Czytaj książkę: «Enchantments»

Kathryn Harrison
Enchantments

A Novel

Dedication

For Joyce

Epigraph

The eyes those silent tongues of love.

—CERVANTES

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

The Hole in the Ice

A Red Ribbon

House Arrest

The Old Guard and the New

The Tea-Tray Toboggan

Handsome Alyosha

The Virgin in the Silver Forest

A Stately Pleasure Dome

The Poplar Grove

A Sunny Child

The Wayward Hand

A Demon in Her Womb

These Things Can’t Happen

Ill Omens

Holy Rollers

The Wild West Show

Russian Roulette

Chicanery

Travel by Combustion

A Prophecy

Spiderweb

Stitches Large and Small

Hothouse

City of Light

Exile

Katya

Last Rites

A Bureaucratic Adventure

That Hollywood Bear

It Was Magic

The Window in the Egg

Tickets to an Execution

The Four Brothers and the Four Sisters

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Type

Other Books by Kathryn Harrison

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Hole in the Ice

BEHOLD: IN THE BEGINNING there was everything, just as there is now. The giant slap of a thunderclap and, bang, it’s raining talking snakes.

A greater light to rule the day, a lesser light to rule the night, swarming water and restless air. A man goes down on two knees, a woman opens her thighs, and both hold their breath to listen. Imagining God’s footsteps could be heard in the cool of the day. But God walks silently along the bank of the muddy river that flows out of the Garden, the river that divides and becomes many: Usa, Kolva, Yug, Onega. Narva, Obsha, Luga, Okhta. Volycha, Sestra, Uver, Oyat. Volga, Kama, Neva, Ob.

From the windows of the house that was my childhood home, I heard a river running. The Tura hurried past our village to join the Tobol, and the Tobol joined the Irtysh, and the Irtysh joined the Ob, and the Great Ob carried our cries and emptied them into the Kara Sea, which, being frozen, preserved them like flies in amber.

“Go on,” Alyosha said whenever I fell silent. “Please, Masha, I like to hear your voice.”

And I did; I told him about my father, about me, about Siberia. I told him stories my father told us when we were children. I did whatever I could to distract him.

THE DAY THEY PULLED FATHER’S BODY out from under the ice, the first day of the new year, 1917, my sister, Varya, and I became wards of Tsar Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov and were moved, under imperial guard, from the apartment at 64 Gorokhovaya Street to the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, the royal family’s private village outside the capital. Eighteen years old, I hardly felt I needed a new set of parents, even if they were a tsar and tsarina. But every week brought more strikes and increasing violence to St. Petersburg. Revolution, anarchy, marshal law: we didn’t know what to dread, only that we were accelerating—hurtling—toward it, whatever it was. And, as the tsar’s officers pointed out, having summoned Varya and me from our beds before dawn, banging at the door with the butts of their rifles, anyone with a name as inflammatory as Rasputin would be an idiot to try to leave St. Petersburg unaided and without protection. As long as the Romanovs remained in power, they represented our only possibility of escaping Russia before it was too late to get out.

But first: my father. For without Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, the end of the Romanovs is no different from that of the Hapsburgs or the Ottomans or any other of the great dynasties that collapsed at the beginning of the century.

Word traveled quickly, more quickly than it would had any other man’s body been dragged from the river. After I signed a paper confirming that the deceased was indeed my father, missing by then for three days, the police escort was to return Varya and me to Gorokhovaya Street to gather our clothes and what few things we cared to keep. But before we could climb back into the sledge it was surrounded by a mob. A crowd of people had come running to where we’d stood minutes before, on the frozen river. They came from their homes with bowls and jugs and cast-iron kettles—anything that could hold water. Some ran pouring wine and vodka, even perfume, into the gutters as they hurried to the Neva to fill their newly emptied bottles. I saw a samovar so big it required three men to carry it, and I saw an old woman lugging a chamber pot. Now, that would have made Father laugh until he hooted and howled and dried his eyes with the heels of his hands—the idea of a withered crone ladling his ghost into her chamber pot.

The crowd surged onto the river like a wave and swept all the officials away from the hole in the ice, the one out of which the police had dragged my father, beaten and bloodied, his right hand raised as if making the sign of the cross. People thronged the hole. They fell on their knees, praying and weeping. The common people, the people my father loved, all along they understood what the intelligentsia were too blind to see. They wanted the water that touched my father as he was dying, the water into which his soul had passed, through which it had swum.

Thousands of people, tens of thousands—the officials lost count as they continued to arrive—came to the Neva that day and the next and the one after that. They came and they came and they wouldn’t stop coming, from all parts of the city and from the outlying towns and provinces. They came over the Urals, from Siberia. Nothing could stop them, not blizzards, not cavalry soldiers. Squadrons of Cossacks on horseback took aim and fired into the crowds, and their nervous mounts reared up and came down plunging, their shoes striking sparks from the paving stones, pale pricks in the freezing gloom.

For all the horses I’d ridden in my life, I’d never seen any as spirited as these. Towering black giants, not one of them less than twenty hands high, they weren’t shying at the noise and chaos—no, that was what they wanted, an orgy of movement and sound. The dark luster of each animal’s coat; the volatile quiver of its flesh as it responded to its rider’s intent, not to his hands, which were busy with a firearm, but to his will, which commanded the horse’s body as if it were his own; the nostrils flared wide at the smell of gunpowder; the shrill whinnying and the sharp gleam of each hoof: in an instant, the sight and sound and smell of them had, like a whetted blade, pared away the rind of shock that left me, in the wake of my father’s disappearance, insensible to every feeling.

