My own mother believed firmly in my father’s skills. Healers, she said, had always existed across our vast nation, men and women who could bring nature under their control. They were known by the Siberian word shaman, and in the 1700s they were found by explorers all the way from the Urals to Chukchi in the Far East. Like Christ, they were special people with a special touch who could make the blind see and the lame walk. It was only recently that modern thoughts-modern Western thoughts, my mother always added, with great disdain-had torn the fabric of our ancient Russian beliefs, casting doubts and questions everywhere. Whereas before we took understanding and meaning from the sun and the moon, the trees and the plants, the modern scientists of the last fifty years, almost all of them educated abroad, were trying to explain away our natural world, not in a spiritual manner but a logical and mechanical one, continually dissecting everything into neat little black-and-white packages.
“If your father had been born a hundred years earlier,” Mama had said one snowy afternoon, as her thick fingers made a large, square pirog-a savory pie-filled with fish in one corner, wild mushrooms in the next, potatoes and onion in the third, and chopped egg in the fourth, “all Russia would be at his feet. Back then no one questioned the ability or the respectability of a healer. And that’s the difference between your father and the modern scientists and doctors-your father seeks to heal people, whereas they seek to cure them.”
My mother hated Sankt Peterburg. It wasn’t the capital of Russia, she said, it was the capital of the material world, Peter the Great’s little window onto Europe which had let in this terrible draft, and made our country ill…with two different sorts of consumption. I had read how even our great Leo Tolstoy had said the capital city was “stupefied and deadened by wine, wealth, and lovemaking without love.” Yes, call it Sankt Peterburg or Petrograd, the capital had lost in the struggle of the spirit over the flesh, the very struggle my father was determined to fight every single day of his life.
And which the Heir Tsarevich Aleksei Nikolaevich himself was now facing.
I looked past my father, past the small blue robe draped on a bedside chair, and stared at the young boy, lying there on his nickel camp bed. Never had I seen such pain, such a blatant fight between good and evil. And in this child I saw not just an illness but a terrible metaphora for all the woes facing the Empire. Here was a young boy afflicted by a sickness brought into Russia by his Western relatives, a disease against which even the best Western doctors were powerless. Only Papa-who’d walked barefoot out of the depths of Russia -and his crude, backward spiritual treatments had offered any hope, let alone comfort. Yes, lying here before me was the body, the vessel, of a small boy, torn between East and West, ancient and modern. Looking at him, one couldn’t help but wonder if the sickly dynasty was strong enough to go on or if the time had come for it simply and easily, to die away.
“Help me, please, Father Grigori,” Aleksei beckoned, reaching up from the bed. “I hurt.”
“I am here, Alyosha. And through me God’s will shall be done. He has seen and heard your suffering, my child, and he has chosen to remove your pain.”
“Thank you, Father Grigori.”
“I have done nothing,” said Papa, whose greatest skill was, undoubtedly, his ability to calm people. “It is God Himself whom you must thank.”
“Da-s,” he said, and closed his young eyes in serene prayer.
My father started chanting and mumbling, and as the words of the Lord fell upon the child, covering him in a blanket of sweetness, I could feel his tension passing. I too closed my eyes, found my lips mumbling, praying, calling to the heavens for serenity and peace, comfort and warmth. I bowed my head and emptied my body of myself. Yes, we have power, all of us, to affect things, just as things themselves have power as well. Like a dream out of nowhere, an image of a blue heart-shaped diamond came into my mind’s eye. I could see it as clearly as if I were holding it. I knew what it was. I had read about this gem in our papers, and the ladies had talked of it at the tea table. It was huge and gorgeous, supposedly stolen from the eye of an idol, a terribly famous diamond that had belonged to many doomed personages, including the ill-fated Marie Antoinette, the Hope family of bankers, our Prince Ivan Kanitowsky, and now an American heiress. Death had followed the diamond everywhere and, I was sure, would continue to do so now that it had left Russia for America. So if death could be attached to an inanimate thing, couldn’t goodness be tied to something as well? Absolutely, I thought, reaching into my dress and clutching the small Orthodox cross that hung from my neck. Yes, there was hope.
