The Summer Day is Done

by Mary Jane Staples

  ‘Papa is growing so thin,’ said Tatiana one day in May, two months after the abdication.

  ‘He hasn’t been blessed by things which help a man to grow fat,’ said Olga, ‘but at least he’s a little happier now that they have let him plant a kitchen garden.’

  They were outside, venturing on a permitted but restricted walk. Soldiers, as always, were never far away, suspicious of every move. Nicholas had been allowed to dig a kitchen garden in the lawn of the Imperial Park, and on this day he was enjoying the pleasure of sowing seed. There were a few soldiers with him, willing to help with the work. Suspicious though they were, their willingness was typical of the effect the Imperial family had on most of their guards throughout their captivity, which was to last sixteen months. Their refusal to show bitterness or to complain, their total lack of airs and graces, and their insistence that it was not they who mattered but Russia, all helped to soften men surly and hard to begin with. At all stages of the captivity there were some men who would have liked the Imperial family to go free.

  Perhaps the only man who would have been totally impervious was Lenin. Lenin was Russia’s sea-green incorruptible. Such men permit themselves no emotions. Lenin, for instance, was able to sit up writing one of his interminable treatises on a night when his wife’s mother lay desperately ill in the same room. He could do nothing for her, she could do nothing for him. Therefore, it was logical for each of them to pursue their separate ways, she towards death and he towards the completion of his manuscript. He did not bother to call his wife when the death rattle came. She could have done nothing, either.

  Olga and Tatiana would have found Lenin utterly incomprehensible.

  ‘Alexander Fedorovich,’ said Tatiana, referring to Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, ‘has told Papa we might be sent to Livadia, to stay there indefinitely.’

  ‘I know,’ said Olga, ‘and he means what he says, I think.’

  ‘Livadia,’ said Tatiana wistfully, ‘would be infinitely better than here.’

  ‘More than that, much more,’ said Olga earnestly. ‘Livadia would be worth praying for every minute of every day.’

  Tatiana’s expression of bright hope matched Olga’s earnestness. Tatiana was nineteen, willowy and by now the most classically beautiful of the Grand Duchesses.

  ‘How I’d love to be watching Papa playing tennis, seeing Mama in the sunshine,’ said Tatiana restlessly. She glanced at her sister as they slowly walked, then at soldiers who were lolling but watchful. ‘Olga, do you know where Ivan is now? Does he write to you?’

  Olga looked straight ahead. The park was lovely in May.

  ‘We’ve never exchanged letters,’ she said. ‘Olga, how stuffy that sounds,’ said Tatiana. ‘Is it because Mama wouldn’t approve? But perhaps she would now. We’re nobodies now, you know. You should write to him, he’ll be so concerned about us. You should tell him we’re all well.’

  ‘Mama is even prouder now than she was before,’ said Olga quietly.

  ‘That isn’t to say you shouldn’t write to a friend, especially now that we don’t seem to have so many. Oh,’ said Tatiana with a sigh, ‘if it were me I’d be dashing off pages and pages every day. Olga, you’re silly to be so sensitive, to be as proud as Mama in wanting to do exactly what’s right when everything is so different now. Well, tell me, is there anything sillier than any of us now saying this or that shouldn’t be done because someone isn’t a Grand Duke or a Crown Prince? If you feel that because of Mama and Papa, Ivan isn’t to be concerned about what is happening to us, aren’t you concerned about what might be happening to him?’

  ‘Tasha!’ Olga was fierce in her hurt. ‘Tasha, how could you!’

  ‘Well, you should write to him,’ insisted Tatiana.

  ‘He is supposed to have written to Mama and to Alexis,’ said Olga. ‘He did last Christmas but not this. Mama hasn’t had a word from him, nor has Alexis. Tatiana, do you think he’s gone back to England? They say it’s awful in Armenia, worse than Galicia was or anywhere else.’

  Tatiana did not answer that. They turned away from guards posted at the limit of their allowed exercise and retraced their steps. Tatiana could only think of one reason why Ivan Ivanovich hadn’t sent Christmas greetings to the family. It was a thought she pushed fiercely aside, a thought she could not put into words in front of Olga.

