Rasputina by Perry Lopez
Associate fiction editor Tori Rego on today’s bonus story: The myth of Rasputin is recreated as circus spectacle in “Rasputina.” As the Russian mystic’s daughter holds the audience spellbound by the arcing of her legs, Perry Lopez pulls us through the dredges of a family history lost to time. “Let them have their show, their fantasy,” our heroine proclaims, mingling the mad with the magical and the gaudy with the spectacular into this entrancing, cabalistic delight.
Rasputina
Just like her murdered father did, Maria makes the royals dance. At the snap of her whip they leap, their golden pelts radiant under the floodlights, and at the flourish of her wrist they rise to waltz—turning slow, staggering circles. The darkness beyond the ring rewards them with a rich cascade of applause. A voice from the gallery calls down, “Kiss your Empress, Nick. Hurry before the Bolsheviks come.” In the posters put up by the circus, her lions are referred to as the Tsar and Tsarina. Maria is billed as Rasputina, Mystic Daughter of The Mad Monk.
She made objections, naturally. Mostly to the slander of her father, who was neither mad nor a monk. “He was a Staretz, what we call one touched by God. He had no ordination with the Church. He sought none. Mr. Hagenbeck, Mr. Wallace—is this not a distinction of importance? Of course, the ticketholders must be entertained. Of course, of course. Let them have their show, their fantasy. But why not give them the truth of my father, too. And mad? Tell me how he was mad. Why not The Sane Staretz. Does this not also have, as you say, a ring?”
But no. The circus owners would not be moved. People prefer the lurid myth. Especially Americans. The crowd tonight stands as testament to that. Maria can see nothing beyond the veil of sodium vapor that marks out her stage, but she feels them in their hundreds. The dark is dense with their watchfulness, their hunger for spectacle and awe. Something transcendent to justify the dollar they spent for admission. It is 1935 and America’s days of plenty have passed. People who have never known want of food know it now. The depression has devoured their amber waves of grain as surely as any Godsent cloud of locusts—and what’s more, these circusgoers are not those moneyed few whose suffering occurs only on paper. Every preterite soul mobbed out there in the dark tonight has felt the depression in their bodies. Every industrial percentage lost has taken fat from the flesh of their children. And so they expect much from their entertainment at the cost of a dollar. Throughout the previous acts, the jugglers and wrestlers, there was little applause. Instead a massive silence loomed, one Maria recognized from her girlhood in Saint Petersburg, during the last months of the monarchy, the famished time before the February Revolution. A quiet charged with grim expectation, with danger—the silence of mass discontent. The jugglers panicked. They dropped their batons and were jeered viciously offstage. The musclebound wrestlers grunted and strove with aplomb, but against the dead hush of the crowd their grappling seemed ridiculous and obscene. They too were hurried off the scalding white sand. Maria alone held no fear of the crowd, for she had felt such eyes on her before, passing through the palace gates for a playdate with the grand duchesses, her father beside her, above her—huge and dark and holy. Sensing her unease at the proletariat protesters, he had leaned down to whisper in a voice as thick and sweet as the dessert wine that lingered on his breath, “They despise us because they think we are not better. We must show them, Grigorievna. Let them see God’s light in you.”
And so she does. Without announcement or fanfare, Maria rides clear of the curtains on a chariot drawn by her lion and lioness, wearing a gown of brilliant white brocade—opalescent under the stage lamps—and a beaded tiara that breaks the light into a many-hued nimbus around her head. She bears high a stock whip of simple braided leather and lashes it into the air to give a crack that quiets those still murmuring in the grandstands, asking if this is her, the woman they came to see, the Rasputina. She raises her face and they know she is. Her features are powdered ghostly pale, her lips painted abyssal black, but the impression all will leave with is of her eyes. Without having met her father, knowing him only from the stories of his monstrosity and magic, still these people see Rasputina’s eyes and recognize they are his. Beautiful and terrible as God’s Word. Black and permanently lit with a look of awful revelation. Or else simply mad. The eyes of a mad woman. The difference is a matter of perspective, or faith. But what cannot be denied is their power. As Maria rounds the circus ring in her chariot, her lions bellowing like angels, she sweeps the audience with her gaze. Passing under those eyes, every man and woman feels the old religion stir in them. Apocalyptic joy, animal fear, the reflex to flee or bow. With her eyes alone, Maria makes a cathedral of this ragged tent.
