.

“Hey, let go of me!” Varya whined. “That hurts!”

“Come on, Papa needs his rest…and so do we! You have to go to bed.”

“But-”

Like an angry schoolmarm, I dragged Varya back to our room, where I practically shoved her into bed.

“Now go to sleep, Varichka,” I said, heading out as quickly as I could lest she see the tears welling in my eyes. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m just going to finish the dishes.”

“Oh, all right!” She was yawning as she crawled under the covers. “But I hate it when you push me around like that.”

Back in the kitchen, my tears fell one after another into the dishwater. Did this mean that Papa didn’t love our mother? Was he going to leave us? What about the sanctity of marriage he so often preached?

“To hell with him!” I cried aloud, slamming my fist into my thigh.

Biting my lower lip, I thought of the many stories told back home over the kitchen sink, of how my parents were married when Papa was twenty and she a few years older. I had come to understand that my mother, like all peasant wives, had been chosen not so much for her beauty, which was limited, and certainly not for her wealth, which was nonexistent, but for her strength and ability to manage farm life, which were exemplary.

Through the cracks in the family stories, however, I had also come to understand that while my mother always loved Papa, in time she had turned away from him. Now that I thought about it, I remembered how things had changed between them after Mama had had an emergency hysterectomy. Had the operation that saved her life in fact killed something else-namely, her need for amorous attention? Mama always claimed she tolerated my father’s long absences from home because she supported his religious life-but that was a total lie, wasn’t it? And what kind of lie was my supposedly holy father-who spoke so often of the blessings of love-living as well?

Right then I hated them all-Mama, Papa, and especially Dunya. Dunya, who was always so sweet to us but who was nothing more than a conniving wench who’d wormed her way into our home and into my father’s pants. A fresh wave of tears burst from my eyes. Everything felt dirty and horrible: this apartment, my entire family, and me. I wanted to run away, flee this place and this life.

And then I heard it again, more knocking at our rear door. Oh, God, I thought, flooded with a kind of bitter joy, Sasha was back. Shaking the dishwater from my hands, I took a towel and dried my eyes. I was just about to reach for the door and pull it wide open when it came, an all too familiar chant that in this case was more like a threat. In an instant I knew it wasn’t Sasha.

Half muttering, half growling like a cat, a woman’s voice called, “Chri-i-ist is ri-i-isen!”

I had no doubt it was Madame Lokhtina, the former beauty of great society and influence who had abandoned husband, daughter, and fortune, all to become Father’s greatest-and most annoying-devotee. She was the one I had discovered attacking Father, ripping away his pants, hanging on to his member, and demanding sin. What in the name of the devil did she want this late, and what was she even doing here in the capital? The last I’d heard she had been walled into a cell at the Verkhoturye Monastery, where soup and bread were slipped to her through a small hole.

Lest her muttering turn into a scream that would wake the dead, not to mention the entire building, I had no choice but to unlock the back door and crack it open. Staring into the darkness, I saw not even a remnant of her former delicate beauty but rather a haggard, filthy woman in a long torn coat of homespun. She leaned on a tall staff decorated with little ribbons, while on her head sat a most strange hat made of wolf fur, torn and muddied, that in a strange way resembled the headgear of a nun. Around her neck hung a multitude of little books with crosses that represented the twelve Gospels.

She leaned forward like a mole, squinting and half whispering, “Christ is risen! Christ is risen! CHRI-I-IST IS RI-I-ISEN!”

“Da, da,” I replied quietly, hoping to appease her. “Christ is risen.” Madame Lokhtina was known and dreaded for this, her habit of walking down any street and barging into any room, screaming these words. Father had commanded her to stop and later taken to beating her, all to no avail. Indeed, the more he struck her, the louder she screamed.

“Yes, go ahead!” she had pleaded whenever she was thrashed. “Strike me! Beat me!”

