Anastasia's Secret

by Susanne Dunlap

  I could hardly taste the biscuits we ate, and only sipped at my tea. As soon as it was polite, I asked leave to get up from the table, and moved away to a window seat to continue my knitting.

  “The little Anastasie has lost her healthy appetite!” said Rasputin. I blushed. He turned to Mama. “You know what that means, of course. It means she is in love.”

  Mama laughed. “Nastya? My friend, how could you imagine such a thing. She is a little child.”

  What Mama said made me even more cross than Rasputin’s remark. But that wasn’t the end of my embarrassment. “Come here, little child, as your mother calls you,” Father Grigory said, “and as you once did when you were only so high.” He held his hand at a distance of about three feet from the floor. I was not tall even then, and I hated being reminded of having been so little before. My mother nodded to me, indicating that I must do as he said.

  I walked over to him, standing about an arm’s length away. “Come, come, come!” he said, reaching his long arm out to grasp my hand. I was tempted to pull away, but I didn’t dare, not with my mother watching me closely. I moved to just in front of his knees. He looked me up and down. “She has not the beauty of Olga and Tatiana, but she has fire. Oh yes, God will protect her. She is a survivor.”

  I thought after his pronouncement he would pat me on the head and let me go. I knew I was blushing violently. He had a way of making me feel like the child I believed I had left behind, and yet at the same time very conscious of the woman inside me. But then he did something much worse. He reached out with both his hands and cupped my almost nonexistent breasts in his long, clawlike hands. I gasped and turned to look at my mother. But she had glanced down at her sewing, and by the time she looked up, Rasputin had taken his hands away. Only Tatiana had seen what happened, and she gave me an almost imperceptible shake of the head. Even without her warning I was too dumbstruck to say anything, so I simply walked back to my knitting basket. I refused to look at Rasputin again that evening.

  That was the last time I saw him. I later realized that Tatiana’s signal probably meant that if I had said anything, Mama would have believed I was lying. In her mind and heart she could not accept that Rasputin was capable of any evil. As far as she was concerned, he had saved Alexei’s life, and foretold everything that has happened since then. She has always believed that the fate of our family was bound up with his, and I suppose events have proven her right.

  But all was not work and difficulty. I was thrilled when I discovered that Sasha came back from the front for a brief leave in Petrograd in November. We managed to meet for an hour when he was sent with a dispatch to Tsarskoe Selo.

  “Your sister Tatiana could end up saving you all, you know,” he said to me as we wandered through the winter garden, as far away from the windows as possible.

  “Tatiana? Why?”

  “Her Refugee Committee. It’s the most well-run, effective effort in the entire government.”

  I smiled. Tatiana was awfully good at organizing things.

  After a while she also decided that the hospital work was too depressing and wanted to concentrate on something with more possibility of a positive outcome. Mama had approved her idea, and that was all it took for her to put herself in charge of finding places for all the Polish and other refugees who were fleeing into Russia from the German and Austrian onslaught.

  “There is much to admire about your sister,” Sasha said, glancing sidelong at me.

  “You mean, besides her committee?” He was testing me, and so I would test him in return. I would make him tell me that he thought her beautiful. I didn’t mind when other people said it, but coming from him, I knew it would sting. Yet still I prodded him.

  “People say she is beautiful and unpretentious.”

  “People?”

  “Yes! I hear it from others often.” He stopped and turned me toward him. “Are you jealous of Tatiana?”

  I couldn’t look at him. “No. Not jealous. I love her. I love all my family.” I didn’t know what to say.

  “I don’t know Tatiana,” Sasha said. “But I cannot imagine that she has a truer heart and soul than you. And that’s the most important thing.” He kissed me on the forehead, like a brother, not on the lips as he had before. And I would be fifteen in a few months!

  I should have been glad that Sasha still thought of me as a friend, and that he had kissed me again, but instead I had a disappointed pang in my stomach. I felt him drawing away, becoming completely engrossed in the war and in his new position of importance as an aide-de-camp to a colonel. “I sometimes play your balalaika,” I said, clutching at the only thing I could think of that might remind him that we had a connection to each other.

  “That’s good. It likes to be played.” He nudged me in a friendly way as we walked through the garden.

  “How did you learn to play?” I asked him.

  “By listening and watching,” he said. “How else?”

  “You didn’t have music lessons?”

  “Hah! In my house? A man must be a man, not a dandy.” He put on a deep, authoritative voice.

  “We have lessons for everything. Piano, dancing, English, French …”

  “All very useful, no doubt, when you are someday married and can torment your own children with lessons in piano, dancing, English, French …”

  I nudged him back, hard. He almost fell off balance. “Be careful! Would you put out my other eye?”

  He was laughing, but I realized that I hadn’t even thought about the patch and what he had looked like before. This new Sasha, who had fought and killed and stared his own death in the face, was now the only Sasha there was. I was a little sad, but also a little in awe. He was a man. My friend, my only true friend, was no longer a boy. “Will I see you again before you go away?” I asked.

  “If I can find an excuse to come here. It’s not easy, you know.”

  “If I were a real grand duchess I could order you,” I said, putting my nose in the air.

