UPON HIS ARRIVAL back in Russia—because he did truly go to the Holy Land—my father discovered how hard it was to attend to one sick person after another, how physically and mentally exhausting it was to be the instrument of a power outside himself. After a morning spent with supplicants, he spent the afternoon lying flat on his back, not asleep but blank with weariness.
His ability to heal had grown stronger, but it had nothing to do with his pilgrimage. That was something he regarded as akin to a diploma, a thing he’d needed to validate his vocation. Or perhaps it did have to do with the pilgrimage, just not directly. As if he had fulfilled a celestial requirement, within a week of his return Father saw the Virgin. He’d seen her before, back home, but never with the heightened, almost hallucinatory detail with which he did on this day.
“It was before he saw her in the snowy woods?” Alyosha asked.
“Seven years before.”
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what she looked like this time.”
“I can tell you only what he told me.”
Father saw something in the road as he was driving home to Pokrovskoye from Jerusalem. He pulled over, turned the engine off, and left the car behind, as he wanted to walk. To approach her on the feet God gave him, as a man, not a foolish creature on wheels.
She stood on a cloud of butterflies, he said. In winter, a cloud of butterflies. Butterflies of all kinds, and of every color. And she wore a dress made of animals—not of the skins of animals but of animals themselves. A cloak of buffalo and tigers and monkeys and zebras, birds and tortoises and more, all of them alive and, as with the story of Noah and his ark, every creature represented. A vast and rippling many-colored cape of white, red, brown, orange, silver, black. Thick, glossy pelts stirring and twisting, an orgy of fur and feathers—held together by what force? What could it be other than the power of the being whose cloak they formed? When I wondered aloud at how huge a woman he must have seen there, standing in the road, he laughed and said, no, she was no taller or wider than he. But how then, I wanted to know, could she have worn a cloak of countless animals, each of which Father could see down to its last whisker?
“No, Masha,” he said. He hadn’t been looking at the Virgin. The apparition overcame him, forced itself inside his head, where it was revealed in more, or other, than the three dimensions mortals see. After all, why would the Holy Mother of God himself be limited to three? She had infinite dimensions.
Her face was as it is always described, at once radiant and sorrowful. And she was, as she always is, crowned. But not with jewels. Nor with stars. Flowers of all kinds circled her head—flowers whose beauty transcended that of jewels. From them, light sprayed into the chilly air like errant sunbeams. She took a step toward my father, and her cape parted to show her sparkling dress, blue like water. The reverse of the story of Moses and his rod, as Father described it, because Moses parted the waters whereas the Virgin’s cloak of land creatures opened to show him the sea. The gown of blue was alive with silver swimming creatures of all kinds—porpoise and tuna and swordfish, even whales. She could contain them all.
“How … singular,” Alyosha said, his brow creased. Someone who didn’t know the tsarevich might mistake his frown for evidence of anger, but it was thinking that made him look cross. When he was angry his face had no expression at all, and if you knew him you understood he had composed it carefully because he didn’t trust his anger, not enough to betray it.
“When he talked about it,” I said, “I could tell it was something he’d experienced. He wasn’t making it up, because if he had been he couldn’t have spoken of it in the way he did.”
“How did he?”
“He was sad, disillusioned. He’d expected different revelations from those he received. He waited on his knees for the Mother of us all to show him the city—a city—of enlightenment.” A city of pure gold yet clear as glass and lit by the light of God, not by the sun, who hid her face at the end of each day. A city in which there was no night, only brightness. But that city, the one he used to describe to me at bedtime, was inspired by descriptions in the Book of Revelation, and the Virgin had something else she wanted to show Father.
The Virgin didn’t speak but handed my father a message written on a scroll only he could see. “He could see it,” I told Alyosha, “but he didn’t know how to read. To learn what it said he had to transcribe the message onto a piece of paper and take it to someone who could read, and that someone was me, because Mother had taught me.”
“What did it say?”
“It doesn’t matter what it said. What matters is that he returned to the car, retrieved a pencil and a piece of paper, neither clean nor whole, and walked back to the same place in the road, an ordinary patch of trampled dirt as far as any other mortal eye could tell. Father went down on his hands and knees to labor over the message, squinting up at the sky and then down at the paper, copying from what no one else could have seen even were he squinting there with him. Eyes other than my father’s would have seen only a few loose flakes of snow turning in the sky and settling onto the barren ground. Father couldn’t do anything but copy, because he didn’t know how to write. He could never have done that if it hadn’t come from a source outside himself.”
“But what did it say?”
“That he was to go to Omsk and there buy a ticket to St. Petersburg. It would be a journey of eight days by train. It was time for him to come to the aid of his country.”
“Like Joan of Arc,” Alyosha said. “Her voices told her the same thing. Except in France, of course. Joan was beatified in 1909,” he added.
In 1920, two years after Alyosha was murdered, Joan would be canonized. She’d be declared a saint—a girl who had been called mad and a heretic possessed by demons. They burned her once, and twice more after that, burned her up until there was nothing left of her but a handful of ashes to throw in the Seine. Burned her lifeless body as they did my father’s, although his ashes were left for the wind to scatter.
Staggering toward the end of the Hundred Years War, about to succumb to what seemed like the inevitability of English rule, Charles VII, of the House of Valois, had been in straits direr than those in which Tsar Nikolay found himself. But Charles VII reigned during the fifteenth century. There was no proletariat to threaten—or even question—the idea of monarchy. Only citizens who, having escaped the previous century’s Black Death, were eager to believe their king ruled by divine right.
