When we entered the room we saw mama, sitting upright in bed, her nightgown askew and her hair in a flyaway state, her eyes large and round and her face pale.
“Someone has trapped the grey dove!” she screamed. “They are sticking him with pins . . . he is bleeding . . . his blood is red as cranberries. . . . He can’t escape. . . . Oh! Oh! Someone has trapped the grey dove!”
Niuta tried to comfort mama but she waved her away, repeating again and again that someone had trapped the grey dove. She was awake—yet not awake. She looked as if she herself had been trapped, inside her own terrifying dream, and was unable to find her way back to wakefulness.
I sat down beside the bed.
“Light some candles,” I said to Niuta. “The darkness is frightening her.”
Remembering the soothing effect of Mr. Schmidt’s voice and the gentle way he had of finding the meaning that underlay images, I began to talk to mama about the grey dove.
“He wore grey,” she said when we had talked for a minute or two. “He had grey hair. He was so innocent, so helpless, so dovelike.”
“Who was, mama?”
“Why, you know who.” She looked directly at me for the first time. “You used to love him. Now you hate him. Why have you trapped him?”
“Tell me who I used to love. Tell me his name.”
“No. You hate him. You think he is evil.”
There was only one person who, in my childhood at least, wore dingy-looking grey tunics and trousers and had greying hair, and who affected an air of innocence. Only one person I could think of who I used to love and now hated. Father Gregory.
It was as if a cold hand had run down my spine. The images—of entrapment, piercing, bleeding—could it be that mama was seeing, in her dream, what Constantin had been telling me about? The elimination of the Dark One, Rasputin?
Forty
It was Sedynov who brought us the first rumors.
“It’s all over the Narva district,” he said, out of breath from climbing the stairs to Olga’s bedroom where my sisters and I were gathered. “They talk of nothing else in the workers’ taverns. They toast the liberators who have killed Rasputin!”
“He’s dead for sure,” Niuta chimed in. “I heard it yesterday in the Schlüsselburg Road. Nikandr heard it too.”
Was it true, I wondered, or only a rumor, one of the dozens of rumors that spread like typhus through the crowded Petrograd streets? Had mama’s terrible nightmares been an omen after all?
Then Captain Golenishchev, a guards officer who had formed part of our escort at the time of the tercentenary celebration, arrived at the palace and asked to see mama. She was helping me with a sweater I was knitting when he was ushered in.
Mama swallowed hard.
“Yes, Captain Golenishchev?”
He was agitated, unsure of himself. “Your Imperial Highness, bloodstains have been found on the Great Petrovsky Bridge.”
“Indeed? There have been many suicides this winter. Perhaps this is one more.”
“If only I could agree, Your Imperial Highness. But—you see—there was a boot found there also.”
“Blood and a boot—and you bring this news to the palace?”
The captain looked shamefaced.
“I would never dream of disturbing Your Imperial Highness with an unimportant matter. But in this case, as the boot belonged to Gregory Novy, known as Rasputin—I believe you call him Father Gregory—”
Mama sat up very straight in her chair. “Are you certain the boot is his?”
“Our investigators are certain, yes.”
Red blotches appeared on mama’s cheeks.
“I ordered him guarded! Why was he not guarded!”
“Efforts were made, Your Imperial Highness, I assure you. Like you, I have wanted Novy protected for a long time. I have done my best.
“But it is not only about the boot and the bloodstains that I have come. We believe that your family may be in danger.”
Mama made a dismissive noise. “We have been in danger for years. Perhaps you remember the bomb-throwers, the would-be assassins—”
“This threat may come—from within the imperial family—certain disaffected family members . . .”
Mama reached for me and pulled me to her.
“Tell the guard to surround the palace at once. Warn my husband—”
“He has already been warned, Your Imperial Highness. He has known for some time that this threat exists.”
Mama’s breath was coming in rapid gasps. The terrible shock of hearing that Father Gregory was dead alternated with dread at Captain Golenishchev’s words.
“No,” she was repeating. “No, no, no. Not my family. Not my children.” She gripped me so tightly that my chest hurt.
“Please, mama. I can’t breathe.”
Sedynov kept us informed, over the following days, about the massive upsurge of joy that greeted the news of Father Gregory’s death. All our servants were delighted—especially Daria—and could hardly keep from smiling though they did their best to hide their delight when in mama’s ashen-faced presence. In Petrograd, Sedynov said, one could see shopkeepers, soldiers, peasants stopping in the streets to kiss one another and embrace when exchanging the joyful news.
Rasputin is dead! they cried. The empress’s evil lover is dead!
It was as if a dark spell that had hung over the empire for years had been lifted, and the people in thrall to it set free. Political oratory flared up as never before, for if Rasputin could fall to assassins then the monarchy too could be brought down, or so the most radical of papa’s subjects declared. And so the noisy rejoicing went on.
Poisonous threatening letters arrived for mama.
“Unless you stop ruining the country with your meddling, murders will continue,” one of them read. She was convinced that the letters came from within the family, just as she believed Father Gregory’s murder was a family plot. The killers—who were soon identified as Aunt Xenia’s son-in-law Felix Yusupov and papa’s cousin Dimitri—were never punished, and in mama’s mind the entire Romanov clan was behind the assassination, as if each of them had plunged a dagger into Father Gregory’s side.
