Worst of all was the wind that shrieked and howled like a live thing, as if all the furies of hell had been loosed and were bent on destroying us. Sometimes at night when we gathered around the stove, attempting to talk, mama trying to knit with her gloves on, Monsieur Gilliard trying to play chess with Olga or Anastasia, papa in his overcoat reading his thick volume of Universal History though the pages kept ruffling up and annoying him, the wind shrieked so loudly that talk was impossible and we clutched our ears with our hands.
The freezing blast came through every unsealed window, under every ill-fitting double door. It burned our lungs and made us cough. It burned our eyes and made them water. We tried to sing—singing always made us feel better—but the wind snatched the very breath from our mouths and we soon gave up.
The worst time of all was late at night, when we could no longer delay going to sleep. We shivered in our damp, comfortless beds, our fingers blue with frostbite and sore from chilblains. We swore, we prayed, we swore again, and in the end we sank into a chill slumber, dreaming of steambaths and blazing fireplaces and hot, sunlit beaches. Of anywhere that was not haunted by the merciless wind.
So much snow accumulated on the roof that papa was afraid it would cave in on us. Wrapped in his greatcoat, his head covered in layers of wool and fur, thick gloves on his hands that were already raw from chopping firewood—he went up on the roof and tried to scrape off the snow. But his efforts were wasted. The snow had turned to ice. We heard him trying in vain to smash the ice with his shovel, and we knew, though none of us said it aloud, that in his own way he was fighting, and fighting hard, not only against the ice but against all that assailed us: the cruel weather, the cruel soldiers and the murderous Bayonet, the unknown hardships that lay ahead. I felt so much pity for him in those moments that I can hardly convey it—a world of pity, just then, for the father I loved so much.
It was in those grey, despairing days that I began to fall ill.
I caught a chill, then began to burn with fever—a fever that rose, day by day, until Dr. Botkin became very concerned about me and asked our guards to allow me to be moved to the nearest large city where there was a well-equipped hospital. But of course this request was denied.
I was having a lot of trouble breathing and my heart was racing even though I was lying in bed, resting. Mama, the doctor and some of the nuns hovered over me, watching me. I was aware that I was watching them back, or trying to, but my concentration kept slipping, and soon I couldn’t remember whether it was day or night, and my thoughts were confused.
I reached down and felt ice on my blankets, yet I was burning up. I felt hands rubbing my arms and legs to try to keep me warm—but whose hands? I heard voices, but could no longer tell whose they were.
I remember seeing the icon of St. Simon Verkhoturie, and hearing mama say, “He weeps for her.”
I coughed, my teeth chattered with the cold and my chest hurt when I breathed. I reached out my hand, but Michael was not there to take it. I tried to say his name. I knew that my lips moved, but I couldn’t hear any sound other than the keening of the wind.
I closed my eyes. Someone was sobbing. Was it mama? I smelled papa’s tobacco.
Then I seemed to slip downward, as if I were on a sled going down the side of an immense snow mountain, going faster and faster, wanting to stop but not being able to.
All was whiteness around me, and the only sound I heard was the muffled plop of snow falling in clumps from the branches of trees onto the frozen earth. Then silence.
Fifty-one
Is she dead?”
“No. But she hasn’t moved in two days.”
I felt a hand clasp mine, and I tried my best to squeeze the fingers. Strong, warm fingers. A man’s fingers.
I continued to feel the touch of the warm hand, and to draw strength from its heat in the freezing cold room.
Then I felt something placed in my hand. It felt like a frozen stick.
“Hold this,” a voice said. A comforting, loving voice. “Hold this, and it will help you get better.”
“Is it Father Gregory’s stick?” I managed to whisper.
“What do you think?”
I tried to put all my concentration into that stick. My thoughts began to cohere. And gradually, hour by hour, I began to feel a little better.
