“A report on what?”
“On someone I just interviewed.”
“Are you going to throw them back in prison, or are you-”
“I will ask the questions and you will answer them,” he snapped. “To start, tell me why you’ve returned to the capital.”
Just then I heard a strange noise. Looking toward the dais, I saw a large fancy grate in the wall. Were looters having their way in the next room?
Carefully measuring my words, I said, “I’ve returned to Petrograd to find a friend.”
“Who?”
I wanted to say, Someone I desperately need to see, someone I once loved. But I had to be strong. I dared not let my interrogator see how much I hurt inside, let alone betray the information I was carrying. There was not a doubt in my mind that if the Thirteenth Section knew what I did, I’d be tossed directly into the Peter and Paul Fortress. Perhaps I’d even be shot. It was for these very reasons that my mother back in Siberia had begged me to stay home.
“For whom are you searching?” he demanded.
“A friend who…who has been imprisoned.”
“I see,” he replied, as if he’d already heard that story a hundred times, which I was sure he had. “And do you know why you are here?”
Desperate to move on, I said, “There are many things I don’t understand, especially why two young xhama”- rogues-“would break down my door and drag me from my home.”
That long mouth with the thin lips drew itself into a tight pinch of…amusement? No, of course I wasn’t what he expected.
Containing his humor, he said, “Be seated. My name is Aleksander Aleksandrovich, and I mean to ask you about your father.”
That was all it took, just his first name and patronymic. There was not a girl with any brains in the capital who was not in love with this man. Yes, of course I knew who he was, and my entire body trembled. For years I had cherished his beautiful words as much as his beautiful photograph.
As forcefully as a priest, I chanted:
“To sin shamelessly, endlessly,
To lose count of the nights and days,
And with a head unruly from drunkenness
To pass sideways into the temple of God.”
My would-be interrogator was suddenly blushing. “I wrote that.”
“Of course you did.” It simply sprang from my mouth. “You’re Aleksander Aleksandrovich Blok, and that was my father’s favorite poem. I recited it to him the very night he was killed… In fact, your words were practically the last I spoke to him.”
The color rushed from his face and he turned as pale as snow on a moonlit night. His own heavenly images of sinful Russia had touched the heart of the devil incarnate? His motifs of heartache and remorse were the last blessing the evil one had heard before meeting…death?
I’d never hated a man so much before. Sitting before me was not only Russia ’s most romantic poet in more than a century, not only our greatest gift since Aleksander Pushkin, but the person who’d once been both my savior and my inspiration. When I, a peasant girl from the distant countryside, had landed in the Steblin-Kamensky Institute, a school for daughters of good home and breeding, I was like a reeba bez vodii-a fish without water- lacking in friends, stylish clothing, courtly manners, a fancy home, personal maid, or anything else that a girl of good society took for granted. But I did have this poet’s images and words, and they had helped transform me from a clumsy derevenschina into a worldly young woman.
My voice quivering as if I were hurling hate on a deceitful lover, I gasped, “Why in the name of God did you bring me here? What do you of all people want from me?”
Blok stared straight at me. “I need to know what happened the night of December sixteenth, the night your father was killed.” He paused. “Allow me to explain, Maria Grigorevna. I was drafted into the army and now serve the Provisional Government. As secretary of the Extraordinary Commission, I have been present at most of the interviews with former ministers and those closest to the former imperial family.”
“Oh, really?” I said, mocking him. “I’ve wondered where you were and what you were doing. I haven’t seen any new poems from you in quite some time. Is that why?”
He glared at me. By the depth of the furrows creasing his forehead, I knew I’d hit not only a sore point but probably a sore truth. I couldn’t have been more pleased.
Pressing on, I said, “So you’ve found something more interesting to do…such as gathering gossip?”
“Maria Grigorevna,” he said, as sternly as a commandant, “it’s my job to take the stenographs from the interviews and edit them into readable form. As I’ve been going through the endless pages on your father, however, I find that not only is Rasputin more a mystery than ever but the truth of his murder is more and more unclear.”
“Of course it is. After all, both monarchists and revolutionaries have proved equally adept at twisting both my father’s life and his death into political legend.”
“They say that first your father was poisoned, next shot, then stabbed. But still he lived, and frantic to kill him, they finally threw him through a hole in the ice and-”
Bitterness stinging my tongue, I interrupted. “Don’t you know better than to believe the stories told by a man’s enemies?”
“Yes, but…”
As his words trailed off, I could see it in his eyes, his fascination with my father, which wasn’t surprising, since the entire Empire had been obsessed with him-or, more correctly, with the myths about him. And yet, as I stared at Blok, there seemed to be more. Could he be one of the few who admired my father, who saw Papa as the ultimate revolutionary, the peasant who’d climbed from the lowest rung to the very top and done what no terrorist had ever been able to do, overturn our entire society?
Suddenly I blurted out the truth. “If you really want to know who murdered the mysterious Rasputin and how, I can tell you. I can tell you exactly what happened on the night of December sixteenth because I was there and saw it all with my own eyes. First, though, you must realize one thing: I was and am a devoted daughter. I loved Papa, and he…he loved me.”
The tears came then, and there was not a thing I could do to stop them. Staring blankly ahead, I simply let the large salty drops roll one after another down my cheeks. But I was not crying because I loved my father. I was crying because I felt so guilty.
“What is it, Maria?” Blok asked, with surprising softness.
I swiped at my eyes. What could I say about my father, the greatest of all Russian enigmas?
“You have to look at the final days of his life,” I said, my voice quivering. “I learned everything I know about Papa during that last week.”
“Then you must tell me every detail of those days, right up to and including the night of the sixteenth, when he was lured to the Yusupov Palace.”
“Yes… But since when has anyone in Russia been interested in honesty, let alone truth?”
CHAPTER 1
December 1916
One week before Rasputin’s murder
It was past eleven in the evening when the telephone rang in our apartment, which wasn’t that unusual because people were always in need of Papa’s help, and in our city, the city of Peter, clocks had never made sense. Though we were fast approaching the lowest point in the year and the day’s light had been barely more than an indifferent blink, sleep for all of us was elusive.
