Anastasia and Her Sisters (22 page)

Alexei must have thought it was some sort of stupid game, and he hustled around, trying to do what he’d been told. Anya told Papa what she’d witnessed, and when Papa confronted Derevenko, the disgruntled sailor stormed out. None of us could understand it. Had Derevenko been seething with resentment all this time, and no one knew it? How many others were there like him? Nagorny was furious at Derevenko’s boorish behavior and gave his word that he would stay.

Papa was amazed by the behavior of the soldiers. “I’m shocked. I know of General Kornilov—he was a prisoner of the Austrians until he escaped last summer and returned to duty. He’s been twice awarded the Order of St. George and several other medals. Not the sort of man I would have expected to allow his men to exhibit such complete lack of discipline. I shall certainly speak to him the next time he comes here.”

But we did not see General Kornilov again.

•  •  •

Mama and Papa concluded that maintaining a normal routine was the best way to cope with our new situation. Once we’d recovered from our illnesses, we rose at the same hour, made our own beds as we always had, ate breakfast at the same time, and dressed in the outfits Mama had chosen for us. Then Alexei, Marie and I—Olga and Tatiana were exempt—went off to the schoolroom. The adults divided up the tutoring chores: Papa taught history and geography, and Mama was in charge of religious studies. Monsieur Gilliard still tried to pound French into our heads. Baroness Buxhoeveden instructed us in English and piano. Mademoiselle Schneider—dear Trina, who had long abandoned her efforts to teach us German—was in charge of mathematics, hoping to convince us of the joy of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Mama’s friend Countess Hendrikova volunteered to give art lessons. Even Dr. Botkin was recruited as a tutor in Russian, replacing Pyotr Petrov, who had gone away and not come back.

The other person missing from our prison school was Mr. Gibbes.

“Where is Sydney Ivanovich?” Alexei asked.

“He was in Petrograd when the new government took over,” Papa explained. “I’m told that he came back to Tsarskoe Selo, but he wasn’t allowed to enter Alexander Palace, or to see us or talk to us.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea. Maybe they think he would help us escape.”

This amused my brother. None of us could imagine the Englishman doing anything of the sort. “The men who are making us prisoners must be very stupid,” Alexei said.

“Possibly,” Papa agreed with a little smile.

“What about Pyotr Petrov?” I asked, but no one knew. He was simply not there. Only his maps remained.

I enjoyed the art lessons and could have done without the rest of the instruction, except from Papa, who was always so kind and gentle that I wanted to please him, and sometimes Mama, who was stern and kept us focused on our lessons.

Olga was glad not to be a student. She wanted only to be left alone to read. I suspected that she had resumed writing in her notebook, but I couldn’t find it. I made several quick visits to her room to search, always risking being found out. Finally I discovered it—a new notebook, hiding inside the cover of a book titled
Advanced Mathematics
.

Have my parents lost their minds? The situation is ridiculous. Father is no longer the tsar, he is “Citizen Romanov,” and he seems not to mind too much, although Mother minds a great deal and looks angry most of the time. He sits and smokes and says that when the weather is warmer we will have a garden. Mother seems to think we are all still “children.”

When she talks about us, it is always “the children.” I am twenty-one, an adult by anyone’s definition. In a few months Tanya will be twenty, and Mashka will be eighteen. Our mother was only a year older than I am when she and Father married, but she still chooses what we are to wear each day, while the world falls apart around us. Tanya weeps secretly for Dimka—“our little Malama,” as Mother calls him, as though he, too, were nothing but a child. We have had no word of him for months. Mashka mopes and writes letters to her Kolya but receives no reply. Both are no doubt dead, but I don’t say that, and my sisters keep hoping for news.

Nastya is going on sixteen and smokes—she thinks no one knows, but I’ve seen her with a cigarette. I was sixteen when I fell in love with Pavel, and I wonder when our Nastya will have a chance to fall in love. I do pity any man she marries—she’ll make joke after joke and tease him until he begs for mercy.

