Anastasia and Her Sisters (17 page)

I was not at all sure Mama could actually make a row, as she called it. To most people she was
Matushka
, “Little Mother,” but many called her
Nemka
, “German woman,” and said she was a traitor because she’d been born in Germany.

Aunt Olga told us about her French-speaking friends who’d been hissed at in shops by people who didn’t recognize any language but Russian and thought they were speaking German.

What stupid people!

When Papa came home for Christmas, we had a small tree just for ourselves, but Papa said it was wiser not to have any large public tree. Our celebration on Christmas Eve was just as it had always been—bowls of traditional
kutya
, almond soup, and roast carp—and we attended Mass at midnight in the chapel, as we always had. On Christmas Day we exchanged small gifts and had a visit from Irina and Felix Yussoupov. But we didn’t go out on the balcony to greet the people, who used to gather to wish us a joyous Christmas. Too many Russians were upset about the war, angry at our family. It seemed better not to make public appearances until the mood improved.

And Olga wrote this in her notebook:

All the good feelings we had last summer when a million people in Petrograd and Moscow cheered until they were hoarse—all that has vanished. Irina says that in Petrograd some of the noble families with German-sounding names are being told to find documents proving that they’re descended from Catherine the Great. Orchestras in Petrograd are not allowed to play music by Bach, Brahms, or Beethoven. Felix says he witnessed the windows of German bakeries being smashed.

So the war was not over by Christmas. Surely by
next
Christmas it will be only a bad memory.

CHAPTER 13

A Year of War

TSARSKOE SELO AND MOGILEV, 1915

I
n January, the train on which Anya Vyrubova was traveling from Petrograd to Tsarskoe Selo was wrecked. She was nearly dead when she was dragged from under the demolished carriage and taken to the hospital in the Catherine Palace. Her legs were crushed and her head and back were badly injured. Mama and Papa rushed to her bedside—Papa had not yet returned to Stavka after Christmas—and the doctors told them, “Do not disturb her. She’s dying.”

Mama immediately sent for Father Grigory. We were in her hospital room, kneeling by her beside and praying, when he arrived. Anya moaned and muttered, calling for him. He nodded to Papa and Mama and went to Anya’s bedside, took her hand, and spoke to her. “Annushka! Annushka, rise!”

At first nothing happened. Sweat bathed his face. None of us dared to breathe. Then, the miracle: The third time Father
Grigory called her name, Anya opened her eyes. When he ordered her to get up, she actually tried to do it, and when he commanded her to speak to him, she murmured something I couldn’t hear. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

Mama was weeping, tears pouring down her cheeks. “Grishka, I beg you to tell me! Will she live?”

Father Grigory nodded wearily. “God will give her back to you if she is needed by you and the country. If her influence is harmful, He will take her away. But she will be a cripple for the rest of her days. Now you must excuse me,” he said. He staggered away, exhausted by the effort he’d made, and Mama collapsed into Papa’s arms.

Soon after that dramatic scene, Papa left again for Stavka. We hated to see him go, and it took days to become accustomed to his absence. The only good thing about Papa being away was that we had unlimited use of his huge swimming bath. Alexei loved it, too. And Tatiana’s silly dog, Ortino, was a witness to our cavorting, barking his head off.

•  •  •

It was a dreadfully sad day when one of Mama’s patients died, a young officer named Grobov. Mama was extremely upset by this. Although she was confronted daily with death in the course of her work at the hospital, she had become quite attached to him, and now he was gone.

Anya was eventually well enough to leave her hospital room and move back to her quarters in Alexander Palace. Now Mama had Anya to look after as well as her work with the wounded soldiers. She demanded so much of Mama’s time and energy, always complaining that she wasn’t getting any attention, no one
came to visit her, she needed to have her wheelchair pushed here and there. And if she didn’t get her way, she pretended to faint!

Father Grigory came to see her nearly every day. Afterward he spent an hour or so with Mama, discussing what should be done about Anya. They talked about the war and what Papa should be doing, and about who should be in charge of what. Mama missed Papa terribly, and in the evenings she wrote him long, long letters, passing along to him the advice Father Grigory had given her.

