Coming to a double door on the left, we turned into the children’s playroom, where years earlier I had been brought to play with the Tsar’s third daughter, Maria Nikolaevna, who was my age. Now, upon entering the large room, we found not the tepee, the tom-toms, the toy dog on wheels, or even Aleksei’s clockwork train, of which he was so proud, but rather a busy cluster of men gossiping sternly among themselves. There was also a man, his back to us, who was sobbing quietly but furiously as he leaned against the tall green tile stove on the far wall. As I quickly trotted after Papa and Madame Vyrubova toward another door, we passed a group of men-a bevy of doctors and specialists-who glared at us and practically spit on Rasputin. But Papa didn’t notice, so I tried to ignore them too. All that mattered, all that my father was focusing on, was the shrieking from the next room.
“Help me!” came the scream. “Mama, help me!”
One of Papa’s greatest skills was his amazing ability to concentrate. He could study a single Bible passage for a week. He could search the morose face of an icon for an entire day. And now he focused on the cry of the Heir Tsarevich Aleksei Nikolaevich, reading the tone of pain as intently as if it were a heavenly hymn.
“Not a moment too soon,” he muttered, his right hand clutching the gold cross, a gift from the Empress herself, that hung around his neck.
Just before I followed him through the next doorway, I glanced once again at the tall stove. The man leaning against the tiles turned and our eyes caught. Gospodi, it was the Tsar himself, his eyes wet and red. My heart ached for him. Was the boy truly on the doorstep of death?
“Mama, I can’t! I can’t! It’s too much!” came the plea from the boy’s chamber. “Please make it stop! Please let me die!”
As we entered the next room, a string of prayers fell from Papa’s lips, a heavenly chant, a call to God for His mercy. My father shed his peasant coat, dropping it to the floor, and pressed onward, but I stopped, moving against one of the windows, which was covered with large floral curtains. The only light in the room came from the oil lamps suspended before the multitude of icons encased in their large curving kiot. Gazing through the soft, smoky light, I saw Aleksei Nikolaevich writhing in pain as he lay on his simple nickel-plated camp bed. It seemed as if his failed body were trying to pull his soul across the threshold of death, while Russia ’s mighty Empress, Aleksandra Fyodorovna, who was on her knees clutching her son’s hand, was trying just as hard to keep him here. Like a mother superior, she was huddled in prayer, begging God for mercy, begging God to save this child who was lost in fever.
“Mama…Mama…,” he gasped, “will it hurt so much when I go to Heaven?”
With supreme confidence, Papa strode right up behind the Empress, placing his hand directly on her shoulder as if she were nothing more than the commonest of commoners. Startled, Aleksandra Fyodorovna turned, looked up, and, upon seeing him, half swooned to the side, falling upon his thigh like an eager lover. Unable to control herself, the Empress of All the Russias grabbed this ugly peasant’s ugly hand and kissed it passionately.
“Thank you, Father Grigori. Thank you for coming,” she gasped in relief. “Aleksei fell on his knee, and now he needs you badly. We all need you. Help us, please help us!”
My father said nothing, focusing only on the boy. The Empress, whose health and beauty had been ravaged by years of worry and anxiety, started to beg a question but stopped. I knew what it was. She wanted to know what none of those doctors or specialists in the playroom could tell her: Would the boy cheat death yet again? She started to speak but instead started to sob, and seemed about to faint. Indeed, she might have tumbled over had she not been leaning so heavily on her Friend, her Savior, my father.
Practically brushing her aside, Papa pressed himself up against the bed and stared down upon the pathetic child, who gazed up at him with hollow eyes, eyes that expressed nothing but excruciating pain. Pulling aside a light blanket, Papa saw a leg hideously bloated with blood, twisted and bent up to the boy’s chest. Papa made the sign of the cross over Aleksei and placed one of his massive hands directly on the boy’s damp, feverish forehead. He then reached down and closed his fingers firmly around the boy’s right hand. Papa had healed me from the worst illnesses in just this manner, and I knew he could read it all: the boy’s fear, the panic of those around him, the hopelessness everyone sensed, and the boy’s pain-the unbelievable pain of the pounding blood that had burst from the veins, swelled the skin, and twisted the limbs.
