The Curse of the Romanovs

by Staton Rabin

  “You think you Romanovs can still tell us what to do? Now we ration your food and spit in your soup!”

  The men laughed.

  One of them told a low and disgusting joke, the sort one hears in an army barracks. Turning pale, Tatiana ran from the room. Mashka stared at the man scornfully.

  “Why are you not disgusted with yourselves when you use such shameful words? Do you imagine that you can woo a well-born woman with such witticisms and have her be well disposed toward you? Be refined and respectable men and then we can get along.”

  As I watched the men slink off in shame like scolded hounds, I was full of pride in my sister.

  I crossed to the end of the main floor, and heard my mother quietly reminding Olga and Anastasia that it was time to take care of their “candy and medicines.” I thought this strange, until I saw what they were really up to. They were sewing our family’s diamonds and emeralds into the hems of the girls’ skirts and corsets, and inside our shirts, pillows, and hat rims. If my sisters ever got separated from the rest of the family, Mama knew that they would be able to sell off their hidden jewels—perhaps bribe their way out of trouble—and be all right. But neither my mother nor my sisters had any idea what was really in store for them. And that no bribe would be enough to save them now.

  “Mama, hasn’t anyone tried to come to our rescue?” I whispered to her. She shook her head sadly. “The Americans? Our cousin King George of England, perhaps?”

  My mother shook her head again. “There was … some talk. Nothing happened. Nobody wants to take the risk of giving the hated Romanovs refuge.”

  “What about the Germans?”

  “I’d rather die at the hands of the Bolsheviks than be rescued by the Germans!”

  Later I knocked on the door of Gilliard’s room. He opened it, and I shut the door behind me.

  “Zhillie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you do something for me?”

  “You know I will. If I can.”

  I sat on the bed and lowered my voice in case the Bolsheviks were listening at the door.

  “If—if anything ever happens to us—to me—please come back to this house. Once the White Army has taken over Ekaterinburg, it will be safe to return here. I am going to leave a book for you inside the piano bench. I want you to take good care of it.”

  Gillliard didn’t try to argue with me by saying we’d all be fine. He had never lied to me. He wouldn’t start now.

  Gilliard looked me straight in the eye. “You have my word.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Tuesday, 16 July 1918

  I’D SPENT THE REST OF MONDAY glued to my family, my questions tumbling out in torrents: “Where did they take you?” “Did anyone harm you?” “What happened to Grandma Minnie, Cousin Felix, and my sailor-nanny Nagorny?” “Where is Uncle Misha?” No matter who I asked about, their answers sounded all the same, like the droning litany of the mass: “We don’t know,” “Dead, I fear,” or “Taken away.” Catching up on the lives of my parents and sisters, I tried to live a year and a half in a single day. My face was a mask, behind which I hid from them the terrible truth: The next day would be our last.

  It may seem strange to you that my family did not ask me where I had been. Perhaps they would have, in time. But all that mattered to them now was that I had returned to them safely, and we were all together again. They had even kept my clothes for me here, hoping that I would come back to them one day. But I sensed that they had learned the hard way—as I was quickly learning myself—that hearing answers to questions sometimes brought more pain than one could bear.

  I’d stayed up all night on the fifteenth, my pen on fire, racing against the clock to finish writing this book. You see, it now had a different purpose from when I had begun. This was no longer just the story of my life, the boy who would one day be tsar of all the Russias. It was our legacy—our insurance against the hateful lies that would be told about the Romanovs after we were gone. They would say my father was cruel, a bloody dictator. They would say my mother was cold and heartless, and my sisters spoiled and useless. That we never knew pain nor sacrifice. They would say that Rasputin was just an evil man who controlled every decision of the tsar, and was kept at the palace as the tsarina’s pet—for no reason but her amusement. They would say we danced while the peasants ate dirt.

  Today, the morning of the sixteenth, dawned hot and humid, heavy with portent.

  Gilliard, clutching a small satchel, stood before me. He opened his mouth to speak, but then looked at his feet and said nothing. “Goodbye, Zhillie,” I said. “Live strong.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me, looking puzzled, then pleased.

