The Passion of Marie Romanov

by Laura Rose

  Never have I known any feeling from Papa, save that first emotion—his overwhelming love and pleasure—in my existence. He has always loved me, given me such love, it is impossible for me to understand why it seems everyone in his country, even his own relations, hate him.

  With my mother, the tsaritsa, it has been different. It is impossible for me to know my mother as she was before my birth, before the births of Olga and Tatiana. Our family albums bear witness to a younger woman who does not much resemble the pain-racked, distraught empress she has been ever since I can remember. My mother, the Tsaritsa Alexandra Feodorovna, was always solemn; the grey of her eyes is more than a color, it is a mien. My mother never has appeared joyful but in the years before my birth, she looked, at least in photographs, calm and sweet-faced. Her present agonized, severe expression was then only a reflective, sidelong gaze—she seemed forever to be seeking something off in the distance. After the birth of four daughters, and always when she looked at me, her pale pupils seemed to contract and her brow furrow. It was obvious to me that I was born a disappointment.

  “Marie! I am calling to you.” Her voice, this new voice, cracked like a whip. I felt the hairs rise at the nape of my neck. A draft passed through the room and chilled me. In the mirror, I could see my naked skin pebbled from the cold. I took this last look at myself and saw a seventeen-year-old girl, waist-long hair in tangles.

  My pupils were enlarged and glowed liquid like an animal’s in the night. My eyes are famous in our family as “Marie’s saucers;” I have the largest eyes, the bluest amongst us. I am actually quite different from my sisters. My figure is fuller than any of my sisters’. My complexion is darker, and I usually have high color— “Russian red cheeks!” the governesses extol—but by lantern light, I looked pale, white-faced and white-bodied save for the dark triangle between my legs. I turned away––I know it is immodest, improper to stare at myself. My woman’s body still seems new to me, and in fact, it is new—my skin shows the stretch marks from the sudden change from the child I was not so long ago. Satin scars stripe my hips and the sides of my breasts.

  “Marie!”

  I donned a corset and bloomers, pulled on my warmest woolen dress, lisle stockings, and stepped, almost stumbling, into my grey kid boots. I buttoned the shoes in haste, my fingers clumsy as I rushed.

  As always, I obeyed Mama and proceeded downstairs to the Red Room. I have always tried to please Mama, no matter that my efforts seemed doomed to fail. A draft caught my skirt, and the flame in my lantern flickered. I could not judge how much oil remained in the lamp. I passed the Green Room, where my sisters lay asleep, watched over by the Sisters of Mercy. In the semidarkness, the nuns’ white habits glowed, giving them a ghostly presence beside the still forms of Olga, Tatiana, and Shvybz. At the end of the corridor, the light of flickering candles emanated from my brother’s room, where he was being watched over by his own attendants. All was quiet, as if those awake were silent, waiting for something to happen.

  Just as I reached the top of the stairs, the flame in my lamp sputtered and went out, leaving me in darkness. My heart hammered alarms. I had never known such fear before—it raced with my blood, rushing from my heart toward my head. For the first time, I understood my mother’s fainting spells, her need for the quick sniff of smelling salts. I felt uncertain on my feet, yet I could not remain still in the near-absolute blackness.

  On the stairwell, I stepped with care, one hand on the wall, one foot seeking the next step, in order not to fall. Even so, I mentally tumbled headfirst. I had always run down these same steps with joy. Our “secret stairs,” we called them—the narrow-pitched steps that connected our rooms in the Children’s Wing to the first-floor family quarters, to Mama and Papa’s cozy warren of their dressing rooms and more intimate salons. How often I almost tripped in my eagerness to reach my favorite destinations— Papa’s saltwater swimming pool, his private hideaway and Mama’s mauve boudoir. But on this night, blind as I descended the stairs, I felt the shiver of prophecy.

  Nothing will ever be the same.

  IN THE RED ROOM

  I could see light emanating from the Red Room; I ran toward that light and into the scarlet salon, where I found Mama and her lady-in-waiting, Lili Dehn. Mama’s old valet, Volkov, appeared with another lantern. Lili Dehn ran about, striking matches to light the tapers throughout the room. Volkov added logs thick as tree trunks to the fire in the hearth and the high flames illuminated the room; the silk-covered walls sprang back into view and the crimson upholstery seemed to pulse.

