Halfway to the Alexandrovsky Station near Tsarskoye Selo, our train, which had left the Warsaw Station in Petersburg at 8:00, with plenty of time to reach Tsarskoye before midnight, inexplicably slowed to a stop in the middle of nowhere. All trains to Tsarskoye had been temporarily halted, our conductor said. We would wait. One hour slipped into two, before Sergei and I realized that our train was being held back purposely: the secret of the tsar’s departure, Kerensky’s great secret, was no longer a secret, and the radicalized railroad workers all along the Warsaw line, hearing the rumors, suspicious, must have decided to refuse to allow any trains into Tsarskoye, no doubt to keep any friends of the Romanovs away until the train chosen to carry the family away had set out. And at this, I began to paw at the sleeve of Sergei’s tunic.
We climbed down from the back of the last car onto the great plain upon which Petersburg also sat, these versts between the capital and Tsarskoye being a small collection of villages and country estates before one reached Krasnoye Selo and Tsarskoye itself. It was late enough now even in a Russian summer to be dusk, and Sergei took the lead as we trudged back toward the village we had just passed. The peasant clothes my brother gave us—my light cloth coat and kerchief, Sergei’s soft cap, loose tunic, and baggy pants—would, I hoped, make us look as if we belonged on foot. Sergei limped ahead of me; his arthritis, which had swollen the knuckles of his fingers, had also torched his joints so that he moved tenderly, back bent. As we followed the track through a thick wood of fir trees, I found myself falling, my grace and balance useless on this ground churned by roots and gullies. Eventually we found a rutted dirt road and Sergei said the village was down below, let’s hurry. Every few minutes I called to Sergei for the time and he checked his watch in its leather pouch: 10:30, 10:42, 10:56, and finally he said, Mala, don’t ask. It was 11:04 when a peasant driving a horse and wooden cart appeared. Sergei limped forward to hail him and I watched their pantomime. Sergei’s arms moved, the peasant, capless but wearing the classic bowl haircut, shook his head, bangs flapping, and gestured to the open back of his cart. Was he offering us a ride? Sergei then brought out his purse. I’d heard that when Niki went out riding these country roads each afternoon at two o’clock, he would stop and speak to the villagers he passed, and that, knowing this to be his habit, peasants from this district and beyond would line the road to beg a favor from the tsar or to hand him a petition, knowing Nicholas liked to honor all these requests. Their Father Tsar loved a supplicant, loved to grant permission. I edged closer. Sergei placed a thick pad of rubles into the callused hands of the peasant. The man wore a short navy blue coat and beneath it a tunic and trousers almost exactly like the ones my brother had given Sergei, but too filthy to be worn by someone merely playing a part. We should have dirtied Sergei’s face and hands with a pot of black makeup from the Maryinsky storage room. Even Father Gapon, in hiding in Petersburg after the debacle of Bloody Sunday, had known to cut his hair, to shave his beard, and to paint his face with theatrical makeup in order to avoid discovery and arrest. We had not had the time to create verisimilitude, though that would matter more later; for now Sergei’s rubles had been real enough. The old peasant lowered himself to the ground and Sergei gestured to me, Come. As he helped me up onto the driver’s bench, the man stood unmoving, staring blankly at the small fortune in his big hands. Surely the world had gone mad, when one was tossed great mounds of money for a rotting cart and a broken-down horse. Was this the new order of things?
Sergei bellowed and snapped the reins to turn the swaybacked horse, and after a hesitation, it lurched forward, straining to get the oversized wheels of the wooden cart in motion once more. Sergei cursed and leaned forward to slap the horse’s rump, hard. The horse snorted, its scrotum swaying gently as it took each heavy step. From the animal’s bowed legs and protruding ribs, I could see we would plod all the way to the Alexandrovsky Station. I turned back to ask the peasant if he had another horse, a faster one—but the man was gone, having vanished into the surrounding forest with his newfound wealth before we could change our minds and turn his pockets inside out. I took a deep breath. We wouldn’t make it by midnight. We’d be lucky to make it before the sun rose. But Sergei and I said nothing to each other, nothing aloud. We would go on because there was nowhere else to go.
