Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,80

how the tsarina would fall under the spell of a man with such an ugly, gnarled, black beard, ruddy skin, and strange eyes. My first impression of him was as an ugly brute in peasants’ clothes. But my impression soon changed. Over the next months, when he visited us frequently, I came to have another opinion of Rasputin. He did not have elegant manners, or even a tendency to flatter, but there was something about his way of being that worked upon me until I was open to his allure. By the third or fourth visit his manner had changed my view of him. I was transformed from judging him the most vile of men to thinking him very subtle, almost charming. I believe this to be the secret of Rasputin’s seductive powers: He was an ugly man who had the ability to make people believe him to be beautiful. I, like so many others, was entranced.

Each time Rasputin visited our home—a small apartment near the Anichkov Palace in St. Petersburg—he and my father went to my father’s study, and I continued with my piano lesson, my French lesson, my lessons in embroidery, or whatever activity I had before me that day. We were not rich, but we had a number of tutors to keep me occupied while my father worked. Most of the time, I had no more direct exposure to Rasputin than seeing him walk from the entrance of the house to my father’s study. After a year or so, he gradually stopped visiting my father, and I began to think of him less and less often. After Rasputin’s murder, and the revolution, there was no reason to think of him ever again.

Or so I believed. My father became ill with cancer in the 1950s. During the final days of his life, when the illness had made him insensible to the world, he told a tale that astonished me. He was delirious when he said these things, and I could not know for certain if they were the incoherent words of a dying man or if there was some truth in his bizarre tale, but my mother was at my side, and she confirmed that I had heard the contents of the story correctly. I write it all down as faithfully as I remember it, reserving judgment for those who read it.

My father confessed that Grigory Rasputin came to him in November 1916, asking for his assistance. My father had won favor with the tsar by making him a tea—a simple mixture of cannabis and wolfsbane—which had the desired effect of relaxing Nikolai. And then one day Rasputin told my father that the tsars—as he sometimes called Nikolai and Alexandra—had another request. They wanted my father to mix a medicine. Rasputin claimed that the mixture would help the tsarevitch, Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, recover from a terrible disorder. My father knew of the child’s illness—the boy had nearly died at Christmastime 1911, and he had heard at that time that the child was a hemophiliac. My father responded that a cure for hemophilia was unknown. Rasputin refused to accept this answer. The medicine, Rasputin claimed, required one thousand petals from one thousand different varieties of flowers. Many of the flowers, my father said, did not grow in Russia and would be impossible to find, especially during the war. It was 1916 and freezing cold; there was only snow and ice and suffering.

Rasputin countered this objection, showing him a book filled with flowers. The empress had been collecting the flowers herself over many years—she and the grand duchesses had gone on hunts together in numerous countries in Europe and had preserved the flowers in a diary they shared. My father would only have to confirm that the flowers were correctly labeled and mix them together in the elixir. Rasputin said that the empress herself promised a large sum of money and an elevated position in the tsar’s university in Moscow to anyone who could make the drug. Rasputin gave my father the album filled with flowers and left.

One month later Rasputin returned to see if my father had finished. My father had gone through the flowers in the album and confirmed that the one thousand flowers in the formula were the one thousand flowers in the book—everything matched up perfectly. My father had been having doubts about the authenticity of Rasputin’s promises, however. He didn’t know if he could trust the peasant to give him the sum promised. And so