by Gill Paul
There was a pause while Bill chewed his last bite of sandwich. “Yeah, there’s a woman in America who’s been claiming since the early 1920s that she is Anastasia. She seems undeterred by the fact that no one who actually knew the family believes her.”
Bill glanced at Val’s uneaten sandwich, and she grinned and pushed it across to him. “Go ahead. I’m not hungry.”
“Are you sure? I’m the world’s biggest glutton. I can eat my own body weight and still be starving.” His eyes were lingering on the sandwich, and the minute she said, “I’m sure,” he snapped it up, took a bite, then continued. “There were claimants for all the Romanov children, but none were ever verified.”
The sandwich disappeared in no time. Val wondered how he could eat so much and still be thin. He didn’t have an ounce of excess flesh but at the same time he didn’t seem a sporty type. Maybe he burned it off with nervous energy.
“I read a book by a Russian historian a couple of years ago that claimed the Romanovs had been murdered by ‘Letts,’ or foreigners.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “The Russians still won’t take responsibility for it themselves. A classic case of passing the buck.”
“Who do you think gave the order?” Val asked. “Did it come from Lenin?”
“There’s no paper trail from the top. It seems to have been the men of the Ekaterinburg soviet who made the final decision.” He grimaced. “But Lenin had already created the Cheka, and they had the power to order summary executions without trial. You can imagine the sort of men they attracted: power-hungry and unscrupulous . . .” He looked as if he was about to say more, then stopped himself. “I’m sorry. I’m not suggesting your father was like that.”
Val screwed up her face. “It’s horrible to accept,” she said. “But I suppose he might have been.”
She agreed that Bill could make copies of the documents and fax them to his colleague in New York. There was no point trying to protect her father’s name. If Bill’s theory was true, he didn’t deserve protection.
* * *
She took the gold box to Hardy Brothers, an upmarket jeweler near Darling Harbor.
“This is Fabergé,” the jeweler said, peering through a loupe at the almost indecipherable engraving on the back. “It has the maker’s mark HW. Those are the initials of the man who made it.”
Val wasn’t surprised to hear it. “Fabergé were jewelers to the Romanovs, weren’t they?”
“Among others. They had wealthy customers across Europe. How did it come into your possession?”
“It was my father’s,” she replied. She couldn’t tell this man that she thought it might have belonged to one of the Romanov family without inviting awkward questions.
“Do you know the provenance?” he asked, as if reading her mind.
She shook her head. “I found it among his possessions after he passed away. But I wondered if you know how to open it? There seems to be something inside.”
The jeweler peered at the edges. “There’s a mechanism sealing it. It’s one of their trick boxes, where you have to know the secret.” He tried pressing on the jewels, twisting them, but nothing seemed to work. “You would have to contact Fabergé themselves, or find someone who is a Fabergé expert. I could cut it open for you, of course, but that would be a waste.”
“Do you know any Fabergé experts in Sydney?” Val asked, but he shook his head.
“Sorry. It’s not my area.”
Val was intrigued. The box was so small, it couldn’t contain anything of major significance, but she imagined there might be something sentimental inside. A baby tooth, perhaps? She kept all Nicole’s baby teeth in a little wooden box. She would have to do some research and try to find an expert. It was yet another mystery associated with her father that she was determined to solve.
Chapter 41
Leningrad, September 3, 1939
MARIA WAS AT WORK IN THE PIG-IRON FACTORY when there was an announcement over the radio that Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Everyone stopped and looked at each other, eyes wide. Maria felt a knot of anxiety in the pit of her stomach. She remembered visiting soldiers in the hospital in Tsarskoe Selo in 1914, the last time Britain and France went to war with Germany. She could still see those men with bandaged heads and oozing stumps where limbs used to be; men whose minds had wandered because of the horrific sights they had witnessed. Peter’s father had been killed during that conflict, and he had told Maria firmly that no good came from war. Not ever.
She had arranged to meet Yuri after work. They saw each other every month, always in his van, always parked in the same quiet street between the park and a warehouse. Maria’s reputation for finding information on people arrested by the NKVD had spread, and desperate strangers often accosted her at Peter’s graveside and thrust into her hand pieces of paper with names and addresses written on them. They spoke of arrests in the dead of night, no information on charges, no word of where their loved one might be, no help from the authorities, and maddening waits at inquiries desks; all too often the glass partition was slammed shut and the officers went off duty just as they neared the front of the line.
Yuri could usually find some news, but Maria had to act as go-between. The worst times were when he said the individual concerned had been executed. It took her straight back to the moment she was informed of Peter’s death. The people she told—usually women—surprised her with their courage. It was as if they had been expecting it. They stooped under the weight of their grief, but generally did not cry out loud.
When Maria and Yuri met on the third of September, she asked him what he thought about the war in Europe. He liked to chat before they got down to business. Annushka had never returned and she could tell he was lonely.
He chewed the inside of his cheek before answering. “Some wars have to be fought. They should never have let Hitler get so powerful, but there was no appetite for another conflict.”
“It’s lucky we are not involved this time,” Maria said. Hitler and Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact just the previous week.
