Anastasia's Secret

by Susanne Dunlap

  “Well, you wouldn’t be, would you? I expect everyone has to bow three times to you when they see you, and would be whipped for forgetting to address you by your proper title.” He crossed his arms over his chest, daring me to notice that he had done no such thing himself at that moment.

  I was shocked. Although no one treated me very specially, no one ever spoke to me rudely—except my sisters and brother, and that was different. Then it struck me that here was someone completely outside my own world. He might be able to teach me what real life was like, outside the palace. I took a chance, and decided not to notice his rudeness.

  “Is that what people think?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Mostly everyone calls me Nastya. Or Anastasie. Or Anastasia Nicholaevna, if they want to be formal. Mama says using a title is only appropriate on state occasions.”

  “It is said your mama has views that the Russian nobility does not appreciate.”

  “Really? What else do people think about us?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. “Are you sure you want to know?” he asked. “You might not like it.”

  I shrugged. “What could they say? Mama and Papa are good and kind, and my sisters, brother, and I—we are just like other children.”

  “Listen.” He took a step closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. “If you really want to know, they think the tsaritsa doesn’t care for Russia, the tsar is afraid to do anything that will mean change, and the rest of you are aloof and spoiled.”

  “How odd.” I suppose I should have been offended by what he said, but instead I was fascinated. If I had never seen Sasha again after that, he would have given me a gift already, a view of my life from a completely different perspective, and it was a view that was not very flattering.

  I decided I had better change the conversation. “So how do you remain in the guards if you are too young?”

  “I thought I’d grow, but I didn’t. My commanding officer guessed, but he finds me useful, I suppose. I’m not allowed to parade because I ruin the line. Mostly I polish boots and buttons, sometimes I fetch swords and guns. I know how to clean a rifle now, and many of the officers ask me to do it for them before a parade. Oh, and they like to hear me play the balalaika.” He looked toward his instrument, as if he needed my permission to retrieve it from the flowerbed. I saved him the trouble by getting it myself. It was a plain wooden instrument with only a little carving on its triangular body and frets of brass up the slender neck. I handed it to him.

  “If there is war, will you fight?” I asked him.

  “What do you know of war?”

  “Everyone speaks of it. I don’t know much.” I tried to shrug casually, realizing that I might have given away more than I should have. I had a way of overhearing conversations I wasn’t meant to. It was the one advantage to being “just Anastasie.” Recently Papa and his advisers had been speaking about Prussia and Austria. But I didn’t want to let on to a guard I had only just met that I knew anything in particular. “Besides, when one sees soldiers everywhere, one naturally thinks of war.” It was a feeble explanation and I was certain he saw through it.

  “Then no one has told you that the Germans are arming, and making rather unpleasant noises that are upsetting all of Europe?”

  Fortunately, I didn’t have time to answer him. I heard Mlle Schneider—Trina—calling my name. “I have to go. My tutor is calling me. May we speak again?” I asked, not sure why, except that I hadn’t found out everything I wished to from this young man with the upturned blue eyes and freckles across his nose, who had dared to steal into the tsar’s garden to play the balalaika.

  “All you have to do is command it!” he said loudly, and bowed with a great flourish of his hand.

  “Ssshh!” I said. “I want to be able to talk to you without anyone knowing. The police record everything we do, you know. I can’t go to the water closet without someone writing a note about it. They say it’s for our safety.”

  “How tedious. Well, I’ll look for you in the garden again, just here,” he said, slapping the trunk of the oak tree near where we stood. It was spring, and the leaves were still small and pale green, and the light from the sun shimmered through them.

  “Will you bring your balalaika?” I asked.

  “You like this peasant instrument? I thought you royals were too proud for that.”

  “Wrong again,” I said. “I love it.” I decided not to tell him yet that I too knew how to play it.

  “Then I’ll bring it.”

  “All right,” I said, then ran off to find Trina.

  CHAPTER 2

  After our first encounter, I didn’t see Sasha for a while. He came once more that season and brought his balalaika. The quiet ballads he played made me sigh and reminded me of Livadia, our estate in the Crimea where the Tartars often had festivals, playing their balalaikas and beating their tambourines all day long and into the night.

  But we were busy with the jubilee, and Sasha was occupied with his guard duties. I didn’t expect to see him much, but I was vaguely disappointed anyway.

  Our life as the imperial family went on almost as normal—or what felt normal to us, at any rate. Marie and I shared a room, and Olga and Tatiana had theirs. We slept on simple camp beds without pillows. We all rose early, had cold showers, and ate breakfast at eight. My little brother Alexei joined us if he was not ill. He was born with a terrible disease—hemophilia—that made him bleed inside and suffer abominably. Although he had been well for long stretches of time, he would never be entirely cured. We thanked God daily that he had been better since that awful time at Skernevizi and then at Spala, our Polish estates, when he nearly died. The doctors had given up hope, and then Mama received the letter from Grigory that said Alexei would survive, and to tell the doctors not to bother him. She did, and he did, and after that Mama and Papa believed more than ever that Grigory Efimovich Rasputin was a saint.

