Kathryn Harrison
Enchantments

A Novel

Dedication

For Joyce

Epigraph

The eyes those silent tongues of love.

—CERVANTES

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

The Hole in the Ice

A Red Ribbon

House Arrest

The Old Guard and the New

The Tea-Tray Toboggan

Handsome Alyosha

The Virgin in the Silver Forest

A Stately Pleasure Dome

The Poplar Grove

A Sunny Child

The Wayward Hand

A Demon in Her Womb

These Things Can’t Happen

Ill Omens

Holy Rollers

The Wild West Show

Russian Roulette

Chicanery

Travel by Combustion

A Prophecy

Spiderweb

Stitches Large and Small

Hothouse

City of Light

Exile

Katya

Last Rites

A Bureaucratic Adventure

That Hollywood Bear

It Was Magic

The Window in the Egg

Tickets to an Execution

The Four Brothers and the Four Sisters

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Type

Other Books by Kathryn Harrison

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Hole in the Ice

BEHOLD: IN THE BEGINNING there was everything, just as there is now. The giant slap of a thunderclap and, bang, it’s raining talking snakes.

A greater light to rule the day, a lesser light to rule the night, swarming water and restless air. A man goes down on two knees, a woman opens her thighs, and both hold their breath to listen. Imagining God’s footsteps could be heard in the cool of the day. But God walks silently along the bank of the muddy river that flows out of the Garden, the river that divides and becomes many: Usa, Kolva, Yug, Onega. Narva, Obsha, Luga, Okhta. Volycha, Sestra, Uver, Oyat. Volga, Kama, Neva, Ob.

From the windows of the house that was my childhood home, I heard a river running. The Tura hurried past our village to join the Tobol, and the Tobol joined the Irtysh, and the Irtysh joined the Ob, and the Great Ob carried our cries and emptied them into the Kara Sea, which, being frozen, preserved them like flies in amber.

“Go on,” Alyosha said whenever I fell silent. “Please, Masha, I like to hear your voice.”

And I did; I told him about my father, about me, about Siberia. I told him stories my father told us when we were children. I did whatever I could to distract him.

THE DAY THEY PULLED FATHER’S BODY out from under the ice, the first day of the new year, 1917, my sister, Varya, and I became wards of Tsar Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov and were moved, under imperial guard, from the apartment at 64 Gorokhovaya Street to the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, the royal family’s private village outside the capital. Eighteen years old, I hardly felt I needed a new set of parents, even if they were a tsar and tsarina. But every week brought more strikes and increasing violence to St. Petersburg. Revolution, anarchy, marshal law: we didn’t know what to dread, only that we were accelerating—hurtling—toward it, whatever it was. And, as the tsar’s officers pointed out, having summoned Varya and me from our beds before dawn, banging at the door with the butts of their rifles, anyone with a name as inflammatory as Rasputin would be an idiot to try to leave St. Petersburg unaided and without protection. As long as the Romanovs remained in power, they represented our only possibility of escaping Russia before it was too late to get out.

But first: my father. For without Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, the end of the Romanovs is no different from that of the Hapsburgs or the Ottomans or any other of the great dynasties that collapsed at the beginning of the century.

Word traveled quickly, more quickly than it would had any other man’s body been dragged from the river. After I signed a paper confirming that the deceased was indeed my father, missing by then for three days, the police escort was to return Varya and me to Gorokhovaya Street to gather our clothes and what few things we cared to keep. But before we could climb back into the sledge it was surrounded by a mob. A crowd of people had come running to where we’d stood minutes before, on the frozen river. They came from their homes with bowls and jugs and cast-iron kettles—anything that could hold water. Some ran pouring wine and vodka, even perfume, into the gutters as they hurried to the Neva to fill their newly emptied bottles. I saw a samovar so big it required three men to carry it, and I saw an old woman lugging a chamber pot. Now, that would have made Father laugh until he hooted and howled and dried his eyes with the heels of his hands—the idea of a withered crone ladling his ghost into her chamber pot.

