The Curse of the Romanovs

by Staton Rabin

  “Alexei—your voice! It’s changing!”

  “What?”

  She was right. I could hear my voice crack, then get lower. A cool breeze suddenly brushed my wrists. My shirt cuffs were moving up my arms!

  “Your arms!” Varda said. “They’re growing!”

  Once again, she was right. I watched in horror as my white sticklike arms appeared before my eyes in the bright summer sun. My legs felt strange, and then I looked down to find my ankles showing, as my pants grew shorter on my legs. And the glass cuts and blood on my feet disappeared before my very eyes!

  “Alexei!” Varda said, staring at me like she had just seen the ghost of Ivan the Terrible. “I—I don’t think you’re twelve years old anymore.”

  I nodded, too afraid to hear the sound of my own new deep voice. At last I cleared my throat and spoke again.

  “How—how old do I look?”

  She looked me over, turning me around.

  “I don’t know. At least thirteen, I guess. Maybe fourteen. You look like the boys whose bar mitzvahs I’ve gone to.”

  “Varda, what is happening to me?”

  “I don’t know. But my guess is we must have returned to Russia about a couple of years after you left! So that’s why you’re older.”

  “Varda, this—this is terrible!”

  “Well, it’s not so bad, really,” she said, eyeing me in a strange new way. “I mean, you’re kind of a hunk …”

  “Nyet, I mean—what if we are too late to save them? What if my family is already dead? Varda, show me your book.”

  “Book? What book?”

  “Your book, your book! Russian history.”

  “I—I left it at home.”

  “What? We need book!”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m a mind reader, you know! You didn’t tell me to take it—and you only gave me about three seconds’ notice before we did the time travel mumbo jumbo, remember?”

  “Without book how will we know when my family is killed, where, by who—how they were taken? We will never find them in time!”

  “Look, don’t get all Russian gloomy on me, okay? We’re not beat yet. Maybe it’s not too late. Hey, wait a minute! How come if it’s 1918 and you’re older now, I’m not, like, minus seventy-seven?”

  “When I left home to go to 2010, I stay same age I was when left Russia—as long as I return to same year. When you leave home in 2010, you stay same age you were then. Da?”

  She shrugged. “Makes sense.”

  “Tickets! Where’s your tickets?” the man in the uniform barked at us. The line had moved up and we now stood before the door to the palace.

  “What tickets?” I said.

  “What did that bozo say?” Varda asked. I translated for her.

  “What did she say?” the man asked me, a suspicious glint in his eye.

  “She said, ‘What did nice man say?’”

  “Never mind, you!” the man said, pushing us along. “Keep moving!”

  The rooms of the palace were filled with people. But I recognized no one. I smelled the familiar odor of rose oil from our icon lamps—but the icons and lamps were gone! The walls were stripped of their tapestries and paintings, our books were packed up in open boxes. Where are the servants? Where is my family?

  A group of several dozen ragged children entered the room.

  “Orphans, all orphans, line up over here! Boys on left, girls on right!” a woman announced. The children lined up in two rows in front of her. “You’ll be living in the royal children’s rooms. Upstairs, now—double time!”

  What?

  A very heavy peasant woman wearing dirty clothes sat right down on my favorite chair, which had a big white tag attached to it that read TSARSKOYE SELO, ROCKING CHAIR, ITEM #4763. “Look at me! I’m the tsarina!” she said, putting a round bialy roll on her head like a crown and rocking faster and faster. CRACK! My chair split in two, and the woman tumbled to the floor with a thump!

  A man picked up a book and read the inscription mockingly to his wife, who was standing next to him.

  “‘For my darling Alix Xmas 1912 fr. Nicky.’ How charming….”

  “Give that to me!” I snatched the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from him. He snatched the book right back. “Take your dirty hands off that!” I said. “It’s mine!”

  “Oh, it’s yours, is it, comrade? And who appointed you tsar?”

  I grabbed for the book again, and we each pulled on it furiously in a tug-of-war.

  “There, now! Are you satisfied?” he said. “Look what you’ve done!” The book had torn in two.

