“There. His place.”
“I don’t understand a thing.”
“Do you mean to test me? All right, I’ll say it. On Thursday you’re going to… to… Rasputin’s.”
“What makes you think that? No one has asked me.”
The lady fell silent.
“You may not have received the invitation yet… but you soon will. It’s already been decided.”
“But why does this matter so much to you?” I asked. “Perhaps you could tell me your name?”
“I haven’t put on this idiotic mask only to go and tell you my name. And as far as you’re concerned, my name is of no importance. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that on Thursday you’re going to be there.”
“I have no intention of going to Rasputin’s,” I replied calmly. “Of that I can assure you.”
“Ah!”
She suddenly leant forward and, with hands tightly encased in black gloves, seized hold of my arm.
“No, you’re joking! You will be going! Why wouldn’t you?”
“Because it’s of no interest to me.”
“And you won’t change your mind?”
“No.”
Her shoulders began to tremble. I thought she was weeping.
“I thought you were someone sincere,” she whispered.
I was at a loss.
“What is it you want from me? Does it upset you that I won’t be going? I don’t understand a thing.”
She seized hold of my arm again.
“I implore you by everything you hold sacred—please refuse the invitation. We have to get him to cancel this evening. He mustn’t leave Tsarskoye on Thursday. We mustn’t let him—or something terrible will happen.”
She muttered something, her shoulders quivering.
“I don’t see what any of this has to do with me,” I said. “But if it will make you feel any better, then please believe me: I give you my word of honour that I won’t go. In three days’ time I’m going to Moscow.”
Again her shoulders began to tremble, and again I thought she was weeping.
“Thank you, my dear one, thank you…”
She quickly bent over and kissed my hand.
Then she jumped up and left.
“No, that can’t have been Vyrubova,” I thought, remembering how Vyrubova had wanted to see me at that party I hadn’t gone to. “No, it wasn’t her. Vyrubova is quite plump, and anyway, she limps. It wasn’t her.”
I found our hostess.
“Who was that masked lady you just brought to me?”
The hostess seemed rather put out.
“How would I know? She was wearing a mask.”
While we were at dinner the masked figures seemed to disappear. Or perhaps they had all just taken off their fancy dress.
I spent a long time studying the faces I didn’t know, looking for the lips that had kissed my hand…
Sitting at the far end of the table were three musicians: guitar, accordion and tambourine. The very same three musicians. Rasputin’s musicians. Here was a link… a thread.
The next day Izmailov came over. He was terribly upset.
“Something awful has happened. Here. Read this.” And he handed me a newspaper.
In it I read that Rasputin had begun frequenting a literary circle where, over a bottle of wine, he would tell entertaining stories of all kinds about extremely high-ranking figures.
“And that’s not the worst of it,” said Izmailov. “Filippov came over today and said he’d had an unexpected summons from the secret police, who wanted to know just which literary figures had been to his house and precisely what Rasputin had talked about. Filippov was threatened with exile from Petersburg. But the most astonishing and horrible thing of all is that, there on the interrogator’s desk, he could clearly see the guest list, in Manuilov’s own hand.”
“You’re not saying Manuilov works for the secret police, are you?”[7]
“There’s no knowing whether it was him or another of Filippov’s guests. In any case, we’ve got to be very careful. Even if they don’t interrogate us, they’ll be following us. No doubt about that. So if Rasputin writes to you or summons you by telephone, you’d better not respond. Although he doesn’t know your address, and he’s unlikely to have remembered your last name.”
“So much for the holy man’s mystical secrets! I feel sorry for Rozanov. What a dull, prosaic ending…”
“Madam, some joker’s been telephoning. He’s rung twice, wanting to speak to you,” said my maid, laughing.
“What do you mean, ‘some joker’?”
“Well, when I ask, ‘Who’s calling?’ he says, ‘Rasputin’. It’s somebody playing the fool.”
“Listen, Ksyusha, if this man carries on playing the fool, be sure to tell him I’ve gone away, and for a long time. Understand?”
I soon left Petersburg. I never saw Rasputin again.
Later, when I read in the papers that his corpse had been burnt, the man I saw in my mind’s eye was that black, bent, terrible sorcerer:
“Burn me? Let them. But there’s one thing they don’t know: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia.”
“Remember me then! Remember me!”
I did.
WE ARE STILL LIVING
Everything is cold and awful. The electricity is only on for five hours a day. There’s no firewood. The buildings are barely heated. These great hulks of stone, six-storeys high, are now so icy that they seem to breathe out cold as you walk past.
And there’s something new to be seen on the streets: the bourgeoisie are now shovelling snow and selling newspapers.
Nothing, it seems, can unsettle these people.
The ladies have run up special outfits for working outside: peasant-style jackets and sheepskin coats—tulups and zipuns.[1] Dressmakers call these new costumes “façon touloup and façon zipoun à la street-sweeper” and charge through the nose for them.
Those Bolsheviks in the Smolny are a crafty lot.[2] They’ve decreed that every woman under forty must report for snow-shovelling duty. What woman is fool enough to tell the whole world she’s over forty? So far, not a single one has owned up. Instead, they’ve all been throwing themselves into the fray. It’s rumoured that many women have tried to bribe the housing committees into putting them on the roster for snow-shovelling. The committees’ response is:
“Go on then, if you’re sure it won’t finish you off.”
The bourgeois selling newspapers are quite happy with their lot. Most of them are ex-army officers.
They sell the evening papers. They stand on Nevsky Prospekt and call out their wares in cheerful, ringing tones. Hearing the cry of a seasoned newspaper-seller, you turn round and, to your surprise, see the kangaroo-fur[3] collar of a former officer and find yourself looking into a pair of intelligent eyes.
The real newspaper-sellers don’t like this: “This business isn’t for the likes of you.”
To which the officer will reply, “And is that any business of yours?”
These bourgeois newspaper-sellers are happy. They earn fifteen roubles a day (more than they could have earned in their wildest dreams) and what’s more, they don’t have to get up early in the morning.
It’s good to be out on the street in the daytime. In the centre of town there is almost no robbing or looting. In shop windows you sometimes come across relics of hoary antiquity: teacups and shirt collars. Or you might catch sight of a little sign: “The latest thing—Stockings!” In bookshops you will find—(ha ha)—books and novels. There was indeed a time when people read novels about young ladies called Vera who sat around all day struggling to understand their true identities. Just look at these Veras now!
7
Alexey Filippov was a banker and the publisher of writings by Rasputin. Ivan Manasevich-Manuilov was a police agent. According to Edward Radzinsky, Manasevich-Manuilov had “suggested that Filippov organize a literary soirée, and he himself had told Tsarskoye Selo about the soirée, attributing the initiative to Filippov. And he had passed on to the security branch […] the list of literary invitees. All the people on it were well-known ‘leftist writers’. Which was why there had been a call from Tsarskoye Selo interrupting the meeting” (
1
A
2
Shortly before the October Revolution the Bolsheviks made the Smolny, previously a government building, into their administrative headquarters.
3
Kangaroo was one of the furs used in military uniforms in Russia, together with squirrel and sheepskin. Ordinary soldiers usually had sheepskin collars.