His shoulder went into spasms and he let out a moan.
And it was all so ludicrous, both the way we were standing in the middle of the room together and the painfully serious way he was speaking…
I had to do something to lighten the atmosphere.
Rozanov came up to us. Pretending he was just passing by, he pricked up his ears. I started to laugh. Pointing at him, I said to Rasputin, “But he won’t let me.”
“Don’t you listen to that degenerate—you come along. And don’t bring him with you, we can do without him. Rasputin may only be a peasant, but don’t you turn up your nose at him. For them I love I build stone palaces. Haven’t you heard?”
“No,” I replied, “I haven’t.”
“You’re lying, my clever girl, you have heard. I can build stone palaces. You’ll see. I can do many things. But for the love of God, just come to me, the sooner the better. We’ll pray together. Why wait? You see, everyone wants to kill me. As soon as I step outside, I look all around me: where are they, where are their ugly mugs? Yes, they want to kill me. Well, so what! The fools don’t understand who I am. A sorcerer? Maybe I am. They burn sorcerers, so let them burn me. But there’s one thing they don’t understand: if they kill me, it will be the end of Russia. Remember, my clever girclass="underline" if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia. They’ll bury us together.”
He stood there in the middle of the room, thin and black—a gnarled tree, withered and scorched.
“And it will be the end of Russia… the end of Russia…”
With his trembling hand crooked upwards, he looked like Chaliapin singing the role of the miller in Dvořák’s Rusalka. At this moment he appeared dreadful and completely mad.
“Ah? Are you going? Well if you’re going, then go. But just you remember… Remember.”
As we made our way back from Filippov’s, Rozanov said that I really ought to go and visit Rasputin: if I refused an invitation coveted by so many, he would almost certainly find it suspicious.
“We’ll all go there together,” he assured me, “and we’ll leave together.”
I replied that there was something in the atmosphere around Rasputin I found deeply revolting. The grovelling, the collective hysteria—and at the same time the machinations of something dark, something very dark and beyond our knowledge. One could get sucked into this filthy mire—and never be able to climb out of it. It was revolting and joyless, and the revulsion I felt entirely negated any interest I might have in these people’s “weird mysteries”.
The pitiful, distressed face of the young woman who was being thrust so shamelessly by her lawyer husband at a drunken peasant—it was the stuff of nightmares, I was seeing it in my dreams. But he must have had many such women—women about whom he shouted, banging his fist on the table, that “they wouldn’t dare” and that they were “happy with everything”.
“It’s revolting,” I went on. “Truly horrifying! I’m frightened! And wasn’t it strange, later on, how insistent he was about my going to see him?”
“He’s not accustomed to rejection.”
“Well, my guess is that it’s all a lot simpler. I think it’s because of the Russian Word. He may make out that he doesn’t attach any significance to my work there, but you know as well as I do how afraid he is of the press and how he tries to ingratiate himself with it. Maybe he’s decided to lure me into becoming one of his myrrh-bearing women.[6] So that I’ll write whatever he wants me to write, at his dictation. After all, he does all of his politicking through women. Just think what a trump card he would have in his hands. I think he’s got it all figured out very well indeed. He’s cunning.”
Several days after this dinner I had a telephone call from a lady I knew. She reproached me for not coming to a party she had given the evening before and that I’d promised to attend.
I had completely forgotten about this party.
“Vyrubova was there,” said the lady. “She was waiting for you. She very much wants to meet you, and I had promised her you would be there. I’m terribly, terribly upset you couldn’t come.”
“Aha!” I thought. “Messages from the ‘other world’. What can she want of me?”
That she was a messenger from that “other world” I didn’t doubt for a moment. Two more days went by.
An old friend dropped in on me. She was very flustered.
“S——is going to have a big party. She’s called round a couple of times in person, but you weren’t at home. She came to see me earlier today and made me promise to take you with me.”
I was rather surprised by S——’s persistence, as I didn’t know her so very well. She wasn’t hoping to get me to give some kind of a reading, was she? That was the last thing I wanted. I expressed my misgivings.
“Oh no,” my friend assured me. “I promise you that she has no hidden designs. S——is simply very fond of you and would like to see you. Anyway, it should be a very enjoyable evening. There won’t be many guests, just friends, because they can’t put on grand balls now, not while we’re at war. That would be in poor taste. There will be no one there who shouldn’t be there—no one superfluous. They’re people who know how to give a good party.”
We arrived after eleven.
There were a lot of people. Among the tail coats and evening dresses were a number of figures in identical black or light-blue domino masks. They were the only ones in fancy dress; it was clear they had come as a group.
My friend took me by the arm and led me to our hostess: “Well, here she is. See? I’ve brought her with me.”
A Gypsy was singing in the large ballroom. Short and slight, she was wearing a high-necked dress of shining silk. Her head was thrown back and her dusky face an emblem of suffering as she sang the words:
“Just wait a moment,” the hostess whispered to me. “She’s almost finished.”
And she went on standing beside me, evidently looking around for someone.
“Now we can go.”
She took my hand and led me across the ballroom, still looking.
Then we entered a small, dimly lit sitting room. There was no one there. The hostess seated me on a sofa. “I’ll be back in a moment. Please don’t go anywhere.”
She did indeed come back in a moment, together with a figure in a black mask.
“This mysterious figure will keep you entertained,” said S——with a laugh. “Please wait for me here.”
The black figure sat down beside me and looked silently at me through narrow eye slits.
“You don’t know me,” it murmured at last, “but I desperately need to speak to you.”
It was not a voice I had heard before, but something about its intonations was familiar. It was the same quivering, hysterical tone in which that lady-in-waiting had spoken of Rasputin.
I peered at the woman sitting beside me. No, this wasn’t Madame E——. Madame E——was petite. This lady was very tall. She spoke with a faint lisp, like all of our high society ladies who as children begin speaking English before Russian.
“I know everything,” the unknown woman began edgily. “On Thursday you’re going to a certain house.”
“No,” I replied in surprise. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She grew terribly flustered. “Why don’t you tell me the truth? Why? I know everything.”
“Where is it you think I’m going?” I asked.
6
The Orthodox term for the women who, early in the morning of the third day, came to Christ’s tomb and found it empty.