“Death is not here today,” I mumbled aloud, not sure how or why I knew this, but certain that I did.
“It has passed us by,” muttered my father, mid-prayer.
A shiver traveled my spine, reached a crescendo, and flowed down my arms and out my fingertips. What was it that I was feeling, this glory, this exaltation now surging through me? And where was it coming from?
“It comes from on high,” said my father, as if he’d heard my silent question. “Dochenka maya, please come here.”
I trembled like a schoolgirl called on by a dominating teacher. The fingers of my right hand clutched the fine curtain. Did Papa intend to involve me in some way?
“Come, child of mine,” my father beckoned, holding out his hand with its incredibly long, gnarled fingers.
There were so many things I didn’t understand about my father. Then again, all that mattered was what he could do right here and now. Papa, I realized, was like Chiron the centaur, who had been wounded by a poisoned arrow but did not die, and who could heal everyone but himself. If only the entire country were here, right in this bedchamber, there would be no shouts for my father’s death, there would be no calling the Empress a traitor. Quite the contrary. She and my father were doing everything they could to save the Heir and the Empire.
Following my father and his unspoken movement, I proceeded around the nickel bed, while Papa continued to the kiot, which was filled with a glittering mass of gold-covered and bejeweled holy icons and flickering lamps. As his hand stretched upward, I knew at once which icon he was reaching for, the radiant Kazanskaya, Our Lady of Kazan, the painted image covered in a mass of gold, seed pearls, emeralds, and diamonds. Depicting the Holy Mother and Child, this icon had over the centuries become linked with the destiny of Russia. While the original rested in town in the Kazanski Cathedral on Nevsky Prospekt, there were many miracle-working copies, of which I could only hope this was one. In our own family this icon was of particular importance for the story of my namesake, little Matryona. In the 1500s a soldier’s house had burned entirely to the ground and everything was thought lost, icons and all. That night, the soldier’s daughter, Matryona, had a vision of the Holy Mother in the ashes. No one believed her, but Matryona insisted, and in time a spade was got, the girl’s mother dug, and the icon was found, completely undamaged. Ever since, many miracles had taken place before this icon, including when it was taken into battle and victory was secured, first over the Poles and much later over Napoleon.
Papa reached up, placed one hand just before the icon, and intoned, “O Most Holy Mother of God, Thou who saved Thine image from harm, we beseech Thee to save us, Thine unworthy ones!”
My father stood there, mumbling and chanting, trembling and shaking. As he called to the heavens to pour forth from and through this religious image, I watched-and felt it, a power, a kind of divine security. Slowly, Papa turned to me, his eyes not blinking, but steadfast and remarkably intent.
“Matryona, daughter of mine,” he said, his voice unusually deep and strange, “turn and place your hands over the boy’s pain.”
I panicked. I had seen death, but only at a distance. I had heard pain, but only from afar. I looked down at my open palms, which were staring blankly back up at me. What were these simple hands and what could they do? Might I hurt the boy instead of help?
Suddenly Papa was touching me on the forehead, saying, “Your wisdom and faith are not here.” Next he was pressing his flat hand against my chest and over my heart. “But here.”
Startled and worried, I raised my eyes.
“There is no fear here tonight, my Matryona. Trust me. Tonight you must help me reach from the icon to the boy, which you can do. It is time for you to realize your own strengths, of which you have a great many.”
As soon as he said it, I realized my father was right. I didn’t know if I’d inherited something from him, much in the same way as a singer or painter or sculptor inherits gifts from her parents, or if in fact I had merely observed and absorbed my father’s skills. But I felt something, a power perhaps, albeit nascent. Or perhaps what I recognized was simply belief, a trust that these things can be made to happen, that the power of prayer can indeed beckon God to shine down and heal someone.
I turned to the bed and stared at the Heir Tsarevich, who lay there against his sheets like a pallid ghost hovering in a pale cloud, his eyes sunken and rimmed with ashen circles. Several days ago he’d nearly died from a simple nosebleed. Today he’d fallen, and now his leg was horribly bloated and twisted; blood had rushed to the contusion on his knee, filling the entire joint and forcing him to make more room by bending it up. A deep wave of pity surged in me and I wanted to cry out, but Aleksei smiled weakly up at me. He will take his cue from me, I thought, so I must convey my belief and my hope. I must give him my strength so he can find his. So I smiled warmly down upon him.
