The Last Days of the Romanov Dancers

by Kerri Turner

  The building where his father lived was indistinguishable from those around it. On the stairs, Luka had to step over children with bare feet. He could smell their dirty hair, skin and clothes, and held his breath as though that might prevent him from catching germs. The company would not like him being here—they would consider the risk of illness too great—but Luka knew his father would never make the trip to the city to see him.

  A grey mark ran underneath the unvarnished, splintered handrail, left by the fingers of decades of children. Luka’s own hands had contributed to those marks. Forgetting to avoid the seventeenth step, he nearly twisted his ankle as the loose board buckled beneath him. He swore softly, then looked guiltily at the children at the bottom of the stairs, who ignored him. The stairwell was narrow, and as he heard footsteps coming the other way Luka stopped and pressed his back against the wall. A man appeared in front of him, and it took Luka a second to recognise him. He lived on the same floor as Luka’s father, in a room with three other men, and they had played together in the street as boys. However, the older Luka got, and the shorter his visits back home from the Imperial Ballet School, the greater the distance between them had become.

  ‘Zdravstvuj,’ Luka said in greeting, and the man halted. Luka saw recognition flit across his face, then his jaw tightened and he shouldered past without responding. Luka watched him go, the man’s silent resentment almost a physical presence. Trying not to feel slighted, he continued upwards.

  ‘Why haven’t you volunteered for the army?’ his father asked as soon as Luka stepped inside the tiny apartment.

  Despite the mild weather, it was colder inside than outside. Luka wondered if his father couldn’t afford to buy coal to keep the stove burning. He tried to pull his light coat tighter around him without his father noticing.

  ‘We’ve talked about this before,’ he replied, stifling a sigh. ‘I see no point in volunteering when I’d likely just die for my efforts. I’m no soldier.’ The Russian words felt strange in his mouth after so many months of only speaking French or English.

  ‘You don’t need to be a soldier to volunteer. You just need to be a man. Like your brother. There’s honour in fighting for your country.’

  ‘And freezing to death in the trenches because I can’t find some dead man’s boots to steal? What honour is there in that?’

  Despite directing the words at his father, Luka felt the cut of them himself. Here, in the room he’d shared with his brother, he couldn’t stop seeing Pyotr’s face. Not as it had been in childhood, when Pyotr’s wide, grinning mouth had taught him dirty words, but frozen in a blue grimace, pale eyes staring unseeing at the sky after succumbing to the winter that still lingered on the Eastern Front. It was a nightmare Luka had woken from many times; and he was glad that he lived alone so no one was there to witness his shameful cries. He shuddered and dismissed the revolting image, reminding himself that he had received a letter from Pyotr only last week. His brother was cold, yes, and wishing for better food, but he was alive.

  His father scowled. ‘You don’t know that’s true.’ He threw back a cupful of cheap vodka without offering his son any.

  Luka rubbed his palms against his eyelids. He’d been up late the previous night dancing in a performance of Le Réveil de Flore, but he didn’t think that was why he felt so tired. ‘All the newspapers say it. There aren’t enough weapons, food or clothing for the soldiers they already have. Can’t you tell from Pyotr’s letters? What would be the point in adding to the problem?’

  ‘It’s what a man would do.’

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t tried, boy. They say I’m too old to fight, too unwell. If they’d let me, I’d be out there. I’m not afraid of war.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should be,’ Luka muttered.

  His father eyed him moodily, but Luka didn’t think he’d heard. If he had, Luka’s face would be dripping with vodka right now. He sat up in his chair a little straighter and spoke louder this time.

  ‘If I’m conscripted’—he tried not to shudder, knowing that would mean his contract hadn’t been renewed—‘I’ll do everything I’m asked to for my country. Even now, I’ve volunteered for the Union of Towns in Moscow during the ballet’s off-season.’

