The tsar, who couldn’t sit still under benign circumstances, launched himself at one unnecessary physical task after another, chopping and riding, marching and drilling, inspecting and cleaning and firing his shotguns, bringing down game that would go uneaten. The tsarina wept desperate, guilty tears for the curse she’d unwittingly bestowed on the son she loved better than herself. She prostrated herself before her hundreds of ikons and begged God’s forgiveness. What had she done to deserve such a punishment?
Knee or kidney or big toe: whatever Alyosha had bumped filled with blood that, unable to clot, went on flowing until the hemorrhage created enough pressure to stop itself. Until the blood had no place left to go. The result of an injury could happen quickly, as when larger vessels were involved, or it could manifest itself with insidious slow stealth, hours or even days after he’d tripped and fallen or stumbled accidentally in play, as much as he was allowed to play. Applying ice might slow the bleeding, but in the end the hemorrhage would still cripple the joint or, worse, engorge the organ to the point of rupture. Grave results from something as small as a burst capillary, no thicker than a strand of hair. And no matter how dreadful his pain (and it was bad enough some days that we all prayed he’d faint, and sometimes he did), Alyosha wasn’t allowed morphine—a precaution lest the crown prince develop a dependence on opiates.
Not yet eleven when Father told me about this so-called precaution, I understood it as one of the routine cruelties adults commit against children in the stated interest of strengthening their characters while succeeding only in damaging certain individuals beyond repair. Even as a child I knew that to allow such agony to go unassuaged was barbaric, and on those few occasions when I happened to accompany my father on a visit to the Alexander Palace, I was frightened in a way that had nothing to do with shyness—I’ve never been shy—or the proximity of the demigods we like to make of royalty. I’d gotten it into my head that the Romanovs were a monstrous kind of family, insensible to the suffering of their most vulnerable member. I must have jumbled up what little I knew about them with stories from history books. My years of formal schooling had only just begun, and we’d been instructed to memorize the succession of all the tsars back to Mikhail of Rus, the name Mikhail gave the piece of land he’d carved away from the Golden Horde and taken for himself. Rus. And he called himself Tsar, for Caesar, as it was his intention to make Moscow a new Rome and from it rule his empire.
It’s Ivan the Terrible, of course, who seizes hold of a child’s imagination, and I fell prey to dark fantasies of his hiding somewhere in the Alexander Palace. Ivan, who suffered seizures of rage and used his scepter to bludgeon the son he loved, only to fall to his knees, howling in anguish, while he rocked the murdered boy and cradled his broken head. Who other than Terrible Ivan could have summoned such noises from a tsarevich?
The first time I heard Alyosha’s screaming, I was ten and a half years old and new to city life. Waiting for my father in the blue-and-gold parlor, I went down on the palace floor. Not that I keeled over, I just bent my body into the shape it demanded—folded my legs under me, pressed my face into my knees, and shut my eyes tight. I remained like that for I don’t know how long, learning what it means to be scared stiff. I heard footsteps in the corridor, servants passing, but no one inquired about my peculiar position there on the blue-and-gold carpet. Or perhaps no one noticed me. Perhaps whoever glanced inside the parlor mistook me for an ottoman.
I never got used to Alyosha’s screams, not ever. When I was eighteen and heard them and remained on my feet, still I folded up inside. On nights I can’t sleep for thinking, my attention called back to the past, I hear those screams. Whose decision was it to give him no morphine? Why didn’t anyone prevail upon Tsar Nikolay, or the physicians, to revisit the question of drugging the boy, rescuing him from a torture he endured not once but over and over? What loving mother could have borne witness to her child’s begging for help, for release, for death even, and not insist he be given whatever it took to alleviate his pain?
I was a coward. Tsarina or no tsarina, I fled at the sight of Alyosha’s face gone gray with pain and slick with the perspiration that soaked his hair and the nightshirt no one dared change, because at the touch of anyone’s hand his screams grew louder. His eyes were sunken and ringed with black circles, and he had the peculiar and pathetic ability to keep his leg absolutely still while the rest of him writhed. What answer did I have to so grave an injury as this? From the moment Alyosha had driven his knee into the newel post, blood flowed into the joint, until the swelling bent and paralyzed his leg, stretching the skin until it shone and, yes, wept red tears. The blood that no longer circulated died, and its cells broke down and flooded his body with chemicals that drove his temperature up. He vomited from the fever and the pain and screamed when the act of vomiting jarred his leg. So this was what my father had been summoned to treat. I hadn’t known such tortures existed. I might have heard the tsarevich scream when I was a child, but I’d seen him only when he was well, from a distance, and whatever Father told me of Alyosha’s illness didn’t prepare me for what it was—how could it have?
I think I might have stood it if he hadn’t screamed so. But I couldn’t stay by his side when he screamed, I couldn’t. Especially as there was nothing I could do to stop it. Suddenly, my failure to take any of the Neva’s water seemed exactly that: a failure. What if it had absorbed some aspect of my father and could have granted Alyosha even a little watered-down relief? Pilgrims had left their canes and bandages around the hole in the river’s ice. They believed in it, whatever it was the river carried away and swept into the Gulf of Finland, from which no one could retrieve it. A minute, even less, of Alyosha’s screams was all that was required to strip away my enlightened education and reveal me to be as superstitious as an ignorant peasant.
I knew my father had sometimes remained with the tsarevich hour upon hour, but under his hands Alyosha’s tortures, and his screams, would have diminished. I’d never known of anyone, not even people with legs crushed by logs or eyes pierced by porcupine quills or appendixes on the verge of bursting, who didn’t eventually fall silent under my father’s hands.
“So much vital energy wasted on protest,” he’d complain, falling into his armchair so I could pull off his boots while Dunia brought him his slippers and a glass of Madeira. “And not one of them able to direct even a fraction of it to any purpose. I have to do it for them.” His eyes, at the end of a long day, showed me what other people’s pain did to him.
The tsarina stayed and listened to Alyosha’s agonies to punish herself. Not that another mother wouldn’t have kept vigil by her child, but a different woman might have done it in a spirit other than guilt. Alexandra Fyodorovna behaved as one who had administered a slow poison to her best beloved, immediately regretting her rash and wicked act and remaining with her victim, sometimes even writhing with him in anguish. When I saw this, so eerie and distorted a mirror of Ivan cradling his poor murdered son, I felt a shudder crawl up my neck.
The tsarina never left Alyosha’s side without being physically pulled away by Dr. Botkin or her husband. To give Alyosha aspirin for the fever that attended a hemorrhage would make the bleeding even worse, and, without the release of morphine, all Alyosha could do was lie as still as possible, his temperature so high that Botkin had no recourse but to drench him in rubbing alcohol, summoning whimpers more awful than screams for their ability to communicate a kind of exhausted resignation, noises like those I’ve heard from dogs as they slink, subjugated and beseeching, toward the hand that whips them.
Handsome Alyosha
THE FIRST TIME Alyosha and I spoke after his accident, we were as awkward with each other as if we hadn’t yet met.
“Masha,” he said when I hesitated in the doorway of his room. “Aren’t you going to come in?”