  “Russia does not know what it has lost,” he said. “Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, you would have made a great tsar.”

  I stood tall, more grateful to him than words could say.

  We shook hands, and then he went down the stairs and was gone.

  In other ways today did not seem different from the day before. My family followed what they told me was now their regular routine. The day started with our praying together, just as we had at home. We ate what the Bolsheviks allowed us—some black bread, a glass of tea. Then at ten, Yurovsky, the commandant, lined us up like army troops for inspection. It was really just a head count to make sure no one had escaped. There was a changing of the guard every six hours. Sister Maria and Sister Antonina had arrived promptly at seven, carrying baskets of eggs and milk to supplement our meager rations. As she was handing me a basket, Sister Antonina managed to whisper in my ear, “Varda is safe.” This lifted a great weight from my spirits.

  My family did not suspect that this was to be their last day. True, they seemed worried and depressed—but I imagine they had been so for quite some time. I kept staring at the guards’ faces, searching into their souls. What kind of man are you? Or are you nothing but a beast? Are you the one who will shoot us? Are you cold-blooded and cowardly enough to pull the trigger on my beautiful mother and sisters?

  The hours ticked by, and the bell in Ascension Cathedral tolled our sudba. But when evening came and still nothing had happened to us, I dared hope that perhaps the Ural Soviet had had a change of heart. Maybe they are not so beastly, after all, I thought. Maybe they cannot bring themselves to shoot this kindly and devoted family man whom God has made their tsar. Maybe they cannot steel themselves to slaughter defenseless women and children.

  At ten fifteen that night, Dr. Botkin was sitting at a desk, writing a letter—to his family, I supposed. I saw him take off his glasses and wipe his eyes, then continue writing with a heavy sigh. Perhaps somehow he knew this letter would be his last.

  I rubbed my knee—it was swollen and hurting from when Joy had knocked me down.

  Then I heard music coming from my breast pocket. The telephone! In all the excitement of seeing my family again, I had forgotten all about it.

  I ducked into a closet, pulled the door shut behind me, and pressed the telephone button.

  “Varda!”

  “Please, Alexei. Come back with me to the future! Don’t you see? There is nothing more you can do for your family now.”

  I looked into the telephone screen at her lovely face. Those eyes, blue like the Neva, that were a sparkling mirror of my own. But now her eyes had a touch of red, and I could tell that she had been weeping.

  “You know how much I care for you,” I said. “But cannot leave family.”

  “Then we’ll take them with us!”

  “Nyet. Mama and Papa would never leave Mother Russia, Romanovs do not run away. They need me here. Cannot let them die alone.”

  “They won’t be alone! They have each other! What about me?”

  Her words pulled at my heart. In all my life the hardest thing I ever had to do was close it—just a little—against her.

  “Varda, please. I beg you! Try to understand. If leave family now, world will say last tsarevich was coward.”

  “I don’t care what the world
says! I need you, Alexei!”

  “I know. Need you too.”

  We were silent for a moment. Then I said: “What would you do? Put self in my place.”

  She shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them.

  “When my father was dying, those last days, I slept on a cot just outside his room. I got so I knew how many times he breathed in a minute. When he skipped even one, it was like I had stopped breathing. That morning, I held his hand for hours, thinking maybe if I just held on tight enough and didn’t let go, he’d never slip away….”

  “So you know where I must be.”

  She sighed. “Yes.”

  My telephone started flashing a message.

  “What means this, ‘Battery low’?”

  “It means—it means we’re out of time, Alexei.”

  “I see,” I said. “Good-bye, Little Peasant.”

  I leaned toward my telephone screen, as she did toward hers. We kissed the glass between our lips.

  Then the screen went black.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  1:30 A.M. Wednesday, 17 July 1918

  WE WERE aLL ASLEEP. A knock on the bedroom door at the House of Special Purpose yanked me rudely back from my beautiful dreams of Varda. Mama, face creased from her pillow, hair down around her shoulders like a young girl’s, went to answer it.

