Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [52]
Anya was already starting to worry. Voices were beginning to be heard in the large Romanov family: get rid of this friend. But Anya managed to hang on with the help of an amusing new game.
One day she announced to Alix that she had decided to go away. Sacrifice her love for them to calm the court. Soon afterward, to general astonishment, omnipotent Anya married the modest naval officer Boris Vyrubov. Witte commented nastily: “The poor empress wails like the wife of a Moscow merchant marrying off her daughter.” But Anya knew the finale to this marriage in advance—she possessed precise information about her groom—and soon she fled her marital bed, for her husband turned out to be a sexual deviant and drug addict. Anya could tell the mystically inclined tsaritsa that this was her punishment for betraying her predestination. Her lot, having given up on the possibility of a family of her own, was to serve Russia’s first family.
So who was she? Simple-hearted, good, serene, candid? Yes. And also—sly, secretive, cunning, intelligent. A dangerous woman who devoted herself to a single passion. Witte wrote: “The entire inner circle pays court to Anya Vyrubova, as do their wives and daughters. Anya arranges various indulgences for them and influences which political figures get close to the sovereign.”
This was her passion: power. The power that immediately suited the young lady and to which she subsumed her entire life. The secret blood of Emperor Paul. Anya was the invisible mistress of the most brilliant court in Europe.
Then suddenly, in 1914, this unexpected hurricane of insane jealousy from the empress. Everything was in jeopardy!
What had happened? Had Anya overplayed her hand? Were the southern nights to blame—those maddening nights in the white Livadia Palace?
None of them are alive now. They have long since departed this world. We are still trying to re-create the scenes, but the shaky figures dissolve in the darkness. The curtain falls. They are behind the curtain, and we are not going to disturb them.
Actually, it is all quite clear: in 1914 (at the start of the war between her new and former homelands), Alix was on the verge of hysteria, and this combined in her with the strange, carnal quality that had been introduced into the palace with the “Holy Devil,” Grigory Rasputin. Although the palace made the devil over into a saint, the half-mad tsaritsa could not help but sense the invisible field of his lust, the electrical charge of his unbridled power. Hence her passionate, carnal dreams in her letters to Nicholas. No, this was no longer comfortable marital love but a frenzied challenge that found an outlet in the insane jealousy that engulfed her then. Now, as in years past, Anya was energetically playing her part of the safe other woman. But one day Alix saw herself in the mirror: tormented, aging … gray hairs had appeared. And next to Nicky this young, blooming woman with ecstatic eyes riveted to him as if she were begging to be petted. Delusion was born.
Anya behaved wisely. Trying to justify herself would have meant fanning suspicion, so she responded with the offended coolness and contempt of the unjustly insulted. And with rudeness. This last was new for Russia’s mistress, but it proved the best medicine. Soon Alexandra was complaining to Nicky: “her humour towards me has not been amiable this morning—what one would call rude.” To rudeness Anya added