Each night after she had satisfied herself that all the others were sleeping, Anna, the Rat, undressed carefully under the heaped bedclothes in the darkened room. But this morning, she woke early. Spring light moved across the room. But the family slept, Ilse as never before. Herbert had already left. The Rat wondered what time it was; perhaps time to wake Ilse and the children.
Spring caressed Anna’s cheek as she regarded the still-sleeping figure of Maria, tucked in so tenderly beside her. Painfully, the Rat managed to shift herself into an upright position, which is to say a semicurled sitting one. Her spine ached. Anna drew aside the blanket where it weighted her. And in the soft first light of the morning, she peered at her body as she pulled her nightgown aside.
Anna’s spine, curved in a semicircle, condemned her to stare forever at her own lap. Because of this, she always, even to herself, even in the dark, kept herself covered. But now she took a look.
There it was. The handprints were still there. A sulfurous burn of a hand mark, each long finger articulated on her withered white flesh. The hands were etched into the flesh of each upper thigh as strongly as the print of a leaf can etch itself into cement or stone.
“Oh.” She sucked in her breath in dismay.
She forced herself to look closely. The bony, determined fingers, the emblazoned palms, the hands gripped her thighs and moved them forcibly apart. As she looked, a smell of quickly struck phosphorus rose up from her body. She felt herself on fire, scorched again and forever by the rapacious hands of Rasputin.
“Unspeakable things,” she murmured to herself, now tracing the outlines of the cadaverous hands on her body. She ran her own small, soft hands over the large marks. “He did to me unspeakable things.” And even while she said this to herself, even while she experienced anew the shame and horror, a little spasm, the beginnings of wild excitement, began to mount.
The hands flickered into flame; the flame ignited. Anna melted into her memories, confounded of shame and excitement. “Yes!” she cried to her now-dead lover. Unwillingly, yet at the same time gladly, the sigh rose up from her silent body. Rasputin seized her, looking into her beautiful eyes, entering her once more. Her body throbbed around his. And Anna gave way, rapturous and horrified.
“Dear lady…,” Rasputin had said ironically. “Would you do anything to save your husband?”
“Yes,” Anna had replied. “Little fool,” she thought now, looking back.
She saw herself once more in the dark room alone with the Mad Monk, a candle flickering. His savage, sensual face stared at her, the head hooded, partially hidden by his cowl. But nothing could veil his fierce desires.
“Very well,” he had commanded, not even bothering to look directly at the woman as she stood, a supplicant for her husband’s lands and money, a bent figure bowed before him. “You shall be my companion for two weeks. And after that, I shall intercede with the Little Father on your family’s behalf.” How quickly Anna had agreed. Even then her heart had pounded with dread. Her body itself was a hooked question mark. She waited meekly. Rasputin took her roughly by the hand, blew out the candle, and led her through a hall.
A cold wind swirled around them. And suddenly, there was an ignited odor in the air. Perhaps it was the odor of fresh air after lightning; perhaps it was the Devil himself. But always, forever after, no matter how often she washed, the Rat was to perceive that odor. It would accompany her everywhere. Like night fog, it swirled about them, and her body was forever after impregnated with it.
“Look at me,” Rasputin commanded. Rasputin parted the skirts of his robe. His mad eyes fixed on hers; he drew from his skirts his enormous member. It throbbed and weaved toward her, pointing toward her body as surely as a dowser’s stick. It quivered. “Look!” Anna tried to look away, down, up, anywhere but directly in front of her. “Look. Behold the Rod of God!” There was moisture on the end of it, a shiny, pearly drop hanging from its tip. The enormous branch of flesh moved toward her; it appeared to be drooling lasciviously. Despite herself, an answering river of liquid ran through her body, down her thighs, a shining river on which to travel inward.
Rasputin stared at her fixedly as his member grew and swelled. “Down on your knees,” he commanded. “Down on your knees before your God!” He grappled for her hump, held it, clawing, palpating. Roughly, he pushed her head against him. The oversized penis grew and found her mouth. “On your knees. Pray,” commanded Rasputin. “Pray, my little Countess.” His head was thrown back; he was staring fixedly at something far away. He began to rock in her mouth. “Pray.”
