“Drink this all the way to the bottom, Grigori Effimovich,” ordered Dunya, handing him the podstakanik, the metal frame holding the warm glass.
Father did as commanded, downing the entire glass of sweet tea as easily as a shot of vodka.
As I watched him drink, I thought of all the horrible rumors about my father that floated like a black fog across town. The most persistent and most damning, of course, was that he was one of the Khlysty-the Whips-a peculiar and very secret sect that had evolved hundreds of years ago in Siberia. Whether or not their name was a derivation of Xhristi-the Christs-no one was sure, but according to rumor the Khlysty were a strange blend of paganism and orthodoxy and, it was whispered, were not afraid to sin. Because of all the nasty rumors-it was said they gathered deep in the forest, where in the dark of night they had big orgies and even ate the breasts of virgins-I was certain my father had never had anything to do with them.
Suddenly there was a heavy pounding on our front door, and Dunya scurried off. No sooner was she gone than Papa snatched the comb from me and threw it on the floor. I immediately retrieved it, for if one of my father’s visitors found it tomorrow the comb was likely to end up being sold and resold. Indeed, there were many souls, desperate for a miracle, who would pay great sums to run Rasputin’s comb through their own hair-what better way to bring God’s blessings down upon them? Just a few months ago I’d caught a baronessa picking up Papa’s fingernail clippings so she could stitch them into her dress and “be protected by his shield.”
“Dochenka maya.” My little daughter, he said, clasping both my hands in his massive grasp. “I had the same vision again. Earlier this evening I saw it all, quite clearly so.”
“Papa, please, I-”
“No, I’m quite certain of it. Soon I’ll be crossing over, soon we’ll no longer be able to see each other.”
In the last several years, fearing that he’d lost his powers, Papa had grown severely depressed. More recently, however, his gifts had seemed to return. Last week he’d healed a babushka who’d been as bent as a twisted branch with arthritis, and not long ago he’d foreseen a doubling of the cost of a single egg. But the return of his second sight wasn’t so very reassuring. I simply hated this talk of his own death, which he’d been grousing of more and more.
“I’m not afraid, and you must not be either, dochenka maya.”
“But-”
“Don’t worry, once I’ve crossed over I will send you a sign. I will signal you from the hereafter, and you will have proof that I am well and live on. Promise me you won’t be afraid. Promise me you’ll be strong!”
I hesitated before lying. “I promise.”
“Good,” he said, as he examined me with his piercing blue eyes. “Now listen to me. When I am dead you must hurry to the Palace and warn Mama and Papa that their lives are in danger. Promise me this too!”
“Yes…of course.”
“I see it as the truth, and Mama and Papa must be warned!” said my father, his sluggish face now beginning to dance.
“But-”
Dunya came hurrying back, my father’s extravagant thousand-ruble sable coat-a gift from the widow Reshetnikova-and beaver hat in hand, and said, “The motor is downstairs waiting, Grigori Effimovich. You must come quickly!”
Father looked at Dunya as if he couldn’t remember what was happening. Pulling away from me, he shook his head and stumbled. I rushed to his side.
And he said, “Yes, Mama needs me. I must hurry.”
Roused from his drunken stupor as if from a mere nap, Papa grabbed his heavy fur coat and hat from Dunya and started briskly down the hall toward the front door. As I watched him hurry off, I couldn’t help but be swept with worry. All this talk of violence. All this talk of murder. I wanted to dismiss it as simple paranoia, but how could I after the disaster that had struck us not so very long ago?
“Dunya, where’s my cloak? My muff?” I shouted. “Oh, and my shoes-where are my shoes?”
CHAPTER 2
There was no doubt about it, the horrible events of two years ago had been largely my fault.
My father had left Sankt Peterburg to visit a monastery and then return home to our village in Siberia. Varya and I, accompanied by Dunya, followed a week later, taking the train to Tyumen, where on a warm July day we transferred to a riverboat for the last hundred versts. Not long after we’d left the dock, the small cabin in which the three of us were packed became unbearably hot and stuffy.
“I’m going up top for some fresh air,” I said, rising to my feet.
