by Staton Rabin
“Da,” I said. “Is Trans-Siberian route. But only goes as far as Tyumen—that’s nearest stop to Tobolsk. We take boat or horses from there.”
“Do you think there are any other people on this train?”
“Engineer. Train cannot drive itself, da?”
“I mean passengers.”
“Maybe,” I said. “War trains carry soldiers, peasants, food, supplies—all on same train. Owners keep cargo secret from passengers.”
“Let’s look in the other cars. Maybe we can find someone who knows what happened to your family.”
The rain was coming down like Noah’s flood.
“Watch step! Take my hand,” I told Varda, helping her pass between cars of the moving train. “Is slippery.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” she said not quite seriously.
We entered the next car. Varda stood staring in amazement at what we found there.
“Jeez. This place has more guns than an NRA pep rally.”
“Hmmm … Eierhandgranate,” I said, inspecting the weapons.
“Huh?”
“Egg bombs, German hand grenades. You just pull pin, and—Ka-boom! Red Army must have captured these from enemy.” I pointed to some big weapons on wheels. “Maxim Sokolov machine guns, old 1910 model. All steel, 7.62 × 54 mm R caliber, muzzle velocity eight hundred sixty meter per second.”
“How do you know all that?”
“Will command Russian army someday. Is my job to know.”
We passed into the next car, and found it crowded with miserable-looking peasants and tired, dusty soldiers. Everyone smelled like old sweat and cheap wine.
“Excuse, please,” I said, as we squeezed past a bunch of them. We were lucky to find a seat.
After a few minutes a smelly, ragged peddler, wearing a dark hood despite the warm weather, came down the aisle. He was carrying a box of goods on a strap that hung from his neck.
“Rags, sewing notions, sundries!” People scowled and shook their heads or ignored him.
He offered us his goods.
“Nyet, spasibo,” I said.
“Ah, but insist take closer look at this,” he said, removing an item from the box and holding it up for my examination. “Might find of particular interest…”
It was a knitting needle.
Mother of God! Him!
“Varda! Run!” I shouted, yanking her up by the sleeve.
We forced our way through the crowd and leaped into the gap between the moving train cars.
I took a quick glance behind us. Father Grigory was only steps behind—but his goods tray got stuck between the car doors. He was struggling to remove the strap from his neck to get free.
“Up there!” I shouted to Varda, pointing to the roof of the train. Rain pounded down in a steady stream, like machine gun bullets on metal. “Quick!”
“No way!”
I ignored her protests and dragged her up the rainslick metal ladder after me.
“Alexei, you’ll fall!”
We crawled onto the roof of the galloping train, clinging to it desperately like baby possums clutching the fur on their mother’s back. Then we rose slowly to our feet like drunken sailors who can’t get their sea legs. The train roared over the Ural Mountains, sending puffs of hot black smoke high into the air.
“Alyosha!” Father Grigory had scrambled up onto the roof after us! “In name of God, stop!”
He scrambled to his feet and barreled after us. Varda and I came to the edge of a five-foot gap between roofs of the moving cars.
I grabbed her hand. “Jump!”
But Varda stood frozen with fear.
Crack!
Lightning struck the train’s first car just in front of us. There was nowhere left to run. Trapped!
“Do not fear,” Father Grigory said, making the sign of the cross as he approached us. “I have come to help Alexei save his family.”
“What?” Varda said.
“If Bolsheviks kill Romanovs, it is end of Mother Russia, end of church—end of all that is holy. Do you not see? We must help each other and save them.”
“You tried to kill me!” I said.
“A thousand times I save your life. And, da, once in anger I try to take it—after you and Felix try to take mine! Have you forgotten? I pray to Holy Mother to forgive you. I have forgive. Now I ask you to forgive me! For sake of your family, your country.”
“Liar!” Varda said. “Don’t believe him, Alexei!”
“Girl is wise,” he replied. “Father Grigory not always to be trusted, da? But this you know is true: We need each other, Alyoshenka! And Mother Russia, she need us both—more than ever now.”
