Blood Red, Snow White (2 page)

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Let me return to the fairy tale, of the Tsar and his people. The Tsar was in trouble, for his was a story nearing its end.

For three centuries the Tsar’s family had ruled like gods over their empire. From time to time there had been an outbreak of opposition, as some foolish soul tried to upset the old order, but each and every time, that order had been restored.

So the Tsar lived with his family still. He had a wife, Alexandra, who he called Alix, just as she called him Nicky from the time when they had fallen in love. They lived in a beautiful palace; in fact, they lived in many beautiful palaces. Each was more sumptuous than the other, but there was one special palace, prized the highest: Tsarskoe Selo. Here they lived with their beautiful children, four daughters—Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia—and their only son, the boy of great sorrow, Alexei.

Alexei, who carries his sorrow, and Russia’s tragedy, in his blood.

They wanted for nothing. In the same way that the Tsars and all their families had wanted for nothing down the centuries, every wish that could be dreamt of the Tsar granted his blessed wife and children.

Our woodcutter and his grandchildren could never have begun to even imagine the splendor of the imperial palaces. Where the woodcutter had three spoons, of wood, one for himself, one for his grandson, Vanya, and one for his granddaughter, Maroosia, the palace had a thousand spoons of silver. Where the woodcutter had three chairs, the palace had four hundred, of gold. And where he had the clothes he stood in and the boots he wore, the Tsarina had ten thousand dresses of satin and silk. Of billowing satin and silk, too, were the coverings for the beds in the royal chambers, where the woodcutter and his grandchildren had a single old woolen blanket each. The Tsarina had jewels, too! Ropes of pearls, long strings, with the most perfect moon-white pearls to hang about her pretty neck. And diamonds! Diamonds by the bucketful, which she kept in a peculiar, small, green leather case.

Even when they sat down to take tea, they did it in style. The Tsarina had a favorite little samovar in which they boiled water for their tea, or rather, their servants did. But the Tsarina loved to pour the hot water into the cups herself, because the samovar was special. It was solid silver, and shone like the white sun low over a frozen lake on a winter’s morning, and on its side were her initials in English, the language she and Nicky would write to each other in:
AR
, Alexandra Romanov.

The woodcutter knew none of this, but went through the woods each day, still unaware of the lurking bear.

And the children? What of them? The Tsar’s children had everything they could ask for. Each had a whole room of toys to play with, and they shared not one but a whole stable of rocking horses. Far away in the forest Vanya and Maroosia had nothing, but still they were happy, as they had each other, and their little black cat and tall gray wolf-dog to play with. And they had Grandfather to feed them and keep them warm and tell them fairy tales at bedtime.

I said that the Tsar’s children had rocking horses, but that is not quite true; the girls had horses, Olga and Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, but their young brother, Alexei, did not. Nor did he have a bicycle of his own, nor a bat and ball. He was not allowed to run and play as his sisters did, and he was not allowed to play with the palace dogs.

And why? Not because his mother and father loved him any less than his sisters, but for a different reason: the tragedy in his blood. For there in his veins, passed down from his grandmother, now long dead but once the queen of the British Empire, skulked an evil disease.

The disease was a strange thing that no one could explain. Maybe even strange enough to put Alexei into Peter’s Chamber of Wonders, if he were to die. For when the young Tsarevich cut himself, the bleeding would not stop.

Maybe it doesn’t sound so serious. You or I might cut ourselves, nicking our hand on the tooth of the saw as we cut logs for the fire. We might take God’s name, but think no more of it. You or I might catch the back of our hand against the bread knife as we pass a hunk of black bread across the table in the hut. We might sing to ignore it, but think no more of it. In a few moments the cut would stop bleeding, and we would go on with our soup and stories.

But the Tsarevich, little Alexei, was different. If he cut himself, no matter in how small a way, there would be pandemonium in the palace. His mother would shriek and call for the nurses, the nurses would come and call for the doctors and all would fly around in useless panic, as the cut refused to heal and slowly, but surely, the boy’s blood would pour from his body.

