“Wait here,” commanded the agent, pointing to the snowy ground with a sharp gloved finger. “I’ll bring him right out.”
I obeyed like an obedient mutt, coming to a quick halt. And like a pathetic dog, my eyes trailed after the agent, watching sadly as he continued down to the end of the building and disappeared around the corner. Why, I wondered, could I go no farther? Was there something I shouldn’t see? I gazed up at the back of the innocuous building and noted a handful of plain windows and two large round drainpipes half clinging to the structure. What business did my father have in there?
Out of nowhere I heard Papa’s unmistakable voice, deep and resonant. Immediately I spun around. Had it come from the building behind me? No, I realized, looking at a huge blank wall painted a tired apple green. Papa’s voice had merely bounced off that. Turning back, I scanned the alley, the wall, and heard it again. Not just his voice but the laughing, seductive voice of a woman. I looked everywhere-nook, doorway, rooftop-and then spied it, a fortochka-a small transom window-that was cracked open because, of course, we Russians were addicted to fresh air summer and winter. Yes, I realized, instinctively moving toward it. Papa was in a ground-floor room right over there, the one with the burning lightbulb dangling from the ceiling.
I could have done nothing. I could simply have waited for the security agent to rouse my father and hurry him out. But that was not my nature. And these were not passive times. Besides, I wanted information, bits and scraps that I could glue together to create a realistic image of my mysterious father.
And so, without really thinking, only knowing that I must, I hurried forward. From the side of the building, I grabbed an abandoned wooden crate and dragged it beneath the window, which stood several arzhini from the ground. As I clambered atop the crate, I heard again the deep tones of my father’s voice, which leaked from the window above and flowed over me like a bizarre draft. Strange words spilled over me, things I didn’t quite understand…and yet did, for they were akin to the deep, lustful words that Sasha had once whispered into the tender corner of my ear. My heart clenched, my pulse kicked like a horse. I shouldn’t be doing this, but I certainly couldn’t stop either.
Clenching the edge of the broad metal windowsill, I pulled myself up. Common things came into view: a plain lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, peeling brown wallpaper, a mirror, a torn curtain, a framed print on the wall. This was no luxurious apartment. It was only a single room, tattered, worn, and poor. Then I saw it, or rather him-the back of Papa’s head, his wild hair moving and jerking about. Sitting in his coat, he was facing the other way, and when I peered over and around him, I saw a single woman standing there. With the exception of a pair of stockings that climbed up to her thighs, she was completely naked. Her hair was thick and blond-a mass of curly ringlets-and her lips were painted an unusually bright red. Slowly swaying and dancing before my father, the woman was cupping her enormous breasts in her hands, pushing them up and forward, offering them to my father in much the same way that a luscious, exotic, and terribly juicy pineapple had been presented to me the very first time. She then ground her broad voluptuous hips from side to side, opened her legs a bit, and ever so slowly thrust forward her delicate patch of mounding hair.
Suddenly my father’s right hand came out of nowhere, slapping himself in the head with a loud thwack. Almost immediately his left hand batted at his very own cheek and gave it what appeared to be a painful pinch. Then, with both hands, he started tugging and yanking at his collar, wrestling furiously with himself. Startled, I swayed to the side and nearly fell, and the harlot spied me spying her and screamed. I screamed. And my father, who’d been sitting there, burst to his feet. Before Papa could see me, I leaped sideways off the crate and tumbled to the snowy ground. Shocked, I lay there in the frost. What was going on in there? What had I just witnessed? Papa wasn’t having sexual relations with this woman-at least not yet-for, I realized, she was naked but he was not. Was it an audition of some sort? Could he be treating her for what he frequently called the most tenacious of womanly problems, lewdness?
A pair of hands came from behind, lifting me up, and I half screamed. “Oi!”
Turning around, I expected to see one of the security agents. Instead, whom did I see but Sasha.
“Maria, are you all right?” he asked, gently helping me to my feet.
“What are you doing here? How do you keep popping up?”