I glanced at Varda, and saw in her eyes what she was about to do. She dashed behind Father Grigory and pushed him.
With a scream he slipped and fell between the cars. At the last second he grabbed onto one of them. Barely hanging on with one hand, he dangled only a few feet above the powerful rolling wheels of the speeding train.
Father Grigory made a desperate grab for the railing with his other hand, trying to pull himself up—but it was too far away. His muscles shook from the strain of hanging on; his eyes pleaded for my help. “You and I, one cannot exist without the other. Like bread needs salt.” He stared at me, eyes boring into my soul. “And like son needs his father”
His words hit me like a thunderbolt.
“Da, is true, Alexei. Did you never suspect it? Why you think I leave wife and family alone in Siberia to help sickly boy? How did tsar with nothing but daughters suddenly have son? From sorcerer’s magic or miracle prayers to saints? Pah! Look into mirror, Alyoshenka. Look very hard. Eyes you will see looking back at you are mine.”
Could it be? “You are my—”
Father Grigory nodded.
Suddenly everything I had seen between him and my mother, everything that had happened in my life, made perfect sense. Wherever I went—past, present, or future—this was why he was always able to find me. And, in truth, I had suspected it all along.
Father Grigory’s strength gave out, he slipped farther toward the deadly rails. He made one last, desperate reach toward me.
It was as if Varda could read my mind.
“No, Alexei!” Varda shouted.
But I had made my decision. I grabbed Father Grigory’s hand, and with the last untsiya of my strength and his, pulled him back to safety on the train.
“God bless you, my boy,” he said, tears in his eyes. He kissed my hand, then put it to his chest. “When Alexei bleeds, Grigory bleeds. When Alexei suffers, Grigory suffers too. This is how God made it, and how will always be. As long as my strong blood runs in your fragile veins, and your warm heart beats in mine.”
Could he be trusted? Somehow I knew that in this, at least, he could.
But whatever the truth about the circumstances of my birth, I was still the tsarevich. And my mother, sisters, and the tsar—the good man who’d raised me—were still the family that I loved. I owed them everything. And I would do anything in my power—anything!—to save them.
“Father, do you know where they’ve taken my family in Tobolsk?”
“They are in Tobolsk no more,” Father Grigory said. “Am told Bolsheviks move them to Ekaterinburg here in Ural Mountains last May.”
Varda asked the question I was afraid to ask myself.
“Are they still alive?”
“Da! For now. But who knows what godless Ural Soviet will do to them. There is not much time!”
“How far are we from Ekaterinburg?” Varda asked me.
“We are in luck,” I said, peeking at her watch. “Next train stop.” She looked impressed at my ready answer, but I pretended humility and shrugged. “Tsarevich knows railroad time tables in Russia like babies know mother’s breast.”
We climbed back down the ladder and found a seat inside the train compartment.
Two soldiers were staring at us. I suddenly realized my fake beard was hanging half oif my face! I struggled to put it back
on, but it wouldn’t stick. Then one of the soldiers took a piece of paper out of his pocket that had a photograph on it, and showed it to the other man. They both pointed at us.
“The heir!”
Every head snapped toward me. Father Grigory grabbed my hand, and I grabbed Varda’s. We bolted for the door, knocking over people in our path, as the train wound its way around the mountaintop.
“Stoi!” one of the soldiers shouted. But we kept on running.
He raised his Mauser at me and took careful aim.
“Don’t shoot him!” the other soldier warned, knocking his rifle aside.
“Out of my way!” the other man said, taking aim again. “He’s worth a million rubles alive or dead!”
Thinking quickly, Varda pulled the train’s emergency brake. The train screeched to a violent halt, throwing soldiers and passengers forward on top of each other like a pile of herring.
Father Grigory and I scrambled to our feet and looked out the window. We were thousands of feet up, on the edge of a cliff. But there was a drop of only about ten feet to a narrow rocky ledge.
