Then came the sound of muffled hooves on grass, and one black shape, then five, then another five charged over a small rise. Niki’s Cossacks were riding their mounts toward the courtyard from their barracks in the Feodorovsky Gorodok. I counted twenty-five Cossacks in all. Were they coming to save the tsar? They made a fierce sight, waxed moustaches slashing their cheekbones, long red tunics topped with silver, the tall black papakhi giving the Cossacks, already tall enough on their horses, an even greater height. In a moment, they would pull their curved sabers—the body of each blade inscribed with the gold monogram H II, the top of each blade with the double-headed eagle—out from their leather scabbards and, whooping, raise them above their heads and bring them down on the heads of these impudent soldiers.
But that did not happen. Nothing remotely like it happened. The soldiers, instead of readying themselves against the approaching horde, barely looked up. And the Cossacks slowed their horses to a walk, sabers still sheathed, to take up positions along the curving drive. They were in the employ of the Duma. For three hundred years, the ferocious Cossacks had pledged their complete devotion to the tsar, each promising to protect the tsar and his family until the last minute of my life. Every man gave twenty years to the military, and no matter how embattled, how desperate a tsar became, he could always count on his Cossacks. Expert horsemen, master swordsmen, unparalleled marksmen, they were the mighty fist of the emperor. They were the enemy Napoleon most dreaded to face. They were the men who tied the Stolypin neckties around the necks of the revolutionaries and who with the army put down the peasant revolts of 1905. These Cossacks had loved this tsar, and this tsar had loved these Cossacks, wore their tunic, practiced the overhand sweep and deadly thrust of the klych. Even Alexei owned a miniature Cossack uniform. But Niki’s Cossacks, no longer his, were here to help escort their master into oblivion.
Two Rolls-Royces raced down the mounted line, and I recognized the first as one of the tsar’s own; as it passed I saw Kerensky sitting within. I knew his face, with the bulbous nose and hair like a thicket, though I had not seen him in person, but only on the postcards he had distributed everywhere, as if to say to the people, as the tsars once had, Know me, love me. He stepped out of the Rolls—the new leader arriving to bid his predecessor a polite farewell?—and then another man emerged. I recognized him, as well: the tsar’s brother Mikhail. The grand duke must be here to say goodbye, with Kerensky acting as monitor, that is, unless Mikhail was going with the family—but why would he go with them? He had been tsar for only three days and Kerensky, reportedly, had been so pleased by the grand duke’s aborted term that he had called Mikhail a patriot. The presumption! Another man followed them up the palace steps. It was the officer from the train station, Colonel Kobylinsky.
Mikhail entered the palace but Kobylinsky paused on the steps to survey his soldiers, who watched him but didn’t rise to attention or salute. He made a curt gesture. Eight soldiers eventually stirred themselves and climbed into the trucks to start the engines. Gears protested as the drivers battled the transmissions, then, after a few false starts, they lurched toward the gates, the servants holding on to one another on their benches, the crates rattling. The evacuation had begun.
Mikhail reemerged with Kerensky, head bent, hand over his eyes, to hide what, his tears? Relief at the fate he had averted for himself with his act of patriotism, the fate his brother the tsar now faced? Kobylinsky shook both Kerensky’s and Mikhail’s hands and closed the car door after them; the car made a slow circle, went down the drive, and was gone.
Kobylinsky waited until the gates were closed again and then motioned the soldiers to form a cordon around the few motorcars that remained. The soldiers reluctantly made an asymmetrical half-circle around the perimeter and two uneven rows from the bottom step to the cars. Several of the Cossacks exchanged glances at this slovenly formation, and I understood that, slovenly or not, this was the gauntlet through which the imperial family must pass, and that I must get inside the palace, quickly, now, and request my private farewell with Vova before these cars were loaded. I stepped away from the tree and started toward the palace. But I had waited too long.
Out from the circular hall of the Alexander Palace and down the stone steps came Niki’s daughters, flanked by Colonel Kobylinsky. The girls all wore wide-brimmed, black straw hats and what must have been wigs, for the hair that had been shaved from their scalps in March surely could not yet have grown back to these lengths, and in their white shirts and long, tweed skirts, they seemed quite adult, which, of course, they must now be! The oldest, Olga, had to be almost twenty-two, my age when Niki trimmed my heart down to nothing to marry Alix. Was it possible I had lived so many years? One of the girls carried a little lap dog and when it struggled out of her sleeve and made to run away, a soldier gave it a kick, the muzhik, and it ran, yapping, back to her. Colonel Kobylinsky stared at the offending soldier but said nothing.
