Unspeakable Things by Kathleen Spivack

Author:Kathleen Spivack [Spivack, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-25T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

RASPUTIN’S MARK

Each night after she had satisfied herself that all the others were sleeping, Anna, the Rat, undressed carefully under the heaped bedclothes in the darkened room. But this morning, she woke early. Spring light moved across the room. But the family slept, Ilse as never before. Herbert had already left. The Rat wondered what time it was; perhaps time to wake Ilse and the children.

Spring caressed Anna’s cheek as she regarded the still-sleeping figure of Maria, tucked in so tenderly beside her. Painfully, the Rat managed to shift herself into an upright position, which is to say a semicurled sitting one. Her spine ached. Anna drew aside the blanket where it weighted her. And in the soft first light of the morning, she peered at her body as she pulled her nightgown aside.

Anna’s spine, curved in a semicircle, condemned her to stare forever at her own lap. Because of this, she always, even to herself, even in the dark, kept herself covered. But now she took a look.

There it was. The handprints were still there. A sulfurous burn of a hand mark, each long finger articulated on her withered white flesh. The hands were etched into the flesh of each upper thigh as strongly as the print of a leaf can etch itself into cement or stone.

“Oh.” She sucked in her breath in dismay.

She forced herself to look closely. The bony, determined fingers, the emblazoned palms, the hands gripped her thighs and moved them forcibly apart. As she looked, a smell of quickly struck phosphorus rose up from her body. She felt herself on fire, scorched again and forever by the rapacious hands of Rasputin.

“Unspeakable things,” she murmured to herself, now tracing the outlines of the cadaverous hands on her body. She ran her own small, soft hands over the large marks. “He did to me unspeakable things.” And even while she said this to herself, even while she experienced anew the shame and horror, a little spasm, the beginnings of wild excitement, began to mount.

The hands flickered into flame; the flame ignited. Anna melted into her memories, confounded of shame and excitement. “Yes!” she cried to her now-dead lover. Unwillingly, yet at the same time gladly, the sigh rose up from her silent body. Rasputin seized her, looking into her beautiful eyes, entering her once more. Her body throbbed around his. And Anna gave way, rapturous and horrified.

“Dear lady…,” Rasputin had said ironically. “Would you do anything to save your husband?”

“Yes,” Anna had replied. “Little fool,” she thought now, looking back.

She saw herself once more in the dark room alone with the Mad Monk, a candle flickering. His savage, sensual face stared at her, the head hooded, partially hidden by his cowl. But nothing could veil his fierce desires.

“Very well,” he had commanded, not even bothering to look directly at the woman as she stood, a supplicant for her husband’s lands and money, a bent figure bowed before him. “You shall be my companion for two weeks. And after that, I shall intercede with the Little Father on your family’s behalf.

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