  “Grand duchesses can do many things, but they cannot give orders to soldiers,” he said, and tweaked my nose.

  “My brother once ordered a whole regiment of guards to march into the sea,” I said.

  He laughed. “Ah, but he is the tsarevich. And a boy.” Sasha walked a little way out of the trees and looked left and right, to see that no one was watching, then came back. “I have to go. You’ve made me waste too much time already!”

  He gave me a smile and a quick salute and strode off. I liked watching him from the back. He had a straight-shouldered, rhythmic walk. He had grown taller too. But he was so caught up in the war and his new position of responsibility that I was very much afraid he couldn’t see beyond his own advancement and change to recognize mine. I so desperately wanted him to understand all the ways that I had grown too. I looked down at my outfit. My child’s coat covered a mock sailor’s uniform, not like anything one actually saw officers wear on board a ship, of course, but the kind beloved by mothers. No wonder he thought of me as little more than a child.

  CHAPTER 11

  In December of 1915, more than a year after the start of the war and months after we had all been told it would end, tragic events began to pile up again. A dear friend of Mama’s, one of her maids of honor, died after a short illness. I thought Mama’s heart would break. Then if that wasn’t enough, Papa returned home unexpectedly with Alexei, who had broken a blood vessel in his nose and was dangerously ill because of it.

  Again, the doctors tried everything and failed to make a difference. And again Mama called in Rasputin, who prayed and touched Alyosha’s face (so Mashka told me, since I refused to be in the same room with him). Alyosha began to recover after that, and the doctors could not account for why. But Mama was convinced it was the holy power of her trusted Grigory. No one could ever have persuaded her otherwise.

  Always, after Alyosha had been ill and was recovering, we made a great fuss over him. The kitchen would prepare endless delicacies to tempt his appetite. “L
et’s go try Alyosha’s food!” I said after Mashka’s and my lessons one day, knowing that a little mischief would cheer him up more than anything. We went to his room just as the first footman arrived carrying trays with special morsels for him: sweets and sausages, noodle cakes and dumplings, caviar and blinis.

  “Come, Alyosha!” I said. “Surely you can’t eat this all by yourself. We’ve come to help you so that Dr. Botkin doesn’t get angry and make you stay in bed for weeks.”

  I helped myself to a few of the little portions. “Leave some for me!” he cried. “I’m feeling much better now, no thanks to you.”

  “What? Didn’t we visit you enough while you were sick?”

  “You came and tormented me with all the things I couldn’t do until I got better.” But he smiled when he said it. It was a trick I had, once the very worst was over: I would tease him into a fighting frame of mind.

  Mashka and I ate our fill of Alexei’s treats, and I think because we were eating them, he ate more than he would have otherwise. I told him all the naughty things my puppy, Jimmy, was doing, that he’d left a mess right in the middle of the semicircular hall and one of the footman had stepped in it while I was running to get a shovel to pick it up. He laughed and laughed. We didn’t leave until Zhilik came to get us for our afternoon lessons.

  Mama too was very ill that winter. Her heart gave her such trouble that she had to use the elevator to go up and down from our floor to hers, and spent much of the day just lying on her chaise. But she and Alyosha both recovered by spring. The doctors decided that Alexei was well enough to return with Papa to Mogilev.

  “Darling, must you take him away again? Remember what happened last time.”

  Mama’s eyes followed Papa as he looked for books he wanted to take with him from the small library. Mashka and I had been enjoying some time quietly reading when they both came in.

  “He must learn. And he has been better for quite a while. Gibbes will go with us so he can continue his lessons, and Nagorny, of course.” He didn’t look at her, just pulled out books, leafed through them and put them back.

  “But if he becomes ill? What then?”

  “Derevenko will be there too. He’s an excellent physician. And the army hospital is well stocked with everything he could need.”

  Just as Mama threw herself into a chair and put her handkerchief to her eyes, Alyosha entered. He did look handsome, and so grown up in his uniform. He had told me that he loved being with Papa and the army, that it was good to get away from Mama’s intense worry for a while. “I’m ready, Papa. Chemodurov and Nagorny have seen to everything, and the motorcar is waiting for us outside.”

  I couldn’t help smiling over in my corner, hearing Alyosha trying to make his voice deep. He was nowhere near a beard yet, though—something I made sure to remind him of as often as I could.

  “I shall be fine, Mama. Please don’t worry.” Alyosha took Mama’s hand. She smiled. “And I promise to write home every day. I shall have to, to make sure Nastya doesn’t drive everyone insane!” He cast me a sidelong glance. I balled up a piece of paper I was using as a bookmark, put it in my mouth, and spit it out at him. It struck him right in the forehead.

  “Nastya! Is that any way to treat your brother when he is on the point of departing?” Mama asked, but Papa had turned away and I realized he was trying very hard not to laugh.

  “No, Mama. Only I hope Alexei won’t become too much like the soldiers, and curse and tell lewd stories.” Now Mashka started laughing. Alyosha just drew himself up taller.

  “For that, you shall get your letter last,” he said. But I knew that I would be the first person he wrote to.