  She said, ‘I think Mama would like to go to England even more than Livadia. Papa says he’ll never leave Russia, but Mama thinks he’d be safer in England than anywhere.’

  ‘England?’ Olga caught her breath. ‘Are they talking again about sending us there?’

  ‘Mama often talks about it and Alexander Fedorovich nods his head and says he’ll see.’

  ‘Oh, it would be the best thing until people come to their senses here,’ said Olga eagerly, ‘it’s the only place Mama and Papa would live in outside Russia. There’d be Great Aunt Alix and Grand Mama – she’d go too – and all our English cousins and—’

  ‘And perhaps Ivan Ivanovich too,’ said Tatiana.

  ‘Tasha, it’s not for myself, truly it’s not.’

  ‘All the same, if he were there,’ said Tatiana teasingly, ‘it would be rather nice, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Colonel Kirby—’

  ‘Colonel Kirby?’ Tatiana laughed a little. They could all still laugh. ‘Olga, oh, how modest and coy you are. When you do see him again I suppose you’re just going to say, “Colonel Kirby, you’ve been rather a long time again, but you may kiss my hand.” Dearest, don’t you see, we really are nobodies, and Mama simply could not refuse your marrying him now, could she?’

  ‘Tasha, don’t,’ gasped Olga, ‘oh, that would give her one more worry when she already has so many.’

  ‘But that is what you’re thinking of if we go to England, isn’t it?’

  ‘Tasha, don’t!’

  The guards watched them, two brightly attired young women walking in the sunshine of the Imperial Park, the Alexander Palace a looming edifice of cupolas and domes. One soldier followed them with sleepy eyes. His mind stirred his tongue and he coarsely expressed his preference. A comrade looked at him, spat softly and turned away.

  In August, Alexander Kerensky, sympathetic towards the Imperial family, had them moved to Tobolsk in Western Siberia. He did not consider them safe while they remained at Tsarskoe Selo and was doing his best to negotiate their eventual exile to England.

  In November, the Provisional Government was overthrown, Kerensky had to run for his life and the Bolsheviks took over. Lenin, who wasn’t quite the prophet Rasputin was, arrived only just in time to participate in the Bolshevik putsch. If it hadn’t been for the accommodating Germans and the short-sighted Kaiser, Lenin might easily have missed it all. However, he did arrive, full of words and pamphlets, and was in time to take his place with Trotsky as a fount of inspiration. Stalin was there too but did most of his work unobtrusively and in the dark.

  In pursuit of power the orators will promise the people anything.

  The autocracy of Tsarism had gone. Now the Provisional Government, which was to bring democracy to Russia, went too. The glorious Bolshevik revolution triumphed, and there emerged the new despots, no less intolerant than the old. Men fighting for the cause of Bolshevism died. But not Lenin, not Trotsky, not Stalin. Like all politicians, theirs was not to die but to encourage others to. They attacked the citadels of authority from the back. The citadels fell and they at once began to establish as cruel and oppressive a system as that which for years they had denounced. Stalin proved as merciless and bloodthirsty as any Tsar, but more hypocritical.

  Such were the men who called the Imperial family butchers.

  Andrei was one of the aristocrats they came for on the last night of November. He came down the stairs of his Petrograd house as they burst in. He was immaculately casual in a silk dressing gown and slippers. His hands were in the pockets. It was the usual untidy crowd. Sailors, soldiers, civilians and women, and all of them hungry-looking.

&n
bsp; ‘What is it you want, food or blood?’ he said.

  ‘We want your bones,’ said a man, ‘we want them for the dogs.’

  Andrei saw his own servants among the intruders. They would not look at him. Nor, he knew, would they help him. The hungry ones rushed. Andrei’s right hand came out of his dressing-gown pocket and lazily, but with a little flicker of satisfaction, he shot the first man. Then, to please himself and to frustrate the rest of them, he very successfully shot himself. He was quite happy to depart. It was their world, not his. There’d be no peace for anyone.

  Aleka came later. She strode into the smashed-up hall wearing a coarse black serge coat, her booted feet tramping, her hair scragged back and bound by a ribbon of revolutionary red. But for her fine pale skin she could have been a worker’s woman. She had Bolshevik comrades at her back. Tucked into a leather belt around her coat was a pistol.