This is not to be a sermon, though. Or if so, it will be one in the Khlyst tradition, a homily for the flagellant sensualist that her father might approve of—with pleasure, pain, and repentance intermingled. The show is initiated, as is only fitting, by another crack of her whip. This is the cue for the hidden band to strike up a burlesque air and for the lions to slip free of their harnesses. A united gasp rises from the audience. At first they are shocked by the ease with which the beasts escape their bindings, then at the feral vigor with which they begin to fornicate. Poor people, it takes them a moment to realize this is part of the performance, and only a pantomime of the true act. Nonetheless, Maria hears the shuffle of some attendees leaving in disgust. Yet as always the vast majority remain in their seats, hopelessly entranced—as much by the Rasputina now as her lustful lions. For Maria has begun to dance. She performs as she learned to do in Paris, stranded in the district of Montmartre by the tuberculoid death of her worthless husband, Boris—a failed acolyte of her father and fraudulent mystic, whose only true gift was for mendacity. She took up with a cabaret house to provide for her two daughters, given the job on the promise of her father’s name to bring in Parisians curious the see the Mad Monk’s daughter flash her ass. She could not have gotten work by the power of her appearance alone, she knows. Maria has never been lovely. Though her body is shapely and strong, her face is too severe to elicit simple desire, her God-lit eyes more withering than stirring. Boris never wanted her. She understood that even at the start. They met at her father’s seances, and Boris saw in her access to the holy man who held the Tsar and Tsarina in his grasp—nor was her father blind to the fact that Boris was the son of Nikolai Soloviev, Treasurer of the Holy Synod. So when her father told her to love Boris, Maria obeyed as best she could. And after her father’s assassination, after the revolution that swiftly followed, during the mad days of the provisional government when all they had to rely on was each other, Maria worked to uphold her duties, ignoring Boris’ brazen infidelities, supporting his despicable deceptions, coaching the confused peasant girls he brought to her, teaching them to masquerade as the Romanov duchesses she used to play with—miraculously spared execution—so that they could be used to swindle gullible aristocrats still loyal to the slaughtered family. “We will only take as much as we need to escape, Maria. Only enough to fly this doomed country.” And they did. They escaped to Paris, where Boris worked as a car-washer until he coughed all his blood up and turned pale on the pillow, where Maria learned to dance in the cabaret.
These Americans have seen nothing like it. In truth, Maria’s style is unconventional even by Parisian standards. There is something nearly numinous to her Can-Can. This is only natural, for her education began at Isadora Duncan’s academy in Berlin during the 1920s, where she was taught the philosophy of dance as sacred practice, as body-prayer. Yes, hers is a palimpsest style, with holy ecstasy shading through its sultry surface—and if it did not exactly titillate the men of Paris, they were at least as spellbound as the Yankees in attendance tonight.
With liquid grace she dances a circle round her lions, flashing pale legs through her gown. And at every lash of her whip, the royal couple leap into a new position. Gradually the performance becomes less erotic, more acrobatic. Maria stands atop her lion’s broad back and high-kicks as he roars magnificently. The audience erupts in cheers. Another flick of her whip and they rise again to waltz. After a few turns, Maria cuts in, politely tapping the gentleman lion on his shoulder with the stock of her whip. He obligingly withdraws, bowing deep as Maria whisks the lioness around the stage and the audience laughs wildly, five-hundred glad souls in chorus—a wonderful sound. They whisper it must be magic, how she masters the beasts so, making them do things that would otherwise be impossible to their savage breed. And they are right. Whatever her objections to the myth of her father, Maria has never doubted that he wielded God-given powers, abilities beyond those natural to man, or that she has inherited them—his true heiress and successor. She delights in the secular world’s frustrated attempts to explain away his miraculous healing of the Tsar and Tsarina’s child, Alexei. How he could staunch the hemophiliac child’s bleeding with just a word, a mere telegram, while the prodding of the royal physicians only ever worsened his condition. She knows her control over the animals of the circus is no less a miracle. Maria’s whole menagerie is released onto the stage now, and it is a joyful riot. She holds court with the emus—making them strut and flutter like the ladies-in-waiting she recalls from the palace. As for the elephants, Maria sets them to blundering like bumptious bureaucrats—drunk at midday on the Tsar’s reserves. All she has to do is wink at one of the mammoths to be seized about the waist by its trunk and ascend laughing into the air, lifted as weightlessly as her soul must someday be. Monkeys fill the role of the palace children admirably, daisy-chained, dashing between the legs of grander creatures. Held aloft by the elephant, Maria conducts the scene from on high. Monkeys, elephants, the emus and lions, even a giraffe strolling with the stately elegance of a Dowager Empress. It is a ball to rival any held at Alexander Palace here in this great, gaudy circus tent.
