Rasputin's Revenge (8 page)

While it is a fact that Russia has a legislative body, called the Duma, it is only a decade old and has no real power. By that I mean it has no power to enact legislation. In fact, all law is directly the will of the Czar. All appointments, all pardons, positions, expenditures—in short, every decision on every conceivable topic is ultimately the Czar’s to make. Even if there are laws covering some situation, that law can be overridden by the simple expedient of petitioning Nicholas.

And here, I’m beginning to understand, is the root of Rasputin’s power. To use Minsky’s phrase, he has the ear of the Czar—or in his case, the Czarina, which may be more effective in that he is at one stroke proposer and lobbyist.

We finished our tea. Perhaps in the time we’d talked, Rasputin had seen something in me that he finally decided he trusted. Though I questioned him rather closely about Minsky, I accepted most of his explanations. Perhaps he came to see that I was not a critic, merely a questioner. In any event, when we had put down our cups, he came and stood in front of me, taking my arms in his incredibly strong hands, and stared into my eyes as he had last night.

I didn’t look away, but neither did I feel the almost hypnotic power in his gaze. As a matter of fact, after a moment I smiled at him, rather as man to man, as if to say, “Enough of this nonsense. Let us do our work.”

And he in turn smiled at this understanding, clapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Your heart is in the right place. Come, we’ll meet the prince.”

He disappeared into his room for another moment, and reappeared wearing heavy boots and black pants under his cassock. Another royal blue shirt peeked from under the black religious robe. If there was a contradiction there, he seemed as oblivious to it as to the rest of his actions.

Interestingly, from this time on he spoke to me normally. I think the two-word phrases and staccato delivery either must be nervousness or an act he delivers for the benefit of those who might be moved by it. When he saw it had no effect on me—it certainly did not make me feel that he was any more holy or inspired—he dropped the pretense entirely. At least that made for easier communication.

We ducked out of his apartment via the back stairway. The people waiting on the landing behind the rope pressed forward, but Rasputin merely blessed them and led me quickly away.

“They are sheep,” he said. “They all want something. They will wait until I return.”

A light, wet snow had begun to fall. We walked out through the courtyard, past a group of lounging men in greatcoats, who bestirred themselves as we came abreast of them and fell in behind us.

“Who are they?” I asked.

The starets didn’t even turn to look. “Detectives,” he said. “Beletsky, one of our ministers, thinks I ought to be protected. I humor them.”

“Protected from what?”

We had come to the Neva, the shortest and coldest of rivers, and turned up toward the Winter Palace.

“Assassination.” He waved his hands as though pushing away the idea. “It is a conceit. I am being watched, spied upon. It is ludicrous.”

“Why do they do that?”

He was setting a pace I found difficult to match. The snow was beginning to fall heavily now and we were quickly outdistancing many of the detectives.

“They want to discredit me with Alexandra. But the Czar already knows I am a sinner. And I keep their son alive.”

I glanced sideways at him to see if there was any trace of irony or humor in that statement, but I could see he meant it literally.

I wanted to question him further on that but the foot traffic in the street had become heavier as we came nearer the Palace, and people had begun recognizing him. The first was a boy, no more than twelve, who ran up
next to us, imploring “Father Gregory” to give him some food. Without breaking stride, Rasputin produced a small loaf of bread and an apple from his cassock.

In a city with a starving populace, such largess doesn’t go unnoticed, and before long a small crowd of children had attached themselves to us, calling out and begging almost in a chant.

Rasputin stopped at the entrance to the Winter Palace. I was ready to duck inside when I saw that he had no intention of avoiding the young mob. Instead, he turned and raised his hand in a blessing.

The children all knelt in the swirling snow and listened to Rasputin talk softly to them. As he spoke, he motioned them forward one by one and gave each a bite to eat—some fruit, bits of bread, pieces of cheese. His message was simple, delivered over and over in his staccato manner. “Russia needs your prayers. Go home. Be with your mothers. Pray for the Czar. There will be bread.”