Our newspapers wrote that my father had driven her mad-why else would a woman of such good breeding now be living on alms, her feet wrapped in rags in the winter and bare in the summer? The truth, however, was that Papa had healed her of neurasthenia, from which she had been bedridden for five years. After her recovery she had forsaken the material world and become the truest of believers. There were even some, including several highly placed bishops, who wanted to bless her as the holiest of the living, a yurodstvo-holy fool-revered in my country for choosing to suffer in the name of Christ.

“Is the Lord of Hosts at home this eve?” she inquired, eyeing me most suspiciously.

Without even hesitating, I lied for the second time that night. “Unfortunately, nyet. Papa left not too long ago.”

“Do you know where he has gone?”

“Well, I’m-”

“Not supposed to say, eh?”

“I…I…”

The forlorn Lokhtina stared at me, and I was afraid she was going to burst into more of her hysterics, but she asked, ever so quietly, “Do you perhaps know, my child, if he has gone out for radeniye?” Rejoicing?

“Yes, absolutely,” I replied, without thinking.

As soon as I said it, I saw a distinct look of appeasement melt across her grimy face. That’s when I realized what I’d told her. I hadn’t implied that my father had gone to dance with the Gypsies, or that he’d gone off to drink at the Restaurant Villa Rode or at the Bear, or even that he’d been whisked away to some fancy party with Prince Yusupov. No, in their own secret code, I’d just informed Madame Lohktina that my father had gone to participate in the principal Khlyst ritual, when members washed away sin with sin via the act of svalnyi grekh-group sinning-an act that was widely rumored to be nothing more than frenzied grupa seksa.

“Ah, ochen xhorosho, ochen, ochen xhorosho.” Very good, very, very good, said the filthy woman before me. “The flying angel,” she continued, referring to the one who passed news and warnings from one ark to the next, “was afraid your father would refuse us again.”

I had never seen Madame Lokhtina so quickly pacified. I had never seen the faintest trace of a smile upon her face, either. And yet she had a pleased look as she turned and started back down the rear steps.

It suddenly occurred to me what I must do. The Khlyst community was a closed one, deeply secret, almost impenetrable. And yet right here and now it was not my door but theirs that had been opened. Did I really want to do this?

“Wait a minute!” I called after her.

Madame Lokhtina turned and stared strangely at me. “What is it, my child?”

“I have been learning the greatest secret of the group,” I ventured.

This powerhouse of religious hysteria stared at me, her eyes shrinking into suspicious slits, and said, “Which is?”

“How to nurture Christ within oneself.”

“And where did you hear such things?”

Even I couldn’t believe the words that came out of my mouth. “At the last radeniye. I am expected again tonight.”

And this woman, who was but a crumb of her former self, said, “Well, then, you had better get your coat and come straight away with me, because we’re both late. And tardiness is the one thing ‘our own’ cannot abide.”

I was so mad at Papa that I hoped he checked and saw that my side of the bed was empty. Just let him boil in worry, I thought as I followed Madame Lokhtina through a back alley and onto a side street.

But while being devious felt like the best revenge, what was I getting myself into? What I really wanted, of course, was to be with Sasha. And yet, wiping the last tears, now frozen, from my eyes, I glanced all around and realized he was not about. I really and truly had sent him on his way. Resigned, I trudged on after my father’s most fanatical devotee.

In Russia there had never been such a thing as a conservative priest, much less a liberal one. There was only one Orthodox Church with only one liturgy, just as there was only one tsar. In fact, any Russian knew that to be anything but Orthodox was heresy and strictly punishable by beating or lifelong imprisonment or both. By law there was no deviation from any of the official church doctrines. Last year it had taken me hours to try to explain this to a girl I’d met, the daughter of an American diplomat. She claimed that in her country religious opinion could and often did vary from church to church, which I myself barely understood. Something like that could never happen in Russia. In our country, pravoslavni actually didn’t mean just Orthodox, it meant the “correct worshipers.” The Catholics and Lutherans, even the Muslims, were always from different countries and only barely tolerated here. Beneath them came pagans like the Buddhists, lower yet, of course, the Jews. And at the very bottom were the schismatics, those Russians who dared to seek another path.