“They will come after me next,” she confided to me.
“No—don’t say that mama!”
“Just you watch. See if they don’t.”
For awhile I began sleeping in her room at night, my loaded revolver under my pillow. Guardsmen were on duty outside the bedroom door, but this gave none of us comfort as we knew it was rumored in Petrograd that many of the imperial soldiers were no longer loyal to papa or his family. The men outside the door might well be assassins, we told one another in confidence. There were said to be traitors everywhere—and spies, and enemy agents. Hardly anyone could be trusted; we had to rely on each other as never before.
How I wished, in those tense days, that papa and Michael were with us at Tsarskoe Selo and not far away in Mogilev. I told Michael everything that was happening in my letters, and received loving and concerned but infrequent replies. I missed him so very much, and longed for the day of his return.
A deep hole was dug in the frozen earth to receive the broken body of Father Gregory. I didn’t want to see the body but mama insisted that each of us glance into the oak coffin to say our goodbyes, and place a keepsake inside. I forced myself to look at the swollen, disfigured face, framed by scraggly grey hair, one more time, and put a jar of wormwood oil (falsely labeled “Honey”) into the coffin before the lid was closed and nailed in place.
We stood silent around the newly dug hole, snow falling in soft flakes on our coats and hats and warm woolen scarves. No choir sang, no procession circled the grave with icons and incense. For Father Gregory was being buried in unconsecrated ground, and the priest who spoke the briefest of words over his body was not sent there by the bishop, but summoned, and paid, by mama.
I disliked being there. I felt forced to honor a man I could not help but despise, even in death. I cringed when I saw m
ama reverently handling Father Gregory’s bloodstained shirt—the last shirt he ever wore—and placing it inside a large hollow wooden cross that she hung on the wall. Aunt Ella had done the same thing with the bloody shirt Uncle Gega had died in, I remembered. Did mama think of Father Gregory as a sort of second husband? I couldn’t bring myself to imagine that she had slept with him, though there were many in Petrograd who believed precisely that; the idea seemed too preposterous—and too painful.
“Don’t frown like that, Tania,” mama said to me as I stared down at the cold ground. “It’s disrespectful to the dead.”
In the pocket of my coat was a crumpled note I had found on the floor in mama’s mauve salon, a note she or someone else had torn and meant to discard. It was still readable. I recognized Father Gregory’s distinctive large, spiky handwriting.
“God is love,” the note read. “I love, God forgives. Gregory.”
I took out the note and glanced at it, then crushed it and threw it into the grave. The priest finished reciting the last prayers, as mama sobbed into her handkerchief. Fog was descending and swirling around us, its cold breath making me shiver. I was relieved when the gravediggers came and began shoveling the dark earth in on top of the coffin, and after crossing ourselves one last time we all went silently home.
Forty-one
No one had ever seen such snow! The winter of 1917, the bitterly cold January, the icy February, the frigid March stung and seared and battered the tens of thousands in the Petrograd streets cruelly, until it hurt to breathe and the air was like frozen fog, opaque and menacing. Blizzard after blizzard broke with fury over the city, leaving deep high drifts of snow, twelve feet high, fifteen feet high, so high they might have been the ice mounds at a winter carnival.
Only there was no carnival atmosphere: there was nothing but suffering and starvation, and the incessant inchoate urge for change. For a transfer of power to the people. For revolution.
There were fires at every crossroads, every street corner had its small blaze where men in torn dirty coats held their hands out to warm them—hands in which fingers had been lost to frostbite. Everywhere one heard the crunch of boots on ice, the thick black ice that was so slippery the horses could not make their way across it without falling.
I saw the high-piled drifts, the ice and the angry, frozen people when we went into Petrograd to visit Aunt Olenka to quietly congratulate her on her recent marriage to her longtime lover Nicholas Kulikovsky. I saw it again when mama, against all sound advice, took me to Ouchinnikov, the goldsmith’s shop on Bolshaia Morskaia Street to buy me a gold bracelet like the one she wore, and the crowd in the street nearly overturned our carriage. I heard about conditions in Petrograd from Sedynov, who went into the capital at least once a week, and from Daria, who was overjoyed to think that at last her dream of a Russia where the people governed themselves was about to come true.
We sat one morning by the window in my bedroom, the crust of ice so thick on the glass that we could barely make out shapes on the other side. Daria’s little dog was in its basket, Artipo sleeping beside my chair. Iskra sat on a cushion on the floor, reading from an English book mama had given her. Monsieur Gilliard gave her lessons from time to time. He told me she was a precocious child with a gift for learning. She had Daria’s light hair and blue eyes, but her face had a more exotic shape than Daria’s, almost Asiatic, and her skin was golden. Her father, Daria had told me, had come from Mongolia. How he had found his way to our Russian capital I never learned.
We were sitting quietly, talking, when Niuta came in.
“Tania,” she said, “your mother needs you in her salon immediately.”
I went at once and found my sisters and brother standing in the room, along with mama’s dressers and Monsieur Gilliard.