He looked at me with a funny grin. “You asked me to come to your house, you asked me to wait by the back door. And I was there, waiting, when I heard your voice and saw you coming out the front. So I followed you. I thought maybe you were leading the way to a café or someplace where we could talk.”
“Oh. Of course.”
“So what’s happened? What are you doing back in this…this alley?”
I wanted to stand there and wallow in confusion, even self-pity. I wanted Sasha to wrap his arms around me. I wanted simply to saunter off with him. But of course I couldn’t.
“I came to get my father.”
“And where is he?”
I motioned up to the window. “Up there.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m not sure, but I have to get him to”-I shouldn’t have said anything, but I just blurted it out-“to the Palace.”
“Really? What’s-?”
We both heard it then, a voice loudly muttering and cursing.
“Sasha, I think that’s one of the security agents. Maybe you’d better not be here now.”
“Right,” he nodded, already slipping away.
No sooner had Sasha melted into the shadows of a doorway than the voice grew into shouting. Turning, I saw not one of the agents coming around the corner of the building, but my very own father. He wasn’t wearing his thousand-ruble fur coat. No, he had on his real coat, the peasant sort, made of wool and long and tight at the waist. And he hadn’t come out to yell at me. Rather, he didn’t even know I was there and was instead just stumbling along, yelling, beating himself with his fists, pulling his hair, even kicking himself.
“You fool! You idiot!” he shouted, cursing no one but himself.
It emerged softly, rolling innocently across my full lips. “Papa?”
He gave himself one last forceful punch in the chest, turned, and saw me. Shocked, he stopped his flaying and stared.
“Dochenka maya,” he said tenderly, “what are you doing here?”
“I…I…”
I had no idea what to say, even where to begin. Instead my hand simply started to rise, and I found myself pointing up to the room with the lightbulb. Amazingly enough, the naked woman with the blond ringlets and the shockingly bright red lips was standing there in the window, a tattered quilt now thrown around her shoulders and her eyes opened wide in shock.
“Oh, her?” My father laughed. “That’s Anisia, the prostitutka. Have you not met before?” Seeing my face twisted by the enigma of his world, Papa said quite innocently, “Yes, sure, I hire Anisia from time to time. She’s very helpful. I use her, you see, to tempt me, to unearth the lust hidden deep in my soul. She brings my terrible thoughts, the very worst ones, right to the surface of my skin. She draws them out of me like sweat in a banya, these lascivious thoughts I don’t even know I’m carrying. And when she draws them to the surface of my consciousness-well, then I can deal with them. Then I can beat them away.”
As if I’d swallowed my tongue, I stared at him, unable to speak.
“Don’t look so shocked, my dear Maria. It’s all very deliberate. Even the saints used to do this, stare at naked harlots in order to find purity of soul. This is the path I struggle so hard to follow as well, not the path of simple Believers but that of a real Christ. How else am I supposed to make my spirit strong unless I continually battle the flesh?” Looking right at me, he hit himself in the face with his own fist. “Besides, I find self-abasement very effective. It keeps me humble and on the right path.”
The joy of suffering. The eternal need to drive Satan out of one’
s own body. The never-ending search for self-purification. Beating away sin with sin. All in the glorious quest of repentance and holy forgiveness. What could be more pagan? More Orthodox? And who, I sobbed within, could be more Russian than my very own father, Rasputin?
As I took Papa by the arm, I stole a glance over my shoulder and waved a quick farewell to Sasha, who was only just stepping out of the shadows.
CHAPTER 15
By the time we returned home, Dunya and my sister were already waiting out front for us. Taking him by his arms, we rushed Papa upstairs and changed him into a fresh kosovorotka.
“You are coming with me, Marochka,” my father said, as we pulled the shirt over his head. “I’m so exhausted there’s no doubt I’ll need your help.”
