Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Rasputin’s assassins were those men who met at the Vladimir Palace: Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, Prince Yusupov, and Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich. The Vladimirichi—Kyril, Boris, and Andrei—the residents of that palace, why, they stayed safely at home, hands unbloodied, but no less guilty for that. Sergei’s brother gave Sergei the details. They had lured Rasputin to the basement salon of the Yusupov Palace with the promise of meeting Yusupov’s wife—Xenia and Sandro’s daughter, Irina—famously the most beautiful woman in Peter. I’ve told you Rasputin had an eye for women. And while Rasputin waited for this beauty to appear, as the men assured him she shortly would, they served him cakes sprinkled with cyanide and wine into which the crystals of that same poison had been dissolved, hoping for an easy night. But the poison, apparently, amazingly, unnervingly, had no effect, and Yusupov, impatient and frantic, pulled out his revolver and shot Rasputin in the back. The staretz , eyes wide, crumpled, seemingly dead, and while the men conferred about the disposal of the body, inexplicably, the body rose from the floor of the salon and bolted across the courtyard to its iron gates, making for the street, and the men fumbled for their pistols and sent after him a spasm of bullets that once again brought him down. There on the cobblestones his panicked assassins kicked Rasputin’s body and clubbed his face, then bound him with rope, and for good measure rolled him up in a blue curtain they yanked, improvising, from a basement window rod. But, apparently, Rasputin survived even all of that, as well as his rough journey to the rustic Petrovsky Bridge, to the hole beneath it in the ice through which he was shoved, drowning, finally, in the freezing water of the Little Neva. When he was found, one hand was freed of the ropes.

That was December 16, 1916, and all of Peter said, sabakye, sabatchya smerte —a dog’s death for a dog. It was even rumored that the tsar’s daughter Tatiana dressed as a guard and had Rasputin castrated before her eyes as vengeance for his alleged attempt to violate her, that she helped push him into the river. What must he have thought about under the black ice? Battered, chained, his clothes saturated with blood and river water, one leather boot on his foot, the other on the surface of the frozen Neva, a murky shape above him on the white ice, the outlines of it made visible by the moon’s face, Rasputin reached out an arm. Was he reaching out his arm to his shoe, to the moon, to the ice shelf above him, the white marble slab of his sarcophagus? Was he lifting his arm to give a final benediction, a final prophecy? Or was he simply trying to untether himself, to crawl upside down along the ice in this black inverted world, to find the hole through which he had been pushed, to run, dripping water and ice, to the Alexander Palace, where, as he had screamed at his assassins on his dash through the Yusupov Palace courtyard, Felix, I will tell the tsaritsa everything!

She knew it soon enough.

When Dimitri Pavlovich entered his box at the Mikhailovsky Theater the night after the murder, the audience stood and applauded him. Penitents in Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral lit thick swatches of candles before the icons of his name saint. And the day after that, Andrei rode with his brother Kyril to Dimitri’s palace on Nevsky Prospekt to assure Dimitri that the Vladimirichi were behind him, to urge him to turn his regiments against the tsar. But luckily, unexpectedly, Dimitri demurred. He might have hated Rasputin, but he loved his tsar. Soon enough everyone knew the triple-tongued Andrei and Kyril had tried to pry open the gates of hell. Ah, the baby of the family, Andrei, turned out to be quite a Vladimirichi, after all.

If the Romanovs could kill Rasputin, it was possible that, encouraged, they might try to carry out the rest of their plots. And that is when I received a summons from Niki to come to Stavka with Vova.

The name of the provincial town Mogilev comes from the Russian word for a grave, you know, and the landscape we viewed from the train car all the way from Minsk looked foreboding enough. It was so cold that when I disembarked at one stop, within a few seconds I could not even wiggle my fingers. Vova was in high spirits at the thought of seeing Sergei again and he had insisted on carrying his present for him—a puppy—in his coat’s big pocket. He was so busy with the animal, making up names for it and asking me what I thought of each one— Nika , born on Sunday, Gasha , good, Kiska , pure—that he did not look out the compartment window as he would normally. I was glad of this, for what would he have seen but trees standing dark against the sky, their limbs split or sometimes pocked by artillery fire. We passed abandoned trenches, the mud walls fortified with wooden boards, barbed wire hanging in scrolls and loops along the surface. The roads were wet and muddy and bore the thick treads of tank and truck tires, water pooled and froze in any depression in the ground, and in the fields white crosses cut their way out of the graves they marked.

A rough wooden fence surrounded the governor’s house, and above the gate on a wooden arch cut in the shape of an Ionian dome was carved the word STAVKA. Sergei met us there. He had put on weight and he had gone almost completely bald, and, as if to compensate for this, he had allowed his beard to grow fuller and wilder than he normally wore it. And yet despite the extra weight and the denser beard there seemed something deflated about him—the disgrace, however unfair, and his resignation had made him uncertain. I could see it even in the way he moved, as if he might take a false step or lose his balance. He had defended me against all critics, including ones from his own family, writing his brother Nicholas, I swear on the icon that she does not have any crime behind her. If they accuse her of bribery, that is all lies. I was dealing with all her business, I can show whoever needs it accurate details about how much money she has and where it came from . He took the punishment for me, and now, because of it, he wore a plain brown tunic—for, having been forced to resign from the army, he could no longer wear his uniform.

Vova jogged ahead of me to greet him, oblivious to the great changes in Sergei, holding the puppy out to him happily in his two hands. The ribbon Vova had put around the puppy’s neck at the start of our journey was long unraveled and gone. It’s for you. To keep you company! You can call it Kiska . Vova grinned, offering up his most recent inspiration. Sergei embraced him and then inspected the black-haired puppy, a spaniel just like Alexei’s. When I reached him, Sergei kissed me, and I felt absurdly comforted by the heft of him, by his familiar scent of tobacco, oranges, and whiskey, and I put my arm through his while Vova took Kiska on a wild run around the frozen, muddy courtyard, which had in the center of it a round fountain. The spouts of the fountain were the open eyes of porpoises, and in the summer those spouts must shoot streams of water, but now Vova picked up a stick to thrust into the empty eye holes.

On the opposite side of the wooden fence, a few boys called to him, peasant boys on a trek back from the river. Vova ducked through a broken and leaning section of the fence to join them, the puppy yapping hysterically as he followed Vova’s stick. Sergei and I watched through the splintered planks as the four of them hurled Vova’s stick like a baton for the puppy to retrieve but Kiska hadn’t learned yet to return it, so inevitably the boys would give chase, laughing as the puppy avoided them with quick zigzags across the field. I’ve missed him , Sergei said. The whiskers under Sergei’s nose looked frozen. I’ve told my brothers everything I have should go to Vova when I die , and I said, Why are you talking about death? You’re not going to die. But Sergei didn’t answer me, calling out to Vova, It’s too cold, let’s go inside , and to me he said only, Niki wants to see you before dinner .