Читать книгу Enchantments - Kathryn Harrison, Kathryn Harrison - Страница 10

VARYA, OUR BROTHER DIMITRI, and I grew up as Father had done, in that part of Siberia where spirits walk the forests and swim the rivers and apparitions of the Holy Mother are not unheard of. Our flesh-and-blood mother, Praskovia Fedorovna Dubrovina, hailed from Yekaterinburg. A city girl when she arrived, the daughter of a merchant who retired to the country, Mother didn’t believe in what she called country superstitions, the kind held by people who lived in a town like Pokrovskoye, little more than the intersection of two roads, one to Tyumen, the other into the wild.

I spent my childhood in Pokrovskoye, knowing nothing of cities, until Father told Mother about the young ladies he met at court and she responded as if to a direction from on high. Providence had arranged a means of securing an education for her daughters, one we could never receive at home, and so I was enrolled in the Steblin–Kamensky Academy for Girls and sent to Father in St. Petersburg, labeled by my mother like a package to be handed from wagon to barge to train. Varya came two years later, when she turned ten. I was excited to be in so grand and important a place, where I could hardly sleep at night for all the carriages and automobiles I heard in the street, their wheels turning over the cobbles. My father might know the future, but I did not, and I welcomed what appeared to be good fortune without wondering the cost.

Some of the girls at the academy were not allowed to speak to us. Their parents thought Grigory Rasputin a charlatan, either that or the devil. Because no one knew what it was that Father did, that it was he who stood between the tsarevich and death, and because Father was so often closeted with Alyosha and his mother while Tsar Nikolay was off waging war, gossip had it that he and the tsarina were lovers, that he and the tsar’s daughters were lovers, that he and the tsarina’s ugly confidante, Anna Vyrubova, were lovers. What else could explain the frequency of his visits to Tsarskoe Selo? Rasputin had mesmerized all the women around the tsar; the tsarina herself was his puppet; the two of them conspired to lead the tsar to make disastrous decisions. Father Grigory was the Antichrist in disguise, the skin hidden under his tunic bearing occult letters and symbols—Marks of the Beast—and he intended to destroy the motherland. Some days we would walk to school and, alert to such things, I’d see that a new inflammatory drawing had been printed and plastered on one wall after another we were forced to pass. Most were cartoons of Father and the tsarina, usually unclothed and locked together in positions that defied human anatomy if not some scoundrel’s filthy imagination.

“Keep your eyes down,” I told Varya. “You walk. I’ll hold your hand and guide you.”

And so we made our way to the academy, with obedient Varya’s innocence intact. Varya was like that when she was younger, untroubled by the kind of curiosity that forced me to look at everything, no matter how gruesome or depraved. There was never a month without a rumor, often printed by what pretended to be a reputable newspaper, about my father’s demonic control over the fate of Russia. Political power, rather than the tsar’s daughters or their mother, was the prize he allegedly sought. The ludicrous nature of such reports had one benefit, in that I never worried any of them might be true. My father might have been a libidinous man who took every opportunity to gratify his desires, but he wasn’t so brazenly disrespectful, or such a fool, as to cuckold the tsar.

Even if Varya and I didn’t receive so many invitations to teas and birthday parties as did our schoolmates, a city like St. Petersburg offered endless distractions. Window-shopping was a thing we could do all day, wandering up and down the Nevsky Prospekt with Dunia, who had come from Pokrovskoye to keep house for Father, all of us entranced by objects as ordinary as brooms and washboards so long as they were in a bright window. We had to hurry Dunia past the Singer building, though, as she had a helpless attraction to sewing machines and could stand all day staring at the models on display, and heaven help us if there was a demonstration. For Dunia, that was better than Shakespeare.

