Rasputin's Daughter (4 page)

Yet when I emerged above and quickly scanned the broad deck, it was just as I had feared-there was no sign of Sasha. Either he’d broken his promise and not come at all, or he’d been here at ten, waited a few minutes, and given up. Oh, no, I thought, squinting in the sharp bright evening light. I spun around, my dark dress flying wide. There was nothing, no one, only this riverboat and the huge blue sky overhead. My eyes began to well up…what had I expected? What sort of fool was I?

Suddenly a firm hand grabbed me by the shoulder. I gasped aloud, certain that Dunya had caught me, but when I twisted around-

“Sasha!”

Pulling me into his arms, he said nothing. It wasn’t the first time I’d been kissed-there’d been a boy who’d pecked me as crudely as a rooster-but it was the first time a kiss had burned with pleasure. I’d never felt anything like it, the rush of heat that zipped almost instantly from my lips and throughout my body, all the way down my legs. So powerful was it that I jerked away in shock.

“I…I-,” I began, my trembling fingers reaching up and touching his soft beard. “I was afraid I’d missed you.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I couldn’t get away any sooner.”

“I would have waited all night,” he said, bending forward and kissing me on the cheek.

As much as every bit of me wanted him, I wanted at the same time to run away. Maybe Dunya was right. Maybe he was after just one thing.

“Listen, Sasha, I…I can’t stay now. I have to get back,” I said, quickly forming a plan. “We arrive in Pokrovskoye in the morning, but will you come visit me later? At our home?”

“Just tell me where, just tell me when.”

“Anyone in the village can tell you where we live. Wait outside our gate at five. Papa always goes to the post office late in the afternoon. I’ll go with him, and you can greet us when we return. I’ll see that Papa invites you to join us for supper.”

“That would be a great honor.”

“And don’t forget your poetry!” I said, as I scurried off.

“Of course.”

I should have known better. I should have known his intentions were anything but honorable. Then again, how could I have guessed?

At home the following day, I rehearsed in my head how I was going to introduce Papa to Sasha and get him invited to our table. I’d never had a young man call on me. Then again, maybe the moment was lost and Sasha wouldn’t keep his word a second time.

Finally, sometime after four, Papa rose to go to the post office, and I leaped at the chance to accompany him. After he had dictated his telegrams to the clerk, we returned home, my arm looped in his. Of course, by then I was nearly faint with anticipation. In fact, I couldn’t believe it when Papa and I turned the corner past the spinster Petrovna’s little hut and there, in a cluster of six or seven people gathered by our gate to beg Papa’s blessing, stood Sasha, neatly dressed, his hair combed. Thrilled, my hand came up in a small, impulsive wave. As if in embarrassment, he glanced away.

Nearing our home, the sad group of petitioners broke into a pathetic chorus.

“Father Grigori!”

“Help me, Father!”

“Lord have mercy!”

At first I noticed no one except Sasha, of course, but then I saw one man on crutches, a woman in mourning dressed entirely in black, and, then, most terribly, a small disfigured woman, her nose ravaged and half eaten away.

“Father Grigori! Father Grigori!” she called pathetically. “Help me, please!”

Sasha, a stern look on his face, came up alongside this poor woman and helped her, pushing aside the others and nudging her to the front. When she was just steps from my father, Sasha even held back the others, keeping her approach clear and free. But rather than seeking to kiss my father’s hand or falling at his knees for his blessing, this poor woman with the hideous nose reached into the folds of her dress and pulled out a long arching knife.

“Death to the Antichrist!” she screamed as she lunged forward, plunging the blade into my father’s stomach.

Right before me I saw the long knife disappear completely into Papa, cutting him from navel to sternum, and I screamed so loudly that my own ears were deafened. My father, groaning like a wild animal, jerked back, and blood sprayed from him like a fountain. He stumbled away, and as I reached to grab him I saw a mound of pink entrails boil outward.

Again the attacker charged at Papa, her knife raised high, her voice a scream. “Death to the Antichrist!”

In the pandemonium, I searched for Sasha and saw him falling away as the other supplicants rushed forward to my father’s defense. Before the madwoman could strike again, the small crowd of people grabbed her and threw her to the ground, whereupon they immediately began to beat her, mercilessly, their hands and fists and heels and crutches raining down on her.

But still the crazy woman screamed, “I must kill him, kill him!”

