I felt faint. “Definitely faint,” I heard myself saying.
Dr. Lazovert knelt by Rasputin’s side, felt for his pulse. He did not seem moved by the blood. In fact, the sight of it seemed to recover him even more.
Perhaps in his profession he is more at ease with blood than poison.
He looked up at us, saying phlegmatically, “He is dead.”
But, as it turned out, that was premature. I began to wonder about the doctor’s qualifications, for not a moment later, Rasputin’s left eye, then his right, opened, and he stared straight at Yusupov with those green eyes that reminded me of dragon eyes. Eyes that were suddenly filled with hate.
The doctor fell back on his rather large behind.
I found myself saying, “I gather that a man arising from sure death is no ordinary occurrence for a doctor.” Nobody paid me any attention.
Yusupov screamed. Not like a man, but like some kind of monkey. It had definitely been he who’d screamed earlier, and not Rasputin. Then he began to gibber. Any second, I thought, he will climb the curtains and be away. And I will be right after him.
But in fact I could not move at all. It was as if we were all in some sort of horrific fairy tale and had been turned to stone. Neither could poor Yusupov move, though at least he’d stopped screaming.
The grand duke was cursing under his breath. And I thought we were about to lose Dr. Lazovert again, who had struggled to his feet but was looking mighty wobbly, like a man standing in a very high wind.
“Long whiskers cannot take the place of brains,” said Rasputin, foam bubbling from his mouth as he spoke. He leaped up, grabbed poor Yusupov by the throat with one hand, and tore an epaulet from the prince’s jacket with the other. But Yusupov was sweating so badly, the monk’s hand slipped from his throat, and the prince broke away from him, which threw Rasputin down on his knees.
That gave Yusupov time to escape, and he turned and raced up the stairs. He was screaming out to Purishkavich to fire his gun, shouting, “He’s alive! Alive!” His voice was inhuman, a terrified scream, more like a strangled cat than a man.
The three of us left in the room watched, frozen with horror and amazement, as Rasputin, down on all fours, foaming and fulminating, climbed the stairs after him.
Prince Yusupov made it to his parents’ apartments and locked the door after him, but the mad monk, maddened further by all that had happened to him, went straight out the front door into the frigid night. He no longer had on a coat, and we could only hope he would die soon of both frost and the poisoned drink. Not to mention the gunshot.
The others, equally underdressed for the weather, followed him to see what he would do, Dr. Lazovert muttering all the while that Rasputin was a devil and would probably sprout bat wings and fly away.
But the mad monk neither opened bat wings nor flew. Instead, he careened across the snow-covered courtyard toward the iron gate that led to the street, shouting all the while, “Felix, Felix, I will tell everything to the empress.”
At last, Purishkevich raised his gun and fired.
The night seemed one long, dark echo. But he had obviously missed because Rasputin was still standing.
“Fire again!” I cried. “If he gets away and tells his story to the tsar, we are all dead men.” Though we had been making so much noise in public now, we were probably dead men anyway.
Purishkevich fired again and, unbelievably, missed once more.
“Fool!” the grand duke said as Purishkevich bit his own left hand to force himself to concentrate.
That there were only a few streetlights made things even more difficult. But as if he were out hunting deer, Purishkevich carefully sighted down the barrel on the running figure. Amazingly, when he fired a third time—his most difficult shot of the evening—it seemed to strike Rasputin between the shoulders. He shuddered, stopped, but did not fall.
“A devil, I tell you,” cried the doctor. I could hear his teeth chattering with the cold. Or just with fear. Or both.
“I am surrounded by fools,” the grand duke said, and I was inclined to agree with him.
Then Purishkevich shot one last time, and this one hit Rasputin in the head for certain, and he fell to his knees. Purishkevich ran over to him and kicked him hard, a boot to the temple. And with that, the monk finally fell down on his back in the snow.
Suddenly, Yusupov appeared holding a rubber club and began hitting Rasputin hysterically over and over and over again.
The grand duke took hold of the prince’s shoulders and led him away. And not unkindly, for someone who had decried him as a fool mere moments ago.
Only then did I take out the knife that was in my shirt and, unsheathing it, walked over to the body and plunged the blade deep into Rasputin’s heart. It went into his body so smoothly, I could not believe the ease of it.
I wanted to say something profound, anything—but there was nothing more to say. This time, the mad monk’s eyes stayed closed, and he did not arise again.
A servant from the princess’s apartment came out a little later with a rope, and they pulled the body over to the frozen Neva and left it there.
“Should we find a hole and push him in?” I asked, eager to be rid of the evidence.
“Let the world see him,” the grand duke said. “Dead is dead.”
I looked at the mad monk splayed out on the ice and wondered at that. By my count, Rasputin should have died five times that night before the knife decided the end. But despite my earlier worry about the monk’s death being called into question, all I felt then was relief.
“Dead is dead.” I agreed and left the body lying there on the river ice.
When I got home, I soaked for an hour in the tub but could not scrub away the feel of my hand touching Rasputin’s back, when the knife went deep into his body, as if through fresh butter.
“It is ended,” I told my image in the mirror.
But really, it had only begun.
Chapter 25
At the Mariinsky Theatre, the tsarina came on stage looking as if she had no idea what was about to happen, but in fact she did. Knowing how much she hated surprises, and how she needed to be prepared, the tsar had told her three days ahead of time about the ceremony. But the rest of the family was not in on the surprise.
The audience was full of noble families. The English and German delegations were there as well. Everyone applauded dutifully—and some even with great excitement—when the tsar made the announcement.
The tsarina put her hand to her breast and looked marvelously surprised, because she had not known her husband was going to make a speech and detail all of the things she had done to earn this medal of honor. And when she stood and made her careful way up the stairs and across the boards towards him, her left hand still rested there on her breast. She looked, one of her friends would tell her later, like a doe crossing the ice, with careful competence and always on alert for possible danger.
Standing by the podium, holding a large bouquet of flowers, the medal on its ribbon around her neck, she was extremely pleased and still a bit surprised.
Nicholas had spoken about the work she had done to improve conditions for the poorer classes since first coming to Russia as a bride; how she had founded schools and hospitals, never hesitating even when difficult regulations and unbending bureaucrats had tried to stop her. She hadn’t known that he had known, which made things all the sweeter and the award—even though she had been warned three days earlier—very surprising. But as her grandmother Victoria probably would have said, “We do it for the glory of God, not the glory of ourselves.”