I watched the men toil with their long iron tools. That was the problem with Nicky, I thought. The tramline from his brain to his legs was in need of repair, and all that was necessary was to find the right workman. A name from out of nowhere flashed into my mind. There was one man in Petersburg who might be able to help Nicky – a man so famed for his healing powers that he had the confidence of the Tsar himself. Though even the idea made my skin crawl, I knew I had no choice but to go and see Rasputin.
“The master’s eating,” the mousey servant told me.
“I’ll … I’ll wait until he’s finished.”
The girl looked me up and down as if she were inspecting a side of meat at the market. “There’s no need to wait,” she said. “He likes people joining him at meal times – and he’ll like you, right enough.”
He was not alone. Round his table sat seven women, most of them young. They were all dressed smartly, in tailored costumes and blouses. Three were wearing hats with feathers sticking out from them. The rasputinki, their detractors called them – members of the prosperous bourgeoisie who had become the starets’ disciples. None of them looked up as I entered the room, their gazes were firmly fixed on Rasputin.
The starets noticed me, though, and his eyes burned with lust. Lust – but not recognition. Then realization came, and he smiled. “You look different, sister,” he said.
I was still wearing my peasant disguise! Such had been my desire to see him before my courage left me, that I’d forgotten to go back to the bakery and change. It was as Lyudmila, not Anna, that I was appearing before him.
“I … I was born a peasant,” I stuttered, “and I have come to you as a peasant. It’s an act of humility.”
“Humility. Yes,” Rasputin said. “Rejoice in simplicity. We are the rebellious and wicked. Lord, work miracles, humble us … Sit down, and we will eat.”
The servant brought me a chair, and I sat at the end of the table, among the rasputinki.
Eating with the starets had as much ritual to it as an Orthodox divine service. Rasputin piled spoonful upon spoonful of sugar into his disciples’ teacups, and the ladies drank the sickly-sweet liquid with a smile, since they considered it a form of grace. He bit into a pickled cucumber and offered the remains to one of his disciples, which she ate as though it were the body of Christ. He distributed hard-boiled eggs, which the women solemnly peeled, preserving the shells carefully in their handkerchiefs as holy relics – I was told that women honoured enough to be allowed to cut his toenails did the same with the clippings.
All the time he ate, Rasputin talked. “We are thine, Lord … Great is thy love for us … only through sin can there be forgiveness … the sins of my sisters here I take on me.”
As he spoke, he spat pieces of bread and cucumber rind from his mouth. He wore no napkin, and blobs of half-masticated food were soon caught in the long black hairs growing from his chin. If his followers noticed it, they took it as yet another sign of holiness.
Though I felt a growing sense of revulsion as the meal progressed, only once did I get the urge to stand up and run from the room – and that was just after Rasputin had dipped his fingers into the dish of jam.
He lifted his hand up for all to see. His fingers were covered to the knuckles with the sticky red substance, as if he had bathed in blood. He held out his hand to the woman closest to him. “Humble yourself,” he said.
The disciple stretched forward and took a thick, peasant finger in her mouth. The finger stayed immobile, so it was her head which was forced to move back and forward during the holy cleansing. Rasputin sat back in his chair and let a smile of perfect contentment play on his lips, a smile which acknowledged – and revelled in – the power he had over this woman.
When all the fingers were licked clean, Rasputin finally fixed his gaze on me. “Come,” he said. “We’ll go to my bedroom.”
I rose to my feet and followed him meekly. The humiliation of the other woman had been just a taster – an hors-d’oeuvre – I was to be the main course.
The bedroom was straight off the dining room. As Rasputin closed the door behind us the rasputinki, now out of their master’s presence, began to talk excitedly amongst themselves. Did they know what was about to happen? Probably. And did it bother them? No! Whatever the starets did was taken as a further sign of his holiness.
“Months have passed since I saw you at Papa’s palace,” Rasputin said to me. “I asked you to visit me.”