And as my father collapsed on the dirt lane, blood and more gushing from him, I caught a brief glimpse of Sasha, not coming to our aid but dashing away. Dear God, I thought, he’s fleeing!

In the end, it was only the swift actions of Mama and Dunya that saved Papa’s life. Sturdy Siberian women, they rushed from our house, my mother already barking orders. Within moments she had commandeered three men to carry Papa inside, whereupon Mama and Dunya threw the dinner dishes from the long table as if they were crumbs. Papa was laid right there, where we should have been eating, and within seconds they were winding him in a wet sheet, which stemmed the flow of blood and kept his entrails from falling out. All of us, however, were convinced that Papa’s end had come. Indeed, by the time a wire had been sent to the closest doctor, who was in Tyumen, and by the time that doctor had come racing into town not by steamer but by troika, a trip that took no less than eight hours on Trakt No. 4-a horrible, bumpy road that linked us with the outer world-it was well after midnight and Papa was clinging to the last threads of life. With no other option, an emergency operation was performed right there on our dinner table under the glow of stearin candles, with my father, who refused to breathe the ether, clutching a gold cross. Fortunately for him, and for all of us as well, he fainted after the first incision.

Papa should not have survived. In fact, the doctor doubted he could. But thanks in great part to his internal strength and great physical vitality-not to mention my constant prayers-he did not pass from this world. A few days later, when he had recovered enough, we took him by telega-a cart without springs-ever so slowly to Tyumen, where Professor von Breden, who’d been sent by the Empress, reopened the wound and made a few things right. After that it took weeks and weeks of convalescing-during which time war broke out, much to Papa’s sorrow-but in time my father was back on his feet. Never, however, did he regain his magnificent strength. In fact, from then on my father lost the look of the holy, that drawn hollow-cheeked appearance of one who observes the fasts. So plagued was he from constant pain that he took to drink as never before, which not only dulled his discomfort but undoubtedly his powers. Soon my father’s appearance became bloated, even corpulent. I never spoke to anyone of Sasha, and months later I no longer cried at the thought of him and his obvious betrayal. How could he have led that crazy woman, who, it turned out, was suffering from syphilis, right to my father?

When Dunya and I finally accompanied Papa back to the capital, we found a greatly changed world. War against the Kaiser had broken out, and spy fever was raging everywhere. Our glorious city, aflame with patriotism, was no longer known by the German-sounding name of Sankt Peterburg but as Petrograd. Even the thousands of Germans settled along our Volga River were being driven from their farms. All this greatly disturbed my father, for he abhorred bloodshed of any kind, and when he made known his opposition to the war, he not only fell out of the Tsar’s favor, he was labeled a traitor by many. In this way, weakened by his wound and demoralized by the defeats our brave soldiers suffered month after month, Papa fell into the greatest depression of his life.

Even two years later, the memories of Sasha and the murder attempt, fueled by my lingering guilt, now kindled my fears as much as Papa’s vision of death. Though my father was under constant police surveillance for his own protection, I knew very well that those who hated him were as clever as they were well connected. Indeed, Gospodin Ministir-Mr. Minister-Protopopov, who headed the Interior Department, had repeatedly warned my father of dangers lurking everywhere.

“Listen to me carefully, Father Grigori,” Gospodin Ministir Protopopov had said. “People are openly plotting your death. Be on your guard every moment! These are very difficult times!”

As I now rushed out the door, I called to the two secret agents posted on our staircase. Coming to our aid, they each took Papa by an arm, and all of us quickly descended. Once downstairs, we stepped from the small lobby, across the courtyard, through the archway, and onto the frigid street, where a dark blue limousine was already waiting for us. It was a Delaunay-Belleville and certainly from the imperial garage, though it lacked a coat of arms and official markings. When the chauffeur jumped out to open the door for us, I could see by his khaki-colored full-dress uniform and the double-headed eagles stamped on the gold braid around his collar that he was in fact one of the Tsar’s personal drivers. That an unmarked motor had been sent was no surprise, for the Tsaritsa always took great pains not to draw attention to my father’s visits to the palace.

As we flew off, rushing down the street and then turning along the embankment of the Fontanka River, I leaned over and lowered Papa’s window so the brisk night air might rouse him to his duties. Sitting back in the rich leather seat, I pulled my cloak over my shoulders and buried my hands in my fur muff-which the Empress had gifted me just the year before.