The colonel settled Olga Nikolaevna in the first open car and the three other girls were joined by a woman who must have been Countess Hendrikov, the only female courtier making the journey at this time, in the second. Then came the boys, both of them, tall and thin in their just-adolescent bodies, their hair cut in identical unflattering styles, a short fringe of bangs drawn across their foreheads. The man who led them from the house did not seem to be a revolutionary soldier but some sort of valet in sailor garb, one of the sailor nannies, the dyadi Nagorny or Derevenko, though the boys would soon be too old for nannies and would need batmen or valets. Vova looked so much older, so much taller! They had each celebrated a birthday in captivity. Vova’s fifteenth was marked, he wrote Sergei, with a cake sprinkled with lilac petals, and Alexei’s thirteenth by a special procession of clergy from Our Lady of the Sign, who had carried with them a holy icon, which even the revolutionary soldiers had felt compelled to kiss. So there was some element of the old world they still respected. Vova walked close beside Alexei, the two probably inseparable now, as they moved quickly down the line of soldiers who stared openly at them. If I pushed through that line, I could hold my son in my arms, but I knew our embrace would be violently broken, so I remained silent. Not yet, but when?
The two boys were followed by the doctor, Botkin, in his blue coat, and a thin man in a hat with a cheap black band which I recognized from Vova’s gleeful description. This must be the children’s French tutor, M. Gilliard. Two other men I recognized, as well, Prince Dolgoruky and General Tatishelev—both of them frequented the ballet. At a sudden shout, we all turned back to the palace. One remaining servant had called to another for help lifting the empress in her wheelchair through one of the French windows onto the terrace.
The wheelchair astonished me. What had happened to all the energy with which she had nursed the children just a few months earlier? Alix now looked drugged, and perhaps she was, by those same helpful, soothing drops Dr. Botkin had squeezed into the children’s mouths when they were all so sick with the measles in February. She wept as the two men struggled with the chair, her body swaying this way and that, until one of them lifted the empress out of the chair and carried her, the long, wide sleeves of her blouse flapping, down the sloping ramp to the courtyard. The other trailed behind, pushing the empty rattan wheelchair with sharp, hard jerks, letting its wide, thin wheels make a rattle over the flat, gray stones. Niki was the last to step through that window. He paused on the terrace, his bearing slightly stooped, until, with conscious effort, he squared his shoulders, the better to balance on them the weight of his family in their solitary exile. Even the horses seemed to still as Niki scanned the scene before him. He gazed at me but his eyes didn’t linger. I was just another subject, come to watch the tsar’s departure. I saw him study the sunrise over the park the Russians had once called Sarskaya Myza—or high farm—and this farmstead had become, for a time, the tsar’s private paradise. And now his expulsion east. Oh, why had not Niki insisted on going to the White Palace in Livadia or to his brother’s estate in Orel, both estates
Kerensky perhaps could have been persuaded to reconsider?
I watched Niki walk down the long ramp and take Alix’s arm at the bottom of it, for without her chair she had stood, hesitantly, seemingly afraid to walk, and together, they followed the boys into the first car. Niki helped each of them into the open carriage and onto the three rows of high-backed leather seats. Colonel Kobylinsky climbed onto the box at the head of the running board and turned toward the Cossacks. To them, he need not say a thing. They knew their roles; a few of them guided their horses in front of and alongside the tsar’s car and along the two others as escort. And now, as the soldiers swarmed aboard the remaining trucks in that long convoy, I realized that I would be left behind if I did not act. There would be no later moment. A Cossack gestured with his big arm that I should move out of the way, down the drive, stop gawking. Babushka! Me—a babushka! So I wasn’t invisible. He urged his horse toward me. Everyone is leaving. I nodded and began walking backward, then sideways, trying to keep my eyes on the family seated in the first of the Son Impérial Majestés, the Cossack and his black horse shadowing me, the trucks and cars and horses circling the courtyard, clop, clop, clop, making their way around the light sand to the drive proper, the Cossacks’ horses keeping pace with the slow turning of the wheels. I supposed they would ride with them all the way to the station, the last assignment of the tsar’s retinue.