On her knees, with Rasputin fondling her hump, Anna was trying to pray. “Please, God,” her heart cried. Her mouth choked around his huge organ. Above her, Rasputin spasmed, whispering strange sounds, fingering the heavy rosary. The beads swayed against Anna’s face. There was a rank smell rising up from his robes and his body, from the enormous searching organ, with its mysterious forested hillocks below.
“Pray, my Countess. Behold thy God,” Rasputin commanded. “Say it aloud. Let me hear you.”
“Please, God,” Anna choked.
“Oh God,” said Rasputin at the same moment. He tore the clothes from her hump, and his hands forced themselves downward. Suddenly, he drew his huge throbbing penis out of her mouth. He grabbed her and in one motion ripped the clothes from her body. “You were praying then,” he muttered. “Now I will give you something to really pray about.” He turned her around and around in his large hands, the smell of incense and unwashed male musk mingling together. “Ah, let me take a good look at that little body of yours.” Anna tried to hide with shame, but Rasputin carefully examined her hump, her deformed spine. Then he once again tipped her face to his. “Look at me, little Countess,” he commanded. “They call me the Devil. Do you think I am the Devil?” He grasped his enormous penis in both hands. “Some may say I am the Devil, but in fact I represent the only true Christ. I come to you as the only true Christ. The living God, do you hear me?”
Rasputin pushed her down on a rough bed. “Your God, do you hear me? I am your God.” Grappling in the dark, the Rat tried to defend herself from his sudden cruel hands. “Say it,” he whispered. “Let me hear you say it.”
Before she could say anything, Rasputin grasped her mouth in his. He bit her savagely. A taste of salt…He bent his head toward her thin breasts. A searing pain shot through her body. “Say it.” Anna smelled his sulfurous odor mixed with sweat and wine.
Rasputin pulled up his monk’s robe and fell upon her voraciously. “Pray, dear lady,” he hissed sardonically.
Anna began to cry piteously. “Have mercy,” she pleaded.
“God has no mercy,” replied the monk. Inexorably, he held her legs apart and gazed at her sex.
“What a pitiful thing a woman is,” he mused. “They give us life. And they can destroy our lives as well.” He seized the huge silver crucifix dangling from his rosary and pressed it to Anna’s bluish lips. Then he held it to own lips and kissed it. “Blessed Virgin Mary, I do this in your name.” The words were drawn out of him, thick and slow. “I do this for you.”
Shrinking, the Rat lay exposed under his gaze. “A poor sad creature, you are, eh, Countess?” He burned her with his eyes, which changed color, green to fiery, as he looked at her. “And a poor sad creature is your husband, the so-called Count,” he added. Anna tried to curl herself up, to really become the small protected shrimp. “Remember your duty to the Tsar and the Holy Family!” Rasputin roared.
Then he fell to his knees, grasping his swollen upright penis as if it were a candle. Or a crucifix. He held it between both hands as it became a shining fleur-de-lis. The monk bent and kissed its blazing purple tip, taking it reverently between his lips. He fingered his rosary, rubbing it against the organ. “Lord, I give myself to you. Take my ornament; take my bright sword. Use it as thou wilt against thine enemies.” His penis flared; a shining aureole surrounded it.
“Lord, I am prepared to do thy will.” Grasping her firmly by each thigh, Rasputin forcibly tore her body open. A searing pain—the wrack of Anna’s fused spine cracking open. There was a sizzle of flesh, an imprint of his large hands forcing her body apart, an imprint so strong that she did not even notice it under the greater pain of her body’s deformity giving way. He entered her and the hot light of his organ pierced her. Rasputin forced deeper and deeper, his penis growing so huge it reached to her heart. And there it penetrated, stayed.
