to ride as well as walk in the cold, I spent hours sitting in the hay, long enough that I’d seen Vanka do what she was famous for doing. Occasionally, the donkey entered a sort of fugue state in which she believed she was before an audience and, without any warning, ran through a repertoire of tricks that included running backward. The first time this happened, Alyosha told me, the tsarina had nearly fainted as the donkey swiftly (demonically, it seemed to Alyosha’s mother) approached him, the muscles of her hind-quarters pumping energetically. What would the nervous tsarina assume but that the animal was rabid?
“I’m surprised she didn’t order that Vanka be destroyed,” I said to Alyosha.
“Oh, she did. Of course she did. But Father showed her how Vanka wasn’t afraid to drink water from a bucket, and she had to admit the donkey was only confused.”
“I don’t think she’s confused,” I said. “She’s happy remembering when she was performing, that’s all.”
The tsarina’s voice was too low for me to hear her from behind the door, but Kornilov’s wasn’t. Although he characterized our arrest as precautionary, intended to protect us from the predation of revolutionary soldiers, he asked the tsarina to summon the palace guard and household staff so he could announce that their responsibility to the Romanovs had come to an end. Those who wanted to remain in the deposed tsar’s service, Kornilov explained, would be held under arrest with his family, confined to one wing of the palace, no longer free to come and go.
Poor Gypsy. She was too small to be a cavalry horse. I imagined myself running to the stable before the Red Guard arrived, opening the doors to all the stalls, and shooing their occupants toward the woods, but the only likely outcome of that was getting myself shot. And it wouldn’t save the horses—even if they left, they’d come straight back. Tsarskoe Selo was the only home they knew.
“What of Varya and me?” I asked the tsarina when Kornilov left the room to address the servants. I was so alarmed by this new turn of events, and by then comfortable enough with the tsarina, that I didn’t bother to conceal or even excuse my eavesdropping. As soon as Kornilov was out of sight, I rushed out from behind the door like a child and burst into the parlor. The tsarina looked at me and smiled, as might a hostess to a guest she didn’t know, a vague, perfunctory expression that betrayed no emotion.
“I’ve spoken with Nikolay Alexandrovich,” she answered, her tone almost serene. “He is confident he can negotiate on your behalf. There are officials who remain faithful to his wishes even if they can no longer be called commands. And remember, Masha, you are a Rasputin. You are God’s chosen, safe in his providence.” I nodded, as I had when she’d said the same thing a week earlier, after we learned the tsar had stepped down.
“May I send my mother word that Varya and I are all right?”
“Of course. You must send her a telegram. I’ll call Fredericks—he’ll help you. It’s all God’s will, Masha. You know that. Nothing comes to pass that isn’t. How could it?”
As I reported to Alyosha when I went back upstairs, only a few loyal and mostly ancient retainers were staying in the Romanovs’ service: two valets, half a dozen chambermaids, ten footmen, the kitchen staff, the butler, and old Count Fredericks, an unlikely source of help of any kind.
The Old Guard and the New
MASTER EMERITUS OF COURT LIFE, Count Vladimir Fredericks might well have been relieved by the contraction of his demesne. Disoriented by the imminence of a revolution that had declared his worldview not only myopic but also corrupt, for weeks the count had been continually lost in the palace corridors. Sent bearing a message from the tsarina to her confidante, Anna Vyrubova, the count would nod briskly, click his shiny heels, and return to the tsarina’s suite some hours later, his mouth and mustache quivering in anxious confusion and the message still on his salver, envelope unopened.
“Why, Count …” the tsarina would begin, but then she’d trail off and smile. “How debonair you’re looking, dear Vladimir! No wonder poor Anna didn’t read my little note. She must have been overcome with shyness when she saw your new waistcoat. Exquisite! It is new, isn’t it?” The count, who at ninety was at least as vain as he had been at twenty, looked down at his waistcoat (which was certainly not new despite his freshened appreciation) and forgot the shame occasioned by the failure of his errand. No one had the heart to scold him, and he spent his days in perpetual futile perambulation, wandering in and out of one suite of rooms after another until he arrived somewhere he recognized.
It was Count Fredericks who had been in charge of lighting when, in 1873, five electric lamps were installed on Odesskaya Street. The count had been following the announcements of the grim eastward march of progress and was among those who gathered for the lamps’ inaugural illumination. A terrible light, poisonous and green, flickered, strobed the crowd of faces, and flooded their open mouths with something that looked like oil of vitriol. Or so Fredericks reported to Tsar Nikolay’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II. Electricity, he predicted with obvious relief, was too vulgar to catch on. A year passed, and then another, and soon it was five, and there was no further mention of electric lamps. Someone had finally taken down the ones on Odesskaya Street, which had remained lit only as long as their inaugural performance. Fredericks, considering his position secure, celebrated their removal by ordering many times the amount of candles he usually did for a year. But no sooner had the candles been delivered than some infidel greedy industrialist plugged the entire Liteiny Bridge into a sinister smoke-belching generator, and just like that the Neva was showered with diamonds. Transformed into a great glittering serpent, the river turned and twisted under the delighted gaze of the hundreds of technology-mad fools packing the bridge’s span, and the count went back to the Winter Palace and embarked upon an epic bender. By 1889 the palace had its own direct-current generating station, and the ever more forceful incursion of vulgarians denied the count his august position: Bringer of Light to Darkness! For some weeks the count refused to leave his candlelit room or take any nourishment besides that found in Finnish vodka. As a gesture of condolence, Fredericks was promoted from Minister to Master of Court Life, and from that point forward no one ever had the heart to scold him. There are those people who cannot be transplanted from one age to the next.
As luck would have it (ours, not his), the count’s lack of foresight provided those of us now confined to the palace with limitless candles to burn once the electricity and gas were cut off.
The thing to do about the telegram was to get Varya to ask OTMA for help. OTMA was the name the Romanov sisters made up for themselves as a single entity—that’s how close they were to one another. They used the first letter of each of their names and arranged them by birth order: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia. While I know they spoke as individuals, I remember them as a Greek chorus, dressed alike in long white gowns and providing a plaintive, sometimes sighing commentary on our plight. Like their mother, the sisters were devout, given to dropping to their knees and praying in concert. Soon after we moved in with the Romanovs, Varya fell in line behind OTMA, clearly happy to have discovered not just one sister whose company she preferred to mine, but a matched set of four. She was suited to life as a princess—even a deposed one was better than nothing—and granted Tatiana the same role her sisters did. Olga, twenty-one, might have been the eldest, but she happily ceded authority to nineteen-year-old Tatiana, the most efficient and pragmatic sister, on whom the younger two, eighteen and sixteen, depended as a kind of governess. Now that they had been abandoned by the servants, she was the only one they had.
OTMA. If the tsarina wanted something done, she didn’t summon Count Fredericks. It was OTMA she called to her boudoir.
THE TSARINA DIDN’T RESEMBLE the image her people had formed of her. Despite having been born a German princess, she wasn’t a spy with a private phone line to the kaiser; she wasn’t my father’s mistress; she wasn’t a frigid, humorless termagant who drugged Tsar Nikolay into submission so she could meddle in state affairs. If she could be faulted for anything, aside from religiosity, it was her opaqueness. Alexandra Fyodorovna was clever, far more than her husband, and had discovered how