Enchantments. Kathryn Harrison

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СКАЧАТЬ I said. “It isn’t anything.” As the carriage started rolling, we each slid to one side of the seat, looking out the window at what we’d last seen in late summer, when it was lushly green rather than white. The sun had set, the moon was rising. The carriage lamps turned everything they touched pale yellow, and behind every yellow thing lay its purple shadow. As we approached the Alexander Palace, I saw that only the imperial family’s private wing was illuminated—lit from top to bottom. From a distance it looked like a lantern left standing in the snow. But then it grew suddenly big, and we stepped out of the carriage and into a world we’d visited infrequently, and never without our father. Apart from Father we had no connection to the tsar and his family.

      The trip from the foyer to the suite of bedrooms (to which a butler, housekeeper, and finally a chambermaid delivered us) involved a surprising number of double doors. Each set opened silently before us, obedient to its pair of liveried, white-gloved porters, and swung silently shut. With every threshold I crossed, with every set of doors that closed behind me, I felt that much more sleepy, as if walking ever deeper into a hypnotizing spell. By the time a lady-in-waiting had emptied our suitcases and hung up our clothes—I could not convince her, as I had the footman, that we could do for ourselves—I was on my back on my bed, asleep on the counterpane, my shoes still on my feet and my hands folded like a dead girl’s over my heart.

      I might have remained there until the next morning without moving so much as a finger, but within an hour of our arrival the tsarina had summoned me to her mauve boudoir, a room infamous throughout the continent for a color scheme so unconditional that lilacs were the only flower admitted.

      “Why not both of us?” Varya said, following me to the sink, where I splashed my face with water to wake myself up. I lifted my shoulders in a shrug and went out after the page, tucking my blouse into my skirt as best I could while hurrying behind him.

      I had no answers for Varya. I had no idea of what was going to happen next—it seemed like anything could, in this new, fatherless world—and no power to protect her, supposing she’d allow such a thing. My sister and I were close in years but little else. Not that either of us wished the other ill, but the time Varya spent in Petersburg changed her from a shy, self-conscious girl to a secretive, dishonest one. From the day she arrived in the city, my sister found it hard to endure exposure to so many staring eyes, and she never developed a tolerance to our providing fodder, as the daughters of the Mad Monk Rasputin, for schoolgirl gossip and taunts. From the beginning I understood it was our father’s power that inspired slander—if a person is conspicuous, people will say anything about him. And what point was there in taking issue with fate? Father’s persecution and martyrdom had been foretold.

      Still, our growing steadily apart was as much my fault as Varya’s.

      She wasn’t one to talk about what bothered her, and I shirked my duty as her older sister, avoiding the chore of slowly coaxing her unhappiness out of her head and into my lap, where I’d have to respond to what I couldn’t repair. For, once Father had decided on a thing, there was no changing his mind, and, though he remained faithful to his peasant ways, he had been set on pleasing our mother by having her daughters educated as she was, in a proper girls’ school. We had to stay with Father in St. Petersburg, and Varya would remain enrolled whether she hated it or not.

      I don’t know how long my sister had made a practice of lying before I noticed that the lies she told seemed oddly useless. They didn’t get her out of trouble or get anyone else into it; they weren’t malicious. Instead, Varya’s lies seemed peculiarly lacking in consequence. I’d ask her, for example, if she’d enjoyed a concert I knew she’d planned to attend, and she’d tell me she hadn’t gone after all. Then I’d bump into an acquaintance with whom she’d spoken during the concert’s intermission. Had she been pursuing some clandestine business, it would have been the other way around: she’d have said she attended the concert to excuse an absence for a different cause, the one she wanted to hide. But if each lie alone seemed to serve no purpose, the habit of telling them amounted to camouflage. For as long as one lie went undiscovered, my sister was protected by the façade it presented, and many of them together created a kind of psychic fortress in which to hide, maybe even a new identity, a life whose terms she dictated and kept separate from Father’s and mine. It also formed, perhaps only incidentally, a barrier between the two of us. On those occasions I challenged Varya, she’d change the topic or, like a politician, answer another, different question, one I hadn’t asked. She slipped away as quickly as a wet bar of soap.

      I almost didn’t see the tsarina when I entered her darkened boudoir, having been given a nudge by the lady-in-waiting when I hesitated on the threshold. She was lying on a chaise longue, and the boudoir was as rumored: the chaise was upholstered in a slippery-looking mauve chintz, the floral-patterned carpets were all shades of mauve, as were the walls, tablecloths, bellpull, curtains, and the blanket pulled up over her knees. Even her lips were mauve, and her fingertips too. I’d heard it said the tsarina had had scarlet fever as a child, and the disease damaged the valves of her heart.

      “You poor, dear, brave, wonderful girl,” she said in answer to my curtsy. “The apple of your dear father’s eye. You cannot imagine how he praised you to me, how proud he was. ‘Don’t be fooled by her size,’ he’d say, ‘my little Masha is destined for great and astonishing things. The good Lord has shown me the crowds that will gather for only a look at her.’” She paused, her eyes searching mine. “I am so sorry we—you—have lost him. Poor child, you look thoroughly worn out. I’ll ring for tea, shall I?”

      “I don’t—” I said. “I hardly know what to think.”

      “Of course you don’t. How could you at a time like this? Did you know how your father spoke of you, my dear? Did he tell you about your future?”

      “Only a little,” I said, and she frowned, faintly.

      “Ah. I’d hoped that with you he had been …” She paused, perhaps searching for a word she wanted. “… more forthcoming.”

      “I … I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean.”

      “Did he say anything about it? Your future?”

      “No,” I said. “It sounds as if he may have told you more than he did me.”

      “Ah.” The tsarina put a finger before her lips, as if cautioning me to keep a secret. “We—you—will have to be patient, then,” she said after a moment. “We will have to wait and see.”

      I smiled in response to the tsarina’s smile, finding it hard to keep up my end of the conversation. In truth, I couldn’t think of any but one thing, my mind prodding and poking, tonguelike, at the absence of my father, pressing up against what was no longer there and trying to measure the loss. I didn’t want to contemplate his murder every minute, but I couldn’t stop adding up the days and hours leading to his disappearance as if it were an equation I could rework to arrive at a different answer, the one in which I’d had the foresight to prevent Father’s leaving the apartment that night. From my father’s death to my portion of responsibility for his death to Varya’s and my future, one fixation ceded to the next; there was our mother’s safety to worry over, and the dangers of travel versus those of remaining in Russia—

      “You and your sister will live here, at Tsarskoe Selo. It was your father’s wish.”

      “Thank you, your—”

      “Please,” the tsarina said, and she shook her finger as though at a naughty child. “No titles. And no more curtsies either.”

      I nodded. My head seemed to bob up and down on its own. Without falling back on prescribed formalities, I had little to say, and my eyes СКАЧАТЬ