I watched, struck still with wonder, as the air around the horses changed color, like iron held over a flame, stealing its heat. The officer who had his gloved fingers wrapped tightly around the top of my arm gave it a shake, as if to dispel what he must have assumed was my fear. But all it was was my succumbing to them, allowing their desire to possess me to the point that I wanted it too—the crumple and yield of bodies under hooves. Then the clamor around me ceased, all the clatter and cries and sharp cracks converged into words only I could hear, and my father’s voice spoke my name. Masha, he said, be comforted, and though I wasn’t faint, I fell back so the officer had to support my weight. At last something had caught and cut me, made me gasp. Until that moment, I was afraid I’d lost not only my father but myself as well.

THE CROWD THINNED, eventually it did, but not before opportunists had set up shop along the riverbank, selling empty jars and bottles to anyone who hadn’t brought one, as well as hawking bread, cheese, pomegranates, kvass and vodka by the glass, cider dipped from a pot hanging over a fire. Day and night, pilgrims stepped around and over stiffening corpses as they walked past the armed soldiers and onto the river, the gray ice of its surface slick with freezing fresh blood. They slipped and scrambled and pushed one another aside to reach the hole in the ice, because the water my father touched he made powerful. For the rest of that terrible winter, the last of the Romanovs’ rule, St. Petersburg shuddered under one riot after another, and her citizens’ blood remained on the ice under the Petrovsky Bridge.

At noon one February day, nearly two months after my father was murdered, I returned to that bridge and stared at the stain below. I’d come back to the city to sign our furniture over to an auctioneer, so the apartment could be rented. “We could chop up his bed into splinters and sell them as relics,” Varya said as I was leaving on my errand, and I gave her a look. For all I knew, she might have been serious, but I, not Varya, was the one responsible for settling my father’s estate, what little there was of it.

How, after cyanide had failed, and bullets as well, after someone had broken his poor head with a brick or a cudgel, had Father’s assassins at last succeeded in killing him? They dropped him from where I was standing, perhaps. Dropped him over the guardrail and watched as the force of his body’s impact shattered the river’s frozen surface, gravity, which holds planets and moons and even the golden sun in its thrall, no longer innocent but an accessory to murder. Or they brought axes. They walked onto the river, bold as brass, dragging Father behind them, his hands and feet bound. Was he conscious? Did he have to watch his murderers hack at the ice to open a door to his drowning? The ringleader was a man he’d mistaken for a friend. Invited to his home, Father had come willingly and drunk the poison he was served.

The Petrovsky Bridge was bewitched, people began to say, and they avoided its narrow pedestrian walkway whenever possible, certainly at night, when traffic subsided and moans rose up from under its span. There must be a natural explanation for water making such noises as it flows beneath a frozen surface, but no one was interested in natural explanations, not that winter. And there were more curious phenomena, impossible to account for. In the attempt to wash the blood away, to remove the unwanted reminder of my dead father’s continued hold over his disciples, cauldron after cauldron of boiling water had been poured over the frozen blood. Tinder was collected, saturated in gasoline, and set to burn on the ice. But the stain refused to fade. As if to accuse the assassins, it darkened and spread, and even reasonable people grew to fear a place where a holy man had been martyred.

Looking down from the bridge, I could see where blood had pooled and feet had tramped and bodies been dragged through the congealing red slick of it, each boot print and smear recorded on the river’s surface. The hole in the ice never froze back over that winter. Too many people visited the spot, refilled their bottles from its bottomless font, rinsed their crucifixes, and kneeled to pray. The same pilgrims, some of them, left crosses and candles. The wind blew, it whistled and shrieked, but it knew to leave the crosses standing, the candles’ flames burning, and the soup in its bowl. Someone had remembered Father’s favorite meal and brought him a deep dish of thick cod soup, which steamed day and night through one blizzard after another, surrounded by a ring of water where it had melted the ice. Others brought boots, a gift traditionally presented to an itinerant healer, and there was a cask of Madeira, bottles of kvass, too many ikons to count, a heaped tangle of prayer cords, and silk stoles, such as priests wear, in gold, purple, red, in every color. Prayers, quite a lot of these, copied onto paper and, if the petitioner lacked the requisite faith, held down with rocks. But the wind let them be, rocks or no rocks. Crutches and canes and unraveled bandages, all testifying that, dead as he was, Father Grigory continued to heal those who came to him. No thief was fool enough to take any of the gifts his petitioners left, not even something as valuable as a pair of stout boots.

If only Father had remained that humble man, walking from one town to the next, he might have avoided so early a death. Forty-seven. With a constitution like his he should have lived to be a hundred.

