In Siberia (2 page)

Now a trickle of pilgrims was coming and going, and one or two lingered under the canopy, hysterical or obsessed. An old couple stood side by side, unfolded prayer-books and sang for
over an hour, she in a whining plainsong, he in a tragic whisper, and crossed themselves with trembling fingers. A mournful Armenian returned here again and again, he said, thinking about his father. ‘My father was sent to the Kolyma camps, and my mother too. The years in Kolyma killed him. Stalin killed him.' His eyes swam over the undulating ground–gravel and weeds sloping west where the cellar window had opened just above the earth. ‘It was criminal, it was terrible what he suffered,' he cried. He had conflated his father's fate with the Czar's. He came here, he said, because he was sick at heart. ‘I just feel ill here.' A purple rash was boiling over his neck. He wanted to feel ill, I think. He felt better feeling ill. ‘My family were aristocrats, like the Romanovs, so they were destroyed. Now that Russia's thrown out Communism, she'll go back to what she was. That's the future. You see, everything returns….'

 

The family waits, as if for a photograph. The empress, ill with sciatica, is seated beside her thirteen-year-old son. The rest are standing–the Czar in front, and the four princesses in the first row, the doctor and three servants behind. The cellar is less than 13 feet square. In the doorway the execution-squad is packed in three ranks with heavy revolvers, so close that the powder burns their wrists. The Czar is killed instantly, and the empress and her eldest daughter never complete the sign of the cross. The diamonds sewn secretly into the princesses' corsets send bullets ricocheting round the room. For a moment they seem endowed with a ghastly immortality. The panicking guards empty their revolvers into them, then club and stab everyone still moving. When the smoke clears, the Czarevitch is still clinging to his father's shirt; and as her body is being dragged away on a sheet, one of the princesses wakes and screams. Perhaps she imagines a nightmare. They bayonet her to death.

 

The quiet of this empty space is the quiet of enforced forgetting. In Communist propaganda the dead Czar declined from a bloodthirsty tyrant into a spineless simpleton. Then he disappeared from history. Now, in the void where the Ipatiev house stood, his
fate seemed to shed its politics and become the personal tragedy of a gentle but stubborn man, his wilful wife and sheltered children.

I walked for a while in its sadness. A splash of colour came from three beds of marigolds and Michaelmas daisies. A sightseeing bus arrived, but the only person to dismount was a young woman. She tiptoed across the gravel, and handed me her camera. ‘Will you shoot me?' I expected her to stand smiling, but instead she flushed her long hair out over her shoulders, then knelt down on the tarmac at the foot of the white cross. There, in profile, she remained praying and crossing herself for long minutes, while I wondered how many snapshots she wanted.

‘Thank you, thank you.' She took the camera and then my hand. ‘Olga.'

This was the name of the Czar's eldest daughter. Perhaps she had been praying for her. ‘I'm Colin.'

‘Colin, Nikolai!'–the Russians always linked the names, one a diminutive of the other. She sent me a disconnected smile, then stared round her. ‘Look at this, look at this.'

‘It's been destroyed.'

‘And our ruler did this.' From fear or disgust, she would not say Yeltsin.

‘But everything's changed now,' I said, for some reason comforting her. ‘There'll be a church here, and they will be made saints.' Their canonisation, I thought, was only a matter of time.

She flared almost angrily. ‘They are already saints! They head the saints in the cathedral of heaven!' She spoke with lilting, passionate certainty. ‘It's only here, in Russia, that we've been slow to know this. The Russian Church abroad canonised them long ago. Abroad the Mother of God took them up to heaven!'

I nodded vaguely, wondering how she knew.

‘And not only Nikolai and his Czarina, but his whole family, she took them up, Aleksei, Olga, Tatiana…and those others, Doctor Botkin and the servants who died because of compassion for them!'

‘Your Patriarch in Moscow…'

‘I don't know about our Patriarch. I don't know him. I've heard that someone has even verified their bones, but I don't know….'
She lifted her eyes to the sky. She did not care for any mortal remains. The family was living in the heaven of her will. ‘In the church where I worship, the Mother of God has told St John the Baptist that they are her ladies-in-waiting, her favourite children…Olga also, who protects and prays for me….'

