Enchantments. Kathryn Harrison

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СКАЧАТЬ wasn’t your father, was it?”

      “No,” I said. “A girl at school, most likely. Father never criticized.” Alyosha said nothing. He was more handsome a boy than I’d gathered from photographs, with dark hair and gray eyes. “Do you know why I’m here?” I asked, finding myself annoyed by his good looks and by his height, which allowed him to look down his straight nose at me. “Here at Tsarskoe Selo?”

      “Because my father wished it.”

      “Yes, I suppose that is true, in that nothing happens outside your father’s wishes.” I wondered suddenly—but only after the words left my mouth—if the tsarina had meant me to keep our conversation in confidence. “My understanding is that Father believed Varya and I would be safer here than anywhere else he might send us in his absence. Your mother imagines I will be able to do for you what he did,” I said. “That I can cure you.”

      “Does she?” the tsarevich said. He studied me from where he was standing, leaning against one of the schoolroom desks. There were five, one for each of the Romanov children.

      “She told me she did. She seems to believe Father bequeathed me to your family for the purpose of preserving your health.”

      The tsarevich nodded. “That sounds like Mother.”

      “You seem quite well to me,” I observed.

      “I am at the moment,” he said. “It won’t last though. It never does.” His expression was one of resignation, but he didn’t feel sorry for himself. I could see that much.

      “Well, then,” I said, “I suppose I will be tested when the time comes, and we will discover if I’m of any use to you.”

      Alyosha smiled, his eyes on my face.

      “What are you looking at?” I asked him.

      “Nothing. Your father called you his ‘little magpie.’ I was wondering why.”

      “A pet name, that’s all.” One inspired by my talking too much when excited. “Like a bird in a tree,” Father used to say. But I didn’t explain this to the tsarevich. I was still holding tight to whatever I could that was left of my father, guarding it jealously and keeping it for my own. It wasn’t fair to blame Alyosha, and I didn’t. Still, I had to push the thought away: if it weren’t for his everlasting illness, my father would never have been murdered.

      “You’ll have to …” he said, “I mean, I hope you will forgive my mother. She is … I’m afraid she can be a little unreasonable. I’ve caused her so much worry, you see. It’s made her nervous. And she … she believes …” Spots of color appeared on his cheeks.

      “What does she believe?”

      “In the grace of God,” he said after a moment.

      “And you?”

      “I believe in history,” the tsarevich said, with a gravitas I wasn’t ready to accept as genuine, coming from a boy who wasn’t quite fourteen. I hadn’t yet learned—witnessed—how life had taught him fatalism.

      “And what about the future? Do you believe in it too?” I wish I’d only thought the words, but I said them aloud, with a tart tone in my voice.

      BULLETINS ARRIVED AT TSARSKOE SELO; the tsar was apprised of each new disaster, but weeks passed and he did nothing—nothing of a political nature. He marched through the woods, he swam in the saltwater natatorium, he hunted, and he rode his horse, until, on March 10, he made the mistake that cost him his crown—well, not the mistake, as there already had been too many to count, but the last and most egregious one. He ordered that the capital be returned to its former state of relative calm, no matter what was required. To accomplish this, his police tore around the city in armored cars; his Cossacks galloped along the avenues, cracking whips and brandishing bayonets; his soldiers fired Chauchats imported from France that spat out 240 bullets every minute. But not only was it too late, order no longer possible; the actions he took against the rioting citizens inspired the Bolsheviks to organize themselves and prepare to challenge his authority.

      “How much does my father understand of revolution? Anything?” Alyosha wanted to know. “Can it be a concept he refutes, one he finds heretical, the way Pope Urban the Eighth insisted the sun revolved around the earth and called Galileo a heretic?”

      “I should think you know him better than I,” I said, answering what was probably a rhetorical question. We were in the schoolroom, occupied with our separate studies—Alyosha’s directed by his tutor, whose head was bent over the second volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall while Alyosha force-marched himself through the first. I was rereading Jane Eyre, in English instead of Russian, allowing me to call it a scholarly occupation rather than the pleasure—the escape—it was. Varya was with the Romanov girls, learning the correct way to put stalks in a vase, a lesson I’d dodged as Admiral–Dr. Botkin, having detected a wheeze while listening to my back with his stethoscope, wouldn’t allow me to walk through the cold to the greenhouses.

      Tsar Nikolay didn’t talk about politics. He had four uncles filled with opinions and would have been, by everyone’s account, happy to hand them the empire. He wanted only to be allowed his exercise and to travel to his army’s headquarters in Mogilev, where he could sleep, eat, and march among his soldiers. As far as I could tell, he spent more time with his army than he did with his family, and I’d heard it said he would have had trouble deciding between the life of a soldier and that of a farmer, had he escaped his heritage.

      But, as all the world knows, he did not escape, and on March 21, 1917, General Kornilov, who had lately presided over the Petersburg garrison, arrived at the Alexander Palace to inform the tsarina that, as there wasn’t any empire left, she and her family were under arrest. The former tsar, his abdication extracted from him as he traveled in his imperial train, had yet to return home from Mogilev to Tsarskoe Selo because the railway workers had received the news of the tsar’s having been toppled as an invitation to stop service for all Romanovs and their retainers.

      “Go down. See what’s happening,” Alyosha said, after Kornilov had been announced. He got up from where he was sitting with his bodyguard Derevenko, playing yet another game of dominoes, a game I hated and refused to join. Alyosha had two bodyguards, Derevenko and Nagorny, both of whom appeared to dote on their charge and were gentle in spite of their military demeanor. Each had previously been a naval officer; now they took turns supervising all the tsarevich did, to make sure no harm came to him, and carrying him in their arms when, inevitably, it did.

      Alyosha gave me a push toward the stairs, and I pushed him back, just a little bit, because I hated that kind of thing in boys, especially in princes, who ought to know better than to boss people about, if only because they got all they wanted anyway. After slipping downstairs, I hurried to the drawing room’s double doors, which were left open into the corridor, one widely enough that I could hide myself behind it, my back to the wall. Even Father admitted that his little magpie had a talent for silence and for making herself as invisible as a scullery maid.

      I watched through the crack as Alexandra Fyodorovna received Kornilov. By now, nearly a week after her husband’s abdication, she’d moved on from destroying official correspondence to incinerating private letters, diaries, telephone messages, bills from the wine merchant and from the purveyor of caviar and truffles, even the former tsar’s game book, in which was recorded every boar, buck, and bird he’d dispatched with his shotgun—any scrap of information that might fall into the hands of some malevolent someone bent on slandering her poor blameless СКАЧАТЬ