The crowd surged onto the river like a wave and swept all the officials away from the hole in the ice, the one out of which the police had dragged my father, beaten and bloodied, his right hand raised as if making the sign of the cross. People thronged the hole. They fell on their knees, praying and weeping. The common people, the people my father loved, all along they understood what the intelligentsia were too blind to see. They wanted the water that touched my father as he was dying, the water into which his soul had passed, through which it had swum.

Thousands of people, tens of thousands—the officials lost count as they continued to arrive—came to the Neva that day and the next and the one after that. They came and they came and they wouldn’t stop coming, from all parts of the city and from the outlying towns and provinces. They came over the Urals, from Siberia. Nothing could stop them, not blizzards, not cavalry soldiers. Squadrons of Cossacks on horseback took aim and fired into the crowds, and their nervous mounts reared up and came down plunging, their shoes striking sparks from the paving stones, pale pricks in the freezing gloom.

For all the horses I’d ridden in my life, I’d never seen any as spirited as these. Towering black giants, not one of them less than twenty hands high, they weren’t shying at the noise and chaos—no, that was what they wanted, an orgy of movement and sound. The dark luster of each animal’s coat; the volatile quiver of its flesh as it responded to its rider’s intent, not to his hands, which were busy with a firearm, but to his will, which commanded the horse’s body as if it were his own; the nostrils flared wide at the smell of gunpowder; the shrill whinnying and the sharp gleam of each hoof: in an instant, the sight and sound and smell of them had, like a whetted blade, pared away the rind of shock that left me, in the wake of my father’s disappearance, insensible to every feeling.

I watched, struck still with wonder, as the air around the horses changed color, like iron held over a flame, stealing its heat. The officer who had his gloved fingers wrapped tightly around the top of my arm gave it a shake, as if to dispel what he must have assumed was my fear. But all it was was my succumbing to them, allowing their desire to possess me to the point that I wanted it too—the crumple and yield of bodies under hooves. Then the clamor around me ceased, all the clatter and cries and sharp cracks converged into words only I could hear, and my father’s voice spoke my name. Masha, he said, be comforted, and though I wasn’t faint, I fell back so the officer had to support my weight. At last something had caught and cut me, made me gasp. Until that moment, I was afraid I’d lost not only my father but myself as well.

THE CROWD THINNED, eventually it did, but not before opportunists had set up shop along the riverbank, selling empty jars and bottles to anyone who hadn’t brought one, as well as hawking bread, cheese, pomegranates, kvass and vodka by the glass, cider dipped from a pot hanging over a fire. Day and night, pilgrims stepped around and over stiffening corpses as they walked past the armed soldiers and onto the river, the gray ice of its surface slick with freezing fresh blood. They slipped and scrambled and pushed one another aside to reach the hole in the ice, because the water my father touched he made powerful. For the rest of that terrible winter, the last of the Romanovs’ rule, St. Petersburg shuddered under one riot after another, and her citizens’ blood remained on the ice under the Petrovsky Bridge.

At noon one February day, nearly two months after my father was murdered, I returned to that bridge and stared at the stain below. I’d come back to the city to sign our furniture over to an auctioneer, so the apartment could be rented. “We could chop up his bed into splinters and sell them as relics,” Varya said as I was leaving on my errand, and I gave her a look. For all I knew, she might have been serious, but I, not Varya, was the one responsible for settling my father’s estate, what little there was of it.

How, after cyanide had failed, and bullets as well, after someone had broken his poor head with a brick or a cudgel, had Father’s assassins at last succeeded in killing him? They dropped him from where I was standing, perhaps. Dropped him over the guardrail and watched as the force of his body’s impact shattered the river’s frozen surface, gravity, which holds planets and moons and even the golden sun in its thrall, no longer innocent but an accessory to murder. Or they brought axes. They walked onto the river, bold as brass, dragging Father behind them, his hands and feet bound. Was he conscious? Did he have to watch his murderers hack at the ice to open a door to his drowning? The ringleader was a man he’d mistaken for a friend. Invited to his home, Father had come willingly and drunk the poison he was served.

