“Yes.”
After dinner this lady sat down beside me. I knew she’d been really wanting to talk to me—ever since I’d read out that sign. But all she could do was prattle in a scatterbrained way about literature. Clearly she didn’t know how to turn the conversation to the subject that interested her.
I decided to help her out.
“Have you seen the sign over the fireplace? Funny, isn’t it? The Bryanchaninovs have one just like it.”
She immediately came to life.
“Yes, indeed. I really don’t understand. Why shouldn’t we talk about Rasputin?”
“Probably because people are talking about him too much. Everyone’s bored with the subject…”
“Bored?” She seemed almost scared. “How could anyone find him boring? You’re not going to say that, are you? Don’t you find Rasputin fascinating?”
“Have you ever met him?” I asked.
“Who? Him? You mean—Rasputin?”
And suddenly she was all fidgety and flustered. Gasping. Red blotches appeared on her thin, pale cheeks.
“Rasputin? Yes… a very little… a few times. He feels he absolutely has to get to know me. They say this will be very, very interesting. Do you know, when he stares at me, my heart begins to pound in the most alarming way… It’s astonishing. I’ve seen him three times, I think, at friends’. The last time he suddenly came right up close and said, ‘Why so shy, you little waif ? You be sure to come and see me—yes, mind you do!’ I was completely at a loss. I said I didn’t know, that I couldn’t… And then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You shall come. Understand? Yes, you absolutely shall!’ And the way he said ‘shall’ so commandingly, with such authority, it was as if this had already been decided on high and Rasputin was in the know. Do you understand what I mean? It was as if, to him, my fate were an open book. He sees it, he knows it. I’m sure you understand I would never call on him, but the lady whose house I met him at said I really must, that plenty of women of our station call on him, and that there’s nothing in the least untoward about it. But still… I… I shan’t…”
This “I shan’t” she almost squealed. She looked as if she were about to give a hysterical shriek and start weeping.
I could hardly believe it! A mild-mannered lady, mousy and thin, and she looked as if she were at least thirty-five. And yet she had suddenly, shamelessly, lost all self-control at the mere mention of Rasputin, that peasant in a pink calico smock whom I had heard ordering “Annushka” to look for the tea strainer…
The lady of the house came over to where we were sitting and asked us a question. And without replying, probably without even hearing her, Madame E——got up and with a jerky, angular gait went over to the mirror to powder her nose.
All the next day I was unable to put this twitching, bewitched lady-in-waiting out of my mind.
It was unnerving and horrible.
The hysteria around the name of Rasputin was making me feel a kind of moral nausea.
I realized, of course, that a lot of the talk about him was petty, foolish invention, but nonetheless I felt there was something real behind all these tales, that they sprang from some weird, genuine, living source.
In the afternoon Izmailov rang again and confirmed the invitation. He promised that Rasputin would definitely be there. And he passed on a request from Rozanov that I should wear something “a bit glamorous”—so Rasputin would think he was just talking to an ordinary “laydee” and the thought that I might be a writer wouldn’t so much as enter his head.
This demand for “a bit of glamour” greatly amused me.
“Rozanov seems determined to cast me in the role of some biblical Judith or Delilah. I’ll make a hash of it, I’m afraid—I haven’t the talents of either an actor or an agent provocateur. All I’ll do is mess things up.”
“Let’s just play it by ear,” Izmailov said reassuringly. “Shall I send someone over to fetch you?”
I declined, as I was dining with friends, and was going to be dropped off after the meal.
That evening, as I was dressing, I tried to imagine a peasant’s idea of “a bit of glamour”. I put on a pair of gold shoes, and some gold rings and earrings. I’d have felt embarrassed to deck myself out any more flashily. It wasn’t as if I was going to be able to explain to all and sundry that this was glamour on demand!
At my friends’ dinner table, this time without any wiles on my part, the conversation turned to Rasputin. (People evidently had good reason to put injunctions up over their fireplaces.)
As always, there were stories about espionage, about Germans bribing Russian officials, about sums of money finding their way via the elder[2] into particular pockets and about court intrigues, the threads of which were all in Rasputin’s hands.
Even the “black automobile” got linked with the name of Rasputin.
The “black automobile” remains a mystery to this day. Several nights running this car had roared across the Field of Mars, sped over the Palace Bridge and disappeared into the unknown. Shots had been fired from inside the car. Passers-by had been wounded.
“It’s Rasputin’s doing,” people were saying. “Who else?”
“What’s he got to do with it?”
“He profits from everything black, evil and incomprehensible. Everything that sows discord and panic. And there’s nothing he can’t explain to his own advantage when he needs to.”
These were strange conversations. But these were strange times, and so no one was especially surprised. Although the events soon to unfold swept the “black automobile” right out of our minds. All too soon we would have other things to think about.
But at the time, at dinner, we talked about all these things. First and foremost, people were astonished by Rasputin’s extraordinary brazenness. Razumov, who was then the director of the Department of Mines, indignantly related how one of his provincial officials had come to him with a request for a transfer. And to support his case, he had held out a piece of paper on which Rasputin—whom Razumov had never even met—had scrawled:
Dearie, do wot the barer asks and yul have no caws for regret.
“Can you imagine? The cheek of it! The brazen cheek of it! And there are a great many ministers who say they’ve received little notes like this. And all too many of them just do as he asks—though they don’t, of course, admit as much. I’ve even been told I was reckless to be getting so angry, because he would hear about it. It was vile. Can you imagine it? ‘Dearie’! As for the fine fellow who turned up with the note, I showed him what a ‘Dearie’ I can be! I’m told he flew down the stairs four at a time. And he had seemed like such a respectable man—as well as being a rather eminent engineer.”
“Yes,” said someone else, “I’ve heard about any number of these ‘Dearie’ recommendations, but this is the first time I’ve heard about one not being granted. People get all indignant, but they don’t feel able to refuse the man. ‘He’s vindictive,’ they say, ‘a vindictive peasant.’”
Sometime after ten o’clock I arrived at Filippov’s.
Our host greeted me in the hall. After saying in a friendly way that we’d already met once before, he showed me into his study.
“Your friends arrived some time ago.”
In the small, smoke-filled room were some half a dozen people.
Rozanov was looking bored and disgruntled. Izmailov appeared strained, as if trying to make out that everything was going fine when really it wasn’t.
Manuilov was standing close to the doorway, looking as if he felt entirely at home. Two or three people I didn’t know were sitting silently on the divan. And then there was Rasputin. Dressed in a black woollen Russian kaftan and tall patent leather boots, he was fidgeting anxiously, squirming about in his chair. One of his shoulders kept twitching.
2
Grigory (or Grisha) Rasputin is often referred to as a monk, but he never took holy orders and had no official connection to the Orthodox Church. Here Teffi uses the vaguer term “elder”. Rasputin was also rumoured to have belonged to an extreme sect known as the Khlysts, but this has never been proven. There is no doubt, however, that he lived the life of a religious “wanderer” for several years and was widely believed to be endowed with healing powers.