ONCE I JOINED, I knew I’d never leave, never make a home and live in it. I wouldn’t—nothing could induce me to—step away from what I’d discovered.
In the circus I was no longer part of the strictly mortal world, gray and workaday, the dispiriting, dull, humbling slog of one day into the next that I’d grown to expect living in Paris. Not that it was all luck, all pleasure, all reward. I went to bed exhausted, and my time in front of an audience was a small fraction of the day. Performing before a crowd, I didn’t need to try to synchronize the horses’ movements with my own, it just happened. I felt their legs beneath them as if they were my own, felt the impact of each hoof as it struck the ground. I entered the ring barefoot and bare-legged, on two white horses. Together we appeared as if by magic out of the black night and into the ring’s circle of light. I never rode but stood on the horses’ backs, my left foot planted on the horse to the left, my right foot on the right, as we moved into a canter.
Before the equestrian troupe signed with Barnum, I didn’t wear so vulgar a costume, but circus performers are expected to sparkle, and sparkle I did in a short, spangled red leotard that ended in something like a gash between my legs. The horses’ reins were red and sequined and glittered like my costume. I held them in both hands, slack. They were the same as an aerialist’s net, for use only when something went wrong. All our communication was through my bare feet, balanced where a saddle would sit, on the horses’ rosined backs. For me it was just our twelve white limbs, the horses’ and mine, moving in a rhythm practice couldn’t deliver. They asked, I answered. I asked, they answered. That was it.
Around, around. Flurries of yellow-white sawdust rising around the blurred hooves, tails rippling like flags in a light wind. Dreamlike, the sound of hooves striking in concert, over and over, incantatory. The orchestra played, but I didn’t hear their music. We went in counterclockwise circles, most of my weight resting on my left leg, flexed as I leaned into the curve. Three loops around the ring and then, before anyone had a chance to see how I’d done it, I was standing backward, looking over the horses’ tails and holding the reins behind my back, and we made another three loops that way. A jump was carried into the ring, a jump four feet in height, and I took it; I took it standing on two horses, I took it facing forward, I took it facing backward. When I got stronger—it took months of training with the floor acrobats—I could do a backbend from one moving horse’s back to the other’s and take a jump with my hands on one horse, my feet on the other, back bowed.
AFTER BORIS DIED (before he’d turned thirty, just as Father promised), there was nothing to hold me in Paris, and from that point forward I closed every letter asking for information about my family with the request that I be contacted care of whatever show I was traveling with. It made me feel safe, as if the circus were a kind of magic kingdom, impenetrable by outside forces, even Soviet spies eager to punish anyone so cavalier as to ignore an iron curtain.
Months would go by without any answer, but I didn’t stop asking until, bit by bit, I received enough information from enough people to piece together what had happened to my family after I’d left. Whoever contacted me didn’t do so in writing—that wasn’t safe—but they carried messages, one to another. After the show’s finale, which gathered all of us—aerialists; equestriennes; dancers; clowns; dogs wearing tutus and walking upright; monkeys capering; elephants swaying under sequined headdresses, toenails painted gold; gymnasts doing handsprings; and I in my sparkling tunic and, later, jodhpurs and tailcoat—after we’d taken a final sweeping bow and the orchestra had screeched its goodbye crescendo, the lights would go up and, every few months, a man or woman would break away from the audience and hurry to accost me as I made my way back to my car. Whoever it was had information, a message to whisper in my ear, old news that was, perhaps, no longer true. But by the time I left Europe for the United States, I was able to confirm that Varya and her chaperone had escaped the soldiers who commandeered the train, only to fall prey to another band of predators. She was buried in a communal grave in the city of Perm. Dimitri was conscripted by the Red Army and became something of a legend for what his superiors called valor. I suspect it was the obedience of a hugely strong and stupid boy that made his military career. My mother was still living in her two-story home, alone except for Dunia and the livestock.
