Unbeknown to him, Rasputin was being watched. Residents of the royal household were under observation at all times of the day, and he was no exception. Police spies drew up long reports. They called them “staircase notes,” but they were spying all the same.
Eventually, a small group of noblemen came to the decision that they had to act. With the Tsar away, Rasputin had become the Tsarina’s key advisor, and it seemed that he was influencing her decisions.
One prince, Felix Yusupov, led the group. He had recently married a beautiful Grand Duchess, but the truth of the matter was that he desired men. Few people knew this outside the court, but while the gorgeous Duchess languished unwanted in her chamber, her husband prowled the murky underworld of the city, looking for excitement. Some say that Rasputin learned of Felix’s desires, but when he tried to seduce him, the two men had a violent falling out.
Felix was joined by two Grand Dukes, Dmitri and Nikolai, and together they plotted Rasputin’s end. They thought about it, dark and deadly, and rumors of what they were planning, even the finer details, spread around the city. No one tried to stop them. By some miracle, Rasputin himself seemed unaware of these stories, and so, on the appointed night, he accepted his invitation to the Yusupov palace on the bank of the canal.
A fabulous ball, golden chandeliers and champagne, was in full swing upstairs, or so Rasputin had been told. He had also been told he was going to meet Felix’s beautiful wife, Irina, alone. Neither of these things was true. Felix had his servants make the noise of a party upstairs, while he ushered Rasputin in through a side door and down to the basement where Felix had a small suite of rooms he used for private entertaining. Upstairs lay the full splendor of the palace, marble and oak, silk and crystal. Down in the basement, things were much more plain. There were a couple of low-arched rooms, simply furnished. On a small round table lay some refreshments. Some wine and a few cakes sat on the tablecloth between two candelabra. A fire burned in the grate.
Felix told Rasputin to wait while his wife took leave of her guests, though in reality she was miles away, out of the city. The two Grand Dukes joined them, and they bid Rasputin enjoy the food.
It was such an obvious trap, and yet he walked right into it. The cakes were poisoned, as was the wine. He ate several of the cakes, then drank deeply of the wine, and Prince Felix and his conspirators began to breathe a little more easily.
But an hour passed, maybe longer, and Rasputin showed no sign of illness. Felix grew desperate, and fetching a pistol from his desk upstairs, tricked Rasputin into inspecting a crucifix. While his back was turned, Felix shot him. He fell to the floor with a loud scream, and lay still.
The three conspirators looked at each other and smiled, then went upstairs to dispose of Rasputin’s distinctive overcoat, hanging on a hook in the hall. As they reached the ground floor, they heard a commotion from the courtyard. There was Rasputin, crawling on his hands and knees in the snow, shouting. His blood had already left a ghastly red and pink trail in the snow, as he flailed around, trying to find his feet.
He saw them and shouted.
“Felix! I will tell the Tsarina everything, Felix!”
They shot twice and missed.
They shot twice more and hit him. He fell flat.
They kicked him in the head.
They wrapped his body in iron chains and dumped him in the icy waters of the Neva, where two days later it was washed up again.
* * *
The murderers were not punished, though Dmitri was exiled, but neither did the murder of Rasputin have the effect they hoped for. They had thought that the Tsarina, freed from his tyranny, would in turn free the Tsar from his feeble decision making. Quite the reverse was true, and the Tsar imposed further strictures on his ministers and tried to clamp down even harder than he already had.
There was no happy ending for the murderers, and the Tsar was also approaching the end of his story, because the bear let loose by Lev and Vladimir was on the outskirts of the city.
MIRACULOUS FEBRUARY
THE CITY FOUNDED BY PETER the Great two hundred years before sat on the river Neva and froze, as if waiting. It was the coldest February anyone could remember; day after day the temperature rose no higher than fifteen degrees below zero. Frost sparkled on the snow like the diamonds that sparkled on the Tsarina’s breast.
At the entrance to a block of flats near the beautiful old theater a porter shook his head in disbelief. He was an old man, and had lived in the city for thirty years, but he’d grown up in Siberia. He tried to cast his mind back to when he was small, wanting to believe that it had been colder in Siberia than it was in the city this February, but he could not. It was cold enough to freeze the thoughts in your head.
He pulled the street door shut with a lazy tug and went back inside to the meagre fire around which his family huddled. They’d run out of coal weeks ago, and it was said there was none to be had anywhere in the city, though the porter wondered if the Tsar and his children were going without coal, too. Instead, the porter and his family were slowing burning their house. They’d started on the furniture, and had moved on to the floor. It was remarkable, they’d discovered, how few of your floorboards you actually really needed.
The porter was old, and his hearing was not as good as it had been when he was a boy in Siberia, so he didn’t hear a low rumble in the distance. It sounded like thunder, or the cannons of battle, but in fact it was neither of those. It was the bear.
The bear had been traveling for a long time, but far from slowing down, it had if anything speeded up. Something else extraordinary had happened, too. As the bear had traveled toward the city it had begun to grow. It got bigger and bigger, until by the time it arrived at the city, the very ice in the river cracked like gunfire beneath its ponderous footsteps. That was the noise the porter hadn’t heard.
