by Teffi
“Well, don’t you?”
“Who’s told you that?” he asked uneasily. “Who? Did he say he was there himself? Did he see for himself? Or just hear rumours?”
“I’m afraid I can’t remember who it was.”
“You can’t remember? My clever girl, why don’t you come along and see me? I’ll tell you many things you don’t know. You wouldn’t have English blood, would you?”
“No, I’m completely Russian.”
“There’s something English about your little face. I have a princess in Moscow and she has an English face, too. Yes, I’m going to drop everything and go to Moscow.”
“What about Vyrubova?” I asked, rather irrelevantly—for Rozanov’s sake.
“Vyrubova? No, not Vyrubova. She has a round face, not an English one. Vyrubova is my little one. I’ll tell you how it is: some of my flock are little ones and some are something else. I’m not going to lie to you, this is the truth.”
Suddenly Izmailov found his courage. “And… the Tsaritsa?” he asked in a choked voice. “Alexandra Fyodorovna?”
The boldness of the question rather alarmed me. But, to my surprise, Rasputin replied very calmly, “The Tsaritsa? She’s ailing. Her breast ails her. I lay my hand upon her and I pray. I pray well. And my prayer always makes her better. She’s ailing. I must pray for her and her little ones.” And then he muttered, “It’s bad… bad…”
“What’s bad?”
“No, it’s nothing… We must pray. They are good little ones…”
I recall reading in the newspapers, at the beginning of the revolution, about the “filthy correspondence between the elder and the depraved princesses”—correspondence that it was “quite inconceivable to publish”. Some time later, however, these letters were published. And they went something like this: “Dear Grisha, please pray that I’ll be a good student.” “Dear Grisha, I’ve been a good girl all week long and obeyed Papa and Mama…”
“We must pray,” Rasputin went on muttering.
“Do you know Madame E——?” I asked.
“The one with the little pointed face? I think I’ve glimpsed her here and there. But it’s you I want to come along and see me. You’ll get to meet everyone and I’ll tell you all about them.”
“Why should I come along? It’ll only make them all cross.”
“Make who cross?”
“Your ladies. They don’t know me; I’m a complete stranger to them. They’re not going to be pleased to see me.”
“They wouldn’t dare!” He beat the table with his fist. “No, not in my house. In my house everyone is happy—God’s grace descends on everyone. If I say ‘bathe my feet’, they’ll do as I say and then drink the water! In my house everything is godly. Obedience, grace, humility and love.”
“There, you see? They bathe your feet. No, you’ll be better off without me.”
“You shall come. I’ll send for you.”
“Has everyone really come when you’ve sent for them?”
“No one’s refused yet.”
9
Apparently quite forgotten, the lawyer’s wife sitting on the other side of Rasputin was hungrily and tenaciously listening to our conversation.
From time to time, noticing me looking at her, she would give me an ingratiating smile. Her husband kept whispering to her and drinking to my health.
“You ought to invite the young lady to your right,” I said to Rasputin. “She’s lovely!”
Hearing my words, she looked up at me with frightened, grateful eyes. She even paled a little as she waited for his response. Rasputin glanced at her, quickly turned away and said loudly, “She’s a stupid bitch!”
Everyone pretended they hadn’t heard.
I turned to Rozanov.
“For the love of God,” he said, “get him to talk about the Khlysts. Try again.”
But I’d completely lost interest in talking to Rasputin. He seemed to be drunk. Our host kept coming up and pouring him wine, saying, “This is for you, Grisha. It’s your favourite.”
Rasputin kept drinking, jerking his head about, twitching and muttering something.
“I’m finding it very hard to talk to him,” I said to Rozanov. “Why don’t you and Izmailov try? Maybe we can all four of us have a conversation!”
“It won’t work. It’s a very intimate, mysterious subject. And he’s shown he trusts you…”
“What’s him over there whispering about?” interrupted Rasputin. “Him that writes for New Age?”
So much for our being incognito.
“What makes you think he’s a writer?” I asked. “Someone must have misinformed you… Before you know it, they’ll be saying I’m a writer, too.”
“I think they said you’re from The Russian Word,” he replied calmly. “But it’s all the same to me.”
“Who told you that?”
“I’m afraid I can’t remember,” he said, pointedly repeating my own words when he’d asked who had told me about the Khlysts.
He had clearly remembered my evasiveness, and now he was paying me back in kind: “I’m afraid I can’t remember!”
Who had given us away? Hadn’t we been promised complete anonymity? It was all very strange.
After all, it wasn’t as if we’d gone out of our way to meet the elder. We had been invited. We had been offered the opportunity to meet him and, what’s more, we’d been told to keep quiet about who we were because “Grisha doesn’t like journalists”—because he avoids talking to them and always does all he can to keep away from them.
Now it appeared that Rasputin knew very well who we were. And not only was he not avoiding us but he was even trying to draw us into a closer acquaintance.
Who was calling the shots? Had Manuilov orchestrated all this—for reasons we didn’t know? Or did the elder have some cunning scheme of his own? Or had someone just blurted out our real names by mistake?
