She closed the portfolio which outlined her surgery schedule with each procedure mocked up as a digitized image of what her body would look like after. It was no last minute hesitation, only a savoring of what was to come. These were the final steps of her journey and the first of her metamorphosis. She was to become Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich Grozny.
The need to become the 16th century Tsar had swollen in her for many years. Planted as a seedling one day when she was caught by the pull of an actor’s mocking stare from a film poster dating from 1947, Ivan the Terrible, hung over the actors head in Cyrillic styled English. What singled him out from all of histories atrocities to be saddled with a title so condemning, she wondered buying a ticket.
That film led to books, and books to museums, museums to pilgrimages; Moscow, Novgorad, Astana, Kursk. She learned Russian and studied the vast output of his writing. The difficult sounds she made while reading the obsolete words felt true in
her mouth. She studied maps of his campaigns against the Tartars with racing blood. She ordered models of his architectural commissions and understood perfectly blinding the men who designed them. She spent most of her money and free time learning everything there was to know about the despot, but feeding the thing inside her didn’t satiate the compulsion; it nourished it.
She adjusted the red tonsure cap over her stringy, shoulder length hair just as the Tsar wore his in the portrait by Victor Vasentsov, towering and gaunt, the ideal of her future self. Dressing and grooming in his style had eased a certain amount of the wanting but for years she knew she could never be complete until she inhabited his dimensions.
Psychiatrists and health counselors had to be seen before any surgeon in America would consider taking on the 243 operations required to complete the transformation. Had she always felt like a man trapped in a woman’s body? Did she have a history of relationships with women? They couldn’t understand it was nothing to do with sex, being feminine or masculine. It was specific; she needed to be everything that Ivan the Terrible was.
Pounding the desk of Metropolitan Cosmetics head surgeon after being denied permission she vowed. ‘I’ll rip your tongue from its root and fill your skull with burning embers.’ In perfect Vasilyevich fashion.
She searched abroad and easily found surgeons in every part of the world willing to take on the full scale restructuring of her 5’4” frame and mold it to the severe lines of Russia’s most notorious leader. She selected Dr. Slobodeniak initially based on his clinics reputation, and was confirmed in her decision when during the interview he knew about Ivan. They discussed the gross mistranslation of the title ‘Grozny’, how it should be translated as awesome, or formidable not terrible.
The doctor flew her to his clinic on Isla Margarita in Venezuela at his own expense. Weary at performing nose jobs and filling out bikinis he was excited about the challenge; therefore he would charge her nothing. The surgeries, her stay at the clinic, all expenses for a year were on him. They signed a contract. Afterward, equally for a year; she would appear in public exclusively at his request. They would become famous together.
In his private office Dr. Slobodeniak found his patient standing rigid before a large painting.
‘Senorita?’
‘Who is he?’
‘You must know. That is the great Simon Bolivar. He liberated South America from Spanish rule.’
The name was irrelevant; the eyes of the lean, majestic figure spoke directly to her core.
