Anastasia and Her Sisters (23 page)

To the soldiers, Papa was a prisoner deserving no respect, but to people like Count Benckendorff, Papa was still the tsar. Others weren’t quite sure how to address him.

One day Papa’s favorite Delaunay-Belleville limousine with Papa’s chauffeur behind the wheel drove up to the entrance to the palace. Out stepped an official of the new government. Count Benckendorff went to greet him.

“I am Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, minister of justice in the service of the Provisional Government,” said the man. “I have come to inspect the palace and see how you live, and to speak with Nikolai Alexandrovich.”

We were at luncheon when this happened and knew nothing about it until the old count told us later that he had taken the minister of justice on a tour of the palace while we ate. Kerensky had ordered his men to go through each room
of our quarters, searching drawers and cupboards, even peering under the beds.

One of our maids, still trembling from the experience, described what she had seen. “They went into the room where Madame Dehn was having lunch with Madame Vyrubova. The ladies were terrified! Madame Vyrubova was still feeling very weak, and when she heard them coming, she crawled into bed and tried to hide under the covers. I stood very still and prayed that he would not notice me! Kerensky pulled back the blanket and shouted at her, ‘I am the minister of justice. Dress and go at once to Petrograd!’ ”

Poor Anya had been too frightened to answer, and the minister summoned Dr. Botkin and asked him if she was well enough to leave. The doctor said that she was, and that made Anya furious. She never forgave him.

The minister of justice now wished to see us. Papa decided we would meet with him in our schoolroom. Suddenly this familiar place felt strange and threatening. Anya and Lili were there, waiting to be taken away. Lili was worried about her little son, Titi—he’d been ill when Lili came to help us, and she’d had no word about him for days because the palace telephone line had been disconnected.

Mama told them sadly, “This good-bye matters little. We shall meet in another world.”

“But surely we’ll see them again soon!” Marie cried.

Olga stared at the floor and shook her head once, very slightly. Tatiana ran to her room and brought two little portraits of Mama and Papa for Lili to take with her. I hugged Lili again and again until the soldiers came. We watched them being led
down the staircase, Anya hobbling on her crutches. Mama surely believed that was the last time we would ever see them.

We were all crying when Minister Kerensky entered the schoolroom. I didn’t know what to expect—a monster, possibly, but Kerensky did not look like a monster. His hair was cut very short, and he had neither a beard nor a mustache. He was not a tall man, but Papa is not a tall man either, and they looked at each other eye to eye. Neither of them seemed to know what to do next. Then Papa put out his hand, and so did Kerensky, and they shook hands and actually smiled at each other.

Mama was
not
smiling, even when the minister of justice—he kept reminding us of his title—tried to reassure us. “You must not be frightened, madame,” he said. “Please have complete confidence that all will go well for you.”

For almost a week nothing happened. I began to feel that maybe we really could trust the minister of justice and that all would go well. But when Mama asked to have some fresh flowers brought from her greenhouse—flowers always cheered her—she was told that flowers were a luxury to which she was not entitled.

Then Kerensky separated our parents in order to question them, and kept them separated for eighteen days. We worried, not knowing what was happening.

“Kerensky is not a bad sort,” Papa told us when it was over. “He’s a good fellow. One can talk to him. We began to get along and developed a kind of mutual respect. I wish I had met him long ago. He would have had a position in the government.”

Mama agreed—I had not expected that! “He told me that the king and queen of England have been asking for news of us.”

That cheered us immensely. Maybe Olga was wrong—it wasn’t a lie. We told each other excitedly that it surely meant arrangements were being made for us to leave for England. A cruiser could still pick us up at Murmansk. We waited for more information.

“We must be patient,” Papa said. “Kerensky is our friend. I’m sure of it.”

I had been prepared to hate Kerensky, but I began to feel hopeful again.

Spring is coming, according to the calendar, but it’s still awfully cold and damp—inside the palace as well as outside, because Benckendorff says there is now a shortage of firewood.

I try not to think of Livadia, where flowers are blooming and the air at this time of year is soft and warm. I also try not to think about Pavel, about any of the life I wanted—or even of those brave young men I met at the hospital. That’s over.