Grasping the stick, I remembered the time, long before, when I had put it onto Michael’s damaged chest, when I was his nurse and he was near death in the crowded hospital. I remembered how the stick had put forth a bud, and then a sweet-smelling white flower. And Michael had come back to life and health.
Eventually I was able to open my eyes. The first thing I saw was—Michael! Alive and well, and grinning down at me. He took me in his arms and I could feel life and strength surging within me.
Everyone gathered around my bedside was smiling: mama, papa, my sisters and brother, the nuns, Monsieur Gilliard—and Daria and Iskra. Weak though I was, I did my best to smile back.
“Daria,” I whispered. “You and Iskra were let out of the basement!”
“Only while the Bayonet is away. He has gone to the Regional Soviet Meeting in Ekaterinburg. He won’t be back for days.”
I clung to Michael, who hardly left my bedside. He insisted on taking care of me himself, as I had once cared for him. He fed me on black bread and soup, raw cabbage and radishes and very weak tea, and he sang to me and told me stories about Daghestan and Georgia, and his fellow soldiers, the men of the Fifth Circassian regiment.
“They are here, you know. In Tobolsk. Waiting for the time when they can be of use to your family. Some money has been raised. Weapons are being gathered. There are many groups here in Siberia eager to oppose the new Bolshevik government. It will be overthrown in time. I am confident of it. Petrograd will be retaken. Extremists like the Bayonet will be executed for their crimes.”
Dr. Botkin came and put his stethoscope to my chest and listened to my heart and lungs.
“You are recovering, Tania, but you must not try to recover too quickly, especially in this icy house. You have had double pneumonia, and you could have a relapse.” On his orders my bed was moved as close as possible to our one stove, and Michael built some makeshift screens to try to shield me from the constant drafts.
In a few days I was able to sit up, and my appetite improved—unfortunately, the food did not.
“Michael,” I asked when we were alone, “however did you escape from Tsarskoe Selo? And how did you find me?”
“The worst time was right after I left you and your family there in the little cottage on the Children’s Island. I ran into the woods, but the guards were everywhere on the island and I was sure they would find me. I couldn’t see anywhere to hide. But I was lucky. They had been drinking all evening. I stumbled over one who had passed out. I put on his uniform. If only the night had been dark! Still, I managed to blend in with the others until I found my way to the elephant’s enclosure. I went inside, and bribed the mahout to let me hide in his hut all night, under the pile of rags where he slept, until it was safe to leave the grounds.
“I don’t mind telling you, Tania, I was terrified. In the morning I took a load of elephant dung in a wheelbarrow to the shed where the night soil man comes with his wagon to collect the waste to be dumped into the Stavyanka. No one questioned me—or wanted to get near me. Oh how I stank! I hid on the underside of the wagon until it went out to the river through one of the side gates. From there I was able to find my way to the garrison of the Semyonovsky regiment which I knew had many officers who were still loyal to your father and were opposed to the growing power of the Soviet.
“I was welcomed as a brother officer and given clothes and a little money. I said that I was in the personal service of the tsar (I did not call him the ‘former tsar’) and they applauded me and wished me well and told me of a special military train that was due to travel eastward in a day or two. Before I left I went in search of Constantin, who was in hiding. He was lucky to be alive. He
was able to tell me where your family was to be taken.
“I got on the train and rode for four days but we were attacked near Perm by a force of Red Guards and the train was stopped. I stayed in a village on the edge of the Urals for a time, but had to move on when someone informed the local soviet of my presence there. I was nearly shot. Many others were not so lucky.
“I was told there were monarchist bandits in the foothills so I went in search of an outlaw band, hoping I might join them. They took me in because I was a soldier, and they needed training. I can tell you, Tania, the life of an outlaw is like the life I knew when I was a boy in the mountains of Daghestan. Completely free, with no one telling us how to live or what to do. My great-grandmother Lalako would have been right at home among those outlaws of the Urals. She would have wound up as their leader!