  I wept bitterly. Varda put a comforting hand on my shoulder.

  A guard walked into the room. He spat on the parquet floor.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “This boy! He has desecrated state property!”

  The man showed the guard the two halves of the torn book.

  The guard grabbed me by the collar.

  “This is a museum, not a school yard for brawling!”

  “Museum?”

  “Get out!”

  The guard yanked me with one hand, and Varda with the other, tossing us out the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “WHAT HAVE THEY DONE WITH MY FAMILY?”

  Varda and I paced Alexander Park at Tsarskoye Selo, trying to think what to do next.

  “Varda, you must remember! What did your history teacher say about murders?”

  Her face scrunched up as if she were trying very hard to remember.

  “All I know is that he said the tsar and his family were assassinated by the Bolsheviks. In the summer of 1918.”

  “Well, is summer now—we find out year! What date in summer was family killed? Where? Please, Varda, think!”

  “I told you—I don’t know!”

  Varda turned away—bumping right into a pretty young woman who was carrying a big basket containing bundles tied with string. The basket tumbled from the woman’s hands, and she fell in a heap on the grass.

  “Idiot!”—or worse—she seemed to mutter in a language (Yiddish?) that I didn’t understand.

  “I’m so sorry!” Varda said, helping her up. Varda stooped to pick up the bundles while the woman talked to herself angrily.

  “Alexei!” Varda said, waving a bundle at me. “Look! She has newspapers!”

  “Excuse me, miss,” Varda said, using her hands to act out her words. “Can I borrow your newspaper?”

  The woman scowled, waiting in vain for a kopeck. Then she reluctantly handed Varda a paper.

  I read the headline—TROTSKY’S RED ARMY BEATS BACK WHITE GUARD—and the date.

  “July 10, 1918! This is Pravda—revolutionary worker’s newspaper,” I said to Varda. “Papa shut down this paper years ago. Is back! This mean Bolsheviks already in charge of country!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Da! Mother of God! They are worst of worst!”

  “Don’t panic, maybe it’s not too late! Hey! Maybe this lady knows something. Ask her what they did with the royal family!”

  I asked the young woman if she could speak Russian. She replied “Da,” so I asked her Varda’s question.

  “Abdicated!” I said in Russian after listening to her long reply. The woman nodded vigorously.

  I turned to Varda. “Papa must have been forced! He would never abandon Mother Russia!”

  “Forced to do what?” Varda said anxiously. “What’s she saying?”

  I motioned for Varda to be silent, then turned back to the young woman.

  “Did no one try to save the Romanovs?”

  “Nyet!” she said, and continued to explain, waving her hands and talking rapidly.

  “Alexei—for God’s sake, tell me what she’s saying!”

  “She says that after tsar abdicate last year, new government hold royal family under house arrest here for months. Then last summer local peasants spot some men putting tsar and tsarina and their girls on train with traveling bags. Peasants did not see t
he heir. She says family look very sad. This is all she knows.”

  Suddenly the woman stepped closer to Varda and me—eyeing our clothing curiously. Fortunately, till now nobody seemed to notice how strangely we were dressed; the peasants wore badly matched clothing themselves, and were too busy with their own problems to study ours. But then the woman put her nose close to mine and inspected my face. I felt a trickle of cold sweat run down my cheek.

  “We have met before, da?” she said, looking at me with suspicion. “What is your name, comrade?”

  I prayed that she didn’t recognize me from pictures as the tsar’s son.

  “Uh … Lance,” I replied. “Lance Armstrongovich. What is yours?”

  “Tillie Spivack,” she said.

  “Tillie Spivack!” Varda said, grabbing my shirt sleeve. “Ask her if she’s a Russian Jew from Omsk and has a son named Josef. Tell her I am a friend, and not to be afraid.”

  I asked the woman Varda’s question.

  “Da!” she replied.

  “Alexei!” Varda said, tugging my sleeve. “This woman—she’s my great-great grandmother! The one in that photo I showed you!”

  “Is so?”

  “That’s why we ended up here—the river of time brought us right to one of my relatives!”

  “Now I know where Varda got bad temper!”