My sister didn’t even look up, for she was already engrossed in a novel, her head propped on one of our bags. But Dunya, whose only duty was to guard us as carefully as a Cossack, immediately dropped her knitting into her lap.
She muttered a hasty, “But-”
“You’d better stay here,” I interrupted, knowing she was loath to let us out of her sight. “It wouldn’t be a good idea to leave Varya here alone.”
“Very well, but be back in thirty minutes-no more!”
Before she could say another word, I slipped out. It was only within the last two months that Papa had permitted me to travel the streets of the capital without an escort; Varya, because she was younger, was still not allowed to go farther than the corner store. And relishing my new freedom, I scurried down the narrow corridor of the steamer, out the door, and up the steep stairs to the top deck, which was totally empty.
All at once I was intoxicated by the magic of my Siberia.
Grabbing hold of a side railing, I peered over the edge at the flat, dark waters of the River Tura, which gave way to the churn of the boat. Gazing upward, I breathed in as deeply as I could, filling my lungs with the rich scents of the endless pine forests on the left and, off to the right, the loamy soil of the wild steppes. I was glad to be going home, glad to escape the capital with its endless buildings and incessant gossip. Here, where the nobility had never held land and so serfdom had never existed, everything was free and open, a nearly endless expanse of opportunity that existed nowhere else in my country.
Suddenly a lyrical voice sang out in the language of my heart:
“I have outlasted all desire,
My dreams and I have grown apart;
My grief alone is left entire,
The gleanings of an empty heart.”
I had thought I was quite alone, yet when I turned I saw a young man with long brown hair and a short beard, half chanting, half singing the words of our greatest writer. He had a smooth dark complexion and wore clothes that were suitably clean but by no means new. I supposed him to be four or five years older than I. In his hands he held a book; I stole a glance at his trim, clean fingers.
When he turned his rich brown eyes upon me, I couldn’t help but call the next verse back to him:
“The storms of ruthless dispensation
Have struck my flowery garland numb-
I live in lonely desolation
And wonder when my end will come.”
I was immediately taken by his smile, kind and small. Moving along the railing toward me, he opened his mouth as if to ask me a question, then gazed down at the open book in his hands. He didn’t know the poem by heart, as I did, yet he recited the last lines beautifully, not only as a literate man but with passion, his voice rising and falling.
“Thus on a naked tree-limb, blasted
By tardy winter’s whistling chill,
A single leaf which has outlasted
Its season will be trembling still.”
When his voice trailed away and was replaced by the churning of the steamer’s boiler, I said, “Of Pushkin’s earliest poems, that is my favorite.”
“Mine too.” He bowed his head to me and said, “They call me Sasha.”
“Maria.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“Sankt Peterburg. And you?”
Though he said he was a native of Novgorod, Sasha was actually traveling from Moscow, where he was attending the university. He was on his way to visit a friend in Pokrovskoye, and when I told him that was my home village, his eyes lit up.
“Say,” he began, pensively tugging on his beard, “if you’re coming from the capital and you’re on the way to…to…well, I heard down below that the famous Father Grigori is on board. You wouldn’t happen to be-”
“Yes, I am his eldest.” I felt my cheeks flush warmly. “But like all rumors, the story you heard is not quite true. While my sister and I are on board, my father is not. He’s already at home.”
“Oh, that is my loss, for it has always been a keen desire of mine to meet him.”
I was never eager to speak of my family-in fact, my father encouraged me not to-so I glanced at his book, and asked, “What do you study at the university, literature?”
“Exactly.” Now it was Sasha’s turn to blush as he bolstered his confidence and confessed, “Actually…actually, I’m a writer.”
“Really?”
As it turned out, we were both aspiring poets, only Sasha was rather more advanced, having published not just two poems at the university but one in a national poetry magazine as well. Of course he was smart, that much I could tell by the sweet squint of his eyes, by the way he used his hands, and, naturally, by his passion for the written word.
“What do you love about literature?” I asked.
“It’s so democratic. I know not everyone can read in our country-that will change-but anyone can pick up a book.”
“And what writers have meant the most to you?”
