“I see no benefit in death—except relief, that all is over at last.”
“And do you ever think of bringing on that relief for yourself, through your own efforts?”
“Yes.”
“Mama!” I gripped her arm. “No, mama!”
“It is the truth, Tania. With Mr. Schmidt I speak the truth.”
“What are you doing to her? Stop doing this to her!” I stood up. “If my father were here, he would put a stop to this.”
“I believe, Tania, that your father would want to help your mother. The kind of talk we are having helps her. It unburdens her.”
“Yes, Tania,” mama said softly. “It is good to talk openly, like this, even of painful things.”
“I understand that you take Veronal to calm yourself,” Mr. Schmidt went on. “Three drops at a time. Am I right?”
“I sometimes take six drops now.”
“Are you ever tempted to take more? So many that all your troubles will end for good?”
“Yes.”
“No, mama no!” I held her arm tightly, my tears flowing. I wanted to run, I wanted to pull mama with me, to take her as far away as possible. Yet at the same time I knew that there was nowhere to run from the wrenching, terrible truth she was revealing. So I stayed where I was, and wept.
“And what is the reason you choose not to end your life? Is it because you know what suffering it would cause your daughter, who I can see loves you so much, and your other children?”
“Yes. That and—”
“And what?”
“I do not give up easily.”
“No. I suspect you are a fighter.”
Through my tears I could see that mama was smiling. “Yes. I am a fighter.”
Mr. Schmidt smiled too. “That is very good to hear.”
He reached around behind his chair and picked up a small golden bell that stood on a nearby table. He lifted the bell and rang it. In a moment there was a knock at the door of the salon and a man came in, carrying some papers, which he handed to Mr. Schmidt.
While this was going on mama turned her attention to me, putting her arm around me and hugging me. “Dear Tania,” she said. “You mustn’t worry. Whatever comes, all will be well. Don’t you remember my ring, with the symbol of well being? I always wear it.”
“Your Imperial Highness,” Mr. Schmidt was saying, “this house we are in is a very special place. Troubled people, people who are thinking of ending their lives, or who are in anguish over unbearable thoughts or nightmares, come here to be helped and healed. There are many who have come in desperate trouble, and who have left feeling themselves to be whole and at peace.”
“Is it a monastery then? It doesn’t look like a monastery.”
“In a way, yes. Only there are no icons and no altars. This is a cathedral of the mind. Sanity, balance, a healthy outlook on the world: these are the iconic treasures to be found in this place. And now I am privileged to be able to offer you a respite here, among us.”
“A respite?”
“Would you like to stay here for awhile, and have unburdening talks like this one, and find relief from all that perturbs you?”
Mama sighed and hung her head. “Yes,” she said, very softly, in a voice so high and so trusting it might have come from a child and not a middle-aged woman.
“Good. Then all you have to do is sign these papers”—he spread out three sheets on a table in front of the sofa—“and you will be made welcome.”
I felt a sharp prickle of unease.
“Mama, don’t you think you ought to talk this over with papa?”
“You can talk to him all you like, once you have moved in here with us.”
Mama took the pen Mr. Schmidt held out to her.
“I want peace, Tania. Above all, I want peace.”
At that moment a piercing scream came from outside the room. Mama grew tense and rigid.
“What was that?”
“At times our guests feel a return of their old disturbances. They have to be subdued.”
“Subdued?” I said loudly, suddenly remembering the horrible device Grandma Minnie had forced me to wear when I was a child, the heavy steel brace that trapped and imprisoned me. What put that into my mind at that moment I couldn’t have said. “Subdued how?”
“Restrained. Kept from hurting themselves.”
“Is this—” I could hardly force myself to say the words. “Is this—a madhouse?”
“No, Tania. We don’t use that old outworn term any more. It is a sanatorium. A healing house for the mind.”
“Come, mama. Come at once. We must not stay here a minute longer.”
“But Tania—” She looked confused.
“No, mama. No. This is no place for you.” With all my strength I pulled her up from the sofa and toward the door. Mr. Schmidt, I noticed, made no effort to stop us. We reached the door, mama protesting all the while, and I managed to fling it open.
There stood two tall, strong-looking Cossacks, both with long sabers hanging from their belts.
I cried out in surprise and terror. Then I saw—blessed sight!—that one of the Cossacks was Nikandr, Niuta’s lover. The man who had helped us convey Daria to the Workers’ Clinic when she was about to have her baby.
“Nikandr!” I called out. “Help us! Don’t let them keep mama here in this terrible place!” He frowned.
“You know me, Nikandr! You can trust me. Niuta trusts me. I helped Daria on the day her baby was born. I helped her when Father Gregory attacked her!”
He nodded.
“Take the empress upstairs,” the doctor said quietly. The other Cossack moved to seize mama, but Nikandr stopped him, holding out one muscular arm and barring him from reaching out for mama.
“No,” he said in his loud ringing voice. “Wait. Let the emperor decide. He is not far away. He has gone to shoot ravens in the hunting park.”
And with that he swept mama up into his strong arms and took her out into the wintry garden, the other Cossack by his side, and with me running along behind, my blood pounding so loudly in my ears that Mr. Schmidt’s angry shouts were no more than thin wails in the cold wind.
