The Silent Land

by Sally Spencer

  Watching him, I felt a sudden chill, as if he had brought the icy winds of Siberia back in his pocket – and was hurling them at me.

  “I know you hate me now,” I said softly to the tiny shape against the railings, “but I’m glad you didn’t die. I always hoped you’d escape. Honestly, Sasha.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Tsarskoe Selo – which means The Tsar’s Village – was only twenty-eight versts from Petersburg, but as I sat on the train and let Vera fuss over untangling the knots in my hair, I couldn’t help wishing that the journey could be much longer because I had knots of my own – in my personal life – which needed to be untangled.

  For reasons I did not then understand, I had been invited to tea with the Imperial family. I liked the Tsar, at least as much as anyone is ever allowed to like royalty. And I knew it was important to Konstantin that I bear myself well. But …

  But the Tsar was the at pinnacle of the system which had driven my mother to a premature grave, the system which had allowed Sasha to be exiled to slavery in Siberia.

  Poor Sasha. I wondered what had become of him after the night of my wedding, when he’d stood on the bridge in the freezing cold, looking up at the window which he knew instinctively to be mine. We’d been so close back in the mir, so very, very close …

  I was avoiding my problem. The Tsar was at the pinnacle of a system which was unfair, and the stronger he became – the more men like my Konstantin could breathe fire into his soul – the more entrenched that system would become. My husband believed that the alternative to autocratic rule was no rule at all, but just this once, he was wrong. There was another option – the Soviet.

  The Soviet! Would I always be haunted by the spectre of 1905? Would I always look back to a Golden Age which I’d been too young even to play a part in? How could I both be true to both my husband and pay off the debt I owed my mother?

  “If you could just keep still for a minute, madam,” my maid said, “we’d soon have all the knots unravelled.”

  Ah Vera, if only it had been as simple as that.

  The track which had paralleled ours from Petersburg now peeled off, and looking down it I could see gendarmes, guarding the route to the Tsar’s private station.

  “We’re nearly there,” I said.

  “Yes, madam,” Vera complained. “And I’m not half finished.”

  “I’m sure it’s perfect. Why must you always worry so much about me?”

  “It’s just that I like you to look nice, madam. I take a pride in your appearance.”

  “Doesn’t it ever bother you that you’re a servant?” I asked. “Don’t you ever resent the fact that you do my hair and I never do yours?”

  Vera looked puzzled. “No, madam. Why should it? You’re a princess and I’m not.”

  I sighed. Changing Russia, and the Russians, was not going to be an easy task at all.

  I was led through the huge domed entrance hall of the Palace and into the antechamber of the Imperial apartments. Here, generations of painted tsars surrounded me, majestic and fierce, their lacquered eyes glaring both at me and at the bicycles which the Grand Duchesses had propped up against their gilt frames.

  My escort was a gigantic Abyssinian, dressed in a white turban, baggy red breeches, a black jacket embroidered with gold – and yellow shoes turned up at the toes. The room he led me to was, by contrast, as mundane as could be. It was filled with ugly Victorian furniture which, even at a glance, I could see was machine made. It wasn’t there by accident. The Tsar, one of the richest men in the world, liked it – and bought it by the roomful from Maples of London.

  The family were already seated and waiting to take tea. I curtsied to each of them in turn. Nicholas, who was wearing a tweed suit, nodded diffidently, as if he were embarrassed. The Empress’s pretty face was strained and so pale that it was almost the colour of her white tea gown, but her eyes blazed with a fire which almost bordered on madness. The Grand Duchesses, all wearing identical polka dot dresses despite the difference in their ages, looked first at me and then at each other, and giggled. The Tsarevitch, clad in a sailor suit, scowled.

  How very bourgeois – how very English – they all looked. ‘The Romanov family of Peckham – circa. 1913.’

  The Tsar rose awkwardly to his feet and pulled out a chair. “Princess Mayakovsky,” he said, “Anna – if I might call you that – do please take a seat.”

