The Castle in the Forest (29 page)

^{Of course, He could have fashioned all this aeons ago, back at the peak of His Creative Powers. In that case, did He now brood on the possibility that His Force might be slackening, which could be why humankind had become His least successful Creation? Were we now awash in the dithering of an old divinity? This Nicky and Alix—they seemed so naïve, so unfitted for any vast project. While I had not been able to get near to their living presence, I had certainly absorbed the tone of their love, their piety, their innocence. I had read hundreds of communications between them. If I now choose to present a few of those missives, it is to provide a sense of how young they were.}

^{In June of 1894, when their engagement was just two months old, Nicky wrote to her in English, a language they could share:}

^{I love you too deeply and too strongly for me to show it: it is such a sacred feeling, I don’t want to let it out in words that}

^{seem meek and poor and vain! But now I will try to break the habit of hiding my feelings, because I think it wrong and selfish in some occasions. Darling primrosy-mine, I love you my darling!!!!!}

^{Be it said, I took pains to count the exclamation marks. Is that not, after all, a point of kinship between us? The observant reader may have noticed that I am fond on occasion of such emphasis at the end of a parenthesis. (Interruptions of attention should pretend, at least, to be vital!)}

^{Four months later, Nicky’s father is grievously ill. Alix, always ready to add her sentiments to Nicky’s diary, offers this:}

^{Tell me everything, dushka, you can fully trust me, look upon me as a bit of yourself. Let your joys and sorrows be mine, so that we may be ever drawn nearer together. My sweet One, how I love you, darling treasure, my very own One.}

^{Only yours, quite your very own little spitzbub, Pussy mine!}

^{Nicky’s diary, 20 October, Livadia}

^{My God, my God, what a day! The Lord has called unto Him our adored, dearly beloved Papa.}

^{My head is going round, I cannot believe it—it seems inconceivable, a terrible reality.}

^{It was the death of a Saint! Lord, help us in these terrible days!}

^{Later I learned that Nicky was recalling the hour in his childhood when a nihilist had managed to plant a small bomb in the railroad car where the royal family was traveling, but in the event, the roof was blown upward by the blast. As a result, no one was injured. Then, however, the roof began to settle down on them. Alexander III, a giant of a man, used the holy and unholy strength of his arms to support the collapsing structure long enough for his wife and children to be rescued. Only a saint was capable of such strength, declared Empress Marie, a small and beautiful woman.}

^{Nicky, being short like his mother, would also revere Alexander’s powerful chest. Through his adolescence, Nicky had worked, therefore, at bodybuilding. He also excelled at horsemanship and at hunting—a point of honor to him. He grew a fine brown mustache and beard, yet he never became hefty enough to look like a Romanov.}

^{21 October, Livadia}

^{After luncheon we held Prayers for the Dead and again at 9 o’clock in the evening. The expression on Papa’s face was wonderful, smiling as if he were about to laugh!}

^{22 October}

^{Last night we had to carry Papa’s body downstairs, as unfortunately, it has rapidly begun to decompose.}

^{Indeed, they soon had to cover the Emperor with an imperial cloth. His hands and face were turning black.}

^{The marriage to Alix came just a few days after the funeral—it would not do for the new Tsar to remain an unmarried man. While the event took place a full year before I arrived in Russia, I was offered detailed accounts by our resident devils sufficient to inspire the confidence that I had been standing in the Winter Palace with ten thousand of the gentry. All of us were without chairs. The Russians seem to believe that devotional services should exact a penance on the body. The mighty had to remain on their feet for three hours while liturgies were recited. All the while, choral music continued, sad in its way, but majestic, due to the length of the occasion. It was as though the deepest groans of Jesus Christ had to be heard again and then again before the Bride might be proclaimed Empress. All were quick to comment on her dignity, her beauty, and on the manner in which her head bowed whenever she greeted anyone. Our devils, being not in the least generous about such matters, remarked that this bobbing of her head was reminiscent of a pigeon.}

⁴

^O

^{n a stay at Tsarskoe Selo, Nicky told his diary:}

^{Such a dear place for us both; for the first time since our wedding we have been able to live alone and live truly soul-to-soul.}

^{Alix added:}

^{Never did I believe there could be such utter happiness in this world, such a feeling of unity between two mortal beings. I love you
—
those three words have my life in them.}

^{On the next day she wrote:}

^{At last united, bound for life, and when this life is ended, we meet again in the other world to remain together for all eternity.}

^{I was intrigued by her confidence that they shared the same passport to the Eternal. Rarely had I encountered newlyweds who seemed as infatuated. Yet Nicky was twenty-six, and no neophyte in these matters. Since Alix had been a virgin, I was disposed to look upon her entries as much too concerned with demonstrating how much she was in love.}

^{Moreover, I could not be certain of Nicky’s feelings. Whenever Nicky passed by a fine forest, he would be able to remind himself}

^{that this loveliness was his land. He had been chosen by God. Would he not see Love as a vertiginous ascent where you could only maintain your balance by climbing upward?}

^{Still, the damnable question remained. It was certainly conceivable that in His Desire to nourish their marriage, God was enriching them with physical ecstasies. How could I know? I had only the language of their letters, and the reasonable assumption that if God was going to choose a Tsar, He would be ready to support him with Wisdom and Strength—against, of course, the not-small skills of the Maestro.}