A Red Ribbon

THE JOURNEY BY TRAIN from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo, sixteen miles to the south, wasn’t nearly long enough for me to gather my wits. It was, at least, a slow sixteen miles, as the track had to be cleared of snow every day, several times a day, in midwinter. I told myself, on boarding, that I would use the time to write my mother a letter saying what I could not, for reasons of economy, fit in a telegram. But I never even opened my satchel to find pen and paper. Once I’d settled myself in one of the imperial train’s velvet-upholstered seats, I sank immediately into a haze that left me balanced like a napping cat between unconsciousness and the hair-trigger alertness that allows it to spring out of sleep and onto a mouse. Scenery unfurled, splendid and sparkling, the last of the slanting midwinter sunlight flaring off mirrors it found in the ice. Varya, two years younger than I, slept sideways in her red velvet seat, her legs tucked under her and her hands caught between her cheek and the back of her seat in an attitude of prayer. Unbound, her dark hair fell around her shoulders like a cloak. Twice the train slowed, stopped, and, after whatever obstruction had blocked our way was cleared from the tracks, started up again.

It was dusk when we reached Tsarskoe Selo. A detail of cavalry officers greeted us at the station, and once Varya and I had disembarked, holding tight to our bags in defiance of a footman’s attempt to carry them, the mounted police escorted us to a carriage bearing the gold imperial crest. Flanked on either side by a moving wall of horses and men, for a moment I felt my sister and I had been arrested rather than adopted, and I hesitated before climbing into the conveyance.

“What is it?” Varya whispered as she sat next to me.

“Nothing,” I said. “It isn’t anything.” As the carriage started rolling, we each slid to one side of the seat, looking out the window at what we’d last seen in late summer, when it was lushly green rather than white. The sun had set, the moon was rising. The carriage lamps turned everything they touched pale yellow, and behind every yellow thing lay its purple shadow. As we approached the Alexander Palace, I saw that only the imperial family’s private wing was illuminated—lit from top to bottom. From a distance it looked like a lantern left standing in the snow. But then it grew suddenly big, and we stepped out of the carriage and into a world we’d visited infrequently, and never without our father. Apart from Father we had no connection to the tsar and his family.

The trip from the foyer to the suite of bedrooms (to which a butler, housekeeper, and finally a chambermaid delivered us) involved a surprising number of double doors. Each set opened silently before us, obedient to its pair of liveried, white-gloved porters, and swung silently shut. With every threshold I crossed, with every set of doors that closed behind me, I felt that much more sleepy, as if walking ever deeper into a hypnotizing spell. By the time a lady-in-waiting had emptied our suitcases and hung up our clothes—I could not convince her, as I had the footman, that we could do for ourselves—I was on my back on my bed, asleep on the counterpane, my shoes still on my feet and my hands folded like a dead girl’s over my heart.

I might have remained there until the next morning without moving so much as a finger, but within an hour of our arrival the tsarina had summoned me to her mauve boudoir, a room infamous throughout the continent for a color scheme so unconditional that lilacs were the only flower admitted.

“Why not both of us?” Varya said, following me to the sink, where I splashed my face with water to wake myself up. I lifted my shoulders in a shrug and went out after the page, tucking my blouse into my skirt as best I could while hurrying behind him.

I had no answers for Varya. I had no idea of what was going to happen next—it seemed like anything could, in this new, fatherless world—and no power to protect her, supposing she’d allow such a thing. My sister and I were close in years but little else. Not that either of us wished the other ill, but the time Varya spent in Petersburg changed her from a shy, self-conscious girl to a secretive, dishonest one. From the day she arrived in the city, my sister found it hard to endure exposure to so many staring eyes, and she never developed a tolerance to our providing fodder, as the daughters of the Mad Monk Rasputin, for schoolgirl gossip and taunts. From the beginning I understood it was our father’s power that inspired slander—if a person is conspicuous, people will say anything about him. And what point was there in taking issue with fate? Father’s persecution and martyrdom had been foretold.

Still, our growing steadily apart was as much my fault as Varya’s.

She wasn’t one to talk about what bothered her, and I shirked my duty as her older sister, avoiding the chore of slowly coaxing her unhappiness out of her head and into my lap, where I’d have to respond to what I couldn’t repair. For, once Father had decided on a thing, there was no changing his mind, and, though he remained faithful to his peasant ways, he had been set on pleasing our mother by having her daughters educated as she was, in a proper girls’ school. We had to stay with Father in St. Petersburg, and Varya would remain enrolled whether she hated it or not.

I don’t know how long my sister had made a practice of lying before I noticed that the lies she told seemed oddly useless. They didn’t get her out of trouble or get anyone else into it; they weren’t malicious. Instead, Varya’s lies seemed peculiarly lacking in consequence. I’d ask her, for example, if she’d enjoyed a concert I knew she’d planned to attend, and she’d tell me she hadn’t gone after all. Then I’d bump into an acquaintance with whom she’d spoken during the concert’s intermission. Had she been pursuing some clandestine business, it would have been the other way around: she’d have said she attended the concert to excuse an absence for a different cause, the one she wanted to hide. But if each lie alone seemed to serve no purpose, the habit of telling them amounted to camouflage. For as long as one lie went undiscovered, my sister was protected by the façade it presented, and many of them together created a kind of psychic fortress in which to hide, maybe even a new identity, a life whose terms she dictated and kept separate from Father’s and mine. It also formed, perhaps only incidentally, a barrier between the two of us. On those occasions I challenged Varya, she’d change the topic or, like a politician, answer another, different question, one I hadn’t asked. She slipped away as quickly as a wet bar of soap.

