The cartoons that resulted from these letters—caricatures of Rasputin, Alix, and the girls that appeared in the papers and could not be suppressed, now that the 1905 reforms had lifted censorship of the press and guaranteed freedom of speech—showed the women of the imperial family frolicking naked, the empress and Rasputin embracing. In another, a demonic, black-haired, oversized Rasputin held two small stupid-faced puppets in his hands: Niki and Alix. Behind Rasputin, the empress knelt naked, a yellow crown in her long flowing brown hair; Niki potbellied and castrated, sat in a palanquin, wearing only boots and a fur hat; clustered about the three of them chattered a legion of grand dukes and ministers, all now exiled or murdered. At this, the family, Niki’s ministers, even the prime minister of the Duma, Petr Stolypin, insisted Rasputin had to be sent away. And so, bowing to pressure, which he never liked to do, Niki sent Grigory Rasputin back home to Siberia for a while, to his village of Pokrovskoe, which was why, in 1912, from Spala, Alix had to telegraph him there.
I saw Rasputin in St. Petersburg later that fall—for after his great success at Spala he had been allowed out of exile to return to the capital—on an evening after the theater while I was driving over the Troitsky Bridge. At first he was just a shape, a long black coat, a hood, hands gesticulating, two animals battling, and then as we drew closer, the lanterns on the outside of my carriage swung into his face. The man beneath the hood was suddenly illuminated, as if the figure had stepped up to the footlights of a stage. He had been turned toward the Neva, staring into the water, possibly importuning his own fate, but he turned his head toward me as I passed in my perfumed and heated carriage, and I saw the face of the creature that Petersburgers had begun to call The Nameless One or The Unmentionable—a nose broad at the nostrils, like the gnarled root of a tree, a heavy brow like a ledge over two blue eyes, pale as electrified water. I knew immediately and unmistakably it was he, so much had his description circulated. When his eyes connected momentarily with mine I felt the shock of it as if I turned inside out and my mind was wiped clean. And then we passed and I looked back at him, but he had not turned to look back at me. He didn’t know who I was or how my son could have seized from him his power.
So, where was I? Yes, how we saw Alexei for the first time, Vova and I. Although it was brilliant daylight outside, the electric lights were burning in the narrow, dark hallways. While my brother supervised the loading of our trunk into the carriage, our utility here over, the tsar escorted us down the hall. The door to Alexei’s room had been flung open, and standing by the bed against a table of medicines and towels, useless palliatives, were Alexei’s sisters, all four dressed alike as if they were a small corps de ballet—in high-necked, white lace blouses and pale, pleated linen skirts. Even their hair was similarly styled—half of it pulled back at the crown with a bow, the rest loose behind the ears and falling over their shoulders. Only the littlest one’s, Anastasia’s, hair was straight. The hair of the other three hung in soft waves. They were kissing at their brother’s fingers and telling him about the bit of theater they had performed last night at dinner for the guests, the members of the imperial suite and the Polish noblemen who had been invited to join them—two scenes from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme that must have called for two of them to be the lady and the pirate I had seen in the corridor last night—and their laughter stopped as they saw at the threshold Vova and me, a little boy and a little woman. They themselves were big, pink swans surrounding the small, white-faced form, who smiled at Vova from his bed. For a moment, with that smile, one could see the lively boy Sergei once described to me who at dinner even with company there licked his plate, squirmed through the meal, teased his sisters, stole the slipper from a lady-in-waiting and returned it to her with a strawberry stuffed into the toe of it, wrote little notes to Niki telling him of his day—When I see you I am going to bathe in your bath—I kiss your hand. The children had few friends, as Alix kept them away from what she considered the salacious influence of the court, which was everyone they knew. So the girls entertained each other, and Alexei was allowed the company of the son of his sailor nanny or when the family was in the Crimea the son of a peasant or on occasion a boy from the Corps des Pages, a well-behaved cadet who was summoned to the palace when they were in Petersburg. And now here was my son, his half brother, the latest to be summoned, standing in his bedroom doorway.
Perhaps Alexei thought Vova was one of those boys come to play with him during his convalescence, for he raised his hand and beckoned Vova to come, telling him not to bow. When Vova approached, toy in hand he had clutched for courage, Alexei said, Is that for me? and without protest Vova handed over to him the stuffed elephant I had given him at Christmas as a remembrance of the real elephant the clown Dourov had brought to the house. The cotton animal wore a red-and-gold cloth saddle and matching hat with a bell that jangled. The children fell upon it instantly—Oh, how darling, look at its little trunk—as Alix and I looked at each other. All night we had each contemplated losing a son, and this morning we shared the same relief. My son bent over the bed to show the heir the intricacies by which the elephant’s legs could be made to move and their two heads touched. Alexei’s hair had more chestnut to it, but Niki was right, the two boys looked remarkably alike, of similar age and build and similar features; it took my breath away to see how similar they were, but one had color and health and the other yellow skin stretched tight across his face. But Alexei was alive. He would not be buried in the cold woods by the Pilitsa River. Soon enough Alexei asked one of his sisters—I don’t know which one—to fetch his box of lead soldiers so they could play elephant hunt, and when she reappeared with the chest of beautifully painted toy men, each molded into a different posture, Niki followed behind her and stood in the doorway to watch the boys stand the soldiers one by one until they filled the hills and dales of the bedsheets around Alexei’s legs—one leg up, the other leg down. It would be a year before the tsarevich could walk normally or fully straighten his left leg, for the stagnant blood that had filled his joint was like acid and it ate away at bone and cartilage and this deformation locked the leg into a bent position. For a year he would wear iron braces designed to slowly once again straighten out the limb, and during this year he would be photographed officially only when seated—on chairs, on sleighs, on steps. The boys aimed their soldiers at the elephant and made shooting sounds, and after a few rounds of this, the tsar said we would have a real hunt another time, when Alexei was all better, and Alix told Alexei to make a gift of those soldiers to Vova and the tsar helped the boys gather all the men and lay them back into the wood box.