Because there was officially only one God and one tsar, one orthodoxy and one Russia, anything different-any splinter group that preached a different liturgy or outlook-was called a sect. Supposedly, there were hundreds of sects scattered all across Siberia. It was only out there, at the back of beyond, that one could escape the government’s reach, build a free life, and nurture any kind of independent thought, let alone a religious one. Sometimes even Siberia wasn’t far enough. If caught, a sectarian could be whipped and lashed; in the old times, it was said, their nostrils were cut off. After Peter the Great had initiated church reforms-he placed the church under his control, encouraged men to shave, and required his subjects to cross themselves with three fingers, not four-the Old Believers broke away from the state church, fleeing all the way through Siberia and, finding themselves still hounded, across the Aleutian Islands to our most distant territory, now owned by the Americans. Other secret sects hadn’t gone so far; they could be found hidden along forgotten rivers and in distant villages. Though no one admitted to membership or even firsthand knowledge, one heard regular whispers of the Skoptsy, who believed in castration as the way to deal with sexual feelings, the Dukhobory, who were known as pacifist “spirit wrestlers,” the Subbotniki, whose religion fell somewhere between Christianity and Judaism and who, it was said, practiced necromancy, the Molokans, who rejected the divinity of the tsar by drinking milk on fast days, and many others. Not long ago I’d heard a group of women talk right in our apartment about whole villages where personal property was condemned as sinful and whose residents lived as one large family. Supposedly, the peasants owned and worked the fields jointly, and both the monarchy and capitalism were condemned. Even more shocking, there were no priests, only people of the people who conducted church services.

But while every Russian knew of the sects and swapped titillating tea-table gossip about them, no one openly admitted to being a sectarian of any kind. That was why I was so struck by Madame Lohktina’s claim of a Khlyst radeniye taking place tonight, right here in the capital. Could it really be made up of a group of princes and dukes, countesses and baronesses? As I followed her through the dark, I probably should have been afraid, but it never crossed my mind. Instead, a strange sense of exhilaration began to seep into me.

As she scurried along, Madame Lokhtina suddenly burst out, saying, “ Nazareth was not unique. No, not unique at all!”

Because no one knew what would set her off, Papa had always told me to avoid her lest she launch into some tirade. But tonight I didn’t care. In fact, I wanted to hear it all, see it all.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I’m talking about the birth, of course. The one there in Nazareth, when God was born a man!” She shook her head as if trying to shake away some evil thoughts. “It didn’t just happen once, you know. It couldn’t.”

Trying to keep her talking, I said, “Of course not.”

“Exactly. The birth-it’s being repeated all the time. Once you submit, once you recognize the power of the Holy Spirit, that’s when it happens. A new Christ is born! A new Christ who can heal the sick and see the future! A new Christ who can save us all on Judgment Day!”

“Yes, I’ve learned that’s one of the principal beliefs of the Khlysty-”

She spun on me like a crazed animal, grabbing me by the arm, her eyes afire. Terrified, she looked behind us for someone, anyone, who might be following us down the deserted street.

“Shh! There are things-names-you must never mention! Never!” She pulled off one of her tattered gloves, pushed up my sleeve, and sank her cracked fingernails into my naked wrist. “Never!”

“Yes.” I winced.

I tried to pull my arm from her painful clasp, but she wouldn’t release me. Indeed, she drew me closer, pressing her lips close to my ear. I cringed as her dank, steamy breath poured against my cold skin and spilled like old tea down my collar.

“Some used to call us the Cod People, but our true name is this.” She checked the street again, to make sure we weren’t being observed, and then pressed her dry, cracked lips right against my ear and whispered, “Khristovshchina,” the Christ faith, “that’s our real name, though you must never speak it.”