One day, Alexei scratched his ear on a thorn. It took three days for the blood to stop. So, as he grew, he was forbidden from doing anything that might endanger him. No rocking horses, no rough games, no running. No fun.

There could be no risk to his life. He was not the first in his family to suffer from the disease. There was an uncle who’d had it, too. Alexei had never known him, because at the age of three he’d fallen through a window. His body bled on the inside, and he never recovered. The Tsar and the Tsarina determined that this must never happen to their son, their only son, and therefore the only future Tsar of Russia. He had to live, so that one day he would rule the empire, as his family had done for three hundred years.

He
had
to live.

IN THE NAME OF THE TSAR

THE TSAR WORRIED.
He worried like no other Tsar before him. He looked inward and he worried about his family, about Alexei and his strange blood. He looked outward and he worried about his empire.

What he saw disturbed him.

There was deep poverty and famine. People were going hungry and were growing angry. Small disturbances on the farms where the peasants worked got out of hand, there had been riots and soldiers had been sent to restore order.

It had happened during his grandfather’s time, and his father’s. Trying to make the workers’ lives better, they had decided to introduce reforms, to give them certain freedoms so that they might earn just a bit more money, to allow them to sell some of what they grew rather than giving it all to the landowner.

The Tsar looked at his people and what he saw disturbed him. He saw clearly what was wrong.

His father and his grandfather had been weak.

They had been indulgent, and now the people were trying to take more than they were entitled to.

“I will never agree to what they want,” he declared, “because I consider it harmful to the people whom God has entrusted to me.”

He knew what he had to do.

He repealed the reforms and sent soldiers to quell any trouble as soon as it started.

The people’s hunger grew worse, and as winter began to bite at their heels, they grew cold, too. Death rode through Russia on a pale horse, taking everyone he could with sickness and famine, and the people grew afraid, and with their fear came more anger. Though the Tsar believed he had restored order, he had not stopped the dark mutterings in hidden corners of his empire.

Seeing the trouble that was boiling up, one young priest decided he had to act.

“Father,” the people called him, though he was father to no one.

“Father,” they said, “what shall we do? Our children are starving, and dying. We are starving and sick. But what can we do? We are nothing. The Tsar owns us as he would a horse, but cares less for us than those beasts. Help us, Father!”

The young priest heard them and replied.

“We will act, together. Let us go into the city hand in hand, to the very gates of the palace. This Sunday, one hundred thousand of us must march and there we will make our case to the Tsar.”

The people looked at him uncertainly, for though they wanted to believe they could do such a thing, they couldn’t believe it was possible. The priest, whose name was Georgy, saw the doubt on their faces.

“Believe me,” he said. “Go to your families now, and to the houses of your friends, and tell them that there must be one hundred thousand of us when Sunday comes. Tell them this, and there will be.”

So they went and told their friends and their families, and everybody told someone else that Sunday would be the day when their lives would change, and in the meantime, Georgy thought about what he had started. What would happen on Sunday? Suppose no one came? Suppose everyone came? It was his doing. He had given the people hope and it was his responsibility. Suppose the Tsar didn’t take any notice of them?

But he had to. He had to! And just in case he didn’t, Georgy decided to write a letter to the Tsar, to give him on the day. It would be as if one hundred thousand people had handed the letter to the Tsar personally. No one could ignore a letter like that.

On Saturday night he sat down to write it. It was a long letter, polite and respectful, and it was passionate and proud. He asked the Tsar to care for his people, to see their troubles and to take them away, to bring good things to Russia.

When he had finished writing, Georgy sat back in his chair. He had written for an hour and it was late. He rose and took his candle to bed, blew it out and lay in the dark, dreaming of the day to come, and dreamed that no one came. In his sleep, he alone stood quaking before the Tsar, and when he handed over the letter, he saw with horror that he was holding a blank sheet of paper.

The priest need not have worried.