The Petrovsky Bridge was bewitched, people began to say, and they avoided its narrow pedestrian walkway whenever possible, certainly at night, when traffic subsided and moans rose up from under its span. There must be a natural explanation for water making such noises as it flows beneath a frozen surface, but no one was interested in natural explanations, not that winter. And there were more curious phenomena, impossible to account for. In the attempt to wash the blood away, to remove the unwanted reminder of my dead father’s continued hold over his disciples, cauldron after cauldron of boiling water had been poured over the frozen blood. Tinder was collected, saturated in gasoline, and set to burn on the ice. But the stain refused to fade. As if to accuse the assassins, it darkened and spread, and even reasonable people grew to fear a place where a holy man had been martyred.

Looking down from the bridge, I could see where blood had pooled and feet had tramped and bodies been dragged through the congealing red slick of it, each boot print and smear recorded on the river’s surface. The hole in the ice never froze back over that winter. Too many people visited the spot, refilled their bottles from its bottomless font, rinsed their crucifixes, and kneeled to pray. The same pilgrims, some of them, left crosses and candles. The wind blew, it whistled and shrieked, but it knew to leave the crosses standing, the candles’ flames burning, and the soup in its bowl. Someone had remembered Father’s favorite meal and brought him a deep dish of thick cod soup, which steamed day and night through one blizzard after another, surrounded by a ring of water where it had melted the ice. Others brought boots, a gift traditionally presented to an itinerant healer, and there was a cask of Madeira, bottles of kvass, too many ikons to count, a heaped tangle of prayer cords, and silk stoles, such as priests wear, in gold, purple, red, in every color. Prayers, quite a lot of these, copied onto paper and, if the petitioner lacked the requisite faith, held down with rocks. But the wind let them be, rocks or no rocks. Crutches and canes and unraveled bandages, all testifying that, dead as he was, Father Grigory continued to heal those who came to him. No thief was fool enough to take any of the gifts his petitioners left, not even something as valuable as a pair of stout boots.

If only Father had remained that humble man, walking from one town to the next, he might have avoided so early a death. Forty-seven. With a constitution like his he should have lived to be a hundred.

A Red Ribbon

THE JOURNEY BY TRAIN from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo, sixteen miles to the south, wasn’t nearly long enough for me to gather my wits. It was, at least, a slow sixteen miles, as the track had to be cleared of snow every day, several times a day, in midwinter. I told myself, on boarding, that I would use the time to write my mother a letter saying what I could not, for reasons of economy, fit in a telegram. But I never even opened my satchel to find pen and paper. Once I’d settled myself in one of the imperial train’s velvet-upholstered seats, I sank immediately into a haze that left me balanced like a napping cat between unconsciousness and the hair-trigger alertness that allows it to spring out of sleep and onto a mouse. Scenery unfurled, splendid and sparkling, the last of the slanting midwinter sunlight flaring off mirrors it found in the ice. Varya, two years younger than I, slept sideways in her red velvet seat, her legs tucked under her and her hands caught between her cheek and the back of her seat in an attitude of prayer. Unbound, her dark hair fell around her shoulders like a cloak. Twice the train slowed, stopped, and, after whatever obstruction had blocked our way was cleared from the tracks, started up again.

It was dusk when we reached Tsarskoe Selo. A detail of cavalry officers greeted us at the station, and once Varya and I had disembarked, holding tight to our bags in defiance of a footman’s attempt to carry them, the mounted police escorted us to a carriage bearing the gold imperial crest. Flanked on either side by a moving wall of horses and men, for a moment I felt my sister and I had been arrested rather than adopted, and I hesitated before climbing into the conveyance.

“What is it?” Varya whispered as she sat next to me.

