do you know he didn’t send Varya?” I asked, surprising myself with my own impertinence, but the tsarina laughed. At least I hadn’t been so forward as to suggest my father might have put his daughters in the care of the tsar to protect us rather than the tsarevich.
“You know, Matryona Grigorievna—Masha—that it is you who takes after your father. And I’m not speaking of your blue eyes and black hair.” She squeezed my fingers with sudden strength. “You know I am right.”
“Yes,” I said. It seemed rude not to agree. I’d thought to claim my portion of the Neva’s water, but then I asked myself what it could give me that I didn’t already have. The tsarina was right, I did take after my father, if not in the one way she hoped.
The color of the tsarina’s lips was the same, exactly the same, as that of the cushion behind her head. I wondered why she didn’t trouble to rouge them and then asked myself why I was dwelling on so trivial a matter. Alexandra Fyodorovna. I’d never before thought of the tsarina as an ordinary woman, with a name like other women have, lying on a chair with a little table at her side and on it a crumpled handkerchief and a plain glass of water, half drunk, next to a small, worn Orthodox prayer book. The book had a red ribbon between its pages, to keep a reader’s place, and the ribbon’s unraveling at the end caught and for a moment held my eye. Alexandra Fyodorovna was the same as any other woman, the same and no different, and her health was poor; she was frightened for the safety of her son. I could feel her anxiety, even see its shadow pass across her features, as though a cloud had come between her and the light from overhead.
“What is it, my daughter?” she said, as if she’d perceived the shift in my understanding of her. “Do you mind if I call you my daughter?”
“No. You may, of course, call me what you please.” No matter what came out of my mouth, it sounded different from the way I’d meant it to. Either it was overly familiar or courteous to the point of seeming insincere.
“Wouldn’t you prefer to sit down?” Alexandra Fyodorovna said. “You’re pale.”
A telephone call away, that’s all Father had been. The tsarina’s driver would have left to fetch my father before she picked up the receiver to summon him, and Father would be delivered to the Alexander Palace in less than an hour. But now he was dead, no longer at her side to provide her strength, and the tsarina’s weak heart was beginning to fail. She’d always had bad spells, as I knew from my father, a month or more of breathlessness that kept her confined to bed, but I never imagined anyone could look as haggard as she did now. The continuing strain of the war against Germany; the food shortages; the strikes and the rioting; the long days she spent nursing moribund soldiers in one of the Red Cross’s makeshift hospitals (for she was always greedy for good works, for opportunities to sacrifice herself in the name of God and country): all of these had taken their toll on the woman my father and every other Russian peasant had learned to call Little Mother—Mamochka.
Mamochka, Father always said when he bent to kiss her jeweled white hand. I never heard him call her by any other name.
“How, then,” I said to the tsarina, “shall I address you?”
“In any way that you are comfortable, Masha. We are a family now, the Romanovs and the daughters of Father Grigory. Your father himself has ordained it. We no longer stand on ceremony. We are equals.”
This seemed unlikely—ridiculous. Still, I nodded and smiled politely.
BUT ALEXANDRA FYODOROVNA WAS RIGHT. Or, if she wasn’t right on the first day of 1917, she would be by the ides of March, when Tsar Nikolay was forced to surrender his throne, a blow she’d receive with the grace and fortitude expected of her station and that would complete the job of ruining her health irrevocably. Of course, the abdication of Nikolay II, emperor and autocrat of all the Russias, was a shock not only to us but to all the world, the kind of warning that ought to have been delivered by the Four Horse-men of the Apocalypse rather than a plain little military detail, for life as we knew it was over and Armageddon begun.
As for the tsarina, once she’d fulfilled the obligations of the wife of a deposed ruler (which was mostly, as far as I could tell, finding and burning whatever might be misconstrued as evidence of her husband’s having exploited the proletariat for the advancement of decadent, royalist agendas, should he be tried), she took to her bed once and for all, too distraught to tend to her own children, her four strapping daughters and Alyosha, the long awaited, greatly desired, and gravely ill son she bore for tsar and emperor, for Russia. The boy on whom so many hopes had been laid.
Lucky for me, to whom it fell—as good as by decree—to comfort Alyosha and keep him amused when he was confined to bed, it turned out the tsarevich was intoxicated by every detail of a country person’s simple life. He asked to hear about my father as a boy and what it was people did to amuse themselves in faraway Siberia. I could tell he pictured it all wrong, imagining everything east of the Urals to be a kind of uncharted territory without a single modern convenience—no train, no telegraph or telephone, no electricity or indoor plumbing. All of us squatting in yurts, stitching up hides into trousers and tunics, and wearing underclothes made of yarn from off our spinning wheels. Riding wild Tartar ponies and murdering, raping, and pillaging one another as a matter of course with our blackened frostbitten ears and fingers falling off. The kind of life a rich and pampered boy might think wild and romantic.
“Like Temujin!” he said, delighted with the idea.
“Who?”
“The Khan Temujin. Genghis Khan. Don’t you know anything, Masha?”
“A lot more than you do. Just not every detail about every last uncivilized warmonger. And, no, it was not like that. Fewer people and buildings, more flowers and less soot, that’s what it was.”
But Alyosha was no different from the rest of the Petersburg aristocrats who took one look at my father’s ill-kempt beard and threadbare tunic and confused him with Jesus. I told Alyosha no one back home ever had to worry about amusing themselves, as every member of a country family had to work all day to keep bread on the table. But to a bedridden prince, this, too, sounded like fun.
Of course, I had to tell Alyosha about Baba Yaga, for what proper Russian leaves childhood behind without learning about Baba Yaga and her hut? Somehow he’d got to the grand age of thirteen without having heard of her.
I told him Baba Yaga lived in the forest in a hut that danced on the legs of a chicken, sliding sideways through the trees and shadows, and I recited the magic words to speak at its door. Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest, your front to me.
“A new one,” Alyosha would say when I asked him what story to tell, and I did, more times than I can count. I made them up from bits and pieces of other tales, from what I knew and what I didn’t know I knew. Usually, the words flew out of my mouth before I had a chance to think them through, entertaining me as well. Alyosha—Tsarevich Alexei Nikolayevich Romanov—was a big boy, tall and sturdy for his age. But when he was ill, feverish and in pain, he liked to be babied. When he was ill you couldn’t imagine the boy he was when he was well, a boy whose nickname was Sunbeam; that was how easy it was for him to make others smile. But Sunbeam had inherited the English disease from Queen Victoria, his mother’s grandmother, an illness carried by females and suffered by males, a torture whose name was never spoken, not even by court physicians. Especially not by court physicians. The threat to the tsarevich’s life inspired fear so intense that to say its name aloud was dangerous and would have been unlawful had anyone been given leave to set the word down in ink. If the people were to learn that the crown prince—the future tsar and heir to the world’s greatest autocracy, ruler-to-be of two hundred million souls—could bleed to death from a tumble down the stairs or a bump on the nose, Russia’s ebbing faith in her government would drain away all the more quickly, hurrying the collapse of three centuries of Romanov rule and of tsarism itself.
Hemophilia: for all it was spoken, the word might as well have not been invented.
House Arrest