“You may be laughing,” he said, “but do you know what your eyes are saying? Your eyes are sad. Go on, you can tell me—is he making you suffer badly? Why don’t you say anything? Don’t you know we all love sweet tears, a woman’s sweet tears. Do you understand? I know everything.”
I was delighted for Rozanov. The conversation was evidently turning to matters erotic.
“What is it you know?” I asked loudly, on purpose, so that Rasputin, too, would raise his voice, as people often unwittingly do.
Once again, though, he spoke very softly.
“I know how love can make one person force another to suffer. And I know how necessary it can be to make someone suffer. But I don’t want you to suffer. Understand?”
“I can’t hear a thing!” came Rozanov’s cross voice, from my left.
“Be patient!” I whispered.
Rasputin went on.
“What’s that ring on your hand? What stone is it?”
“It’s an amethyst.”
“Well, that’ll do. Hold your hand out to me under the table so no one can see. Then I’ll breathe on the ring and warm it… The breath of my soul will make you feel better.”
I passed him the ring.
“Oh, why did you have to take it off? That was for me to do. You don’t understand…”
But I had understood only too well. Which was why I’d taken it off myself.
Covering his mouth with his napkin, he breathed onto the ring and quietly slid it onto my finger.
“There. When you come and see me, I’ll tell you many things you don’t know.”
“But what if I don’t come?” I asked, once again remembering the hysterical lady-in-waiting.
Here he was, Rasputin in his element. The mysterious voice, the intense expression, the commanding words—all this was a tried and tested method. But if so, then it was all rather naive and straightforward. Or, perhaps, his fame as a sorcerer, soothsayer and favourite of the Tsar really did kindle within people a particular blend of curiosity and fear, a keen desire to participate in this weird mystery. It was like looking through a microscope at some species of beetle. I could see the monstrous hairy legs, the giant maw—but I knew it was really just a little insect.
“Not come to me? No, you shall come. You shall come to me.”
And again he quickly reached up and quietly touched my shoulder. I calmly moved aside and said, “No, I shan’t.”
And again a spasm went through his shoulder and he let out a low moan. Each time he sensed that his power, the current of his will, was not penetrating me and was meeting resistance, he experienced physical pain. (This was my impression at the time—and it was confirmed later.) And in this there was no pretence, as he was evidently trying to conceal both the spasms in his shoulder and his strange, low groan.
No, this was not a straightforward business at all. Howling inside him was a black beast… There was much we did not know.
“Ask him about Vyrubova,” whispered Rozanov. “Ask him about everyone. Get him to tell you everything. And please get him to speak up.”
Rasputin gave Rozanov a sideways look from under his greasy locks.
“What’s that fellow whispering about?”
Rozanov held his glass out towards Rasputin and said, “I was wanting to clink glasses.”
Izmailov held his glass out, too.
Rasputin looked at them both warily, looked away, then looked back again.
Suddenly Izmailov asked, “Tell me, have you ever tried your hand at writing?”
Who, apart from a writer, would think to ask such a question?
“Now and again,” replied Rasputin without the least surprise. “Even quite a few times.”
And he beckoned to a young man sitting at the other end of the table.
“Dearie! Bring me the pages with my poems that you just tapped out on that little typing machine.”
“Dearie” darted off and came back with the pages.
Rasputin handed them around. Everyone reached out. There were a lot of these typed pages, enough for all of us. We began to read.
It turned out to be a prose poem, in the style of the Song of Songs and obscurely amorous. I can still remember the lines: “Fine and high are the mountains. But my love is higher and finer yet, because love is God.”
But that seems to have been the only passage that made any sense. Everything else was just a jumble of words.
As I was reading, the author kept looking around restlessly, trying to see what impression his work was making.
“Very good,” I said.
He brightened.
“Dearie! Give us a clean sheet, I’ll write something for her myself.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
I said.
He chewed for a long time on his pencil. Then, in a barely decipherable peasant scrawl, he wrote:
To Nadezhda
God is lov. Now lov. God wil forgiv yu.
The basic pattern of Rasputin’s magic charms was clear enough: love, and God will forgive you.
But why should such an inoffensive maxim as this cause his ladies to collapse in fits of ecstasy? Why had that lady-in-waiting got into such a state?
This was no simple matter.
I studied the awkwardly scrawled letters and the signature below: “Grigory”.
What power this signature held. I knew of a case where this scrawl of seven letters had recalled a man who had been sentenced to forced labour and was already on his way to Siberia.
And it seemed likely that this same signature could, just as easily, transport a man there…
“You should hang on to that autograph,” said Rozanov. “It’s quite something.”
It did in fact stay in my possession for a long time. In Paris, some six years ago, I found it in an old briefcase and gave it to J.W. Bienstock, the author of a book about Rasputin in French.
Rasputin really was only semi-literate; writing even a few words was hard work for him. This made me think of the forest-warden in our home village—the man whose job had been to catch poachers and supervise the spring floating of timber. I remembered the little bills he used to write: “Tren to dacha and bak fife ru” (five roubles).
Rasputin was also strikingly like this man in physical appearance. Perhaps that’s why his words and general presence failed to excite the least mystical awe in me. “God is love, you shall come” and so on. That “fife ru”, which I couldn’t get out of my head, was constantly in the way…
Suddenly our host came up, looking very concerned.
“The palace is on the line.”
Rasputin left the room.
The palace evidently knew exactly where Rasputin was to be found. Probably, they always did.
Taking advantage of Rasputin’s absence, Rozanov began lecturing me, advising me how best to steer the conversation on to all kinds of interesting topics.
“And do please get him to talk about the Khlysts[3] and their rites. Find out whether it’s all true, and if so, how it’s all organized and whether it’s possible, say, to attend.”
“Get him to invite you, and then you can bring us along, too.”
I agreed willingly. This truly would be interesting.
But Rasputin didn’t come back. Our host said he had been summoned urgently to Tsarskoye Selo[4]—even though it was past midnight—but that, as he was leaving, Rasputin had asked him to tell me he would definitely be coming back.
“Don’t let her go,” said Filippov, repeating Rasputin’s words. “Have her wait for me. I’ll be back.”
3
Often the subject of lurid speculation, the Khlysts observed ascetic practices and ecstatic rituals as a way of attaining grace.
4
A town fifteen miles from the centre of St Petersburg, the location of the Russian royal family’s summer palace.