“Nothing,” I said. “It isn’t anything.” As the carriage started rolling, we each slid to one side of the seat, looking out the window at what we’d last seen in late summer, when it was lushly green rather than white. The sun had set, the moon was rising. The carriage lamps turned everything they touched pale yellow, and behind every yellow thing lay its purple shadow. As we approached the Alexander Palace, I saw that only the imperial family’s private wing was illuminated—lit from top to bottom. From a distance it looked like a lantern left standing in the snow. But then it grew suddenly big, and we stepped out of the carriage and into a world we’d visited infrequently, and never without our father. Apart from Father we had no connection to the tsar and his family.

The trip from the foyer to the suite of bedrooms (to which a butler, housekeeper, and finally a chambermaid delivered us) involved a surprising number of double doors. Each set opened silently before us, obedient to its pair of liveried, white-gloved porters, and swung silently shut. With every threshold I crossed, with every set of doors that closed behind me, I felt that much more sleepy, as if walking ever deeper into a hypnotizing spell. By the time a lady-in-waiting had emptied our suitcases and hung up our clothes—I could not convince her, as I had the footman, that we could do for ourselves—I was on my back on my bed, asleep on the counterpane, my shoes still on my feet and my hands folded like a dead girl’s over my heart.

I might have remained there until the next morning without moving so much as a finger, but within an hour of our arrival the tsarina had summoned me to her mauve boudoir, a room infamous throughout the continent for a color scheme so unconditional that lilacs were the only flower admitted.

“Why not both of us?” Varya said, following me to the sink, where I splashed my face with water to wake myself up. I lifted my shoulders in a shrug and went out after the page, tucking my blouse into my skirt as best I could while hurrying behind him.

I had no answers for Varya. I had no idea of what was going to happen next—it seemed like anything could, in this new, fatherless world—and no power to protect her, supposing she’d allow such a thing. My sister and I were close in years but little else. Not that either of us wished the other ill, but the time Varya spent in Petersburg changed her from a shy, self-conscious girl to a secretive, dishonest one. From the day she arrived in the city, my sister found it hard to endure exposure to so many staring eyes, and she never developed a tolerance to our providing fodder, as the daughters of the Mad Monk Rasputin, for schoolgirl gossip and taunts. From the beginning I understood it was our father’s power that inspired slander—if a person is conspicuous, people will say anything about him. And what point was there in taking issue with fate? Father’s persecution and martyrdom had been foretold.

Still, our growing steadily apart was as much my fault as Varya’s.

She wasn’t one to talk about what bothered her, and I shirked my duty as her older sister, avoiding the chore of slowly coaxing her unhappiness out of her head and into my lap, where I’d have to respond to what I couldn’t repair. For, once Father had decided on a thing, there was no changing his mind, and, though he remained faithful to his peasant ways, he had been set on pleasing our mother by having her daughters educated as she was, in a proper girls’ school. We had to stay with Father in St. Petersburg, and Varya would remain enrolled whether she hated it or not.

I don’t know how long my sister had made a practice of lying before I noticed that the lies she told seemed oddly useless. They didn’t get her out of trouble or get anyone else into it; they weren’t malicious. Instead, Varya’s lies seemed peculiarly lacking in consequence. I’d ask her, for example, if she’d enjoyed a concert I knew she’d planned to attend, and she’d tell me she hadn’t gone after all. Then I’d bump into an acquaintance with whom she’d spoken during the concert’s intermission. Had she been pursuing some clandestine business, it would have been the other way around: she’d have said she attended the concert to excuse an absence for a different cause, the one she wanted to hide. But if each lie alone seemed to serve no purpose, the habit of telling them amounted to camouflage. For as long as one lie went undiscovered, my sister was protected by the façade it presented, and many of them together created a kind of psychic fortress in which to hide, maybe even a new identity, a life whose terms she dictated and kept separate from Father’s and mine. It also formed, perhaps only incidentally, a barrier between the two of us. On those occasions I challenged Varya, she’d change the topic or, like a politician, answer another, different question, one I hadn’t asked. She slipped away as quickly as a wet bar of soap.