I almost didn’t see the tsarina when I entered her darkened boudoir, having been given a nudge by the lady-in-waiting when I hesitated on the threshold. She was lying on a chaise longue, and the boudoir was as rumored: the chaise was upholstered in a slippery-looking mauve chintz, the floral-patterned carpets were all shades of mauve, as were the walls, tablecloths, bellpull, curtains, and the blanket pulled up over her knees. Even her lips were mauve, and her fingertips too. I’d heard it said the tsarina had had scarlet fever as a child, and the disease damaged the valves of her heart.

“You poor, dear, brave, wonderful girl,” she said in answer to my curtsy. “The apple of your dear father’s eye. You cannot imagine how he praised you to me, how proud he was. ‘Don’t be fooled by her size,’ he’d say, ‘my little Masha is destined for great and astonishing things. The good Lord has shown me the crowds that will gather for only a look at her.’” She paused, her eyes searching mine. “I am so sorry we—you—have lost him. Poor child, you look thoroughly worn out. I’ll ring for tea, shall I?”

“I don’t—” I said. “I hardly know what to think.”

“Of course you don’t. How could you at a time like this? Did you know how your father spoke of you, my dear? Did he tell you about your future?”

“Only a little,” I said, and she frowned, faintly.

“Ah. I’d hoped that with you he had been …” She paused, perhaps searching for a word she wanted. “… more forthcoming.”

“I … I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Did he say anything about it? Your future?”

“No,” I said. “It sounds as if he may have told you more than he did me.”

“Ah.” The tsarina put a finger before her lips, as if cautioning me to keep a secret. “We—you—will have to be patient, then,” she said after a moment. “We will have to wait and see.”

I smiled in response to the tsarina’s smile, finding it hard to keep up my end of the conversation. In truth, I couldn’t think of any but one thing, my mind prodding and poking, tonguelike, at the absence of my father, pressing up against what was no longer there and trying to measure the loss. I didn’t want to contemplate his murder every minute, but I couldn’t stop adding up the days and hours leading to his disappearance as if it were an equation I could rework to arrive at a different answer, the one in which I’d had the foresight to prevent Father’s leaving the apartment that night. From my father’s death to my portion of responsibility for his death to Varya’s and my future, one fixation ceded to the next; there was our mother’s safety to worry over, and the dangers of travel versus those of remaining in Russia—

“You and your sister will live here, at Tsarskoe Selo. It was your father’s wish.”

“Thank you, your—”

“Please,” the tsarina said, and she shook her finger as though at a naughty child. “No titles. And no more curtsies either.”

I nodded. My head seemed to bob up and down on its own. Without falling back on prescribed formalities, I had little to say, and my eyes strayed to the books on the tsarina’s shelves and the paintings on her wall. History, mostly of the Orthodox Church, theology, and landscapes of mauve rivers and mauve forests and fields, mauve haystacks and mauve mountains. Suddenly, then, the overhead light went on and I saw that the tsarina had risen from her pillows. Sitting up straight as a fence post, her hand still on the switch plate, she was breathing rapidly and her eyes were frantic and bright, almost glittering. I wondered if she was suffering an attack of some kind, and I was on the point of calling for help when she reached out and seized my hand.

“I know it’s in you,” she said. Her hand wasn’t, like her words, feverish but as cold as though she had one foot in her grave. Other than suppressing a shudder, I didn’t respond to her assertion. Cryptic as it was, I could pretend I didn’t understand her meaning, and I remained silent under her stare. The voluble self I knew seemed to have parted company with me, and I felt as though I were inhabited by a stranger, her expression blank, seamless as an egg.

“That’s why he made Nikolay Alexandrovich your guardian, yours and your sister’s.” The tsarina’s eyes didn’t focus on my face so much as they approached it as they would the lid of a box. I could feel her looking for a place to pry me open and peer inside. “Your father wouldn’t have left Alyosha without having planned for his future. He sent you to us. He wanted you near the tsarevich, to keep him from harm. To heal him when he is ill and to comfort him. He sent you here for Alyosha. For Alyosha and for Russia as well.”

So I wasn’t beyond being shocked anew, as that declaration had my mouth open before I had anything to say. It was rumored the tsarevich had been a terror as a little boy, spoiled by a family and servants who couldn’t bear to deny a sick child whatever he asked, as long as it couldn’t harm him. At table he’d taken food from others’ plates, kicked and cried whenever he was disciplined. The risk that he might do himself injury while thrashing about was so great that soon even the hint of a tantrum’s approach guaranteed his demands would be satisfied immediately. Even were he no longer inclined to such tricks, he would still be accustomed to getting what he wanted.

“How do you know he didn’t send Varya?” I asked, surprising myself with my own impertinence, but the tsarina laughed. At least I hadn’t been so forward as to suggest my father might have put his daughters in the care of the tsar to protect us rather than the tsarevich.

“You know, Matryona Grigorievna—Masha—that it is you who takes after your father. And I’m not speaking of your blue eyes and black hair.” She squeezed my fingers with sudden strength. “You know I am right.”

“Yes,” I said. It seemed rude not to agree. I’d thought to claim my portion of the Neva’s water, but then I asked myself what it could give me that I didn’t already have. The tsarina was right, I did take after my father, if not in the one way she hoped.