I thought doubtfully of the shy, capricious Olga, but the woman continued in a rush of celestial detail. John the Baptist, the Czar, Olga, the Virgin Mary…the throne-rooms and antechambers of heaven filled up like those of the Winter Palace, astir with favourites and intercessors. Her voice bustled and sang. Twice she called me Nikolai, and I felt flattered. ‘Now they all live in the courtyard of the Mother of God, and send our prayers to her.
Direct
.'

On the edge of the desolation a tiny chapel had been raised to the Czarina's favourite sister, the pious Elizabeth, who was martyred when the Bolsheviks threw her alive down a mineshaft. Years before, she had enchanted the French ambassador by her beauty and innocent seriousness, and after her husband, the Grand Duke Sergei, was blown to bits in the abortive 1905 revolution, she founded an order of nuns to care for the dying and abandoned. Now she was a saint.

Under her chapel cupola, sheathed in wooden scales and topped by a high cross, we entered a sanctuary blazing with votive candle-flames, and Olga prayed to an icon of St Elizabeth floating in glory above her mineshaft.

‘We'd lost all that history until now,' she said. ‘For years we lived in a dark valley–twenty million gone in the last war, and forty million more taken by Stalin. And nothing in return! Only in 1991 the Mother of God gave back the truth which Communism had concealed for eighty years.'

Her eyes glittered over me unfocused as she replaced the Soviet myth with her own. The next moment we were standing, astonished, where a sheaf of flickering lights enshrined an icon of the imperial family, newly done: they had already been turned into saints. Olga set her taper before them with shaking hands, crying: ‘There they are!' Her kisses fell softly on their painted hems and slippered feet. I examined them in fascination. In their icon they had acquired the elongated bodies and court robes of Byzantine
saints, and their tapering hands held up white crosses. Crowned and haloed, they seemed to gaze out with a sad foreknowledge of their end. Their features echoed one another's, as in some inbred clan, and they were all washed in the same amber light. All the vitality of remembered photographs–the moods and stains of real life–was emptied and stilled. Sainthood did not allow for them. Even the emergent individuality of the princesses–the imperious beauty Tatiana, the plump tomboy Anastasia–was drowned in this mist of holiness.

Olga said: ‘Soon, Nikolai, there will be a resurrection of the Church.'

‘You mean a new czar?' It was barely conceivable. Two years before, a young Romanov claimant had travelled to Russia with his mother, and been received with bewilderment and official circumspection.

‘No, not a czar.' Even Olga demurred. ‘But a celestial union. The Church on earth will be united with the Church in Heaven! Soon, very soon!' Her voice started its hypnotic music again. ‘Light for the future of humanity!'

I said dully: ‘When?'

‘At any moment! Because now the Mother of God wants to carry Russia upward. Quickly, quickly Russia is going to the light! Perhaps it will happen through grief. Then the heart of Russia will open! A new, holy Russia!'

It was an old Orthodox idea: that suffering would flower into purity. Out of the anguish of history–even of daily, Chekhovian frustration–a new world must be born. It made sense of sorrow, of tedium. It made suffering dangerously embraceable. It seemed to heal Time.

 

On the night of the murders the corpses were driven into woods twenty miles from the city. There they were stripped naked–the girls' corsets oozing jewels–and lowered into a flooded mine. But the next evening they were dredged up again and taken towards a remoter site. When the lorry that carried them broke down, two of the corpses were painstakingly burnt and the rest heaped into
a shallow grave and doused with acid. Yekaterinburg fell to the White army a week later.

The Whites found the Czarevitch's spaniel wandering half-starved in the Ipatiev garden. But when they located the mine they discovered no bodies: little but the doctor's false teeth, a finger of the empress, and the medallions of Rasputin which the princesses had worn round their necks.

Only in 1991 was the impromptu grave fully excavated. Then a forensic scientist from Moscow's Ministry of Health reassembled the skeletons, and DNA testing on samples from living relatives proved whose bones these were. The missing two were Aleksei and the third daughter, Maria.

For a long time the rest lay in fragments on a tin table in a Yekaterinburg morgue. Then they were buried with small ceremony in the imperial mausoleum in St Petersburg. Their obsequies divided Church and State, even the Romanov heirs. At the service, their names were never mentioned, for the Church, pandering to the Russian Orthodox abroad, refused to acknowledge whom they were burying. Their canonisation has become a political and ecclesiastical minefield. It is the living, now, who will not rest in peace.

