Читать книгу Catastroika - Charles Rammelkamp - Страница 13

Jewels

Papa knew Rasputin’s secretary,

Aaron Simanovich, in Kiev,

where he ran a small jewelry shop –

all Jews knew every other Jew –

but I only became aware of him

when I lived in Saint Petersburg.

Simanovich had brought his son to Rasputin,

suffering from Saint Vitus’s Dance,

Ioann, a teenager when the spasms began,

jerking like a puppet,

Pinocchio pulled by strings.

The Petersburg doctors were helpless,

so Simanovich, desperate,

brought Ioann to Rasputin,

who cured him in ten minutes,

laying his healing hands on Ioann’s head;

he never suffered from St. Vitus’ Dance again.

Simanovich had made a fortune

selling diamonds to the Tsarina’s friends,

became Rasputin’s secretary, replacing

Ivan Dobrovolsky, who, with his wife,

had been embezzling money

the petitioners brought to Rasputin.

Maria called him by her pet name,

Simochka, fond of the Jew

who’d saved her father when Khvostov,

the Interior Minister, tried to assassinate him.

Later, after the Revolution,

after Felix Yusupov finally did kill Rasputin,

the family moved in with Simanovich,

too dangerous to stay at their father’s apartment,

and much later than that,

when Maria’d separated from Boris Solovyov,

she and her two daughters lived with him again,

in Berlin. Her daughters’ names?

Tatyana and Maria, after the Tsar’s children.

But me? I may have been a landsman,

but I never felt I could approach him.

“Quite a nasty man,” the Okhrana reported,

and if you can’t believe the secret police,

who can you believe?