The sun gave a luster now to everything, the buttercream palace, the blue cornflower sky, the black doors of the automobiles, the chocolate eyes of the horses upon which the Cossacks sat. The park birds had begun to herald this exodus which was to have been made in the desolation of night, but which was now taking place, thanks to Russia’s short summer nights, less safely, in plain view. And in this sunlight I was plainly walking backward toward a life I couldn’t conceive continuing without my son. What would I tell Sergei when I reached the bottom of the drive, Sergei who hoped his Magnificent Mathilde would bring back our beautiful boy? How could I tell him the truth of my failure? But now, with the column starting down the drive, the truth was all I had left.
And so I stepped in front of the first vehicle and the Cossack beside it, waved my short arms, and began to yell in my vulgar-sounding Russian—yes, I admit it, I speak more like a peasant than like a boyar, even in the French I acquired in exile this is the case, so perhaps my costume was not so much an impersonation as a revelation of my truest self—Stop! Wait! And at the unexpected sight of me the lead Cossack halted his horse and the drivers braked their vehicles to stare at this demented woman, and to them all I cried, I want my boy!
Would he bring his whip down on me as I had seen his comrade do to that poor man on the Troitsky Bridge in 1905? Like a mechanical toy, wound almost to breaking, I began to repeat over and over—I want my boy. I want my boy—until the Cossack looked back in bewilderment at one of the trucks that held the soldiers. From within the cab, someone shouted at him to move the old woman, and the Cossack spurred his horse forward. But when I stood my ground, instead of trampling me, he simply reined in his horse. I could hear both of them breathing and I raised my hands to him.
He called over his shoulder to Kobylinsky, standing on the running board of that first car, She wants her boy. The Cossacks let their horses stamp their huge feet and shake their long manes impatiently to signal me there was only so much of this foolishness they would allow. What is the delay? Move the woman, called a voice from the back of the line. I saw Niki lean forward in his seat, squint in my direction to take in my small shape, and abruptly straighten up. He had recognized me. But I could tell that Vova had not, as he peered around at the soldiers surrounding the motorcar. And then Niki pushed open the door and stepped out, walking forward past the lanterns fixed to the front of the hood, with Alix protesting from her seat; and at the tsar’s movements, the soldiers, all brass buttons and alarmed caps, began jumping down from their trucks, racing forward with raised rifles and fixed bayonets. Kobylinsky held his hand up to Niki, Her son must have left earlier with the underservants.
Her son is not an underservant, Niki said. He is part of my suite, and he gestured to the interior of the carriage to Vova, who sat next to Alexei on the middle seat. Kobylinsky looked clearly perplexed—Why would the tsar have a peasant boy as a member of his suite? Why would the tsarevich have the son of a peasant as a playmate?—but he said nothing, looking at Vova and then over at me. Niki studied my face as the soldiers converged about him, and I thought, Niki is not going to give Vova back to me, he still thinks as Sergei does that he will return to Peter in the fall, he thinks I’m acting precipitously, he doesn’t understand that Kerensky, with one shift of the winds, will soon be running for his own train to save his own skin. But then Niki reached into the car and took Vova’s hand and Vova climbed out onto the running board and jumped down.
He stood very close to Niki, pressed tightly against him in a posture of filial intimacy that set the soldiers to shouting, Look, that is the heir. This is a trick—their worst nightmare come true, someone in the imperial family was about to slip from their grasp. One regiment was posted at the station, but two remained here, and so there were many men to make a commotion and over it Niki held Vova to him with one arm around his shoulder, and Kobylinsky stepped back on the running board and called, futilely, to the excited soldiers, Move back, but his soldiers had no intention of moving back now, and they surrounded the cars, calling, Who is this boy? and, Where is the heir?, as if wondering for the first time why the tsar’s entourage counted in its number two boys instead of one. And I thought, What game is this? Surely they know who is who—they had been guarding the family for months. It was only later that I would learn that these men had been newly assigned to accompany the family, and what help were imperial portraits and genealogical charts (if these men had ever laid eyes on such things) in sorting out the bedraggled human reality of their prisoners? In Siberia the guards would take photographs of the family and servants and assign each one an identity card which, ridiculously, had to be produced on demand.