Behind me, Papa raised one hand again to the Kazanskaya, while he clasped me on my shoulder with the other. Oh. So this was how. We were to telegraph the energy from the icon through my father, through me, and down to the boy. I can do that, I said to myself with confidence. I reached down and placed my right hand on the boy’s hot forehead and my left gently onto his swollen leg. Aleksei flinched ever so slightly, but I remained sure in my newfound confidence, and a moment later I sensed him already relaxing.
Papa breathed in, exhaled, and intoned the trope, half chanting, “O fervent intercessor, Mother of the Lord Most High, You do pray to Your Son Christ our God and save all who seek Your protection. O Sovereign Lady and Queen, help and defend all of us who, in trouble and trial, in pain and burdened with sin, stand in Your presence before Your icon, and who pray with compunction, contrition, and tears and with unflagging hope in You. Grant what is good for us, deliverance from evil, and save us all, O Virgin Mother of God, for Thou art a divine protector to Thy servants.”
Throughout the years my father had studied the Scriptures endlessly, memorizing long passages because he could not read, and this afternoon none could have pronounced the prayer more simply or more humbly. He went on and on, beseeching the heavens for mercy, for comfort, for intervention. And I could feel it, the warmth rushing down my father’s arm onto my back, through my body, out my hands, and into the Tsarevich. I closed my eyes tightly and felt the power burning out of my fingertips. It was as if Dr. Derevenko, the Heir’s personal physician, had attached one of his electrical apparatuses to me. My entire body began to tremble. Something akin to perspiration began to bubble from my palms onto the boy’s skin and sink into his wounded body. One moment I was overcome with warmth, the next I was shivering, icy cold. Papa’s words echoed in my ears and resounded through my entire body.
I don’t know how long I stood like that, ten minutes or two hours, but I came to understand something that had always been before me but which I had never seen: the infinite power of love. Yes, truly, the power of love to calm and strengthen, the power of love to relax and imbue confidence-and, most important here this afternoon, the power of love to nurture and heal. Such were the lessons of Christ Our Lord, and such was my father’s simple and secret weapon. The monarchists, the social democrats, the rich, and the poor were all seeking to use my father, to turn the fabled Rasputin into a political legend of one kind or another for their own benefit. My father knew that but didn’t care, for he had found the ultimate truth, this intense feeling of affection and caring called love and the extravagant benefits love could lavish, not just on the heart and soul but on the physical being as well.
After a while Papa turned from the icon and, still chanting, came over to the other side of the bed and touched the boy ever so gently. And I saw it with my own eyes, my father’s prayers lifting Aleksei to a place where there was no pain. From my father’s mouth the words of the Lord fell upon the Heir, carrying him on a soft cloud to a place of heavenly rest. And like a fever that burst, I could see the pain pass from that small body and move on like a quickly passing storm.
Then Papa took Aleksei on a trip to other lands and other times.
“Close your eyes and hold my hand, dear boy,” came Papa’s deep, sweet voice. “Now imagine we are strolling through the forest near my home in Siberia. Can you picture it? Can you see the endless pine wood and smell the sweet scent? The trees-they are so big!”
His eyes closed, Aleksei breathed in, exhaled, and replied softly. “I see it all, Father Grigori…so many pine trees…and mushrooms too! Lots and lots of mushrooms!”
“Yes, that’s right! Let’s pick some, shall we?”
“Da-s!”
So Papa led the boy via a story to our forest, showing him all the glens and little brooks and the best places to find endless numbers of mushrooms. And when they were done there, when their baskets were overflowing, the snow fell, soft and white.
“Alyosha, would you like to go on a wild troika ride pulled by three of the most beautiful horses in the Empire?” asked Papa.
Aleksei, seeing it all as he lay there with his eyes pinched shut, grinned and nodded, and off they flew through the snow, my father at the reins, whooping and hollering, the bells jingling, and the cold, cold air rushing against their rosy cheeks.