It seemed to be a different Rasputin, a glimpse of a real holy man. Through the snow I could see a few of the detectives who had stayed with us watching the scene. When the last of the children had been fed, and had gone—presumably home to their mothers to pray—Rasputin took me by the arm and we entered the Palace.

“I wonder if that will make it into their reports to the Czar,” he said, and immediately my sense of his goodness was marred by doubts over whether he had somehow orchestrated a charade.

Paleologue’s words came back to me with renewed force: “In St. Petersburg, nothing is what it seems.”

I have already commented on the size of the Palace. As Rasputin and I walked toward the children’s quarters, I realized that what I had thought was one of the largest and most complex structures I had ever been in was really only half of it. The building is actually in the shape of a huge rectangle with a courtyard within it. The long side of the structure, against the river, houses offices of people such as Sukhomlinov and quarters for visitors like myself. It also affords a view across the river to the Petropavlovskaya Krepost’, the Fortress of Ss. Peter and Paul, a walled prison from which no inmate has ever escaped.

The street side of the Palace is the more heavily guarded. It is the city residence of the Czar’s family and, as such, like Tsarkoye Selo, it is almost a city in its own right. Under the high ceilings are myriad booths dispensing goods for the royal table (which Rasputin told me were wasted—Nicholas, Alexandra and the children all ate simply). Nevertheless, the shops seemed to be flourishing. The contrast with the poverty in the streets outside could not have been more complete. There
were also stores—storerooms might be a better word—with furniture, bolts of cloth, hardware, bric-a-brac. So well-provisioned did they appear to be on this side of the Palace that I briefly entertained the amusing thought that they could mount a seige on St. Petersburg from within.

Of course, we had no trouble entering this enclave. Rasputin and I were admitted without a show of identification. Presumably anyone in the company of the starets was considered safe, a notion I find potentially quite dangerous.

When we had gone through the public area, we came to another checkpoint, and here again we entered unmolested. I asked Rasputin if he had really predicted my arrival.

He stopped and looked at me as though surprised at the question. “The
matushka
was distraught. I told her that her son would soon have his French tutor.”

“And she took that to mean me?”

The lids came down, half covering his eyes. “Did you not?” he asked. It was the same tone he had used when he told me that he kept the Czar’s son alive, and I haven’t yet decided if he is merely a brilliant opportunist, claiming successes for coincidences, or whether he really does have some powers of healing or foresight that he may not fully understand and yet fully believes in. Certainly what happened next speaks well for the latter.

We had just come into a rotunda off which led several hallways when we heard a regular drumlike tattoo followed immediately by the sustained screams of young girls. Wasting not a second, Rasputin ran for the sound, his cassock flowing. I was only a step behind him.

At the end of the hallway, we stopped at the entrance to what might have been designed as a grand ballroom. Now, the marble floors of the huge chamber were covered end to end with straw, and over the straw was galloping an enormous Arabian stallion, nostrils flared and panicked, squealing like a pig.

On the magnificent animal’s back clung a small boy in a soldier’s uniform. Across the room, four girls in white dresses huddled together around another figure. As the horse came upon them, it rose up on its hind legs, turning from the wall, and the girls screamed, panicking the animal even more.

Without any hesitation, Rasputin ran to the middle of the room and began whistling, yelling, jumping up and down, anything to get the horse’s attention.

As the stallion turned from another headlong rush at the distant wall, the boy added to the cacophony with a scream of his own. He was holding to the pommel with both hands, his feet miraculously still in the stirrups.
The reins dragged between the horse’s flying hooves, and foam flecked its distended mouth.

“Griskha!” the boy yelled. “Grishka!”

Grishka is the diminutive of Gregory, and I realized the boy had seen Rasputin and was yelling for help.

The horse put its head down now and charged at the monk. But as soon as he knew that the stallion had seen him, Rasputin stopped his wild gesticulating. Instead, he stood stock still with outspread arms, and began a kind of singing in a deep voice that echoed from the gilded walls. The words were pure gibberish, or perhaps some peasant dialect that I didn’t know. Maybe, in fact (when I reflect on it now), he was speaking in tongues. In any event, it seemed that it would be his last action, since the charge showed no sign of slowing. We all watched horrified as the animal bore down upon the holy man. Surely he would be trampled to death!

