Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison Page A
Authors: Kathryn Harrison
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they’d probably walked forward into the spray of bullets, expecting a caress or a treat. From the window we watched the soldiers make their way back to the palace, exhaling plumes ofsteam as they walked through the cold. Intoxicated, a few of them lurched and fell into the snow; one dropped to his hands and knees and vomited. The Romanov children turned from the windows, drew the curtains, and went back to their beds.
Ignored, for once, by OTMA, who tucked themselves tidily back under their covers, white nightgowns slipping between white sheets like letters into envelopes, Varya came to me as I brushed and braided my hair before bed. “What should we do?” she wanted to know.
“Nothing,” I said. “There is nothing to be done for this.”
Not without Father, anyway. From the day he died, things had spun more and more violently out of control. My sister and I were under arrest, not benefiting from our connection to the Romanovs, perhaps even tarred by the same brush that had painted them enemies of the state. Long after the others had fallen to sleep, I was awake and worrying. I think I didn’t sleep at all. The next morning, I got up before dawn. I’d been waiting for enough light to look for the deer, hoping what I’d seen had been a nightmare, that all of the preceding day, month, year, had been a nightmare.
But when I put my lips to the windowpane and breathed on it until I’d melted a hole in the morning frost, there they were, as we’d seen them last, lying on the reddened snow. Behind them, in the woods, there was an orange light, and for a moment I stared through the hole I’d made, trying to imagine what could have caused the strange glow. Something was burning, I couldn’t see what.
The Poplar Grove
“W HAT IS THAT NOISE ?” Alyosha asked, not on the first or even the second day we heard the sharp cracks that echoed so they seemed to come from all directions at once, but after it had gone on for more than a week.
“Don’t move it,” I said. For several hours a day, Alyosha’s leg was forcibly straightened and strapped into a brace to keep the swelling from crippling his knee. It was on a Monday that he’d hurt it. April 2, 1917. I know because he recorded such events in a journal, which came into my possession after his death.
“I’m not moving.”
“You are. I’m not blind, you know.”
“What difference does it make? We’ll all be dead in a month. I don’t know why they don’t kill us now. Shoot us all and confiscate every last trapping of decadent tsarist rule. Get it over with, why don’t they?”
Either Alyosha—it must have been the nickname, Sunbeam, that led me to mistake him for an optimist, before fate threw us so continually together—was a secret cynic or his father’s forced abdication had turned him into one. Preoccupied by a crisis no adult could manage, asking every day—when he wasn’t too sick to care—for news of the provisional government’s success in holding revolution at bay, Alyosha seemed far older than his years, and he spoke hismind without regard to what his audience might think. I liked his refusal to euphemize as the rest of his family did, pretending our incarceration in the Alexander Palace was something akin to a pause between acts. As if we were taking a break backstage, changing our costumes as the props were adjusted, practicing lines for an upcoming scene. The arrival of the White Army, for example.
“Matryona Grigorievna! What is making that noise?” Alyosha said. “You hear it, don’t you? Yes, I see by your face that you hear it.”
“Your father chopping, that’s all.”
“Father chopping what?”
“Wood, of course,” I said. “What else?”
Tsar Nikolay was finishing what he’d started the day after Alyosha’s fall and the bleeding it caused: cutting down a grove of poplars. Trees he’d planted himself, as a boy, on the periphery of the horse cemetery where Alyosha’s pony, Bucephalus, had been laid to rest
Ignored, for once, by OTMA, who tucked themselves tidily back under their covers, white nightgowns slipping between white sheets like letters into envelopes, Varya came to me as I brushed and braided my hair before bed. “What should we do?” she wanted to know.
“Nothing,” I said. “There is nothing to be done for this.”
Not without Father, anyway. From the day he died, things had spun more and more violently out of control. My sister and I were under arrest, not benefiting from our connection to the Romanovs, perhaps even tarred by the same brush that had painted them enemies of the state. Long after the others had fallen to sleep, I was awake and worrying. I think I didn’t sleep at all. The next morning, I got up before dawn. I’d been waiting for enough light to look for the deer, hoping what I’d seen had been a nightmare, that all of the preceding day, month, year, had been a nightmare.
But when I put my lips to the windowpane and breathed on it until I’d melted a hole in the morning frost, there they were, as we’d seen them last, lying on the reddened snow. Behind them, in the woods, there was an orange light, and for a moment I stared through the hole I’d made, trying to imagine what could have caused the strange glow. Something was burning, I couldn’t see what.
The Poplar Grove
“W HAT IS THAT NOISE ?” Alyosha asked, not on the first or even the second day we heard the sharp cracks that echoed so they seemed to come from all directions at once, but after it had gone on for more than a week.
“Don’t move it,” I said. For several hours a day, Alyosha’s leg was forcibly straightened and strapped into a brace to keep the swelling from crippling his knee. It was on a Monday that he’d hurt it. April 2, 1917. I know because he recorded such events in a journal, which came into my possession after his death.
“I’m not moving.”
“You are. I’m not blind, you know.”
“What difference does it make? We’ll all be dead in a month. I don’t know why they don’t kill us now. Shoot us all and confiscate every last trapping of decadent tsarist rule. Get it over with, why don’t they?”
Either Alyosha—it must have been the nickname, Sunbeam, that led me to mistake him for an optimist, before fate threw us so continually together—was a secret cynic or his father’s forced abdication had turned him into one. Preoccupied by a crisis no adult could manage, asking every day—when he wasn’t too sick to care—for news of the provisional government’s success in holding revolution at bay, Alyosha seemed far older than his years, and he spoke hismind without regard to what his audience might think. I liked his refusal to euphemize as the rest of his family did, pretending our incarceration in the Alexander Palace was something akin to a pause between acts. As if we were taking a break backstage, changing our costumes as the props were adjusted, practicing lines for an upcoming scene. The arrival of the White Army, for example.
“Matryona Grigorievna! What is making that noise?” Alyosha said. “You hear it, don’t you? Yes, I see by your face that you hear it.”
“Your father chopping, that’s all.”
“Father chopping what?”
“Wood, of course,” I said. “What else?”
Tsar Nikolay was finishing what he’d started the day after Alyosha’s fall and the bleeding it caused: cutting down a grove of poplars. Trees he’d planted himself, as a boy, on the periphery of the horse cemetery where Alyosha’s pony, Bucephalus, had been laid to rest
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