The color of the tsarina’s lips was the same, exactly the same, as that of the cushion behind her head. I wondered why she didn’t trouble to rouge them and then asked myself why I was dwelling on so trivial a matter. Alexandra Fyodorovna. I’d never before thought of the tsarina as an ordinary woman, with a name like other women have, lying on a chair with a little table at her side and on it a crumpled handkerchief and a plain glass of water, half drunk, next to a small, worn Orthodox prayer book. The book had a red ribbon between its pages, to keep a reader’s place, and the ribbon’s unraveling at the end caught and for a moment held my eye. Alexandra Fyodorovna was the same as any other woman, the same and no different, and her health was poor; she was frightened for the safety of her son. I could feel her anxiety, even see its shadow pass across her features, as though a cloud had come between her and the light from overhead.

“What is it, my daughter?” she said, as if she’d perceived the shift in my understanding of her. “Do you mind if I call you my daughter?”

“No. You may, of course, call me what you please.” No matter what came out of my mouth, it sounded different from the way I’d meant it to. Either it was overly familiar or courteous to the point of seeming insincere.

“Wouldn’t you prefer to sit down?” Alexandra Fyodorovna said. “You’re pale.”

A telephone call away, that’s all Father had been. The tsarina’s driver would have left to fetch my father before she picked up the receiver to summon him, and Father would be delivered to the Alexander Palace in less than an hour. But now he was dead, no longer at her side to provide her strength, and the tsarina’s weak heart was beginning to fail. She’d always had bad spells, as I knew from my father, a month or more of breathlessness that kept her confined to bed, but I never imagined anyone could look as haggard as she did now. The continuing strain of the war against Germany; the food shortages; the strikes and the rioting; the long days she spent nursing moribund soldiers in one of the Red Cross’s makeshift hospitals (for she was always greedy for good works, for opportunities to sacrifice herself in the name of God and country): all of these had taken their toll on the woman my father and every other Russian peasant had learned to call Little Mother—Mamochka.

Mamochka, Father always said when he bent to kiss her jeweled white hand. I never heard him call her by any other name.

“How, then,” I said to the tsarina, “shall I address you?”

“In any way that you are comfortable, Masha. We are a family now, the Romanovs and the daughters of Father Grigory. Your father himself has ordained it. We no longer stand on ceremony. We are equals.”

This seemed unlikely—ridiculous. Still, I nodded and smiled politely.

BUT ALEXANDRA FYODOROVNA WAS RIGHT. Or, if she wasn’t right on the first day of 1917, she would be by the ides of March, when Tsar Nikolay was forced to surrender his throne, a blow she’d receive with the grace and fortitude expected of her station and that would complete the job of ruining her health irrevocably. Of course, the abdication of Nikolay II, emperor and autocrat of all the Russias, was a shock not only to us but to all the world, the kind of warning that ought to have been delivered by the Four Horse-men of the Apocalypse rather than a plain little military detail, for life as we knew it was over and Armageddon begun.

As for the tsarina, once she’d fulfilled the obligations of the wife of a deposed ruler (which was mostly, as far as I could tell, finding and burning whatever might be misconstrued as evidence of her husband’s having exploited the proletariat for the advancement of decadent, royalist agendas, should he be tried), she took to her bed once and for all, too distraught to tend to her own children, her four strapping daughters and Alyosha, the long awaited, greatly desired, and gravely ill son she bore for tsar and emperor, for Russia. The boy on whom so many hopes had been laid.

Lucky for me, to whom it fell—as good as by decree—to comfort Alyosha and keep him amused when he was confined to bed, it turned out the tsarevich was intoxicated by every detail of a country person’s simple life. He asked to hear about my father as a boy and what it was people did to amuse themselves in faraway Siberia. I could tell he pictured it all wrong, imagining everything east of the Urals to be a kind of uncharted territory without a single modern convenience—no train, no telegraph or telephone, no electricity or indoor plumbing. All of us squatting in yurts, stitching up hides into trousers and tunics, and wearing underclothes made of yarn from off our spinning wheels. Riding wild Tartar ponies and murdering, raping, and pillaging one another as a matter of course with our blackened frostbitten ears and fingers falling off. The kind of life a rich and pampered boy might think wild and romantic.

“Like Temujin!” he said, delighted with the idea.

“Who?”

“The Khan Temujin. Genghis Khan. Don’t you know anything, Masha?”

“A lot more than you do. Just not every detail about every last uncivilized warmonger. And, no, it was not like that. Fewer people and buildings, more flowers and less soot, that’s what it was.”

But Alyosha was no different from the rest of the Petersburg aristocrats who took one look at my father’s ill-kempt beard and threadbare tunic and confused him with Jesus. I told Alyosha no one back home ever had to worry about amusing themselves, as every member of a country family had to work all day to keep bread on the table. But to a bedridden prince, this, too, sounded like fun.

Of course, I had to tell Alyosha about Baba Yaga, for what proper Russian leaves childhood behind without learning about Baba Yaga and her hut? Somehow he’d got to the grand age of thirteen without having heard of her.

I told him Baba Yaga lived in the forest in a hut that danced on the legs of a chicken, sliding sideways through the trees and shadows, and I recited the magic words to speak at its door. Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest, your front to me.