“You jump, I catch!” he whispered to Varda and me, pulling us by the hands. “Is only hope!”
Father Grigory ran to the front of the car, mumbled a prayer, then leaped out of the train, landing on the narrow ledge. Then he held out his arms to us. Varda went first, then me. He caught both of us, one at a time, in his strong peasant’s arms. The ledge was barely wide enough to hold the three of us.
Several shots rang out.
“Alexei!”
Father Grigory jumped in front of me, shielding me from the bullets with his body. A half-dozen soldiers in the front car were breaking train windows with their rifle butts, then firing down at us like shooting mechanical rabbits in a carnival gallery.
I pushed Varda farther back on the ledge, so they could not get a good bead on her.
“A cigar to the first man who shoots the heir!” one soldier shouted to the others.
The bullets came at us like a swarm of bees, but it was hard for the soldiers to see us through the driving rain.
Suddenly, Father Grigory’s body jerked like Petrouchka. He was hit! His face turned deathly pale, eyes rolling back in his head.
“Do svidaniya, my son,” he whispered with his final breath. “Do not fear—God is with you!”
Father! Do not leave me!
I reached for his hand, but it was too late. Our Friend made the sign of the cross, then tumbled over the side of the rain-swept cliff, to meet his final sudba—alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CRACK!
A bolt of lightning struck a huge pine tree twenty feet from us on the cliff above. Then we heard a sound like the shrieks of the damned in hell.
“Alexei, what’s happening?”
“The tree! It’s going to fall!”
“Which way?”
“Duck and pray!”
We crouched down on the rocky ledge, hands over our heads, preparing for the worst.
A few seconds later we heard a terrible crash.
All was silent like the tombs of my ancestors, then we heard screams and moans of pain. We looked up—the tree had missed us but landed right on the roof of the train, crushing it like a caviar tin.
I looked for a foothold to scramble back up from the ledge.
“Where are you going?” Varda said.
“People injured, they need help.”
“Alexei, those people want to kill you!”
“Not all. Some are innocent! I help them, like Grandpa Sasha did in train crash at Borki.”
She grabbed me by my jacket sleeve.
“Alexei, for God’s sake, listen to me! There’s nothing you can do for those people now. We have no bandages, no plasma. And if you go back in there, they’ll shoot you—or take you prisoner! How will you be able to help your family then?”
But I would not listen to her. I scrambled back up the cliff, slip-sliding all the way, and Varda followed, still trying to stop me.
The train was lying on its side, derailed by the impact of the gigantic tree. I inspected the wreck.
“Alexei—be careful!”
I stepped carefully over the tree trunk and jagged, smoking mass of train metal. We peered into one of the train windows. It was a terrible scene. The soldiers who had been firing at us from the front car lay over the floor and crushed seats—dead.
We entered another one of the train cars, to a chorus of moans of pain.
One old peasant woman on the floor slowly raised her bloody head, staring at me in amazement.
“The tsarevich! Our angel sent from heaven!”
So! Not everyone in Russia is loyal to the Bolshevik cause!
“Are you all right, Mother?” I said to her, checking her forehead and helping her to her feet. I always call old ladies “Mother,” as a sign of respect.
Varda and I went around to each of the passengers, to see if there was anything we could do to ease their suffering. In this car most of the people weren’t seriously hurt, thank God. We tore up their shirts to wrap wounds, just as I’d seen my mother, Olga, and Tatiana do with real bandages at our army hospitals. We offered the passengers sips of water from dead soldiers’ canteens.
As we got ready to leave them, promising to send help, the most amazing thing happened. Wounded or not, every passenger in the car rose slowly to his feet.
And they bowed to me.
