The Lost Crown (32 page)

“Quickly, ladies,” Monsieur Gilliard says, “the wine! Under the tablecloth.”

“The glasses!” Tatiana pops up like a waiter and starts us stuffing the wineglasses under the table.

When Rodionov pokes his head around the doorway, we’re all staring at the table as solemnly as if we’ve got Bibles lying open in front of us instead of veal and macaroni. I don’t dare look up, but I can feel him standing behind us. A squeak leaks out of Tatiana, and she claps a napkin over her mouth. Before I can get ahold of myself, my eyes pop up and catch Monsieur Gilliard’s long mustache wiggling like a rabbit’s nose. Next thing I know, I’m trying so hard to swallow a laugh it probably looks like I’m gagging. Then,
bang!
Mr. Gibbes lets out a whoop like a schoolboy, and we all go to pieces. Olga practically slides down her chair like a smear of butter, she’s laughing so hard.

We kick up such a rumpus, I don’t even hear Rodionov slink back down the hall. Good riddance.

34.

MARIA NIKOLAEVNA

Spring 1918
Ekaterinburg

E
lectric streetcars clatter by just before the bells sound matins from the cathedral across the square. Lying in my cot, the chimes make my ribs rumble, but beyond the fence all I can see are the onion domes with their crosses on top. Today I’ll write a real letter to my sisters, I promise myself, and make sure to tell them God hasn’t abandoned us.

Before we’ve dressed, there’s music out in the street, mixed with the sound of banners flapping in the breeze. Mama scratches her lucky swastika sign into the window frame while Papa hoists himself up to the highest pane for a look. “Can’t see a thing,” he grumbles. “The palisade is so close to the house, it’s like looking into another room instead of the outdoors.”

If the view is terrible, at least this room is pretty, with irises and pansies painted above the striped yellow wallpaper. It reminds me of the cabbage roses and butterflies Anastasia and I had along our ceiling back home.

“Perhaps the people are celebrating, Nicky. It’s May Day on the Western calendar,” Mama says, opening her diary. Warm air from the window ruffles its pages. “Maria, go and see if there’s a thermometer in this house. It must be nearly twenty degrees outside already.”

I hesitate in the doorway to the duty office. This room has two windows, and the fence only covers one of them. Below, people cluster in the street like they did in Tobolsk while a guard shouts, “Walk on, citizens, walk on! There’s nothing to see here.”

“If there’s nothing to see, why can’t we stand here?” one of them wants to know.

The room smells a little of liquor, even though there isn’t a bottle in sight. Maybe it’s Commandant Avdeev himself. Instead of answering my question, he shoos me away. “Tell your family and your people to assemble in the drawing room in twenty minutes for an outline of daily procedure. I will answer any questions following the briefing.”

Commandant Avdeev’s mustache is so neat, I can’t help wondering if he pencils it on every morning. It wavers up and down like a thin brown caterpillar as he goes over the rules with his hands clasped behind his back. “Also, you will no longer be addressed by your former titles.”

“What!” Mama says. “Why now?”

“The Revolution has swept away such vanities, Alexandra Feodorovna.” He says “revolution” as if it begins with a capital
R
. “You are now in the hands of genuine revolutionaries.”

Mama turns to Papa and says in English, “This is absurd.”

“No foreign languages are permitted in the presence of myself or the guards,” Avdeev adds.

Mama’s lips go white. I think she’d like to crush this commandant like a cigarette under her shoe. My stomach teeters like a tightrope walker. How will I calm her after this?

“There are two guard posts inside the house,” Avdeev continues. “One at the head of the main stairs leading down to the street, and another behind that, in the hallway containing the lavatory and the staircase to the garden. If you wish to leave your quarters and enter an area where guards are stationed, you are required to ring first. The bourgeois system of bells formerly used to communicate with servants has been modified for that purpose. In addition to the sentries outside the palisade, there are also guards posted in the garden, on the balcony, and at the corner of the house below your bedroom window. Machine guns have been stationed in the attic, the guards’ quarters downstairs, and on the balcony.”

