The Lost Crown (4 page)

When we step from the launch onto the streets of the capital, there’s already a crowd waiting to gawk as if the six of us were made of gold instead of ordinary leather. I do feel like a
galushka
, wrapped up in a tablecloth of a dress and a hat like a platter of flowers. The people jostle to see Papa, then turn toward Mama, next in line, but by the time they get to the back, they’ve seen too many lace-encrusted grand duchesses to care about me, the only one still stuck in skirts above the ankle.

Aleksei was right. They want him. Their eyes walk up and down the procession, wondering where the tsarevich is this time. I wonder what kind of ridiculous stories they’ll imagine to explain him away. Some of them will be even worse than the truth, I bet.

The crowd elbows and cranes, and I wish I could ogle right back at them. Ahead of us, Papa takes Mama by the hand instead of offering her his elbow, which sends my eyebrows reaching to meet my fringe. Mama is usually so stiff and proper in front of people: Empress with a capital
E
. But today she holds hands with Papa all the way across the red carpet and into the Winter Palace, just like they do at home.

Inside, it’s horrible. The halls are stuffy and crowded with overdressed courtiers. The women have red eyes and sloppy handkerchiefs, and the men sweat under their collars as they fiddle with their swords and ribbons. My mouth opens at the sight of nasty old Aunt Miechen standing at the far end of the hall with tears running down her face.

“Anastasia, close your mouth.” Maria giggle-snorts. Before I can point out Aunt Miechen, Tatiana gives us both a deadly look over her shoulder, and I promise myself I’ll get even with her later.

When the crowd in the Nicholas Hall catches a glimpse of Papa and Mama, a “Hurrah!” rises up that shakes the heavy frowns from all their faces. Papa stops for half a step, then begins nodding his head at them, smiling a little. Mama has her best Empress Face pasted on. She stands tall and nods along with Papa, never letting go of his hand until they reach the altar. I can tell she’ll have one of her foul headaches by the time we get back to the
dacha
, especially since no one— not even an empress—can sit down during Liturgy.

Before us stands the seven-hundred-year-old miraculous Kazan icon of the Mother of God, and the metropolitan and bishops in their best gold mitres sparking with jewels. Satin rustles and swords clink as we kneel on the hard parquet floor, and the Liturgy begins.

I should close my eyes like everyone else, but instead I watch Papa’s face turn pale and tight, and see Mama try so hard to hold a calm expression that the rest of her body almost quivers. The service seems to calm the crowd around us, but my skin’s creeping. It doesn’t make any sense.

When we rise, Papa marches to the altar and announces, “Officers of my guard, here present, I greet my entire army, united as it is, in body and spirit standing firm as a wall of granite, and I give it my blessing. I solemnly swear that I will never make peace so long as the enemy is on the soil of our Holy Motherland. Great is the God of the Russian Land!”

In front of me, Olga lets out a sob just as a cheer rolls up from the crowd. I grab Maria’s hand and bite my lip. For ten whole minutes the hall quakes with the sound of the people crying and shouting. As we make our way toward the balcony, everyone rushes us, their voices hoarse and wet, dropping to their knees and stretching out to touch us as we try to pass. Papa’s whole face freezes. General Voiekov barks at them all to stay back and make way, but Mama steps forward and puts her hand on his arm.

For once, she looks just like our mama. Her face isn’t all tight and blotchy. Tears stand on her cheeks, but she smiles and goes ahead, letting the people kiss her hands and dress. Papa doesn’t make a peep as she floats from one person to the next. Some of the women shake and sob, so Mama holds them to her for the length of a hiccup or two before she passes. Behind her, the people bow and make the sign of the cross over us, and suddenly my mouth feels dry as wallpaper.

At the French doors to the balcony, Papa and Mama join hands again and face the crowd along the river Neva. The riverside roars so loud when they see our parents, my sisters and I hang back in a clump, peeking through the curtains at the thousands of upturned faces. I see Papa’s mouth move when he tries to speak, but we can’t hear his voice even though we’re only a few steps behind him. He tries two more times to call out to the people, but the balcony and the windows rattle with the noise from below. Instead Papa bows his head and slowly makes the sign of the cross over them. Like a wave from the water, they fall to their knees on the cobblestones, and for the first time in my life, I see tears streaming down my golden papa’s face and into his beard.

From the streets below, five thousand voices break into song, the words washing over us all as my sisters and I kneel too:

God save the tsar!
Mighty and powerful!
May he reign for our glory,
Reign that our foes may quake!
O orthodox tsar!
God save the tsar!

With my face hidden against Olga’s shoulder, I cry without knowing why.

4.

OLGA NIKOLAEVNA

September 1914
Tsarskoe Selo

F
rom the moment Papa leaves for the front, our whole family throws itself into war work. Hospitals and sanitary trains in our names open one after another. In the Catherine Palace across the park from our home, many of the great halls have been cleared and converted into a lazaret filled with beds for the wounded. Mama, her best friend Anya, Tatiana and I all attend Red Cross classes so we can nurse the soldiers ourselves. Maria and Anastasia are too young to tend the wounded, but they visit “their” wards as often as they can to cheer the men with their childish antics. Tatiana and I each head our own war relief committees and travel back and forth to the capital— newly rechristened Petrograd in the spirit of Slavic patriotism—to collect donations. In our spare moments we knit socks and mufflers, for Mama never likes our hands to be idle, and wartime is no time for embroidery.

But when Anya telephones to say that
Otets
Grigori wishes to see us, Mama and I stop everything and hurry to Anya’s little yellow house across the corner from our palace—we haven’t seen
Otets
Grigori since he was stabbed nearly to death. I take just enough time to slip my volume of Lermontov’s poems into an apron pocket.