  Luka kept his tone firm, but he was afraid his father might still sense the quaver of guilt that ran through him, hear his desperate need for approval. Approval from whom, he wondered. Himself? His father? The absent Pyotr? Luka didn’t even know. Vladimir opened his mouth to deliver a smart reply, but instead began to cough. It was a rattling sound so fierce it shook the uneven chair he sat on. Luka wanted to slap him on the back to ease the cough away, but didn’t. It would only earn him a clip around the ear. Instead, he looked carefully away, pretending he didn’t notice.

  The apartment was tiny; just one room in which a few steps had you touching every wall. It had once been the corner of a bigger apartment, but space was at a premium and it was common for people to erect more walls to create extra sleeping quarters. Luka’s father had got the best part of the former apartment, though: at one end hunkered a clumsily built stone stove that provided warmth and survival. A curtain of furs, which had long ago lost any resemblance to their original animal, enclosed the warm space on top of the stove where his father slept; a space Luka, Pyotr and their mother had once shared too. There was no bathroom—that was two floors down: a hole in concrete that was considered quite a luxury—nor was there a kitchen. Meals were a group affair, with the building’s residents pooling whatever food they had into one large tyurya or shchi to share. Still, Vladimir was lucky he didn’t have to resort to sleeping in factory barracks or next to his machinery, and even luckier to have a place to himself, where the bed was not on shared rotation. As a metal-worker, he was considered skilled and ranked at the higher-paying end of the factory workers.

  While he waited for his father’s cough to subside, Luka stared at the water bucket in the corner of the room with the old peeling painting that served as a lid. The pockmarked surface of the table was rough beneath his hands, and he realised that for many months now he’d only touched surfaces that were polished and smooth.

  Finally, the coughing died down, and his father scratched at his beard in irritation, bits of spit still damp on his lips. ‘I suppose no one else in that company of yours is joining the fight against the Germans either?’

  Vladimir never referred to the ballet directly, as if the word would poison his mouth. Luka wished that he could talk properly to his father and describe his life at the ballet: how he still felt like the malysh that Xenia teasingly called him, yet also how it was as though he’d been there forever. But if he could have done that, they would have been an entirely different father and son.

  ‘Too busy spending money the rest of us don’t have,’ his father added. ‘Relaxing in their palaces and playing with their diamonds and pearls, no doubt.’

  ‘I’ve told you before, it’s not like that. Mathilde Kschessinska has even set up a hospital for wounded soldiers and the Grand Duchesses themselves volunteer there, to help men like Pyotr.’

  His father shrugged. Like many other factory workers, he considered the hospitals the wealthy had established a way of alleviating their bourgeois guilt. Luka had wondered whether paying for a hospital would assuage his own guilt if he’d had the means, then pushed the thought away, disgusted at himself.

  ‘I’d wager your lot adore the mad monk too,’ his father continued, in his element now. ‘I’ve heard what he gets up to with those rich women while our sons and brothers are sacrificing their lives. Plain immoral if you ask me. Though no one ever does, of course. I’m just a poor factory worker—my opinion doesn’t matter. Never mind that it’s people like me who keep this country running and stop us all from becoming Germans.’

  The visit dragged on in the same uncomfortable manner until finally Luka couldn’t listen to his father’s wet cough any more. He made his excuses and left, ignoring the visibly relieved l
ook on his father’s face. Unfortunately, leaving Vladimir’s presence didn’t mean he left his voice behind. Luka could hear it still as he travelled back towards the centre of the city and its clean buildings that glowed with electric light. Would a lonely death in a trench somewhere, hungry and far away from home, truly be a more honourable path? Pyotr didn’t want that for him. In truth, Luka didn’t want it for himself, either. Of course, one day that choice might be taken away from him.

  Luka took the letter out of his pocket for what must have been the hundredth time. He ran his fingertip over the imperial eagle in the top corner, silently thanking the Romanov dynasty for understanding the need for ballet in a world that too often succumbed to ugliness.

  The letter had arrived while he was in Moscow, filling his summer off-season with volunteer work for the Union of Towns. They were attempting to send munitions and food to the front, where a supply crisis was causing Russian troops to lose ground as well as lives. The heavy lifting had been a good workout for Luka’s muscles while he wasn’t dancing, but seeing the weapons, knowing what they were meant for, had unsettled him.

