‘Quick,’ she said to Brana. ‘Pass me the mandrake.’ Brana sprinkled the powdered mandrake into a glass of wine, dark and red, the colour of blood for her to drink.
‘Kulla! Kulla!’ she began, draining the glass in one. ‘Kulla! Kulla!’ she repeated, her eyes flickering and her body swaying and she worked herself into a meditative trance. ‘Kulla! Kulla!’ She picked up the small bullet made from the molten cross. ‘Kulla, Kulla…’ She pushed the bullet slowly into the chest of the poppet made of fat. ‘Kulla! Kulla! Blind Rasputin, black, blue, brown, white, red eyes. Blow up his belly larger than a charcoal pit, dry up his body thinner than the meadow grass, kill him quicker than a viper.’ She reached into her box and pulled out three of his toenails. ‘Kulla! Kulla!’ she continued, as she squashed them into the fat. ‘See these nail clippings, may he never be able to clamber out of his dead man’s grave, may he never climb to heaven, may he always be in hell!’ She looked up. ‘Brana, the window!’
Brana rushed to open the window as Militza sprinkled the foxgloves, the henbane and the hemlock over the small metal dish then lit the candle underneath it. Soon the little poppet began to sizzle in the dish. The doll melted and suddenly the liquid and herbs all caught fire.
‘I call upon the winds!’ Militza had her eyes closed and her arms outstretched. ‘I call upon the winds to take this zagovor with all its maleficence and take it on the wind, find Rasputin, wherever he is.’ She opened her eyes a little; there was nothing but a light breeze coming through the window. ‘I call upon the winds! The four winds! I call upon them to take this zagovor, take it! Take it and find Rasputin!’
Suddenly the curtains billowed and there was a loud whistling as a huge gust of wind came charging through the window like a whirling dervish. Books and papers flew everywhere, glass and china smashed on the floor as the wind tore around the room, howling, moaning, weeping in Militza’s ears. It wrenched at her clothes, lifted tables and chairs, flew paintings off the wall; it was so strong that she could not manage to open her eyes. And then suddenly it left. The curtains lay flat against the wall and the room was silent. Militza looked down. The metal dish with the bullet, the herbs and the pool of melted human fat had disappeared. The spell had flown.
Not long after, Militza was woken by a telephone call in the middle of night. Rasputin had been stabbed in the stomach by a noseless whore just outside his own house.
Militza smiled softly and went back to sleep.
33
17 August 1915, Znamenka Peterhof
The crying, the hand wringing, the hysterical weeping lasted for the days.
‘Grisha is no more!’ ‘Grisha is no more!’
The crowds chanted like a Greek chorus as they bore his semi-conscious body off a steamer in Tyumen. The Tsarina was prostrate with grief, unable to get out of bed, calling for all the elixirs Dr Badmaev had in his little leather bag; she was more upset on the attempt on Grisha’s life than the assassination of Arch- duke Franz Ferdinand and the declaration of war on Serbia, Russia’s ally, by Austria-Hungary a month later. The Tsar was sleepless with anxiety; if the mystic died who would help calm Alix’s nerves and her painful heart? He was exhausted by the hysterics; he’d never prayed so forcefully for another man’s life.
Meanwhile, the rest of the court held its breath. When could they celebrate?
For the first few days, his life was in the balance. The noseless whore, ravaged by syphilis, Khionia Guseva, who yelled, ‘I have killed the Antichrist!’ as she dug the knife into his belly – had managed to slice through his stomach so deeply his entrails had fallen out. The doctor stitched his gut back together – as well as his soul, apparently – on the dining-room table by candlelight. But the pain and the agony was so profound that the icon, the Virgin of Kazan, hanging in the corner of Rasputin’s house in Pokrovskoye, was said to have wept tears of sympathy.
But he survived. He survived well enough that by the fourth day of his ordeal he was photographed sitting up in bed, looking sad, clutching his chest as he always did, exuding tremendous piety and religious fervour, all the while declaring that any nurses on the ward with him should be relieved of their corsets. It was, thus, a little easier for him to put his hand up their skirts.
Militza was furious; instead of freeing Russia from the clutches of this monster, she’d only succeeded in creating some sort of living saint. Albeit a saint with a newfound fondness for opium, to dull the pain of his assault, but a saint all the same, whose Lazarus-like recovery from a whore’s knifing made him more remarkable than ever. The fact that the whore was an ex-lover of his was rarely, if at all, mentioned.
His return to St Petersburg – now more patriotically named Petrograd – was a return to his old ways. Except, this time with impunity. The queues outside 64 Gorokhovaya laced all the way down the street, the moaning from the back-room divan was constant, the ten o’clock club was taken over by daily 10 a.m. telephone calls from Tsarskoye Selo on his new telephone – Petrograd 64646 (the number of sixes was not lost on Militza) – and the Okhrana were no longer following him around as he walked the streets of Petrograd but chauffeuring him in his new private car.
With Nicholas away at the front, Rasputin’s visits to see Alix, Anna and the children became as regular as his visits to banya and the nearby brothel. By now, dislike for the man had spread through every corner of the empire and even previously loyal acquaintances of the imperial family and indeed other members of the imperial family, could no longer hold their tongue. The Dowager Empress declared dramatically that unless Rasputin was removed from the court, she would move to Kiev… She moved to Kiev. Xenia and Sandro were equally vociferous in their distaste; they too were ignored.
And still Stana would not change her position. She simply refused to talk about the man. She even purchased one of the ‘Rasputin is Not Discussed Here’ signs on sale in the market around Nevsky and placed it very firmly on her mantelpiece in the salon. For many, this was a standing joke in the fine sitting rooms of Petrograd, but for her it was a little different. Her position was untenable. With Nikolasha as Commander-in-Chief of the army and Rasputin constantly speaking out against the war, theirs were two paths that would never meet.
By the spring of 1915, nearly four million Russians had been killed, wounded or captured. The situation on the front was becoming increasingly desperate. There was talk of a second round of conscripts (commandeering all twenty-one to forty-three-year olds). There was panic in the countryside: these men could not go to fight! Who would sow and bring in the next harvest? Who would stop the rest of Russia from starving? There had not been a call-up of the second round since Napoleon’s invasion in 1812.
In Petrograd itself the atmosphere was febrile and frightening. Rumour was rife and revolution was in the air; there were meetings and gatherings and speeches – the peasants had had enough and the government and the imperial family were becoming a laughing stock, tellingly ruled by The Cock. All conversation began and ended with the name Rasputin. As did all verse.