What surprises me most is Father. I was shocked when he came home from Mogilev. He has aged so much, his face is so deeply lined, he is thinner than ever. And his eyes are so sad! Mother’s beautiful hair has gone completely gray. She never smiles, but why would she? There is really nothing to smile about, and I wonder if there ever will be again. Tanya says I must not be so gloomy, that my low mood affects everyone, and to demonstrate her joy in life she walks around with a fixed smile. Mashka is lucky—she lives in her own dream world, loving everybody, grinning at Kerensky as though he was her best friend. I trust him not at all—not because he is a bad man, but because I believe he is powerless, almost as powerless as we are.

Then there’s Nastya, clowning around and pulling silly faces, a true
shvibzik
. But sometimes I catch her watching me, as though she knows what I’m thinking. I pray that she does not, because I see nothing good ahead for any of us. The youngest OTMA may be the only one in the family I could talk to honestly, but

That’s where Olga stopped writing. Someone must have come in and interrupted her, and she slapped the
Advanced Mathematics
book shut, smearing the last word, before she shoved the notebook back on the shelf. “But”
what
? What was she thinking? I wondered if I would ever find out.

•  •  •

Our life as spring slowly unfolded was very strange. We could spend more time outdoors, but waiting for an officer to meet us with a key to our own park was annoying. The soldiers jeered at us and shouted stupid insults. One soldier poked his bayonet in the wheel of Papa’s bicycle and made him fall off. If I had been Papa, I would have been furious, but if he was angry, he didn’t show it. I wanted to stick out my tongue and cross my eyes and make fun of those idiotic soldiers, especially the young ones with pimples on their faces and teeth that they hardly ever brushed.

“What girl would ever want to kiss you!” I shouted at them, but I shouted in English so there was no chance they’d
understand. I felt better when I’d done it, but soon after that a new rule was imposed: We were not allowed to speak English or French, even to each other—only Russian.

Every day crowds of ordinary people jammed against the fence surrounding the park and gawked at us, as though we were animals in a zoo. Some whistled and yelled insults, most of them directed at Papa. This drove Alexei crazy. He couldn’t stand seeing Papa treated so disrespectfully. “They used to kiss Papa’s shadow when he passed by,” Alexei raged. “And now they call him names and spit at him.”

Papa seemed less concerned about all of this than he was about the progress of the war, which he followed in the newspapers he was still allowed to read. Soldiers were deserting by the hundreds, maybe thousands, and the army seemed to be melting away. “I worry that the Provisional Government isn’t strong enough to pull itself together to win the war,” he told Mama. “It would be a disaster for Russia if England and France make peace with Germany.”

Whenever they talked about the war, I thought of Olga’s Pavel and Tatiana’s “little Malama” and Marie’s Kolya and all those brave wounded soldiers Mama and my sisters and I had cared for in the hospital. Were any of them still alive? Sometimes I could not bear to think of it anymore.

•  •  •

In May a new officer, Colonel Kobylinsky, was put in charge of the soldiers at Tsarskoe Selo. On the whole, the officers were not a bad lot. Many of them were actually quite decent men, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if Marie had taken it into her head to fall in love with one of them. Colonel Kobylinsky was
one of the best—he seemed to like us, and we liked him, too. He had been a member of the Imperial Guard and had fought at the front, until he was wounded. But the regular soldiers were mostly boorish louts, shooting off their guns at all hours, killing the tame deer in the park and even the beautiful swans floating regally in the pond. The least thing put the soldiers in an uproar. One day they found Alexei playing with a toy gun and demanded that he surrender it. Colonel Kobylinsky got it back and smuggled it to my brother, piece by piece, but he sternly ordered Alexei not to march with it outside.

When the last of the snow had finally disappeared and the ground was thawed, Papa announced that we would plant a kitchen garden in the park. We set to work, digging up the grass and carrying it away. Our tutors and most of the servants helped with the huge effort of preparing the soil. Even some of the soldiers pitched in. Mama watched from her wheelchair, a blanket over her knees and a needlepoint project in her lap.

