Angelopolis(78)

assistance. My father had won favor with the tsar by making him a tea—a simple mixture of cannabis

and wolfsbane—which had the desired effect of relaxing Nikolai. And then one day Rasputin told my

father that the tsars—as he sometimes called Nikolai and Alexandra—had another request. They

wanted my father to mix a medicine. Rasputin claimed that the mixture would help the tsarevitch,

Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, recover from a terrible disorder. My father knew of the child’s illness

—the boy had nearly died at Christmastime 1911, and he had heard at that time that the child was a

hemophiliac. My father responded that a cure for hemophilia was unknown. Rasputin refused to

accept this answer. The medicine, Rasputin claimed, required one thousand petals from one thousand

different varieties of flowers. Many of the flowers, my father said, did not grow in Russia and would

be impossible to find, especially during the war. It was 1916 and freezing cold; there was only snow

and ice and suffering.

Rasputin countered this objection, showing him a book filled with flowers. The empress had been

collecting the flowers herself over many years—she and the grand duchesses had gone on hunts

together in numerous countries in Europe and had preserved the flowers in a diary they shared. My

father would only have to confirm that the flowers were correctly labeled and mix them together in

the elixir. Rasputin said that the empress herself promised a large sum of money and an elevated

position in the tsar’s university in Moscow to anyone who could make the drug. Rasputin gave my

father the album filled with flowers and left.

One month later Rasputin returned to see if my father had finished. My father had gone through the

flowers in the album and confirmed that the one thousand flowers in the formula were the one

thousand flowers in the book—everything matched up perfectly. My father had been having doubts

about the authenticity of Rasputin’s promises, however. He didn’t know if he could trust the peasant

to give him the sum promised. And so he gave Rasputin the elixir but kept the diary with the flowers

as a guarantee.

When Rasputin returned with the money, he was drunk. I remember the evening well, because I was

in the sitting room during the visit. I listened as Rasputin bragged to my father about the empress’s

devotion to him, calling her “Mama,” a name he was encouraged to use by the empress herself.

Rasputin claimed that he knew all of Mama’s secrets, that she kept nothing from him. As proof of her

confidence in him, he told my father to visit Pokrovskoye, his native village. There he would find, in

the care of Rasputin’s wife, a treasure unlike anything the world had seen before, one worth more

than anyone in Moscow or St. Petersburg could imagine. Rasputin told my father that he would send a

telegraph to his wife, who still lived in Pokrovskoye, telling her to allow my father to examine the

treasure himself. The story was so ridiculous, and Rasputin so drunk, that my father took his payment,

gave him the flower album, and kicked Rasputin out. Some days later Grigory Rasputin was murdered

by Feliks Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich at the Moika Palace and his body thrown in the Neva.

My father never went to Pokrovskoye to see the treasure. I believe he forgot all about it—our lives

were filled with real concerns during those years. After Rasputin’s death, however, a servant from

Tsarskoye Selo arrived with a purse of money for my father, a gift of thanks from the tsarina herself,

and a warning that he must never speak of what had transpired between them.

After my father’s death, in the summer of 1951, my mother and I began to wonder of these strange

events. After much consideration, we took a train to Rasputin’s native village to see if Rasputin’s

widow was still alive. It was a long journey from Petrograd to Tyumenskaya Oblast, and it was

somewhat silly to make the trip, but we were exceptionally poor and extremely curious, and so

decided that we must confirm Rasputin’s story, to put our minds at ease.

We found the widow without too much trouble. She lived in the same place she had shared with

Rasputin decades before. She was a kind woman, and she invited us into their two-story house, sat us

down, and served tea. My mother introduced herself and mentioned my father’s name. Mrs. Rasputin

ruminated over the name a moment, and then went to a wooden box and removed a telegram: It was

Rasputin’s communication from thirty-five years before, instructing her to show my father the

tsarina’s treasure. Rasputin’s widow returned with a metal trunk, the Romanov eagle emblazoned on

its surface. No doubt the poor woman had no idea what was inside or why she should keep it, only