The Lost Crown (20 page)

September 1917
Tobolsk

“Y
ou will have your photos taken and carry identification cards at all times,” Pankratov’s assistant declares. The two of them are as different as salted cucumbers and ice cream. Nikolsky’s hardly spoken to us before this, and now he’s giving orders like a sergeant.

“What?” Mama bursts out. Papa puts his hand on her arm but doesn’t say anything.

“It was forced on us in the old days, so now it’s your turn,” Nikolsky barks at her. He smiles when he speaks to Mama, but his eyes are hard, and his teeth show too much, like a dog when it growls.

“Why is Mama so angry?” I ask the Big Pair while we freshen up for the photo session. I can hear Mama’s sharp voice poking through their bedroom wall like a needle through an embroidery hoop.

“It is absolutely insulting,” Tatiana huffs. “Why should the tsar and tsaritsa of Russia have to carry identification cards inside their own house? I have never heard of anything so ridiculous.”

“He’s nursing a grudge, Mashka,” Olga explains. “To be ridiculous and make us angry. And anyway, it isn’t our house,” she adds.

I don’t like the sound of that. And I don’t feel angry at all. I suddenly feel small as a kitten in a basket.

“Anything that brute says is insulting,” Tatiana goes on. “He barges right in without knocking and never takes his cap off when he speaks to Mama and Papa.”

“The whole thing is silly,” Anastasia answers. “With our hair cut they can hardly tell us apart in the first place. They might as well take the dogs’ pictures instead. Besides, it’s not as if we can go anywhere. What are they going to do, check our photos at the dining room door?”

She picks up an envelope from the writing table and holds it at arm’s length beside Tatiana’s face like an artist considering a painting. “Ah yes, you there beside the empress, you must be Daughter Number Two. And the noisy one, isn’t she Daughter Number Four?”

Tatiana snatches the paper from her hand. “Stop that. This is nothing to joke about.”

“I should pull a face for the camera so they’ll be able to tell me apart from the rest of you baldies.”

Olga looks horrified, all pale and awful.

“Anastasia Nikolaevna, don’t you dare!” Tatiana scolds. Anastasia flares so quickly I can feel her temper rising beside me like a hot Crimean wind before the blotches show on her neck and cheeks.

“Please, Shvybs,” Olga says gently. A little tremor in her voice goes through me like a pinprick. She tries to take Anastasia’s hand, but Anastasia brushes Olga away—she hates being babied almost as much as being told what to do.

I hate watching my sisters fight. When something I say sets their tempers flinging back and forth, I’m helpless as a tennis net in the middle of it all. Before Anastasia can answer back, I throw myself between them. “Don’t worry, Tatya,” I say with a big grin I don’t mean, “nobody’s better at getting pictures taken than we are!”

I don’t know if it’s what I said or the tears brimming just above my smile, but Tatiana takes one look at me and backs down. “You are right, Mashka.” Her voice has gone haughty, almost like Anastasia’s when she’s being fresh, but harder. “We have looked into more cameras than that Nikolsky has seen in his entire life. If he wants to insult us, he will have to find something better than a photograph to do it.”

Olga hooks her hand through my elbow without saying a word, and I know she’s proud of me.

The photos are nothing like the formal portraits we used to have. Nikolsky’s curtained off one end of the corridor and set up a wooden chair with a sheet draped behind it. A black camera stares its wide empty eye at the wall. One by one, we’re marched to the bare seat and told to hold still and look straight ahead, then to the side. Olga was right. There’s something about Nikolsky’s smirk as the photos are snapped that makes me squirm inside. Every time the flashbulb flares, I flinch. When Aleksei peeks around the other side of the curtain before his turn, Nikolsky bellows at him like cannon fire. Aleksei skitters away, probably to Mama. Not one of us smiles after that.

Things settle down again once that’s all over. Olga keeps herself buried in books, or the poems by Gleb that Dr. Botkin carries across the street in his pockets. Mama holes up in her drawing room with her Bible and embroidery and hardly ever comes downstairs, even for dinner. Every day we take turns sitting and reading with her, and I’m glad that when the sun shines she’ll sit out on the balcony so I can peep over the pages and watch my people in the streets. Except for our Anya, I don’t have friends from the Red Cross like Mama and the Big Pair, so instead of writing stacks of letters to Petrograd I imagine stories for the townspeople. My favorite is a young lady in a blue coat who walks by almost every afternoon at three o’clock. She always has two small boys by the hand, and I call her Natalya. In my head, she has a black-haired baby girl at home, and a husband named Andrei away at war. Natalya never lets go of the boys’ hands, but she smiles up at my window when the little ones stop to wave.