“So far,” he said in his enigmatic style, making her stomach flutter with nerves.
“Do you think we might have to fight?” What if Stepan was called up? She couldn’t bear that.
He shrugged and didn’t answer, and Maria decided not to persist. She was still scared of him. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking.
“Regarding the information you wanted,” he said, “there are no executions to report.”
That was a relief at least. The killing had been worst in 1937 and 1938, but the rate had slowed now; more men were being sent to gulags in Siberia, with an average sentence of twenty-five years.
He gave her a note of the gulags where the men she was asking about that week had been sent. It must be hard for their families, Maria thought, but at least they could send packages of food, blankets, and clothes, along with letters. She would give anything to be able to write to Peter and read his replies. Almost two years had passed since he had died, and she still cried every day.
* * *
Two weeks after Britain and France went to war with Germany, Soviet troops invaded eastern Poland and annexed a vast swath of territory there. On the radio the announcers spoke of Polish citizens welcoming the Red Army with open arms, giving them gifts of bread and salt, and Maria wondered if they knew what they were letting themselves in for.
During the winter of 1939–40, Russia went to war with Finland and grabbed yet more land, this time to the north of Leningrad. With each new announcement Maria was terrified that Stepan would be forced to fight. He had almost finished his studies at the Institute and his English was near perfect, while he spoke French and German as well. She hoped he would get work in a university. It would be awful if he were forced to enlist.
As the months rolled on, the news from western Europe was grim: the fall of Belgium, Holland, and then France; the hasty evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk; the bombing of London. Loudspeak
ers on street corners, in the factory, and outside apartment blocks broadcast the latest developments. Maria saw photographs on the front page of Pravda showing ruined buildings, women and children being carried from them on stretchers by men wearing tin helmets while fires burned in the background. It looked like a vision of hell. Thank God the Soviet Union was not involved. Life went on more or less as it had before, far from the tragedy engulfing their western neighbors.
* * *
On June 22, 1941, a Sunday, Maria was on her way to Peter’s grave with the three youngest children. Stepan had gone fishing and Irina was out with her friends. Suddenly a voice boomed from the loudspeakers; she recognized it as that of Vyacheslav Molotov, Commissar of Foreign Affairs.
“Men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union, at four o’clock this morning, without declaration of war and without any claims being made on the Soviet Union, German troops attacked our country.”
Around them, everyone in the street came to a standstill. Maria squeezed Yelena’s hand so tight she squealed.
“Our cause is good,” the voice continued. “Our enemy will be smashed. Victory will be ours.”
Maria pulled her children toward her: Yelena now nine, Mikhail thirteen, and Katya fifteen. She wished she could wrap them up in lint.
What shall I do, Peter? she asked in her head when they reached his grave. How shall I keep our children safe? As usual, there was no reply.
That same evening, Stepan announced that he had been to a recruitment office and joined a long line of volunteers to help with civil defense. He told Maria he had been assigned to a team digging antitank trenches several miles out of town and that he must leave the following morning.
“But when will we see you? Will you not be in danger? I don’t like this.” Maria fretted as she stuffed a bag with fresh clothes, rolls of bandages, and tubes of liniment, and jars of food to supplement his rations.
“I’ll be back one day a week. It’s only until the city defenses are complete,” he told her.
“Others could do that,” Maria grumbled. “Digging is backbreaking work and you are an intelligent boy. You should be living off your brains.”
Leaflets were distributed urging that all children, old people, and anyone who could not help the war effort should evacuate the city. Maria wrestled with this: she did not want to be parted from her children, but she couldn’t leave herself, not while Stepan was still there. Besides, where would they go? Her overriding instinct was to keep the family together, so she ignored the evacuation calls but kept an ear out for every new broadcast in case the situation changed.
“The Red Army has won a great victory, although it was outnumbered four to one by German troops,” the announcer Yuri Levitan read in his excitable tones.
“Yes, and I hear Ivan killed five Germans armed only with a spoon,” Maria’s work colleague whispered to her.
Maria grinned. They were learning not to trust the radio proclamations. Always they spoke of victory, and yet it was clear that the Germans continued to advance.
“Some think Stalin might surrender Leningrad because it is too hard to defend,” her colleague continued, then added treacherously, “It might not be altogether a bad thing. I can’t imagine Hitler is as bloodthirsty . . .”
That was one good thing about the war: fear of the NKVD appeared to have lessened and people were speaking their minds again, albeit discreetly.
The same colleague told her that a group of children evacuated from the city had been shepherded directly into German lines. “Yet another example of the wonderful efficiency of Soviet bureaucracy,” she added with a droll expression.
Maria was glad she had decided to keep her brood around her. And yet she trembled when the first snub-nosed gray German bombers flew overhead at the end of August. She fitted blackout curtains and hurried down to the block’s air-raid shelter when there was a raid on September 8. They were forced to sit opposite Raisa and Galina, but Maria kept her eyes on her children and her thoughts to herself. Where was Stepan? Was he safe? She prayed to God he wouldn’t come to any harm.
