by Ariel Lawhon
October 8, 1943
Anna is in bed when the bombs begin to fall. Her apartment is on the third floor of an old building near the Marstall Gate along the bank of the river Leine. The one-bedroom flat has high ceilings, wood floors, and exposed brick walls. Ample windows. Sparse, gently used furniture. There is wallpaper in the bathroom and rusty plumbing throughout. The place smells of lemon oil, mothballs, dust, and cedar. Somehow this combination means home to her, now that she has been here for almost five years. This is the first time since the boardinghouse in Berlin that she has lived entirely by herself, and even though it was a strange adjustment at first, she has grown to love the independence and the solitude. Anna loves the quiet.
No, not quiet. Not now. It is nearly one in the morning and the air is filled with thunder and chaos. Earsplitting bedlam.
As Anna stumbles out of bed the room is lit with a blinding white light. Like a spotlight. Like a vision. The way she imagines it will be when she passes into eternity. And that is her first thought, that she has died, and it is only the raging sound of explosions that convinces her she is still alive.
For now.
Anna blinks furiously and finally sees something out the window. It hangs from a streetlight at the corner, right outside her building, glowing a phosphorescent white. A Christmas tree. But not the kind of tree cut and decorated during the holidays. This is the sort dropped from the warplanes flown by the Allied forces. A nickname given to the parachute flares that mark a designated target on the ground. And there, several blocks farther down the street, is another. They always come in fours, tidily boxing in their targets. Anna does not wait to see where the others will land.
Muscle memory is an odd thing. Linked to music and athletics and survival. Anna does not even have to tell her limbs to move, to run. They do it on their own. She’s across the room, yanking open the top drawer of her dresser before she has time to register a single coherent thought.
Anna’s thin cotton nightgown falls to her ankles. She wears nothing beneath it, but she does not have time to dress, so she yanks a pile of clothing from her closet and throws it into a suitcase. Then she dumps the contents of the dresser drawer into it as well. A photo album. An icon. A chess set. A paper knife. Keepsakes from a former life that she will not leave behind, cards she might yet need to play.
Boots. She pulls them over her feet but does not lace them. No socks. No stockings. Her toes are cold.
A long, heavy coat hangs on a hook by the door. She yanks it over her shoulders and down her arms. It is not belted or buttoned. There is no time. She tears through the apartment and out her front door.
Anna crosses the landing and plunges down three flights of stairs, holding her suitcase in one hand and the stair rail in the other. She flies down, her feet barely touching the worn wooden steps. Heart banging in her chest. Breath catching in her throat every time the roof rattles and the walls shake. Another blinding flash of cruel white light. The third Christmas tree.
Run for the cellar. It is the single thought she is able to form as she goes down, down, down those steps. And then the lobby with its chipped tile and heavy door. A hard left and she darts down the hallway. Other people are there, but she does not stop and greet them. She runs. They all run. A child cries. A woman cries. A man curses.
Another door.
Another set of stairs descending into darkness, and Anna is only two-thirds of the way down before she is knocked off her feet and sent tumbling down the remaining five steps to land on her knees on the hard concrete floor. The impact sends a jolt of pain through her entire body. She can feel it in her teeth, at the back of her skull. Someone trips over her. Curses. She crawls toward the wall and curls into a ball, suitcase between her knees, hands over her ears, eyes squeezed shut.
The air around her vibrates, filled with the screaming of people and the screaming of bombs, and then one eerie moment of total silence as that sickening white light from the fourth flair spills into the cellar. The single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling explodes, illuminating for one morbid second the terrified faces around her.
And then the air is ripped apart.
* * *
—
In the morning there is nothing left but scattered bricks and splintered timber. No building. No apartment. The residents who made it into the cellar step out into the grim reality of Armageddon. The Allied forces had not been targeting their building after all, but something farther down the street. She knows this only because of the ten-foot crater in the ground a block away. The shock of the explosion flattened her building, but those structures that were beside the crater were decimated, turned to ash. In the other direction the buildings are still standing, but their windows and doors are gone, like missing teeth in blackened skulls. Anna cannot bear to look at the people who wander, stricken, through the rubble. The air is filled with soot and ash, with the wailing of women and the blare of distant sirens.