I almost didn’t see the tsarina when I entered her darkened boudoir, having been given a nudge by the lady-in-waiting when I hesitated on the threshold. She was lying on a chaise longue, and the boudoir was as rumored: the chaise was upholstered in a slippery-looking mauve chintz, the floral-patterned carpets were all shades of mauve, as were the walls, tablecloths, bellpull, curtains, and the blanket pulled up over her knees. Even her lips were mauve, and her fingertips too. I’d heard it said the tsarina had had scarlet fever as a child, and the disease damaged the valves of her heart.

“You poor, dear, brave, wonderful girl,” she said in answer to my curtsy. “The apple of your dear father’s eye. You cannot imagine how he praised you to me, how proud he was. ‘Don’t be fooled by her size,’ he’d say, ‘my little Masha is destined for great and astonishing things. The good Lord has shown me the crowds that will gather for only a look at her.’” She paused, her eyes searching mine. “I am so sorry we—you—have lost him. Poor child, you look thoroughly worn out. I’ll ring for tea, shall I?”

“I don’t—” I said. “I hardly know what to think.”

“Of course you don’t. How could you at a time like this? Did you know how your father spoke of you, my dear? Did he tell you about your future?”

“Only a little,” I said, and she frowned, faintly.

“Ah. I’d hoped that with you he had been …” She paused, perhaps searching for a word she wanted. “… more forthcoming.”

“I … I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Did he say anything about it? Your future?”

“No,” I said. “It sounds as if he may have told you more than he did me.”

“Ah.” The tsarina put a finger before her lips, as if cautioning me to keep a secret. “We—you—will have to be patient, then,” she said after a moment. “We will have to wait and see.”

I smiled in response to the tsarina’s smile, finding it hard to keep up my end of the conversation. In truth, I couldn’t think of any but one thing, my mind prodding and poking, tonguelike, at the absence of my father, pressing up against what was no longer there and trying to measure the loss. I didn’t want to contemplate his murder every minute, but I couldn’t stop adding up the days and hours leading to his disappearance as if it were an equation I could rework to arrive at a different answer, the one in which I’d had the foresight to prevent Father’s leaving the apartment that night. From my father’s death to my portion of responsibility for his death to Varya’s and my future, one fixation ceded to the next; there was our mother’s safety to worry over, and the dangers of travel versus those of remaining in Russia—

“You and your sister will live here, at Tsarskoe Selo. It was your father’s wish.”

“Thank you, your—”

“Please,” the tsarina said, and she shook her finger as though at a naughty child. “No titles. And no more curtsies either.”

I nodded. My head seemed to bob up and down on its own. Without falling back on prescribed formalities, I had little to say, and my eyes strayed to the books on the tsarina’s shelves and the paintings on her wall. History, mostly of the Orthodox Church, theology, and landscapes of mauve rivers and mauve forests and fields, mauve haystacks and mauve mountains. Suddenly, then, the overhead light went on and I saw that the tsarina had risen from her pillows. Sitting up straight as a fence post, her hand still on the switch plate, she was breathing rapidly and her eyes were frantic and bright, almost glittering. I wondered if she was suffering an attack of some kind, and I was on the point of calling for help when she reached out and seized my hand.

“I know it’s in you,” she said. Her hand wasn’t, like her words, feverish but as cold as though she had one foot in her grave. Other than suppressing a shudder, I didn’t respond to her assertion. Cryptic as it was, I could pretend I didn’t understand her meaning, and I remained silent under her stare. The voluble self I knew seemed to have parted company with me, and I felt as though I were inhabited by a stranger, her expression blank, seamless as an egg.

“That’s why he made Nikolay Alexandrovich your guardian, yours and your sister’s.” The tsarina’s eyes didn’t focus on my face so much as they approached it as they would the lid of a box. I could feel her looking for a place to pry me open and peer inside. “Your father wouldn’t have left Alyosha without having planned for his future. He sent you to us. He wanted you near the tsarevich, to keep him from harm. To heal him when he is ill and to comfort him. He sent you here for Alyosha. For Alyosha and for Russia as well.”