Papa supervised the layout, deciding which vegetables should be planted where. We sowed seeds, putting in row after row of carrots, five hundred cabbages, and every kind of vegetable. We hauled water from the kitchen in barrels on wheels. We’d never worked so hard in our lives, but Papa insisted that physical exercise was far better than sitting and brooding, and no doubt he was right. It was certainly better than being cooped up all day in our schoolroom, memorizing French parts of speech. Even Monsieur Gilliard grudgingly admitted that.

The days passed with the endless cycle of watering and weeding. The garden thrived during the long hours of daylight, and the cabbages were growing huge. When I teased Papa that
he would be eating cabbage three meals a day, he replied, “And for tea as well.”

He moved on to cutting down dead trees in the park. He and Monsieur Gilliard chopped the trees into firewood, and we stacked it in piles.

“Think how warm this will keep us next winter!” Papa said cheerfully, and I saw Olga look at him and guessed what she was thinking:
If we’re still here next winter
.

In the evenings we were weary to the bone, but it was a
good
kind of weariness. We did needlework in Mama’s mauve boudoir while Papa read to us from the Russian classics. I loved Gogol’s short stories. My favorite was “The Nose.”

We observed another round of birthdays. I was now sixteen.

Grandmère Marie once promised that we would celebrate my sixteenth birthday in Paris. I had always imagined that we’d go there by imperial train. But was there such a thing now as an imperial train? Or was it called something else? It seemed better not to say anything about it. I could imagine Olga’s dour look if I did. But no one could stop me from dreaming.

My best present was a birthday greeting from Gleb Botkin. He was sometimes allowed to visit his father in the guardhouse, and he’d made a little card that folded like a fan, small enough to fit in Dr. Botkin’s boot. On the title page he had printed:
The Adventures of Anastasia Mouse
, followed by a series of drawings in colored pencil. In the first the mouse wore a court dress, her tiny paws peeking out of the open sleeves and a
kokoshnik
perched above her pink ears. In the background were the onion-shaped domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral by the Kremlin in
Moscow. In the next drawing Anastasia Mouse peered out of the window of the imperial train, next she was on a yacht with
Standart
lettered on the bow, and finally she stood by the Eiffel Tower. The mouse had made her way to Paris!

On the last page he’d written,
To Anastasia Nikolaevna on the occasion of her 16th birthday. With kind regards from your friend, Gleb Evgenievich.

•  •  •

In low voices we discussed what might happen next. Minister of Justice Kerensky had spoken again of a ship to take us to England. Papa’s cousin King George V would see to it that we were allowed to stay there. Their mothers were sisters, and in old photographs King George and Papa looked so much alike it was hard to tell them apart. There had been disagreements between them; King George believed in the English parliamentary system with a cabinet and a prime minister, and Papa believed a tsar was destined by God to rule as an autocrat. Nevertheless, Papa started sorting through his books and papers, deciding what he would take with him.

But everything remained unsettled. Kerensky was sympathetic to Papa and our family, and he held an important position in the Provisional Government—he had been promoted to prime minister—but a militant group, the Bolsheviks, opposed that government. The Bolsheviks were not sympathetic to us—they hated us!—and they controlled the rail lines. Kerensky said now that he feared we’d never get through to Murmansk. He told Papa he thought we’d be safer somewhere else in Russia.

“I suggested Crimea,” Papa reported to us with a rare smile.
“And Kerensky says it might be possible. In any case, he told me we should start packing.”

Livadia! How splendid that would be! Grandmère Marie had left Kiev for Crimea, and so had Aunt Olga and her new husband and the baby we’d learned she was expecting, and Uncle Sandro and Aunt Xenia were there with loads of cousins—who were probably still barbarians, but it didn’t matter. Mama was sure the Tatars who lived in the mountains around Yalta were our friends. We were so excited that we could talk of little else—until Count Benckendorff warned us that this constant talk of Livadia was unwise.

“You may be unaware of it,” he said, “but there are spies in every corner of the palace, listening to every word you say and passing it along to their superiors.”