Knowing that my father’s commands were every bit as absolute as the Empress’s, I obeyed silently, following him down the stairs and into the back of the royal limousine, which had just arrived. All at once we were racing toward Tsarskoye Selo, the vortex of Russian politics, gossip, scandal…and tragedy. But as we sat there in the rich leather seats, I didn’t speak or even look at my father for fear of the anger and confusion that would burst forth. Besides, the most important thing was for him to gather his strength for his duties ahead. And so I gazed out the window in thought.
The greatest attack on Papa had come three or four years earlier, when his former friend and ally in Christianity, the monk Illiodor, turned so rabidly against him. Whether or not Papa had in fact raped a nun, as was proclaimed, Illiodor began shouting everywhere that Papa was a holy devil set on destroying the very foundation of Holy Mother Russia-the monarchy-and that he was pandering to the Yids as well as aiding the new capitalists, who, the fanatic monk claimed, were hell bent on debasing the Russian soul.
To launch his famous attack, Illiodor released a letter that he had stolen from our home in Pokrovskoye, a letter tucked in my father’s little wooden desk and written by none other than Her Majesty the Empress, to my father:
My beloved, unforgettable teacher, redeemer, and mentor! How tiresome it is without you! My soul is quiet and I relax only when you, my teacher, are seated beside me. I kiss your hands and lean my head on your blessed shoulder. Oh, how light, how light do I feel then. I only wish one thing: to fall asleep, to fall asleep…forever on your shoulders and in your arms. What happiness to feel your presence near me. Where are you? Where have you gone? Oh, I am so sad and my heart is longing… Will you be soon again close to me? Come quickly, I am waiting for you and I am tormenting myself for you. I am asking for your holy blessing and I am kissing your blessed hands. I love you forever.
Yours, Mama
Not even the censors could stop the wide publication of this letter, and it caused a scandal of the greatest magnitude. People of every level of society were aghast at the thought of their Empress kissing the foul hands of that dirty peasant, and the worst rumors started running everywhere, even supposed eyewitness accounts of Khlyst activities in the cellars of the Aleksander Palace itself. Soon thereafter an even worse story started circulating as quickly as a hot fire in a parched forest-that Rasputin had molested the Tsar’s second daughter, Tatyana.
People didn’t understand. Or what they did surmise was wrong. I myself had received a note from the Empress written in such a florid manner, for that was her style. She was all emotion, all soul, and she gave herself completely to those she cared for. Those were the exact words the Empress wrote to my father-her Father Grigori-but no one understood where the words came from or what they truly meant for one simple reason: No one knew her secret, a secret that affected everything in our country, right down to the soft snowballs formed and handed to me that winter afternoon at the Aleksander Palace.
In fact, hardly anyone realized there was one, a state secret of such magnitude that it was carefully guarded even from many princes and princesses of the royal blood. I was one of the very few privy to it, and only then because I knew of my father’s activities. Unbeknownst to almost everyone in the nation, there was an explanation for the imperial family’s withdrawal from the whirling social world of the capital, there was logic behind their decision to retreat to the Aleksander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo and live there in near isolation, and there was most definitely a reason for the Empress’s lack of laughter and perpetually sad appearance.
It was that the Heir Tsarevich Aleksei Nikolaevich suffered from the English disease. He was a bleeder. And the Tsar and Tsaritsa, and even their most trusted advisers, had decided that no one should know that the future of the nation was in peril not just from the Germans but from a simple bruise or bump, any number of which most little boys encountered on any given day. It all came down to blood-royal blood, to be specific-that had been passed from Queen Victoria to her favorite granddaughter, a minor German princess who became our Empress Aleksandra Fyodorovna, and who in turn passed the condition to her first-born boy, Heir to the Imperial Throne of All the Russias.
The only time I ever heard Papa speak against the monarchy was when he had groused that we simple people took better care in breeding our pigs back home-where everyone knew you needed fresh stock from other villages to keep the herd strong and healthy-than these fancy nobles did in breeding themselves. But it was in this, the inability of the Heir’s blood to clot, that lay the true nature of my father’s extraordinary bond with our Empress.