It was all very insalubrious. What was truly going on was anyone’s guess.
And what did I know about all these dinner companions of ours? Which of them was from the secret police? Which would soon be sentenced to forced labour? Which might be a German agent? And which of them had lured us here? Which member of this upright company was hoping to use us for their own ends? Was Rasputin the weaver of this web—or the one being caught in it? Who was betraying whom?
“He knows who we are,” I whispered to Rozanov.
Rozanov looked at me in astonishment. He and Izmailov began whispering together.
Just then the musicians struck up. The accordion began a dance tune, the guitar twanged, the tambourine jingled. Rasputin leapt to his feet—so abruptly that he knocked his chair over. He darted off as if someone were calling to him. Once he was some way from the table (it was a large room), he suddenly began to skip and dance. He thrust a knee forward, shook his beard about and circled round and round. His face looked tense and bewildered. His movements were frenzied; he was always ahead of the music, as if unable to stop…
Everyone leapt up. They stood around him to watch. “Dearie”, the one who had gone to fetch the poems, turned pale. His eyes bulged. He squatted down on his haunches and began clapping his hands. “Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Go! Go! Go!”
And no one was laughing. They watched as if in fear and—certainly—very, very seriously.
The spectacle was so weird, so wild, that it made you want to let out a howl and hurl yourself into the circle, to leap and whirl alongside him for as long as you had the strength.
The faces all around were looking ever paler, ever more intent. There was a charge in the air, as if everyone was expecting something… Any moment!
“How can anyone still doubt it?” said Rozanov from behind me. “He’s a Khlyst!”
Rasputin was now leaping about like a goat. Mouth hanging open, skin drawn tight over his cheekbones, locks of hair whipping across the sunken sockets of his eyes, he was dreadful to behold. His pink shirt was billowing out behind him like a balloon.
; “Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!” went “Dearie”, continuing to clap.
All of a sudden Rasputin stopped. Just like that. And the music broke off, as if the musicians were quite used to this.
Rasputin collapsed into an armchair and looked all around. His piercing eyes now seemed bewildered, vacant.
“Dearie” hastily gave him a glass of wine. I went through into the drawing room and told Izmailov I wanted to leave.
“Sit down for a moment and get your breath back,” Izmailov replied.
The air was stifling. It was making my heart pound and my hands tremble.
“No,” said Izmailov. “It’s not hot in here. It’s just your nerves.”
“Please, don’t go,” begged Rozanov. “Now you can get him to invite you to one of his rituals. There’ll be no difficulty now!”
The guests had moved into the salon and were sitting around the edges of the room, as if in anticipation of some sort of performance. The beautiful woman came in, too, her husband holding her by the arm. She was walking with her head bowed; I thought she was weeping.
I stood up.
“Don’t go,” said Rozanov.
I shook my head and went out towards the hall. Out of the dining room came Rasputin. Blocking my path, he took my elbow.
“Wait a moment and let me tell you something. And mind you listen well. You see how many people there are all around us? A lot of people, right? A lot of people—and no one at all. Just me and you—and no one else. There isn’t anyone else standing here, just me and you. And I’m saying to you: come to me! I’m pining for you to come. I’m pining so badly I could throw myself down on the ground before you!”
His shoulder went into spasms and he let out a moan.
And it was all so ludicrous, both the way we were standing in the middle of the room together and the painfully serious way he was speaking…
I had to do something to lighten the atmosphere.
Rozanov came up to us. Pretending he was just passing by, he pricked up his ears. I started to laugh. Pointing at him, I said to Rasputin, “But he won’t let me.”
“Don’t you listen to that madman—you come along. And don’t bring him with you, we can do without him. Rasputin may only be a peasant, but don’t you turn up your nose at him. For them I love I build stone palaces. Haven’t you heard?”
“No,” I replied, “I haven’t.”
“You’re lying, my clever girl, you have heard. I can build stone palaces. You’ll see. I can do many things. But for the love of God, just come to me, the sooner the better. We’ll pray together. Why wait? You see, everyone wants to kill me. As soon as I step outside, I look all around me: where are they, where are their ugly mugs? Yes, they want to kill me. Well so what! The fools don’t understand who I am. A sorcerer? Maybe I am. They burn sorcerers, so let them burn me. But there’s one thing they don’t understand: if they kill me, it will be the end of Russia. Remember, my clever girl: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia. They’ll bury us together.”
He stood there in the middle of the room, thin and black—a gnarled tree, withered and scorched.
“And it will be the end of Russia… the end of Russia…”
With his trembling hand crooked upwards, he looked like Chaliapin singing the role of the miller in Dvořák’s Rusalka.
At this moment he appeared dreadful and completely mad.
“Ah? Are you going? Well if you’re going, then go. But just you remember… Remember.”
As we made our way back from Filippov’s, Rozanov said that I really ought to go and visit Rasputin: if I refused an offer coveted by so many, he would almost certainly find it suspicious.
“We’ll all go there together,” he assured me, “and we’ll leave together.”