“Let us pray together,” he said. The hot organ became a burning fer-de-lance and drove itself in farther. Her flesh sizzled. He grabbed her hump and forced her head back. His eyes rolled up and she saw only the whites. He rammed his member into her again and again, until finally he was sated. First light was leaking through the high wainscoted windows. She swooned.
When she came to, Rasputin was already retying his robe. “Clean yourself up, dear lady,” he said. “I shall expect you here at the same time tomorrow night.” He pushed her aside with not another glance. Small, naked, broken, the Rat lay in her violation. She heard heavy-booted footsteps receding through the stone corridors. It was the hour of Matins.
The Rat lay there dry-eyed. She did not weep for the rough violence that had entered her. She did not weep for her own insignificance. What, after all, was she offering Rasputin? Hers was the body of a woman who had never known sexual pleasure. The reluctant advances of her husband had never aroused her. “Anna?” he had pleaded wetly, once his mother had given him the idea of what to do. “Anna, tell me. Is it all right?” The more her husband had asked her permission, the more she despised him, lying inert. The Rat could not remember how they had managed to conceive their children.
As she found her clothing, pasting it over her humped body, the sound of monks chanting was rising from the chapel on the other side of the building. She made her way out, shamefully. Now, like a dog, the Rat dragged herself home through the streets of Saint Petersburg. It was not yet dawn, and finally she managed to find her carriage, the coachman sleeping peacefully, in front of the palace beside the frozen Neva. She stumbled painfully, spots of blood staining her passage, into the large house, and then to bed. There she lay all day, her eyes closed.
She dreamed of Rasputin, his huge organ, and of her total surrender. Anna was in a state, climaxing again and again. She could not stop the strange sensations overtaking her. She refused to see anyone, even her children. She could not live until she would be with the Mad Monk once again. “Your mother has a headache,” her mother-in-law said, shooing the children away.
The next evening, the Rat once more summoned her carriage when the others were asleep, and returned to the covenant she had made.
Rasputin looked at her directly, his somber eyes burning with knowledge. “So, my dear lady,” he murmured, “you will come to like this. Even this.”
The words, the realization of truth, sent Anna into an immediate panic. “No…,” she pleaded on his bed, naked, curled up around herself.
“My dear Countess…” Rasputin smirked. He raised her small clawed hand to his lips and kissed it sardonically. His large hands were gentler this second night. They prayed together.
The same smell of sulfur, the same searing of large handprints on her thighs. But this time, Anna ignited also. A strong burning smell rose up from her flesh as her body met his. There was a green sizzle in the air. Rasputin poured his hot spurt into her again and again. His enormous organ throbbed. “My sword of Christ,” he called it, forcing it into her till she thought she would burst. His hands seared her body. He touched her everywhere. She swooned. But her body’s mouths cried More!
His hand grasped her hump, and he forced her over the bedpost and took her one last time from behind. “On your knees, Countess,” he hissed, “on your knees!” He rammed her again and again, reciting the liturgy as he did so. Blasphemies and exhortations. He recited it backward and forward. He took her both ways, too.
At dawn, Rasputin pulled out of her as quickly as before. But this time, Anna wanted to keep him in her, to know this man. She tried to hold him with her body, squeezing against him as he withdrew. He laughed ironically. “So, perhaps you are changing now, my fine little lady?” She opened her eyes just long enough to see him close his monk’s robe about him once more. A glimpse of something strange and hairy—was it a tail?
“Dress yourself, dear lady,” he said. Anna’s torn-open body lay meekly, still throbbing with desire. All of a sudden, she longed to put her arms around the monk, to kiss his large sensual lips with a passion she had never felt before. “You will come to like this, to crave this,” Rasputin murmured cruelly, as if reading her thoughts. “Already you are developing the appetite. You see, dear lady, even a countess is not so high-and-mighty.” He mocked her as he left the stone-flagged room, his rosary clicking, his robe swirling about his legs.