Had Tsar Nikolay kept the throne, I might be the daughter of a saint rather than a madman. Russia would have had no choice but to have the Church declare my father a martyr, as France did Joan of Arc, retried in absentia, twenty years after her murder. After all, what king can afford to be associated with madness? A man prone to hallucinations and yet allowed access to the tsarina and her children: that man had to be declared holy, a saint rather than a scheming impostor. Otherwise it would reflect badly on the ruling dynasty.
FATHER LEFT HOME almost as soon as he’d arrived. He got back in the ruined automobile and drove it as far as Kazan, where the thing broke down and Father told its previous owner that its service was done, he’d been called to the capital. Katkoff looked at what had once been his pride and joy, green paint dulled by desert sandstorms, no windscreen, no doors, no spare tire, not much upholstery, one headlamp gone, the other hanging by its cord like an enucleated eyeball.
“Keep it, my good man,” he said. “I never expected you to give it back—it was a gift. You can drive it to Petersburg.”
No, the Virgin had said Father was to take a train from Omsk.
“Drive it to Omsk, then.”
But Father had been galvanized by his encounter with the Virgin. The automobile—it had been revealed to him as a toy, nothing more. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child,” he quoted 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verse 11. “But when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Katkoff understood there was little point in arguing with a man who answered back in Bible verses. He bid Father Grigory farewell and gave the wreck to one of his tenants, Oblomov, who hitched a pair of mules to the thing and took it to town each market day, well pleased with his windfall.
The train from Omsk to St. Petersburg did take eight days, as the Virgin had said it would. The speed at which it traveled—the engineer told him it was harnessed to the power of 2,000 horses.
“How can that be?” Father asked, perhaps picturing, as I did when he told me, a great herd of animals running before the locomotive.
“Combustion,” the engineer said.
And if that wasn’t wickedness—to burn up even one horse to produce such a scream of iron wheels on their iron track, clouds of black smoke issuing from the locomotive and the black ash, all that was left of the poor beasts, on the white snow. For a peasant raised in Pokrovskoye, the train was a figment inspiring more fear than a visit from the Virgin.
My father arrived in St. Petersburg in March, during a snowstorm, unnerved every time he turned a corner and came upon another clot of freezing beggars and drunkards and prostitutes. A man who dreamed of a harmonious city upon which God’s light shone without interruption, he’d imagined the tsar’s city would exhibit some lesser degree of holiness, but a palpable holiness nonetheless. Certainly he’d never anticipated a world in which a millworker might choose to sleep on the floor by his or her loom because it was more comfortable, clean, and safe than a doss-house. The sole lodging factory hands could afford, doss-houses offered the one advantage of an invitation to drink oneself to death, as one couldn’t in a textile factory. So, it was mostly women who slept by their looms, and had their babies there, too, as mill foremen didn’t give a woman even one day off to bring a child into the world. How could Father have predicted that workers at the tanning factories were hungry enough to eat the rotten bits of meat they scraped from the hides? He had no more idea than Alyosha that destitution claimed most of the populace, no idea how desperate were the lives of most of the city’s poor.
Even if Father dressed like a beggar, we had never been poor in Pokrovskoye, and we weren’t poor in St. Petersburg. Our apartment was spacious, five rooms as well as a kitchen and a private toilet and bath, in the safe and not-unfashionable neighborhood my mother had insisted on for Varya and me. Third floor, with a private entrance. No filthy stairwell reeking of cabbage and cluttered with unclaimed bills and broken-down boots. Equidistant from the Nikolaev and Tsarskoe Selo stations, a short walk from the Maly and Alexandra theaters, not even half a mile from the Winter Palace. Within shouting distance of the Hotel de l’Europe, and five blocks from the Astoria.
When I, and later Varya, arrived in St. Petersburg, we couldn’t believe our eyes. Such opulence, and so many buildings and electric lights and things we’d never seen before, things we never knew existed. Water that came out of shining taps, shops with doors made of glass, hospitals and restaurants, streets crowded with more people than we imagined existing in all of Russia, let alone one city, buildings twenty stories high and cathedrals so grand we could have fit a hundred of our humble little church inside and still have room for more, trams and trains, and every month more automobiles: there was no end of things to astonish us.
When good fortune greeted my father, when unexpected gifts arrived and doors opened—doors to affordable lodgings in the good part of town—he interpreted these as further evidence that the Virgin’s prophecy, as well as Makary’s from years before, would be fulfilled. All would unfold as he had been told. He had no idea Duchess Militsa, who initiated the craze in spiritualism, was a close friend of Madame Katkoff. Militsa had made such a success of séances that they were no longer avant-garde, and before they became as tired as the next parlor game, she replaced them with Father. Within a month of his arrival in the city, he’d become a fixture in her sitting room, with its walls covered in green silk, its heavy sterling sconces and samovar. It required a Militsa, married to Tsar Nikolay’s cousin and intent on continuing her reign as the hostess whose invitations were prized above all others, to make an unwashed, uncouth, sexually incontinent peasant with an un-barbered beard into the most sought-after sensation in Petersburg. The aristocracy had never seen a man like my father. They looked into his blue eyes, eyes he fixed on theirs with a relentlessness they’d have called rude in one of their own set, and concluded he was authentic in a way they were not. A member of the true Rus.
A holy man named Father Grigory—perhaps she should bring him to the palace? That was the question Militsa asked Alexandra Fyodorovna, who practically advertised herself as a religious maniac. The one she asked herself was: what better way to secure her fortunes than to inspire firmly and forever the tsarina’s gratitude?