⁵

^O

^{n the other hand, one could also ask how well had God prepared this young man to be a Tsar. It is certain that the court had not. Everyone had supposed that Alexander III would rule for at least another generation, and so Nicky was poorly prepared for public life.}

^{17 January 1895, St. Petersburg}

^{An exhausting day. I was in a terrible state about having to go to the Nikolayevsky Hall and deliver a speech to the representatives of the nobility, and the town committees.}

^{He had been closeted with the Grand Dukes before delivering the speech. They assured him that he must follow in his father’s footsteps. “Nicky, you must be
absolute
!”
His grandfather, Alexander II, had been assassinated. His father had had that close call on the train. Absolute allegiance must be proclaimed.}

^{From Nicky’s speech:}

^{I
am aware that recently in some
zemstvos
there have arisen the voices of people carried away by senseless dreams of taking part in the business of government.}

^{Let everyone know that I will retain the principles of autocracy as firmly and unbendingly as my unforgettable late father.}

^{Despite such promises of unrelenting strength, his official duties oppressed him. He kept lamenting that he could not spend enough time alone with Alix.}

^{As the first winter of their marriage came to an end, she began, however, to develop
symptoms.
We counted on that. Symptoms were our stock-in-trade. Victorian women were never easy to invest, but we could always send a shiver into their corseted defense of personal virtue. It called for no more than tainting their dreams with one or another smelly thought. Symptoms soon followed.}

^{9 April 1895, St. Petersburg}

^{Unfortunately, dear Alix’s headache continued all day. She did not go to church nor to luncheon.}

^{10 April 1895, St. Petersburg}

^{Dear Alix still has an unbearable pain in the temples and she was obliged to remain in bed, on my advice.}

^{An ongoing headache! When intense enough to be characterized as migraine, these headaches speak of a clear desire to commit murder. I did not believe Alix had such sentiments toward her husband, but it could be another matter with her mother-in-law. The Empress Marie had adored her huge husband for the best of reasons, and one of them was that she had been the Empress. Animosities were developing.}

^{By June, Alix was free, however, of her worst headaches. She was also pregnant. I suspect that her mother-in-law was, in consequence, able to exercise less pressure upon her temples. In an entry to Nicky’s diary on June 10, Alix wrote:}

^{My sweet old darling Manykins, Wify loves you so deeply and strongly . . . what intense happiness . . . ours . . . our very own . . . what happiness could be greater; only Wify must try and be as good and kind as possible lest another little person suffer for it. A big kiss.}

^{This is June, but the baby will not be born until November. Is Alix suggesting that manykins and wify have no contact down below until the baby arrives?}

^{My comprehension was not advancing. None of us was ready to admit this to ourselves (and never, certainly, to the Maestro) but the presence of real love blurred the clarity of our analysis. We could penetrate every aspect of false love, and be demonic at converting the sensitivities of love to the imperatives of lust. Of course, there are special occasions when God decides that lust will be beneficial for one of His chosen, yes, there is Godly lust as well, and so the issue can offer ambiguity.}

^{It is a curious contest. The angels have powerful sweets to offer, but, in turn, I would say we possess more improvisational skills than the Cudgels. We also lack a quality I do not wish to confess, although I must, or what I offer will make no sense. It is that I know everything about love but Love itself. I do not like to make this confession. Yet, it is true. I recall nothing of my existence as a human, nor even whether I was, to the contrary, always a spirit. This, however, I can say—I have never known Love. I can expatiate upon its properties and tendencies, its dilemmas, its dissipations, I can delineate most of the reasons for its presence or disappearance, I can inspire jealousy, doubt, even periods of revulsion toward the beloved, I can tell you everything about Love except that I cannot distinguish true Love from its artistic substitutes.}

^{Witness, then, my confusion concerning Alix. I could comprehend that Nicky needed Love the way others require drink. But Alix? Could it be that her amorous hysteria was the best way of believing that she felt heights of passion, pleasure, and devotion?}

^{Given, however, one curious line in her letter, “Wify must try and be as good and kind as possible lest another little person suffer}

^{for it,” I came to a conclusion. She was, indeed, declaring a temporary moratorium on sex. Over many a milk run, I had watched pregnant women enjoying the act in their eighth or even ninth month. Of course, this might be different. Alix was preparing for the next Tsar, and one wouldn’t dare to bruise the development of that royal head, but still!—was there to be no sex scheduled until November? She was writing this in June! I now leaned to the hypothesis that Alix had strained mightily to rise to the passionate heights she deemed necessary for this first essential of their marriage to be accomplished but now that the heir-to-be had been put in place, she was ready to enjoy a rest. Yes, we must not do it “lest another little person suffer.”}

⁶

^A

^{lix was more than pregnant. Her belly was huge. The Romanovs were full of anxiety awaiting the birth of that young bouncing male baby who would soon be Tsarevitch to Nicholas II.}

^{It is the mark, however, of good breeding that no disappointment was mouthed by them when a strapping ten-pound
female
came forth.}

^{It did not matter that much to Nicky—Alix, at least, was safe!}