Suddenly I can’t swallow, but Mama doesn’t even blink. “We must make arrangements to attend regular
Obednya
services as well as the High Holy Days,” she interrupts. “Our transfer has already deprived us of celebrating Palm Sunday. Tomorrow is Great and Holy Thursday.”

“You may file a request with the Central Executive Committee for a priest to serve
Obednitsa
in the drawing room, but you will not be permitted to attend services outside this house.”

Mama stamps her cane on the floor. “Why not?”

Even I’m frightened of her when she gets this way. Not Avdeev. “Because, Alexandra Feodorovna, this is a prison regime.”

“And what about exercise?” It’s the first thing Papa’s said. “We are accustomed to walking outdoors twice daily.”

“Starting tomorrow, you will be allowed one hour for your customary morning and afternoon walks in the garden. Today I cannot permit you to go outside. There are demonstrations in the streets for International Workers’ Day. In the meantime, you may unpack your hand luggage and arrange the rooms as you see fit. The remainder of your baggage is expected tomorrow. If you have further concerns, my office is at the northeast corner.”

Mama goes straight to bed with a sick headache after that. I stumble through a few pages from
The Great in the Small
until she drifts into a doze, then slip away to get acquainted with the house.

Almost all the doors at the back of the house are locked, leaving four rooms for the three of us to share with Dr. Botkin, Nyuta, and Sednev. Five if I count the doorless dressing room leading into our bedroom. Avdeev’s office is off the drawing room, between our quarters and the sentry posts. Outside the duty office there’s a funny little passage— too wide to be a corridor and too small to be a room—with an inside window cut right into the wall so you can see who’s posted in the back hall where the lavatory and stairs to the courtyard and guards’ quarters are.

Even including the locked rooms, it’s much smaller than the governor’s mansion in Tobolsk, but prettier and cozier, too, with fancy wallpaper, wainscoting beaded with gilt, and carved moldings like thick braids of icing. My favorite chandelier is made of pink frosted Venetian glass, blown in the shape of lilies. There’s a piano, and the furniture has velvet and damask upholstery. Only the linoleum in the water closet is a little shabby where the copper pipes leak onto the floor.

Best of all, when I look around I can tell people really lived in this house, and not just because so many of their books and plants and things are still here. It’s different from Tobolsk, where everything was stripped and cleaned and remade in a big hurry for us to move in. A house that someone’s decorated just the way they like it, even if it’s someone else’s house, is so much nicer. Even the air smells gently of other people’s tea and perfume and soap.

“Don’t I know you?” I ask before the new deputy commandant can introduce himself. I put down my tea and go right up to him. A tiny scar under his nose tickles my memory. “I do—you’re from the Crimea! Papa, look at him. He was in the army, do you remember?”

“My name is Ukraintsev,” the man says, “and you’re right, I’m from Gagra. I served as a beater to your brother, Mikhail Alexandrovich, on hunting trips at Livadia,” he tells Papa, “and also played with your sister as a small boy.”

With a squeal, I practically pounce on him. “You know Uncle Misha and Auntie Olga? Did you know she had a baby of her own last summer? A little boy called Tikhon. We’ve never seen him, but he must be just gorgeous, don’t you think? I’m dying to meet him. We haven’t been to the Crimea for nearly two years. I miss it dreadfully! How long has it been since you were at Livadia?”

Ukraintsev looks as bewildered as if he’s stepped into a puddle and sunk in up to his shoulders. Papa and Mama just chuckle and shake their heads at me.

“Please sit down,” Papa says. “Tell us about yourself. If there is one thing our Maria likes better than bowling a man over with questions, it’s hearing the answers.”

Next morning I sniff at the air in the dining room. “It smells of tobacco, doesn’t it?”

Papa wrinkles his nose. “Cheap tobacco at that.”

Mama holds her handkerchief to her face. “Do you want one of your Christmas sachets?” I ask her. “Or your heart drops?” She waves me away.

“I’m sorry, Your Majesties, but there is no hot water for tea this morning,” Nyuta says. “The guards drained the samovar for themselves.”

“Outrageous,” Mama sputters at Avdeev when he comes in to apologize. “Men! Wandering in our rooms!”