I replied that there was something in the atmosphere around Rasputin I found deeply revolting. The grovelling, the collective hysteria—and at the same time the machinations of something dark, something very dark and beyond our knowledge. One could get sucked into this filthy mire—and never be able to climb out of it. It was revolting and joyless, and the revulsion I felt entirely negated any interest I might have in these people’s “weird mysteries”.
The pitiful, distressed face of the young woman who was being thrust so shamelessly by her lawyer husband at a drunken peasant—it was the stuff of nightmares, I was seeing it in my dreams. But he must have had many such women—women about whom he shouted, banging his fist on the table, that “they wouldn’t dare” and that they were “happy with everything”.
“It’s revolting,” I went on. “Truly horrifying! I’m frightened! And wasn’t it strange, later on, how insistent he was about my going to see him?”
“He’s not accustomed to rejection.”
“Well, my guess is that it’s all a lot simpler. I think it’s because of The Russian Word. He may make out that he doesn’t attach any significance to my work there, but you know as well as I do how afraid he is of the press and how he tries to ingratiate himself with it. Maybe he’s decided to lure me into becoming one of his myrrh-bearing women.9 So that I’ll write whatever he wants me to write, at his dictation. After all, he does all of his politicking through women. Just think what a trump card he would have in his hands. I think he’s got it all figured out very well indeed. He’s cunning.”
10
Several days after this dinner I had a telephone call from a lady I knew. She reproached me for not coming to a party she had given the evening before and that I’d promised to attend.
I had completely forgotten about this party.
“Vyrubova was there,” said the lady. “She was waiting for you. She very much wants to meet you, and I had promised her you would be there. I’m terribly, terribly upset you couldn’t come.”
“Aha!” I thought. “Messages from the ‘other world’. What can she want of me?”
That she was a messenger from that “other world” I didn’t doubt for a moment. Two more days went by.
An old friend dropped in on me. She was very flustered.
“S—— is going to have a big party. She’s called round a couple of times in person, but you weren’t at home. She came to see me earlier today and made me promise to take you with me.”
I was rather surprised by S——’s persistence, as I didn’t know her so very well. She wasn’t hoping to get me to give some kind of a reading, was she? That was the last thing I wanted. I expressed my misgivings.
“Oh no,” my friend assured me. “I promise you that she has no hidden designs. S—— is simply very fond of you and would like to see you. Anyway, it should be a very enjoyable evening. There won’t be many guests, just friends, because they can’t put on grand balls now, not while we’re at war. That would be in poor taste. There will be no one there who shouldn’t be there—no one superfluous. They’re people who know how to give a good party.”
11
We arrived after eleven.
There were a lot of people. Among the tail coats and evening dresses were a number of figures in identical black or light-blue domino masks. They were the only ones in fancy dress; it was clear they had come as a group.
My friend took me by the arm and led me to our hostess: “Well, here she is. See? I’ve brought her with me.”
A Gypsy was singing in the large ballroom. Short and slight, she was wearing a high-necked dress of shining silk. Her head was thrown back and her dusky face an emblem of suffering as she sang the words:
In parting she said:
“Don’t you forget me in foreign lands…”
“Just wait a moment,” the hostess whispered to me. “She’s almost finished.”
And she went on standing beside me, evidently looking around for someone.
“Now we can go.”
She took my hand and led me across the ballroom, still looking.
Then we entered a small, dimly lit sitting room. There was no one there. The hostess seated me on a sofa.
“I’ll be back in a moment. Pl
ease don’t go anywhere.”
She did indeed come back in a moment, together with a figure in a black mask.
“This mysterious figure will keep you entertained,” said S—— with a laugh. “Please wait for me here.”
The black figure sat down beside me and looked silently at me through narrow eye-slits.
“You don’t know me,” it murmured at last, “but I desperately need to speak to you.”
It was not a voice I had heard before, but something about its intonations was familiar. It was the same quivering, hysterical tone in which that lady-in-waiting had spoken of Rasputin.
I peered at the woman sitting beside me. No, this wasn’t Madame E——. Madame E—— was petite. This lady was very tall. She spoke with a faint lisp, like all of our high society ladies who as children begin speaking English before Russian.
“I know everything,” the unknown woman began edgily. “On Thursday you’re going to a certain house.”
“No,” I replied in surprise. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She grew terribly flustered. “Why don’t you tell me the truth? Why? I know everything.”
“Where is it you think I’m going?” I asked.
“There. His place.”
“I don’t understand a thing.”
“Do you mean to test me? All right, I’ll say it. On Thursday you’re going to… to… Rasputin’s.”
“What makes you think that? No one has asked me.”
The lady fell silent.
“You may not have received the invitation yet… but you soon will. It’s already been decided.”
“But why are you so upset about all this?” I asked. “Perhaps you could tell me your name?”
“I haven’t put on this idiotic mask only to go and tell you my name. And as far as you’re concerned, my name is of no importance. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that on Thursday you’re going to be there.”
“I have no intention of going to Rasputin’s,” I replied calmly. “Of that I can assure you.”
“Ah!”
