Rasputin's Daughter - By Robert Alexander Page 0,1

bold stroke of his pen, he made a notation on the cover.

“What’s that?” I inquired.

“A report.”

“A report on what?”

“On someone I just interviewed.”

“Are you going to throw them back in prison, or are you—”

“I will ask the questions and you will answer them,” he snapped. “To start, tell me why you’ve returned to the capital.”

Just then I heard a strange noise. Looking toward the dais, I saw a large fancy grate in the wall. Were looters having their way in the next room?

Carefully measuring my words, I said, “I’ve returned to Petrograd to find a friend.”

“Who?”

I wanted to say, Someone I desperately need to see, someone I once loved. But I had to be strong. I dared not let my interrogator see how much I hurt inside, let alone betray the information I was carrying. There was not a doubt in my mind that if the Thirteenth Section knew what I did, I’d be tossed directly into the Peter and Paul Fortress. Perhaps I’d even be shot. It was for these very reasons that my mother back in Siberia had begged me to stay home.

“For whom are you searching?” he demanded.

“A friend who…who has been imprisoned.”

“I see,” he replied, as if he’d already heard that story a hundred times, which I was sure he had. “And do you know why you are here?”

Desperate to move on, I said, “There are many things I don’t understand, especially why two young xhama”—rogues—“would break down my door and drag me from my home.”

That long mouth with the thin lips drew itself into a tight pinch of…amusement? No, of course I wasn’t what he expected.

Containing his humor, he said, “Be seated. My name is Aleksander Aleksandrovich, and I mean to ask you about your father.”

That was all it took, just his first name and patronymic. There was not a girl with any brains in the capital who was not in love with this man. Yes, of course I knew who he was, and my entire body trembled. For years I had cherished his beautiful words as much as his beautiful photograph.

As forcefully as a priest, I chanted:

“To sin shamelessly, endlessly,

To lose count of the nights and days,

And with a head unruly from drunkenness

To pass sideways into the temple of God.”

My would-be interrogator was suddenly blushing. “I wrote that.”

“Of course you did.” It simply sprang from my mouth. “You’re Aleksander Aleksandrovich Blok, and that was my father’s favorite poem. I recited it to him the very night he was killed…. In fact, your words were practically the last I spoke to him.”

The color rushed from his face and he turned as pale as snow on a moonlit night. His own heavenly images of sinful Russia had touched the heart of the devil incarnate? His motifs of heartache and remorse were the last blessing the evil one had heard before meeting…death?

I’d never hated a man so much before. Sitting before me was not only Russia’s most romantic poet in more than a century, not only our greatest gift since Aleksander Pushkin, but the person who’d once been both my savior and my inspiration. When I, a peasant girl from the distant countryside, had landed in the Steblin-Kamensky Institute, a school for daughters of good home and breeding, I was like a reeba bez vodii—a fish without water—lacking in friends, stylish clothing, courtly manners, a fancy home, personal maid, or anything else that a girl of good society took for granted. But I did have this poet’s images and words, and they had helped transform me from a clumsy derevenschina into a worldly young woman.

My voice quivering as if I were hurling hate on a deceitful lover, I gasped, “Why in the name of God did you bring me here? What do you of all people want from me?”

Blok stared straight at me. “I need to know what happened the night of December sixteenth, the night your father was killed.” He paused. “Allow me to explain, Maria Grigorevna. I was drafted into the army and now serve the Provisional Government. As secretary of the Extraordinary Commission, I have been present at most of the interviews with former ministers and those closest to the former imperial family.”

“Oh, really?” I said, mocking him. “I’ve wondered where you were and what you were doing. I haven’t seen any new poems from you in quite some time. Is that why?”

He glared at me. By the depth of the furrows creasing his forehead, I knew I’d hit not only a sore point