Anastasia and Her Sisters (7 page)

“As the iceberg did to the
Titanic
,” Mama said. “Imagine the terror of those people.”

We grew quiet again. There seemed to be nothing more to say. Admiral Chagin promised to bring any further news of
the fate of the passengers of the
Titanic
, and he and the other officers took their leave and were driven back to the
Standart
.

In Olga’s notebook I read this:

An excursion today to a beautiful waterfall, hiking up a steep and rocky trail that required dear Pavel’s assistance. He took my hand and even squeezed it several times. He is so handsome, so intelligent and kind! I was VERY bold and suggested that we might slip away for a few minutes after tea when the others were discussing politics, or whatever it is they talk about, and look at the new gardens just coming into bloom. It would have given us a chance to speak privately and would not have been improper, though Mother might have thought otherwise. But no—Chagin was here with awful news about an English passenger ship that sank, so many dead, and it was so sad and depressing that the tea ended more like a funeral. It was a very great tragedy and I pity the victims, but I’m disappointed that I did not have even one moment alone with P. all day! I tell myself that we will be here in Livadia for another month, and perhaps something good will happen in that time.

We celebrated Tatiana’s fifteenth birthday at the end of May with a luncheon in the pavilion. Many neighbors were invited and came. I hoped that the emir of Bukhara might also come, but he did not. Then there was a rush to pack up and take the train back to Tsarskoe Selo. I watched Olga closely, but unless she was cleverer than I think she was, she never did get that moment alone with Pavel Voronov that she yearned for.

CHAPTER 5

On the Sea and in the Forest

BALTIC AND BIALOWIEZA, 1912

F
or the few weeks we were at home in Tsarskoe Selo, Papa was kept busy with official duties. Years earlier, after peasant uprisings, he had allowed the creation of an elected assembly, called the Duma, with a prime minister that would take part in governing Russia. Even though he’d permitted it, Papa hated the whole idea. He believed that as tsar, he was the appointed representative of God in Russia—the autocrat, the emperor, the Little Father of all the Russian people. It was God’s will that the tsar and the tsar alone must rule. Now the men of the Duma wanted to meet with him to discuss certain matters. This had him fuming.

“I want nothing like the Parliament the English have,” he told Mama. “I don’t see how my cousin George can possibly rule as king of England with Parliament constantly interfering.”

Mama completely agreed with him. “Being the king of England is not at all the same as being the Tsar of All the Russias,” she said. “It doesn’t begin to compare.”

Even so, the prime minister had finally persuaded Papa to meet with the members. Papa was so busy with his meetings that my eleventh birthday was almost ignored—just a luncheon for the family. Grandmère Marie came from St. Petersburg, but I noticed that she and Mama didn’t have much to say to each other. Nothing had changed there.

At last his duties were finished, Papa gave a speech to the assembly as he had been asked, and at the end of June we boarded the
Standart
for our summer cruise in the Baltic Sea.

First we sailed to meet Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany on his yacht, the
Hohenzollern
. We called him Cousin Willy, because he and Papa were distant cousins, and he and Mama were first cousins—their grandmother was Queen Victoria. Mama had been very close to her mother’s mother, and it annoyed Mama to no end that Willy loved to brag tearfully about how the queen had died in his arms. After Papa and Cousin Willy had a long talk together, the rest of the family—except for Mama, who was feeling tired and ill and didn’t much like Cousin Willy anyway—went over to the German yacht. The
Hohenzollern
was a little smaller than the
Standart
but larger than our other yacht, the
Alexandria
, which we used in places where the water was not deep enough for the big yacht. Cousin Willy told Papa that he’d be happy to get the
Standart
as a gift, and Papa laughed as though he must be joking. But I didn’t think Willy was joking at all—I thought he really meant it. It wasn’t always possible to tell if Willy was serious or not.

Cousin Willy had pale gray eyes—cold as ice, I thought—a loud voice, a barking laugh, and an amazing mustache with ends that turned up like the handlebars on a bicycle. Papa told us that a barber went every morning to Kaiser Wilhelm’s dressing room and waxed his mustache to make the ends stand up properly. I couldn’t help staring at it.