“A new one,” Alyosha would say when I asked him what story to tell, and I did, more times than I can count. I made them up from bits and pieces of other tales, from what I knew and what I didn’t know I knew. Usually, the words flew out of my mouth before I had a chance to think them through, entertaining me as well. Alyosha—Tsarevich Alexei Nikolayevich Romanov—was a big boy, tall and sturdy for his age. But when he was ill, feverish and in pain, he liked to be babied. When he was ill you couldn’t imagine the boy he was when he was well, a boy whose nickname was Sunbeam; that was how easy it was for him to make others smile. But Sunbeam had inherited the English disease from Queen Victoria, his mother’s grandmother, an illness carried by females and suffered by males, a torture whose name was never spoken, not even by court physicians. Especially not by court physicians. The threat to the tsarevich’s life inspired fear so intense that to say its name aloud was dangerous and would have been unlawful had anyone been given leave to set the word down in ink. If the people were to learn that the crown prince—the future tsar and heir to the world’s greatest autocracy, ruler-to-be of two hundred million souls—could bleed to death from a tumble down the stairs or a bump on the nose, Russia’s ebbing faith in her government would drain away all the more quickly, hurrying the collapse of three centuries of Romanov rule and of tsarism itself.

Hemophilia: for all it was spoken, the word might as well have not been invented.

House Arrest

FEBRUARY 1917 BROUGHT TEMPERATURES so low a thousand locomotive boilers froze and burst, each stranding as many as fifty cars. And not one of the few trains left running could enter Petersburg; every track leading into the capital had been buried in drifts. The laborers who would otherwise have dug them out were dying at the front, a line that moved over the continent as fire does through the dry grass of the steppes, leaving smoke and ruin in its wake. No flour was delivered to the city, no butter, and no sugar. Without coal, lights dimmed and flickered. Newspapers went unpublished. The letters I wrote and mailed to my mother never reached her. The telegraph office was closed. Actors performed to empty houses, as did musicians and ballerinas. And vodka poured from water faucets and ran in the gutters—it must have, for never has there been, neither before nor after, such uniformity of drunkenness. Inebriated bands of looters broke into bakeries and smashed storefronts to make off with bread, while a few doors down the Nevsky Prospekt the windows of Fabergé remained intact, crusts suddenly more valuable than cabochons.

Corpses piled up in the streets. Every so often, the wagon from the potter’s field would stop; then two men jumped down and picked up one body after another. The first man took the corpse by the hands, the second grabbed the feet, and together they swung it onto the growing heap. When they’d collected all they could, they drove the bodies to a pit, dropped them in, poured on the quicklime, and went back to the streets for more. It looked as if St. Petersburg was dying as she had been born, thousands of unknown and uncounted workers dumped in communal graves.

“How strange and claustrophobic it must be for the dead who haven’t a private grave or even a coffin. I’m sure such things are as important to the dead as to the living.”

“What peculiar things you say, Masha.”

“I can’t not think of them, poor things, all heaped together on top of one another, having to molder next to strangers, the dust of one life mingling with that of another. And very lonely, as no one can come calling on a person without a headstone.”

“There’s no point in thinking of them at all, as they are dead and you didn’t know them.”

“I know you consider yourself very clever, your highness, but not all thoughts are undertaken with a purpose. They just arrive, that’s all.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that.”

“What?”

“‘Your highness.’”

“I’m sorry, Alyosha,” I said, and I begged his pardon, as I’d had to do on several occasions since the day we were left in the schoolroom to get to know each other, an introduction postponed by my falling ill with quite the worst flu I’ve ever had. My head was aching when I left the tsarina in her boudoir, my eyes dry and hot. As soon as I was delivered to my room, I crawled under the counterpane in my street clothes and fell into a restless sleep from which I woke before dawn, worrying over Father’s body, which the coroner had promised to release by noon, and his burial, for which arrangements had yet to be made.

There was no point trying to rest. I bathed, dressed, and secured permission to return to the capital, and by the time I made my way back to bed, I’d missed another and another night’s rest and, thoroughly spent, succumbed to a fever that climbed and broke, climbed and broke, a hundred times it seemed, before I was well enough to sit up against my pillows with a tray on my lap.

“You’d better eat something,” Varya observed from the chair by the window, where she was buffing her fingernails in the wan winter light. “You look like a ghost.”

I felt like one too, when I made my way to the water closet, my head spinning with the effort of walking a few yards. Too faint to stand and put my hair to rights before the mirror, I took the brush back to bed with me, where I found I wasn’t any more equal to the effort of sitting up for as long as it would take to untangle so many snarls.

“What are you staring at like that?” Varya asked.

“Nothing. I was just trying to sort out the date.” And to separate the nightmares I’d dreamed from the one I was living.

“The ninth.”

“Of January? That’s impossible.”

“Ask Doctor Botkin. He should know—he’s been in to see you every day.”

“The admiral? The one with the gold buttons?”

“He’s not an admiral. He’s a physician.”

He looked like an admiral, though, with a navy-blue military coat trimmed with enough gold braid to inspire nautical fever dreams, and he wore so much cologne it made me sneeze, which he interpreted as evidence of continued infection, keeping me to my bed for a full week more and quarantined to my room for another one after that. It was February before I made the tsarevich’s acquaintance, stepping into our friendship on a more querulous note than I might have had the tsarina not saddled me with a responsibility I knew I couldn’t meet.

“You have the reputation of being a rather difficult person,” I said, aborting a curtsy and offering him my hand. I didn’t mean to say it—the words just popped out of my mouth.