  All my life, I have found Mama’s inner sanctum somewhat alarming but it is the room she loves best and where, once a month, she had the Roumanian orchestra play her favorite gypsy songs which by some acoustic anomaly reverberated within the walls of the Red Room with a palpable rhythm. Whenever I heard that music and felt its shivering intensity, I was unnerved and experienced a momentary hallucination that I was inside the scarlet beating heart of Russia.

  This night, I was grateful for the firelight, for it was the dark I fear most—the amorphous shadow which could envelop me. I will confess to a lifelong near-hallucination which was much aggravated by the conditions of the siege. Ever since I was a small child, I have had the sense of a fleeting form moving just ahead of me or sometimes to my side, faster than the eye could track, much as a bat would dip and dart. No matter how quickly I ran to enter a room or corridor or turned round to catch true sight of the creature, it eluded me.

  I fared much better in bright, well-lit quarters. In the bedroom I share with Shvybz, I always sleep with several sconces lit and a lamp beside my own bed. But in the night, I often dreamt that I was chased by this shadowed shape to conclusions that I could not, even in a nightmare, envision.

  Since childhood, I have been troubled by these visions and, even in our best of times, I would bolt up in bed in the predawn dark, my heart pounding, eyes blinking. Where am I? What is happening? It always took me several tormented moments to reenter my actual world—ever so cozy and beautiful, with my place secured in the constellation of our family, the seven stars of our galaxy.

  In the Red Room, I experienced an extreme version of this optical illusion when I was told that I must remain there. Remain for how long? Until what might happen? I dared not ask. The sensation of the dark figure fluttered past me and I could feel the draft of its passing too close. That rush of air must have been an illusion or an ordinary draft.

  Why had we lost the electric power? Why was no one coming to fix it? When I looked outside, the guards who always stood right below our windows were missing. The snow-frosted stone courtyard appeared white and blank, for the first time ever in my life, empty. Where had the Imperial guards gone?

  Demidova, “Nyuta,” Mama’s personal maid, appeared, the heavy girl shaking like a blancmange in her huge blue dress. She began moving about the room, as if seeking a duty to perform. This was like Demidova—she was a good, big-boned young woman, eager to assist but always somehow at a loss. She compensated in loyalty and goodwill for what she lacked in efficiency. Demidova was the single person in the Red Room expressing hysteria.

  “What is happening? What shall we do?”

  “Calm yourself,” Mama snapped.

  Then Mama turned to look at me, with an expression more critical than I had ever before seen. Her grey-blue fluctuant gaze seemed to take a quick kaleidoscopic quarter turn to the left; I saw her pupils constrict in that way I dreaded. Would I pass this test?

  “Open the draperies,” Mama told me.

  I loosened the sashes; the red velvet swung heavy, weighted. I tugged to part the draperies; the wind blew so hard that the old window glass seemed to bend inward as if it might shatter. The snow had sharpened into a frozen mist which had already infiltrated the sills. Small drifts, scalloped like meringues, mounted inside the window frames and I took up the task of hacking away at this crystallized snow with a silver cake cutter and then scooping the ice into a crystal dish that once held caviar.
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  We kept the heavy red drapes open to watch the courtyard below for Papa. He had been gone for a week, to the military post at Stavka, and had been expected to return on that fateful thirteenth of March.

  For the first time, ever, Papa did not appear on schedule and there was no message. With the sleet came the hiss of rumor; the servants spoke in muffled voices in the curtained hallway. I heard what I was not supposed to—the whispered number “300,000,” a mob of rebels so vast that even the most loyal soldiers might abandon their posts at our gates. The maids of one of the tutors, Mlle. Schneider, had already fled.

  Other members of our suite who had been away were now rushing back to the palace. My tutor, Nastintka Hendrikova, was en route to Tsarskoe Selo from the Caucasus; our governess, Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, sent word that she would take the train, if it was still running, from Petrograd. Two counts, Apraxin and Benckendorff, had already left their own estates and were on their way to help us.