“Mama,” I ask as the motorcar rumbles through our gates and into the streets of Tsarskoe Selo, “that woman who tried to kill
Otets
Grigori—”

“She was insane, darling,” Mama interrupts, “a filthy, diseased madwoman. Such people have no reason.”

Of all the peasants in all of Siberia, this madwoman happened to stick her knife into the tsaritsa’s confidant? If I read it in a novel, I wouldn’t believe such a coincidence. “Mama, she called him the Antichrist. Surely she wouldn’t have said that to just anyone.”

“Our Friend has suffered persecution as all the saints did. It isn’t our place to ask why.”

A fleck of frustration kindles at the back of my throat. That tone means not only that I shouldn’t question God, but that I should stop nagging Mama with questions as well. I stuff my hands into my pockets and finger the pages of my poetry book until we pull up to Anya’s front door—right under the three-storied nose of the palace police head quarters. With all its windows facing the streets, Anya’s house is private as a curio cabinet. By the time we reach her parlor, news that the empress has visited Grigori Rasputin in the home of Anna Vyrubova will be halfway to the capital.

Inside the tiny foyer, Anya clasps Mama’s hands and curtsies clumsily. “Please forgive me, Madame,” she says with the little lisp that always makes her seem a bit like a child. “My leg pains me today.” Mama starts to speak, but Anya interrupts her. “It’s nothing to worry about,” she chirps, shuffling toward the parlor as if her leg were made of wood. I smother a smile. Our Anya is always pleased to have something to complain about. “Come along, dears, Our Friend is waiting.”

Otets
Grigori sits on the small flowered couch near the fireplace with an afghan tucked over his knees. Beside him on the table stands a photo tree, its branches crammed with Anya’s favorite images of Papa and Mama. Seeing
Otets
Grigori like this, it’s hard to believe any of the coarse whispers I’ve begun hearing about him from the nurses at the lazaret.

“Matushka!” he cries, holding out his hands to Mama. He never calls her Imperial Majesty or Empress—always “Little Mother,” for every Russian is the child of the tsar and tsaritsa.

Mama kisses both his cheeks and takes up the chair beside him. I sit on the other side of the fireplace, tucking my feet up under me to keep them warm. It’s only late September, but already the floors in Anya’s house are chilly as the river Neva. Under the handsome blue blouse Mama made for him,
Otets
Grigori’s shoulders hunch as though his wound still pains him, but his eyes are bright and deep as water. His dark hair and beard look like he tried to give them a combing, then gave up and matted everything down with greasy tonic.

“Grigori,
moi lyubimi drug
.” Hearing Mama speak Russian makes me smile. At home we speak mostly English with her, but Our Friend speaks only Russian with a Siberian accent and a peasant’s vocabulary.

“Matushka, your work pleases God and to make Him happy is as the sun shines. No good will come of war, but the Russian heart will rejoice to see Matushka put her own hands on their wounds.” His words run together in a stream. He plays his voice like a harp—one note lingers even as another begins. “Russia bleeds and you will soak their pain from them into your own heart. Is Papa well?”

Quick as that, the conversation flows in another direction before Mama seems to hear what
Otets
Grigori said. Often it happens that way—the sound of his voice alone can rinse away our worries, but this time it flusters me, as though I were listening to a poem with its stanzas out of order. Mama has enough pain of her own without suffering for her country.

As far back as I can remember, Mama’s compresses and brown bottles of heart drops have been common as salt shakers in our house. Aleksei’s illness is violent and temperamental as a volcano, but sweetheart Mama’s eats away bits of every day. To look at her you’d never guess how many hours she spends in the dark on her sofa, miserable with headaches, angina, and shooting pains in her legs. Dr. Botkin visits so often, I feel almost as close to him as my own papa, though his cologne is strong enough to raise a headache out of thin air.

There’s something to what
Otets
Grigori says, though. Nursing seems to be good for her. For all Mama used to shun balls and banquets, so far she’s rarely missed a day’s work at the lazaret. She’s never happier than when she’s needed.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but the truth is, I miss the days when most of the men I saw in uniform were at Auntie Olga’s weekend tea parties, not battered and bedridden in the wards.

Nevertheless, the wounds I’ve seen don’t upset me so much as the thought of those we’re sheltered from. No matter how the shattered bones and pulpy flesh turn my stomach, what we see isn’t real war. Our lazarets are in the imperial park, the wards surrounded by gilt and marble, and we have cupboards full of bandages and supplies. At the front lines, there are tent hospitals full of mud and panic, where the men arrive brightly bloodied and screaming. Once they’ve been patched up by field medics, our wounded come in by rail to find themselves pampered with hot cocoa, jigsaw puzzles, chess matches, billiards tables, and concerts. All our luxuries won’t keep some men from dying—it can only be a matter of time until I see it happen—but in our lazaret death will creep silently onto the operating table or nestle between clean sheets.

Even during those first weeks of filing instruments and boiling silk in carbolic acid, Tatiana would have told a different story of the lazaret than I. She has such a knack for nursing. The precision that makes her so perfect and dull at the piano serves her well in the wards. It seems to me that she walked into the lazaret on her first day knowing how to keep her face calm and her hands steady. I’m always pressing too hard, or biting my lip, or wincing on some poor soldier’s behalf when I should be putting on a brave face.

The way
Otets
Grigori looks at me, perhaps he senses my doubts, as if they rise from me like a scent. I wish his words could rinse away my troubles too. But how can I tell him so with Mama sitting there between us?

The only one I can tell is God.

5.

TATIANA NIKOLAEVNA