Anastasia and Her Sisters (27 page)

When Olga had her twenty-second birthday, the cooks baked a cake for her, and I stole a look at her notebook and wished I hadn’t.

Twenty-two today. A prisoner for more than half a year. Every day is like the one before it. Sometimes I am appalled at Father’s patience. How does he do it? The one good thing is that my hair has grown back, and I no longer hate looking in the mirror. Tanya, Mashka, and I are very thin—too thin. Mother, too.

But not Nastya: She’s still round as a dumpling, like a
pirozhok
on legs. Strange as it seems, I do believe that something was going on between her and Gleb. I saw the looks that passed between them during the journey here last summer when they thought no one would notice. Of course this romance, if it can be called that, can go nowhere. The poor boy is not even permitted to cross the street. If we ever leave this place—and I doubt that we will, although I say nothing, keep that entirely to myself—Mother would never allow a match between a grand duchess and the son of an admired doctor, even though the youngest of four has not much value on the marriage market. Gleb used to say he intended to become a priest. Even if he changed his mind, Mother wouldn’t change hers. Poor little Nastya! How sad she looks that he is not allowed to visit here.

I quickly got over her insulting remark—a dumpling on legs!—and read over again what she had to say about Gleb.
Oh, Olya, dear Olya, you’re right about me and about Gleb, too, but I hope you’re wrong about everything else.

•  •  •

The Siberian winter closed in with an iron grip. I had never been so cold in my life. We called our bedroom “the ice house.” The skin that formed on the water in our basins had to be cracked every morning. We wore our coats and felt boots all day and piled the coats on top of blankets when we crept into our freezing beds at night. Mama’s fingers were so stiff that she could hardly hold knitting needles.

We did whatever we could think of to stave off boredom. Papa was upset at not getting enough exercise; his exercise bar had disappeared. Kobylinsky tried to help. He had trunks of trees brought in and provided saws and axes, and Papa and Monsieur Gilliard began cutting up the trees into firewood. They’d gotten quite good at that while we were still at Tsarskoe Selo. Olga, too—she handled an ax as easily as if she’d been raised as a woodcutter’s daughter. After each heavy snowfall Papa climbed up on the roof with a shovel to clear it off, although that may have been an excuse for him to have a lookout over the fence. In the evenings Papa read to us, while we mended our ragged clothes and knit fingerless gloves. He’s fond of Arthur Conan Doyle, the Scottish novelist who wrote the books about Sherlock Holmes. I often played cards with Alexei. Alexei was mad about bezique.

Gilliard and Gibbes were more ambitious; they adapted scenes from plays and coaxed us to act them out. Chekhov was their favorite. Alexei loved to stomp around with a fake mustache and hold forth in a deep voice, and he tried to convince Dr. Botkin to take the part of a country doctor.

Dr. Botkin refused. “Someone must be your audience, Alexei Nikolaevich,” he said.

But Alexei was insistent. “You’re the only one who can bring authenticity to the role,” he pleaded, and that eventually persuaded the doctor, leaving Mama, Chef Kharitonov, Trupp the valet, and a few others as our audience.

One day I scraped the frost off part of a pane of glass and looked out, hoping to catch a glimpse of Gleb passing by with his father or sister. I was disappointed, as usual, but I did see a woman
gazing up at our windows and recognized Baroness Buxhoeveden.

“Mashka, come look!” I shouted. “It’s Sophie!”

Marie rushed to the window, we cleared another pane, and the two of us jumped up and down like wild things. Baroness Buxhoeveden smiled and waved back, but in an instant the guards were pointing their bayonets at her, probably thinking she was sending us a coded signal. Thank God, Kobylinsky arrived just in time, and we watched him escort her into the fish merchant’s house across the street.

“She’ll be coming over here to see us soon,” I said. “Mama will be so pleased!”

We felt sure that after her long journey from Petrograd the baroness would be allowed to visit us, but when Mama inquired, Commissar Pankratov told her that her request had to be referred to “the soldiers’ soviet”—whatever
that
was—for discussion. A few days later, Mama asked again. This time the commissar said that the soviet was “afraid of excesses.” It seemed that the more the soldiers saw how much Mama wanted to see her friend, the more determined they were that she should not be granted permission, just to punish her.