What remains of Hannover is on fire. Smoke billows upward, in every direction, and it takes Anna several minutes to find the sun, to orient herself. Two blocks, picking her way through the rubble—bricks and posts and bits of furniture, bits of people—and she sees the Marstall Gate. It stands unscathed, its white stone arch is eerily pristine, without so much as a crack or a smudge of soot. Anna passes through and finds the footpaths along the river to be mercifully clear of debris.
She stops long enough to wash her face and hands, to tie her boots and belt her coat. Then she walks south, toward Winterstein.
· 10 ·
Anastasia
EXILE
1917
Cherepovets, Russia
August 1
“From Gleb,” Dr. Botkin says, setting a small, round bundle in my hand. I fold back the edges of his crisp white monogrammed handkerchief to find a pear. “It should be ripe in a day or two.”
“How—”
“He made me promise I’d deliver it to you. And he was very specific. This pear, not any of the others. And only once we’d left.” Botkin sits down beside me and rests his heavy, warm hand on my shoulder. “He said they’re your favorite.”
“They are.” Emotion, heavy and scratching, lodges at the back of my throat. I have to clear it before I can speak. “Thank you.”
It is the Krazulya pear Gleb saw me admiring that day in the garden. I didn’t let him climb the tree and fetch it for me, but he found a way to make sure I got it anyway. Stupid, stubborn, sweet boy. A ridiculous gesture. Totally unnecessary. I blink hard, pushing back tears.
“Keep the handkerchief,” Botkin says, then leaves the compartment and slides the door shut behind him.
I press Botkin’s handkerchief to my face and stifle a sob. My mother is a weeper. My sisters as well. But I want to be a different sort of woman. A woman like my great-grandmother, Queen Victoria of England. A woman so calm and collected and sure of herself that she is called a brass-plated bitch behind closed doors. I doubt very much that such a simple gift, an unexpected act of kindness, would make her go to pieces. Yet here I am, wiping snot on Dr. Botkin’s linen kerchief.
Jimmy presses his cold, wet nose into my hand and I glance up to see those great pale eyes looking at me curiously, his ears turned forward and pitched like a tent. I refuse to believe that animals are incapable of emotion, that they cannot communicate. Jimmy has always possessed a preternatural ability to sense what I am feeling and to comfort me when necessary.
“I’m okay,” I whisper and scratch him on the hard knob between his ears. Satisfied that all is well, he flops at my feet again, huffs in contentment, and begins to snore. By the time Alexey enters the compartment several minutes later and sits across from me I am dry eyed and composed once again. At least on the outside. Inside, however, I feel strangely untethered.
Once, when I was very little, I climbed the willow tree in our sitting garden and settled into the crook of a bran
ch to eat a stolen sweet—a jam tart I’d pinched from the kitchen—but I didn’t notice the oozing sap that dripped down the trunk. I leaned against it, and by the time I had licked the crumbs from my fingers, a heavy strand of hair was stuck to the bark. Too proud to call for help, I yanked myself free and lost a patch of hair in the process. That’s how I feel as the train travels eastward, my thumb brushing the thick, firm skin of the pear. Ripped away.
* * *
—
We travel east all day, only stopping at sidings in small towns and sparse villages, but we are never allowed off the train. With every mile Father grows more and more grim. Every hour we travel east, into the sun rather than away from it, means our chances of going to England diminish. Father paces up and down the narrow hallway of our car, peering out the small square windows on either end. Three hundred and fifty soldiers travel with us. Farm boys and villagers mostly. Men conscripted into service at the beginning of the war. Neither political nor dangerous, simply following orders and biding their time until they can go home. They are crammed into the other train cars, practically spilling out the windows. Our car remains mercifully private except for Leshy, Semyon, and the boy called Tomas, all of whom watch us carefully anytime the train slows.