“Is there anything you require?” Pankratov asks each morning.

“We would like to be allowed to walk in town,” Papa says, like always. “You can’t be afraid that I might run away?”

If he knew my papa, Pankratov might be able to hear the annoyance hiding behind the joke in his voice. Listening to them feels like swallowing an aspirin tablet without any water.

“Of course I believe you, Nikolai Alexandrovich. And anyway, an attempt to escape would only make things worse for you and your family.”

“Then what is your objection, sir? I visited Tobolsk as a young man. I remember it as a beautiful city. I would like to see it again, with my family. My wife and daughters are especially keen to visit the churches, and I know my son would enjoy the kremlin.”

The commissar looks at us. I try to smile as much with my eyes as my lips. All of us would love to go to church, but I know it would fill Mama, Olga, and Tatiana like a thick cut of beefsteak.

“In the best interests of your safety, I cannot permit it. Have you any letters to post today?”

We always have letters to send, but Pankratov has to read them before they’re posted. It makes Mama so mad, she won’t even look at him. When we get letters in return, she won’t take them from his hand, either. She glares at her knitting needles until he puts the opened envelopes on the table and leaves the room. I don’t know how she can stand it. I’m so eager to hear from the outside—especially for any word of Auntie Olga’s precious baby—that I want to ask Pankratov himself for the news instead of waiting to open them.

“Maria darling,” Mama says, tucking a thick envelope into my pocket, “see if an officer of the Fourth Regiment will post this one letter to Anya for me. I won’t tolerate that man reading my private correspondence.” My insides flip over like hot
blini
in a pan whenever Mama asks me to do this. I’m proud that she trusts me, but I’m a dreadful sneak.

Out in the corridor, I find Commissar Pankratov speaking to Aleksei.

“Since you can’t go into town yourself, I thought perhaps you would like to look at this.” Pankratov hands over a little blue notebook with a government seal printed on the cover.

“‘1916 Souvenir,’” Aleksei reads. Pictures of the city fan by as he pages through it.

“It isn’t new, but Tobolsk hasn’t changed so much in the meantime. You may keep it in your room until you’re finished with it.”

Aleksei says,
“Spasibo,”
and carries the booklet away like it’s a silver tray.

“God bless you, Mr. Commissar,” I tell Pankratov, coming up beside him. He jumps as if I’ve poked him.

“It’s nothing,” he says, but I think it is something. It’s as if the commissar’s trying to make up for all the times he has to say no, and it makes Mama’s letter sizzle like a hot stone in my pocket. I ought to turn it over to Commissar Pankratov right then and there, but I don’t. He may be responsible for us, but the thought of disobeying Mama puts a bigger quiver in my belly than going behind the commissar’s back.

Anytime our favorite section of the Fourth Regiment is on duty, Papa and Aleksei slip off to play cards with the men in their barracks. Whenever I can get away without Mama noticing, I follow them, and today is a perfect chance. It’s all right for me to smuggle her letters to the guards in the yard, but she tells me it isn’t proper for a young lady to consort with all those men in their barracks. I don’t care. Mama doesn’t know the Fourth Regiment the way I do, and they’re never anything but perfectly proper. The men still call out,
“Nash naslednik”
whenever Aleksei visits, even though he isn’t heir to anything at all anymore, and they call me Imperial Highness, even though I turn eighteen shades of red and tell them they don’t have to anytime our parents aren’t listening. Sometimes the three of us even share a bit of supper with them.

“Why is the Second Regiment still such a surly bunch?” I ask the officers around the table.

“They’re young, and eager to fight,” one of the older men says. “Maybe things would have been better if they’d seen the front instead of being reserves. Since they were stationed in Petrograd, the revolution broke out and went straight to their heads like a round of drinks. Besides, lately Commissar Nikolsky has been lecturing them about their so-called rights.”

“Nikolsky might as well drop a lit match into a bottle of vodka as pass out those pamphlets of his,” another officer mutters.