  Papa, Alyosha, and Sasha, of course, had gone back to the war. The house was quiet and dull again. I contented myself with writing to Papa and Alyosha, and thinking of Sasha when I played his balalaika quietly at night after everyone had gone to their rooms. Mashka actually came to like it, and would often fall asleep to the sound.

  This secret practicing was all I thought I would have to preserve me from the quiet drear of Petrograd, Peterhof, and Tsarskoe Selo. Tatiana had started her nursing duties again, and she and Olga went to Petrograd every other week for committee meetings and other charity work, leaving Mashka and me to knit, sew, and read to Mama. Occasionally Anya invited us all to her house in Tsarskoe Selo for a party. She also invited any officers she knew who were on leave, and sometimes we danced to the gramophone. Or rather, I should say I only danced if there were more officers than women, being the youngest and still in short skirts. I asked any of the ones who were from the Semyonovsky guards if they knew the colonel Sasha was with, hoping by that means to get some information about him without giving away our acquaintance.

  Did Mama know I had a secret friend? I am not certain. I think it would have been quite easy for her to find out. I have gone back and forth thinking that she didn’t care enough to ask, and that she understood my need for a friendship unconnected to the court and not influenced by court manners and traditions. I like to give her the benefit of the doubt, and believe that although she didn’t often take the time to know my thoughts and feelings, she still recognized that I had them.

  Whatever the case, the spring of 1916 was much happier than our previous two had been, and not only because I knew that Sasha, with his blind eye, would probably not be sent to the front lines to fight. We all—my mother, sisters, and I, and the suite—went away on an extended visit to the south, to see the hospitals and sklady there and make sure the soldiers and wounded on the Galician front had all that they needed. We were within a stone’s throw of Livadia, but Mama would not let us go there because she said it was too self-indulgent to do so when the country was at war. I think it was mostly because she couldn’t bear the thought of being there without Papa and Alexei, who spent much of their time at Mogilev.

  Still, the warm weather was heavenly. The war seemed farther away around Sebastopol, even though the German fleet had entered the Black Sea, and we had to black out the windows on our train at night along with all the lights in the cities and towns, fearful as everyone was of possible air raids.

  After that we went to Eupatoria, a very exotic seaside town that remained largely Mohammedan. I will never forget going to a service of thanksgiving at the mosque. We were invited specially, women not usually being permitted in the mosques. The chanting was beautiful, although I didn’t understand it. We went to a synagogue too, and heard the psalms chanted in Hebrew. I wished I could have talked to these strange, different people more, but we were hurried from one place to another. So many people seemed to want to see us.

  Perhaps the most extraordinary time was in the summer, though, when we took the imperial train to Mogilev to visit Papa and Alexei at the front. It wasn’t really the front, in that there was no fighting nearby. But occasionally we could hear the distant guns, like thunder.

  I remember the first time we actually heard them, in fact. We had pulled into the siding where our train would stay, as the train was the only suitable accommodation for our family in the vicinity. We sisters all dressed to go to the nearby villages, where we were told we could talk to the people and see if they needed anything. These villages were so small that most of them did not even have names. And there were several within a short walk, so we split up into our usual two pairs, accompanied by a few guards to keep us safe, so we could get to as many as we could.

  “I can hear someone chopping wood in the distance,” I said to Mashka, who was convinced that we had become lost in looking for the first village we were to visit. The guards who accompanied us simply followed, not offering much help. Perhaps they were secretly laughing at us.

  “That’s better than nothing, I suppose,” she answered, cross with me again.

  We continued toward the sound, and it did, in fact, turn out to be our village—more a hamlet, really. About a dozen thatch-roofed cottages surrounded a well. Each cottage had a chicken coop and manger behind it, sometimes inhabited by goats, sometimes by
a cow. We approached a fellow chopping wood at the back of one of the cottages. He didn’t hear us coming, and so I had to say, “Zdravstvuytye!” very loudly a few times before he looked up. When he did, he made the sign of the cross. I suppose he thought we were ghosts!

  I stepped forward, being a little braver than Mashka about these things, and tried to explain who we were and why we were there. He said he knew the emperor was at Mogilev, but did not expect the grand duchesses to have braved the journey from Petrograd.

  As we spoke, people began to filter out of the cottages and from the surrounding woods. By the time we had discovered that the fellow’s name was Botichev and that he had a wife who was out at the market, five strong sons who were off fighting the war, and a daughter who stayed home to help, quite a crowd had gathered. There were several girls our age among them. At first everyone was quiet—in awe, I suppose. But then I turned to a girl who appeared to be the one all the others looked up to, and said, “You have on a very pretty dress. Did you make it?” I stepped forward to where she stood, a little out of the center of the group.

  “Yes,” she answered, and smiled.

  “I love to do needlework,” I said. “Your embroidery is very fine.”

  Botichev said, “That is my daughter Anyushka. She will marry in the fall.”

  My mouth fell open. She was hardly older than we were! A vexed look crossed her features. “Perhaps you can show us around, tell us what you do here, and how the war has affected you,” I said, trying to sound official, but really looking for a chance to talk in private with this girl who didn’t look happy about getting married.

  She and her friends took us around the tiny settlement and then led us to one of the cottages, the one where she lived.