There was no color anywhere, only white snow, white ice, trees frosted white. Not a color so much as a flare of illumination too intense for mortal eyes. He didn’t see the Holy Mother until he was in her presence.
The Virgin took the form of a fir tree, all of her sparkling white, with boughs for arms, and in each arm she held one of the lives my father had saved, human lives and those of animals as well.
“Was I there too?”
“Of course. By then Father was a man of forty years, and the tree was as tall as a church spire and laden with souls. Every soul including that of the first creature he’d raised from the dead, a—”
“Little white goat.”
“Yes. The Holy Mother had so many arms—boughs—and the light was so intense that Father found himself dazzled, unable to go on looking and equally unable to turn away. To help me understand, he drew a picture of the apparition.”
“Can I see the drawing?” Alyosha asked the first time I told the story. “Did you keep it, Masha?”
“I have it among my things. I’ll fetch it if you like.”
My father was barely able to write. When he tried, the letters came out backward or out of order—a nearly faultless memory hid his lack of education, as he could quote page after page of scripture while pretending to read—but his hand was that of an artist. He’d drawn a crown of sparkling snowflakes over the Holy Mother’s head and rooted her feet into a bank of snow, and he made each of the branches that were her arms curve gently outward from her trunk, its outermost twigs like fingers cradling the head of a newborn. One sleeping soul rested along the length of each branch, toes toward the trunk. Some lay on their sides, some on their backs; all had his or her eyes closed.
“Bring a light,” Alyosha asked when I came back with the drawing. It was late in the afternoon; the room had fallen into shadows. Alyosha studied each face on each bough, looking for a likeness of himself, I assumed, but I kept this to myself.
“What happened next, Father?” I’d always ask about his walk in the Silver Forest, and he always answered with the same word: “Nothing.”
Nothing happened, at least not as things usually do. He’d known he was in the presence of the Virgin, that’s all, and his happiness was so intense he neither moved nor dared think his own thoughts for fear she’d leave him, and when she did leave he fell to his knees and wept.
MY FATHER WASN’T BORN with the power to heal. He described himself as an indolent second son, who neither expected nor wanted to inherit the family farm. Even when he wasn’t busy causing the usual adolescent mischief, he didn’t make himself useful. He never could think about working when there was a girl in sight, and both he and his older brother, Mischa, looked forward to Mischa receiving all their father’s property.
But in the spring of 1883, when my father was fourteen and Mischa sixteen, the brothers suffered an accident together. The snows were melting and the Tura was running high and fast, but boys, boys—they do seem determined to prove themselves idiots. Having hiked to a bend in the river not far upstream from the falls where the Tura joined the Tobol, the two set down their picnic of bread, onions, kvass, and white cheese. They were going to bathe in the river before they stuffed themselves with all they’d plundered from their mother’s pantry. But Father hadn’t even undressed before his brother went in and was caught by the current. Father waded in to save Mischa, but he couldn’t. The water was so strong and held Mischa so fiercely that, once Father had an arm around his brother’s neck, both boys were pulled downstream and nearly drowned. A man who happened to see—it was Arkhip Kaledin, the village blacksmith—fished them out before they reached the falls, but they took fevers, and in three days Mischa was dead.
After he lost his brother, my father’s illness was made worse by his grief, and for weeks he went on being feverish and delirious and saying things no one could follow, until one day he woke up with voices in his ears. Sometimes they told him of things that had yet to come to pass; other times they revealed secrets or thoughts people hadn’t voiced. He identified a man who had stolen a horse from a neighbor; he predicted the day, even the hour, of an uncle’s death. The grass began talking to him, and the trees told him their secrets. When raindrops pocked the surface of still water, he could read the marks they made just as other men read a newspaper.
Worms under the dirt, they talked to him. If he lay down in a meadow, he couldn’t sleep for all the noise beneath his head. The cries of trees feeling the woodsman’s ax, the keening of sheep for their slain lambs, the scream of a rabbit with its leg in a snare. And the underwater screeching of the fish that swallowed a hook didn’t drown out the shriek of the worm impaled on the hook. There was no voice he could refuse to hear, and this was frightening before it was tolerable, and tolerable before it was something he understood as a gift. Even when he was able to find joy in his unusual sympathies, still they exhausted him. To be at the mercy of all creation—because that was how it felt—sometimes this was a dreadful blight. Even if he clapped his hands over his ears, plugged them with his fingers, he couldn’t escape the clamor. And what was he to do with such a gift? How was he to use it?
By the time I could sit up and take notice of who was around me, my father was no longer there. He’d left home to find his purpose in the world. On foot he tried to overtake it, his destiny, and he walked hundreds of miles, thousands of miles, before he at last arrived in St. Petersburg, and what he did along the way became a matter of curiosity and debate. The Mad Monk Rasputin had been, it was said, indoctrinated into a cult that preached sin as the means to redemption, and it was thus that he learned to be less a healer than a sexual outlaw, mesmerizing ladies of the court with the same hypnotic power he held over Alyosha and his disorderly blood. Somewhere along his path to the nation’s capital, rumor had it, my father fell in with the Khlysty, whose members were thought to meet in the woods, where they lashed one another into a frenzy of lust, heightened by vodka and, ultimately, quenched by fornication.
It’s possible. My father did enjoy the company of women. He wasn’t much of a drinker, though, not before he came to St. Petersburg and found himself badgered day and night by countless petitioners eager to exploit his influence on the royal family.
AFTER MISCHA DIED, my grandfather Yefim told my father he expected him to assume ownership of the family farm, a thought that filled my father with dread. A daydreamer, Father took every opportunity to slip away from mending a fence or digging potatoes, from whatever my grandfather expected him to do, and wandered afield, called away from his chores by ants whispering in the grass or sent away by the protests of potatoes that didn’t want to be pulled from their home in the soil. He could hear clouds gliding high overhead, and the singing of stones. He’d heard the Virgin calling him when he was ill. If he listened carefully, she told him, the world would reveal his vocation. Perhaps he’d be a hero of some kind. That would attract girls, with their soft skin, and their tight bodices that showed him just a little of their white bosoms, and their warm thighs that he tried to feel beneath their skirts.
I saw my father with countless women. In droves they came to the apartment at 64 Gorokhovaya Street, dressed in finery, silk buttons he undid with his unwashed hands, so I know of what I speak. Women threw themselves at my father. From dawn to dusk and late into the night, an endless line of them waited on the stairs to our apartment. They were always there, as familiar as the wall-paper. They wanted to be held and kissed and bedded by a man different from any they’d known. They wanted their hair mussed and the color on their lips smeared. They wanted the feel of his hot, callused hands on their smooth skin. They wanted to be healed, comforted, and even, some of them, scolded.
They wanted his blessing, or they wanted a more tangible favor: one of the notes I wrote and he signed. In order to preserve the secret of his illiteracy, I made up hundreds of these in advance and kept the desk in the sitting room well stocked with all he needed. Dear Friend, As a favor to me, have pity on the bearer of this message and grant what she requests. Father Grigory. There was another