  “Very funny. Wow, this is way cool. Look, I want to hang out with Tillie for a while.”

  “Varda, my family is in danger. We must go! We travel to Petrograd. Maybe we find out more there,” I said, starting to walk away.

  “Just give me a few minutes with my bubbe!”

  “Your what?”

  “That’s Yiddish for ‘grandma.’ I know some Yiddish; I bet she speaks it—all the Russian Jews did. I want to talk with her.”

  “No! We leave now!”

  Varda frowned, sighed, and followed me.

  “Tyrant,” she said, kicking the dirt with her feet as she walked.

  Varda’s great-great-grandmother had already wandered off, busy handing out newspapers in exchange for kopecks.

  As we crossed Alexander Park to get to the train station, we passed a tree. I stuck my hand in the knothole.

  “What are you doing?” Varda asked.

  I pulled a small book—this book—out of the tree.

  “Story of Alexei’s life. The Curse of the Romanovs,” I said. “Book I am writing.”

  “Why do you keep it in a tree?”

  “So secret police won’t find. So nosy sisters won’t find.”

  I remembered the last thing I wrote before I went to the future. It was the beginning of Chapter 11, when I asked Gilliard to take me to Petrograd to see Cousin Felix.

  “Can I read it?” Varda asked me.

  “Someday … maybe,” I said.

  I put the book in my front pocket. I swear by the Holy Mother, while I live, it shall never again leave my side!

  I would catch up on writing my story at every possible moment. I would have to write much faster now—not knowing what my sudba might be.

  I showed Varda a letter carved into the tree bark.

  “See this?” She nodded. “That is where my grandpa Sasha carved his initial, long time ago. This is how I make sure find right tree where book is.”

  “Why are you writing a book?”

  “Many people tell lies about my family! Alexei Nikolaevich does not tell lies.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  WE STOLE A RIDE TO PETROGRAD in the back of a peasant’s wagon—hiding under sacks filled with duck down. The feathers made such a cozy bed that I soon drifted off to sleep. I was very weary, and don’t know how long I slept.

  “Alexei!” Varda whispered, rudely nudging me from tender dreams of Prianik medoviy (honey cakes). “I think we’re here.”

  The wagon had come to a stop. Petrograd! We hopped off and dashed away before the driver could catch a glimpse of us.

  The first thing I noticed in Petrograd was something quite amazing: The sky was blue. Now, you may not think this a very strange thing. But the smoke from our factories used to make the skies always gray here. I guessed that the factories must not be so busy anymore.

  The streets had very few people on them compared to the Petrograd I remembered. Many of the people were very thin and coughing, or otherwise looked ill. And everywhere there were big ugly machine guns, with soldiers behind them eyeing everyone with suspicion.

  A group of unshaven men wearing drab tunics and carrying rifles on their shoulders marched down the street at a goose step. They were headed straight for us!

  “Come quickly!” I said, grabbing Varda by the arm. “Through alley!”

  Breathless, we hid behind some waste cans at the side of a building. Stomp-stomp-stomp! The soldiers passed by us so closely that I could smell the sweat of a thousand forced marches. I couldn’t resist taking a quick peek at them. Ah! So these pitiful-looking specimens are the fearsome Red Army of the Bolsheviks! Not at all the spit-and-polish soldiers of Papa’s Imperial Guard!

  I squinted against the bright sunlight reflecting off the shiny bayonets on their Mosin-Nagant rifles. Then I watched the regiment march out of view.

  Varda and I stayed hidden until the rhythmic beat of the soldiers’ boots faded to nothing and we were sure we were not being followed.

  On the brick wall of the building, old posters with my papa’s handsome face on them hung by a thread, in tatters. Pasted up in their place were other posters. One showed a man waving his fist and shouting—with the caption: COMRADE LENIN LEADS US TO ULTIMATE VICTORY! He had a pointy beard, like the devil, and a lot of hair under his nose—but very little on top of his head. I could tell I would not like this Mr. Lenin.