“I wanted to see you,” I lied. “I haven’t been able to. My husband wouldn’t allow—”
“The Lord will not wait forever. Yea, and he will smite the unrighteous with his sword and cleave them in two.”
“I … I have a favour to ask of you,” I said.
“A favour?” Rasputin smiled the smile of a cunning peasant who knows he holds all the cards.
“My son has no movement in his legs.”
Slowly and deliberately, the starets placed his hands on my shoulders and pulled me towards him. My body screamed at me to resist, but my will held me firm – for the moment.
Rasputin lowered his head to mine. His lips were sticky and cold. It was as if a slug had fastened itself to me. The smell of him filled my nostrils – the cheap soap, the perfume, the decaying food in his beard. His tongue forced my teeth open and entered my mouth – exploring, violating. His hand moved to my left breast and began to paw it, pressing and squeezing, pressing and squeezing.
A second’s weakness – I broke away.
“Can you cure my son?” I asked.
“Perhaps,” the starets answered. “Love can cure many things. And my love is great … great is my love. But love is a reservoir … it must be filled by the rain of more love. Do you love me?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then fill my tank … pour your love into me.”
I could taste bile in my mouth, and felt I was going to vomit. I think Rasputin would have liked it if I had been sick. It would have added pleasure to my submission to him if he’d realized just how much I loathed him.
I swallowed hard. “Shall I undress?”
“Disrobe me first,” he said. “Take the staff of my love in your mouth … yield righteousness from it … your sins I take upon me … you are my sister and no harm can come …”
I knelt down in front of him. The floor was hard against my knees. Rasputin’s trousers bulged as his stiff penis strained against the cloth.
The staret’s hands were on my head, his fingers tugging at my hair, raking my skull. “See, oh Lord, see!” he said loudly. “See how our little sister gives her love.”
Trembling, I reached for for the top of his trousers – and felt his hand on my head, pushing me away. What had I done wrong? How had I displeased him?
“Store up your treasures,” Rasputin told me.
“You want me to go?”
“Go! Go as the Canaanites and wander in the wilderness.”
Did he want me to beg? Was that what would make him happy – to see me grovelling at his feet, begging him to let me take his foul prick in my mouth? Very well. “Please,” I said. “I need your love. I need to be purified.”
“Store up your treasures,” the starets said again. “For if a gift be worth the giving, so it is worth the waiting.”
I looked up at him, at the lust which still burned in his eyes, and suddenly understood. He wanted me very badly, but his desire for the flesh was not as great as his love of the power he had over me. Once I had performed the act, he would never be able to humiliate me quite as much again, whatever he made me do. He wanted me, oh yes, and he’d have me, but for just a little while longer he wanted to hold on to the feeling of my submissiveness, my helplessness – my shame.
“Tomorrow,” he said again. “Tomorrow you will come back and show me that you love me. Then I will cure your son.”
I took the stairs up to the nursery two at a time. I had to see Nicky! I desperately needed the strength I could draw from him – the strength I needed to
go back to Rasputin’s apartment the next day.
I flung the nursery door open. Konstantin was there, leaning over the crib, pedalling the baby’s legs. I threw my arms around my husband and sobbed. I knew it was weak, but I couldn’t help myself.
“What’s wrong?” Konstantin asked worriedly.
I didn’t dare tell him for fear that he might try to stop me. “I … it’s … it doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ll be all right in a second.”
“There must be something wrong,” Konstantin persisted.
How tempting it was to spill it all out, to let Konstantin take the responsibility for my visiting – or not visiting – Rasputin again.
“I’m … I’m just upset about Nicky,” I sobbed. “The poor little mite.”
Konstantin prised me gently away from him and turned me so I was facing the crib.
“Look at him,” he said. “Look at our child.”