  Personally, I thought he was just odd and harmless. He was very kind to all of us children, although he sometimes made me uncomfortable, the way he looked at me with his startling blue eyes, so pale they were almost colorless. Now I can’t believe he ever did half what they say he did.

  After breakfast every day except Sunday we tidied our rooms, then Mashka and I went to the schoolroom for our lessons, while Olga and Tatiana did other things until it was time for theirs. We had French and English, mathematics and geography, art and drawing. I loved my drawing lessons—anything to do with pictures, really—and the music and dancing. I didn’t care for German at all, and Mama gave up trying to make me learn it after a while. Once the war started, no one spoke German if they could help it anyway.

  I think my first premonition of what lay ahead came that early summer of 1914 when we were traveling to Tsarskoe Selo from our holiday at Livadia. We had come back early on the imperial train because there were “troubles” abroad and at home. Also, Alexei was not well, having slipped on a chair in our schoolroom. He had his nurse and Mama looking after him in their private car.

  At first, at every station along the way there were crowds to greet us—waving and cheering, some people in tears, hands clasped in front of them as if our train were the holiest of icons that could perform miracles. “For Tsar and country!” I heard all around me. I was surprised. We were normally treated with respect, but this seemed out of all proportion. Had something happened that we did not know about, or at least that Mama and Papa had chosen not to tell us?

  “Papa, what is all this?” I asked him.

  Mama answered, “Oh, there has been an unfortunate incident in the Balkan states. The Archduke Ferdinand has been… assassinated. I’m sure it will come to nothing, but there is such an outcry against the Germans now.”

  Mama did not look up from her sewing, but her lips were pressed together in a tight line, and Papa reached over and put his hand on her knee.

  “The people adore your mama and papa,” said Mme Vyrubova, Anya, who was traveling with us even though the other m
aids of honor had been sent ahead on their own. That always made them jealous.

  “It is so foolish,” Mama continued, her voice a little shaky. “Your papa has determined that we are to call St. Petersburg ‘Petrograd’ from now on, just so it does not sound German.”

  Of course, Mama is German by birth, although she was brought up mainly in England and is now wholeheartedly Russian. Her brother is the Grand Duke of Hesse. It would be her worst nightmare to go to war against her own family.

  My sisters and I excused ourselves from the luncheon table and returned to our parlor in another car. I wondered if Mama was right, that it would all blow over. I wasn’t so sure. Cities did not change their names over trifles. I thought then of Sasha, and wondered what he knew. I had not seen him since the spring, when we were at Peterhof. He had told me then that unsettling events were occurring on our Western frontier. When I had brought this news back to Tatiana and Olga they laughed it away. No one was laughing now.

  But that was not the worst of it. Later that day, as we drew into another station, I saw a great crowd gathered, just as they had gathered at many such stations along the way. Only this crowd was not cheering and waving.

  “Look, Mashka,” I said. She left her book and came over to peer out the window with me.

  “I expect they have bread and salt to present to Papa,” she said, then shrugged and went back to reading. It was a tradition to give the tsar bread and salt on a gold tray when he came to your city. Papa had decreed that only wooden trays should be used, though, when he found out that the poorer villages could not afford gold.

  But this crowd appeared different from the others. They were not simply quiet, they were silent. And the silence was filled with something tense and hostile. It was warm at that time of year, and I had opened the window to get the fresh breeze, but I decided to pull it back down almost all the way as we drew nearer to the crowd and I could discern flashes of something like anger in their eyes.

  We were not scheduled to stop, but as our train approached, the crowd swarmed the tracks so that the engineer had to pull the brakes and, amid much screeching and scraping of metal on metal, we ground to a halt. The people pressed up against the cars. Because the platform was low, they were nearly the height of a man beneath us. They turned their sullen faces up to stare. I drew back a little from the window.

  Suddenly a guard threw open the door to our carriage and ran through, closing and latching the protective metal shutters. “Don’t open them until I say!” he barked.

  As soon as the guard left, I unlatched the shutter nearest me and raised it a little so that I could look out. It all seemed unreal from inside our train, up above the heads of the common people outside.

  “Don’t, Nastya!” hissed Olga. She and Tatiana had been playing a game of bezique, but stopped abruptly when the train came to a halt. Their game was as orderly and tame as their hair, which was always neatly arranged and smooth. I ignored my oldest sister, who was nineteen and quite grown up, and peeked out. Local guards had come with their bayonets fixed and tried to push the crowd back, but the people held fast.

  “Come, brother, join us! Your life is as hard as ours,” a man quite close to me said to one of the guards.

  I thought he sounded very friendly and wondered if the guard would agree. Instead he lowered his rifle and plunged the bayonet through the man’s stomach.

  My hands flew to my mouth. I thought I would vomit. I concentrated hard to stop the bitter saliva from flooding my mouth.

  The next thing I knew the entire crowd had erupted in screams and shouts. I felt our train car being jostled. Then, Papa himself ran through our car, his eyes wild with fear.

  “We must go! Start the train!” he called as he ran up to the car behind the engine.

  Just before the door slammed shut behind Papa, I heard a voice from up ahead respond, “I can’t! The people are blocking the way!”