So I wasn’t beyond being shocked anew, as that declaration had my mouth open before I had anything to say. It was rumored the tsarevich had been a terror as a little boy, spoiled by a family and servants who couldn’t bear to deny a sick child whatever he asked, as long as it couldn’t harm him. At table he’d taken food from others’ plates, kicked and cried whenever he was disciplined. The risk that he might do himself injury while thrashing about was so great that soon even the hint of a tantrum’s approach guaranteed his demands would be satisfied immediately. Even were he no longer inclined to such tricks, he would still be accustomed to getting what he wanted.

“How do you know he didn’t send Varya?” I asked, surprising myself with my own impertinence, but the tsarina laughed. At least I hadn’t been so forward as to suggest my father might have put his daughters in the care of the tsar to protect us rather than the tsarevich.

“You know, Matryona Grigorievna—Masha—that it is you who takes after your father. And I’m not speaking of your blue eyes and black hair.” She squeezed my fingers with sudden strength. “You know I am right.”

“Yes,” I said. It seemed rude not to agree. I’d thought to claim my portion of the Neva’s water, but then I asked myself what it could give me that I didn’t already have. The tsarina was right, I did take after my father, if not in the one way she hoped.

The color of the tsarina’s lips was the same, exactly the same, as that of the cushion behind her head. I wondered why she didn’t trouble to rouge them and then asked myself why I was dwelling on so trivial a matter. Alexandra Fyodorovna. I’d never before thought of the tsarina as an ordinary woman, with a name like other women have, lying on a chair with a little table at her side and on it a crumpled handkerchief and a plain glass of water, half drunk, next to a small, worn Orthodox prayer book. The book had a red ribbon between its pages, to keep a reader’s place, and the ribbon’s unraveling at the end caught and for a moment held my eye. Alexandra Fyodorovna was the same as any other woman, the same and no different, and her health was poor; she was frightened for the safety of her son. I could feel her anxiety, even see its shadow pass across her features, as though a cloud had come between her and the light from overhead.

“What is it, my daughter?” she said, as if she’d perceived the shift in my understanding of her. “Do you mind if I call you my daughter?”

“No. You may, of course, call me what you please.” No matter what came out of my mouth, it sounded different from the way I’d meant it to. Either it was overly familiar or courteous to the point of seeming insincere.

“Wouldn’t you prefer to sit down?” Alexandra Fyodorovna said. “You’re pale.”

A telephone call away, that’s all Father had been. The tsarina’s driver would have left to fetch my father before she picked up the receiver to summon him, and Father would be delivered to the Alexander Palace in less than an hour. But now he was dead, no longer at her side to provide her strength, and the tsarina’s weak heart was beginning to fail. She’d always had bad spells, as I knew from my father, a month or more of breathlessness that kept her confined to bed, but I never imagined anyone could look as haggard as she did now. The continuing strain of the war against Germany; the food shortages; the strikes and the rioting; the long days she spent nursing moribund soldiers in one of the Red Cross’s makeshift hospitals (for she was always greedy for good works, for opportunities to sacrifice herself in the name of God and country): all of these had taken their toll on the woman my father and every other Russian peasant had learned to call Little Mother—Mamochka.

Mamochka, Father always said when he bent to kiss her jeweled white hand. I never heard him call her by any other name.

“How, then,” I said to the tsarina, “shall I address you?”

“In any way that you are comfortable, Masha. We are a family now, the Romanovs and the daughters of Father Grigory. Your father himself has ordained it. We no longer stand on ceremony. We are equals.”

This seemed unlikely—ridiculous. Still, I nodded and smiled politely.