“Is that why we hardly see him in the house? I’m glad. He’s awfully rude to us, especially Mama.”

“Missing out on a war seems to turn young men into bullies,” another tells me. “We old fellows have fought at the front, and we have families of our own. We’ve seen enough fighting.”

“That sounds backward,” I say, turning it over in my head. “You’ve gone to war and come back more decent. They stayed behind and turned sour.”

Aleksei interrupts. “But why won’t Commissar Pankratov let us visit the town, or go to church for
Obednya
? He’s in charge, and the men are supposed to do what he says. But those soldiers boss him and Colonel Kobylinsky around like new recruits.”

Before anyone can answer, the door swings open and Commissar Pankratov himself walks into the barracks. At the sight of us, he stops and blinks at our plates of food.

“Come join us, Mr. Commissar,” Papa says, sounding jolly as Father Christmas. “There’s plenty more to share.”

Pankratov looks for a moment as if he’s swallowed a live oyster, then turns and leaves.

In cold weather, Papa saws and chops wood for hours at a time. I snap photos of them: Papa and Gilliard, Papa and Aleksei, Papa and Olga. On top of all the chin-ups he does each morning, nobody can outlast Papa with a saw or an ax, and soon there are stout birch logs piled up higher than the little white picket fence. Next thing we know, he’s mounted a rough platform along the roof of the greenhouse where we can all sit in a row to catch the afternoon sunshine. Some of the soldiers even help him build a catwalk up the side of the building. With three big round lengths of wood, the men rig a frame in the yard to hold a swing for us children. When it begins to snow, all three of my sisters and I bundle up in our gray capes and red and black angora caps to take turns pushing one another and jumping into the drifts. Soon there’ll be enough snow to toboggan, but it’s flat as a pond inside our fence.

While we play, Aleksei noses through the sheds and outbuildings, collecting all sorts of rubbish. “You’re just like the dogs, pawing through the trash. What are you going to do with a bunch of bent nails and bits of string and glass?” I ask him.

“Prigoditsya,”
he says.
It may come in useful.

“Useful for what?” Anastasia pesters. Aleksei only shrugs and goes back to his foraging. How like a boy!

Just then, one of the Fourth Regiment nudges his way into our little triangle. “
Izvenite
for interrupting, but would these be of interest to a young man like yourself?” His name is Oleg Sergeevich. He holds out two tarnished brass buttons and a belt buckle to Aleksei.

“Da, spasibo!”
Aleksei salutes, then runs off to show Papa his newest treasures.

“You have a boy yourself, don’t you, soldier?” I ask.

“Indeed I do, Your Highness. My little Vanya is younger than the heir, but boys are very much alike. I’m sorry there isn’t much here to interest young ladies.” Anastasia giggles. I kick at her boot heel to hush her.

“It is awfully muddy and ugly in here,” I admit. It’s like living inside a cardboard box. Every time we circle the yard, it seems smaller and duller. “I miss the trees and paths in the park back home.”

“I miss keeping up with the latest fashions,” says Tatiana, coming up behind us, “but I would trade all my best dresses for an afternoon by the sea.”

“Parts of Siberia are quite beautiful,” Oleg Sergeevich tells us. “You should ask Commissar Pankratov to tell you about it. He’s been all over this part of the country.”

Tatiana doesn’t answer. It’s one thing to chat with the officers from Petrograd, but striking up a conversation with Pankratov seems odd, even to me.

I am the clumsiest thing!

“I don’t know how she managed it,” Anastasia tells Dr. Botkin as they help me up the stairs. “There isn’t a thing out there to trip on. Even the ducks know to waddle out of the way when they see Mashka coming.” Under my cupped hand, my eye throbs and waters. My whole face feels like it’s twisted up tight around my eye socket.

Upstairs, Dr. Botkin and Mama and Tatiana bustle around me.

“I’m afraid it will bruise, but I don’t think any real harm’s been done,” Dr. Botkin decides.

Mama crosses herself. “Thank God it wasn’t Aleksei.”

My feelings trip and spill all over each other.
Konechno
, I’d take Aleksei’s place in a heartbeat rather than see him suffer for days over such a silly bump as this, but hearing the words the way Mama says them leaves me feeling like more than my face is bruised.

“Try not to look so glum,
dushka
,” Tatiana whispers. “Remember, tripping over your left foot is a good omen.”