“I knew I had to get to Tiumen and hoped that I might be able to take the river steamer from there to Tobolsk. But by the time I finally reached Tiumen the river was frozen. I thought I might have to spend the winter there, in Tiumen, but there were wolf hunters setting out from the town in sledges and I managed to ride along with them. In time I found my way to the Ivanovsky convent and the nuns took me in. They told me all that had happened with your family—and that you were very sick and were not expected to live.
“I knew that the nuns came here to your compound every day with food and the newspapers. I decided to disguise myself as a farmer bringing butter and eggs and coffee. I became very popular with the guards—and your mama, who loves coffee. Even the Bayonet likes coffee, though he sometimes throws it in people’s faces when he is displeased.”
I held out my hands and Michael took them in his.
“What a lot you have gone through for me—and my family.”
“I would do it again—a thousand times.”
We embraced then, as if we would never let each other go, and I thanked heaven for bringing my Michael back to me.
“I must ask you one thing more,” I said at length. “Why did you keep Father Gregory’s stick with you all the way from Tsarskoe Selo?”
“What?” He laughed.
“The healing stick. The one that brought you back to life when you were wounded, and saved me from my pneumonia.”
“Oh, that. That was just some stick I picked up in the yard. It was nothing special.”
“But I thought—”
“I know what you thought. I knew you would think that. You needed to put your faith in something, so I found you a stick. The truth is, it was your own strength that saved you.”
“No. It was my faith—and you. Promise me you won’t leave me again, Michael. I couldn’t bear it.”
He leaned down and kissed me. “I couldn’t either,” he whispered. “Now, eat your soup.”
Fifty-two
As I recovered, I noticed that the nuns who often came to sit at my bedside were sewing. They stitched so rapidly that their hands seemed almost to flow over the cloth, the tiny needle flashing as it went in and out of the woven fabric almost too quickly for the eye to follow. Sometimes they did embroidery, sometimes they made lace. But quite often, it seemed, they were stitching garments: their own black habits and white wimples, lavish vestments for the priests, and most often, clothing for the poor.
“Would you be so kind as to make us some new underwear?” I asked one day. “We have had none in almost a year. Ours have been patched and darned so many times there is almost nothing left of them.”
I was assured that supplying new underwear for me and mama and my sisters would be no trouble at all, and in a matter of days a basket of petticoats and corsets and intimate undergarments was delivered to us, each garment very skillfully made though rather loose-fitting and without ornament.
“This is practical underwear,” Olga said, holding up a petticoat. “Not stylish silk undergarments from Paris. Besides, what can nuns be expected to know about costly lingerie for fine ladies?”
“What impresses me,” I said, “is how very quickly all this was sewn. I imagine these nuns could make a ball gown overnight if they were shown one to copy, and given all the materials.”
“In the old days, before the war, Lamanov would take two or three weeks to make a ball gown for mama or Grandma Minnie.”
“Yes, that’s just what I mean. These nuns are so very quick!”
The Bayonet returned from his faraway meeting of the Regional Soviet and spread fear throughout the house. Daria and Iskra were shut in their cellar once again and Michael was forced to return to his refuge in the Ivanovsky convent, though he did visit every day with the nuns, bringing us his gifts of food and never forgetting the Bayonet’s coffee.
The guards had begun to build a snow mountain in our small yard, but the Bayonet ordered it destroyed.
“Don’t you know that the exploiter and his family could climb to the top of the mountain and see over the fence? Don’t you realize they are conspiring with the Whites to destroy the revolution?”
The Whites was a term the Bolsheviks used to refer to anyone who opposed them.
“But the carnival is coming,” I heard one of the guards protest. “We always have snow mountains at carnival season.”
“What carnival?” barked the Bayonet. “Superstition, God-worship! That is all over and done with. There will be no carnival!”
But the townspeople of Tobolsk thought otherwise, and we could see, from our fog-shrouded window, that preparations for the pre-Lenten carnival were under way, whether the Bayonet and his Bolshevik superiors approved or not.