It was slightly past midnight, and had this been before the war and these the White Nights of summer, the streets would have been flooded with dusky sunlight, people in search of entertainment, and any number of horse cabs. In December, however, the planned boulevards and prospekti of the capital-all of which were big and straight and therefore so very foreign, so uncomfortably non-Russian-were dark and freezing and filled now with droves of wounded soldiers and hungry peasants, some huddled around open fires, others sleeping right out on the pavements, with a few marauders roaming about. Not long ago Papa had had a vision that the Tsar needed to bring trainload after trainload of grain into the capital. And he was right. The liodi-common people-needed food. Back home in our village, we had lived through many hard seasons, and my father knew very well what the Tsar did not-that a peasant without bread was a very dangerous man.

When we turned onto Nevsky Prospekt I saw only a small handful of sleighs and just one place that looked lively and warm, the Sergeeivski Palace, which had been home to Grand Duchess Elizabeth, the Tsaritsa’s sister, before she’d taken to the cloth. Now it was inhabited by the young Grand Duke Dmitri, and the second-floor windows of the stunning red building were ablaze with electric lights and some sort of revelry, for of course there were not and never would be any shortages among the nobility. After that, all was depressingly quiet, the streets filled with litter and lost souls, who, I began to realize, looked increasingly less like wounded soldiers and more like deserters.

Within a short time we left the edge of the city and were speeding through the countryside. Father and I sat silent in the rear seat, he gazing out his window, I staring out mine. The moon was surprisingly bright, and as my eyes followed the snow-laden landscape, I saw flat white fields, then a strand of birch, next a cluster of small huts with smoke curling from the chimneys and a tiny church with a gold onion dome, then again dormant fields tucked under a pale blanket.

There was little doubt in my mind that by morning all good society and then some would know of tonight’s events. I was sure that by sunrise the drunken princess, the half-naked countess, and the balalaika player, even the secret agents, would start spreading the word that the Empress had called Rasputin to the palace yet again-and at such an ungodly hour, no less. By teatime tomorrow afternoon, all the court would probably be gossiping about how a late-night call had been placed for the Tsaritsa, a call begging the besotted Rasputin to rush to her private rooms and soothe her desperate needs. Yes, the tongues would wag, for we Russians were the most vicious of gossips, and there were sure to be nasty rumors of the wild peasant romping in bed with the Empress Aleksandra Fyodorovna-that German bitch-and even with her devoted friend, that slut Anna Vyrubova, perhaps all three of them together. There might even be gossip of a Khlyst act, a “rejoicing.” After all, didn’t the name Rasputin come from the word rasputa-a debauched, depraved good-for-nothing? The counts and dukes and princes might even hold an emergency meeting at the Yacht Club, where they would smoke and drink and mutter that something had to be done about that filthy monk who was ruining the prestige of the Tsar, the peasant who was nothing but a stain on the entire House of Romanov. After all, wasn’t he more than likely spying for the Germans, even quite possibly drugging the Tsar himself? Gospodi-good heavens-for the sake of Holy Mother Russia, shouldn’t he be eliminated?

Yes, I thought with a shudder, Papa’s visions of his own end were not so hard to believe.

The closer we came to Tsarskoye Selo, the more I could see that the bite of cold night air was invigorating Papa like a dip in the Gulf of Finland. Indeed, as the wintry countryside gave way to villas and small palaces tucked in parks, I was relieved to see that my father appeared in complete control of himself.

Within minutes of entering the royal village, we came to the long iron fence surrounding the vast palace grounds. Staring across a plain of snow and into the deep night, I caught a distant glimpse of the buttery-yellow walls and white columns of the home Catherine the Great had built more than a century earlier for her favorite grandson, Aleksander I. When we reached the entrance itself, the guards hurriedly swung open the gates without so much as a single question, and the limousine followed the drive up a slight hill. I couldn’t hide my surprise, because for years my father hadn’t been allowed to approach the home of the tsars so directly. Because of an uproar of protest from, among others, nearly the entire Romanov clan, the infamous Rasputin had been forced to sneak into the imperial home via a pretend meeting with a maid in the right wing of the palace. In fact, the outrage against him had grown so vocal recently that the only place he could meet their Imperial Highnesses was down the road at Madame Vyrubova’s tiny house. All this because the chamberlain’s staff listed any visitor to the palace in the Kammerfurier-the court log-available to many officials. Needless to say, whenever the name Rasputin appeared, it sparked another wave of protest about his dark influence on the throne.