Read Online Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison - Free Book Online Page A

failure to take any of the Neva’s water seemed exactly that: a failure. What if it had absorbed some aspect of my father and could have granted Alyosha even a little watered-down relief? Pilgrims had left their canes and bandages around the hole in the river’s ice. They believed in it, whatever it was the river carried away and swept into the Gulf of Finland, from which no one could retrieve it. A minute, even less, of Alyosha’s screams was all that was required to strip away my enlightened education and reveal me to be as superstitious as an ignorant peasant.
    I knew my father had sometimes remained with the tsarevich hour upon hour, but under his hands Alyosha’s tortures, and his screams, would have diminished. I’d never known of anyone, not even people with legs crushed by logs or eyes pierced by porcupine quills or appendixes on the verge of bursting, who didn’t eventually fall silent under my father’s hands.
    “So much vital energy wasted on protest,” he’d complain, falling into his armchair so I could pull off his boots while Dunia brought him his slippers and a glass of Madeira. “And not one of them able to direct even a fraction of it to any purpose. I have to do it for them.” His eyes, at the end of a long day, showed me what other people’s pain did to him.
    The tsarina stayed and listened to Alyosha’s agonies to punish herself. Not that another mother wouldn’t have kept vigil by her child, but a different woman might have done it in a spirit other than guilt. Alexandra Fyodorovna behaved as one who had administered a slow poison to her best beloved, immediately regretting her rash and wicked act and remaining with her victim, sometimeseven writhing with him in anguish. When I saw this, so eerie and distorted a mirror of Ivan cradling his poor murdered son, I felt a shudder crawl up my neck.
    The tsarina never left Alyosha’s side without being physically pulled away by Dr. Botkin or her husband. To give Alyosha aspirin for the fever that attended a hemorrhage would make the bleeding even worse, and, without the release of morphine, all Alyosha could do was lie as still as possible, his temperature so high that Botkin had no recourse but to drench him in rubbing alcohol, summoning whimpers more awful than screams for their ability to communicate a kind of exhausted resignation, noises like those I’ve heard from dogs as they slink, subjugated and beseeching, toward the hand that whips them.

Handsome Alyosha

    T HE FIRST TIME Alyosha and I spoke after his accident, we were as awkward with each other as if we hadn’t yet met.
    “Masha,” he said when I hesitated in the doorway of his room. “Aren’t you going to come in?”
    “Of course I am,” I said, and when I got to his bed I asked him how he was feeling.
    “Very well, thank you.”
    I hope I managed to close my open mouth upon hearing so preposterous an answer. He was drawn and pale and every so often visibly braced himself against pain, holding his breath or holding tight to the side of the bed.
    “Are you sure?” I asked stupidly, and we looked at each other. He smiled at me then, after we’d done staring.
    “Well, I’ve been better, perhaps,” he said, “but I’m on the mend. Botkin said—”
    “I’m so sorry, Alyosha,” I interrupted. “I wish I …”
    “Masha. I didn’t think you—”
    “No, no, I know you didn’t. But I’m sorry I can’t. Had I known what … what … I never would have made light of it, not even in jest.”
    Alyosha shook his head. “I don’t remember your making lightof anything,” he said. With his cheeks so white, the thick black lashes around each gray eye were that much more striking.
    “I’m—I’m terribly sorry, Alyosha. Please forgive me. I was flippant when we—”
    “Masha.”
    “No, listen. All the while you’ve been ill, I’ve felt so ashamed. Over and over I heard myself say I supposed I would be tested when the time came and then we’d discover if I