“I have had some very distressing news,” she began, struggling for self-possession. “From the military headquarters where your father is.”
And where Michael is, I thought to myself.
“I have been told—” she broke off and swallowed, then continued.
“I have been told—” once again she paused, her hands trembling. She clasped them and held them tightly at her waist.
“Children, I need to tell you that your father has decided that it is best for Russia if he steps down as tsar in favor of your Uncle Michael.”
We were speechless. Then Olga began to cry, quietly, and soon we all had tears running down our cheeks. But we were all grand duchesses, and we had been trained well. We continued to stand, our backs straight and our heads up, watching mama. If she could be strong, then so could we. But poor papa!
“So he has abdicated,” Monsieur Gilliard said. “He has been forced to sign the instrument of abdication.”
It hurt to hear these words.
“Yes,” mama said quietly, obviously short of breath, her hands still held tightly at her waist.
“Will he be allowed to return here, to Tsarskoe Selo?”
Mama shook her head, and began to speak, but could not. Then her eyes closed, her knees seemed to buckle and she sank to the floor.
It may seem odd—it seems odd to me, looking back—but the thing I remember most clearly about the first confusing weeks and months after my father’s abdication was the sound of scraping, constant scraping. It was the workers on the roof, scraping off the snow and ice. They never stopped, except for a few hours at night when I suppose they must have slept.
There had been a great deal of snow, after all, and no doubt there was an unusually large concentration of ice on the roof. All I know is that the scraping sound persisted, and the laborers continued to work, even though many of the household servants ran off without so much as a word and the troops that had been guarding the palace also began to desert in large numbers.
The changes that came over the palace were sudden and severe. First our electricity was cut off, leaving us with only candles to light the rooms and only firewood to cook our food. Then we discovered we had no water flowing from our taps; we could only get fresh water by breaking the ice on the lake in the palace park and scooping up the freezing water in buckets. For a few days Niuta did her best to provide warm baths for my sisters and me, heating the lake water over the stove and pouring it into our silver tub which was brought into the kitchen to make her task easier. But it took too long for each bucket to heat up, and the air was so cold that the heated water cooled down once it was poured over us. We soon gave up the thought of bathing in the tub. Instead we gritted our teeth and washed with cold water, soaping ourselves and then rinsing under an improvised shower, our teeth chattering.
We were worried about papa—all the more so when we heard that Uncle Michael, unwilling to take on the hated role of tsar, had abdicated. Romanov rule was over—though mama continued to insist that papa’s forced abdication was invalid and to insist even more strongly that an anointed tsar could never renounce the authority given him by God.
We watched for a message, listened for a phone call, but none came. Why hadn’t papa come back to us? Was he in jail? Surely the new Provisional Government we were told of would not order his execution. Surely they had a vestige of feeling, a vestige of pity left for the Little Father who had always ruled over them.
Then Constantin came to the palace—officially, as a deputy in the new Provisional Government. His task was to report on the effectiveness of palace security, meaning how loyal to the new government were the guardsmen who were our jailers, keeping us from escaping, and how safe would we be in the event of a mutiny by the guards or an attempt on our lives by the real rulers in Petrograd: the newly formed Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies.
“What you all must understand,” Constantin told mama and the rest of us in the few private moments we had together, “is that there is chaos in the capital. We delegates are attempting to rule—that is, to keep chaos at bay—but we disagree on so many things. We fight, we argue. We cannot seem to find a common will. We have so many issues to face—the war, the shortages,
the dissatisfied workers who see us as no better than the old monarchy, and want more radical change.”
He paced back and forth, his brow furrowed. Deep worry lines had dug themselves in his forehead since I saw him last.
“You can’t imagine how bad things are. There is no meat, no bread, no salt in the marketplace. For the homeless, there is not even a closet to rent. Looters are raiding the mansions on the Fontanka, breaking into the wine cellars, getting drunk. No one is working—”
“The workers have been bribed to go on strike!” mama burst out. “Enemies of the state are undermining all authority. Dark forces are loosed, murderous instincts—”
“Don’t you understand? There is no state! There is no authority! While we argue and debate, the Soviet is raising the red flag of the Bolsheviks over every public building. They have seized the railroads and the telegraph. The people turn to them for help, not to us.”
“Why doesn’t papa come home?” Anastasia asked. There was silence, and in the silence the incessant scraping of the roof continued.
Constantin stopped his pacing and looked down into my sister’s face.
“I don’t know, dear,” he said. “I’m sure he will be with you as soon as he can.”
Then he had to leave, and after pressing my hand and giving me the briefest of worried smiles he was gone.
One dark, cloudy afternoon the guards admitted a familiar burly figure to the palace, as tall as a man but with a grimy yellow skirt and small gold earrings.
“Avdokia!” I cried when I saw her. “Oh, how glad I am to see you!” And indeed I was glad to see anyone who was not a guardsman or a visitor from the Provisional Government in those isolated, difficult days.
“I have brought this for your mother,” she said gruffly. She held out an icon to me, an image of the Virgin Mary, her head veiled in gold and her garments gleaming in the candlelight. “It is from his grave.”
The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold) Page 22