Enchantments. Kathryn Harrison

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