“It’s rude to stare!” Tatiana scolded.

“But Cousin Willy
wants
to be stared at,” I said. “Why else would he have a mustache like that?”

I did know better than to stare at his left arm, which was small and undeveloped. He had his jackets designed with a special pocket so he could hide it.

The conversation was odd because Cousin Willy spoke German to Papa, Papa answered in French, and they both spoke English to the rest of us. Cousin Willy joked with me, telling me that he thought every day should be celebrated as his birthday. “Then you must be very old indeed, Cousin Willy!” I said, and that made him laugh:
Har har har!

After dinner he handed out gifts to each of us: silver dresser sets for Olga and Tatiana, porcelain dolls (as though we were
children
!) for Marie and me, and a miniature of the
Hohenzollern
for Alexei. Then we had to watch a boring film showing Kaiser Wilhelm, dressed in tall black boots, a white cloak, and a helmet with a fierce-looking spike on top, marching back and forth in front of a regiment standing at attention, Kaiser Wilhelm on a battleship with sailors standing at attention, and Kaiser Wilhelm in a very large motorcar.

Marie and I were falling asleep as our launch took us back to the
Standart
, but when I heard Olga whisper to Tatiana, “Can
you imagine, Cousin Willy once courted Aunt Ella!” I was instantly wide awake. “He used to send her love poems when he was a student.”

“Ugh!” Tatiana said. “He’s a pig! How could she even bear to be around him?”

“She couldn’t! She once told me that,” Olga said. “He was so insulted when she rejected him that he vowed to marry some other princess as soon as he could.”

I scrambled to sit closer to my older sisters. “So did he?” I asked. I loved this kind of gossip.

“He did,” Tatiana said. “A German girl, even though his family said she was a nobody. And Aunt Ella married Papa’s uncle, Grand Duke Sergei.”

“But after Uncle Sergei was blown to bits by a revolutionary’s bomb, Aunt Ella became a nun and founded the Convent of Mary and Martha in Moscow,” Olga whispered. “You were only three when that happened, Nastya. You wouldn’t remember.”

I hated it when Olga and Tatiana talked about things that I was too young to remember. But I would learn that some things were better
not
to remember.

•  •  •

After the visit with Cousin Willy, we cruised near the coast of Finland, dropping anchor in a small bay we’d named the Bay of Standart, near a special island where we went for long hikes and had picnics on the beach, Alexei played in the sand, and Papa swam in the icy water and played tennis on the court he’d had built. Mama stayed on the
Standart,
reading and embroidering and chatting with Anya. A few times, she was carried ashore
and made comfortable in a shady spot, where she continued with reading and embroidering and chatting with Anya.

Grandmère Marie arrived on her yacht, the
Polar Star
, for the celebration of her name day in July. She and Mama politely ignored each other, but the rest of us were happy to see her and glad of an excuse for a party. The balalaika orchestra played, and we danced the mazurka and the polonaise on the deck with the ship’s officers as our partners. Olga tried, not very successfully, not to show just
how
happy and glad she was.

She finally got what she had wanted all along: Lieutenant Voronov kissed her! I, naughty child that I was at age eleven, had made it my mission that summer to spy on them. Olga must have known what I was doing and simply decided to ignore me, thinking I would tire of the game. Generally I didn’t like being ignored, but in this case it served my purpose. I was lurking in the shadows by one of the great funnels when her big moment came.

All the proof I needed was recorded in one brief sentence in her secret diary:

P. kissed me. Not once, but three times. Oh, what joy!

I had witnessed only a single kiss. When and where, I wondered, were the other two?

•  •  •

Later that summer when we had finished cruising and left the
Standart
, Papa and Mama traveled to Moscow for the hundredth anniversary celebration of a great battle against Napoleon, and we were left at home in Tsarskoe Selo to annoy our tutors.
Olga moped, because her happy days of kissing Pavel were over for the season, probably until Livadia in autumn.