Being a crown prince has its rewards, of course, but, like most with royal blood, Alyosha paid with his freedom. There was much of the world, almost all of it, he had never seen. What did he know of his own birthplace? Oh, he’d been taken like a tourist to all the sights, the Bronze Horseman and the Alexander Column and the little cottage from which Peter the Great had issued his decrees while he waited for his metropolis to assume proportions befitting his majesty. Alyosha had slept through a ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre; he’d stuffed his fingers in his ears while one or another of Antonina Nezhdanova’s arias transformed the same theater’s stage lights into a rain of broken glass that fell past the imperial box and, as if it were a planned effect, landed like glittering bits of ice on the proscenium. More than once he’d been allowed to meander among the shops at Gostiny Dvor, as much as a boy accompanied by an imperial guard can meander. In the shining black bombproof carriage presented by Napoleon III to his great-grandfather Alexander II—and what more suitable gift from one tyrant to another?—he’d toured the Nevsky Prospekt and its fine shops filled with pastries and furs and haute couture fashions. With their English governess, he and his sisters had taken tea in a tea shop, just like a more average set of aristocratic siblings, and he’d strolled with their French tutor and repeated after him the word for store (le magasin), for window (la fenêtre), for police (les gendarmes), for cheese (le fromage), for horse (le cheval). (Trés bon! said the tutor.) Under the watch of Derevenko or Nagorny, he’d seen the showrooms of Fabergé. Peter Carl Fabairzhay, who made a fashionable French name of his Russian one and from whose atelier came the jeweled eggs presented by tsars to their tsarinas, each egg worth more than most people’s houses. Fabergé, whose hands had strung the tsarina’s long ropes of pearls. Aloysha’s mother wore her pearls every day.

“They die if you don’t,” Tatiana had told me.

“What do you mean, die?” I said, having no idea they were alive. The ropes moved as the tsarina walked, swayed and tapped against one another, their clicking distinct from the whisper of her slippered feet on the floor.

“They go gray and their luster disappears. All the light goes out of them.”

I nodded, as I always did when Tatiana offered me such splinters of information. They weren’t casual asides. She spoke intently, as if bit by bit she was imparting a kind of code that, with practice, I could use to accomplish great things. I liked it. Not for the wisdom she volunteered—it wasn’t of a type I considered useful—but for the earnestness in her eyes, which was maternal. I could tell she was edifying me as she did her sisters and Varya, out of a sense of duty.

Alyosha had, like me, watched the sun sink over a slow-flowing summer Neva, a few errant beams spraying off the gilded dome of Saint Isaac’s. Whenever it wasn’t frozen, the Neva’s flat surface reflected sunsets of freakish beauty. Fuchsia-pink clouds streaked with violet and orange were a regular occurrence in a city ringed with factories exhaling smoke. Neighborhoods spewed smoke as well, dark plumes rising from fires in the harbor district’s slums, warrens of squalid cells connected by dirty passages so dark they seemed subterranean. Workers, stuporous with exhaustion or drink, or more likely both, dropped their still-burning cigarettes, and whole city blocks discovered the speed with which rotten timbers burst into flame. Across the wide river was the Peter and Paul Fortress, where would-be revolutionaries rotted away in solitary cells infested with rats—at least they did until Alexander II made the mistake of coming out from behind his bombproof carriage door and down its bombproof steps to tread on a grenade. After that, the ministers of his successor, who was Alyosha’s grand father Alexander III, thought it prudent to remove prisoners and the plots they hatched to the old Schlusselburg Fortress, forty miles upstream from Petersburg.

Whenever he was allowed, the tsarevich had stood at his father’s side, staring down from the balcony of the Winter Palace at endless bristling ranks of bayonet-bearing soldiers parading below them to collect their tsar’s—his father’s—blessing before they walked into battle. But that was all Alyosha knew of the city from which, he had been told, he would rule the nation he was to inherit, and for whose future he was being educated.

He’d never seen behind the pink and yellow stuccoed façades of the great avenues, never been to the Haymarket to gasp in wonder at the city’s squalid soul, a tide of beggars, drunkards, and whores washing through the aisles of market stalls like debris loosened by one of the Neva’s dependably imminent floods, each a guaranteed-to-be-pestilential deluge of cholera germs and candelabra, of corsets, croissants, chapbooks, clocks, chopsticks, and—

“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.

ONLY 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.

The tsarina stayed and listened to Alyosha’s agonies to punish herself. Not that another mother wouldn’t have kept vigil by her child, but a different woman might have done it in a spirit other than guilt. Alexandra Fyodorovna behaved as one who had administered a slow poison to her best beloved, immediately regretting her rash and wicked act and remaining with her victim, sometimes even writhing with him in anguish. When I saw this, so eerie and distorted a mirror of Ivan cradling his poor murdered son, I felt a shudder crawl up my neck.

The tsarina never left Alyosha’s side without being physically pulled away by Dr. Botkin or her husband. To give Alyosha aspirin for the fever that attended a hemorrhage would make the bleeding even worse, and, without the release of morphine, all Alyosha could do was lie as still as possible, his temperature so high that Botkin had no recourse but to drench him in rubbing alcohol, summoning whimpers more awful than screams for their ability to communicate a kind of exhausted resignation, noises like those I’ve heard from dogs as they slink, subjugated and beseeching, toward the hand that whips them.