By the time Sergei and I arrived at the Alexandrovsky, the sky had changed from ebony to magenta to the marble green that preceded dawn. The family had boarded a train for the abyss of Siberia more than five hours ago. The station house glimmered in this almost light, the building a yellow-and-white slice cut from the yellow-and-white cake of the Alexander Palace, now empty. I used my hands, elbows, and knees to ratchet myself down from the cart, Sergei laboring to keep up with me as I made for the big station doors, twice the height of a man, and from there to the tracks on the other side. Behind me, Sergei called that Vova would be fine, that he could learn where the family was taken, we could still get him back, but my terror made me deaf. I stepped out onto the small platform by the two tracks to sniff the scent of my boy, ready to lie down on the empty tracks that had guided him away from me. But, to my astonishment, the platform was a crush of people.
On the tracks waited a long gray train that flew the Japanese flag—it was not, in fact, Japanese but an ordinary passenger train that bore a placard, Red Cross Mission, though the train was not on a mission of mercy. It was more poorly disguised than we were. Milling about the platform was half a regiment of Russian soldiers in their brass-buttoned tunics, rifles slung over their shoulders, taking long pulls on their cigarettes. The uniforms looked new, as if issued for this particular assignment. Sergei put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me back against one of the tall, many-paned station windows; while we watched from this recess, an officer with a high forehead and a small moustache emerged from the train and descended to the platform to speak to the soldiers. That’s Colonel Kobylinsky, Sergei said to me quietly. He’s a war hero, detailed to Tsarskoye to oversee the family.
Although I could not hear Kobylinsky as he spoke to the men, it was clear from his posture and from the relaxed stances of the soldiers that the train’s departure was not imminent. In fact, there was not the slightest hint of tension. The imperial family must not yet be on board. Perhaps the family had not even left the palace. I turned to Sergei, my face a question, and he said, If Kobylinsky’s still here, they haven’t left yet.
By some holy miracle, the family must still be at Tsarskoye. I would later learn it was no holy miracle. The same revolutionary railway workers who had stopped all the trains had refused to shunt and couple these, suspecting the tsar was being spirited out of the country, an action they were determined to prevent: the tsar was a prisoner of the revolutionaries, he was to stand trial, he was not to live out his life in some comfortable exile. It had taken Kerensky multiple calls to the rail yards, shouting into the receiver in his loud, excitable voice, to prod the men—who now by new habit questioned all authority and respected none.
We need to go, Sergei said to me softly.
The streets of the town of Tsarskoye were quiet. In our cart, we passed the racetrack, the storage houses and slaughter yards, the cathedral, the police station, the post office, all the municipal buildings that made the little town hum so efficiently when the tsar was still tsar. Sergei knew the streets well—Malaya, Kolpinskaya, Stredniaya, Sadovaya, Dvortsovaya—having traveled them all in his Rolls-Royce in happier days, following the tsar with the rest of the court—and all the streets we rode lay like a well-pressed apron, its strings tied up neatly in front of the massive compound of Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar’s Village itself. The imposing mansions of the former court made a silent honor regiment for our approach. I prayed that we would not see the family and its entourage barreling toward us in their motorcars in a race to the train station. Before I could lift my hand or shout a name, they would be gone, and Vova would be whisked away from me again, like a cruel joke.
Sergei began to rehearse aloud a plan to rescue Vo
va, choreographing bold dashes, feints, flanking maneuvers, but just like all of Russia’s battle plans, his relied more on fantasy than on reality—an overestimation of our strengths, a fatal underestimation of the enemy. Finally I cut him off.
We are two. Do you hear yourself?
Sergei started to protest, then fell silent.