Without so much as glancing down at her, Papa barked at the Empress, “Leave us!”
Aleksandra Fyodorovna could barely rise, so wrought with worry was she, so pummeled by years of constant fear, the fear that hung like a guillotine over her head every moment of every day, the fear that today the blade might come suddenly crashing down and she would lose her beloved son. She tried to push herself to her feet but could not. She rose, and then sank, and I was about to hurry to her side when a short but muscular figure charged into the room. Rushing right up to her, the man tenderly reached down and took her in his own shaking but loving hands.
“Come, my dear,” the Tsar urged gently, his own tears now controlled. “We must let Father Grigori do his work.”
“Oh, Nicky!” She wept, clutching his arms, kissing his hands. “I…I…”
Then Papa offered the greatest of benedictions. “Do not worry. God has heard your prayers. Now leave us!”
Aleksandra tried to contain herself. The strongest of mothers, the mightiest of tsaritsas, attempted to restrain her joy, but she could not. She fell apart, and tears of boundless relief burst from her eyes.
“Thank you, oh, thank you!” she exclaimed, grabbing my father’s hand and kissing it.
The Tsar, small tears glistening in his eyes, leaned down, kissed my father’s hand, and thanked him too. “Spasibo.”
“Take care, my Sunbeam,” said Aleksandra Fyodorovna, kissing her son tenderly on the forehead. “Rest well, my dearest. Did you hear Father Grigori? You’re in the hands of God. Let’s all get some rest…and we’ll come back later. Everything’s going to be fine. We’ll be back later to kiss you good night.”
“Yes, Mama,” the boy replied softly, as if the pain was already beginning to pass.
Papa didn’t move. He didn’t budge. Not as the Tsar escorted his wife from the room. Not as the doctors and specialists were sent away. Not as the bedchamber and playroom were emptied. My father banished everyone, every last one of them except me, and within moments all was quiet and the door to the boy’s room was shut. Only I was left because only I understood how to serve Papa, only I, his own flesh and blood, could anticipate his needs. Dropping my coat on a chair, I pushed myself back into the tall floral curtains, where I disappeared. My own deep eyes never left Papa, who kept one hand pressed against Aleksei’s forehead, the other clasped around his fingers. Hidden in the vines and flowers of the fine fabric, I stared at my father as he chanted prayers and began the work for which he was both worshiped and reviled, that greatest of Christian gifts, the laying on of hands. But would he be able to perform a miracle yet again?
“Dear God,” I prayed quietly, “please grant Papa strength, please let Aleksei Nikolaevich live through the night.”
CHAPTER 16
For all my frustrations with my father, I knew one thing for sure: He was a healer. I knew this for one simple reason: Whenever I was ill, his presence, his touch, and his prayers not only made me feel better, they returned me with speed to good health.
The horse with the lame leg-the very first creature he had ever healed-knew that as well, as did the babushka, once bent with arthritis and now walking tall. And the boy run over by the carriage, now living in happiness and good health. Also Madame Vyrubova, who survived the train wreck when the doctors thought her lost. Papa had healed hundreds, if not thousands. Indeed, his powers were not limited to mere living creatures. Back home farmers frequently brought him cumbersome bags of seed to bless, and when he did-holding them close to his
heart and chanting heavenly words-they grew into the best fields of rye. Everyone in our province was aware of that. Seeds and plants that Papa talked to would thrive, whereas the ones he ignored would more often than not fail.
My own mother believed firmly in my father’s skills. Healers, she said, had always existed across our vast nation, men and women who could bring nature under their control. They were known by the Siberian word shaman, and in the 1700s they were found by explorers all the way from the Urals to Chukchi in the Far East. Like Christ, they were special people with a special touch who could make the blind see and the lame walk. It was only recently that modern thoughts-modern Western thoughts, my mother always added, with great disdain-had torn the fabric of our ancient Russian beliefs, casting doubts and questions everywhere. Whereas before we took understanding and meaning from the sun and the moon, the trees and the plants, the modern scientists of the last fifty years, almost all of them educated abroad, were trying to explain away our natural world, not in a spiritual manner but a logical and mechanical one, continually dissecting everything into neat little black-and-white packages.