Less than an hour later a pair of heavy black iron gates opened before us and the royal limousine carried us once again to the very steps of the Aleksander Palace. I thought of the boy’s pain, of the Empress’s misery…and of the terrible things constantly said about her. Even her own mother-in-law, the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, had called her a traitor, first because she had given birth to four daughters in a row and then because she had birthed such a sickly boy. To make it all worse, the court of the Dowager Empress was filled with evil gossips, highborn personages who spread the most wicked stories to all the courts of all the grand dukes and beyond. There was even tittle-tattle that Aleksandra Fyodorovna had a secret telegraph cable stretching from the mauve boudoir all the way to her native Germany and the offices of her cousin, Russia’s sworn enemy, Kaiser Wilhelm, with whom we had been at war for so long. Every time I heard that I shuddered, for I couldn’t help but think of the poor Marie Antoinette, daughter of the Austrian monarch, whom the French had labeled the Austrichienne, the Austrian dog.
But none of the incendiary stories they told about the Empress was true. Not one. And yet virtually every Russian believed them because the stories had been told and retold, heard and heard again so often, that eventually no one doubted their authenticity. There were supposed eyewitnesses everywhere.
Russia had long been an aria in search of a tragedy, and as Papa and I clambered out of the deep seats of the Delaunay-Belleville limousine and up the steps, I wondered if my father would be able to forestall the finale of the doomed opera. Or were we too late? I couldn’t tell, not by the tears rolling down the big round cheeks of Madame Vyrubova, who greeted us once again at the top of the steps. Forgetting the frost, today she simply stood there, wearing a gray dress and leaning heavily on crutches.
“Thank you for coming, Father Grigori,” she said, profusely kissing Papa’s hand. “The boy, he…he-”
“Yes, I know,” said Father, with a godly authority. “He’s still with us.”
“And-”
“This I know as well. Batushka,” the Dear Father, meaning the Tsar, “has returned home.”
“Not more than ten minutes ago.”
“Eto xhorosho.” Good.
How my father knew these things, I didn’t know, yet I knew he was right, for with each step an aura seemed to grow more clearly around him. Was it the cod? Had the endless amounts of fish he consumed made his soul so clear, his body so pure, that he had indeed become a heavenly vehicle? Or had he been purified by his session with the prostitute Anisia?
When we reached the top of the steps, Madame Vyrubova glanced nervously at me and said to
my father, “Father Grigori, I think it’s better if the child is returned home. You know how the Empress doesn’t-”
“I’m still exhausted from the other night,” said Papa firmly. This afternoon and evening will be long and hard…my daughter stays. She will attend to me.”
“Of course, Father,” the most powerful courtier in the nation replied, submissively bowing her head. “It is as you wish.”
“It is as is needed.”
Minutes before we’d pulled up to the gates, Papa had clasped my hand and told me the details of the other night when we’d come so late and I had been turned away. Aleksei had come down with a chill and sneezed. Such, of course, was the nature of any cold, only the boy had started to bleed profusely from the nose. Compresses had been applied, to no avail. The doctors had been called in and the boy’s nose was cauterized, which hadn’t done anything but elicit screams of pain from Aleksei Nikolaevich, who was never given the likes of morphine. As always, the best and finest doctors of all Europe hadn’t been able to do a thing, so finally Papa had been summoned. And only many hours of Papa’s prayers beside the Heir’s bed had slowed and finally stopped the bleeding.
“I can see the boy’s suffering is worse than it was the other day,” Papa muttered, as we entered the palace. “I do not know what I can do for him, for of course it is up to the will of God, but I shall try my best.”
Once again we hurriedly followed Madame Vyrubova through the large doors, past the guards and the reception desk, and into the private apartments of the royal family. Rather than proceed down the long central hall with its roll of Oriental carpet, Madame Vyrubova, hobbling on her crutches and with her gray dress trailing on the floor, took us into the small wooden elevator on the left. In silence we rode up to the second floor, the children’s floor, where we were taken down a long empty corridor. I noted that the doors on the right were all shut tight, for these were the rooms of the Tsaritsa’s personal maids, who surely had been told not to set foot outside their chambers.
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