The soldiers encircled the carriage and one of them pushed by the tsar to reach into its interior. I could see Vova still had no idea who I was. Why had Niki drawn Vova from the motorcar and yet not sent him toward me? Perhaps he had in mind we were only to say goodbye, and the farewell I had been prepared to pretend I wanted might be all that I would, finally, be allowed—but with the soldiers all around, we were not even to have that chance. With a few shouts, one of the men pulled Alexei from his seat in the black automobile and stood him side by side with Vova as if to inspect them both, and the men began to shout, Which one is the heir? Which one is Alexei Nikolaevich? For how could they tell which was which? If Niki were so inclined, if he feared what lay ahead, he could push Alexei my way and take Vova with him to Siberia. And from the car I saw Alix reach for Vova’s tunic as if to pull him back within and I thought, Does she, too, know what is at stake? Or can she simply not bear to let him go? And from the girls in their car behind came a wailing which seemed only to further excite the soldiers, who pointed their rifles first at Niki and then at the boys, and when they remembered, at me. The soldiers closest to the car began to shout at the boys, What is your name?, but both remained silent with terror, looking mutely at those wide peasant faces, and through all this Niki remained with his arm around Vova, his eyes on the boys to keep them calm. What was he thinking now? And Kobylinsky from the running board called, Back to your trucks! The soldiers ignored him, but his words had some effect—they had been up all night and the train was ready at the station and on the train they could sleep—and so they called out to one another, Let’s take them both with us, and they gestured with their rifles to herd the boys back into the first car. After a quick look at me, Niki gave a nod to the boys. Alexei clambered back in immediately, but as Vova ducked his head to follow, I cried out and took a step forward. My son looked back at me, but the Cossack was closer and he leaned over on his horse and put out his hand, big as a wall, to stop me—but my son ha
d paused and I took advantage of that moment to drop to my knees like a serf on the roadway with a petition in my hand. Yes, I played the beggar, but really, in my defiance of the tsar’s clear wish to keep our son for himself I was more the revolutionary, was I not? On my knees I called out to Niki as he turned from me toward the car, Tsar-Batiushka, remember Taras Bulba!, an incantation so bizarre the entire party halted, the soldiers, the Cossacks, even Kobylinsky, atop the car, and Niki, one hand on the car’s open door. Would Niki remember the opera whose hero gave up his country for the love of a young Polish girl? Would he remember how he had once toyed with me in his letter, playing at giving up the crown for me? Now his crown was gone. I needed him only to give up our son.
Unexpectedly, Niki laughed. Yes. He remembered Taras Bulba, and he laughed. And when he turned from me, decisively, still smiling, it was to grasp Vova by the shoulders as he stood on the running board of le grand Son Impérial Majesté, to guide him away from the car. And then, after a triple kiss to my son’s cheeks and an embrace, he whispered something into his ear and pushed him along in my direction, saying aloud, Go. But to my frustration Vova did not run toward me, but moved vaguely, like a somnambulist, so that I began to wonder if he, too, had not been drugged by the dispensary of Dr. Botkin, and I clapped my hands at him as if he were a dog—hurry, hurry—even as the weeping girls, their faces contorted, had the girls become so attached to my son in this short time?, began now to climb from their seats, while Niki tried to hold them back. I had disrupted the entire convoy! Vova looked over his shoulder at Niki as if hoping to be called back. What madness was this?
Through the tall thin trees I could see the tiny figure of Sergei watching helplessly from the road. I turned back. Vova had neared the last Cossack, the one with the big fist, a hulking man with a beard that spread across his chest like a shield, and just as he was almost within reach of me, the soldiers, infuriated that their fellows had not impeded this decision of the tsar, recovered themselves and shouted out orders of their own. Prisoners were not to give orders. Nicholas Romanov was no longer tsar. The boy would come with them. The Cossack reached down and gripped Vova, mid-step, by the neck, and I could see Vova’s features twist in pain; with this, he seemed, finally, to wake. He took in my small shape, my dark hair beneath my babushka, my brown eyes, and when I smiled at him, encouragingly, the distinct outward tilt of my dog teeth: the peasant woman in front of him was his mother, and his mouth opened. I thought he might speak, but whatever word he thought to say became a wince as the Cossack, still holding Vova, began to turn his horse around to lead him back. Seeing this, Niki barked, Ostanovites!—Stop!—with such authority that all these men, the Cossacks still enough the tsar’s servants, the soldiers still so much the peasant with their hundreds of years of subjugation at the hands of the squire, paused. Even the Cossack’s horse paused, one hoof in the air to await the pleasure of the master.
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 33