Anastasia's Secret (22 page)

C
HAPTER
27

By November it had become too cold to spend much time outdoors, except at midday when the sun shone and the wind died away. The hours of tedium were almost unbearable, with only a few rooms to roam in, the same books to read, and lessons I no longer had any interest in doing. Mama made me read unceasingly from the book of Isaiah—I don’t know why. All those evil children and sinful cities upon whom God turned his back. Beating swords into plowshares—perhaps she sensed my restlessness, the way I wandered around, unable to settle, longing only to see Sasha but with no one to tell, no one to share my feelings, good and bad. I sometimes satisfied my frustration by reverting to my old tricks. Why not? I thought. Everyone expected it of me. And then, I hit upon something that might at least give me a sight of Sasha, let me drink in everything I could in one glance to take back with me to my solitude.

“I’m bored,” I said, after lessons were over and our lunch cleared away. “Let’s go see what the guards are doing.”

“We can’t do that!” Mashka exclaimed.

“Why not? We’re allowed to go outside, and the guards’ house has an entrance from our yard. We could hardly escape through a building full of people who wish to keep us captive.”

To my surprise, it was Tatiana who seconded my plan. “Yes, why not!” she said. “The worst that could happen would be that they’d turn us away.”

“But what would we do once we got there?” Olga asked.

I went to the table and picked up the draughts board and pieces. “We’ll play,” I said.

In the end I convinced everyone except Alexei. “It’s too cold to go outside,” he said.

“Oh, don’t be such a little girl!” I teased. His look held a warning, though. For a moment I thought he saw through my mischief to the real purpose behind it. But I didn’t remain there long enough to find out, and the others didn’t know anything, or if they did, they hadn’t said.

Even if I hadn’t wanted to lead the way, my sisters would have pushed me ahead of them when we reached the door of the guardhouse. As I knocked, I hoped they would open quickly—we hadn’t bundled up as we would if we were planning to stay outside, and it was already so cold that within minutes our noses would turn blue. Thankfully, our knock was answered quickly by a young guard who stared at us in silent amazement.

“Hello. Would you like to play draughts with us? And can we come in? It’s terribly cold out here!” I gambled that his astonishment would overcome any resistance he might have had to fraternizing with us.

And I was right. A helpless grin brightened his face as he opened the door wide and said, “Come in! It’s not very luxurious here, but we could do with a change to cheer us up in this weather.”

He led us into a sort of common room filled with cigarette smoke, with men huddled around a stove for warmth. A quick glance showed me that Sasha wasn’t there. For a moment we all stared at each other, speechless. Then I held up the draughts board, and quickly the guards cleared off a table, pulled up stools for us, and brought out their own draughts boards. Before long, the competition was fierce—and friendly.

I’ve always loved playing games, and I soon forgot myself in the challenge of trying to win these fast-paced contests. Before long, the room rang with everyone’s laughter, shouts of triumph, and groans of defeat. Time went quickly.

I gave up my seat at the board to Mashka, who had initially held back but eventually became caught up in the fun. One of the younger guards came over to me and offered me a cigarette. I took it. It was not one of the ones Papa would give us, elegantly wrapped in colored paper with a gold band around it for your fingers. This was hand rolled, tobacco spilling out at one end. I wasn’t prepared for the rawness of it, and the smoke burned my throat. I coughed.

The guard smiled. “A little strong for you?”

I waved my hand in front of my tearing eyes and nodded, then handed the cigarette back to him.

“Tell me,” he said. “Point out which of your sisters is which.”

I told him who was who.

“Tatiana,” he said musingly. “How old is she?”

I had to think for a moment. “Twenty-one.”

He looked surprised. “Really? She seems younger.”

That was the end of our conversation, but I continued to look around at the guards, many of whom could not take their eyes off my older sisters, who did look especially beautiful in the flush of winning or losing their game.

After I don’t know how long, the door opened, and Colonel Kobylinsky entered. Suddenly everyone became quiet. A draught fell on the floor and rolled away, the only sound as we all held our breath, worried that the colonel would punish the men or become angry at us.

“I see you have found a way to pass the long winter afternoons,” he said, then smiled. A sigh of relief went around the room. “So long as you don’t forget when it is time to relieve your brethren at their duties.” He pointed to a wall clock, and in an instant, the guards in the room stood and put their hats on their heads. We also stood, putting our coats and hats back on.

“Thank you,” Olga said, and we all followed suit.

“Will you come back tomorrow?” one of the youngest guards asked.

We all looked at Colonel Kobylinsky. “Members of the Romanov family are free to move anywhere in the confines of this area. If they wish, they may come.”

No one could suppress a grin.