BUT ALEXANDRA FYODOROVNA WAS RIGHT. Or, if she wasn’t right on the first day of 1917, she would be by the ides of March, when Tsar Nikolay was forced to surrender his throne, a blow she’d receive with the grace and fortitude expected of her station and that would complete the job of ruining her health irrevocably. Of course, the abdication of Nikolay II, emperor and autocrat of all the Russias, was a shock not only to us but to all the world, the kind of warning that ought to have been delivered by the Four Horse-men of the Apocalypse rather than a plain little military detail, for life as we knew it was over and Armageddon begun.

As for the tsarina, once she’d fulfilled the obligations of the wife of a deposed ruler (which was mostly, as far as I could tell, finding and burning whatever might be misconstrued as evidence of her husband’s having exploited the proletariat for the advancement of decadent, royalist agendas, should he be tried), she took to her bed once and for all, too distraught to tend to her own children, her four strapping daughters and Alyosha, the long awaited, greatly desired, and gravely ill son she bore for tsar and emperor, for Russia. The boy on whom so many hopes had been laid.

Lucky for me, to whom it fell—as good as by decree—to comfort Alyosha and keep him amused when he was confined to bed, it turned out the tsarevich was intoxicated by every detail of a country person’s simple life. He asked to hear about my father as a boy and what it was people did to amuse themselves in faraway Siberia. I could tell he pictured it all wrong, imagining everything east of the Urals to be a kind of uncharted territory without a single modern convenience—no train, no telegraph or telephone, no electricity or indoor plumbing. All of us squatting in yurts, stitching up hides into trousers and tunics, and wearing underclothes made of yarn from off our spinning wheels. Riding wild Tartar ponies and murdering, raping, and pillaging one another as a matter of course with our blackened frostbitten ears and fingers falling off. The kind of life a rich and pampered boy might think wild and romantic.

“Like Temujin!” he said, delighted with the idea.

“Who?”

“The Khan Temujin. Genghis Khan. Don’t you know anything, Masha?”

“A lot more than you do. Just not every detail about every last uncivilized warmonger. And, no, it was not like that. Fewer people and buildings, more flowers and less soot, that’s what it was.”

But Alyosha was no different from the rest of the Petersburg aristocrats who took one look at my father’s ill-kempt beard and threadbare tunic and confused him with Jesus. I told Alyosha no one back home ever had to worry about amusing themselves, as every member of a country family had to work all day to keep bread on the table. But to a bedridden prince, this, too, sounded like fun.

Of course, I had to tell Alyosha about Baba Yaga, for what proper Russian leaves childhood behind without learning about Baba Yaga and her hut? Somehow he’d got to the grand age of thirteen without having heard of her.

I told him Baba Yaga lived in the forest in a hut that danced on the legs of a chicken, sliding sideways through the trees and shadows, and I recited the magic words to speak at its door. Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest, your front to me.

“A new one,” Alyosha would say when I asked him what story to tell, and I did, more times than I can count. I made them up from bits and pieces of other tales, from what I knew and what I didn’t know I knew. Usually, the words flew out of my mouth before I had a chance to think them through, entertaining me as well. Alyosha—Tsarevich Alexei Nikolayevich Romanov—was a big boy, tall and sturdy for his age. But when he was ill, feverish and in pain, he liked to be babied. When he was ill you couldn’t imagine the boy he was when he was well, a boy whose nickname was Sunbeam; that was how easy it was for him to make others smile. But Sunbeam had inherited the English disease from Queen Victoria, his mother’s grandmother, an illness carried by females and suffered by males, a torture whose name was never spoken, not even by court physicians. Especially not by court physicians. The threat to the tsarevich’s life inspired fear so intense that to say its name aloud was dangerous and would have been unlawful had anyone been given leave to set the word down in ink. If the people were to learn that the crown prince—the future tsar and heir to the world’s greatest autocracy, ruler-to-be of two hundred million souls—could bleed to death from a tumble down the stairs or a bump on the nose, Russia’s ebbing faith in her government would drain away all the more quickly, hurrying the collapse of three centuries of Romanov rule and of tsarism itself.

Hemophilia: for all it was spoken, the word might as well have not been invented.

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