But wait. Wait. Listen. A solemn sting of violin signals the end of the party. The elephant returns Maria to the ground as all the animals retire from the stage light—dissolved into the dark periphery where their handlers wait to retrieve them. Only Maria and her lions remain. Music of a more melancholy sort flows from the bandstand. A cold, bitter requiem. This is the part of the performance Maria dreads. Even beneath her ghostly makeup the audience can see her grow pale. With a weak wave of her hand she dismisses her lions. Reluctantly, they retreat to the edge of the arena and there begin to circle, orbiting their crestfallen mistress. A shadowy stagehand emerges, carrying in his arms a robe of coarse brown cloth and a fake beard, jet black. Only this assistant is close enough to see the tears tracing the Rasputina’s cheeks as she pulls that humble robe over her brilliant brocade gown and affixes the beard to her face. Having seen herself in this costume, Maria knows she passes well for her father. When she is outfitted, the stagehand departs and the dancers emerge. Silently they detach themselves from the darkness, all adorned in sable unitards, their movements as fluid as watered ink. Six in all, they creep closer to Maria, who stands at the center of the stage, her head bowed in prayer. She has trained these dancers herself, and so they move well, with the awful grace of fallen angels—lunging as if they remember flight. Hooded, they are featureless except for the tools they carry. In one hand, a wine glass of the finest crystal. In the other, a pistol. They pirouette and plié ever nearer, with the wine glass held forward and the pistol cunningly hidden. Maria looks up from her devotions. She notices her guests and begins to dance as well—her movements grand and gregarious—welcoming these friends, who must only wish, as her father ever did, for nothing more than the good of the Tsar and his people. Gladly she accepts the first glass of wine. Then a second, then a third. With every drink the dance becomes more manic. Maria stumbles through her steps—her limbs losing feeling from the alcohol laced with cyanide. Meanwhile the assassins’ dance turns triumphant. Exultant entrechats as their victim reels across the stage. At the edge of the arena, her lions growl nervously—claws flexing into the sand. Maria cannot help but imagine how easy it would be to call them down upon these Judases. She need only whisper. Her golden children would turn the sand to red slush. Her dearest dream, to save her father thus, to see his betrayers devoured. But it cannot be. This is only a performance, and it must be seen through to its end. The shadows must have their day. Yet, even after a fourth drink, she does not fall. The murderers trade worried looks as Rasputina staggers after them, still in good spirits, laughing, begging of them another glass of poison. Stealthily they confer. After a moment, a new plan is decided upon. Two of the shadows approach Rasputina, taking her about the shoulders as friends. A third stands before them, spreading his arms in an attitude of the cross. Let us pray together for Russia, they say, and the long life of her Heir. A splendid idea. Together Rasputina and the dancers kneel before the cross. All of them but one. This last shade stands apart, waiting for the rest to bow their heads. Then they draw their pistol and fire. In this open theater, the gunshot sounds too small for the accompanying burst of flame, the plume of smoke from the pistol. Rasputina falls dead before the cross. The conspirators wait a moment, watching the body for any sign of life, then gather to exchange sober handshakes, telling themselves they have done what was necessary to save the royal family from the influence of a madman. Together they raise a toast to seal their treason and then go to collect the corpse. The one who fired the shot, faceless here but in reality a young aristocrat named Felix Yusupov, is the first to touch the fallen Staretz. And at his touch, Rasputina bursts to life with a roar to match any lioness. A woman in the crowd shrieks. Even shot through the breast, Maria manages to wrestle the young traitor to the ground as the other assassins fall back in horror. With her hands at his throat she curses him, his enterprise, his coward’s heart, his designs against Russia. She is prepared to snap his neck when a second shot takes her in the side. The force of the bullet rolls Maria onto her back. As she struggles to rise up again, another figure, the one who performed as the cross, steps over her, levels their pistol, fires a final shot between her eyes. At last Rasputina lies still. The murderers take a moment to regain themselves. Then together, each to a limb, they lift the body. As the requiem reaches its plangent crescendo, the conspirators carry the corpse to the edge of the lamplight. There, without last rites or the least human dignity, they heave her body—her father’s—into oblivion.
The dancers depart. The lions follow suit. The audience is struck silent and the ensemble is similarly mute. An uneasy stillness settles. A minute passes, two. The only thing to look at is the empty floodlit stage. No one is quite sure what to do. Here and there people begin to get up from their seats, scuffling down the aisles. The rest murmur. Is that it? Is the show over? Should we go? Faintly, from somewhere in the gallery, the sound of a weeping child.
Then, with an abruptness to stop the heart, to set a still one pounding again, every trumpet in the band blares in unison as Maria emerges—arisen and restored to her former grandeur. A cry of joy goes up from every soul in the audience. She lives! She wears again her heavenly gown and tiara, riding to centerstage on the chariot drawn by her faithful lions. Behind her comes her court of animals, frolicking even more wildly now that time has been unwound. Stately madam giraffe bows graciously to the crowd as the elephants rear up on their hindlegs, press their feet together to dance. And at the sight of her monkeys riding the ladylike emus in frantic circles, Maria hears the wailing of the child replaced with the sweetest laughter, and she cannot help but laugh herself, thinking of her daughters, twirling her whip high in the air, making it sing. Glowing like a saint as her animals all bow, as the people give a standing ovation, she calls out, Thank you! Spasiba! Thank you! The curtains fall away to reveal the band and Maria applauds them as they lift their instruments in salute. Then she makes a final circuit of the ring on her chariot—waving, laughing, catching the flowers that fall for her here in this great, gaudy tent that throbs like God’s own heart, where she and her father might live this dream of resurrection forever.
Perry Lopez's fiction has appeared in Slice, West Branch, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. He also has a story forthcoming in The Kenyon Review.