“Maybe at Christmastime they’ll allow us a brief visit,” Mama said. “Just a few minutes. Surely that’s not an excess.”

We labored for weeks making simple gifts for each of the loyal servants who’d bravely and unselfishly chosen to share our fate. And we had a Christmas tree, a small one cut for us by Anton Ivanovich, the soldier who, I thought, must have succumbed to “Marie’s saucers.” We spent hours devising decorations for it made from bits of colorful wool and Mama’s tiny paintings of holly and berries.

“It’s possibly the handsomest tree we’ve ever had,” I declared, and my sisters were kind enough not to call that an outright lie.

On Christmas Eve, surrounded by guards, we crunched through the most recent snowfall to the little nearby church for Mass. We were hopeful that Baroness Buxhoeveden might be there, too, and we would be able to see her and perhaps even to exchange a Christmas kiss. I wished desperately that Dr. Botkin and his son and daughter would be allowed to attend the same Mass. But none of the people we longed to see were there—just the usual sullen soldiers with their rifles and bayonets.

Our situation worsened when the priest made the mistake of praying for the tsar and his family. That prayer had always been the custom, but it had been eliminated since Papa’s abdication. When the soldiers heard it, they were furious. After that, we weren’t allowed to go back to the church at all, at any time.

One more thing to break poor Mama’s heart.

CHAPTER 22

Prisoners

TOBOLSK, WINTER 1918

A
s the bleak winter wore on, we decided to build a snow mountain like the one our servants had once helped us make at Tsarskoe Selo. We set to work shoveling snow into a great heap in the exercise yard, stopping occasionally to fling snowballs and to chase each other around our little mountain as it grew higher. With everybody helping—even a few soldiers—it took almost two weeks to build our mountain and then to carry water from the tap in the kitchen, some thirty buckets of it, to pour over it. Sometimes the water froze before we could pour it over the piled-up snow, but eventually we managed to create a toboggan run. Chef Kharitonov supplied roasting pans and metal trays, and we immensely enjoyed sliding down on our improvised toboggans.

We learned that the regiment of older soldiers—the ones
we got along with best—was being sent away. Some of them came secretly to say good-bye. On the day the regiment left, Papa and Alexei climbed to the top of the ice mountain, from which they could look out over the fence and watch as the men marched off. Guards immediately spotted them. Within an hour a detachment of soldiers stormed in with shovels and picks and tore down our lovely little mountain, while we watched helplessly.

New soldiers, young recruits, arrived. Most were revolutionaries who made it plain that they hated us. Guards were now posted inside the house as well as outside. They drew disgusting pictures on the wooden fence that we couldn’t help seeing. Even “Marie’s saucers” and her engaging ways didn’t make things any better, and she stopped even wanting to try.

Some of these hostile new soldiers demanded that Papa remove the epaulets from the shoulders of the army uniform he wore every day. These were the insignia of a colonel, the only rank he’d held, even when he was in command of the Russian army. Papa, who was usually very agreeable in order not to upset anyone, stubbornly refused to take them off. His father, Tsar Alexander, had awarded him those epaulets, and he was going to wear them, no matter what. When Prince Dolgorukov told him that it would be better for everybody if he obeyed the order, Papa finally gave in—sort of. He wore a cape concealing them whenever he went out into the exercise yard.

Mama sent a message to Baroness Buxhoeveden through Dr. Botkin that she would stand at her window every day at one o’clock and asked Sophie to stand at hers. Day after day, that is what they did, bundled in their warmest coats and wrapped
in scarves, the windows open for a few minutes. I heard Mama speaking, and I could just make out that Sophie was also speaking, but I couldn’t make out a word either one said.

“I have no idea what she’s saying,” Mama said. “The sentries will not allow us to have an actual conversation, and so we simply pretend we do.”

Each week brought us new worries and new hardships.

Colonel Kobylinsky, looking ten years older than he had only a few months before, told Papa that he wanted to resign. He explained that he didn’t have control over the soldiers anymore and felt he could no longer help us.

“A transfer to Murmansk?” Papa whispered to him. “Is that no longer a possibility?”

Kobylinsky shook his head.

Papa pleaded with him not to leave. Finally the colonel agreed to stay on, at least for a while. Soon after, the two civilian commissars, Pankratov and Nikolsky, were dismissed. We had no idea what to make of that.