I wrote him long letters, too, telling him what we were learning from our tutors—not much, in my case. Mr. Gibbes, our English tutor, said I was “lacking motivation and self-discipline,” which translated as “lazy,” while the other tutors continued to torment Marie and me with math, French, and geography.

The huge map that Pyotr Petrov had hung on the wall of our schoolroom became the center of a daily examination of the progress of the war. We focused on the part of Russia that lay west of the Ural Mountains, as well as Hungary, Austria, and Poland, where the fighting was taking place. We had little boxes of pins—white for the Russian army, black for the Germans, yellow for the Austrians—and as news reports came in about the progress of the war, we moved the pins. It was awful to see the black pins advancing and the white ones retreating, but in March there was some good news. Fresh recruits had arrived at the front, and Uncle Nikolasha led the army to a brilliant victory, capturing lots of prisoners and big guns at a fortress in Galicia, a small kingdom west of the Ukraine that belonged to Austria. Papa was so pleased that he presented him with a beautiful gold sword decorated with diamonds.

There were no more gay weekend parties with Aunt Olga—she was now a nurse, too—and no more formal luncheons with Grandmère Marie, who had left St. Petersburg and moved far away to Kiev in the Ukraine. Olga and Tatiana were at the hospital most of the time, but Mama had not been feeling well lately and often had to stay in bed. Visitors were rare, but Mama’s friend Lili Dehn sometimes came out from Petrograd with her little boy, nicknamed Titi. Titi was four years younger than Alexei and worshipped my brother, following him around like a slave.

The winter was long, cold, and gray. During those cheerless months, we learned that the
Standart
and Grandmère Marie’s
Polar Star
had been taken to Helsinki—the admiral believed the yachts would be safer in the Finnish harbor from German attack—and their crews had been reassigned. Lili Dehn’s husband was now the captain of a Russian destroyer, and Olga wrote in her notebook that Lieutenant Voronov was serving on a ship in the Baltic to lay mines underwater to blow up German ships.

There would be no visit to Livadia at Easter and, unless there was a miracle before summer, no cruises on the
Standart
.

That year the gorgeous Fabergé egg that Papa commissioned as a gift for Mama was designed to honor the ladies in Papa’s family who had become Red Cross nurses. Inside the white enameled egg were five tiny portraits on ivory of Mama, my two older sisters, our cousin Dmitri’s sister Maria Pavlovna, and Aunt Olga, who was working at the hospital she’d established near her villa in southwestern Russia. In their portraits, all were wearing white nurses’ wimples. It was the plainest egg
Papa had ever ordered, and Mama pronounced it “beautiful in its simplicity, and absolutely appropriate to the times.”

Spring wore on, and again news about the war turned abysmal. Any victories were won at huge cost of lives and didn’t last. We were suffering one defeat after another, and the black pins of the enemy on our map moved closer to Russia. “I don’t want to do this with the pins anymore,” I told Petrov. “It’s too depressing.”

No one spoke to Marie and me about the losses, but we had ears to hear, and what we heard was that more than a million men had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Mama seemed either consumed by her nursing duties at the hospital, writing page after page to Papa, or involved in deep conversation with Father Grigory. He and Mama blamed Uncle Nikolasha for what was happening to the Russian army.

Tatiana Botkina endured the horrible experience of seeing her brother Yuri’s mangled body brought to the hospital where she worked with Mama and my sisters. He survived only a few days, and she was with him when he died. We observed a deep change come over Dr. Botkin after the loss of his two older sons. And Gleb, always soulful, became even more serious, and the stories he made up were less fanciful and much darker.

Aunt Ella sometimes left her convent and fled Moscow for the peace and quiet of Tsarskoe Selo and a short visit with us. “The mobs are running wild in Moscow,” she said. Her hand shook when she reached for her cup of tea. “They hate everything German, and burn down houses and shops belonging to people with German names. They rushed the gates of the convent and accused me of hiding German spies. They said I was hiding our brother.”

“But Ernie’s not even in Russia!” Mama said. “He’s an officer in the kaiser’s army!”

