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

his supposed influence over the tsarina—bore witness to the pressures heaped upon my father.
    Varya and Dunia lived with us, of course, but I was the one who worried over things my sister never considered, and when Dunia wasn’t out to market or cooking what she’d bought there or washing and ironing clothes or sitting at the kitchen table darning socks, or any of the countless tasks she performed each day, she kept to her room and her Sears, Roebuck catalogue. She couldn’t read it—she couldn’t read any language—and it was several years out of date, but it wasn’t the idea of ordering anything that drew her back to it. She told me she just liked looking at pictures of machines used in the home, that was all. I’ve wondered since if Dunia imagined from the illustrations that there was, or would someday be, another life for wives and servants. I asked her once what she thought of such things as democracy and women’s suffrage, but after I explained them she only shook her head, apparently mystified.
    Mother asked me, one summer when I was home from school, about the women on the stairs. Did he love any of them, she wanted to know.
    “I don’t think he even knows their names,” I told her.
    A S A YOUNG MAN IN P OKROVSKOYE , my father had liked to watch the girls in town, especially when they went to the river to bathe and afterward lay their bodies on their discarded clothing to dry in the sun, naked for anyone to see. And he liked taking his father’s cart to the market in Kuban and meeting girls along the way. There were innkeepers’ daughters who were happy to warm a young man’s bed before he went to sleep. By the time my father found the woman who would become his wife, he was well practiced in kissing and probably much more.
    In 1888, when the Dubrovins moved from Yekaterinburg to Pokrovskoye, my mother was twenty-three and my father was nineteen. They met during the May Festival, when the people of our village carried ikons down our one street to greet the spring, dragged tables from their houses into the sun, and piled them with food and drink, and there was no one too old or too young to resist the rhythm of the “Kalinka.” My mother was beautiful, even by Petersburg standards, and she was voluptuous and blond and educated. My father could dance like a demon. From the ends of his too-long hair to the cracked leather of his peasant boots, he moved in a way that made people take notice, and once they’d looked they couldn’t stop. He was tall and rawboned, and his long legs stamped and jigged so quickly it was hard to tell what steps they followed—a dance of his own devising, that much was clear.
    Whatever my father did betrayed his carnal nature. Not that he made any vulgar movements; he didn’t have to. No one could watch my father do anything physical in the company of awoman—walk, plow, sweep—without sensing lust and the intent to gratify it. Dancing, he took hold of a girl and led her firmly. One after another he took them, twirled them, wore them out, and left them breathless and clapping among the others in his spellbound audience. He spun my future mother until her cheeks blazed and her skirts flew out, twisting around his legs as well as her own. If I know my father, and I do, he spun every last thought out of her head and left it empty, ready to receive annunciation.

A Stately Pleasure Dome

    W HITE WITH WHITE . White with black. Black with black. Bay with bay. Dappled gray with silver. There never was a time when the Nevsky Prospekt wasn’t crowded with long queues of fashionable sleighs, each pulled by a team of matching horses whose color complemented or reflected that of the sleigh, all of them moving slowly up and down the avenue and all the beautiful horses exhaling clouds of steaming warm breath. For there was never a temperature so low as to dissuade the vehicles’ occupants from their daily promenade. They weren’t going to wait for a party to show off new furs and