“It’s too dangerous. We can’t meet every night.”
“Why is every night more dangerous than meeting just one night?” I asked.
“Because.” He paused. “Because I can’t answer for what might happen.”
It was a vague response, but in my heart I knew what he meant. Things were uncertain. If we were discovered, it could be disaster for Sasha—or not. If we weren’t discovered, I knew enough about desire to understand how close we were to crossing a boundary between love and something more physical. Part of me didn’t care. But part of me was frightened by the thought. I felt as if I was standing on the edge of a precipice, where stepping off would lead to the wonderful sensation of flying, but also the possibility of destruction.
“You’d better go,” Sasha said, even as he held me tighter.
“I wish I didn’t have to,” I said.
“I’m here, remember, even when we don’t see each other.”
I nodded. That knowledge had reassured me in the months since Sasha had become one of our guards. But now it was not enough. “I’ll be sixteen next month,” I said, not sure what I meant to imply.
“I know,” Sasha said, and kissed me again. “I don’t think anything will happen before then,” he added, leaving me unsure of whether he meant between us, or with the probability of moving my family.
I backed away from him until the darkness engulfed him, then I turned and ran silently back to my room. There was no hope of sleep for me that night. When I dozed, I dreamed of feeling alternately warm and protected, and exposed and alone. It used to be my family that gave me a feeling of calm and safety, in the certainty of our affection for each other. But all of that had changed. While we comforted each other, suddenly that very association was now where the danger lay. We were all huge in my dream, too big to hide anywhere. No matter where we went, people could see us and they mocked us, throwing rotten vegetables and stinking rags at us. Only when I saw Sasha, and he reached up to touch me, did I become small again and enter the world of normal people. As soon as I let go of him, I would expand once more into that monumental, unwanted being—a Grand Duchess of Russia.
CHAPTER 20
I found it very hard to hide my feelings the next day. Fortunately, it was one of those May days that brings a promise of summer, so everyone’s spirits were lifted by the weather. We spent hours working in our garden while Papa chopped wood. I didn’t see Sasha the whole day, but it took little effort for me to imagine his kisses and conjure up the warmth of him.
One day stretched into a week, though, and Sasha did not show himself. I assumed he must have been put on night-guard duty. Perhaps that was how he had managed to meet me that time. I wondered why I didn’t hear from him and began to worry that something had happened.
Things went on as they had in our altered existence. Alexei was feeling better, but Mama seemed to get worse. Just walking from one room to another tired her, and Papa often pushed her around himself in her wheelchair.
The days lengthened, both in the hours of sunlight, and in the difficulty of making them pass. Endless games of bezique entertained us in the evening, and we read and sang. We put on a little play for what was left of the suite. That gave us something to do and diverted the adults for a few hours.
For a while we were able to play the piano and had access to all the musical instruments, and I was happy to lose myself in the music. But then came an order that the pianos were to be taken away, as well as most of Alexei’s remaining toys. It was an unnecessary and cruel maneuver. I wondered what would happen next.
The trial in Petrograd against Mama ended, and they found nothing with which to accuse her of treason. But that made no difference in what people still said about her and her associations with Rasputin. Every once in a while Korovichenko, who had remained as the palace commander for a time, brought us newspapers—usually weeks old—and there we would read the most awful things about us. And the guards would get hold of pamphlets with vile cartoons in them, and these also somehow came to our notice.
“My brother tells me he wrote a letter to the editor trying to set him straight about these horrible lies,” Papa said one evening after supper. “But the editor would not print it. It seems that everyone is afraid of appearing to be a monarchist and being sent to prison as a traitor to the Provisional Government—or more specifically now, the Soviet.”
Somehow, those lies upset me more than anything else, even more than being held captive. We were so helpless against them, and people all over Russia, who used to love and revere Papa, were being made to think he was a devil, and the rest of us little better than evil spirits who feasted on the flesh of infants. I didn’t know how they could believe it of us. I could tell from the way the townspeople stared at us through the fences when we went outside that they did indeed accept what they were told as true. At least, I thought, they would find no evidence to support such lies in our actions. We wore simple clothing and worked in our garden. We were just like them. And yet completely different.
Sasha and I met twice more in the cellar during the month of May. But then I did not see him for the first two weeks of June. I began to worry that he had been sent somewhere else, because I didn’t even see him from a distance around the grounds or the palace. My ecstatic feelings melted away, eventually transforming into almost unbearable, crushing disappointment. I started to imagine that the worst had happened: he’d been killed in some freak accident, and I would have no way of knowing because no one would think to tell me. Or worse, he had fallen in love with someone else, and the two of them were laughing about my naive, trusting affection, plotting ways to hurt me. I was in a misery of doubt and uncertainty.
All that ended, though, and I went back to feeling as if I had been lifted up to the sky again when I found a note from Sasha on my dressing table one evening. I could not imagine how it got there, because the guards were not supposed to enter our private apartments, especially our bedrooms—unless they accompanied Kerensky on one of his visits, and Kerensky had not been in Tsarskoe for over a week. Maybe, I thought, someone else in the palace knew about Sasha and me. But how could that be? Mashka would never have breathed a word, and she would have told me if Sasha had given her a note. She had no reason not to.