“Really?” he said, squeezing my fingers hard, as if to assert his station. “Who told you that?”

“I don’t know. Someone must have, but I don’t remember who.”

“It wasn’t your father, was it?”

“No,” I said. “A girl at school, most likely. Father never criticized.” Alyosha said nothing. He was more handsome a boy than I’d gathered from photographs, with dark hair and gray eyes. “Do you know why I’m here?” I asked, finding myself annoyed by his good looks and by his height, which allowed him to look down his straight nose at me. “Here at Tsarskoe Selo?”

“Because my father wished it.”

“Yes, I suppose that is true, in that nothing happens outside your father’s wishes.” I wondered suddenly—but only after the words left my mouth—if the tsarina had meant me to keep our conversation in confidence. “My understanding is that Father believed Varya and I would be safer here than anywhere else he might send us in his absence. Your mother imagines I will be able to do for you what he did,” I said. “That I can cure you.”

“Does she?” the tsarevich said. He studied me from where he was standing, leaning against one of the schoolroom desks. There were five, one for each of the Romanov children.

“She told me she did. She seems to believe Father bequeathed me to your family for the purpose of preserving your health.”

The tsarevich nodded. “That sounds like Mother.”

“You seem quite well to me,” I observed.

“I am at the moment,” he said. “It won’t last though. It never does.” His expression was one of resignation, but he didn’t feel sorry for himself. I could see that much.

“Well, then,” I said, “I suppose I will be tested when the time comes, and we will discover if I’m of any use to you.”

Alyosha smiled, his eyes on my face.

“What are you looking at?” I asked him.

“Nothing. Your father called you his ‘little magpie.’ I was wondering why.”

“A pet name, that’s all.” One inspired by my talking too much when excited. “Like a bird in a tree,” Father used to say. But I didn’t explain this to the tsarevich. I was still holding tight to whatever I could that was left of my father, guarding it jealously and keeping it for my own. It wasn’t fair to blame Alyosha, and I didn’t. Still, I had to push the thought away: if it weren’t for his everlasting illness, my father would never have been murdered.

“You’ll have to …” he said, “I mean, I hope you will forgive my mother. She is … I’m afraid she can be a little unreasonable. I’ve caused her so much worry, you see. It’s made her nervous. And she … she believes …” Spots of color appeared on his cheeks.

“What does she believe?”

“In the grace of God,” he said after a moment.

“And you?”

“I believe in history,” the tsarevich said, with a gravitas I wasn’t ready to accept as genuine, coming from a boy who wasn’t quite fourteen. I hadn’t yet learned—witnessed—how life had taught him fatalism.

“And what about the future? Do you believe in it too?” I wish I’d only thought the words, but I said them aloud, with a tart tone in my voice.

BULLETINS ARRIVED AT TSARSKOE SELO; the tsar was apprised of each new disaster, but weeks passed and he did nothing—nothing of a political nature. He marched through the woods, he swam in the saltwater natatorium, he hunted, and he rode his horse, until, on March 10, he made the mistake that cost him his crown—well, not the mistake, as there already had been too many to count, but the last and most egregious one. He ordered that the capital be returned to its former state of relative calm, no matter what was required. To accomplish this, his police tore around the city in armored cars; his Cossacks galloped along the avenues, cracking whips and brandishing bayonets; his soldiers fired Chauchats imported from France that spat out 240 bullets every minute. But not only was it too late, order no longer possible; the actions he took against the rioting citizens inspired the Bolsheviks to organize themselves and prepare to challenge his authority.

“How much does my father understand of revolution? Anything?” Alyosha wanted to know. “Can it be a concept he refutes, one he finds heretical, the way Pope Urban the Eighth insisted the sun revolved around the earth and called Galileo a heretic?”

“I should think you know him better than I,” I said, answering what was probably a rhetorical question. We were in the schoolroom, occupied with our separate studies—Alyosha’s directed by his tutor, whose head was bent over the second volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall while Alyosha force-marched himself through the first. I was rereading Jane Eyre, in English instead of Russian, allowing me to call it a scholarly occupation rather than the pleasure—the escape—it was. Varya was with the Romanov girls, learning the correct way to put stalks in a vase, a lesson I’d dodged as Admiral–Dr. Botkin, having detected a wheeze while listening to my back with his stethoscope, wouldn’t allow me to walk through the cold to the greenhouses.

Tsar Nikolay didn’t talk about politics. He had four uncles filled with opinions and would have been, by everyone’s account, happy to hand them the empire. He wanted only to be allowed his exercise and to travel to his army’s headquarters in Mogilev, where he could sleep, eat, and march among his soldiers. As far as I could tell, he spent more time with his army than he did with his family, and I’d heard it said he would have had trouble deciding between the life of a soldier and that of a farmer, had he escaped his heritage.

But, as all the world knows, he did not escape, and on March 21, 1917, General Kornilov, who had lately presided over the Petersburg garrison, arrived at the Alexander Palace to inform the tsarina that, as there wasn’t any empire left, she and her family were under arrest. The former tsar, his abdication extracted from him as he traveled in his imperial train, had yet to return home from Mogilev to Tsarskoe Selo because the railway workers had received the news of the tsar’s having been toppled as an invitation to stop service for all Romanovs and their retainers.