“If your father had been born a hundred years earlier,” Mama had said one snowy afternoon, as her thick fingers made a large, square pirog-a savory pie-filled with fish in one corner, wild mushrooms in the next, potatoes and onion in the third, and chopped egg in the fourth, “all Russia would be at his feet. Back then no one questioned the ability or the respectability of a healer. And that’s the difference between your father and the modern scientists and doctors-your father seeks to heal people, whereas they seek to cure them.”
My mother hated Sankt Peterburg. It wasn’t the capital of Russia, she said, it was the capital of the material world, Peter the Great’s little window onto Europe which had let in this terrible draft, and made our country ill…with two different sorts of consumption. I had read how even our great Leo Tolstoy had said the capital city was “stupefied and deadened by wine, wealth, and lovemaking without love.” Yes, call it Sankt Peterburg or Petrograd, the capital had lost in the struggle of the spirit over the flesh, the very struggle my father was determined to fight every single day of his life.
And which the Heir Tsarevich Aleksei Nikolaevich himself was now facing.
I looked past my father, past the small blue robe draped on a bedside chair, and stared at the young boy, lying there on his nickel camp bed. Never had I seen such pain, such a blatant fight between good and evil. And in this child I saw not just an illness but a terrible metaphora for all the woes facing the Empire. Here was a young boy afflicted by a sickness brought into Russia by his Western relatives, a disease against which even the best Western doctors were powerless. Only Papa-who’d walked barefoot out of the depths of Russia -and his crude, backward spiritual treatments had offered any hope, let alone comfort. Yes, lying here before me was the body, the vessel, of a small boy, torn between East and West, ancient and modern. Looking at him, one couldn’t help but wonder if the sickly dynasty was strong enough to go on or if the time had come for it simply and easily, to die away.
“Help me, please, Father Grigori,” Aleksei beckoned, reaching up from the bed. “I hurt.”
“I am here, Alyosha. And through me God’s will shall be done. He has seen and heard your suffering, my child, and he has chosen to remove your pain.”
“Thank you, Father Grigori.”
“I have done nothing,” said Papa, whose greatest skill was, undoubtedly, his ability to calm people. “It is God Himself whom you must thank.”
“Da-s,” he said, and closed his young eyes in serene prayer.
My father started chanting and mumbling, and as the words of the Lord fell upon the child, covering him in a blanket of sweetness, I could feel his tension passing. I too closed my eyes, found my lips mumbling, praying, calling to the heavens for serenity and peace, comfort and warmth. I bowed my head and emptied my body of myself. Yes, we have power, all of us, to affect things, just as things themselves have power as well. Like a dream out of nowhere, an image of a blue heart-shaped diamond came into my mind’s eye. I could see it as clearly as if I were holding it. I knew what it was. I had read about this gem in our papers, and the ladies had talked of it at the tea table. It was huge and gorgeous, supposedly stolen from the eye of an idol, a terribly famous diamond that had belonged to many doomed personages, including the ill-fated Marie Antoinette, the Hope family of bankers, our Prince Ivan Kanitowsky, and now an American heiress. Death had followed the diamond everywhere and, I was sure, would continue to do so now that it had left Russia for America. So if death could be attached to an inanimate thing, couldn’t goodness be tied to something as well? Absolutely, I thought, reaching into my dress and clutching the small Orthodox cross that hung from my neck. Yes, there was hope.
“Death is not here today,” I mumbled aloud, not sure how or why I knew this, but certain that I did.
“It has passed us by,” muttered my father, mid-prayer.
A shiver traveled my spine, reached a crescendo, and flowed down my arms and out my fingertips. What was it that I was feeling, this glory, this exaltation now surging through me? And where was it coming from?
“It comes from on high,” said my father, as if he’d heard my silent question. “Dochenka maya, please come here.”
I trembled like a schoolgirl called on by a dominating teacher. The fingers of my right hand clutched the fine curtain. Did Papa intend to involve me in some way?
“Come, child of mine,” my father beckoned, holding out his hand with its incredibly long, gnarled fingers.