Anna managed once more to get herself to the entry and then into her waiting carriage. The monks’ chants rose mournfully from their stone crypt. By now, the Rat had become obsessed. All day she lay in her bed at home, not speaking to anyone. She thought without stop of the moment when she would rejoin Rasputin and her pact with the Devil.
The sulfurous handprints on her thighs throbbed with desire, seeking again their owner. They would not be still. Her body twitched and jerked, as if now it had become a phantom body desperate for completion—Rasputin’s hands on her thighs, his large entry into her, his blazing sword. Anna felt she had come into her real life. Everything before had been unreal, uninteresting. She burned only for her nights with Rasputin.
As the two weeks neared their end, Rasputin began to be tender toward Anna. He kissed her hair, moved her body toward his more gently. He still came as many times, sometimes even more. He would not let her move from him; he lay in her body, hardening again and again, coming without end. “Now I am truly lost,” he murmured. He caressed her private parts. “The source of joy…” He spoke aloud to the Holy Mother and then he came in Anna again.
She arched her body to receive him; she could not contain her cries of joy or the large tears that welled up in her beautiful eyes. Her body was not large enough to contain it, their passion. He saw her arousal. He played with her. He watched her again, her angelic eyes and mouth, her consumed expression. She bore down on his organ, and they lay together for hours and hours. A throb, a vibration, an answering one. “Pray, my little Countess,” he murmured to her as her ardor rose toward his. “Christ is risen.” Tears came into his furious eyes, and he let them fall, his large head heavy on Anna’s narrow chest. “Our two weeks are almost over,” he murmured. “Let us pray.” Anna stroked his bulging forehead; she had always known they would part.
Rasputin put his hands into his handprints, which lay like large silver leaves on Anna’s body. “You shall have something to remember me by, eh, my Countess?” he said. “You shall always remember thy Lord, thy true God.”
And then Rasputin took her again and again without stopping, as if he would slake a mad thirst by consuming her. Anna, crouched like a dog, endured his repeated entries. A mad lust rose from her body, a wild, bitter scent filled the room, and the flowers outside the window in the garden withered instantly. Anna’s body was an opened red poppy,
Rasputin kept Anna with him until after the first dawn’s light. The monks were already chanting their dirgelike sounds, but he did not seem to heed them. With half a mind, Anna worried about the hour. But this thought was pushed away by her body’s answering desire. This time, Rasputin did not come; he thrust and, quivering, thrust again. He held his rosary, watching her come almost to the brink of satisfaction, then withdrew pleasure again. Anna writhed, biting her lip. He watched her, brought her to the brink again, and then watched her body twist, pleading for more. His eyes were still abstractly focused. He made her kiss his crucifix. He made her kiss his penis. “Kneel,” he commanded. He entered her again. He held himself back. He watched her spasms, impaled upon his penis.
Finally, he threw her down disdainfully and pushed her away from him. “It’s over now,” he said. It was time to leave: the end of her two weeks’ pact. Anna lay in an exhausted heap. She thought she would expire from her own heat. Rasputin swung himself away from her. “Well, my Countess?” he said quizzically. But his face and voice were tender. He tied his robe once more around him. “Now you shall remember me.”
“No. I beg of you, my Little Father.” Anna held her arms to him, imploring.
Rasputin threw back his large head and began to laugh. “So,” he said. “So it has happened. Good, then. Now I return you to your husband, the Count, and your house and land. But money, house and land, and a poor figure of a Count for a husband, all that is nothing, my lady, nothing.” He hissed, his dark eyes glowing, putting his face close to hers. “We know that now, don’t we, little lady?”
Anna’s body burned. “I implore you,” she said softly.
“You made a bargain,” he reminded her. “And we have had the best of it, both of us.” He scrutinized her naked, unprotected body. “Something you’ll never forget, eh, Countess?” She looked at him. “But it’s over now. Over and done with. Never let it be said I broke my vows.” He threw back his head and laughed, a deep, rusty laugh that broke the pitcher beside the bed. “Pray for me,” he commanded. “If you dare.” Rasputin turned on his heel and, without another look at Anna, left her forever.
