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

was around me, my father was no longer there. He’d left home to find his purpose in the world. On foot he tried to overtake it, his destiny, and he walked hundreds of miles, thousands of miles, before he at last arrived in St. Petersburg, and what he did along the way became a matter of curiosity and debate. The Mad Monk Rasputin had been, it was said, indoctrinated into a cult that preached sin as the means to redemption, and it was thus that he learned to be less a healer than a sexual outlaw, mesmerizing ladies of the court with the same hypnotic power he held over Alyosha and his disorderly blood. Somewhere along his path to the nation’s capital, rumor had it, my father fell in with the Khlysty, whose members were thought to meet in the woods, where they lashed one another into a frenzy of lust, heightened by vodka and, ultimately, quenched by fornication.
    It’s possible. My father did enjoy the company of women. He wasn’t much of a drinker, though, not before he came to St. Petersburg and found himself badgered day and night by countless petitioners eager to exploit his influence on the royal family.
•  •  •
    A FTER M ISHA DIED , my grandfather Yefim told my father he expected him to assume ownership of the family farm, a thought that filled my father with dread. A daydreamer, Father took every opportunity to slip away from mending a fence or digging potatoes, from whatever my grandfather expected him to do, and wandered afield, called away from his chores by ants whispering in the grass or sent away by the protests of potatoes that didn’t want to be pulled from their home in the soil. He could hear clouds gliding high overhead, and the singing of stones. He’d heard the Virgin calling him when he was ill. If he listened carefully, she told him, the world would reveal his vocation. Perhaps he’d be a hero of some kind. That would attract girls, with their soft skin, and their tight bodices that showed him just a little of their white bosoms, and their warm thighs that he tried to feel beneath their skirts.
    I saw my father with countless women. In droves they came to the apartment at 64 Gorokhovaya Street, dressed in finery, silk buttons he undid with his unwashed hands, so I know of what I speak. Women threw themselves at my father. From dawn to dusk and late into the night, an endless line of them waited on the stairs to our apartment. They were always there, as familiar as the wallpaper. They wanted to be held and kissed and bedded by a man different from any they’d known. They wanted their hair mussed and the color on their lips smeared. They wanted the feel of his hot, callused hands on their smooth skin. They wanted to be healed, comforted, and even, some of them, scolded.
    They wanted his blessing, or they wanted a more tangible favor: one of the notes I wrote and he signed. In order to preserve the secret of his illiteracy, I made up hundreds of these in advance and kept the desk in the sitting room well stocked with all he needed. Dear Friend, As a favor to me, have pity on the bearer of this message and grant what she requests. Father Grigory . There was another version for men, and I made far fewer of those.
    “See, Father?” I said, pointing out that the ones for women were in the drawer on the right, those for men on the left. “And, look, I’ve tied a ribbon around the handle of the right drawer, just in case you forget.” Not that he ever forgot anything.
    A petition to have an officer husband moved away from the front? He could pack his kit that very day. An introduction to the creative director of the Ballets Russes? What could be easier? To avoid the censure of a man whose wishes were the tsarina’s command, or so it was rumored, a madman who had power over life and death, Mr. Diaghilev would be happy to receive an unexpected guest.
    I don’t know that anyone else in my family—or anyone else who knew him, because the poor man had no friends, only those who intended to use