  I didn’t hear what Papa said next, but I felt the great steam engine rumble, and we began to inch forward. I peered out again. Most people scattered as we picked up speed, spitting and cursing and shaking their fists at us. I was relieved to be in the safety of the carriage instead of standing among them. Something Sasha had told me stuck in my mind, something about the anger that was barely hidden beneath the surface of most Russians. I was beginning to understand what he meant when I looked into the eyes of those people.

  I must have been holding my breath, because as the train started up again, I let out a long sigh. I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. It was a strange sensation. I don’t think I was ever really frightened before that time. I have been frightened many times since, though.

  But the tragedies weren’t over for that day. One very angry person must have stood his ground when everyone else stepped aside to let the train pass. Just as we began to pick up speed, the engineer pulled the brake and all of us were thrown from our seats.

  He had not pulled it soon enough. I heard my father cry out, “Stop! Stop! We have hit some poor devil! We must see to him.”

  “It is too late, Your Majesty,” said a guard. “We can do nothing, and there is great danger behind us.”

  My father passed back through our car, this time sobbing. We all stood and dusted ourselves off, then went back to our seats. Olga and Tatiana tried to recommence their card game. Maria picked up her book again, but I saw her hand shaking as she turned the pages. I went back to staring out the window, wondering how many more people like that there were in Russia and what would happen if they all gathered together and attacked us.

  CHAPTER 3

  Once we were back in Tsarskoe Selo, at the Alexander Palace—the one of our many palaces we really thought of as home—I sent word to Sasha that I wanted to meet him. I was eager to ask him about the incident at the station, to find out if he knew anything about it and what it all meant. Sasha and I couldn’t simply send letters; everything that came and went from the palace was read by the secret police. It was for our protection, they said, to prevent attacks upon us. But I sometimes wonder if the Bolsheviks had members among these same police and were storing up information about us for later.

  So instead of letters, to keep our friendship secret we devised a way of communicating through the girl who brought in the eggs, and who was happy to earn a few extra kopecks. These Sasha supplied, because I never had any actual money. Everything we wanted was purchased from our personal accounts, which were managed by the palace staff. It is funny now to think that I had no idea what things really cost, only that there was always enough money for everything that we wanted.

  Sasha and I sat at the foot of the oak tree in that protected glade of the garden where we had first met. High shrubs nearby kept out prying eyes, and the thick foliage of the oak protected us from the summer sun.

  “Why were those people at the train station so angry? So hostile?” I asked.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Sasha had his amazed, superior look.

  If someone else had acted that way, I would have been angry. But in my meetings with Sasha, I dropped all formality and decided that it was worth his friendship to tolerate whatever he said or did. Something about the way he looked at me made me forgive him for anything. And it was unsettling to think how little I really knew about what went on in Russia. “Did you hear of it?” I asked him, steering the conversation back around to the pursuit of information.

  “No,” he answered. “I expect no one will. The Okhrana hushes up everything that casts a bad light on the tsar, if they can. What’s the life of one peasant, after all?”

  Now he had gone too far. How could he imagine that we thought any person’s life was not sacred? But I didn’t want to show my anger and risk sending him away. Instead, I pulled up a clump of grass and threw it at him.

  “Be careful, Your Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Anastasia!” he said.

  “Oh!” When he wanted to provoke me he called me by my title. I had to resist the temptation to fall upon him and pummel him with
my fists. It would have done my white dress no good at all, and I would have had to offer some reasonable explanation later. I satisfied myself with sticking my tongue out at him.

  He laughed silently until the tears streamed down his cheeks. “You can’t be serious. You’re just like a little girl, yet you’re a grand duchess.”

  “I am just a normal person, like you or any of Papa’s subjects.” I refused to think of myself even then as a little girl, and it infuriated me when Sasha said it.

  Sasha grew serious. “It’s true, they have not spoiled you and given you high and mighty airs. But do you really know what it’s like to be what you call a ‘normal person’?”

  “I know the servants, who are not wealthy, and the sailors on Papa’s yachts.”

  “They all receive costly gifts from your parents at Christmas or Easter, or at the end of a cruise. They have long since feathered their nests with the proceeds from imperial presents that they sell in the marketplace.”

  I didn’t want to tell Sasha that I hadn’t any idea which gifts were costly and which were not. I had seen peasants working in the fields, seen shopkeepers and tradespeople in the streets of Petrograd and Moscow, seen the Tartars in the Crimea, with their red and gold costumes and their horses. But I couldn’t really claim to know any of these people, or to have any idea what kind of lives they led. “Nonetheless, the people have a good life here. If they do not, it is because they are lazy and refuse to work.”

  Sasha’s face darkened and I realized I must have gone too far in repeating something I had heard Mlle Tutcheff, a governess we had for only a short time, say when I was younger.

  “That way of thinking is what will ruin your family and all of the Russian nobility as you know it,” he said.

  It was hard sometimes to stay calm when Sasha told me things. I was getting tired of not knowing anything, always having to accept what he said as the truth. “If you think I am so uninformed, why don’t you show me what the real people are like? For all I know, they’re like you, sleeping in comfortable barracks with three meals of meat a day!”