So—Olga believed I would drive any man crazy, forcing the poor fellow to beg for mercy! I had to swallow my annoyance, at least for the present. As for smoking, it was true; I’d tried it a few times. Papa smoked steadily, and Mama said that smoking calmed her. Probably my sisters smoked, too.

•  •  •

There would be no Easter in Livadia; that was obvious. There was no point in even talking about it, because talking just made us more unhappy. We had been told that we had to stay inside and were not allowed to go out—not even to the cathedral for services. Mama’s sitting room was made into a private chapel,
and we brought the holy icons from our rooms. Four soloists from the imperial choir sang beautiful hymns, while outside the palace soldiers paraded up and down and a band played the “Marseillaise.” Mama prayed, tears pouring unchecked down her cheeks. Papa prayed, his thin face like the face of a martyred saint in an old icon.

On Saturday, before the Easter Eve service, a priest came from the cathedral to hear our confessions. I was supposed to contemplate my sins while I waited my turn. Should I confess that I had made a habit of reading my sister’s secret notebook—not just once, but as often as possible? Was that really a sin? Olga would probably say that it was, but what about God? Would He think it was a sin, and if so, why? The priest was likely to agree with Olga. I decided not to mention it.

When I knelt beside the screen that had been set up to conceal the confessor, I rattled off a list of minor sins—speaking unkindly to Mashka or to Shura, complaining about my lessons, sneaking a forbidden sweet during the Great Fast. But suddenly I burst out passionately, “My gravest sin is hatred. I
hate
Uncle Willy for starting this ugly war! I
hate
the Germans who kill our Russian soldiers! More than anything, I
hate
the revolutionaries who forced Papa to abdicate!”

I was talking loudly instead of murmuring quietly, and the priest hustled out from behind his screen to calm me. He gave me my penance, instructing me to pray for those I hated and to pray for God to enter my heart and cleanse it of all anger.

Not much chance of
that, I thought.

At midnight we stood behind a glass screen for the Easter Eve service, which lasted a couple of hours. I wondered how
Mama was able to stand for such a long time, when she usually spent so much of her day on her daybed or in her wheelchair, but her fervent love of God must have given her the strength.

We were forbidden to have a procession, but at the end of the service, when the priest turned to us and cried, “Christ is risen!” we did manage to shout, “He is risen indeed!” Then we all returned to the library.

Food shortages were still serious, but in spite of that Kharitonov and the kitchen staff had laid out a traditional Easter feast of
paskha
and loaves of sweet
kulich
. Besides the servants who still remained with us, and our tutors and maids, Papa had invited the officers of the men ordered to guard us.

“But they’re not protecting us,” Olga remarked. “They’re here to keep us from escaping.”

“They are Russians, and they are Christians,” Papa explained in his quiet, patient way. “We embrace them on this holy day as fellow human beings.”

I did not understand how Papa could do this. All I could think about was how much I hated the people who had put us in this terrible situation, despite the priest’s orders that I must cleanse my heart. I thought Mama agreed with me more than she did with Papa.

Papa had ordered jeweled Fabergé eggs for Mama and Grandmère Marie, as he always did, but only my grandmother’s gift had been delivered. Mama’s egg had not been finished by Easter. Monsieur Fabergé apologized to Papa, closed his shop, and fled from Petrograd.

This year’s egg was made of a special kind of birchwood with scarcely any trimming on the outside, very austere, but
inside was a tiny mechanical elephant studded with diamonds. The problem was how to get it to Grandmère Marie. Papa was deeply worried about her. She had traveled on her train from Kiev to Mogilev to spend a few days with Papa before he came home. She’d returned to Kiev, but now Papa had no way of communicating with her. He decided to send the egg to Uncle Misha at his palace in Gatchina, and asked him to find a way to deliver it to their mother.

“Things will be different next year, Alix,” Papa promised Mama. “And you shall have your egg.”

We all pretended to believe him. Only Marie actually did.