  Count Apraxin, who served as Mama’s secretary, arrived first, on foot from the Tsarskoe Selo rail station and Count and Countess Benckendorff sent word they would travel by troika and arrive as quickly as they could.

  Sophie Buxhoeveden was the second to reach the palace. She caught the final train to Tsarskoe Selo but had trouble finding a carriage to take her to the grounds of the Tsarskoe Selo proper, the palace park. The driver refused to enter our gates. Sophie had to run the final distance to the palace and she arrived somewhat disheveled, her dark hair escaping her cap and pink cheeks frozen. She was out of breath and entered with the first true gust of panic at her back. Sophie had narrowly escaped from drunken hooligans who had crashed into Petrograd wine shops and were roaring drunk, rampaging through the city and setting fires. Although Sophie was not young or pretty with her close-set eyes and pinched lips, she had feared for her virtue: “The men are running wild and they are headed this way…”

  Lili Dehn served her a cup of strong tea from the samovar. We all drank so much tea, the small brass-top kettle atop the samovar was soon emptied. I think we drank the hot tea as much to keep warm as to assuage our thirst and calm our nerves. Sophie Buxhoeveden pleaded exhaustion and retired to her room.

  Count Apraxin remained in the Red Room. “I had to be by your side,” he told Mama. Mama gave him her vexed look; I always had the feeling she mistrusted Count Apraxin. “They are all around me,” she whispered to me, “all enemies and false friends.”

  “I am so sorry,” Count Apraxin apologized, removing his sodden boots on the Aubusson rug. He then stood up, looking frozen and pale. “I regret to say,” he said through thin blue lips, “the town has fallen to the rebels.”

  The official town, Tsarskoe Selo, only a few miles from our palace compound of the same name, was now overrun by the mob. Villagers had broken bakery windows and stolen all the goods. Count Apraxin reported one rather comic event—in their confusion, the hooligans had mistaken an elegant confectionary emporium for the Imperial Palace and looted it of all its marzipan treats. Less amusingly, they had searched for us, for “the family,” and when they had not found anyone, they burned down the building and ran off, wrapped in velvet window hangings and screaming for “Justice!”

  Now, the mob was marching through the blizzard to our home inside the gates at Tsarskoe Selo. How long would it take so many people to trudge fifteen miles through this heavy snow? What would happen when they reached the Tsarskoe Selo Park? Would the rebels enter our gates? Would they storm the Alexander Palace, invade our private quarters? This very room? What would they do to us?

  I heard the sound of hoof beats in the courtyard and peered down below: Was it the invasion?

  I saw only a well-appointed troika. As I stared down from the frosted window, I could not help but admire the exceptionally beautiful sleigh and its three fine horses: the powerful shaft horse in the center that pulled the weight and the two prancing side horses who maintained the speed. At least one hundred bells were suspended from the harnesses, bridles and saddles; together they chimed, an incongruous cheery music. Despite the situation, my spirit rose to the sound of the troika bells.

  Help had arrived.

  Down in the courtyard, the fur-caped figures of Count and Countess Benckendorff emerged in the silvered light. I saw the elderly couple approach the doors for the first time without the assistance of our guards and footmen. Count Benckendorff escorted his wife; they leaned on their canes as they hobbled inside.

  Within minutes, carried in by the blast of the cold air, looking for all the world like a trim, erect Father Nicholas with his white frosted beard, Count Pavel Benckendorff presented himself, and bowed to Mama. Despite his great age, he announced he was here to act as the liaison between my mother and the loyal generals and the now disloyal Parliament, the legislative group whom Mama only referred to as “that dreadful Duma.”

  I felt my body relax. Count Benckendorff would save us.

  “You must insist,” Mama said to Count Benckendorff, even as he removed his cape. “They cannot call a state meeting. That dreadful Duma.”

  “They have done so,” he said. “They have declared an emergency has seized all Russia and that they must take steps to control the insurrections and defections of the soldiers.”

  “But that dreadful Duma will seize more control for themselves to do that,” Mama said.