  He was grateful the letter had been forwarded from his Petrograd address; he didn’t know if he could have stood being in the dark about his future too much longer. He’d let out a whoop of elation when he’d read that his contract had been renewed—an expression of joy those in the Union of Towns hadn’t appreciated. Now, as the taxi carriage trundled towards the noise of Kalanchyovskaya Square, he had to resist the urge to press the letter to his lips. Instead, he tucked it carefully back into his pocket, as tenderly as though it were a living thing.

  The noise was increasing—they must be getting closer. But as the taxi carriage slowed, the joyful expression on Luka’s face faded. This wasn’t the ordinary noise of traffic and travellers. This was something else. The carriage halted. Chanting overwhelmed Luka as he stepped down. ‘Down with Niemka! Down with the German woman!’

  The women and men who swarmed over Kalanchyovskaya Square had their fists raised in the air, anguish and anger competing on their faces. Children weaved between them, playing games as though this were some sort of celebration—for them, it probably was: a rare day away from gruelling work in the factories. Most were without shoes, and their eyes were large in their thin faces. A few reached beseeching hands out to a woman who sprinted along the edge of the crowd, using her teeth to tear off mouthfuls from the loaf of bread she’d clearly stolen. Two women and a one-armed man chased her, screaming obscenities.

  Beads of sweat sprang up on Luka’s forehead. He’d read in the Moscow newspapers that protests were cropping up over the city: people were upset their Tsarina, ruling in place of her husband who was at the front, listened more to the whisperings of the monk Grigori Rasputin than she did to their cries. But seeing this angry mass, Luka knew it was worse than had been reported. The people of Moscow had had enough of loss and fighting. The prospect of triumph promised by the Tsar had faded, and instead they were left with gaping chasms of grief, and farms that were unmanned and thus unable to provide food. And to cap it all, their ruler insisted they must not, would not, back down.

  Luka stared in the direction of the Nikolayevsky Terminal, but it was too distant to make out the clock tower’s hands. He would have to hope he could get through the crowd in time to board the train home. The driver handed him his rectangular case, and Luka thanked him, wishing he could hop back into the carriage and be whisked to safety instead. He didn’t think this crowd would be happy to know that he was exempt from the risk of losing his life to the increasingly unpopular war.

  He put his head down and stepped into the crowd. Immediately, the hot odour of humanity swept over him as he was jostled from side to side. He could only move slowly, shuffling steps that often took him sideways instead of forward.

  Two women grabbed his arms and linked them through their own as they lifted their voices high into the air. ‘Send her away to a convent! Russia for Russians only!’ They looked at him, faces split by wide grins; they were indistinguishable from the women Luka had grown up around, and he could easily imagine his father amongst their ranks should the protests ever arrive in Petrograd.

  He forced himself to smile back, but the expression felt ugly. He pulled his arms from their grip and, ducking his head down, powered through the crowd towards the rusticated masonry of the train terminal, careless of who he knocked out of the way. He needed to break free of this swirling, heaving mass and the treasonous shouts, back to where the world made sense again. He emerged from the crowd and gasped like he was surfacing from the ocean. The pilasters of Nikolayevsky Terminal loomed tall, and if he’d craned his neck he could have made out the time on its clock tower now. But he just wanted to be inside.

  By the time he’d got his passport and documents verified and boarded the train, where the shouts could no longer be heard, his heartbeat was returning to normal.

  Luka threw his bag into his sleeper compartment—one of twenty-five curtained cubicles in the carriage—but didn’t crawl in after it. After the stress of the crowd, he didn’t want to be in a confined space quite so soon. He stood in the corridor, leaning his weight forward to stretch his calf muscles. Outside the small windows white clouds of steam billowed, and slowly the train pulled forward, taking him north to Petrograd and another year in the Imperial Russian Ballet.