When Father isn’t pacing the hallway, he sits with Mother in their compartment, methodically tracking each train station we pass, trying to decipher our destination as though it’s some puzzle he must solve. I hear them once, discussing our route.
“Tikhvin. Cherepovets. Shavra.” Father taps the map with his pencil. “We’re still going east.”
“I don’t even remember these places,” Mother says.
“That’s because we’ve never been to them.”
“Is that the point, then? Drag us around the whole of Russia and humiliate us?”
“No, Alix,” he whispers. “I think they have something else in mind.”
I do not stay to hear what he thinks that something else might be, but seek out Botkin for a game of dominoes instead. Only a small retinue of servants has been allowed to travel with us. Dr. Botkin. Dova. Cook. And Alexey Trupp, father’s valet, who we simply call Trupp because Mother insists there are already too many Alexeys in our household. Everyone else has been sent away, back to their homes, to relative safety. These four refuse to abandon us, and my affection for them increases daily as a result. Our tutor, Pierre Gilliard, will join us once we reach our final destination.
I spend the afternoon distracting myself with endless games of dominoes and whist. Botkin, ever the gentleman, lets me win four times.
Dinner comes and goes, served to us in our compartment by an Armenian chef hired by the railway line. Cook has been forbidden to leave our train car or help in the galley, so he takes his meal with a sour face and a poor attitude, complaining all the while that the meat is dry. But the simple meal of roasted chicken and vegetables tastes fine to me. It comes with hot bread and is wonderfully seasoned. I don’t even realize how hungry I am until I find my plate empty. I want more but am unsure whether that’s allowed, so I let my dish be cleared away without speaking a word.
The sun is setting when Leshy finally orders the train to stop so we can stretch our legs. He unwinds his long, rangy body from where he sits beside the door, and leads us outside. There is no station, no railway siding to be seen. Only rolling green fields, dotted with trees and bushes, stretching out in either direction.
Joy, Jimmy, and Ortimo, so eager to relieve themselves, are out, darting between our legs, before any of us can get down the stairs. My parents drift off to speak in low whispers while Alexey and my sisters pick bilberries in a low, scrubby hedge.
“You have fifteen minutes,” Semyon announces. Ortimo scuttles away at the harsh sound of his voice, and I see Tomas’s brows draw tight beneath the brim of his cap. He says nothing but simply wanders off a short distance and watches us patiently. Semyon, however, slides the bolt on his rifle and rests it against his shoulder, ready, I presume, in the event that any of us decides to run. “Stay near the train!” he shouts.
I press my heels against the tracks and take Gleb’s pear from my pocket. The setting sun washes the clouds with a gentle pink that matches the skin of the Krazulya, and I take it for a sign as I bite deeply into the flesh. For once Botkin is wrong. The pear is perfectly, deliciously ripe, and I eat the whole thing, seeds, stem, and core, as the sun disappears below the horizon.
When the whistle blows we all file back toward the train. Semyon stands by the door to our car, waiting, I think, to kick Ortimo as he passes. But Tatiana scoops the little dog into her arms and steps up into the train with her nose in the air. Jimmy stays by my side, attentive and protective as I fall back to walk beside Father. I lean my head against his arm. “Where do you think they’re taking us?”
He pulls me closer and kisses the top of my head. His voice tightens when he says, “To Siberia.”
FIVE DAYS LATER
Tyumen, Russia
August 6
The penal colonies were established in the early 1800s as a means of punishing criminals, dissidents, and anyone else who ruffled the sensitive feathers of my forefathers. I know this, of course I know this. Pierre Gilliard has covered this, along with all of the other grand, sweeping moments of Russian history. But to the best of my knowledge—which I can now admit is grossly insufficient—we are the first royals in history to be condemned to this legendary exile.