Of course, I didn’t have to ask for news of the Romanovs, as their deaths were genuine news, printed in papers all over the world. After the news reports stopped, I never expected to learn any more of Alyosha, but I did. Working for Barnum & Bailey, I toured in Europe until 1935, when I auditioned for a smaller, American company. I imagined I’d be happier in a new world that didn’t hold so many memories, forgetting of course that it isn’t places but people who hold memories. Too, performing in America satisfied a little of my childhood dream, even if I was no longer on horseback but working with cats and bears and had joined the Forepaugh–Sells circus rather than Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.
“TOO BIG FOR YOUR BRITCHES.” That’s an American expression for hubris. I hadn’t been traveling with Barnum for long before I’d been seduced, thoroughly and indelibly, by the cats. The horses were my friends, old friends. I knew them inside and out. But the cats—I couldn’t stop looking at them. I wanted to be closer to them, wanted to be the one they watched, the one on whom their eyes remained fixed. It got so that I felt I needed them to recognize me, acknowledge me. I dreamed of touching their faces, made myself a nuisance hanging around their cages. Then I discovered there weren’t any women who tamed lions—not after Claire Heliot retired—and I couldn’t let go of the idea that I could be the next. Either that or it didn’t let go of me.
I knew every minute working with cats would be like that gap in the air between two trapezes, when the aerialist has let go of the first bar and is flying, falling, yet to grab the next bar or catch a partner’s hand. The only thing that gave me any rest from my fantasies of being a lion tamer was becoming one, but it took two years to find someone willing to take on a female apprentice, and the only reason he did was as a parting blow to his rivals. Seventy-five years old, Nero Highgate—Master Nero—was retiring from show business, and leaving all he knew to a woman whose father was an infamous madman: that seemed to him enough like a final triumph over other tamers, in their prime.
It began, like any art, with watching. And it began not with lions but tigers. For a fortnight all I did—all I was allowed to do—was sit outside a tiger’s cage, hour after hour, focusing my every thought on the beast within.
“Banish from your mind,” Master Nero said, punctuating his instructions with snaps of his whip, which I rarely saw out of his hand, “whatever thought does not concern the animal. The animal has powers of perception you cannot understand. While you will never learn its thoughts, it will always know yours.”
What I’d loved about horses was our shared, silent, almost sacred partnership—we understood one another. It looked hard, but it was easy. Now the inequality, the challenge, the shift of power—all of it was exhilarating. Master Nero brought me a battered red stool and placed it on the ground outside the bars of the tiger’s cage. If I found my attention wavering, I was told I should stop, walk away, take a break. The cage was one of six in the circus’s winter quarters, a run-down compound in a run-down port city in the south of Italy—Brindisi, where the breeze off the water smelled of motor oil and rotting seaweed. My apprenticeship, all said and done, was six months of tedium punctuated by moments of panic.
“Although you will never see into a cat’s head,” Master Nero said day after day after day, “you can memorize its behavior. A cat isn’t like a person, hard to predict. It always responds the same way it responded the time before.” And there was this, his parting caution:
“I’ve seen you on horseback,” he said, “enough that I can guess your weakness with cats.”
“What is it?” I asked him, when he didn’t continue. He’d given me my own whip—never to be used on a cat, only as a visual cue to direct its movements. I’d spent enough time with him that I hadn’t expected a purely celebratory gesture.
“No matter what I tell you, you believe you will establish a sympathy with the cats you train. You’re vain. You think your heritage, your father’s gift, whatever it was, if it was, will exempt you from the rules. But mark my words: if you try to push your friendship on the animal, then, pffft, you will be done for.” He smiled at the idea. He was a small man with a very large smile filled with tobacco-stained teeth. We shook hands. A year later I heard he’d married for the seventh time, this time to a pretty gymnast half his age. Apparently he hadn’t been so astute in his estimation of human behavior, because she did to him as she’d done to her first two husbands: run off to Argentina with all his money. She picked men who were old enough that chasing a wayward wife around the globe seemed, in the wake of her departure, not quite worth the trouble.