Our discussion took off like a racing troika, surprisingly fast and impetuous. Of our great writers of the last century, we both cherished Pushkin most of all for the way he spoke not to the upper class but to us, the common people. Sasha enjoyed Lermontov for his emphasis on feeling, while I found magic in Gogol’s strange mix of language. As to Dostoyevsky, however, we both found his stories too morose and too filled with sorrow.
“Have you heard of Tsvetayeva? She’s quite young, but I really like her work-she has such passion and intensity,” I said. “Plus I like how she relies on fairy tales and folk music. She will be very famous, I think.”
“Perhaps. What do you think of Anna Akhmatova? You know what she said, don’t you? ‘I am the first to teach women how to speak.’”
The conversation went on and on, our words tripping over one another, and I completely lost track of the time. I’d never been able to talk about these things with any boy, let alone a man, and that Sasha could be so interesting, let alone so interested in what I had to say, was nearly the most exciting thing I’d ever experienced. How could he know so much, how could he anticipate what I was going to say, how could he take my thoughts and expound upon them so easily?
Suddenly, like the crack of a thunderbolt, a grandmotherly voice shouted out my full name: “Matryona Grigorevna Rasputina!”
I jumped like a common thief, even more so when I realized that Sasha was holding my hand. Spinning around, I saw Dunya, huffing and puffing, at the top of the steep stairs.
“You are to come down at once!” she snapped.
“Yes…yes, of course. Just give me a minute. We were talking about poetry, and-”
“Now!”
Right in front of Dunya, Sasha lifted my left hand to his firm soft lips and kissed it. “Will I ever see you again?”
I glanced at Dunya’s disapproving scowl, turned back to Sasha, and in a quick whisper said, “Meet me here at ten tonight…and bring some of your own poems!”
Softly, he replied, “Only if you will.”
I scurried off, but as I started down the steps I turned and saw Sasha staring after me with sweet eyes and a soft smile. My cheeks suddenly bloomed with a girlish blush, and I practically flew down the stairs, along the deck, and back into our tiny cabin. And my cheeks continued to burn as I dropped on the berth next to my sister, even more so when I noticed Dunya glaring at me.
“You shouldn’t talk to strangers, young lady,” she admonished as she picked up her knitting. “You know very well what men want!”
I couldn’t stop myself from grinning like a complete fool. “No, I don’t. What do they want, Dunya?”
She shook her head in disgust. “And you most certainly shouldn’t let someone kiss your hand!”
Varvara dropped her book. “Did someone kiss your hand, Maria? Oi, tell me! Tell me what he looked like! Was he old and ugly or was he young and…and-”
Almost silently, I mouthed, “Handsome!”
Her eyes grew into disks. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said lightly, slapping her leg. “Nothing at all.”
But as I reached for my satchel, I knew that something had indeed taken place, something different from anything else. I could feel it in the tightness of my stomach, the way I could still sense his lips on my hand, and how I kept trying to hold his image like a photograph in my imagination.
While I knew our Siberian sun would never set on that midsummer night, I feared the hours would never pass. They dragged by, and I busied myself with sorting through a few of my own poems I’d brought with me. Which would Sasha like the most? Which would win his approval? I didn’t have my favorite with me-a poem I’d written just this spring about the blooming of the birches-and when I tried to write it down from memory, it came out all stupid and clumsy. Frustrated, I tore the paper to bits.
My sister fell asleep around nine, just as I had thought, but Dunya kept knitting away, more and more furiously, the sleeve of a sweater growing longer by the minute. I’d counted on her dropping off long ago, lulled by the churning of the boat and the soft waters we sailed, yet she didn’t. I kept staring at our traveling clock, and when it reached ten-fifteen, I could bear it no more.
“I’m going to the toilet. I’ll be right back.”
Dunya scowled at me and hesitated before nodding. Clutching a folded piece of paper with several of my poems scrawled on it, I charged out. Reaching the end of the narrow corridor, I glanced briefly over my shoulder to make sure our housekeeper wasn’t watching, then burst out a side door and onto the narrow deck. In seconds I was clambering up the steep stairs to the top deck, my breath coming short and quick.