The tears streamed down my face, and it was as if I were watching my baby through a window on a very rainy day. But I could still see that he was the most beautiful, wonderful child in the world. No sacrifice was too great to make, I thought. What did my life matter when weighed against his?
Konstantin leant forward again and ran his finger lightly along the sole of the baby’s left foot. Nicky gurgled with happiness. And then he kicked his leg.
Nicky would always limp slightly, but it became hardly noticeable. It didn’t stop his having as normal a childhood as was possible in those times. It didn’t prevent him fighting by my side in Spain.
Perhaps whatever was wrong with him had been remedied by nature. Or perhaps Rasputin had been right, and he was cured by the power of love. But if that was true, then the love had not come from a healer who abused his blessed gift by bartering it for sexual favours – the love had come unselfishly from a man who’d have laid down his life for a child who wasn’t even his own.
Chapter Sixteen
At one o’clock, having eaten my thrifty lunch, I set out for the Vulcan, as I do every day, come rain or shine. Why every day? Because there is something in me which fears that if I miss, even once, I will never be able to force myself to make the effort again.
Perhaps whatever happens, this will be my last visit. The armies ranged against me are formidable – my great-granddaughters and their husbands, the social service department, a whole society which believes that the old have outlived their usefulness, even to themselves. Yes, my foes are formidable indeed – and I am not the fighter I once was.
As I make my way carefully along Matlock Road, a feeling of gloom and despondency weighs down heavily on my thin shoulders. It is a feeling I have experienced before. In the spring of 1914, the whole of the city of St Petersburg was suffering from it.
Petersburg was drifting. Boredom, or gloom – or possibly a combination of the two – hung over the city like a black, sticky cloud. Suicide was almost an epidemic. Government was at a standstill as the Duma became embroiled in any number of petty squabbles with the Tsar’s ministers. A wave of strikes and demonstrations – in which an underground revolutionary called Lyudmila was heavily involved – shook the capital. Things could not go on as they had been. Everybody knew it – though not many people could bring themselves to care. Something had to happen.
Konstantin was one of the few men in the city who seemed to have any energy left – but his, as always, was that of three ordinary men. He had been posted to the General Staff, and was furious about it. “They don’t take the job seriously,” he complained. “There are fifteen religious holidays in May. Fifteen! And they intend to celebrate every one of them. When what they should really be doing is preparing for the war!”
“Are you sure it’ll come?” I asked anxiously.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“But who wants it? Who’s looking for it?”
Konstantin shrugged. “A few generals, perhaps. The odd ambitious politician. The arms manufacturers. A minority of the people in power, certainly.”
“Then why will it happen?”
“Simply because it must. You can put a lot of wolf-hound puppies in one cage, but what happens when they start to grow?”
“They each need more space.”
“Exactly. And unless the rest are prepared to defer to one leader, or one group of leaders, they’ll fight for it. Fight for more territory, fight for the strategic position near the door, so they can get at the food first. Does that mean they’re naturally bad-tempered or vicious?”
“No. It’s just the situation they’re in.”
“And that’s what it’s like in Europe – we’ve all grown up and now the cage is too small.”
Konstantin worked like a madman during those first few months of 1914, bullying men who outranked him, pushing through reforms against entrenched opposition – and all in aid of a war he was almost certain we couldn’t win. Courage in the face of hopelessness is, I think, the greatest courage of all. I only wish that in all my defeats I had shown half the spirit which came as naturally as breathing to my husband.
Yet it was not all work, Konstantin made sure of that. He found time to take me to the Mariinsky theatre to see Pavlova in Petrouchka and to the Musical Drama Theatre to hear the great Chaliapine sing.
“A man who says he can’t find the time to relax either has too many decisions to make or is taking too long to decide,” my husband told me. “In either case, he’s performing his duties badly.”
I don’t think he even realized that he was indirectly criticizing his lord and master, the Tsar.
Though there was still some time before a formal declaration of hostilities, the slide into the Great War began on the 28th of June 1914, with the assassination of Grand Duke Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist.