The wheels of the wagon groaned and sounded as if they would splinter.
Listen to me, I began. If there were fifty soldiers at the station, there will be a hundred more at Tsarskoye. If they see you, they will recognize you and believe you part of a plot to save the tsar. You could be arrested. Or shot.
Or, and this I did not say, they might—enraged still by the ammunition shortages of the war in which they had served—lynch him on the spot; lynching had become a far too common practice in Peter. There would be ten thousand by the end of the year alone. A mob would capture a thief and cut off his hands, snatch up a murderer and throw him into the Neva to shoot him when he tried to climb out, tie up a borzhui and string him by the foot from a tree the better to torture him.
I watched Sergei stare ahead, jaw set.
These men have never attended a ballet in their lives. I will be just another old woman to them.
The black wrought-iron fence that enclosed the Tsar’s Village abruptly rose before us and Sergei pulled the cart over on Dvortsovaya, not far from the mouth of the short drive that led up to the palace gates. I could hear the trees high above me shuffling their leaves like hands to cards and that wind also dispatched the sweet scent of lilacs planted by a half-dozen empresses over the span of the last two centuries. The last time I was here, it had been winter, snowflakes spiraling like ice insects around the lamps mounted high on either side of the palace doors. I had left my son behind at Tsarskoye in March, but I could not leave him behind now in August.
Until this moment, my mind had been playing out my worst imaginings for Vova again and again, like a scratched gramophone record, but the needle had been lifted and uncertainty filled the emptiness. There would be guards at the gate. What would I say to persuade the guards to let a member of the tsar’s suite go free? And what if Niki had no intention of letting him go? An idea began to form, in its own way as foolishly simple as Sergei’s battle plans were elaborate—I would simply ask for a chance to say goodbye to my son. Surely they would give an old woman that, and from there, what? No matter. I needed to get only there. The end would take care of itself. I only had to invent the beginning. And the beginning lay ahead of me. Against the pink sky behind the birch trees that lined the road, I could see the top of the yellow-and-white palace.
As I got down from the cart, Sergei said, Mala, vot zapomni—now remember—and I nodded, yes, yes, I would call to him if I faced any danger.
I walked along the black fence, and as the Russian saying goes, I felt as lonesome as a blade of grass in a field. Two trucks carrying a contingent of soldiers drove noisily past me and turned in, stopping at the two sets of locked gates. I knew they must have come to escort the family back to the train, and my tongue went numb. The bed of the truck was open; within it were the soldiers from the station, and this close I could see their uniforms were ill-fitting, their buttons at the neck undone and their shirts untucked. Some of them looked only a few years older than Vova, but the combination of their rifles and their youth made me uneasy. The young have little attachment to the past, to the history of their fathers. The gates, each one embellished with a great wrought-iron wreath, swung open, and a sentry stepped forward to wave the trucks in, then pulled the gates shut with a solid, unyielding clank.
Here, the trees had thinned and I had a clear view through the iron bars of the drive that rose slightly as it made its short journey from the gate to the palace courtyard. The trucks rumbled up to the courtyard and slowed to a stop. I could see only the heads of the soldiers now, bouncing, disembodied, as they clambered out of the trucks to the ground, their rifles floating beside them. Unholy dread had blown me to these gates, and if opportunity presented itself, I hoped God would signal me. But whose side was God now on? Not Niki’s, by all appearances. And I had spent many years tying my fate to his.
The wind made the trees hiss and that sound brought with it a chill and I was chilled also by the sight of a mass of dark figures shuffling across the courtyard. What was this? The dead fleeing a dying empire? Yes. As the mass started down the drive, toward the gates, I could see from their long dark coats and dark hats that they were the underservants, the ones who earned little notice but who were necessary to the smooth running of the palace. They had been dismissed. They were not making this trip with the tsar and his family, these kamer-diners and kamer-jungferi and komnatnlye devyushki, who after years of service ferrying plates or boiling linen were now free to find glorious employment with the new regime. Their faces were strangely emotionless, showing neither relief nor sorrow. For most of them, the palace was their home. They were being exiled just as surely as Niki and Alix were, though their journey would not be as far.
