Rasputin's Daughter Read Free Page A

right knee. The countess, though, was none too pleased and jerked back, whereupon the back of the old leather sofa fell off. The visiting beauty uttered a stifled scream.
    “Ah, now, don’t you worry, my tasty dish,” muttered Papa, as he slowly and drunkenly pushed himself to his feet. “One of those fat sisters from the women’s monastery slept on that sofa last week and broke it.”
    Almost without effort, Papa bent over the countess and lifted the heavy piece into place with one hand. Swaying slightly, he then leaned down and patted his guest on her head.
    “We’ll continue our purification later.”
    “Papa!” I insisted.
    He stretched one hand toward me and called weakly, “Yes, yes. Come help me, malenkaya maya.” My little one.
    Understanding that he’d drunk too much, his “little one” was not eager to go to his side; I would have preferred simply to leave the room. But my mother in Siberia had long ago forgiven Papa his excesses, grateful for the three children he had given her, not to mention the finest house in the village and a field to till. So, as the oldest Rasputin female in the Petrograd household, I had no choice but to overlook things also.
    Looking down at the countess one last time, Father made a drunken sign of the cross over her and intoned one of his favorite sayings: “Remember, great is the peasant in the eyes of God!”
    As I helped him from his study, I stared at this terribly plain, even homely man, who was nothing less and nothing more than a muzhik-peasant-from Siberia. He was not dashing and debonair like the fathers of my classmates, many of whom were princes or counts. Instead, here was a person of only medium height, a semi-illiterate ox of a man who had toiled in the fields for years. He had light blue eyes, the kind that made people feel uncomfortable, his nose was long and slightly pocked and his skin wrinkled beyond his age, while his lips were thick and ripe with color. One look at him and anyone could tell he was from the wilds, for his long hair was dark and parted down the middle like a crooked dirt lane, and his beard, which was thick like an ancient forest, had a dark reddish-brown hue.
    No, my father was not a handsome man, nor was he charming or witty or devilishly tall, as so many wrote. But he did have an extraordinarily magnetic presence. He could enter a palace room and, though at first all the nobles would stare down on this ugly peasant, within moments they would be listening to his every word.
    And he did have amazing physical strength. Never had I seen anyone able to grow sober so quickly, which he did just then. Oh, he leaned on me as I walked him into the hall, and he slurred a few words on the phone with Madame Vyrubova as she begged him to come to the palace, saying a motorcar had already been sent. But he pulled himself together in short order, for he was the Empress’s favorite, the one on whom she depended most deeply, the one whom she loved as no other. No, my father had not lied, Aleksandra Fyodorovna could not exist without him. She knew it all too well, as did I.
    Dunya left Princess Kossikovskaya vomiting to the sad twang of the balalaika player, and together we pulled Papa into the washroom, where we wiped his face with a damp cloth, changed his soiled shirt, and attempted to comb his unruly hair. As I pulled several strands aside, I hit the little bump on his forehead, a bump like a budding horn that he was always trying to conceal.
    “I’ll do it!” he shouted, trying to grab the comb from me.
    “No, Papa, let me!” I said, slapping away his hand.
    Cowering like a little boy, he bowed his head and let me continue; unfortunately, when I was done he looked no better than a roadside waiter. Meanwhile, Dunya had slipped away to the samovar, to return with a tall lukewarm glass of tea loaded with so much sugar that the granules floated this way and that like snow in a lazy blizzard. This was Dunya’s medicine, which she dispensed not only