•  •  •

Someone had decided that it was costing the new government too much money to feed us. We had to let go at least half of our servants, and that was sad because many of them had families here and would now have no way to support them. Most of the kitchen staff was dismissed. Only Kharitonov and the kitchen boy, Lenka, would stay. Also, we were going to be put on soldiers’ rations. No more butter or coffee, they announced sternly, and that made me laugh because it was almost the start of the Great Fast, when we never ate butter anyway. And we all drink tea, not coffee.

Intolerable
, we whispered among ourselves—but we had to tolerate it.

One of those let go was my dear Shura. Gilliard arranged for her to move out of her cubicle in the fish merchant’s house and into a small apartment nearby. I think it was an arrangement they both liked, and of course we teased them mercilessly. Shura promised to come to see us every day, but we quickly learned that was forbidden.

A new rule was imposed. No one in the fish merchant’s house could go anywhere unless accompanied by a guard. “The guards dislike it and sometimes refuse,” Gilliard told us. “I have to bribe them to take me to see Shura.”

•  •  •

“If we’re going to be rescued, I hope it happens soon,” Alexei said one evening.

That’s what we’d prayed for, and Mama believed that our prayers were about to be answered. Her maid, Anna Demidova, repeated a rumor that she’d heard whispered in one of the shops: A man named Boris Soloviev who had married Rasputin’s daughter was raising money to arrange a rescue—armed guards hired, a riverboat or several sleighs secured, depending on the time of year, to take us to a train that would also have to be secured, to carry us all the way to Vladivostok. That it was Father Grigory’s son-in-law in charge of the plans convinced Mama we were soon to be saved.

We waited tensely. The days dragged on. We heard nothing, but Mama’s faith didn’t waver.

The cold deepened. I could hardly wait to rush back inside at the end of the hour we were allowed for outside exercise. At
least inside the governor’s mansion it was slightly above freezing. Still, despite the privations, we were all fairly healthy—even Alexei—although everyone was bone-thin except
me
, the dumpling on legs.

Every day Dr. Botkin came to look at our throats, take our temperatures, and listen to Mama’s heart. He looked weary. His elegantly tailored blue suits hung on his large frame, his immaculate white shirts were frayed and yellowing, and he had apparently exhausted his supply of French cologne that had always been the clue that he was somewhere nearby.

We asked if he had brought another story about Mishka Toptiginsky and more of Gleb’s paintings, and sometimes he had. I waited for the doctor to say something, anything at all, about Gleb. I was glad when Mama asked about him.

“I have spoken again to him about entering the priesthood, once this situation has come to an end and we leave here,” he said.

Mama beamed. “Such a lovely boy!” she said. “So good and pure! I believe he’s well suited to become a priest. He would minister well to those who were in his care.”

“But now he claims to have changed his mind about it. He seems to have become more interested now in pursuing the life of an artist,” said the doctor. He reached in his medical bag for the pills Mama took for her heart. “Or perhaps there is some other reason that he hasn’t mentioned.”

I felt my face grow hot—even in that freezing room. Was I the reason? That was too much to hope for, but the one thing I had clung to during the dark weeks of our imprisonment was the notion that Gleb might care for me as I cared for him.
I wondered if he thought of me, and I had to believe he did.

When I sometimes caught a glimpse of him, after staring for an hour or two through a small opening I’d melted in the thick frost covering the window, I imagined the conversations we might have as we walked along together. We would talk about art, of course, and share our memories of Livadia, the
Standart
, the beach at Peterhof where he found the sea glass as green as his eyes. And maybe we’d even talk shyly about our dreams of the future. But these conversations existed only in my mind.

•  •  •

Alexei hadn’t been bleeding for some time, but there was a wildness in him that could not be controlled. He took it into his head to try using one of Kharitonov’s metal trays as a toboggan and the staircase as a toboggan slide, now that the snow mountain had been destroyed. No one saw what he was up to until it was too late. We heard the clattering as he made his first run, and then his cry when he fell off. The bleeding started inside his body, and the pain increased until it must have been unbearable. It was like the terrible time at Spala all over again. I stopped my ears against the sound of his screams, but Mama never left his side. The two doctors did what they could, but there was no Father Grigory to perform a miracle. Eventually, though, the pain eased, and slowly Alexei got better. Mama said our prayers were responsible.