We continue rolling east through Katen, Chaikovsky, Perm, Kamyshevo, Poklevskaya, and Ekaterinburg. I am stiff and sore and tired. Every mile in that rattling, old train multiplies into an eternity. I cannot get comfortable. I cannot focus on my thoughts or the book laid open in my lap. The thunder of the tracks pounds in my ears constantly, setting my nerves on edge. The dogs whine. None of us have bathed, and we’ve barely slept since leaving Tsarskoe Selo. So it’s understandable that, when the train finally pulls to a stop in Tyumen near midnight, we stupidly think our journey is at an end. That is until Leshy orders that our belongings be loaded onto a steamer whose engine is chugging like a tubercular old man beside the dock.
Father, exhausted and belligerent, marches toward him with fists balled. “What is the meaning of this? Why must we leave the train?”
Leshy plucks the cigar from his mouth and blows a cloud of smoke in Father’s face. “The tracks stop here.” As Father coughs he adds, “Count yourself lucky. Boats can make the passage only a few months each summer. If this were winter you’d be traveling by horse and cart.”
It takes hours to load our belongings onto the ship, with those weary, bitter soldiers trudging back and forth, single file, from the train to the ship carrying boxes and trunks and furniture. It is not until dawn that the great, lumbering steamer, Rus, pulls away from the dock and into the muddy current.
Brown water. Brown riverbanks. Brown fields. Brown huts. The occasional brown-clad peasant. That’s all we see until the next day when we merge first into the Tobol River and then, later, into the Irtysh and the marshes of eastern Siberia.
We have no rooms on board the Rus, only hard berths and scratchy blankets in the great, cavernous hold. There is no privacy, no separation from the soldiers, and very little in the way of facilities. The hold smells of bad plumbing and unwashed males, so I stay on deck with Father until forced to bed that second night. We keep to our designated corner, in bunks stacked three high, while Botkin, Trupp, and Cook take turns keeping watch. They do not like the way Semyon leers at us in the darkness, the way he stares shamelessly. Twice I wake to Jimmy’s low warning growl as Semyon passes near Olga’s bunk. I can feel the rumble against my legs, and I see the points of Jimmy’s sharp, white teeth flashing in the dark. I sleep, finally, but in fits and starts, while Jimmy lies curled beside me, head resting on his paws, his pale blue eyes gleaming in the dark.
I am up before dawn to join Father on the deck. As always, Jimmy follows close behind. The breeze
is minimal but the air is clean, and Father smokes his pipe at the rail, telling me stories of his childhood and his travels. I pay no attention to the details, but rather listen to the cadence of his voice, taking comfort when he sets his hand atop my head, when he drapes an arm around my shoulders, in the sweet, rich smell of his pipe.
When breakfast comes I have no appetite whatsoever, so I feed the cold eggs and boiled potatoes to Jimmy. Father takes his portion without complaint and eats it quickly. I marvel at his ability to chew and swallow without tasting or grimacing. He is notoriously picky with Cook at home, yet suddenly his palate seems to have lost all discernment.
“That is the home of Grigory Rasputin,” Father says an hour later, pointing toward a white stone house, high on the bank after we pass through Pokrovskoe. He doesn’t exactly spit the words, but there is no fondness in his tone.
“Should I get Mother?”
“No. It will only trouble her.”
We stand in silence, watching the house fade into the distance. Rasputin came from the borderlands of Russia, only to rise in Mother’s favor, and then in power. He embedded himself in our lives. His daughter, Maria, was even my friend for a time. We played together as young children. And then it was all over. Rasputin’s end was grisly, and here we are, passing his beginnings. Fate does twist her knife in the most unexpected ways.
Mercifully, our journey comes to a close late that afternoon. We are greeted in Tobolsk, at the far reaches of Siberia, by two memorable things as the Rus chuggs into position against the dock: church bells peeling loud across the city and mosquitoes the size of bumblebees. A ringing in one ear and a buzzing in the other.
“We have been delivered to hell,” Father says, swatting at his neck, then wiping a bloody smudge on his pant leg. “And they are celebrating.”
· 11 ·