Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison Page B
Authors: Kathryn Harrison
Ads: Link
like all faithful servants of the Romanovs, under a proper headstone carved with his name and the dates of his birth and his death.
Tsar Nikolay—we were to call him “Colonel Romanov” now—wasn’t felling trees wildly, as if in a rage. That would have been less unnerving. In this, as in all else, he was his methodical self. He used an ax to take down a single tree, directing its fall away from the grove and onto the adjacent park lawn, where he sawed off its branches, cut them and its trunk into logs of a uniform length, and split those whose circumference might prove unwieldy for whoever tended hearth the following winter. Dogged by two guards, he carried wood by the armload and stacked it neatly near one of the palace’s sealed-off service entrances, and he gathered the smallest branches into tidy bundles of kindling, which he tied with twine. Only when he had dismantled all of one tree into firewood, delivered it to the woodpile, and raked away the remaining litterof twigs and leaves did he turn his attention to the next. He walked among the trees in the grove, took a cigarette from the case he carried in his right pocket, and lit it while looking at their boughs, peeling a bit of bark away from a trunk with his thumbnail, deciding which, after the cigarette was smoked away, would be the next to go under his ax.
All of us held at Tsarskoe Selo—everyone except for Alyosha and the tsarina, who had begun her months of prostration—had ventured outside, under guard, to learn what was causing the noise. The four Romanov girls; Dr. Botkin and Anna Vyrubova; Nagorny; my sister, Varya, and I; the two valets and six chambermaids, the footmen and the cooks, the butler and the laundress; the grooms and the stable boys; old Count Fredericks, who discomfited everyone with his silent weeping: eventually everyone found a discreet vantage from which to watch the former tsar of the Russian Empire work away at killing his trees with a deliberation that seemed to imply he anticipated a use for the wood they’d yield. Did he picture the fires it would afford those living there the following winter? Could he have imagined he and his family would remain in the Alexander Palace for that many more months? Guests of the Bolsheviks? Perhaps he thought we’d all be preserved as an exhibit, like the panorama of savages at Petersburg’s Kunstkamera or, better yet, on the midway of a traveling circus, with a banner over our heads that proclaimed, The Romanovs and their Two Wards, Matryona and Varvara Rasputin, Daughters of the Mad Monk Grigory Rasputin . Newly minted Soviets would pass before us, thrilled and disgusted by the decadence of monarchists who extracted their lavish comforts from the suffering of the proletariat. Until the Soviets became not so newly minted and found themselves jealous, a credible response from a worker dressed in drab, with an apartment upholstered in drab, who ate drab food and rinsed it down with cheap vodka.
“Perhaps it is hard,” I said to Olga, who was standing one afternoon with Varya and me, where her father couldn’t see us if he happened to look up from his chopping and sawing. “Perhaps it is unsettling, not to have governing to do.”
“He planted those trees with his brothers,” Olga offered by way of an answer. “They are nearly forty years old.”
Forty isn’t old for a tree, but poplars grow quickly. These were taller than the Alexander Palace by now, spaced evenly and well apart, as if they’d been planted with an eye to felling them, the space required to swing an ax. After the tsar chose a tree, he stood beneath it for a moment, looking up into its branches. Then he pulled his ax from where he’d left it, the blade sunk into one of the fresh stumps, and paced out the direction of the fall he’d planned for the tree, starting with his back at the base of its trunk and setting the heel of one boot immediately before the toe of the other, close enough to touch, heel-to-toe,
Tsar Nikolay—we were to call him “Colonel Romanov” now—wasn’t felling trees wildly, as if in a rage. That would have been less unnerving. In this, as in all else, he was his methodical self. He used an ax to take down a single tree, directing its fall away from the grove and onto the adjacent park lawn, where he sawed off its branches, cut them and its trunk into logs of a uniform length, and split those whose circumference might prove unwieldy for whoever tended hearth the following winter. Dogged by two guards, he carried wood by the armload and stacked it neatly near one of the palace’s sealed-off service entrances, and he gathered the smallest branches into tidy bundles of kindling, which he tied with twine. Only when he had dismantled all of one tree into firewood, delivered it to the woodpile, and raked away the remaining litterof twigs and leaves did he turn his attention to the next. He walked among the trees in the grove, took a cigarette from the case he carried in his right pocket, and lit it while looking at their boughs, peeling a bit of bark away from a trunk with his thumbnail, deciding which, after the cigarette was smoked away, would be the next to go under his ax.
All of us held at Tsarskoe Selo—everyone except for Alyosha and the tsarina, who had begun her months of prostration—had ventured outside, under guard, to learn what was causing the noise. The four Romanov girls; Dr. Botkin and Anna Vyrubova; Nagorny; my sister, Varya, and I; the two valets and six chambermaids, the footmen and the cooks, the butler and the laundress; the grooms and the stable boys; old Count Fredericks, who discomfited everyone with his silent weeping: eventually everyone found a discreet vantage from which to watch the former tsar of the Russian Empire work away at killing his trees with a deliberation that seemed to imply he anticipated a use for the wood they’d yield. Did he picture the fires it would afford those living there the following winter? Could he have imagined he and his family would remain in the Alexander Palace for that many more months? Guests of the Bolsheviks? Perhaps he thought we’d all be preserved as an exhibit, like the panorama of savages at Petersburg’s Kunstkamera or, better yet, on the midway of a traveling circus, with a banner over our heads that proclaimed, The Romanovs and their Two Wards, Matryona and Varvara Rasputin, Daughters of the Mad Monk Grigory Rasputin . Newly minted Soviets would pass before us, thrilled and disgusted by the decadence of monarchists who extracted their lavish comforts from the suffering of the proletariat. Until the Soviets became not so newly minted and found themselves jealous, a credible response from a worker dressed in drab, with an apartment upholstered in drab, who ate drab food and rinsed it down with cheap vodka.
“Perhaps it is hard,” I said to Olga, who was standing one afternoon with Varya and me, where her father couldn’t see us if he happened to look up from his chopping and sawing. “Perhaps it is unsettling, not to have governing to do.”
“He planted those trees with his brothers,” Olga offered by way of an answer. “They are nearly forty years old.”
Forty isn’t old for a tree, but poplars grow quickly. These were taller than the Alexander Palace by now, spaced evenly and well apart, as if they’d been planted with an eye to felling them, the space required to swing an ax. After the tsar chose a tree, he stood beneath it for a moment, looking up into its branches. Then he pulled his ax from where he’d left it, the blade sunk into one of the fresh stumps, and paced out the direction of the fall he’d planned for the tree, starting with his back at the base of its trunk and setting the heel of one boot immediately before the toe of the other, close enough to touch, heel-to-toe,
Similar Books