“So I informed them, but they wouldn’t believe me—even when I invited them to come into the convent and have a look around so they could see for themselves.” Her face was drawn, and she had dark circles beneath her eyes. “Several shouted, ‘Get the German woman! Take her away!’ Then someone threw a stone. It didn’t strike me, but I was afraid the next one would. Still, I refused to back down. A company of our soldiers arrived just in time and broke up the crowd.”

We were silent, too shocked to say anything. Marie crept closer to Aunt Ella and reached for the pale hand that lay trembling in her lap.

“They shout insults wherever I go,” she continued. “They call for Rasputin to be hanged. They shout for Nicky to be deposed and Nikolasha to be made Tsar Nicholas the Third.”

Mama, white-lipped, could barely speak. “And me?” she managed to say. “What do they say about me?”

“That you should be shut up in a convent,” Aunt Ella whispered.

What about my sisters and me? And Lyosha?
I wondered, but I couldn’t bear to ask.

•  •  •

Summer came. Three of us had birthdays—Tatiana had her eighteenth, a week later I was fourteen, and the week after that Marie turned sixteen. I can’t say that we “celebrated” the birthdays—
observed
is a better word—but we did have nice little family dinners with Aunt Olga and Grandmère there for each of us. Marie received her special necklace of sixteen diamonds
and sixteen pearls. Chef Kharitonov produced delicious meals in spite of the shortages of food that were beginning to appear, and Alexei serenaded us with his balalaika. I made the stupid mistake of talking about the wonderful party we’d had at Livadia for Olga’s sixteenth birthday four years earlier. I hadn’t meant to make everyone sad, especially Olga, who was probably thinking of Pavel Voronov when she suddenly burst into tears and rushed away from the table. I believe she was still in love with him—hopeless, of course, since he was now married to Olga Kleinmichel, but I suppose it’s not possible simply to decide
not
to be in love with someone.

•  •  •

At the beginning of July Papa came home. Mama got very excited whenever we expected Papa’s return, almost the way Olga used to be when she thought she’d be seeing Lieutenant Voronov. Papa stayed through most of August, and for a little while things seemed almost normal for our family. In fact, one very funny thing did happen.

Prince Carol of Romania came to visit. He was no longer just a crown prince but a full-fledged prince, because his grandfather had died and his father had succeeded as King Ferdinand of Romania.

A year earlier, when Carol had been considered a possible husband for Olga, she’d flatly rejected the idea. Now, when she heard that he was coming, she suddenly had a full schedule of meetings involving her various war projects. “I will have absolutely no free time to spend with him,” Olga announced. “I’m terribly sorry, Father,” she added.

“You don’t sound the least bit sorry, Olya,” I said.

“But it’s true that I’ll be too busy.”

“The visit is purely diplomatic,” Papa assured her. “One part of Romania shares a border with Russia and another part borders Austria-Hungary, and Romania therefore has remained neutral in the war. I believe King Ferdinand is sending Prince Carol to discuss Romania joining Russia to fight against Germany. It might help if you were here.”

“I sincerely wish I could be,” she lied. “But I simply cannot.”

I found it all very amusing. Carol arrived, accompanied by a huge suite of courtiers, mostly old men and ladies and nobody young and interesting. I found him just as irritating as when we met with him at Constanta, and I expected the whole visit to be hugely boring. As it turned out, though, the visit was
not
purely diplomatic.

Toward the end of the prince’s visit, Marie came shrieking into our bedroom with the news. “Carol asked Papa if he would consent to let him marry me!”

“Prince Carol wants to marry
you
, Mashka?” My mouth was probably hanging open.

“You needn’t act so surprised that someone would want to,” she huffed. “Anyway, Papa just laughed and reminded him that I’m still just a schoolgirl and not in any way ready to marry or even to consider an engagement.”

“Well, congratulations, dear sister. You’ve had your first proposal.”

She grinned mischievously. “He still has that mop of uncombed hair,” she said. “But if you’re lucky, Nastya, he’ll be back again in two years to ask for
your
hand.”

I rolled my eyes.

When they’d gone, Papa said that Romania had decided to remain neutral.

•  •  •

One warm August afternoon as we were having tea with Anya on Mama’s balcony, Papa appeared suddenly, looking pale as a ghost, a telegram in his trembling hand.