There had always been a week of celebration before the beginning of the Lenten season, Lent in Russia being the eight weeks preceding Easter Sunday. It was a tradition centuries old. It was called the Maslenitsa, or Butter Week, because of the butter we smothered over our sweet pancakes called blinis, butter that dripped deliciously down the chin and into the beard or onto the bosom. Butter that symbolized fat, and plenty, and looked forward to the end of the long hungry winter when food would be abundant again.
In Butter Week there were contests to see who could consume the most succulent blinis, filled with sweet fruit or jam or caviar, salmon or smelts from the White Sea. Michael joked that in this year of 1918 there would be only Bolshevik Blinis, filled with nothing, but unlike Petrograd, where there was mass starvation, Tobolsk had fresh game and fresh fish in the marketplace and stores of food from the farms and market gardens just outside the town, so I thought that the blinis would be filled to overflowing.
How I daydreamed of rich, good food in those days of thin cabbage soup and black bread and turnips! As I recovered my health my appetite returned, and even the smell of the Bayonet’s coffee was enough to send my stomach churning and my thoughts racing. Try as I might to suppress the memories, I could not help but remember the banquets we had at the Winter Palace and at Tsarskoe Selo, the heaping platters of marinated mushrooms and anchovies, smoked salmon and herring, stuffed goose and puree of ham and broiled hare garnished with truffles. The pâtés, the escargots, the delicate sauces and tarts and éclairs. I have never been a gourmand but in those lean days my thoughts ran wild. I envisioned suckling pigs and grouse roasted in sour cream, reindeer steaks and Volga sterlet, tender white asparagus and iced puddings and cloudberries with sugar. My mouth watered and my poor stomach hurt.
I could not help remembering mama’s Cousin Bertie at Cowes with his jars of Bar-le-Duc jam. How he ate! I wondered what he would think if he could see our family now, thin from deprivation, shivering in our icebox of a house, and humiliated in a way he could never have imagined royalty being humiliated. But then, Cousin Bertie would never have allowed this to happen to us. He would not have been cautious, as his son King George was, fearful of intervening in Russian affairs to rescue us even though he knew our lives were at risk. No! Cousin Bertie would have sent his army and his navy and all the forces at his command to rescue us, and would not have been satisfied until we were sitting at his table again, enjoying the bounty from his kitchens.
The English were not at hand, but we were learning that there were others who had our best interests at heart and who were busy making plans to aid us.
There was a kitchen accident and one of our cooks was badly burned. An old man was brought in to replace him—at least he seemed old to me, young as I was then. Probably he was no older than my father. He had been working in the nuns’ kitchen, but I heard one of the nuns tell our head guard that they could spare him since our kitchen was understaffed.
I noticed that the old man, who was bald and slightly bent, but still spry, was making himself useful not only as a cook but outside the kitchen as well, sweeping the rooms, cleaning the windows (a hopeless task, since as soon as the frost was cleared away new frost accumulated), and even helping papa chop wood.
Our wood supply was running low. Our family’s one stove, the kitchen fires, and the stove in the basement that kept Daria and Iskra alive were consuming more wood than we could chop. The Bayonet ordered thick beech trunks brought into the yard and papa worked for hours every day reducing them to sticks of firewood that would fit in the stoves. Despite Dr. Botkin’s cautions about the state of my lungs I went outside and did my best to help papa, small though my contribution to the woodpile was. It was too cold for my sisters; they stayed inside.
One afternoon the old bald servant came out as usual to offer his assistance. He bent down to pick up his axe—but instead of bringing the axe down on the chunk of wood before him I saw him look toward the house. It was a frigid day, the guards had gone inside to avoid the wind. No one was observing us. The old man turned to papa, with a look on his face of such benign reverence that it went to my heart.
Then he knelt in the snow at papa’s feet.
“Babiushka,” he murmured. “Babiushka, Little Father, we are here to help you.”
I saw tears in my father’s eyes.
“Who are you?”
The old man got to his feet again.
The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold) Page 27