Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,81

he gave Rasputin the elixir but kept the diary with the flowers as a guarantee.

When Rasputin returned with the money, he was drunk. I remember the evening well, because I was in the sitting room during the visit. I listened as Rasputin bragged to my father about the empress’s devotion to him, calling her “Mama,” a name he was encouraged to use by the empress herself. Rasputin claimed that he knew all of Mama’s secrets, that she kept nothing from him. As proof of her confidence in him, he told my father to visit Pokrovskoye, his native village. There he would find, in the care of Rasputin’s wife, a treasure unlike anything the world had seen before, one worth more than anyone in Moscow or St. Petersburg could imagine. Rasputin told my father that he would send a telegraph to his wife, who still lived in Pokrovskoye, telling her to allow my father to examine the treasure himself. The story was so ridiculous, and Rasputin so drunk, that my father took his payment, gave him the flower album, and kicked Rasputin out. Some days later Grigory Rasputin was murdered by Feliks Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich at the Moika Palace and his body thrown in the Neva.

My father never went to Pokrovskoye to see the treasure. I believe he forgot all about it—our lives were filled with real concerns during those years. After Rasputin’s death, however, a servant from Tsarskoye Selo arrived with a purse of money for my father, a gift of thanks from the tsarina herself, and a warning that he must never speak of what had transpired between them.

After my father’s death, in the summer of 1951, my mother and I began to wonder of these strange events. After much consideration, we took a train to Rasputin’s native village to see if Rasputin’s widow was still alive. It was a long journey from Petrograd to Tyumenskaya Oblast, and it was somewhat silly to make the trip, but we were exceptionally poor and extremely curious, and so decided that we must confirm Rasputin’s story, to put our minds at ease.

We found the widow without too much trouble. She lived in the same place she had shared with Rasputin decades before. She was a kind woman, and she invited us into their two-story house, sat us down, and served tea. My mother introduced herself and mentioned my father’s name. Mrs. Rasputin ruminated over the name a moment, and then went to a wooden box and removed a telegram: It was Rasputin’s communication from thirty-five years before, instructing her to show my father the tsarina’s treasure. Rasputin’s widow returned with a metal trunk, the Romanov eagle emblazoned on its surface. No doubt the poor woman had no idea what was inside or why she should keep it, only that a man—the doctor named in the telegram—would be coming for it. She seemed eager to be rid of it, telling us that it was just sitting around collecting dust.

We hoped for jewels or gold, something of value we might sell. And from the look of the trunk, with its elaborate buckles and fine leatherwork, it seemed that we would soon be rewarded for our efforts. Instead, we found, after we opened the trunk, another sort of thing altogether. Nestled in a bed of red velvet lay an enormous egg—a gold egg with flecks of scarlet on its shell. I picked it up and felt it in my hands. I must clarify that this was not an object like the famous enameled eggs that one could buy in Fabergé’s shop in the days before the Revolution. This was a living egg, large as an ostrich egg, heavy and warm when I took it in my hands. I had never seen anything like it and instantly wanted to give it back, but Mrs. Rasputin insisted that we take it with us. And so we packed the living egg back into the trunk marked with the Romanov insignia and took it home to Petrograd.

Dr. Raphael Valko’s compound, Smolyan, Bulgaria

Vera turned the paper over, looking for more. “That’s it?”

“The account ends there,” Valko said, taking the pages and sliding them back into the red book. “After Katya told me about this giant egg, I began to do some searching into the imperial family’s past, looking for something that could explain how this egg could have come into existence.” A look of frustration crossed his features, as if he were remembering the difficulties of the search. “But