Anna pushed herself to her feet, a large, passionate, sorrowing cry rising, even as she stifled it. She tottered after him a few steps, but Rasputin was gone. Only the smell of brimstone lingered—a smell that was never to leave her flesh thereafter.
The weak Count was never returned to his grateful family, weeping and slobbering with the miracle of it all. But the house and lands and money were once again returned to him. “The Tsar pardoned us,” his old mother kept repeating over and over in dazed wonderment. And though no one ever spoke of unpaid gambling debts, the Rat was never to have peace of mind again.
Over and over, she replayed the two weeks with Rasputin in her mind. Her head burned; her ears rang. She could think of nothing else. Although sensible to the world around her, the Rat merely went through the motions of her life. Her children did not move her, and her husband, whom she realized she despised, seemed a little stuffed doll to her, propped up in the Crimea, which she imagined as a painted cardboard panorama: The Tsar’s Officers at Rest. Complete with tents, horses, cannons, binoculars, gaming tables, and outspread maps. Like hand-painted wallpaper.
Obsessively, the Rat remembered the scenes with Rasputin: the pain, the terror, the excitement. Wildness rose up in her. Each night, she regarded her body, putting her small, wondering hands against the large, passionate handprints burned into her flesh. She thought of Rasputin’s gleaming organ every time she prayed. The Rod of God. She climaxed each time she knelt in church. She bit her lip so none could hear her cries.
As if at a distance, as if it were happening to someone else, the Rat lived through all the later ensuing horror: the complete disappearance of her husband, the flight from Saint Petersburg, the loss of her children. She heard, as in a distant dream, news of the slaughter of the Holy Family. Of Rasputin’s fate, no one knew. But even this did not move her as one would have thought—she merely thought of his large face, the hooded face, the hairy body, and what looked like a tail. And she touched her body and dreamed of the time when she would meet him again.
But something finally cleared in the Rat’s mind when she was reunited with her beloved cousin Herbert and his grandchildren. Dumped unceremoniously on the floor of a large, vacant, echoing space, the New York Public Library, Anna came to. Suddenly, she snapped out of the obsession—that obsession for sexual experience, for union with evil, that had managed to cloud all subsequent suffering. That obsession that had silenced her during her flight through Europe, the long wait in detention camps for passage to the United States. The long, silent wait, while she kept herself sealed in her own thoughts.
The Rat was freed from all this, and although she remembered dimly, as if at a distance, all her losses, once carried home in Herbert’s arms, she returned to herself, as if all were washed away.
The Rat was once again the earnest young girl she had been, arguing seriously with her cousin about the meaning of life. She and Herbert looked at each other as if no time had passed. They did not see the age upon their faces, only the simple joy of being.
Watching Maria and Philip, the Rat knew happiness. She dreamed, and her dreams were gentle ones, not the hot, tortured sexual ones that had carried through the long years of a heavy life.
In this stuffy room, rejoined with the little family, Anna knew once more a simple purity of being. She was content to sit by the window, hearing the sounds of New York rising up, and watching the faint rays of sunlight cross the room. Everything here made Anna happy; she was a simple Rat after all.
Anna watched the little girl in bed beside her, her breath rising and falling as she slept peacefully. Her hair caught the light. Anna drew the bedclothes about them both more snugly. She had entered another time of her life, the easiest time.
Anna adjusted her small aching body. She knew there were modern ways of getting rid of marks. She had heard already that doctors were voluntarily removing tattoos—one did not need to be marked forever. In conversation, Herbert had told her that Felix, their friend from the old days, was one such doctor. Compassionate, humane, Felix treated only the escapees from Europe. The Rat remembered him from the old days, their fierce intellectual discussions. Yes, she would offer to go with Maria to her next appointment with the old doctor, and there she would ask him to help her. Almost regretfully, the Rat stroked her own marred thighs. It would not do to go to her Maker with the mark of evil on her. She knew her time was coming; she was already preparing for it.