  Another poster showed the tsar, a priest, and a rich man “on the shoulders of the laboring people,” crushing and whipping them. What lies! FOR THE RED ARMY, THERE ARE NO OBSTACLES! another illustration proclaimed, as a line of soldiers snaked up the mountains toward a brilliant sun. One poster had a woman on it carrying a basket of food on her shoulders. It said WOMEN, GO INTO COOPERATIVES!

  “Look! Shoes!” Varda said, handing me a discarded pair of men’s boots she’d found in the waste can. They had holes but fit me not too badly.

  As Varda and I rounded the bend of the alley, we saw a bent old woman waving a heavy cane and cornering a big bony rat in an alley.

  “Come here, lyubimaya, come to mama,” she said.

  It hissed at her. She hit the rat many times. With a final hiss, like the air going out of a bicycle tire, the rat was silent. Then she picked it up by its pink tail, letting it spin in circles as she studied it with appreciation. The woman licked her thin lips.

  We watched, mouths dropped open in fascinated horror.

  “Keep away from me!” she snarled, swinging her cane wildly at us. “Go find your own supper!”

  We backed away from her, then ran across the street. Pausing to catch our breath, we sat down on the stairs of the Smolny Institute, a school for young noble girls.

  “Do you know anyone in Petrograd who might be able to help us?” Varda asked me. “Someone who might know where your family was taken?”

  I shook my head, then suddenly remembered: “Wait! Do know someone! Someone … wonderful!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “YOU’LL FIND HIM THERE,” SAID A STAGEHAND, pointing to a side entrance of the building. “Poor devil,” he muttered mysteriously, shaking his head.

  We entered and walked to the back of the empty theater.

  Onstage, completely alone, was Vaslav Nijinsky—dancing like a man possessed, to music that only he could hear. He danced across the empty stage of the Mariinsky with a strange and jerky motion, as if pulled by invisible strings. This was a role I’d seen him dance before: Petrouchka, the lovesick wooden puppet who was hacked to pieces by his rival, the Moor, only to rise and dance again. But now Nijinksy moved as if he did not care whether he danced himself to death. Sweat poured in rivers down his bare arms and ch
est, his feet bled. His eyes looked dark and hollow; I could count his ribs.

  Nijinsky had not seen us come in. He suddenly stopped, turned to his right, listening—as if he’d heard someone speak to him from the audience. He addressed a row of empty seats.

  “I showed my wife the blood on my feet. She does not like blood. I told her that blood was war and I do not like war.”

  He cocked his ear and listened again—to no one.

  “You are wrong! My wife, she love me very much! She is just afraid for me because I played nervously today. Come closer—I tell you secret …” He leaned forward as if whispering in someone’s ear. “I played nervously because the audience will understand me better if I am nervous. I was nervous because God wanted to arouse the audience. The audience came to be amused. They thought Nijinsky dance to amuse them! Ha! I dance frightening things. They are frightened of me and think that I want to kill them. I do not want to kill anyone. I love everyone, but no one loves me!”

  He tore at his hair, and sat down on the wooden floor, face in his hands.

  “Alexei,” Varda whispered nervously in my ear. “He’s just acting—isn’t he?”

  “I—I don’t think so,” I whispered back.

  Nijinsky suddenly looked up and noticed us.

  “And you!” he said, pointing to us with a shaky finger. “You are worst of all!”

  “Is me, Vaslav. Alexei. Alexei Romanov, the tsarevich. Remember?”

  “Why do you laugh at Nijinsky!”

  “I—I did not laugh.”

  “The audience started laughing! I started laughing. I laughed at my dance. The audience understood my dance, for they wanted to dance too. I danced badly because I kept falling on floor when did not have to. The audience not care because I dance beautifully. They understood my tricks and enjoy themselves! I wanted to dance more, but God say to me: ‘Enough!’ I stopped.”

  Suddenly he leaped up, his head snapping toward the wings.

  “He comes for me!”

  We looked where he was looking, but saw or heard no one. “Who—who is coming for you?”

  “The Moor! He will stop at nothing to kill Petrouchka! Quick—we must hide!”

  He crouched down on the stage, curling up into a ball, his hands over his head. He trembled, and we could hear the sound of quiet weeping.