Rasputin stood his ground. The horse galloped down the length of the room. Then, suddenly, when no more than ten meters separated them, the stallion visibly slowed. It was too close to stop, but the animal passed by Rasputin, who turned as if he were a matador executing a madrilena, without a cape.

Following his lead, the horse seemed to be struggling to come to a full stop and get back to the starets. It finally did so, then turned around, dropping its proud head, and shuffled almost lazily, snorting, until it came and nuzzled its nose into Rasputin’s bosom.

Immediately, a rough-looking man with a huge mustache, dressed in a sailor’s uniform, ran up and took the shaken Heir Apparent from the saddle. Rasputin continued to stroke the stallion’s face, speaking quietly to it. He took yet another apple from the bountiful cassock and fed it to the beast. The girls rushed up to surround him as I approached from the other side. But no one said a word. No one dared interrupt.

Only when satisfied that the horse was calmed did Rasputin look up. He seemed genuinely surprised by the crowd surrounding him. The sailor, who on closer inspection looked even more like a thug, handed Alexis to Rasputin, who chucked him gently on the chin and smiled.

“You did well not to fall,” he said.

The boy, a well-formed, even handsome twelve year old, beamed. “How did you stop it?”

With no hesitation, as though he believed it to be the truth, Rasputin answered, “God wanted it to stop. He wanted no harm to come to you.”

The sailor spoke up. “It is too late for that. He’ll be bruised.”

Rasputin put the boy down and glared at the man. “The bruises will not be serious.”

“They don’t have to be! You don’t know the …”

“Enough!” It was a woman’s voice. The horse blocked my vision of who had spoken. “Derevenko, it might be better if you took his Highness to be examined.”

Rasputin bowed meekly to the command, though I thought I sensed irony even in that action. “As you wish, Elena. It couldn’t hurt.” He looked at me. “As it turns out, the tutoring will have to wait.”

“Oh, is the new tutor …?”

From behind the stallion stepped the graceful figure of the woman I had seen last night at Vyroubova’s. When she saw me, she smiled as if secretly pleased at something, then extended her hand with a natural self-possession I couldn’t help but admire.

“Hello,” she said, with a flawless British accent, “I’m Elena Ripley.”

If she had been an enigmatic and distantly lovely vision last night—a precious and untouchable cameo—today she radiated a wholesome freshness that was nevertheless somehow consistent with the earlier image. Her beauty was so transcendent it makes style seem wholly irrelevant.

And yet she wasn’t intimidating. Rather, without being in the least forward, she projected warmth, invited friendship. She must have been aware of the potential power of her beauty—her imperious tone to Derevenko and Rasputin was evidence of that—but I could see it was not her way to wield it.

Elena, drama tutor to the Grand Duchesses and governess to Tatiana, introduced me to the four of them—Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia. Finally I met Alexis, who, now that the immediate danger had passed, seemed high-spirited and intelligent.

As soon as the introductions began, Rasputin took the horse by the bridle and walked away with it. Elena was apologetic that my tutoring of Alexis would have to wait, but she demanded that Derevenko take the boy to his doctors to be checked. Evidently, internal bruises are as serious as cuts for him—and this morning’s ride would have bruised nearly anyone.

As soon as Alyosha and Derevenko had gone, all four of the Grand Duchesses began coaxing Rasputin to rejoin them. They seemed genuinely fond of him, asking him to tell them what must have been a familiar story of Russian peasant life. When he came back over to us, leaving the horse with a servant, Elena separated herself from the group. Her distaste for the monk was obvious, but she was too well-bred to show it overtly.

I listened to the first few words of Rasputin’s story, but I really had no interest in it, and if I wasn’t going to be instructing Alexis today, I had
other appointments to keep. Waiting for a natural break in the tale, I bowed and bid them all adieu.

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