I never lied about my abilities. I was a competent trainer of lions, tigers, and leopards, and professed no unusual talents. Whoever hired me lied in my stead, advertising a performer with the power to hypnotize animals, an occult ability illustrated on the midway as blue electricity zigzagging from my eyes. I could almost hear Father laughing. As for me, I found the portrait a little too similar to the cartoons of him and the tsarina plastered over every blank wall in St. Petersburg.
AN AMERICAN AUDIENCE wasn’t going to be satisfied as easily as those back home—that was clear from the start. The expectation of spectacle added to a name like Rasputin: I couldn’t claim such a heritage without doing something that seemed impossible. As impossible as laying hands on a hemorrhaging hemophiliac and stopping the blood from flowing. Anything less and I’d disappoint. In Europe, people wanted to see me perform because I was a Rasputin. They didn’t care about my proving my expertise. They accorded it to me as a birthright. But Mr. Forepaugh—every time I proposed an act he asked for one more element, one more twist. Lions, tigers, leopards, pumas—I wanted to keep it to cats. I had experience with cats. Two lions, two tigers, two leopards, and two pumas. Not enough.
“A bear,” Mr. Forepaugh said. “A bear maybe could shake things up.”
I agreed: a bear. How different could a bear be from a lion?
“Can’t have just one.”
I said we’d add another. Mr. Forepaugh frowned. “There’s something … Something’s missing.”
Ten animals. What could be missing?
“I know what’s missing—that Hollywood bear,” he said. “That Hannibal bear.”
Hannibal tipped the balance because he had a history, like I did, the kind that seizes hold of people’s imaginations and inspires morbid curiosity. We weren’t even halfway through the off-season before they’d drawn up a new program that included his biography, ginned up to make him seem that much more dangerous, and hired a publicist to plant articles in the papers in Chicago, Detroit, Omaha, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati—anywhere Forepaugh–Sells was scheduled to perform—pitting the Daughter of the Mad Monk against the Man-Eating Hollywood Bear. Which might have been fine, if there hadn’t been ten other animals in the ring. If bears, like cats, had good eyesight and responded to visual cues.
They’d scrapped the jungle picture. It had been one of those blighted ventures, the kind in which everything went wrong—sets flooded, people got sick, the female lead broke her ankle, props burned up in a fire. A biblical onslaught of plagues, one after another, and then Hannibal, without provocation, tore a piece out of an actor’s shoulder, and the general disaster that the project became excused the bear any responsibility for his attack. It was interpreted as a spell of bad behavior generated by the picture’s unbeatable bad luck, something that hadn’t had anything to do with any particular bear; that would have happened no matter what bear, because that was the kind of bad luck it was—pervasive. Circus people are as superstitious as Russians.
NERO. HANNIBAL. THE names seemed taken from an invocation. I never looked at Hannibal without thinking of Alyosha memorizing the Caesars as part of his ill-fated training for leadership—not after Alyosha suddenly returned to me, returned to life, it felt like, in his journal.
The under-trainer, Jim Nelson, and I were blocking out my ridiculous, stunt-packed “exotic extravaganza” on the day I received a thick envelope, much creased and smudged, addressed to Matryona Grigorievna Rasputina, with a series of crossed-out addresses. The idea had been to have two bears doing somersaults while I waltzed with a third, Hannibal, and an assortment of lions, pumas, leopards, and tigers sat on their haunches, looking at us and bringing their front paws together in clumsy, nearly silent applause. Hannibal learned the simple box step quickly. As soon as we played the recording, up he’d go on his hind legs. He couldn’t lead, but he did move in time with the music, and none of us had hoped for that much. It was enough to have a waltzing bear. For the Daughter of the Mad Monk to waltz with a bear to Strauss while a dozen potentially murderous animals watched was enough, even for Americans. He kept his front paws in the right attitude. As long as I did my part, his left paw looked as if it were guiding me at the waist, and he held the right one up for me to hold.
That afternoon, I had my hand on the arm of the phonograph and was about to set the needle on the record when a little man whistled from outside the fenced ring to catch my attention. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, and he looked like a Rumpelstiltskin with his huge ears and nose, his hunched back, and his peculiar black coat with its enormous pockets, out of one of which he drew the thick envelope.