  “Yurovsky says there’s trouble in the town, they must move us to a place of greater safety,” Dr. Botkin told her. “It would be dangerous to be in the upper rooms if there is shooting in the streets. He says we must dress quickly and go downstairs.”

  My mother frowned.

  “That awful man could not have told us this at a decent hour? All right, Doctor. Tell him I’ll wake the children and we’ll be down as soon as we’re dressed.”

  The threat to Ekaterinburg from advancing White and Czech forces had been as great yesterday as today. If Yurovsky was waking us in the middle of the night, I knew it was not for our safety, but for some “special purpose.”

  My hands shook so while I dressed that I had trouble buttoning my military shirt.

  “Here, Little Man,” Olga said, coming to my aid. “I’ll do that for you.”

  Olga probably thought I was just nervous about the armies marching toward Ekaterinburg. And this is just what I’d hoped she would think. Since there was no escape for any of us, it would be best if they did not know what was about to happen to them. Please, Holy Mother, give me the strength not to betray my feelings!

  As Olga did the buttons on my shirt, she smiled at me—that gentle, motherly smile of the big sister that I had known since she’d wiped the infant’s spittle from my bib. I bit my lip, trying not to weep. How it tore at my heart to think she would never have children of her own!

  I was first to go downstairs, and Yurovsky and the guards had not yet entered from their posts. I sat, alone with my thoughts, writing in this book, waiting to meet my sudba. I pressed the button on my telephone. “Battery low,” but it was still working. Perhaps long enough to—

  “ILUVU4EVA,” I typed, and pressed send.

  There was no answer.

  My family was now gathered all around me. My eyes passed from one dear, dear face to another, engraving them into my memory. Papa with his quiet strength and unguarded eyes that dared to let you see into the very depths of his gentle soul. Mama whose Snow Maiden courage showed in the coolly determined set of her jaw, but whose meltingly warm smile was a special gift kept only for her husband and us children. Olga, facing life square on, brave enough to lead armies like Joan of Arc. Tatiana, “the governor,” who had inherited my mother’s sense of duty, and wisely steered us away from childish nonsense unsuited to the offspring of a tsar. Dear Anastasia, our sprite of mischief, who took the hot air out of anyone too puffed up with their own importance. And lovely Marie, our “Mashka,” a warm and feminine flirt, who still stood firmly on the rock of principle when her noble sense of decency was offended.

  Dr. Botkin stood calmly wiping his eyeglasses on a handkerchief. This wonderful man who had left his own family, to take such good care of me and mine. And there stood our loyal servants who had bravely followed my family here, willing to make our sudba theirs: Papa’s valet Trupp, Mama’s maid Anna—clutching two small pillows like a child’s teddy bears—and our cook Kharitonov. We’d been told that Leonka the kitchen boy had been taken home by his uncle. God help him, I hoped it was true.

  “Cross the courtyard and go downstairs into the room in the basement,” the black-bearded man they called Yurovsky ordered us, his hand nervously tapping the right pocket of his uniform. I noticed the crescent moon shape of a small object, its outline showing through the pocket fabric. “You will be safer there.”

  Everyone turned to go.

  I crossed the room, and pretended to be looking through the piano music inside the bench.

  “Come, Alexei,” Papa said, noticing I was limping. He held out his strong arms to lift and carry me one last time, as he had thousands of times before. As he had carried the whole of Mother Russia—the whole suffering world—on his shoulders.

  “In a minute, Papa.”

  “Hurry up, boy!” Yurovsky snapped at me over his shoulder.

  My telephone made music from my pocket. A message flashed on its screen.

  “ILUVU4EVA2.”

  My heart leaped like Nijinsky. Varda!

  “Battery dead.”

  The words winked out. And with them, all my hopes and dreams.

  Putting the telephone back in my breast pocket, I scribbled these final words. In the next second I will slip this testament under the sheet music for Mozart’s Requiem, then limp toward my father’s outstretched arms.

