Free Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison Page B

But I could tell stories, and they were, most of them, true.

The Virgin in the Silver Forest

    “I T HAPPENED IN the Silver Forest.”
    “The one outside Moscow,” Alyosha said.
    “Yes, outside of Moscow.”
    The setting was important. It wasn’t any forest but that particular forest of birch and pine.
    “Once upon a time, when you were a little boy, you fell down in the park and injured your arm, and your poor frightened mother summoned my father to come to you from Moscow.”
    “He was there for the opening of an orphanage,” Alyosha continued. “Father Grigory’s Home for Children.”
    “Yes.” Although it wasn’t so much an orphanage as a place for destitute families to leave their children, lest they starve. All the money Father was given as bribes he gave away, often to orphanages, and this one had thanked him by changing its name. I think it was a hard thing for a tsarevich to consider: that loving parents might abandon their children to be fed, clothed, and protected—care they could not themselves provide.
    “He missed the opening,” I said. “The re-opening, really. He bought a ticket for the first available train to Petersburg.”
    “And then?” Alyosha said.
    “And then,” I answered, “as there were hours to fill before its departure, he went for a walk.”
    After I’d told Alyosha the story of the Virgin in the Silver Forest once or twice, it became something closer to a prayer than a distraction. Were I to omit a detail, Alyosha supplied it. If I changed anything inadvertently, he corrected me. It had to be the same each time, exactly the same.
    “Your father didn’t like walking in cities,” he’d prompt, and I’d say, “No, he didn’t. He didn’t like it at all.”
    For Father, a walk meant going beyond the outskirts of Moscow, with its poverty-choked streets. Apart from their taverns, where he could dance with gypsy women, Father found the noise and ugliness of cities offensive. To get to the Silver Forest, he crossed a fallow field. Once inside the trees, sheltered from the wind, he found the woods silent, and he saw how a storm had left everything, every needle and twig, glazed with ice. The sun shone on the trees and reflected off the ice, and every tree around him blazed with light. He couldn’t walk without peering through his fingers, his hands held before his face to protect his eyes, and he went forward that way, deeper and deeper into the Silver Forest.
    There was no color anywhere, only white snow, white ice, trees frosted white. Not a color so much as a flare of illumination too intense for mortal eyes. He didn’t see the Holy Mother until he was in her presence.
    The Virgin took the form of a fir tree, all of her sparkling white, with boughs for arms, and in each arm she held one of the lives my father had saved, human lives and those of animals as well.
    “Was I there too?”
    “Of course. By then Father was a man of forty years, and the tree was as tall as a church spire and laden with souls. Every soul including that of the first creature he’d raised from the dead, a—”
    “Little white goat.”
    “Yes. The Holy Mother had so many arms—boughs—and the light was so intense that Father found himself dazzled, unable togo on looking and equally unable to turn away. To help me understand, he drew a picture of the apparition.”
    “Can I see the drawing?” Alyosha asked the first time I told the story. “Did you keep it, Masha?”
    “I have it among my things. I’ll fetch it if you like.”
    My father was barely able to write. When he tried, the letters came out backward or out of order—a nearly faultless memory hid his lack of education, as he could quote page after page of scripture while pretending to read—but his hand was that of an artist. He’d drawn a crown of sparkling snowflakes over the Holy Mother’s head and rooted her feet into a bank of snow, and he made each of the branches that were her arms curve gently outward from her trunk,