  “I am afraid that can no longer be avoided,” Count Benckendorff said. I noticed that the ice crystals on his beard and cape had begun to melt by the heat of the fire. His wife, Countess Benckendorff, a stout woman known to be in poor health, sank onto the settee by the hearth. Lily Dehn offered to take her wraps but the countess clung to her cape. Puddles formed at her feet.

  “I can’t allow this. They must wait for the tsar,” Mama said. She strode to the wall where the palace telephone was anchored to a wooden cabinet; she held the telephone’s tulip-shaped receiver as she spoke. “The meeting must be cancelled.”

  The word “Duma” beat like a drum: Duma, Duma, Duma. I confess I had only a vague notion of the workings of the government. So far as I could comprehend, until 1905, my father held absolute power as tsar. That year, as I turned six years of age, there was a significant change. To avoid a revolution, Papa had to allow the restoration of the Parliament, the Duma, which Peter the Great had abolished in the 1700s. My father agreed to introduce certain basic civil liberties, and permit the Duma to have power in creating and enforcing law. At that time, Mama reassured us—Papa held on to more power than he surrendered. He could still dismiss the ministers at any time. Mama fumed over the concessions that Papa did make but I heard Papa say that his own grandfather, Alexander II, the Tsar-Liberator, would have approved.

  “As long as you can overrule,” Mama stressed. In these conversations, my mother and father came closer to argument than I ever witnessed. Even then, I thought it a bit odd—that my mother cared more than Papa as to who was in control. And now, with mobs running toward the palace, no could reach Papa. But Mama seemed convinced he would return soon.

  “Papa will be home by six tomorrow morning,” she said with certainty.

  Clad in her violet velvet dressing gown, Mama stood in the center of the Red Room, where not so long ago a gypsy violinist had played his sad Roumanian love song and said, “Until Papa comes home, I must act as he would, as the tsar.”

  For one second, I saw her, not as my mother but as a stranger, a woman whose hair had gone grey and was not well-combed, and whose white lips narrowed as she spoke. Her voice was insistent over the audible wind.

  “Are you in charge now then?” she said into the phone to a man I heard her refer to only as Rodzianko. Rodzianko—she uttered the name like an insult. Who was this Rodzianko to defy the tsar and the tsaritsa? He was the chairman of the Duma. Was he in charge now?

  Mama set the phone speaker back onto its receiver.

  Count Benckendorff suggested that we should abandon the palace— “Perhaps even leave Russia?”

  I never saw an express
ion as fierce as Mama’s as she answered: “Never.”

  The whispers in the curtained hallways grew louder, turned to outcries. The wind howled from the city and through the palace. Servants blew out the back doors. Maids and footmen were fleeing; worse, news came from a footman that the regiments near the city had gone over to the rebels and joined the mob. Thus far, our own palace guards, special elite units, were holding fast but for how long?

  Within our family quarters, our defense appeared pitiful. The two counts, Benckendorff and Apraxin, took up positions in the servants’ quarters, where they shared a dressing room. Even with the defection of so many of our suite, there were still many people about the palace—the doctors Botkin and Derevenko as well as Countess Benckendorff and Sophie Buxhoeveden. Mama and Lili Dehn ran about, finding more pillows and setting them out for our guests. While I carried the blankets, Demidova, “Nyuta,” served tea. So, we were not alone, and Mama seemed confident.

  “The Garde Equipage will not desert us.” She listed our fortifications: “Two battalions, thousands of troops, well-armed, our arsenal, the cannons. There are six companies in the souterrains and the Cossacks are here just below us.”

  I imagined the helmeted guards of the Cossack Convoi who now occupied the souterrains, a vast series of underground chambers beneath the palace and grounds. I could envision these fine men defending the shadowed subterranean labyrinth we loved to explore as children. The souterrains were an underground estate that held a dark mirror to the aboveground world. Below us were the stone catacombs filled with mechanical pulleys and cisterns, conveyors of waste and hydraulic systems that served the palace and outbuildings. Machines ran the lift and refilled Papa’s swimming pool with hot water. Down below us, unseen, hundreds of soldiers and servants lived and worked. And now Mama assured us that the soldiers in the souterrains were armed and ready to rise to the surface to vanquish the revolutionaries.