Before I fell asleep that night, I thought about Olga and Tatiana. If things had been different, they both might have been married by then, perhaps even had children of their own. Would that ever happen now? Some of the guards were quite handsome, and I could tell that my sisters would have liked to be able to flirt with them openly and that they might have had romances like mine with Sasha. I was a little glad they didn’t, though, because in the cold weather there were few places to meet in private. I giggled to myself at the idea of us all enacting a sort of imprisoned bedroom farce, like the French plays we put on under Zhilik’s direction.

Sasha and I had taken to meeting in a small room in the cellar of the guard’s house, which had been built in the old Siberian style, with chambers below the ground that had small windows that just peeked out above. One of these was little more than a root cellar, but again Sasha had done his best to make it comfortable for us. He brought a wool rug down, and cushions, so we could sit and talk and do those other, intimate things that made me feel so alive and free even as in our daily lives we became more and more like prisoners.

It was on a bitterly cold November day that Sasha informed me of something that would have monumental importance for my family, although I couldn’t have realized it at the time. We had met as planned, but after our initial greeting he seemed more distant and quiet than usual.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him, threading my fingers through his after we had lain together and kissed for a while.

He furrowed his brow, making the patch over his eye dig into the edge of the socket in a way that looked uncomfortable. “There has been news today. It hasn’t been in the papers yet, so you mustn’t say anything to your family.”

I sat up. This sounded serious. “What is it?”

“There has been another Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd and Moscow. This time, they succeeded. The Provisional Government has fallen and the extremists are in control.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Does this mean anything for us?”

Sasha dropped my hand and a cross look passed over his face. “I see. So nothing is important except insofar as it directly affects you and your family? Well, ex-Grand Duchess, the world is no longer the same. You are not Her Imperial Highness!”

His words stung me. “I—I didn’t mean that. I meant you and me.”

He shrank visibly, his shoulders drooping, as if all at once the tension in his muscles had let him go. “I don’t know. It could.”

“Perhaps they will forget about us? Surely they have more important things to worry about than keeping guard over people who are now, as you say, simply private citizens.”

“You and your sisters and brother are. But your parents are under arrest. Prisoners of the state. And there is a strong feeling against them among the soldiers.”

“But they are so friendly to us, most of them anyway.”

“You make a sympathetic group, you four girls and Alexei. But even that, I fear, will soon change. As soon as they hear about the revolution.”

There it was again. Sasha knew something that nobody else knew. How could he? Where did he get his information? I wanted to ask him, but I was afraid. I didn’t want to change our relationship, take it out of the realm of pure feeling, out of its magical time and place, where only we two existed. I didn’t want to know things that would spoil that enchantment. “So, I must truly keep this to myself.”

He kissed me. “I know I can trust you. You’ve always proven that to me. I wish everyone in Russia could know how worthy you—and your family—really are.”

When we parted that night I had a heavy feeling in my heart. Where before when it came to Sasha, all was sunshine and light, now I sensed gathering clouds. I did not know how soon those clouds would rip open and hurl lightning bolts at us in our relative tranquility, beset by vexing regulations and constricted in our movements, yet still—for the moment—able to eat and sleep and dream of better times.

C
HAPTER
28

We spent a quiet, cold Christmas and New Year in Tobolsk. We had made what Christmas gifts we could for the servants and our friends, using the scraps of this and that we were permitted to keep. With ribbons and cloth we made sachets and cards, and embroidered prayers onto handkerchiefs that we wrapped around beads and paper images of the saints. Mama knitted woolen waistcoats for Zhilik, Dr. Botkin, and Dr. Derevenko, as well as for some of the servants. We even gave presents to one or two of our guards, the ones we saw every day, which I think surprised them. Mama gave a Christmas tree to the servants, but without any decorations it looked sad and somber.

Mama also invited Kobylinsky, Pankratov, and Nikolsky to our Christmas dinner. It was a silent affair, as we felt keenly how different this Christmas was even than our last, as prisoners at Tsarskoe Selo.

We all wrote letters to our friends, to Anya and Isa, to Lili Dehn and others, knowing that they would be read and scrutinized for codes and conspiracies many times before they reached their intended recipients—if they ever did. Anya, at least, was out of prison and living with her parents. This we heard through Mr. Gibbes, who had visited her and taken a photograph of her in her horrible conditions. He had arrived a few weeks before the holiday and was staying with us, whereas poor Isa left only a week or so later and had still not been given permission to visit.

“It took me weeks of effort to get the necessary papers to travel here,” Mr. Gibbes said as he sipped his evening tea with us at Christmas.

“Why are they so afraid of letting us have our people around us?” Mama said. “I’m so glad you’re here, Syd. Baby’s English has become quite bad.”