  She looked at the body, at the pool of blood on the shining floor.

  ‘Andrei, oh you fool, why didn’t you go?’ she said, but only to herself. Aloud she said, ‘Well, they all have to go in one way or another, comrades.’

  But he could have escaped. She had telephoned him, implored him to get away and at once. He had preferred to stay. It was sad. She had loved him. He had loved her. But for the sake of the revolution one had to suffer some heartache.

  She began to abuse the short-sighted comrades who had damaged what was now the property of the people.

  Chapter Six

  In December they said that Lenin smiled.

  Among things that actually did happen was the conclusion of an armistice between the Russian army of the Caucasus and Turkey. The Turks were only too pleased, their own Ottoman Empire was falling apart. The prisoners they held were one more drain on their vanishing resources. So they began to open the gates.

  ‘That way,’ they said to the Russian prisoners, pointing north, and the released Russians began their long walk home. It was a last walk for some. The sky hung each day like a frozen grey blanket, the earth was soundless and without life. Only warmth could make the soil breathe again and warmth seemed as if it had gone for ever. Some of the men reached Russian lines by Christmas. Kirby was one of them.

  In early January he was back in Kars. The place was bleak and brooding, icy and bitter. Men moved indifferent to each other. The Russian forces were breaking up under the demoralization brought about by a terrible war and a Bolshevist revolution. All these wasted years when each savage battle had only paved the way for another, and the death of one day led to the suicide of the next.

  Kings and queens, emperors and empresses were at the top of the long slide down.

  Kirby walked slowly, his garments a hotchpotch, his fur coat a shapeless, seedy replica of the original. He had taken it from an officer who had dropped and, it seemed, gratefully died. Headquarters in Kars had not been very interested, all kinds of prisoners were turning up. There were still dinners, dances, women. There was still wine. There were still elegant, well-dressed officers. If they knew they were dancing while the flames came closer they did not seem to be bothered. He was to come and see them when he felt better. It was good to know he had survived, of course. His name had not been included in any prisoner-of-war lists.

  He asked them about the Tsar and the Tsar’s family.

  They shrugged as if to indicate Nicholas had brought it all on himself. And there was no real news except that the whole family was now reported to be in Tobolsk in Western Siberia. They would not be there long, of course. The place was full of loyalists who would rescue them any moment.

  Kirby thought of the family as he trudged through the icy streets. There had been scarcely a day since news of the abdication reached his prisoner-of-war camp when he had not thought of them. He thought of Alexis the boy, Anastasia the gifted, Marie the romantic, Tatiana the intelligent. And he thought night and day of Olga the sensitive, now in the hands of people who, embittered by oppression, would take pleasure in humiliating the whole family.

  He reached the house. It stood in hard grey-brown defiance of the biting cold. He had no key but the door to the first-floor apartment was not locked. Headquarters had said Karita was still here. The apartment was empty, but it was warm and lived-in. The fire was laid but not lighted. Timber was in the grate. A small oil heater burned and spread comfort. A samovar stood on it as if someone had known he was coming. He poured tea from it, drank the golden liquid slowly and gratefully. He put a match to the fire. The flame sprang. His fur coat, his ear-muffed fur hat and his worn brown boots were stiff with ice. He couldn’t remember where he had got those boots.

  Removing cap and coat he sank into a chair. He sat stiffly. He wondered about Karita. Headquarters had said she had anchored herself to the place as stubbornly as a sailor’s mule. Yet she hated Kars. He began to pull tiredly at his boots. His face was dark with the stubble of beard, he was thin of face and looked like a cold, unshaven tramp. There was someone at the outer door. He heard footsteps and seconds later Karita came into the room, pinkly glowing in the sable he had bought her in old St Petersburg, when the capital had been gay and alive, when he had been alive too. She was carrying a paper bag.

  She stopped, she stared. A gasp came from her. He managed a smile as he looked up at her from the awkwardness of loosening boots he hadn’t had off for weeks. Karita gave a wild sob, threw the bag down and ran to tumble to her knees in front of him. She hid her face as she pulled at his left boot. She was crying noisily. He put out a hand, pushed back her hat and teased her golden hair.