When Sunday came, it was possibly more than one hundred thousand people who flocked into the streets of the city. They joined in a massive throng, and began to walk toward the Winter Palace. As they went, they sang, and the crowd was so very large that many different songs were all sung at once. Here and there the words and melodies mixed with each other, but no one cared. There were women and children in the crowd, too, and there was laughter and hope and comradeship. A tired mother gratefully let her daughter ride on the shoulders of a tough old veteran, the washerwomen from the Neva walked like princesses alongside the sailors, until at last the one hundred thousand surged into the Palace Square, so that Georgy could hand his letter to the Tsar.

In the square, the Tsar had his answer already waiting. Even before Georgy had a chance to hand over his letter, the Tsar gave his reply.

A thousand soldiers stood outside the palace gates.

A thousand soldiers knelt in the snow, and lifted their rifles to their shoulders.

A thousand shots scorched the air, and the blood began to flow.

They screamed and they ran.

The young priest ran, too. As he ran, the letter fell from his hand, where it was trampled underfoot by one hundred thousand pairs of feet.

CRUEL TALES

SOME FAIRY TALES ARE CRUEL,
like the last one. Sometimes there is no happy ending, where the brave young peasant marries the beautiful princess, and wins a trunkful of treasure to boot. What happens in a fairy tale is no more or less in anyone’s control than what happens in life. What should have happened in the last story? How should it have ended?

Maybe it was not the end of the story at all. Perhaps the Tsar thought it was, but didn’t realize that what he had done would lead to a very different ending indeed.

Even in a tale with a happy ending, there may be sadness on the way. Think of Vanya and Maroosia. They are happy children, they love their grandfather, and they love their little cat and big dog. But they have no parents. Their parents died years before our story starts. What awful thing takes both parents away from their children? Maybe you don’t want to know, and maybe it doesn’t matter. But it was the Tsar who killed them.

Not with his own hands, but just as surely, the Tsar killed their parents. He made serfs of them, made them move to work on his lands, and then worked them so hard that Father died of exhaustion and Mother died of a broken heart.

ENGAGEMENT AND ESCAPE

WAIT!

There!

It’s the bear again, prowling through the flawless snows, heavy and heavy and heavy, paws and claws and teeth and fur. Thick, thick fur.

He is moving again, but as yet without purpose. Dimly he hears the commotion from the city, the gunfire and the stampeding feet, but it means nothing to him yet. He wanders through the trees as if asleep, or in a waking dream, unclear of what he is and what he will be. He is mighty, almost unbelievably powerful in fact, but like a gentle giant, he doesn’t know his own strength.

Not yet.

Not yet, but soon.

The bear stumbles back to a hidden cave who knows where in the forest, to hibernate. He goes to sleep, an enchanted sleep, as in a fireside tale.

He sleeps for twelve years.

And for now, our story lies elsewhere.

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Do you remember the stranger? The young stranger, with the suitcase in one hand and the wooden box in the other. Wearing an old soldier’s greatcoat to armor himself against the cold, he’s still walking through Russia, but he has left the forest behind him now and is approaching the city. There are many fairy tales already about him, and by the time he is an old man there will be many more, but let me tell you the story about the stranger, and Ivy.

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The young man had been born, across the water, in the big open country called the Lakes, because that’s just what you find nestled between the hills and fells where he lived. He’d lived in this beautiful tough land all his childhood, and had gone to school with ugly rough boys on the shores of his favorite lake.

One winter, when he was barely more than a toddler, his father was visited by a Russian prince, a man with the splendid name of Kropotkin. After they had concluded their business, the prince was appalled to find that the child could not ice-skate, and there and then took him out to a frozen river and guided his infant steps. It’s a fairy tale in itself. A tale with a happy ending, how, when he got to the big school by the lake, he suffered at the hands of the other boys, bigger and stronger than him. And meaner. Every day, as they fought and played their way through their school days, he’d be punished for being weak. Until the day, when, in the midst of the hardest winter in thirty years, the lake on whose shores the school stood froze over. None of the other boys had seen such ice before, and the headmaster declared that school was shut and all games should be played on the ice.