Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

All that night on the other side of the door that connected us to Alexei’s room we heard the many comings and goings of Doctors Raukhfus and Derevenko and Botkin and Federov and Ostrogorsky—all sent for from Petersburg—and through the door I could hear their voices and then Niki’s voice and Alix’s. Beneath the door on occasion the shadow of a shoe would appear and then be withdrawn. There would be light and then shadow. And, of course, we could hear the suffering of the child and his mother’s croon as she attempted, helplessly, to soothe him. Although I put Vova into his dressing gown, I never undressed but sat in a chair drawn up to his bed, much as Niki had said Alix sat fully clothed by her son this night and every night for two weeks past, rarely sleeping. Vova lay in bed with his eyes open. We could see very clearly from our window the moon and stars made crisp by the frost; the earth seemed very large and heaven very far away. I stroked my son’s brow and his silky brown hair and his slender beautiful fingers and I tried to answer his questions.

Why is the boy crying?

Something hurts him.

When will he stop crying?

I don’t know.

But with the continuing moans and shrieks from next door, Vova’s questions stumbled to a halt. He was listening, his eyes wide, to the boy’s cries from the next room. Lord, have mercy or Mama, help me or, the worst, Let me die , and soon Vova began to whimper himself in sympathy. Mama, is that boy dying? But he put his hands over his ears for my answer. And then I heard the unmistakable sounds of prayer, one voice, not conversing, but intoning. Through this holy anointing and His most loving mercy, may the Lord help you by the grace of the Holy Spirit , and then several voices, Amen . This was the first part of the rite of extreme unction, the anointing of the sick, followed by the last confession, and finally, the administration of the viaticum, the Eucharist, food for the journey. The journey where? The journey to heaven. Alexei was dying, right now, in the next room, and at any moment Niki would open that adjoining door and take possession of his other son, without telling me, without asking me. And right there I decided I would tell Niki it was both too late and too soon. He could have Vova later, as a man, as a page, as an officer in the Guards, as a diplomat or a minister. He could make him a prince. But he could not take my baby from me now even if God took Alexei from him. And in the silence coming from the next room, I stroked my son’s sleeping head, and I rehearsed my lines, Batiushka, hear my plea .

But Niki did not appear to us in this little room until the morning, and then he said only, Alexei is better. Come and see him .

So what or who had effected this sudden miracle? The staretz Rasputin. Alix had telephoned him in the night sometime between my arrival and the delivery of last rites. In her grief and despair she had reached out wildly for his help, just as Niki had reached out for mine. And just as I rushed to obey, so did Rasputin, far away in Pokrovskoe, Siberia. He did not have to travel, though; he simply prayed, interceded with God and then sent to the tsaritsa a telegram: God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The Little One will not die.

Perhaps a word here about Rasputin. He had begun to perform healings for Alexei and because of this he had become indispensable to Alix, which would not have been a problem had Rasputin been a quiet man, but, alas and alack, he was a man of the theater from start to finish, so perhaps I understood him better than most. Let’s begin with the costume—the shabby black coat, the peasant’s blouse, and the peasant’s boots (all of which Alix soon replaced with silk shirts embroidered with cornflowers, with velveteen pants, with boots soft as butter, with a beaver cap and a beaver coat), the long, uncombed hair that fell past his shoulders like the hair worn by no man, peasant or prince, only by holy fools, the long, unkempt beard, the beard of all Old Believers, and then the eyes, a light blue like the pale gemstone tourmaline, just as sharp and piercing and as shot through with light as a crystal. I heard he could barely read a tract of Scripture, had trouble remembering any of its passages, and that his handwriting was a scrawl of big black letters, misshapen, of uneven size, the words misspelled, toppling onto each other. But when he spoke, it was an incantation, an almost incoherent ramble— the world is like the day, look it’s already evening; love the clouds, for that is where we live . Most theatrical of all were his healings, where he took the hand of the patient, and then, using the greatest powers of concentration, made his face lose all color, turn yellow. Sweat dripped down his cheeks, and with his eyes closed he began to tremble—it was as if life left him and entered the body of the sick. Yet a storm of criticism always surrounded Rasputin because of his behavior at the margins of the stage—at the height of his popularity a stream of women came to his apartment in Petersburg to listen to his lectures, to give him money, even to be defiled by him, after which, in the night, he went to bathhouses, consorted with prostitutes, drank himself to public drunkenness beyond even that of an ordinary Russian, and once at the Moscow restaurant Yar, Rasputin, leering, exposed himself to a group of women and created a fracas that ended only when the management called high enough up the ladder of command until someone, the assistant minister of the interior, was well enough positioned to give permission for the arrest of the palace favorite. Alix believed the police reports were false, the ministers who spoke against her association with him his enemies—and hers. But when her letters to Rasputin began circulating in Petersburg in 1911, letters written in an effusive style so at odds with her chilly public demeanor, letters in which everyone was her darling and in which she longed to kiss them all, copies Rasputin himself released at first to the capital and then to cities all over Russia to silence his tormentors ( I only wish one thing, to fall asleep forever on your shoulders and in your arms. Where are you? Where have you gone? Will you soon be again close to me? ), it seemed all of Russia was in an uproar. What was the empress doing in the arms of this unwashed staretz ?

The cartoons that resulted from these letters—caricatures of Rasputin, Alix, and the girls that appeared in the papers and could not be suppressed, now that the 1905 reforms had lifted censorship of the press and guaranteed freedom of speech—showed the women of the imperial family frolicking naked, the empress and Rasputin embracing. In another, a demonic, black-haired, oversized Rasputin held two small stupid-faced puppets in his hands: Niki and Alix. Behind Rasputin, the empress knelt naked, a yellow crown in her long flowing brown hair; Niki potbellied and castrated, sat in a palanquin, wearing only boots and a fur hat; clustered about the three of them chattered a legion of grand dukes and ministers, all now exiled or murdered. At this, the family, Niki’s ministers, even the prime minister of the Duma, Petr Stolypin, insisted Rasputin had to be sent away. And so, bowing to pressure, which he never liked to do, Niki sent Grigory Rasputin back home to Siberia for a while, to his village of Pokrovskoe, which was why, in 1912, from Spala, Alix had to telegraph him there.

I saw Rasputin in St. Petersburg later that fall—for after his great success at Spala he had been allowed out of exile to return to the capital—on an evening after the theater while I was driving over the Troitsky Bridge. At first he was just a shape, a long black coat, a hood, hands gesticulating, two animals battling, and then as we drew closer, the lanterns on the outside of my carriage swung into his face. The man beneath the hood was suddenly illuminated, as if the figure had stepped up to the footlights of a stage. He had been turned toward the Neva, staring into the water, possibly importuning his own fate, but he turned his head toward me as I passed in my perfumed and heated carriage, and I saw the face of the creature that Petersburgers had begun to call The Nameless One or The Unmentionable —a nose broad at the nostrils, like the gnarled root of a tree, a heavy brow like a ledge over two blue eyes, pale as electrified water. I knew immediately and unmistakably it was he, so much had his description circulated. When his eyes connected momentarily with mine I felt the shock of it as if I turned inside out and my mind was wiped clean. And then we passed and I looked back at him, but he had not turned to look back at me. He didn’t know who I was or how my son could have seized from him his power.