•  •  •

We had mostly recovered from the measles and the infections, and we were feeling better, but we looked genuinely awful. The medicines Dr. Botkin prescribed made our hair fall out in clumps, and Mama decided it would be best to shave it all off and let it grow back naturally. The court hairdresser came to our rooms with an assistant, and, one by one, we each became as bald as eggs—chicken eggs, not the gilded Fabergé kind. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I made a stupid joke about when we were going to hatch, and we found scarves and hats and sometimes wigs to cover our naked skulls. We were wearing straw hats when Monsieur Gilliard lined us up for a photograph one bright and sunny day, and by prearranged signal we swept off our hats and grinned for the camera just as he was about to snap the picture. That photo is one of my favorites. Naturally, Mama wasn’t pleased.

We mugged for the camera, but in private we struggled
with our confusion and our fears. Marie was determinedly optimistic: “Everything will work out! A British ship will take us to England, where we’ll be safe until we can come back. We must have faith, we must not waver, and we must do everything we can to keep Mama’s spirits up, and Papa’s, too.”

Tatiana steadfastly reinforced everything Mama said and emphasized that we must stay together. “We are OTMA. We must always remember that what one of us says or does must support the others. We are a team, a single unit, no matter what. It’s the best way to get through this trying time.”

I was the
shvibzik
, the one who crossed her eyes, stuck out her tongue, mimicked the court ladies with their imperious ways, laughed at Dr. Botkin’s French perfume that signaled his arrival and Count Benckendorff’s monocle that dropped out of his eye when he was excited. But I had difficulty sleeping, my dreams were troubled, and I woke up crying out.

I clowned, Marie cheered, Tatiana exhorted, but Olga said little. She seemed very far away. For long periods she didn’t even write in her notebook. Then I found this:

From my earliest memories our lives have been orderly and predictable. We were told which hours we would spend with our tutors. We had luncheon with guests at one o’clock, a meal that lasted exactly fifty minutes. Dinners with the family, Sunday lunches with Grandmère Marie, and afternoon parties at Aunt Olga’s. In summer we cruised on the
Standart
or stayed at Peterhof, traveled by train to Livadia in fall and spring, endured the hunting lodges for Papa’s sake. It was a calm, well-ordered life. I could imagine no other.

And yet I was not satisfied. I yearned to escape that predictable life, to find something different. The only way out was through marriage, but not if it meant leaving Russia. I was clear about that. And certainly not if it meant spending my life with an oafish character like Prince Carol! Mother and Father were understanding, to a point. I would not be forced to marry someone I did not love, but that didn’t mean I could marry someone I did love.

Now everything has changed, and it will never again be the same. My calm, orderly, predictable life is over, and no one knows what will come next. Mama and Papa no longer speak of the British cruiser supposedly waiting for us in Murmansk. It was all a lie.

But still we did not talk about how we felt—about being prisoners, about the future. As if talking about what we feared most would somehow make it happen.

CHAPTER 18

House Arrest

TSARSKOE SELO, SUMMER 1917

I
n the weeks after Papa came home from Mogilev, we struggled to adjust to our situation. The first time Papa tried to go out into our park for a walk, a half dozen soldiers surrounded him. They pushed and prodded him with their rifle butts and ordered him around, telling him, “You can’t go there, Mister Colonel,” or “You’re not permitted to walk in that direction, Mister Colonel.”

Anya was watching from a window. “Your poor papa said nothing at all to those coarse brutes. He simply turned around and came back to the palace. The tsarevich was with him, and he was in tears, seeing how they treated your father. The total lack of respect was appalling. Baby held his head high and was silent, but anyone could see that he was deeply wounded.”

After that, Monsieur Gilliard and several others joined Papa and his friend Prince Dolgorukov for morning and
afternoon walks. First, they had to wait in the semicircular hall for the officer in charge to unlock the gates to the park. Guards surrounded the little group for the short distance they were allowed to walk—not even as far as the pond, which we could see from Mama’s balcony—and they all had to return together.

It bothered Papa to have his walk cut so short. He always took a lot of exercise. Besides the swimming bath in his bathroom, he had an exercise bar—there was even one on our train—and he loved long hikes. I remembered one such hike when I was eight or nine: I insisted on accompanying him on a walk around our special island on the Finnish coast. Papa warned me that it would be a very long walk, but I was stubbornly determined. It turned into a twelve-mile march, and I wept through most of it.