Thirty
As I hoped and expected, papa did not allow mama to be confined in the sanatorium, and in fact we left Berlin soon after the incident. Immediately after Sissy’s wedding we left for Petersburg, saying a hurried goodbye to our English and German relatives and receiving assurances that whatever happened between our various countries, we would all love and help one another in any way we could.
Adalbert kissed my cheek and looked at me soulfully. “I am at your service, Tania, whenever you may need me. I will always be your loving friend.” I assured him that I felt the same and that I hoped to see him at his wedding.
As we boarded our train I noticed that Grandma Minnie was not with us.
“We will not be seeing her for awhile,” papa confided to me. “I have sent her away, to Kiev. She has friends there. She will not be making trouble in our family again.”
I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from my young shoulders.
“Oh, thank you, papa! Now she won’t always be plotting behind our backs, and criticizing us.”
“And always snatching cigarettes out of my mouth when I’m about to light them.” We laughed.
During the long train journey I talked to papa again, this time much more seriously. We were in a comfortable, secluded section of the imperial train, a car whose walls were paneled with old oak and whose furnishings were upholstered in red plush embroidered with gold threads in patterns of crowns and eagles. We sat beside a large window, looking out on the snowy landscape of dense forests and quaint small towns and villages.
“What should be done about mama?” I asked him. “A sanatorium is not the answer, even an enlightened one—if such a thing exists. But what other answer is there? She says she has thoughts of doing away with herself.”
Papa patted my hand. “She has been saying that ever since
I first met her, as a girl. It is a sort of Wagnerian fantasy, the wish for a glorious romantic ending to an otherwise rather conventional life, even though it is a life of exalted status and privilege. I don’t think she really means to do it.” He sighed. “Besides, if the worst should happen—and I have lived with that possibility for decades now—then I know that all is in God’s hands.”
“I don’t believe God wants mama to die.”
“Then He will make sure she does not die.” He smiled. “We cannot prevent from happening all the sad things we imagine might happen. I learned that years ago, when my dear grandfather was blown up.”
“I wish I had your resignation.”
“Faith, Tania. Not resignation. Faith.” He turned to gaze out the window, and I realized that there was nothing more to be said.
Thirty-one
The warm, wet summer of 1914 brought mold to the dripping, south-facing walls of the palace infirmary, and another outbreak of typhoid to Smokestack Town, and, inevitably, a series of crippling strikes.
Half the laborers in Petersburg were on strike, it was said, and their refusal to work meant that in the idle factories, the guns and shells and rifles for the army were not being made, the railroad cars needed to bring food into the city were not being assembled and the large, dissatisfied crowds in the streets were becoming more vocal and more unruly by the day.
I began volunteering four afternoons a week in the hospital because of the number of typhoid victims and my sisters Marie and Anastasia helped out too by carrying trays and scrubbing floors (“It’s good for them!” mama said, and she was right), delivering meals to the patients who were recovering and able to eat and carrying messages between the wards.
Marie had grown into a beautiful, dark-haired girl, buxom and strong—so strong she helped out by moving heavy iron bedsteads in the wards—but she was troubled and kept her distance from the rest of us. She called herself a changeling, a child from another family deposited in our nest by mistake. Mama brushed off this absurd suggestion and papa was faintly amused by it. Neither took the time to either comfort or confront the prickly Marie, who spent a great deal of time with Aunt Xenia’s family where she felt more at home.
Anastasia was a will-o’-the-wisp, always in motion, hard to keep track of and even harder to discipline. She slipped in and out of rooms with the same quicksilver ease that she showed in slipping in and out of obligations, particularly unpleasant ones. She came to the hospital with us, and did some of her assigned chores, but ignored others, exasperating us all. She ran errands for mama, who called her “my legs” and was grateful for her help—until she looked around and discovered that her “legs” were nowhere to be found.
I loved my sisters, yet I found them trying, each in her own way; I’m afraid that at times I lectured them, the way older sisters do, and I must have irritated them a good deal.
As the summer wore on the slow drizzling rain continued to fall, but the rain did not prevent the growing number of strikers from coming together at street corners and glaring at the police and mounted guards who kept an eye on them, and sometimes beat them with truncheons or slashed at them with their sabers when they spilled out into the streets and became disruptive. Peasants, looking very odd and out of place in their sheepskin coats which were far too warm for the summer season, joined the strikers and helped them erect barricades in the broad avenues, walling off whole neighborhoods from police interference and singing and chanting provocative songs and slogans.
I watched all this, going back and forth most afternoons between the hospital and Tsarskoe Selo in its protected suburb. I was aware, too, of the unease that spread following the latest act of bomb-throwing. In June a revolutionary had thrown a bomb at the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and, when the bomb missed its target and blew up others in the archduke’s retinue, another assassin came forward and shot and killed Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie as well.
Once again Tsarskoe Selo was full of police searching for people with hidden bombs. And the hospital where we all volunteered was searched several times a day for hidden weapons and “agitators,” as papa continued to call them.