“This will not be repeated,” he promises. “Only myself and my three senior aides are permitted to enter your rooms at any time. I will order a separate samovar for the guards myself this afternoon.”

I don’t think Mama is impressed, but maybe she’s only too offended to say any more.

That afternoon when our belongings arrive, they take us into the hallway by the lavatory and search through every last thing. I have nothing to be ashamed of in my bags, but I back up to the wall like a naughty child anyway. Papa paces along the banister, muttering. Next to me, Mama trembles and fidgets with the lace on her cuffs. If Tatiana were here, she’d know right away if Mama is nervous or angry. I link my arm through hers the way Papa does sometimes, hoping it will calm her. And me, too, if I’m going to tell the truth.

Our bags are a mess, even before the guards rummage inside. The roads shook everything so horridly, the papers we used as wrapping are almost destroyed. Even the tobacco has jostled out of Papa’s good cigarettes. Strangely enough, not one bit of the glass and porcelain we packed has broken.

“I don’t see the reason for this—this
search
,” Mama spits as the men open up her valise. “It’s an insult. Mr. Kerensky would never have subjected us to this. Compared to you Bolsheviks, he was a revolutionary and a gentleman.”

One of Avdeev’s assistants, Comrade Didkovsky, shakes his head and smiles into the bag he’s examining. He must think my mama is a silly woman. Last of all they go through Mama’s traveling pharmacy and open every vial. Papa’s voice makes me jump. “Until now, we have dealt with decent people!”

“Remember, you are all under investigation and arrest,” Didkovsky barks back.

The whole time, Avdeev keeps his hands behind his back, just nodding or shaking his head at the objects his assistants fish out. They take away all sorts of things—my camera and film, Papa’s ceremonial daggers and swords, all our binoculars—then demand to know how much money we’ve brought. Papa and Mama don’t have a kopek between them, and I have to hand over my seventeen rubles and sign for them.

After that, everything is routine. At eight thirty we have to be ready for inspection so Avdeev and his aides can make sure we’re all here. Once in a while the commandant is a little tipsy, but we all pretend not to notice, even the guards. For breakfast there is always tea and black bread, and sometimes cocoa, fruit, oatmeal, or pastries. Still no butter or coffee. Our other meals come from the soviet canteen downtown. It’s on the dull side, mostly soup and fish or cutlets, but tasty and plentiful, as Papa says, and sometimes I trade smiles with the delivery women.

In between meals and walks outside, we read, sew, play cards, and write letters. No matter what we do, we’re really just waiting. Waiting for the next meal, or the next walk, or most of all, for the next letter. I write pages and pages to my sisters, leaving space for Papa and Mama’s little notes at the bottom, but we get no reply.

At first we’re allowed two hours outdoors a day, then one, but since the garden is so tiny it hardly matters much. Papa paces it off at just forty steps square, and it’s full of rubbish. The sentries in the garden and on the balcony carry revolvers and hand grenades along with their rifles. After a few days, they don’t frighten me at all. I sit with Mama all day long, but if I want to walk outside I have to leave her alone sometimes. Secretly, I’m glad. The delegations who show up from the Ural Regional Soviet to watch us would make her temper crackle like dynamite.

It’s bad enough when she has to go past the duty office and the two sentries to get to the toilet, even though there’s a door directly across from the lavatory that must lead straight into one of the locked rooms in our quarters. Just like on the train to Tobolsk, Mama doesn’t go more than twice a day if she can help it, and she never rings first. “I would as soon bark like a dog at the door than ring that bell,” she tells Avdeev when he objects.

Every time I have to go, I look through the window in the passage outside the commandant’s office to see who’s on duty first. It seems silly, stationing a man out there with a rifle and bayonet, as if he’s keeping watch over the toilet. Some of them fidget and squirm so much, their boots creak. You’d think they’d never seen anyone walk into a water closet before. If they’re embarrassed now, Anastasia will mortify them when she arrives, poor things. Sometimes they even fall asleep at their posts. A few glare at me, with cigarettes drooping out of their lips like lolling tongues. Whenever one of those men are on duty, I wait for a shift change before I ring the bell.