“Are you sure?” I asked stupidly, and we looked at each other. He smiled at me then, after we’d done staring.
“Well, I’ve been better, perhaps,” he said, “but I’m on the mend. Botkin said—”
“I’m so sorry, Alyosha,” I interrupted. “I wish I …”
“Masha. I didn’t think you—”
“No, no, I know you didn’t. But I’m sorry I can’t. Had I known what … what … I never would have made light of it, not even in jest.”
Alyosha shook his head. “I don’t remember your making light of anything,” he said. With his cheeks so white, the thick black lashes around each gray eye were that much more striking.
“I’m—I’m terribly sorry, Alyosha. Please forgive me. I was flippant when we—”
“Masha.”
“No, listen. All the while you’ve been ill, I’ve felt so ashamed. Over and over I heard myself say I supposed I would be tested when the time came and then we’d discover if I was of any use to you. And, of course, I wasn’t. Not that I was vain enough to imagine I would be, only that I didn’t understand what your mother wanted me to do for you. I didn’t imagine a person could go through anything as horrible as … as you have. Now that I know, I’m even sorrier to be so useless. I’ve been hiding in my room, praying she won’t summon me.”
Alyosha laughed, and winced because it hurt him. “I don’t doubt you have,” he said.
“Please. I’m talking to you in earnest, Alyosha.”
“Stop fretting. I told you, or I tried to. I’m past the crisis, or whatever Botkin calls it. I’ll tell Mother I’m sure it’s your doing.”
“No, no, don’t. Don’t, Alyosha. Please don’t. She knows I’m useless.”
He looked at me, his arms crossed over his chest, smiling at my using my hands to beseech him. “At least I’ve distracted everyone for a bit,” he said, “given Mother and Father something else to think about, other than …” He trailed off, frowning at me. “You like me now,” he said after a minute. “You like me better than you did before. Why?”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” he went on when I was silent. “If it wasn’t, you’d have disagreed with me.”
“You make it sound as if I didn’t like you before.”
“Perhaps you didn’t. Oh, Masha, don’t look so—”
“I never didn’t like you. I just … now I see how preoccupied with myself I’ve been, with Father’s death. It came between me and … and everything. Between me and the rest of life.”
Alyosha nodded. “Are you afraid?” he asked after a moment.
“Of what?”
“Of living without him.”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know what I thought it was before—someone dying. Someone who isn’t a stranger but a person you love. Now that I do, it’s … Nothing’s the same. Or it’s me that’s not the same. No matter what I’m doing, or even if I’m doing nothing, it’s like looking at a picture hanging on the wall and seeing it’s crooked. In my mind, I keep trying to adjust it, whatever it is, and stepping back to consider. But it’s me that’s the problem. I’m listing in some way I can’t correct.” I stopped talking, surprised to have found myself confiding in Alyosha, who nodded slowly as I spoke.
“I think I understand,” he said. “As much as I can, anyway. Actually, I probably can’t imagine at all what you’re suffering. That was a presumptuous thing to say. I just meant I wished I could.”
“Could what?”
“Understand. I want to understand. I realized, but not in time to shut up, that I was talking about myself when I asked if you were afraid. Do you know, this is the first time in my life I’ve had an accident without his coming to my rescue? Now I … well, now I know.”
“Know what?” I asked.
“What it’s like when he isn’t here,” he said, after I’d given up waiting for any answer at all.
“Oh, Alyosha. I’m so—”
“Please don’t tell me you’re sorry again.”
“But I—”
“It’s only Mother who’s unreasonable enough to expect you to help. Masha. Masha, please don’t,” he said.
“It’s nothing.”
“You’re crying.”
“No I’m not.”
“You look like you’re crying.”
“Don’t you know,” I asked, after drying my eyes on my sleeve, “that when someone says she isn’t crying, you’re not supposed to argue with her?”
BEFORE MY FATHER DIED and I came to live with the Romanovs, most of my visits to the Alexander Palace had been accidental, a matter of my being with Father when he was called to tend to an emergency. Most often I was left in the blue-and-gold parlor, and sometimes a lady-in-waiting offered me a book or a paint box and paper. Once, the children’s governess collected and deposited me in the nursery playroom, where I saw something I’d never seen before: a wheeled chair for invalids but made small, for a child. There was a wagon in the playroom too, and a plump little horse covered in real horse hair, with a real mane and wheels where its hooves should be and a saddle big enough to sit on, and I looked at the three things, each with its four wheels, and felt what I couldn’t yet identify as pity. I was so overwhelmed by all of what was around me—the riches, the servants, the vast number of rooms—I had no idea what I felt, other than outrage at the wanton wickedness of taking pieces of a real horse to make a plaything. What kind of family would provide a child such a toy? I missed my horses back home—I think I missed them more than I did my mother—but I wouldn’t have touched that false steed, not if it had been the last suggestion of an equine specimen on earth.
In truth, I didn’t dare touch any of the toys. Not while the screaming continued. The longer it went on, the younger I became, whittled down from ten to a baby of five or six, prey to morbid imaginings and sure such sounds could only be the work of malevolent Ivan, who had bewitched the nursery, stunned and stilled each toy. Any doll that could lie down and close her eyes had done just that. The ball and hoop rolled back to their places in the cupboard, and the mechanical wonders that entertained the tsarevich—railways and factories, fleets of ships that sailed, battalions of minuscule soldiers that marched—remained motionless, waiting on the fate of their bedridden owner, a boy who would have traded everything he owned for the one pleasure denied him, the gift for which he begged every Christmas and every birthday: a bicycle.
So I gave one to Handsome Alyosha.
“What color is it?” Alyosha wanted to know.
“Red, of course.”
“Tell me what it looks like.”
“You know what a bicycle looks like.”
“I want to know what his looks like.”
“Handsome Alyosha’s bicycle is red,” I told Alyosha, “but the handlebars are chrome.”
“Does it have mudguards over the tires?”
“It does.”
“Well, why aren’t they chrome too?”
“Who said they aren’t?”
“Is it a Raleigh or a Triumph?”
“Neither.”
“Royal Enfield?”
“No.”
“It