  They are calling me again. Do svidaniya, I must go!

  At the threshold of our grave, I pray for my family and our enemies. May God grant

  peace

  to

  VARDA’S EPILOGUE

  by Varda Ethel Rosenberg

  New York

  December 2010

  “I am Anatole Gilliard. Are you Mademoiselle Varda Ethel Rosenberg?”

  The guy in the suit and tie who stood shivering at the door of our apartment stared at me with popeyed eagerness, like someone selling Scientology, or one of those people who wants money to save the rain forest. He tugged on his little polka-dotted bow tie, which was pressing against the Adam’s apple on his skinny neck.

  My mother told me that opening the door for a stranger in New York was dumber than burnt toast. But for the past week—ever since I’d left Alexei and his family to die back in 1918—I’d been hanging out back at home, doing nothing but crying my guts out and watching reruns of Bewitched. If this guy at the door was some new kind of wimpy-looking axe murderer, I was too miserable to care.

  “Yeah, I’m Varda,” I said. “Look, write us a letter if you want money, we don’t do door-to-door spam.”

  I started to slam the door in his face. But before I could, he pushed a little book into my hands—this book. It was worn at its leather edges, and the fancy gold lettering was chipping off. But I could still make out the title: The Curse of the Romanovs by Alexei Romanov.

  “I am the great-great-great-grandson of Pierre Gilliard,” the man said with a French accent and a little bow. “Before the tragedy, Alexei ask Pierre to make certain this book reaches you.”

  “My Alexei?”

  Anatole handed me one of those ritzy gold pens like you see in stores on Fifth Avenue, and a piece of paper with all kinds of legal stuff written on it.

  “Sign here, s’il vous plaît.”

  I signed, hoping it was just a receipt for the book and not a promise to become a Scientologist. I handed the paper and pen back to him. I had a million questions for this guy. But before I could even thank him, he was gone.

  My mother wouldn’t be home from work for several more hours. So I lay on my bed, gulping down everything that was in that book. And the more I read, the more sure I was. Nobody in the world could have written that book
but my Alexei.

  Alexei had known the Bolsheviks would never have allowed his story to be published while they ruled Russia. So he had left his book to the future—to me—knowing that I’d do everything in my power to make sure it was published now that Russia was free. The world must finally learn the truth about him and his family. He had trusted me with his story. I would not let him down.

  I’d come back to 2010 from 1918 only a few hours after I’d left. At least it was only a few hours from my mother’s point of view. So she’d never even known I’d been gone.

  That was only a week ago. She’d wanted to know where Alexei had gone, of course. But I knew she’d never have believed me if I’d told her the truth. So I said that his parents had called while she was at work, asking him to come home right away. We’d taken the bus out to the airport.

  “He’s gone back to Russia to be with his family,” I said. “They really missed him.”

  Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie.

  When I couldn’t eat or sleep, wouldn’t go to school, and couldn’t stop crying, my mother sort of understood. After all, she missed Alexei too.

  Then came the big hemophilia science conference at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. I’d been planning to go for months. I was hoping I might meet somebody there who’d give me research money to work on my gene therapy treatment, and let me work in their lab. But I was too depressed to go anywhere. Then my science teacher, Mrs. Gentian, actually called me up on the phone. She gave me a whole shpiel about how important this conference was, how important she thought my research was. And somehow, I don’t know how she did it, she talked me into going.

  I arrived at the conference about an hour late. I’d missed the keynote speech—about the challenges of finding a gene therapy cure for hemophilia.

  There was an old man in a wheelchair up on the stage. Some scientists from Johns Hopkins introduced him as Vasily Filatov, the oldest living hemophiliac. It was like he was some freak of nature, the Elephant Man or something. He was one hundred and six years old—and they said they were studying his body chemistry to figure out how he’d survived with the disease for so long. Even with all the great new treatments available, most hemophiliacs probably wouldn’t be able to live past their sixties. The scientists figured maybe they could learn something from studying this guy that could help other hemophiliacs, or even lead to a cure.