Enchantments by Kathryn Harrison

Author:Kathryn Harrison
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

The Wild West Show

“THAT’S WHAT WE NEED,” Alyosha said, once I’d finally taken my hands away from my face.

“What?”

“A magic carpet. Woven of all dark colors, blue and purple and black. We’ll ride it only at night, so if anyone were to look up, all he’d see was the dark sky; we’d blend right in. No one could apprehend us.”

“Where will we go?” I asked, praying he wouldn’t return us to the midnight sleigh rides over the Neva. Not that I didn’t deserve it, teasing him by telling stories that implied I might like to be ravished like the heroine of a romance and then behaving as I had.

“Australia,” he said, and then shook his head. “No, America.”

“Do you think it’s wise to take a flying carpet that far, over an ocean?”

“Of course, Masha. It’s the safest way to go. It can’t sink or run aground or collide with an iceberg.”

“I suppose not. Where in America?”

“Chicago.”

“Why Chicago?”

“It’s the only American city I know anything about. Do you remember Joseph?”

“The Abyssinian guard?”

Before the tsar abdicated, two tall men with shining black skin had guarded the family’s private apartments in the Alexander Palace. Their scarlet uniform jackets were trimmed with gold braid and epaulets and buttoned over voluminous blue silk trousers that looked like those in the color plates accompanying Alyosha’s edition of The Arabian Nights. Whoever had designed the uniform must have considered Arabia close enough to Abyssinia to excuse poetic license, or ignorance. Turbans, scimitars, jeweled slippers with upturned toes—having been imported as objects of curiosity from an exotic land, the pair of Abyssinian guards appeared more ridiculous than imposing, just as did, to my mind, gondoliers with striped shirts and red-ribbonned hats on the canal or Mandarins in the Chinese theater, dressed in coats of stiff, quilted silk, with red pom-poms on their heads and extravagantly long mustaches dropping from their jowls …

“One was from Addis Ababa,” Alyosha said. “The other, Joseph, came here from Chicago. He said the city had a river going right through it, like Petersburg, and that the winters were cold, with a lot of snow. He told me about the World’s Fair in 1893. He’d been an Abyssinian there too, in one of the exhibits. Only they called it by another name. Ethiopian, I think it was.”

“What, for an anthropology exhibit, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand. Is he an Abyssinian, then, or not?”

“He isn’t. There were also Esquimau and Argentinean vaqueros and a replica of a Viking ship that sailed to America from Norway. Japanese geishas. It was all in a great hall constructed for the purpose. You know, to edify onlookers.”

“How horrible that must be, to be put on display like an animal at the zoo.”

Alyosha smiled. “You haven’t spent much time at court, have you? Anyway, he said he didn’t mind, as they paid him quite well and all he had to do was stand there in a costume.”

“Ah,” I said. “Good training for the Alexander Palace.”

Alyosha nodded. “He said as much. Although

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