Then, two astonishing things happened.
First, the sun came out. It came out as if for the very first time, it was so strong. Immediately, the temperature soared to a balmy minus five, and cheered by this, people stuck their noses into the streets as if it were summer. The porter turned to his wife and told her to put the fire out.
“Save the floor for when it gets really cold,” he said, and took one of his coats off to celebrate.
Then, the second remarkable thing happened, and it was even more amazing.
The bear, which by now was as large as the cathedral on Catherine’s canal, rose on its hind legs like a dancing bear in a street market. For a moment the sun was blotted out by its size, and then it fell. As it fell, it came apart. It disintegrated. It fell like brown snow, but each flake was a person. The bear had been one hundred thousand people, and now the people came to earth, tumbling into the snowy streets of the city and picking themselves up, laughing at it all.
Far from being hurt, they realized that they felt strong. But, like the bear, they felt hungry.
They ran through the streets, swarming like bees, joining others who had emerged when the sun had.
It was chaos.
Fights began to break out over nothing, and it was then that Lev and Vladimir arrived.
They’d seen the bear go out of sight over the horizon ahead of them, and had decided to stop talking for a while and get on a train instead, so that they might catch up.
Vladimir and Lev came out of the railway station and found a huge crowd, pressing and heaving on all sides. Lev looked at Vladimir, who nodded. He jumped up onto the bonnet of an armored car, and with a word, he stilled the crowd.
“Bear!” he cried, and there was silence.
The crowd looked up at him in wonder and expectation. They knew their time had come, and they knew immediately that Vladimir was the man who had given them this time.
“What should we do?” a voice cried.
“Do you not remember? Why did you come here? Do you not remember who it is you’ve come to see? Who is it who has starved you? Who is it who took you to war, so that the hunger and death got only wo
rse?”
Then the people remembered, and they ran from the station as if someone had shoved a pointed stick up their arse.
“Wait!” called Vladimir after them. “Wait! The Tsar isn’t here; he’s at his palace. We need to strike in the city. To remove his puppet ministers! Then we will have power!”
The people were already gone.
Vladimir climbed down from the armored car, and straightened his cap.
“Do you think they heard me, Lev?”
“Oh, yes,” said Lev, “I think they heard you. Well, some of them. And as for the rest…”
He shrugged.
“It’s begun.”
They shook hands and walked into the city that would soon belong to them.
EXIT THE FAIRY TALE, ENTER THE STORYTELLER
NOW, THE TIME FOR FAIRY TALES is nearly over. But, before they’re done, there’s time for one more, and, just as all rivers flow into the sea, so that their waters are mixed, all our stories flow together here, into one.
There have been sad stories, as fairy tales often are. It’s odd that when people talk about a fairy-tale ending, they mean something good and happy. There was the story of Vanya and Maroosia, the orphans, who lost their grandfather Peter, killed by a runaway bear.
There was the story of the bear itself, and that story is not done yet, not even to this very day.
There was the story of the mad monk, Rasputin, and how his lechery did for him in the end as he drowned in the thick cold waters of the Neva. When his body washed up on the river shore, local women went to drink water from the spot for days afterward, believing it would contain miraculous healing powers. Even in death his story was not finished. At first his body was embalmed and buried in the palace grounds, but when the bear got there, he dug the body up, and dragged it to the woods in his jaws. There, petrol was poured on it, and it burned. The ashes were thrown to the wind.
There was the story of Alexei and his blood. Exactly how much, ultimately, did that blood have to do with the end of the Tsar? This was truly momentous, for it was not just the end of one Tsar, but of three hundred years of a dynasty, and hundreds more years of other Tsars before them.
Who knows?
Whatever, it was the end for the Tsar. He abdicated, a rather pointless gesture since power would have been taken from him either way. Realizing this made the sickly Alexei technically the Tsar, he abdicated for him, too. It was all futile.
In the city streets, people confronted the troops, the Tsar’s soldiers. They faced each other across the thawing snow and the soldiers lowered their rifles to aim at the body of men, women, and children opposing them. The soldiers, in their warm uniforms and heavy boots, looked at the people in their rags, many of them barefooted in the snow.
An officer gave the order to fire. No one did.
The officer shouted again, but no one took any notice. Not one of them.
There was a loud cheer from the crowd, and the soldiers cheered back. They shouldered their guns and the two sides walked toward each other, laughing and smiling. The two crowds became one, rifles and caps, jackets and boots were passed from hand to hand until no one could tell who was who anymore. It didn’t matter, there was only one side now: the people.
Shots were fired into the air, for joy, and with each shot the people shouted and cheered. They ran riot through the streets, smashing statues of the Tsar, burning his paintings and pulling the all-seeing double-headed eagles from the tops of the gates and doorways. Anything too big to destroy was draped in vast swathes of red cloth. They poured in and out of the buildings once forbidden to them, giddy with their new freedom.