 

Behind the vanished Ipatiev house is a medley of trees and shrubs long ago gone wild. Here, under the eyes of their guards, Nicholas would carry the Czarevitch out to a chair, then walk for half an hour with his daughters in the garden. In these last weeks, he wrote, the scent from orchards all around was overpowering.

A path went through the trees–less a man-made track, it seemed, than the spoor of some animal. I followed it idly, and arrived where a broken ladder crossed to a rubbish-tip. My feet snagged on wires and bottles. For all I knew some fragments of the Ipatiev house were here, whose bulk had ended up on the municipal dump. But an eerie sense of habitation touched the place. Around me someone had festooned the trees with carrier-bags–twenty or thirty of them–all rotted and split. They drooped from the branches like dead bats. In the dump's crater, bits of debris had returned to their old use: a defunct stove set
with dented kettles, a sodden sofa facing a broken chair, two shoes decomposing side by side. And a campfire was guttering.

At first I thought it the play-house of a child, but from above me a voice bellowed: ‘Get the fuck out of here!'

He seemed very small, and bent, and old. Either through weakness or drink he half fell through the trees towards me, then recovered. His features were nested in white hair, and as he straightened, his eyes snapped open. ‘Oh, it's you! I thought you were one of those officials. But'–and his voice turned quite tender, blurred by drink–‘it's you. You've come back.'

My words rang polite in the rubbish-dump: ‘It's the first time we've met.'

But he didn't hear. ‘Sit down!…not there, that's wet…find some rags.'

I perched on the chair, and he on the sofa. Already the damp was leaking through my trousers. It had thundered and poured all night, and his shelter of canvas and branches lay collapsed nearby. ‘The water came in everywhere. It put out the fire after you left, and I didn't sleep….' Then his black eyes refocused me, and he realised I was a stranger. He said: ‘The bastard, I knew he wouldn't come back.' His shoulders hunched. ‘In September I'll go away too. It's terrible here in winter. The frost clutches you. If you take my advice, you'll go south in the autumn.' He fingered the points of the compass in mid-air. ‘I'll go to Rostov, to the Black Sea….'

‘Alone?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘You too, alone?'

‘Well, yes.'

‘My wife and son are up in Archangel. We…well, she…' His words trailed into privacy. Then he asked ceremoniously: ‘Would you like lunch?'

So we sat there, he on the sofa-springs, I on the three-legged chair, while a rusty pan of potatoes bubbled over the fire. Around us spread a sea of scrap-iron and rags, splintered furniture, gutted machinery and pots. We enquired about one another. He found a jar of green peas awash with rainwater and forked them fastidiously out. I passed him some English sweets. Once he plumped
up a tattered cushion for me, then reached into a box of sodden magazines and offered me a ten-year-old copy of
The Orthodox Times
; and twice we toasted one another in vodka, rather formally.

I asked him about his family and work. He seemed so old, I thought, it must all be long ago. He answered in a code of hints and omissions. Locked in his rough quiet, an urban delicacy survived. From time to time he let out a long, guttural
Errrr
, which seemed to comfort and stabilise him. ‘Maybe I committed crimes during my marriage, I suppose I did. Now God go with her…she lives alone.' He prodded the potatoes with a soft
Errr
,
errr
. ‘That's how it is. Both of us, alone.' His tone showed no regret or pleasure: solitude was simply a fact of life, perhaps its law.

I said: ‘You're used to that?'

He looked vacantly round him. ‘My father was killed in the war, I never knew him. And my mother died in the factory when I was thirteen. An electric cable fell on her. And then my sister brought me up, and I sat with her when she died just as I'm sitting with you now, for a long time. I was nineteen then, in 1958….
Errr
.'

With a shock I realised that he was the same age as me. For a second I gaped at his features, then at his scarred hands, their nails black and worn to the quick, and up again at his face, and for a moment saw in that tangled froth of hair and beard my own mortality. Then I grew confused. Sometimes his face seemed a trembling wreck in its tempest of hair. But his voice was strong, and at other times the delta of lines radiating down his cheeks appeared to reverse its course and fill his eyes with mirth, or even contempt.