However it got there, his note said he wanted to see me that night. I will always remember the date. June 17, 1917, the day before my sixteenth birthday. I was happy to have a meeting with Sasha to look forward to, but also afraid. What if he had changed again? What if he did not welcome me and embrace me as he had? Perhaps he now thought he had made a mistake, or that it was too dangerous for him to admit feeling anything for me. Or he had met someone else. But immediately after I suggested it to myself, I knew it to be untrue. We had known each other too long for him to change toward me completely. And I hadn’t changed at all. I felt warm all over just thinking of him.
“I’m going out after midnight tonight,” I told Mashka. I left her an opportunity to say that she had delivered the letter. But she only said, “Be careful. They seem to watch us more closely since Damadianz became palace commander.”
It was true. Korovichenko, the previous commander, had become quite decent, and we thought things were improving. Then one day the previous week Kerensky had informed us that Korovichenko had been transferred elsewhere, and that Damadianz, the former deputy commander, would take over. Damadianz enjoyed exercising his authority over us. Every day he reduced our privileges further. We were no longer allowed to work in our garden, and it had become sadly overgrown. Papa could hardly go outdoors at all, and if he did, he had to stay close to the residence. We had less food at every meal, and I sometimes went to bed with my stomach still growling. There was no more hot water for our baths—the servants were not permitted to use fuel to heat it, which is what they had done before, carrying buckets up to our bathrooms ever since the running water had been turned off. The rooms we were allowed to ourselves were reduced—although thankfully we children still had the same bedrooms
and our schoolrooms, all on our own floor.
Damadianz also made several more of the servants leave, saying there were too many duplicated jobs. That meant we really had to do everything for ourselves. I didn’t mind—we had actually been doing chores all our lives anyway. Only Alexei never had to clean his own room. Besides, it gave us more to occupy ourselves with. I enjoyed sweeping the floors and dusting all the little objects in Mama’s boudoir. I especially liked dusting the photographs of our family that lined one wall of her room, and crowded each other on the mantelpiece. I had taken many of them myself. They made me remember how simple life had been then, when we were all still in short skirts. What pranks I used to play! There was one photograph of me and all the crew and servants on the Standart wearing roller skates. It had been my idea. And then there were all the plays we put on in the little theater in the Winter Palace, or in the makeshift theaters we created wherever we spent more than a few weeks of our lives. The Winter Palace was best for that, though. We had a real theater with lights and curtains and a dressing room. The attics were full of ancient clothing, and we used them to dress up in for our productions, great heavy brocade dresses with hoops from the reign of Alexander I.
In another photograph, we were all piled on one toboggan. That was the beginning of OTMA—we four girls’ initials—which we still called ourselves, as if we were one unit, one entity that could never be broken apart.
Yes, life had been simple. But it was unvarying. Now it was complicated and strange, more interesting in a way. Not in a good way, except for one. I had the deep thrill of my feelings for Sasha, which allowed me to stop longing for earlier times. On that day, knowing I would meet him at night, I wandered around in a fog—walking into rooms and forgetting why I was there, stopping in the middle of a sentence and getting distracted, staring out of a window at nothing at all, until Mashka poked me in the ribs. It was the first time I actually regretted having shaved my head for Mashka’s sake, and I wished that I could take a long, warm, fragrant bath so that my skin would smell like spring flowers.
How wonderful it would be, I thought, to be a simple peasant girl who planned to meet her lover. I would be able to ask my sisters—at least one of them would have to be younger so she could look up to me—to help me choose what to wear, and arrange my hair so that it would look its best. Perhaps one of them would lend me a locket to draw my beloved’s eyes to my neck, or a bracelet to set off my pretty hands.
Well, my hands were hardly pretty now. They were rough and dry from working outdoors and in. And there was the matter of my hair—it would be dark, I told myself. Perhaps Sasha too preferred the darkness. I could understand that he might want to hide his disfigurement. The patch gave him a certain distinction, but even I had been nervous to ask him to reveal the scar behind it. If we were ever to get married…
I began to allow myself a fantasy then, which I have continued to elaborate on through the months of our captivity. In it, my family was at last permitted to live like all other Russians, in freedom, on a farm somewhere in the Crimea perhaps, which would be best for Alexei’s and my mother’s health. Sasha would come and present himself to my father as my suitor, and we would spend a proper amount of time attending parties and going out with friends. We would have a real romance. I would experience my first kiss all over again, and then, perhaps on my seventeenth birthday, Sasha would ask me to marry him. The fantasy went on to include a small wedding in a village church and a cottage of our own not far from my parents. Sasha was a soldier, and his income would sustain us. Perhaps I would become a nurse and work in a local hospital.
Then I imagined us retiring at night. Sasha would take the patch off his eye, and I would kiss and caress the ugly scar, and we would make love until we both fell asleep, exhausted. Of course, I had no real understanding of what it was to make love, how it felt. My sisters and I sometimes talked about what it would be like. If Olga and Tatiana had ever experienced it, they never said. I imagined it little more than an extension of the kissing and embracing we had done the last time we met. All I knew was that it would make us closer, and I wanted to be so close to Sasha that there would be no distance between us.