  A strange hiccupping noise interrupted Luka’s thoughts. He turned to see a boy of about thirteen trying to coax a woman into a sleeper cubicle. She was crying with such force that she couldn’t see where she was going. Another boy, around ten, was holding onto her skirt with one fist, attempting to look brave.

  ‘I know, Mamma,’ the older boy said, his voice quaking with responsibility. ‘Let us just climb inside the sleeper and then we can grieve together.’

  Luka’s heart lurched as though he too were feeling the woman’s grief. Stepping forward, he took her arm, hoping to help, but at his touch she flinched. Her cries cut off abruptly and wet eyes turned to glare at him. With an expression on her face that cut Luka to the core, she crawled into the sleeper below his, pulling her younger son with her.

  Luka turned to see another pair of dark eyes flaming at him.

  ‘Why aren’t you fighting at the front like my father did?’ the older boy asked. ‘Like all his friends are—and like I will as soon as I’m old enough?’

  Luka opened his mouth to tell the boy that his brother was at the front. But he stopped himself. That would not ease the boy’s anger. There was nothing Luka could say that would make things seem right in the young man’s eyes. He knew that from dealing with his father. He knew it because there was nothing right about it. He was protected where others weren’t.

  Lowering his head, Luka turned towards his sleeper. But he couldn’t stomach nineteen hours of this broken family’s silent reproach. He would wait until they’d had enough time to fall asleep. He walked away down the carriage, feeling the boy’s eyes boring into his back. It was a relief to get through one door and into another carriage, putting a barrier between them. But the weight in his chest was still heavy, the hollowness in his stomach still accusatory, and he kept moving, feeling the thrum of the steam locomotive underneath his feet as he walked the length of the train.

  When he reached a door near the very front of the train, an attendant put up an abrupt hand to stop him. ‘Sorry, sir, this is a private carriage. There’s no entry.’

  Luka’s heart sank. He wasn’t ready to return to his sleeper yet; he needed the distraction of movement. But the choice wasn’t his and so he turned back.

  ‘Look here, little Djibi needs to go—could you do something about that?’ a woman’s voice said.

  The door had opened, and a short, very finely dressed woman was holding a small white dog with a black patch covering half his face out to the attendant. With a jolt of recognition Luka saw it was Mathilde Kschessinska, the prima ballerina assoluta of the Imperial Russian Ballet.

  The attendant tentatively ac
cepted the dog, clearly unsure what to do with it. Mathilde turned away, straightening the necklace of walnut-sized diamonds that encircled her throat. She paused for a second, then turned back to look straight at Luka.

  ‘I know your face,’ she said.

  Luka checked over his shoulder. There was no one else there, so it must be him she was speaking to. ‘Yes, Mademoiselle Kschessinska. I’m an imperial dancer too. Only in the corps de ballet though.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Mathilde’s eyes lit up with interest and she looked Luka up and down. ‘Yes, you do have the look of a dancer, even if I hadn’t recognised you. Come, join me and talk of the ballet. It will liven up this frightfully boring trip until it’s time to sleep.’

  Startled, Luka felt his feet grow roots, holding him to the spot. Mathilde was in the class of perfection, but he had never spoken to her before. She was far too above him. He couldn’t imagine spending minutes in her company, let alone hours.

  She had walked back inside the carriage, and a grey-haired man who must be her porter was holding the door open for Luka, waiting. Luka took a nervous step forward. The porter gently nudged him further in, then closed the door behind him, blocking out the chatter of the public carriage.

  Luka stood in the corridor of a carriage that contained private cabins. A carpet of swirling, intricate patterns had been laid down, and a boy was stomping up and down it, chanting, ‘Bored, bored, bored, bored,’ over and over. He didn’t even look at Luka. As he moved hesitantly forward, Luka saw the door to one cabin was open. Within sat two young ladies playing cards. They glanced up, surprised to see a trespasser. Luka nodded a greeting to them, but Mathilde was striding along the carriage and he hastened to catch up. He noticed that many of the other cabins, devoid of passengers, were packed with boxes, some spilling their tissue paper that caressed new purchases.