In early July, President Poincaré paid an official visit to Petersburg to reassure us of France’s solidarity with Russia – but it only served to convince people that the outbreak of war was imminent. The Empress came out of seclusion to attend a banquet in his honour, and after it, she summoned me to her private apartments in the Winter Palace.
She looked terrible. Her face was flushed, veins stood out on her cheeks. She was only forty-two, but she looked like a woman preparing to die. “You haven’t visited us for quite some time,” she said reproachfully.
“Your Majesty has not invited me.”
“I have not had the strength to put pen to paper,” the Empress said wearily, “but you, coming from where you do, should have been able to sense that I needed you.” Her face softened until it was almost pleading. “Do come and see me, Anna.”
“I will, Your Majesty,” I promised.
It would be comforting, now that I am nothing but a powerless, old woman, to ascribe statesman-like motives to that promise. Little Anna influencing the Empress, helping steer the ship of state through troubled waters. Or Lyudmila the Revolutionary, pretending to be Anna, giving the Empress false advice, hastening the fall of the Romanovs and the triumph of the proletariat. It would be comforting, but it wouldn’t be true. Looking at that small, ill woman, the wife of the most absolute ruler in Europe but as lonely as the humblest pensioner in Matlock Road, my heart stirred. I promised to go and see her because I felt sorry for her.
On the 29th of July, Austrian gunboats bombarded Belgrade, the Serbian capital.
“The Austrians are fools,” Konstantin told me over dinner. “Not only are they hell-bent on plunging us into a general conflict, but they’ve attacked before they’re even ready themselves.”
“I thought they mobilized their army four days ago,” I said.
“They ordered the mobilization, yes, but that’s not the same thing. Imagine it, Anna. After the soldiers have been called up, they have to travel to their units. The transport system, which works perfectly adequately in peace time, is suddenly swamped by millions of men and huge amounts of matériel There are delays – inevitably. Men report for duty when they can, they’re issued with equipment when it arrives. Eventually, all the units
are up to fighting strength – but it takes time. I’d estimate they won’t be fully ready for another eleven or twelve days.”
I thought of Russia – its vastness and its inefficiency. “And it would take us even longer than that,” I said.
“Much, much longer,” Konstantin agreed gloomily.
The next afternoon, our weak, vacillating Tsar put his signature to a document declaring complete the mobilization of the army. Germany responded with frightening speed, sending an ultimatum to the Foreign Ministry demanding that Russia suspend all war preparations or face the consequences.
It had started – the armed struggle which would dissolve the Europe we’d known, the war which would turn the whole continent into a charnel house.
Chapter Seventeen
It’s impossible to adequately describe the fever which swept through Petersburg. Gloom and despair became things of the past. Patriotism and loyalty to the Tsar were the new virtues. The German Embassy was attacked, and the two bronze horses on its roof were hurled down into the street, while the crowd, carrying flags and icons, cheered wildly. The Duma, from being at daggers drawn with the Government, voted almost unanimously to support it in its war effort. Strikes were called off, demonstrations were now in favour of the Tsar’s ministers. The name of the city was changed from the Germanic sounding ‘St Petersburg’ to the thoroughly Russian ‘Petrograd’. All over the country, peasants and workers responded willingly to the call-up and younger sons of the aristocracy put in rapid applications for commissions.
And then the war started to go badly. The border with our enemies was five hundred and fifty miles long. The army was poorly equipped, and poorly supplied. Only a fool would have considered taking the offensive – but that was exactly what Grand Duke Nicholas, the Tsar’s uncle, did. Before even a third of his army was deployed, he attacked on three fronts. The defeats which followed were so bloody that even the German commander, Hindenburg, admitted to being sickened by the sight of the mounds of Russian dead who had to be moved in order to get a clear field of fire at the next, suicidal onslaught.
The Silent Land Page 18