Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison

its outermost twigs like fingers cradling the head of a newborn. One sleeping soul rested along the length of each branch, toes toward the trunk. Some lay on their sides, some on their backs; all had his or her eyes closed.
    “Bring a light,” Alyosha asked when I came back with the drawing. It was late in the afternoon; the room had fallen into shadows. Alyosha studied each face on each bough, looking for a likeness of himself, I assumed, but I kept this to myself.
    “What happened next, Father?” I’d always ask about his walk in the Silver Forest, and he always answered with the same word: “Nothing.”
    Nothing happened, at least not as things usually do. He’d known he was in the presence of the Virgin, that’s all, and his happiness was so intense he neither moved nor dared think his own thoughts for fear she’d leave him, and when she did leave he fell to his knees and wept.
    M Y FATHER WASN’T BORN with the power to heal. He described himself as an indolent second son, who neither expected nor wantedto inherit the family farm. Even when he wasn’t busy causing the usual adolescent mischief, he didn’t make himself useful. He never could think about working when there was a girl in sight, and both he and his older brother, Misha, looked forward to Misha receiving all their father’s property.
    But in the spring of 1883, when my father was fourteen and Misha sixteen, the brothers suffered an accident together. The snows were melting and the Tura was running high and fast, but boys, boys—they do seem determined to prove themselves idiots. Having hiked to a bend in the river not far upstream from the falls where the Tura joined the Tobol, the two set down their picnic of bread, onions, kvass, and white cheese. They were going to bathe in the river before they stuffed themselves with all they’d plundered from their mother’s pantry. But Father hadn’t even undressed before his brother went in and was caught by the current. Father waded in to save Misha, but he couldn’t. The water was so strong and held Misha so fiercely that, once Father had an arm around his brother’s neck, both boys were pulled downstream and nearly drowned. A man who happened to see—it was Arkhip Kaledin, the village blacksmith—fished them out before they reached the falls, but they took fevers, and in three days Misha was dead.
    After he lost his brother, my father’s illness was made worse by his grief, and for weeks he went on being feverish and delirious and saying things no one could follow, until one day he woke up with voices in his ears. Sometimes they told him of things that had yet to come to pass; other times they revealed secrets or thoughts people hadn’t voiced. He identified a man who had stolen a horse from a neighbor; he predicted the day, even the hour, of an uncle’s death. The grass began talking to him, and the trees told him their secrets. When raindrops pocked the surface of still water, he could read the marks they made just as other men read a newspaper.
    Worms under the dirt, they talked to him. If he lay down in ameadow, he couldn’t sleep for all the noise beneath his head. The cries of trees feeling the woodsman’s ax, the keening of sheep for their slain lambs, the scream of a rabbit with its leg in a snare. And the underwater screeching of the fish that swallowed a hook didn’t drown out the shriek of the worm impaled on the hook. There was no voice he could refuse to hear, and this was frightening before it was tolerable, and tolerable before it was something he understood as a gift. Even when he was able to find joy in his unusual sympathies, still they exhausted him. To be at the mercy of all creation—because that was how it felt—sometimes this was a dreadful blight. Even if he clapped his hands over his ears, plugged them with his fingers, he couldn’t escape the clamor. And what was he to do with such a gift? How was he to use it?
    By the time I could sit up and take notice of who