At work next day, all the talk was that the city was surrounded. It was no longer possible to leave, and overnight German bombs had hit the Badayev warehouses, where the food stores were kept.
“I suppose the Red Army will have to air-drop food for us,” said Maria’s friend at the factory. “Knowing their prowess, it will land in the middle of Lake Ladoga.”
After work, Maria and Irina toured every food store within reach and stood for hours in lines buying whatever was left on the shelves: dried fruits, blanched almonds, even a tin of caviar. Maria also bought a large box of vitamin powder. She had read an article in a magazine claiming that vitamins could prevent diseases like rickets that were caused by a poor diet, so it seemed a good idea.
Rations were reduced in mid-September, but everyone assumed the shortages would only be temporary, until the Red Army started to drop food. Siege was a medieval strategy of war, something the Greeks and Romans had done; Maria couldn’t believe it would be maintained for long in the modern age.
Chapter 42
Leningrad, September 1941
ALMOST OVERNIGHT, MARIA FOUND HER EVERY WAKING thought was about food. What could she serve for a meal that evening? Where could she find supplies to top up their bread ration?
She lay awake in bed remembering what Peter had taught her about edible plants. There were dandelions and borage, nettles and cow parsley in the cemetery where he lay. When she found a crop of white mushrooms there one Sunday it felt like a gift he had sent from beyond the grave. She decided she would cook them with wild thyme leaves and serve them on bread, so their juices were soaked up.
Stepan helped by going fishing whenever he had time off, so at least once a week they had fish to share. Maria eked out the last of the potatoes and served the fish baked, with boiled greens on the side.
There was one more mouth to feed because Stepan had returned from digging trenches and was now being trained to operate the big guns on an antiaircraft battery.
“Does that not mean you will be the Germans’ first target?” Maria fretted.
“They’re not going to waste a bomb on a few of us when they can target the docks or the warehouses. Don’t worry, Mama,” he assured her, with calm rationality.
“But I hear firing during the day. Will their soldiers not try to shoot you?”
“We are well camouflaged,” he promised. “I’ll make sure no German bullets have my name on them.”
At the end of September, just as freezing gusts of rain brought the first sign of winter, the oil and gas supplies to the city were cut. Maria turned on her stove and struck a match but no gas hissed out. She would have to burn wood in the burzhuika to heat food. That meant foraging for firewood after she finished work, when she was bone-weary from the day’s toil.
The factory switched to production of shell cartridges. They were heavy to carry and the steel shavings cut into the palms of her hands, but she was grateful for the job because it meant her ration was bigger than it would otherwise have been and she got canteen meals at lunchtime. When a vacancy arose, Irina came to work there too, and between them they were able to smuggle home jugs of soup to supplement the family’s evening meal and some porridge to heat for their breakfast. It was just as well, because the bread ration was reduced to two slices a day. How could anyone live on that? Especially when you could tell it was made of flour substitute, with an odd texture so that it fell apart when you tried to cut it, and a taste that was bitter and unpleasant.
Meat was a distant memory, and stories circulated of pets being stolen and killed for their flesh. One evening there was a knock on their door and Maria opened it to find a stricken Raisa.
“Have you seen my cat?” she pleaded. “It’s been two days. I didn’t let him out of the courtyard so I wondered if someone here might . . .” She couldn’t finish her sentence.
For the first time since Peter was arrested, Maria felt a twinge of fel
low feeling for Raisa. “I’m sorry, I haven’t seen him. But I will look out for him, I promise.”
She could understand why someone might take a cat. Hunger made otherwise moral people desperate. She had heard of ration cards stolen in the street, of people trading fur coats for a sack of potatoes. Her family were lucky that so far they had not had to resort to desperate measures, but life got tougher as the days passed and the temperature dropped.
The electricity became intermittent, then in November the water supply failed after bombs ripped open the pipelines. Now they had to fetch buckets of water from a fire hydrant at the end of the street, and use a kerosene lamp for light in the evening. Maria gave each child his or her own job: Yelena and Mikhail got the water and Katya collected firewood; Irina brought home the canteen food, and Maria went for the bread and any other food she could forage.
At night, when the planes flew overhead, they sang songs in the shelter to drown out the noise. “The Little Blue Scarf,” in which a soldier pined for the girl he loved, was a particular favorite.
It can’t last much longer, Maria told herself. Where was the Red Army? Stalin called himself “father of the nation”; now was the time for him to prove it.
* * *
“My tummy hurts,” Mikhail complained one night in November as he slumped over the dinner table. He was thirteen years old and tall for his age. Maria touched the back of her hand to his forehead and noticed that his skin was gray, his eyes dull, and he had a sore at the corner of his lips. She put her arms around him and felt his ribs sticking out. They were all getting thinner, but his weight loss seemed more severe than the others’.
“Have some soup,” she told him, ladling a generous portion into a bowl; then she dissolved a teaspoon of vitamin powder in water and told him to swallow it.
“Eat slowly,” she cautioned. “Don’t make yourself sick. Tomorrow I will try to find extra.”
When she picked up her bread the next day, counting out the precious coupons carefully, she asked, “Is there any way to get more for my son? He is unwell.”