  Poor man, compelled by his coronation oath to rule an empire which stretched from the Prussian border to the Pacific Ocean – a sixth of the world’s land mass – and contained over a hundred million people. He would have been much happier living in Peckham, catching the trolley-bus to the bank in the morning, putting in eight hours conscientious – if uninspired – work and returning home as darkness fell for an evening of cosy domesticity. To this day, I hate him as a symbol, but though his incompetence caused the death of thousands, I could never bring myself to hate the man.

  I sat, as instructed.

  “We are very fond of your husband,” the Tsar said stiffly. “He served with us in the army. He’s a good soldier and a loyal comrade.”

  “He will be greatly honoured when I tell him what you’ve said, Your Majesty,” I replied, “which, with your permission, I will.”

  The Tsar nodded his head in assent. “Could you pour the tea, please, Wifey?” the absolute autocrat of all the Russias asked his Empress.

  Countess Olga would have been outraged if anyone had suggested that she pour the tea. The act was below her. That was what servants were for. The Empress Alexandra simply smiled at her husband and reached for the silver teapot.

  Sandwiches, scones and cakes were passed around the table with the proper show of genteel manners, and the Tsar finally began to unbend a little. “And what have my Sweet Chickens been up to all day?” he asked his daughters.

  The four Grand Duchesses outlined their doings in voices which should have belonged to much younger children. Annoying as it was, I suppose their emotional backwardness wasn’t really their fault. The family led a very private life. The only people the girls ever saw were close relatives.

  So why was I there? Especially at tea, the only time in the Tsar’s long day when he had a real opportunity to see his children? Out of respect for my husband? Konstantin hadn’t thought so when I’d asked him. It was a mystery.

  I caught the Empress staring at me, as if she wanted to say something, but was afraid to. She was painfully shy, poor woman. Each year she attended fewer and fewer social functions, much to the annoyance of court officers and high ranking civil servants who would have gained cachet from meeting her. And when travelling on the Imperial train, she’d pull the blind down at stations, thus enraging the local aristocracy who’d waited for hours to catch a glimpse of her. It was a vicious circle. The less she appeared in public, the more unpopular she became. And as her unpopularity grew, so did her reluctance to go out and be seen.

  “You … you come from peasant stock, do you not, Anna?” the Empress said in a rush, finally finding her courage.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “And how do they feel about my husband in the countryside?”

  I was lost for an answer. How could I tell her that the only thing a muhzik felt anything for was his earth, and any loyalty he had for his Tsar was based on mystical self-interest?

  They were waiting for me to speak – all of them. I thought back to my days in the izbá, sitting by the stove and listening to Papa describe how he would travel to Petersburg and, with typical peasant cunning, talk the Tsar into giving him more land.

  “My father often mentioned His Majesty,” I said. “He saw the Little Father as both a friend and a protector.”

  Clever Anna! What a fox you were then! Why couldn’t you have handled your social worker this morning with even half the cunning you used before the Empress?

  Alexandra let out an audible sigh of relief.

  “Yes, the common people love their Tsar,” she said. “They know that he
has been placed on the throne by God, by God, to rule them. That’s why the bureaucrats, the aristocracy, the so-called intelligentsia, all conspire to set up a wall between him and his people.”

  She really believed that – they all did. Everything the government wanted to do, every action taken by the parliament, was part of re-enforcing a wall – a strednostenie we call it in Russian – which kept the Tsar away from his true subjects. If only the Tsar could find a way to breach that wall and make contact with the peasantry, Alexandra thought, he would receive the adoration he deserved.

  How easy it is to be romantic about muhziks when you don’t know any! Perhaps that’s why Nicholas never followed in the footsteps of his illustrious ancestor, Catherine the Great, and made a grand tour round the country – there’s a comfort in romance which is rarely to be found in reality.