  ‘You should have gone home to your parents, little one, but thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Ivan Ivanovich … oh, you’re disgraceful, disgraceful … all this time and not a word from you.’ She put her hands to her face and sobbed into them.

  ‘Now look here,’ he said mildly because of physical lassitude, ‘I haven’t been lying around enjoying balmy Arcadia—’

  ‘Arcadia? Who is she?’ Karita’s voice, wet with sobs, managed to sound outraged.

  ‘It’s a kind of rustic heaven. Well, I haven’t been there. Didn’t you get any of the cards they let us write?’

  ‘I’ve heard nothing, nothing. Oh, it’s easy for you to sound as if everything has been quite ordinary, you knew you weren’t dead, but I didn’t.’ Her voice burst through her tears. ‘It’s the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever heard of. A whole year and I haven’t once known what was to become of me. But you would go off, you wouldn’t listen to me and see what happened.’

  ‘What did happen?’ He felt he was home again. Karita, like Olga, was always herself.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she cried indignantly, ‘nobody knew. Oh, those stupid people at headquarters. It’s no wonder Russia is in such a state when there are so many people like that about.’

  ‘Didn’t you guess I was in a prisoner-of-war camp?’

  Karita, still on her knees, lifted her head. She was so happy that the tears ran sparkling with joy. Her long loneliness was over.

  ‘There, that’s it,’ she said, ‘you would go. But you were supposed to do away with Turks, not let them put you in some awful camp. Oh, look at you,’ she gasped, ‘you’re so thin, so cold. What have they been doing to you? What have you let them do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘this is just wear and tear. Still, I suppose it does show I’m pretty inadequate without you.’ His eyes, dark in their hollows, were more alive than the rest of him. They were warm with affection because she was here, because she had waited. Karita was hot with gladness.

  ‘Why didn’t you say you were coming?’ She began to pull at his boots again. ‘Oh, they’re so stiff, are they frozen to you?’

  ‘I hope not, otherwise you’ll have both my legs off. I’m not putting you out because I didn’t let you know, am I?’

  ‘Ivan Ivanovich, doing silly things is bad enough,’ she said, ‘but saying silly things is even worse. There.’ She had loosened the boots. She sat back on her heels for a moment, surveying him with quite po
ssessive pleasure. She pulled the boots off, sat back again and then gasped. She stared in horror. In the flame of the fire, a brightness in the darkening room, the condition of his grey woollen socks was unspeakable. His heels and toes emerged from mere woollen rags. The dirty rags were indescribable, but for Colonel Kirby to have such disgustingly filthy feet, well! There were simply no Russian words she could think of.

  ‘They’re stinkingk,’ she said in English.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Just be grateful that you haven’t had to live with them for as long as I have.’ She surveyed him again. How drawn he was, how tired. But at least his eyes were bright. Karita felt the strangest emotions. Her heart hammered. Her blood rushed. Moistness took renewed possession of her eyes. She got up, her face flaming.

  ‘Stay there,’ she said breathlessly, ‘I’m going to bring some hot water and then some hot soup. Later you can have a bath. Oh, it’s disgraceful, everything is.’ She rushed out. In the kitchen she stamped a foot at herself because of the stupid tears. She took him a bowl of hot water, put the bowl on the floor at his feet, picked up the woollen rags and threw them disgustedly into the fire. Kirby slid his feet into the bowl.

  ‘Oh, so this is the unbearable bliss, is it?’ he murmured. ‘Karita, you precious lovely girl.’

  Karita stifled a sob and rushed out again. She began to prepare soup. She went back when the pot was on. He was still there, very relaxed, his feet immersed. The water was muddy.

  ‘Karita.’

  She stood beside him. He looked up at her. There was something in his eyes, a reflection of thoughts painful and intense.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Is it true? They’ve taken the Imperial family to a place called Tobolsk?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. There was a burning in her brown eyes he had seen before. ‘Yes, that’s what we’ve heard. Ivan Ivanovich, if they harm them I shall still love Russia but I shall despise its people.’