Enchantments. Kathryn Harrison

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СКАЧАТЬ underscoring the necessity of a lady mastering her passions, conquered the hot-tempered girl I was. And nothing the health instructor said had warned me that a girl’s initiation into sex—my first kiss!—might be so vile. The guard pulled away, bellowing, as shocked by what I’d done as I, who was gagging on his blood and spitting it out of my mouth even as he opened his and showed me the damage to his tongue.

      “Stupid slut,” he said, or something like it. The injury slurred his speech to the point that I hardly knew what he said.

      For a week or more, Varya and I both endured insults and threats, but she was as good as I at acting deaf, dull, and stubborn. The Red Guard were under orders (at that point, anyway) to restrict their once-exalted prisoners without touching their persons, so once the soldiers had corralled all of us onto one floor of the family’s private apartments, they no longer could take any liberties requiring privacy. Cramped as we were, there was that to be grateful for.

      DEREVENKO, WHO HAD CARED FOR ALYOSHA for eight years with a devotion that appeared sincere, had either feigned that love or lacked the character to resist what appeared to him as an immediate existential promotion. In the hours before he abandoned the tsarevich, he tested his new agency by sprawling on Alyosha’s bed and ordering him about.

      “You!” he barked. “Light my cigarette. Polish my boots and shine my buckle. And when you’ve done that, go to the kitchen and get me something to eat.”

      In silence, without betraying any resentment, Alyosha did all these things while his sisters and I looked on, none of us daring to protest. Dina, as Alyosha called him, sprayed crumbs over the bedclothes and wiped his greasy fingers on the satin wall covering while the tsarevich went to find the “good big traveling trunk” the sailor asked for.

      “That,” Derevenko said when Alyosha came back. He pointed at Alyosha’s scale model of the family’s yacht, Standart, on which they sailed the Baltic Sea each fall. “And that. And all of those. Into the trunk with the rest of it.” Derevenko watched as Alyosha did as he was told, filling the trunk from his shelves and drawers and closets. The railway cars and sailing ships; the battalions of minuscule soldiers that marched—some of these playthings had been made by Peter Carl Fabergé and were worth inestimable rubles; the clothing the tsarevich wore for court appearances; his ikons and saints’ medals; his boots; his hairbrush and comb: whatever the sailor imagined would fetch a good price, especially those things that bore Alyosha’s initials or some other proof of their ownership, went into the trunk. When it was filled, he stood from the bed and brushed the crumbs from his shirt onto the floor.

      “There it is,” he said to the tsarevich. He picked up an ornamental sword, its hilt engraved with the Romanov crest, and used his shirt cuff to polish the ruby set into the pommel. “Severance pay.” He threw the sword back onto the pile of plunder and kicked the trunk’s lid shut.

      Perhaps Alyosha’s forbearance had been, as he said when we spoke about it that afternoon, more the result of shock than noblesse oblige, but I saw him differently after Derevenko’s departure; I stopped calling him “your highness.” If the rumors had been true, if he had once been a child who threw tantrums and behaved shamefully, he was no longer that overweening boy, and it was wrong to tease him as if he were.

      NO ONE SLEPT that first night. The tsarina dismantled Tsar Nikolay’s dressing room and found where he had saved the letters she’d written him during their courtship, and at three in the morning had set to work burning any that seemed prudent to destroy, as her children looked on. They, as well as Varya, gave the impression of being too stupefied to comment, but I was tantalized by the letters, enough that I insinuated myself into a corner from which I could make out the words of the one the tsarina had been reviewing before she turned to poke the fire. “It’s cold, isn’t it?” I said to Tatiana, pretending I’d moved to be closer to the hearth, but neither she nor her sisters gave any indication they noticed my trespass, only a replica of their mother’s vague smile, which they had perhaps been trained to summon in response to any social awkwardness.

      I would never be able to summon the tsarina’s face without seeing it as it appeared while she destroyed her own carefully preserved history, letters so passionate I had to remind myself to keep my features composed while I read what I could of them. It was the first time I’d encountered that kind of thing—a love letter. I hadn’t known they existed outside of novels, and I wondered if my mother would have written such things to my father if he’d known how to read.

      That she might have was strangely fascinating to me. I contemplated the idea the way I did the exhibit of birds of the new world at the zoological garden. Here was plumage the color of which I’d never seen before.

      The tsarina read quickly, but I could tell she wasn’t skimming the words, she was reading each one, her eyebrows drawn into an anxious V, her lower lip caught between her teeth, and her eyes wholly focused on the work before them, one page after another bearing her excitable penmanship, line after line punctuated by nothing save dashes and exclamation points. In contrast, the tsar’s hand was so regular a typewriter might have produced it.

      The Tea-Tray Toboggan

      VARYA, OUR BROTHER DIMITRI, and I grew up as Father had done, in that part of Siberia where spirits walk the forests and swim the rivers and apparitions of the Holy Mother are not unheard of. Our flesh-and-blood mother, Praskovia Fedorovna Dubrovina, hailed from Yekaterinburg. A city girl when she arrived, the daughter of a merchant who retired to the country, Mother didn’t believe in what she called country superstitions, the kind held by people who lived in a town like Pokrovskoye, little more than the intersection of two roads, one to Tyumen, the other into the wild.

      I spent my childhood in Pokrovskoye, knowing nothing of cities, until Father told Mother about the young ladies he met at court and she responded as if to a direction from on high. Providence had arranged a means of securing an education for her daughters, one we could never receive at home, and so I was enrolled in the Steblin–Kamensky Academy for Girls and sent to Father in St. Petersburg, labeled by my mother like a package to be handed from wagon to barge to train. Varya came two years later, when she turned ten. I was excited to be in so grand and important a place, where I could hardly sleep at night for all the carriages and automobiles I heard in the street, their wheels turning over the cobbles. My father might know the future, but I did not, and I welcomed what appeared to be good fortune without wondering the cost.

      Some of the girls at the academy were not allowed to speak to us. Their parents thought Grigory Rasputin a charlatan, either that or the devil. Because no one knew what it was that Father did, that it was he who stood between the tsarevich and death, and because Father was so often closeted with Alyosha and his mother while Tsar Nikolay was off waging war, gossip had it that he and the tsarina were lovers, that he and the tsar’s daughters were lovers, that he and the tsarina’s ugly confidante, Anna Vyrubova, were lovers. What else could explain the frequency of his visits to Tsarskoe Selo? Rasputin had mesmerized all the women around the tsar; the tsarina herself was his puppet; the two of them conspired to lead the tsar to make disastrous decisions. Father Grigory was the Antichrist in disguise, the skin hidden under his tunic bearing occult letters and symbols—Marks of the Beast—and he intended to destroy the motherland. Some days we would walk to school and, alert to such things, I’d see that a new inflammatory drawing had been printed and plastered on one wall after another we were forced to pass. Most were cartoons of Father and the tsarina, usually unclothed and locked together in positions that defied human anatomy if not some scoundrel’s filthy imagination.

      “Keep your eyes down,” I told Varya. “You walk. I’ll hold your hand and guide you.”

      And so we made our way to the academy, СКАЧАТЬ