“Go down. See what’s happening,” Alyosha said, after Kornilov had been announced. He got up from where he was sitting with his bodyguard Derevenko, playing yet another game of dominoes, a game I hated and refused to join. Alyosha had two bodyguards, Derevenko and Nagorny, both of whom appeared to dote on their charge and were gentle in spite of their military demeanor. Each had previously been a naval officer; now they took turns supervising all the tsarevich did, to make sure no harm came to him, and carrying him in their arms when, inevitably, it did.

Alyosha gave me a push toward the stairs, and I pushed him back, just a little bit, because I hated that kind of thing in boys, especially in princes, who ought to know better than to boss people about, if only because they got all they wanted anyway. After slipping downstairs, I hurried to the drawing room’s double doors, which were left open into the corridor, one widely enough that I could hide myself behind it, my back to the wall. Even Father admitted that his little magpie had a talent for silence and for making herself as invisible as a scullery maid.

I watched through the crack as Alexandra Fyodorovna received Kornilov. By now, nearly a week after her husband’s abdication, she’d moved on from destroying official correspondence to incinerating private letters, diaries, telephone messages, bills from the wine merchant and from the purveyor of caviar and truffles, even the former tsar’s game book, in which was recorded every boar, buck, and bird he’d dispatched with his shotgun—any scrap of information that might fall into the hands of some malevolent someone bent on slandering her poor blameless Nikolay. The drawing room’s fire had burned all night, its flames licking, cracking, and smacking as it consumed leaf after leaf of creamy stationery bearing the gold-embossed Romanov crest. The flue must have needed adjusting. The ceiling over the hearth was blackened with soot.

“Abridging history, I see,” Kornilov said, sniffing at the smoke-tinged atmosphere. He was a good-humored-looking man, with ears that stood out like handles from his shorn head and a mustache so robust it obscured his lips. The tsarina rose from where she had been sitting among emptied boxes. Her mauve-lipped pallor continued to unnerve me. On the cushion next to hers was a small bundle of billets-doux to her from her husband. This was all that remained of what had been thousands of letters to tens of recipients, her grandmother, Queen Victoria, foremost among them.

Already I’d overheard servants talking among themselves about plans for the tsarina and her children to join Tsar Nikolay at Murmansk, the seaport on Kola Bay, where they’d find a ship to board for a journey west toward asylum. Because even if England’s George V, the tsar’s own first cousin, wouldn’t have them, surely somewhere would. America or Australia or whatever other continent invited thieves and outcasts and exiled dreams.

But what of Varya and myself? I didn’t know whether we would be considered a part of the Romanov family and treated as such, or taken by the new regime’s police to be questioned about Father, or liberated with the rest of Russia and discharged into the chaos of Petersburg to make our way home to Siberia, and I didn’t know which would be worse or if we had any choice in the matter. And timing—there was timing to consider. I’d intended, before the tsar left for Mogilev, to approach and speak with him, to find out what he knew, or could control, of our fate, but each time I’d succumbed to my fear of taking up the topic at exactly the wrong moment. Though they’d encouraged us to befriend their children and, to all appearances, welcomed us into their lives, the tsar and tsarina were like two people poised on the crest of a breaking tidal wave, surveying the landscape against which they would be dashed. Each time I marched myself, like a responsible older sister, down the corridor to the tsar’s study, rehearsing my little speech in my head, I ended up turning right where I should have turned left, grabbing my coat, shoving my feet into Wellingtons, and stealing away as fast as I could to the one place I knew I’d find comfort.

Just the smell of them and the sound of their breathing and all the other noises I knew so well: their soft whickering, the swish of a tail after a fly, and the accompanying stamp of a hoof. Just to press my face into the soft flesh of their necks, run my fingers over the ridge of velvet nostrils, feel the gust of their warm breath hit my face, my neck and chest. I would have petitioned to live in the stable had the idea not struck me as one my hosts would find preposterous.

Peering through the crack at Kornilov, I wished I’d had the nerve to approach the tsar while there was still time to act, before Kornilov and his soldiers came for us. But I hadn’t, and perhaps because it was simpler to contemplate their fate, I found myself worrying about the horses before the people. What would happen to the old ones, long retired from the harness? I hoped the groom would think to end their lives mercifully before soldiers took over the stables. And the others, who were fit for work, accustomed as they were to tranquil bridle paths and the affection of all who cared for them, what would happen to such animals were they commandeered by the gathering Red Army and forced into the pandemonium of civil war?

There was one horse I particularly liked, Gypsy, a black mare compact enough that a bareback rider—the only kind I knew to be—was comfortable straddling her withers. She shared a loose box with Vanka, an aged donkey the Cinzelli Brothers’ Circus had presented as a gift to the tsarevich and his sisters after a private performance at Tsarsko Selo. As Botkin had forbidden me to ride as well as walk in the cold, I spent hours sitting in the hay, long enough that I’d seen Vanka do what she was famous for doing. Occasionally, the donkey entered a sort of fugue state in which she believed she was before an audience and, without any warning, ran through a repertoire of tricks that included running backward. The first time this happened, Alyosha told me, the tsarina had nearly fainted as the donkey swiftly (demonically, it seemed to Alyosha’s mother) approached him, the muscles of her hind-quarters pumping energetically. What would the nervous tsarina assume but that the animal was rabid?

“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.