  “Could I have another cup of tea please, Wifey?” the Tsar asked.

  Wifey dutifully poured. “You see the truth, Anna,” she said, as she handed her husband his drink. “Coming from the country, you can see it in a way that none of the court officials possibly could.”

  I was beginning to see something – the reason I’d been invited. I was their chink in the wall, a nicely sanitized peasant who would tell them what they wanted to hear.

  “And do you know our dear friend Grigorii?” the Tsar asked.

  “Grigorii?”

  “Grigorii Rasputin. He’s a starets – a holy man – from Siberia. You must have heard of him.”

  As a matter of fact, I had heard a great deal about Rasputin. He had no table manners, it was said – his way of eating his favourite food, fish soup, was to plunge his fingers into the liquid, pull out the solid pieces of flesh and then, when he’d eaten them all, to suck his fingers clean. He was known to have a voracious sexual appetite, and to take any woman to his bed – from the grandest countess to the commonest prostitutes – with equal gusto. He frequented the gypsy camps on the outskirts of the city, where he often drank to the point of collapse. There were new stories about his excesses every week, each one more outrageous than the last – and most of them were true.

  “You must surely have heard of the wonderful work he’s done,” the Empress said, impatient to hear me sing his praises.

  “I’m told he’s a great healer,” I said cautiously.

  “Indeed he is,” she replied warmly. “He’s the only one who can relieve our poor son’s pain.”

  Alexei, the poor son, had already been diagnosed as a haemophiliac, an illness transmitted only through the female line, and his condition had contributed both to the Empress’s sense of guilt and her unpopularity in the city.

  I was surprised to hear the door click open behind me. The servants had strict instructions not to disturb the family during tea. I was surprised, too, at the instant change in the Empress. The tension drained from her face, her smile was almost saintly. I turned, and saw him standing there.

  He was dressed like a peasant in baggy trousers, blouse and boots, but the boots were highly polished leather and the blouse pure silk. The man who was to contribute so much to the fall of the Romanov dynasty was then around forty-eight. He was about medium height and had powerful shoulders. His hair was parted in the middle, his skin had the weather-beaten complexion of a Siberian peasant. But it was his eyes which were most striking. As he turned his attention on me, they seemed to grow larger and larger. It was said that he could expand his pupils at will, though perhaps this was just illusory – like so many other things about him.

  He’d been a real peasant when he first arrived in Petersburg, said people who’d know him at the time. His beard had been filthy, his skin mottled with dirt. Yet even then there’d been something about him which had made society ladies take him up and teach him him to use expensive pomades on his beard, to look after his hands and fingernails, to wash in water rather just relying on steam in the bathhouse to cleanse him.

  “Grigorii! Dear Friend!” the Empress sighed.

  The starets rushed across the room, flung his arms around the Tsar, and kissed him. It was no great coincidence that he had arrived just as we were discussing him. The Empress was always talking about him. And Rasputin, himself, with greater access to the royal family than any court official, was a constant visitor.

  Breaking away from the Nicholas, Rasputin kissed the Empress, and all the children. It was only when he finally relinquished his hold on pasty-faced Alexei that he spoke.

  “Mama, Papa, I am come to guide you … the sins of the world I take upon myself … for has not the holiest man … for as the eagle shall fly to the top of the mountain, so shall the worm sink below the earth.”

  It was all gibberish, of course, but Rasputin’s reputation was never built on his words – it rested solely on the impression he made.

  The royal couple trusted him completely, and not just in the matter of their son’s health. Two years earlier, the Tsar dispatched him to Nizhny Novgorod to ‘look into the soul’ of its governor and decide whether or not he would make a good Minister of the Interior. Later on, in the war, he grew so powerful that he could force a change of government almost at will.

  Were Nicholas and Alexandra fools to have so much faith in him? Perhaps, but they were not the only ones. He had a large following amongst the society ladies of Petersburg and the support of several eminent churchmen.