There were so many things I didn’t understand about my father. Then again, all that mattered was what he could do right here and now. Papa, I realized, was like Chiron the centaur, who had been wounded by a poisoned arrow but did not die, and who could heal everyone but himself. If only the entire country were here, right in this bedchamber, there would be no shouts for my father’s death, there would be no calling the Empress a traitor. Quite the contrary. She and my father were doing everything they could to save the Heir and the Empire.
Following my father and his unspoken movement, I proceeded around the nickel bed, while Papa continued to the kiot, which was filled with a glittering mass of gold-covered and bejeweled holy icons and flickering lamps. As his hand stretched upward, I knew at once which icon he was reaching for, the radiant Kazanskaya, Our Lady of Kazan, the painted image covered in a mass of gold, seed pearls, emeralds, and diamonds. Depicting the Holy Mother and Child, this icon had over the centuries become linked with the destiny of Russia. While the original rested in town in the Kazanski Cathedral on Nevsky Prospekt, there were many miracle-working copies, of which I could only hope this was one. In our own family this icon was of particular importance for the story of my namesake, little Matryona. In the 1500s a soldier’s house had burned entirely to the ground and everything was thought lost, icons and all. That night, the soldier’s daughter, Matryona, had a vision of the Holy Mother in the ashes. No one believed her, but Matryona insisted, and in time a spade was got, the girl’s mother dug, and the icon was found, completely undamaged. Ever since, many miracles had taken place before this icon, including when it was taken into battle and victory was secured, first over the Poles and much later over Napoleon.
Papa reached up, placed one hand just before the icon, and intoned, “O Most Holy Mother of God, Thou who saved Thine image from harm, we beseech Thee to save us, Thine unworthy ones!”
My father stood there, mumbling and chanting, trembling and shaking. As he called to the heavens to pour forth from and through this religious image, I watched-and felt it, a power, a kind of divine security. Slowly, Papa turned to me, his eyes not blinking, but steadfast and remarkably intent.
“Matryona, daughter of mine,” he said, his voice unusually deep and strange, “turn and place your hands over the boy’s pain.”
I panicked. I had seen death, but only at a distance. I had heard pain, but only from afar. I looked down at my open palm
s, which were staring blankly back up at me. What were these simple hands and what could they do? Might I hurt the boy instead of help?
Suddenly Papa was touching me on the forehead, saying, “Your wisdom and faith are not here.” Next he was pressing his flat hand against my chest and over my heart. “But here.”
Startled and worried, I raised my eyes.
“There is no fear here tonight, my Matryona. Trust me. Tonight you must help me reach from the icon to the boy, which you can do. It is time for you to realize your own strengths, of which you have a great many.”
As soon as he said it, I realized my father was right. I didn’t know if I’d inherited something from him, much in the same way as a singer or painter or sculptor inherits gifts from her parents, or if in fact I had merely observed and absorbed my father’s skills. But I felt something, a power perhaps, albeit nascent. Or perhaps what I recognized was simply belief, a trust that these things can be made to happen, that the power of prayer can indeed beckon God to shine down and heal someone.
I turned to the bed and stared at the Heir Tsarevich, who lay there against his sheets like a pallid ghost hovering in a pale cloud, his eyes sunken and rimmed with ashen circles. Several days ago he’d nearly died from a simple nosebleed. Today he’d fallen, and now his leg was horribly bloated and twisted; blood had rushed to the contusion on his knee, filling the entire joint and forcing him to make more room by bending it up. A deep wave of pity surged in me and I wanted to cry out, but Aleksei smiled weakly up at me. He will take his cue from me, I thought, so I must convey my belief and my hope. I must give him my strength so he can find his. So I smiled warmly down upon him.
Behind me, Papa raised one hand again to the Kazanskaya, while he clasped me on my shoulder with the other. Oh. So this was how. We were to telegraph the energy from the icon through my father, through me, and down to the boy. I can do that, I said to myself with confidence. I reached down and placed my right hand on the boy’s hot forehead and my left gently onto his swollen leg. Aleksei flinched ever so slightly, but I remained sure in my newfound confidence, and a moment later I sensed him already relaxing.
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