I noticed Zhilik flare his nostrils and turn away a little. I think that was the first time I realized that our two foreign tutors actually disliked each other so much. Mr. Gibbes had refused to share Zhilik’s room, and so was given a much smaller room that was barely more than a cupboard.

Although Isa was right across the street in the Kornilov house, Mama never saw her at all in the end, only getting messages to and from her through the others. We all wrote letters to her as if she were still at Tsarskoe. I really wished she could have visited us then. She would have been a comforting person to have around. Always practical, always kind. She would have helped with the accounts and other matters; perhaps she would have been able to prevent the complete destruction of Mama’s undergarments by the local laundry. Then it would not have been necessary for our friends outside in Petrograd to deprive themselves by sending her underlinen and warm stockings.

After the New Year, the weather grew as bitterly cold as Siberia could manage. All of us became ill with colds, or in our cases, with German measles. This was not nearly as bad as the measles we had in Tsarskoe, and we recovered quickly. Then it was endless days and nights of ice and snow. Most days we couldn’t even get across to the guards’ house for games of cards—which Sasha never took part in, I noticed. He knew we were there whenever we came, because he would mention it to me. But he always stayed away. I’ve come to think it was wise of him. We might not have been able to act as distant as we should, and someone might have guessed what was going on.

I have an image of Tobolsk that I will always carry with me. It is snowing hard, a blizzard, so that the railings that enclose our small exercise area are indistinct. The windows are etched with beautiful, crystalline patterns of frost climbing up them from the bottom, leaving only a small space at the top where I can look out and see. I am standing on a chair so that I can peer through that tiny space. I stay like that for a long time, watching the snow climb up the fence, wondering if that fence will disappear completely and we might have the illusion of not being enclosed, but connected to the town and the rest of Russia by that smooth whiteness. I keep my eyes focused on the swirling snow, until the constant, white movement makes it seem as if the snowflakes are neither falling nor being blown, but suspended in air, suspended in time. In my memory I fantasize that perhaps we too were not only out of the mainstream of life, but had been placed in a bubble of time. If we could only break out of that bubble, we would find that the world outside was just as we had left it before the war: Papa would be tsar and we girls, OTMA, would be thinking about who we might marry. And Alexei would be well. He would not suffer any more. And Sasha …

These were just comforting fancies. My other comfort, the warmth of Sasha’s arms, had been denied me since the beginning of the year. The heavy snow made it more and more difficult for us to meet, since I could not make the short walk outside at night without anyone noticing. At the very least, opening a door or window let in such a blast of cold and snow that the entire house felt chilled by several degrees, and it often took a long time to clear up the snow that had blown in, requiring buckets and mops and a lot of noise.

During our enforced separation, I composed letters to Sasha in my head, since I did not dare write them down. The letters gradually evolved into poetry. I wanted my mind and heart to leap across the barrier between us. Those twenty or so feet could have been an ocean requiring a long voyage to cross, for all the contact we were able to have during that Siberian winter. I remember some of the poems I wrote. Perhaps they are silly. Here’s one:

A curtain of snow between us,
Soft, white, and pure.
That such beauty can separate us
Makes life impossible to endure
.

Silly, yes. But I ached so to see Sasha. The only times I was able to were when he happened to be among the guards who would come in and make what they called a domiciliary visit, which was only a less offensive way to say house search. They would go in pairs and dig through drawers and shake out books, looking for messages or for evidence that we had somehow broken the rules of our imprisonment. They always managed to find something suspicious: a letter Mama was writing in Old Church Slavonic; one of Alexei’s few toys, kept more for sentiment than use but that might have been employed to carry a message; books in English and French that they could not understand and were thought therefore to contain counterrevolutionary propaganda. I particularly remember one of the more unpleasant guards picking up a copy of
Martin Chuzzlewit
with his first finger and thumb and dropping it as though it had a bad smell into the satchel full of “evidence” they would bring back to the commander to pore over and sift through. Sometimes the books made their way back to us via Pankratov, but he had less and less influence as time went by.

“The personal life is now of no importance,” Nikolsky announced one day, as if by a wave of his hand he could change millennia of human behavior and create a new order in the world. I wondered if he knew how imperious he sounded, and that my father, the supposedly evil tsar, would never have presumed to force his will on his subjects in such a way.

The snow eventually stopped falling, leaving piles and piles of whiteness. In our small space outdoors, we began to build our own mountain to slide down and climb over. We made it quite gigantic. We brought buckets of water out from the house to solidify it. It was so cold sometimes that the water would freeze in the buckets on the way, so it became a game to run as quickly as possible and throw the water, watching some of the droplets crystallize in midair. It was our only project, and all of us with the addition of our tutors and Kolya Derevenko attacked it with determination and concentration. Some of the guards we had played draughts with helped us too. I noticed a few flirtatious gestures, and once thought I surprised a guard trying to give Tatiana a surreptitious kiss. I pretended not to notice, but she blushed so obviously that it was plain enough for anyone to see.