The Tsar, the Tsarina, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei were all placed under house arrest at their palace and, as they got used to their captivity, they bizarrely enjoyed some of the happiest times of their lives. The Tsar found himself relieved not to have to make decisions anymore, and the Tsarina was happy to see her husband more his normal self. The children played through the summer, as they always had, and even young Alexei seemed heartier than usual. It was like one long weekend party that lasted all summer. The children had their toys, their pets, their books. The difference was that there were guards at every corner, guards who were dressed not in uniform, but in street clothes. The only things that showed they were guards at all were the rifle on their shoulder and a red rag tied as an armband. And they were not unkind, being somehow still in awe of their once so mighty prisoners.
So the Romanovs were happy. For a brief time.
* * *
But what of this final story? Well, it’s a story about love, and like the others, it flows out to the sea, too, to become part of one great tale.
Arthur, the young writer, was tired. He’d been writing about the war—the Tsar’s war against the Kaiser—as best as he could, though sometimes he wondered whether anyone was listening. Then he wrote about the new war, the one between the Tsar, and Lev and Vladimir’s bear, and still he wondered if anyone was listening. He suffered like everyone else. He was cold and hungry, and then one day he got ill, from something in the water.
He got very, very ill, and nearly died.
When he got well again, he made a decision. He realized how very easy it is to die, and that there were people he needed to see back home before he did anything so drastic.
There was his mother, waiting patiently at home in the Lakes for news of her sons, one fighting in the war, the other writing about it, each in as much danger as the other. He wanted to see her again.
There was Tabitha, his daughter, who would have grown up so much since he had last seen her.
And there was Ivy. He wondered if he’d been wrong about Ivy. They had loved each other once, it was true. Perhaps he’d been too hasty in leaving her. Perhaps there might be something for them after all.
So he caught a train, and a boat and another train, and then he visited all the people he wanted to see.
He visited his mother, and he found that he loved her as much as he always did.
He got on another train and went to see Ivy and Tabitha.
He found that he loved Tabitha even more than he always had. To his great delight, he found that she still loved him, too. They went for walks together and sang some silly songs and danced down the lane, laughing in the autumn sunshine.
Things in fairy tales come in threes, that was something else that Arthur had learned as a reader and a writer. Two things go this way, the third goes that. Two things are good, the third is bad.
So maybe he wasn’t surprised to find that when he went to see if he still loved Ivy, he found that he did not.
For three days, they fought and wrestled, and he knew it was time to leave again, though he knew that if he left Ivy, he would perhaps lose Tabitha, too.
But it had to be.
He kissed Tabitha’s sleeping head once more, crept from the house, and with a broken heart he caught a train early one morning.
A few days later he caught another train, and then a boat, and then yet another train, and he came back to that great city where history was churning out more stories than could ever be written down.
* * *
It was Christmas Day.
A lot had happened since he’d left.
The people, who now called themselves Reds, had decided that they enjoyed what had happened in February so much, that in October they did it all again.
Things had not moved on as much as they had hoped and desired, and some people were even suggesting that the Tsar should be returned to power. In response, the last trace of the Tsar’s government was swept away, and anyone who disagreed was swept aside with it.
Arthur realized he had missed the biggest story of his life and that he had to do something about it. He spent the next couple of days chasing round the city, looking for stories to write down and send back home.
It seemed to him that the vital thing was to talk to the people in charge, and he soon learned that their names were Lev and Vladimir.
He couldn’t find Vladimir at all. But a day or so before the year ended, he found Lev in a huge old building that had been a school for rich girls until the coming of the bear had frightened them all away. The school was so big that Lev and his friends decided that the best way to get round it was by bicycle.
Arthur wandered through cavernous corridors, open mouthed. It was an unusual sight; the building was magnificent, or rather it had been, but its new inhabitants seemed not to care for the richness of the place. It was a mess. Litter lay everywhere. Cigarette ends had been trodden into the carpets, paintings lay slashed on the floor.
Oh, thought Arthur, so the mighty have fallen!
Finally, at the end of a long corridor on the first floor, he found the door he had been looking for.
It was number 67, and on a piece of paper stuck to the door with a drawing pin was Lev’s name.
Arthur knocked, but there was no reply. He knocked louder, but still there was no reply. The third time, he thumped the door so hard the paper trembled, and the door swung open.
There was a room full of people, all busy, all talking. No one had heard him knocking, and no one seemed to take any notice of him, so he tugged someone’s sleeve.
“Lev?” he asked.
The man shook his head, and pointed at a farther door.
“In there,” he said. “He’s expecting you.”
Arthur made his way across the room, round piles of papers and piles of rubbish, and put his hand on the brass doorknob. As he did so, he saw that he was being watched by a woman, and had to turn away, because she was too beautiful to look at.
He opened the door and let himself in, and there was Lev, deep in conversation on the telephone. He motioned for Arthur to come in.
He finished his phone call, though he took his time, but then Arthur and he talked, and Arthur made notes in his head for the story he would write later.
Arthur was very impressed with Lev, and saw that he was a clever man, which he could tell from the way he stroked his small and excellent beard when he was thinking.
Arthur left, and on his way through the outer room, was disappointed and relieved to see that the beautiful woman had gone, but as he made his way down the stairs, he saw her on the landing. He felt his eyes pull to hers, then look away, but not before he had seen her smile, ever so slightly.