I was looking forward to returning to Germany for Adalbert and Adi’s wedding, which was to take place early in August, but as the time came nearer I realized it would probably not be possible for me to go. I sent a wedding gift, a beautiful silver samovar on a handsome tray, and with it a letter wishing the couple all good fortune, and saying how sorry I was that I would not be able to attend the ceremony after all, I knew they would understand why.
Private concerns were giving way before the larger events that were rapidly encompassing us all. Just as I had seen German soldiers in great numbers in the streets of Berlin, so now our Russian armies were assembling, and the Petersburg streets, once full of strikers, were now filling with troops and guns, gathering in the capital before being sent westward to the borderlands between Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Everyone, even the most peace-loving among us, now conceded that war was coming; it was only a matter of time. Finally, in August, we learned that Germany had declared war on Russia. Cousin Willy had turned against us at last, just as mama said he would. It was up to us, to Russia, along with our allies France and England, to defeat him.
A patriotic mood gripped the city as flags waved, troops marched, guns boomed in salutes to the motherland and to papa. The icon of the Holy Virgin of Kazan was carried in procession through the streets of Petersburg to spread her protection over us, and priests with religious banners paraded past the troops and guns, blessing them and leading the crowds in singing hymns and odes to the motherland.
I had never before seen such an effusion of feeling, not even when I was a child and I watched the crowds from the balcony of the Winter Palace at the time of the war against the Japanese.
“You see, Tania, how my people love me. They long to do their part to defend our land. There are so many recruits, so many volunteers, that there aren’t enough uniforms to clothe them or guns to arm them.”
Feelings ran so high, in those rainy autumn days, that some of the peasants crowding in to the recruiting stations in hopes of joining the army were trampled and killed, becoming the first casualties of the war. Constantin and his ambulance crew brought in one man who had been caught up in the rush to enlist and accidentally pushed under a cart, his legs crushed by its weight. Accident victims were often brought to the ward I volunteered in and this man was no exception. He was put on an examining table where Constantin looked him over and shook his head.
“We’ll be lucky to save his life,” he said. “His legs have got to come off.” I had never before assisted at an operation but I did so now, for the ward was understaffed and more hands were needed. Constantin began giving orders loudly and with assurance, just as if he had been a trained surgeon instead of a surgical student. I cut the cloth of the injured man’s trousers away from his bleeding legs and swabbed the blood as best I could with towels while a nurse put a mask over his face and dripped ether onto it—the sharp smell of the ether making me nauseous and then sleepy.
After passing his knife through a candle flame (antiseptic being in short supply just then, and kept in a cupboard at the opposite end of the building), Constantin cut the flesh—slimy and green in places—and sawed the bones of the man’s legs, ignoring his piteous half-delirious screams and the repulsive smells that issued from his tormented body.
I nearly passed out, brought back to consciousness by Constantin’s loud, sharp orders directed at me.
“More towels! More pressure!”
I did my best, knowing without having to be told that the man would die if he lost more blood. My apron was soaked in blood, my shoes squelched when I took a step, they were so drenched in blood. My arms and hands were red. I must look like some horrible butcher, I thought to myself. I fought the confusion and disorientation that threatened to engulf my consciousness. I felt myself sway. Yet I held on, pres
sing with all my strength against the raw flesh and flinging aside each of the towels as it became saturated.
His hasty cutting and sawing complete, Constantin tied tourniquets to the man’s thighs and paused for breath.
“The bleeding’s stopped for now,” he said. “Take the legs away.”
The words were so strange to my ears that I almost asked Constantin to repeat them. Take the legs away? Take them where? I had never before handled amputated body parts; how was it done? Surely severed legs were not to be casually deposited in the refuse bins, along with used bandages and swabs and filth swept from the floors?
I found an old torn pillowcase and, lifting the legs gingerly one at a time, placed them inside it. Then I carried the pillowcase into the herb garden adjacent to the hospital and, finding a shovel, began to dig a sort of grave. For if we bury the bodies of the dead in the earth, reverently and with prayers, I reasoned, then it had to follow that we ought to bury parts of bodies with the same attention to their spiritual value.
“What are you doing there!” came a harsh croaking voice—the voice of the matron, a hardbitten, flinty-faced woman who, I had observed over the past few months, was skeptical of upper-class and aristocratic volunteer nurses, much preferring trained and seasoned professionals like herself.
“I’m burying some remains, matron.”
“Where do you think you are, a churchyard? Take your remains and put them in the incinerator, as we always do.”
“I didn’t realize that was what was expected.”
She glared at me, her look and her tone of voice unsparing.
“If you are ignorant, girl, then ask. Don’t invent. What have you got there anyway?” She grabbed the bloody, stinking pillowcase from me and peered inside it.
“Humph! Legs again! We’ve been having too many legs come off this autumn. Now, here’s a lesson for you, one that the Red Cross didn’t teach you. Amputated limbs are full of pus and germs. They reek of gangrene, as a rule. Gangrene is horrible stuff, perhaps you’ve heard of it? The moist, slimy green kind, the kind you can see on your legs there, spreads very rapidly, simply by touch.”
The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold) Page 17