Often we would end by throwing snowballs at each other and competing to build the mountain to its highest point before it was crushed down by clambering feet. When our mountain was done, we made makeshift toboggans out of wooden slats, and passed many hours in the winter sunshine sliding down its slope.

Soon enough, life began to change and shift around us. In February, we learned that many of the guards from Tsarskoe who had become friendly with us were to be sent back to Petrograd, and a new division would replace them. On the eve of the guards’ departure, Nikolsky came to pay a visit to Papa.

“The ice mountain must be destroyed,” he said.

“Why on earth?” asked Papa, who had enjoyed seeing our progress as much as anyone.

“You and Marie Romanova were seen climbing to the top of the mountain and looking over the fence into the town. This disturbs the townspeople.”

“That’s absurd!” Papa replied and shook his head. Nikolsky didn’t look at any of us. No doubt he didn’t want to confront our disappointed faces.

We gathered at the window to watch some of the same soldiers who had helped us create our whimsical ice slide now hammer it to pieces with picks and shovels. They looked as disappointed as we felt. What startled me most, though, was to see that Sasha was the soldier assigned to watch over the destruction. He stood by passively, only occasionally pointing out a vulnerable place that would undermine the structure and save some work for the men. I couldn’t help staring out the window, willing him to look up in my direction so that a silent signal could pass between us. But he didn’t. I hoped it was because he couldn’t trust himself to do it. I prayed it was not because he no longer wanted to see me, or wanted to forget what we had been to each other.

“It’s sad, isn’t it?”

Mashka had come up behind me and passed her arms around my waist, resting her chin on my shoulder. “Yes,” I answered, knowing that I was responding to more than she probably meant.

“Let’s have some music this evening,” she said. “Alexei’s not feeling well, but you could play the balalaika. Not the sad songs, the lively ones. It always cheers everyone up.”

“All right,” I said. “After dinner.”

“Ah yes, dinner! How many courses will the servants bring us this evening?”

It was a game we played, pretending that the meager rations we now had were in fact sumptuous feasts. “I believe we shall start with the soup.”

“A clear soup for the first course, yes. And then a bread roll for the second course,” Mashka said, giving me the cue to continue.

“And Papa will carve.” This started us laughing at the idea of our father ceremoniously carving up a roll into small portions for our large family, plus the suite and the doctors and the tutors.

“Are you coming to Mama’s sitting room? It’s so cold in here,” Mashka said. I was watching from the one room in the house I knew would be empty just for that reason.

“I’ll be along soon,” I said. Mashka knew enough to kiss me lightly on top of my head and leave without asking any more questions.

In fact, it was always Mashka who could read the mood of the house. I was too involved in my own feelings to notice the changes in those around me. And I did not feel much like strumming cheerful dance tunes and comic songs on Sasha’s balalaika that evening. It would remind me too much of him. When we were seeing each other every second or third night, it used to make me feel as though he were touching me even when I was in the midst of my family. But now it had been almost a month, and he hadn’t even looked at me directly, let alone met me or spoken to me or touched me. Now the hollow wood of the balalaika seemed empty and forlorn, not full of unspoken promises.

But Mashka was right. I had to be the one to keep everyone’s spirits up. They all expected it of me, and for me to appear hopeless or downcast would make everyone feel worse.

It was while we were playing and singing in Mama’s sitting room one evening about a week later that Pankratov and Nikolsky came in to see us, not wearing uniforms, but in ordinary street clothes.

After some clearing of his throat, Pankratov spoke. “It has been decided… we are obliged to … well, we wanted to tell you ourselves—”

“We have been asked by the new soldiers to resign, and we are to be replaced by a Bolshevik commissary from Moscow,” Nikolsky interrupted, having bristled with impatience at Pankratov’s stuttering and stammering.

Papa stood and approached them. We all had our eyes upon him as he walked forward. “When must you leave?” he asked.

Pankratov, having got over the news itself, found his tongue again. “We’re leaving tomorrow. We have no desire to be here when the new commissary arrives. Things are so uncertain.”

Papa nodded. Then he put out his hand to each of them. “You have been fair, and treated us with respect. I—we—shall miss you.”

Nikolsky stood erect, but I could tell even he was affected. Pankratov sank to his knees and kissed Papa’s hand.

“No, no, that is all at an end. I am no different from you or from any of the men in the guardhouse. Go with God.”

We all felt unaccountably sad about the departure of our principal captors in Tobolsk. They had been the authors of many petty regulations that had made our lives less tolerable. And yet, we knew them, and now once more we had no idea what would happen next.