Counting the days when I’ll see P. again. Sometimes I feel so miserable, surrounded by people, never really alone, but lonely! I think Mother has some notion of my feelings for P., though she has not said anything. It’s possible that A. saw us together, but I don’t think she’ll tattle. I dread Bialowieza and Spala in the fall—such gloomy places, and the weather is sure to be rotten! But Papa loves them, and so we’ll go.

I can’t get rid of the feeling that something terrible is going to happen. What is it?

“A.” of course referred to me, and Olga was right—I wouldn’t tell Mama what I saw. Why would I? But I didn’t understand why Olga felt so lonely. Or why she believed something terrible was going to happen. Alexei had a disease we were not allowed to talk about and something awful could happen to him at any time, but other than that, it seemed to me our life was almost perfect.

When Papa and Mama came back from Moscow, we went by train to the royal hunting lodge deep in the Polish forest of Bialowieza. With its turrets and steep roofs, the lodge looked like something that belonged in a fairy tale. Mama scratched the date of our family’s arrival with a diamond on a balcony window:
1 September 1912
. The last date she’d marked was in 1903, the summer before Alexei was born, when I was only two.

My sisters and I were half frightened of the huge, shaggy stuffed beasts that loomed in the entry hall and the stuffed heads with murderous tusks we had to pass every time we climbed the stairs to our bedrooms. Those terrifying beasts were aurochs, long-horned wild oxen that had become almost extinct. Papa said there used to be countless bears and wolves and even lions prowling the forest, until our grandfather, Tsar Alexander, had them killed off in order to protect the aurochs. The idea was to bring the aurochs back from the brink of extinction so that he and his friends could hunt them—and, I guess, stuff them and put them in the entryway to scare his grandchildren. Now there were lots of them roaming the forest, and they were known to be extremely dangerous. I hoped I would never see a live one.

It rained almost every day in Bialowieza, but that didn’t stop my sisters and me from venturing into the forest with Papa on horseback and hunting—not for animals, but for mushrooms. Armed guards rode with us, just in case. Alexei couldn’t go on these excursions, because the doctors would not allow him to risk injuring himself. His sailor-attendant Derevenko tried to find safe ways to keep him entertained, but the precautions didn’t always work. One day while we were away with Papa, Alexei somehow hit himself on something, and when we got back with our mushrooms, the bleeding inside his body had begun. It hurt badly, and Alexei was suffering. Mama and Papa pretended nothing serious was wrong, as they always did, but anyone could see how worried they were.

Dr. Botkin made Alexei stay in bed and rest—the only treatment he knew. Alexei hated that, especially when the rest
of us were out enjoying ourselves, and so one of us always took a turn staying with him. After a week, Dr. Botkin decided he was well enough to be moved, and we left the royal lodge in Bialowieza for another royal lodge in Spala, where the Polish kings used to hunt before Poland was made part of Russia two centuries ago.

The Spala lodge was dark and gloomy, and it always felt damp and smelled moldy. The hallways were narrow, and the rooms were small and cramped. The electric lights were kept burning all the time. This was my least favorite of all the imperial palaces, but Papa loved to hunt there for stags. He and his guests, Polish noblemen whose names I could not pronounce, went out hunting every day. We could hear the stags bellowing from early morning on, and in the evening the corpses of the deer the men had shot were laid out on the lawn with greenery woven in their antlers. Between
zakuski
and dinner, the noblemen, dressed in their belted greatcoats and tall fur hats, and the ladies, wrapped in cloaks and furs—all except Mama—went out to admire the poor dead beasts by torchlight. I felt sorry for the stags, and I didn’t understand what pleasure the men got from killing them.

“It’s an old custom,” Olga said. “And you know how Papa loves old customs.”

At Spala, Alexei seemed to be getting better—so much better that Mama, thinking he needed to get out of the dismal lodge and into the fresh air, took him for a carriage ride with Anya. The bumping of the carriage over the rutted roads made the bleeding begin again, and Alexei had to be put back to bed. Dr. Botkin did what he could, but nothing eased the pain. Papa
sent to St. Petersburg for another doctor who might be able to help—Dr. Vladimir Derevenko. While we waited for him to come, Papa reminded us, “We must continue to act as normally as possible. There is nothing we can do until the doctors arrive, and Alexei’s condition must not become public.”