We made our way gingerly down to the bottom of the deep canyon, where we found Father Grigory’s body. By the grace of God, his hands were crossed neatly over his body, eyes staring up toward heaven, like a painting of a dead saint. The mist had cleared, and the rain clouds parted. Taking off my cap, I knelt and recited the Orthodox prayer for the dead that I’d heard the Metropolitan say in church so many times:
“Give rest, Lord, to the soul of your servant Father Grigory who has fallen asleep, in your kingdom, where there is no pain, sorrow, or suffering. In your goodness and love for all men, pardon all the sins he has committed in thought, word, or deed, for there is no man or woman who lives and sins not, you only are without sin.”
I kissed Father Grigory’s forehead.
We had no shovel to bury him, so Varda and I covered him with pine tree branches.
As we went on our way in the direction of Ekaterinburg, I kept looking back to the place where Father Grigory lay. He had survived so much before, part of me expected him to simply get up and fly away. But he was a man, not an angel, and men don’t have wings.
After we’d walked a verst or two, Varda noticed I was limping.
“You bumped yourself,” she said.
“Nyet,” I said.
“Don’t lie to me! You’re hurt!”
“Is nothing. We must—we must get to Ekaterinburg.”
But the pain was too great; I could not hide it from her any longer. I had bumped my ankle during the chase on the train.
I stumbled and fell.
“Alexei!”
She ran to my side, breaking my fall just in time.
“We must go,” I said, struggling to get on my feet. “My family…”
“You’re not going anywhere, Your Highness,” she said, pushing me gently back down and examining my leg. “Not on that ankle.” Varda propped my leg up on a rock, giving me water from the soldiers’ canteens we’d brought with us from the train. She packed my ankle in mud, but it did about as little good as Dr. Botkin’s mud treatments at home.
“What about pill?” I said.
“What pill?”
“Pill you make, show me in New York. ‘Jeans therapy.’”
“Gene therapy. I don’t have it with me, it’s at home. Besides, that treatment hasn’t been tested on people yet. It might kill you!”
“Okay,” I said.
“Look, we can go back to my time. For factor VIII. Please, Alexei, let’s go back to New York. The doctors there can help you!”
“Nyet! Must save my family!”
Within
a few hours tears ran down my cheeks. I chewed my lips raw, trying to hold back the pain.
“Don’t try to hold it in!” Varda said. “Don’t be brave. You’ll go crazy! Do something. Scream!”
“My family never let me scream at palace,” I told her. “Afraid someone hear me.”
“Well, scream all you want out here. No one will hear you. God knows, you’ve earned it.”
I took a deep breath. “It hurts!” I yelled.
“Louder!” she said.
“It hurts!!”
“Louder!!”
I screamed from the bottom of my toes, from the bottom of my soul. A whole lifetime of screams unscreamed.
My screams echoed off the mountaintops. “IT HURTS! HURTS! HURTS! HURTS!”
Varda was desperate to help me, but other than holding my hand, there was little she could do.
She felt my forehead.
“God, Alexei, you’re burning up,” she said.
“I need Father Grigory!”
“You can get well on your own. You’ve got to!”
“Nyet! He heals me. Alone, I die!”
“You’re not alone. You’ve got me. You’ve got you. Think of your parents, your sisters. They need you. I need you. Please, Alexei, don’t give up!”
But I grew weaker, and my eyes fluttered closed.
In my mind, I stood alone, up to my knees in a flowing river of blood, inside the narrow, winding blue tunnel of my veins. I listened to the ever-fainter beating of my heart. In my right hand I held a small gardener’s shovel, and I was surrounded by buckets of soft, wet yellow sand, like the sand from the skerries. Suddenly a great rushing sound roared in my ears, as if a giant wave were barreling toward me. I heard it but could not see it. Working feverishly, desperately with my trowel, I built a dam of yellow sand against it. Then a massive wall of red liquid roared toward me like an onrushing train. As I drifted into unconsciousness, my last thought was: Mother of God, I cannot fail my family! Please give me the strength.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
A FEW HOURS MUST HAVE PASSED. Many times I slipped in and out of awareness, hovering between this world and the next. When I finally awoke, Varda was sleeping, her head resting against a rock. I shook her.