At the appointed time I made my way down to the cellar floor. I had become very adept at getting there without making a single sound. The other times we had met, Sasha was always waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, and would reach for me and take me by the waist, swing me gently around before putting me softly down on the floor. Except once, when he held me tight with my feet off the floor, and we kissed like that. I felt weightless and out of control.
So when I didn’t see Sasha waiting for me, I felt ice go through my veins. What if something had prevented him from coming? What if the other guards knew, or this had been a trick? How would I explain what I was doing there if someone else discovered me? I was on the point of scampering back up the stairs and running to my room when someone came up behind me, grabbed me around my waist, and covered my mouth before I could cry out. I struggled.
“Shh! It’s me! Come with me.”
I was so frightened that at first I didn’t believe it was Sasha, not until he lightly kissed the edge of my ear as he drew me back into a space that was even darker than the hallway. He closed a door behind us, struck a match, and lit a candle. We were in some kind of pantry.
“It’s not very luxurious, but I think we’ll at least have some privacy here. Everything they used to store here was used up weeks ago.”
My heart was still thumping. “You scared me so much, Sasha!”
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t want you to make a noise,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have.” To be honest, I was a little cross with him. First I had suffered sadness thinking he wasn’t coming, and then I was certain someone else discovered me and I was overcome with dread. I was a little short with him when I spoke. “What did you have to tell me?”
He took off his jacket and spread it on the floor, then grasped my hand as he sat, pulling me down next to him. “Don’t be cross. I’m sorry it was surprising.”
I still wasn’t ready to forgive him. “Your note said you wanted to see me.”
“Yes,” he said, taking my chin and turning my face this way and that, letting his eyes take in every feature until I felt almost embarrassed. “I said I wanted to see you.” He moved the candle closer.
So it was true. He had not forgotten me. He still liked me. He still loved me. He brought his face closer to mine until we were almost touching. I couldn’t stand it and closed the distance between us with a kiss, which he returned.
When we stopped, he outlined my face with the tip of his finger, following its progress with his eyes. I felt him examine every detail, as if he were taking a long-exposure photograph to look at later when we weren’t together.
I closed my eyes and felt his finger measure the length of my neck and continue down to the bone in the center of my chest. I opened my eyes when I felt him start to unfasten the top button of my blouse.
“Is it all right?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” I answered. He stopped. “No, it’s all right.” I didn’t want him to stop. I was a little afraid of continuing, but I was more afraid of losing him.
I closed my eyes again, as if not looking would lessen the wickedness of it, or at least I wouldn’t have to see his eyes when he saw my breasts. He was very slow, very gentle. By the time his hands cupped my small breasts, I was trembling, wanting him to go on and on.
“I want you,” he said.
I opened my eyes to receive another kiss. This time I felt the rough serge of his uniform against my skin. “I … I want you too. I suppose I’ve always wanted you. Do you think I’m still too young?”
Sasha gently pushed me away from him. Everything was so new, I wondered what he was going to do. I watched, fascinated, as he made a great show of taking out a pocket watch and peering at it. “Young? According to Russian law and custom, you are now an adult.”
He was ri
ght. It was after midnight. It was my birthday. Sixteen. The tears came to my eyes so suddenly that I couldn’t stop them.
“What’s wrong?” Sasha asked.
“Oh, it’s just that I didn’t imagine this on my birthday. Olga and Tatiana and Marie had celebrations and received pearl and diamond necklaces. They went to a ball and danced all night.” I laughed through my tears. “It all seems rather foolish now.” Sasha gave me his handkerchief and I dried my eyes. His expression was tender, but amused. “I suppose there will never be any balls ever again,” I said. “Russia seems like such a different place. I don’t know why I’m crying. I don’t cry in front of anyone else.”
Sasha didn’t say anything more. He just gently laid me down beside him on the brick floor of the pantry. I didn’t notice how hard and uncomfortable it was. All I felt was Sasha, touching me, kissing me. He was showing me, tenderly and adoringly, that he loved me. I, Anastasie, was loved by a man, a man I loved so much that I wanted to give myself to him completely. I wanted to be two people at once: the creature who had nothing but feelings and who was discovering her body in a way she never knew was possible, and my old self, standing aside and watching this love scene—so perfect, and yet real. But that feeling lasted only a moment. Soon I was lost in the sensations that welled up through my body in waves so powerful they made me forget who I was. I let all consciousness go and took that step off a high cliff, trusting that Sasha would keep me safe. Trusting that he cared enough for me to protect me against anything.
CHAPTER 21
The following weeks were full of contradictions. Life became harder for us, but Sasha and I grew closer.
The lovely, graceful walls of the palace were covered with disgusting insults to our family painted in crude, black strokes. I could barely stand to look at the palace when we were allowed to go out, which was hardly ever now. And the process of getting this privilege was increasingly irksome.
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