A horn bleated behind me, and I started. I turned to see a grinning soldier swerve another truck into the drive. He braked, then nudged his vehicle forward, alternately leaning on the horn and waving his arm out the window, shouting as he motioned the knot of servants out of the way. The sentries fell in to help, clearing the drive with a push here or a shove there, and I saw my chance. With a quick glance back to Sergei, watching intently beside the cart, I followed the truck through the gates. And that easily, I was one of them. A servant of the court. Wasn’t that what I had been all my life?
I was moving against the flow of the crowd, though, and so I decided I was looking for something I had dropped, and in my mind I made this a silver buckle. Ahead I could now see much more of the courtyard—the wide palace steps of gray stone, three waiting cars, long touring motorcars made especially for the emperor by Delauney-Belleville, a model the French firm dubbed Son Impérial Majesté, and it appeared that in these the emperor and his family would be escorted from the Alexander Palace. To my left glittered the gold emblems on the cornices of the Catherine Palace, and between here and there lay the green water of the pond that during the day captured the reflection of this palace, a pale yellow crescent against the blue cornflower of the sky. In the imperial menagerie, in better days, the animals given the tsar by the foreign ambassadors, Siamese elephants and South American llamas and Tyrolese bulls, had chewed at their breakfasts at this hour.
Keeping my head down, I crossed the drive to the shade of a lone, full tree, and the soldiers’ eyes flitted quickly past me, a nobody in a kerchief. Next to the first truck idled another, already heaped high with bags and boxes, and beyond it, another one still, this one stacked with rolled rugs and pieces of furniture. It seemed as if every stitch and crumb of the palace were being removed. It was not a simple matter to send a former tsar into exile. A convoy of trucks wound around the side of the palace. Soldiers stirred and coughed everywhere, squatting on the stone steps, leaning against the palace columns, strolling the sandy ground, at least sixty, seventy men in uniforms less presentable than the ones I had seen earlier, uniforms without the tsar’s insignias, without decoration, no braid, no medals. A large group of sweating soldiers heaved dozens of trunks and cases and crates into the back of the empty truck as if trying to break them wide open, while an older man, familiar to me—yes, it was Count Beckendorff, a member of the imperial suite, tall polished boots, trim white beard—supervised from the steps. Sergei had told me that although Kerensky had kept the tsar’s exact destination, departure date, and members of his retinue a secret from his ministers, the tsar’s old court knew exactly which of his suite would make this voyage east with the tsar. Word had traveled softly from one prince to another the past few days—the Countess Hendrikov, Prince Dolgoruky, and General Tatishelev would go now, the Baroness Buxhoeveden and Count Beckendorff to follow later. So thrilled was I to see a familiar face that, like a fool, I almost called out and ran to his side to enlist his help
. But I knew the count, as a member of the tsar’s suite, was now as much a prisoner as the imperial family, and there would be no advantage in revealing myself to him. The soldiers hoisted the last crate into the truck and surrounded the count, who pulled some paper money from his pocket and held it out. One of the soldiers snatched it from the count’s hand and as the men circled to divvy up their pay, three rubles apiece, I heard one of them say, for three hours’ sweat, I understood the count had not been supervising the soldiers, but had bribed them to follow their orders.
The count retreated to the central hall, which, luckily for me, had been designed with floor-to-ceiling French windows, and I could watch him as he moved behind those windows among several figures, some of whom now began to file out the main entrance. These were the higher-ranking servants, the ones who would accompany the family on its flight—the valets, the chambermaids, the footmen, the cooks and assistant cooks, the wine steward. At a soldier’s shouted direction, they climbed up into the bed of one of the empty trucks, the men helping the women, and sat down on its wooden benches.
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 32