“What is this?” I asked him as he pressed it into my hands.
“A gift from a friend,” he said in Russian.
“Who is this friend?”
“A friend in the old country,” he said, and he gave a deep bow.
The handwriting on the envelope was crabbed. Inside, an unsigned typewritten letter was tucked between the pages of a small black leather-bound book—a journal, written in a hand I knew well, as sometimes when Alyosha wanted me to come to him and tell a story, he sent me a note, usually through Nagorny. The letter explained that the journal had been smuggled out of the house where the family had been executed. As a kind of introductory remark—or perhaps a warning—the note’s author explained that the book contained the tsarevich’s account of his family’s exile, from August 1917, when they left Tsarskoe Selo, until July 17, 1918. I looked up from the letter to ask how the bearer of the envelope had come into its possession, but he had vanished.
THREE BEARS, TWO LIONS, two tigers, two leopards, and two pumas.
“Asking for it,” Jim Nelson said of the act. “Too big for your britches,” he said. But it wasn’t that. I was distracted; I’d lost focus. Having read Alyosha’s journal once, I read it again and again, I don’t know how many times. I had trouble sleeping and couldn’t keep my mind on work. We were rehearsing when Hannibal escaped my control.
Jim shook his head when he visited. He stared morosely at the sheet tented over my leg. I hadn’t seen it. The expression on the face of whoever was unlucky enough to change the dressing told me all I needed to know. At night, with the door to my room open, light entered from the hall, and instead of the sheet I’d see a luminous white blur above my weeping, sutured thigh. What with morphine and fever dreams, I took this to be the ghost of my leg hovering over its mangled flesh, uncertain as to whether it was to go on to the next world or remain with me in this one.
According to the calendar hung on the wall opposite my bed—“To help orient you,” the nurse explained—it was nearly May. I’d slept through half of April. Well, not slept exactly. The last thing I remembered, Hannibal was on my chest. He’d pinned my shoulders to the ground and was licking my temple. I was laughing. I thought he was kissing me.
“How many stitches?” I asked the nurse unwrapping my thigh.
“Do you have any idea what lives in the mouth of a bear?” she answered, as if to imply I’d been careless in choosing a means of injuring myself. I did know, actually, as the pathology report was clipped under the fever chart at the foot of my bed and I’d got the night nurse to show it to me. Staphylococcus epidermidis, Streptococcus, Escherichia coli, Serratia fonticola, Serratia marcescens, Aeromonas hydrophila, Bacillus cereus, Enterococcus durans.
Jim visited with a photographer from a local paper and two panther cubs. “Borrowed from the zoo,” he said. “Mr. Forepaugh wants a little good publicity.”
“We see a lot of circus people,” the nurse told the photographer. “And there are accidents. There are always accidents. Rasputin,” she said, shaking her head. “Can you imagine?” She talked about me as if I weren’t there or couldn’t understand English, and I was reminded of Alyosha’s telling me that was how he knew he wasn’t expected to live, the way no one ever bothered to keep anything from him.
She cranked up the bed so the photographer could pose me with the under-trainer and the cubs. Miss Rasputin being comforted by her lifesaver, Jim Nelson, who brought the cheerful cubs to her bedside at the Dukes Co. Hospital. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes, but it exhausted me. All the articles I saw lauded Jim for his courage in pulling the bear off me. A lot of telegrams, mostly from people I didn’t know.
I waited until the nurse left the room to ask if Hannibal had been put down.
“I’m sorry,” Jim said. And then the nurse came back in; he slipped away. Poor Hannibal.
I had the most peculiar dreams. Even when I thought I was awake. I’d look up and there Alyosha would be, sitting not just on the bed but on my injured leg. “Well,” he’d say, “this is unexpected—you bleeding to death for a change,” and he’d laugh as if it were a fine joke on me. Apparently I very nearly had. Bled to death, I mean.