  Nor was the starets a complete charlatan. Drunkard, lecher and bribe-taker that he was – as any muhzik would have been in his position – he was convinced of his own holiness.

  Even I, at that first meeting, could feel his power, and though I didn’t believe for a second it came from God, it still terrified me.

  “Who are you?” Rasputin asked, and I realized that he was talking to me.

  I was suddenly incapable of speech. It was the Empress who supplied my title.

  “The Prince’s new wife!” Rasputin exclaimed. “Beautiful, beautiful.”

  He leant forward and kissed me. His lips brushed against my cheeks in the Russian way – once, twice, three times. My nose was filled with the smell of the strong, cheap soap which he would always insist on using, despite his society disciples’ protests.

  I suppose I was lucky he didn’t fondle me then and there. He often caressed women in public, saying he was tempering them against passion, telling them there was no harm in him touching them intimately, because they were all his sisters. I suppose I was lucky – but the kiss was bad enough.

  “Anna,” he murmured. “Little sister … only through weakness shalt thou find strength … only through temptation shalt thou discover redemption.”

  I was smothered by his presence, flooded with a mixture of fascination and horror. I felt as if his lips were sucking my essence from me. The moment he stood back I rose hurriedly, but shakily, to my feet.

  “If Your Majesty will excuse me …” I said.

  The Tsar nodded absently. The ‘dear friend’ had arrived and the family wanted him to themselves. I would still have gone anyway, with or without permission. I couldn’t have stayed in the room with Rasputin a second longer.

  He spoke to me once more as I was opening the door. “You must come to my house,” he said. “63–65 Gorokhavaya Street … come and eat with my beloved sisters … and the Lord said, ‘Yea, to the pure all things are pure’ … You must come.”

  It wasn’t until I was back in my own palace that I felt safe, until I had the arms of my kind, strong husband around me that I finally stopped shaking.

  There is too much of the Russian fatalist in me to deny that some things are meant to happen – that there is a guiding force which plots at least part of our destiny. And this guiding force, this ‘god’ if that’s what you want to call it, has both a sense of humour and a flair for the dramatic.

  I understand him very well, this puppet master in the sky. Know the way he thinks, the way he works. Know, with absolute certainty, that he can rarely resist the temptation to show us the contrasts and contradictions which exist in all o
ur lives. Which is why, on the night after I’d visited the Alexander Palace, I drew back the curtains of my bedroom window and looked down on Liteiny Bridge. Which is why, when I saw the solitary figure standing there and looking up in my direction, I wasn’t surprised. I’d been to the bastion of autocracy and tradition. Why should it now seem strange that the other end of the scale should be trying to suck me towards it?

  I closed the curtains, opened them again and closed them a second time. It was not a prearranged signal – how could it be when we hadn’t even talked to each other since I was a child? But it said, “I’m ready!” and I was sure Sasha would understand.

  I waited ten minutes before opening the curtains once more, and when I looked down onto the bridge it was deserted.

  Chapter Twelve

  When three days had passed, and nothing had happened, I began to question my instincts. Had it really been Sasha on the bridge on the night of my wedding? Him I’d signalled to from my window? Or had the tiny figure I’d looked down on been a stranger – a drunk or a tramp – who’d stopped on the bridge simply because he had nowhere else to go?

  We’d been so close, Sasha and I. When we’d sat by the well and talked, the words we’d spoken had been important, but more important still had been the understanding which lay behind them. Or so I’d thought. Perhaps I’d been wrong all along – romanticizing my childhood, imagining an empathy where none had existed.

  If it was you, Sasha, why won’t you contact me, I thought worriedly.

  Like so many things we wait anxiously for, the message, when it came, took me by surprise. I was shopping on Nevsky Prospekt – buying baby clothes – when the note was thrust into my hand.

  “Who … what …?” I asked, but the messenger boy had already dashed off, without even waiting for a tip.