The Passion of Marie Romanov

by Laura Rose

  To my surprise, the dreaded Siberia turned out to be a place I enjoyed. I especially loved the dry, cold climate, and I even expressed the sentiment that I might prefer to live in Siberia some day! The night skies were celestial miracles, with frequent aurora borealis. At all times, I felt close to a greater spirit.

  I had one outrageous political revelation while in Tobolsk, and it came from an odd source. As in much Russian literature, it was a comedy which taught me my most serious lesson.

  It happened that whenever we suffered a toothache, we would be attended to by a local dentist. In Tobolsk, this meant the services of a young Jewess referred to only as Mrs. X, who repaired my mother and father’s teeth, and one day I too suffered a cavity, and made use of her.

  Mrs. X was the first real Bolshevik with whom I had extended conversation. As most of the Bolsheviks did, Mrs. X seemed to pride herself on her untamed appearance and the continual stream of propaganda which came from her mouth. She flaunted tradition for the untamed Bolshevik look. In her case, the woman, who appeared to be perhaps Mama’s age, forty-five, this took the form of a wild mass of black ringlets—her eyes were wild and black also. She wore loose clothing, a man’s jacket and cap. Mrs. X had a wide mouth that was continually in use, displaying her own impressive square white teeth. Mrs. X was diverting to look at as I had never seen such a woman, dressed almost as a man. Everything about Mrs. X seemed to be in motion. Her eyes rolled, her mouth was never still and she gestured, sometimes alarmingly, while holding her instruments. For all this, Mrs. X seemed to be more a curiosity than an outright enemy. She could relieve my dental pain and so I looked to her with a degree of hope. But would her politics interfere with her ability?

  As a dentist, Mrs. X did appreciate fine dental work. She could not suppress a sigh of admiration over my mother’s mouth. “I have never seen such delicate work!” But she was also determined to teach us right from wrong and she held the former Imperial family captive. Often, she worked upon us two at a time. One patient was expected to hold down the head of the other, while Mrs. X drilled and filled without benefit of any anesthetic other than small shot glasses of vodka. For me, the experience meant sharing the dental sessions with my mother.

  To receive Mrs. X’s ministrations, we were seated in the dining room of the Governor’s House and Mrs. X displayed her instruments spread on the fine white tablecloth. Mama sat in the highest chair, a throne-like mahogany affair with gnarled claws as armrests.

  “You need not worry, Mrs. X,” Mama told her, “I have received and even assisted at far worse surgeries. I shall not flinch.” Mama must have been referring to her time as an operating nurse at the hospital at Tsarskoe Selo.

  “Everyone flinches,” Mrs. X said, her voice as sharp as her pick. Mama was worked upon first and I tried to be gentle as I held her head fast between my two hands.

  “Hold her down harder—she will squirm when I drill,” Mrs. X commanded.

  Mrs. X performed an excavation, pressing her steel pick down to the nerve on Mama’s molar. I imagined this would cause Mama to scream but Mama sat as if made of stone. Even Mrs. X was impressed, and looked to Mama with respect. “I never saw such control.”

  Then it was my turn and Mama held my head—while Mrs. X probed a very sore tooth. My right cheek was puffed and I knew I had an abscess. Would she, out of her class hatred, perform an excruciating extraction?

  To my astonishment, while her manner was harsh, Mrs. X’s touch was light. She “cleaned” me out and then used her drill. Unlike Mama, I did squirm and begged for a few intervals to recover between spasms of drilling. The respites were not without their price—while she had me, mouth clamped open, Mrs. X gave me a great earful of her political beliefs.

  “Why should your family have so many palaces? How many dresses do you own? And how many banquets each year?”

  She drilled and probed as she questioned me, and my yelps of pain were not only a response to her silver pick, but to my conscience. I could not give fair answers—and for the first time in my life, I questioned our opulence and saw that it was excessive in contrast to the poverty suffered by so many Russians. It was of no use to tell her that we of OTMA gave much of our allowance to the poor, worked in the hospitals with the wounded, slept on hard camp beds, and did our own darning. Mama also was in constant service to the needy—knitting, crocheting, sending off gifts of food and clothing. Mama did not deign to speak. I knew our answers would never satisfy Mrs. X, and by the time Mrs. X had finished, my own defense sounded as hollow as my bad tooth.

  While Mama never questioned divine rule, I confess I began to have doubts. And there was far more and harsher criticism than the accusations of great wealth. Mrs. X’s people had suffered in pogroms, killed by the thousands by the Black Guards. How was Papa to blame? I wanted to know.

  “They were they acting under your Papa’s orders,” Mrs. X insisted. I had never heard Papa speak against the Jews, though many noblemen did and they blamed the Jews for the Revolution. Yet I knew that Papa’s first love, long before Mama, had been a young Jewess, and I never heard him speak against the Jews.

  If it was true that so many Jews died, I hoped Papa was guilty only of ignorance. It was all too possible that he was ignorant if not innocent—he had never wanted to be tsar (and now he was no longer). Sometimes we were all a bit chagrined by Papa’s easy adjustment to abdication.

  “Now I get to read and have time with my sweet family,” he said, causing Mama’s eyes to narrow. I could see she found the remark unworthy. More and more, I was puzzled by a certain blankness in him, a denial of the seriousness of our situation. Yet then he would turn round and worry everyone with his self-proclaimed fatalism. In his darker moods, Papa reminded us often that he had been born on the Day of Job. He must have recited the grim prophesies and history a thousand times.

  I loved Papa so much but I began to see him anew in the glare of the Siberian sun. Was he a child-man, unequal to the task of a true leader? I did not even want to ask, let alone answer. I felt disloyal to the person who loved me most on earth, and who had never failed me in his kindness. I followed his lead in our new confinement; I sawed wood with him, and admired his stacked logs, praised him as I would a child. With my sisters, I helped him construct a platform above the greenhouse, and there, we sunned ourselves between stints of gardening under the roof. For the second time, we started a garden we would never get to harvest.

  One terrible event occurred in Tobolsk, which affected all that followed. Monotony set in as the weather grew more frigid. The days became a dull round of wood sawing, chopping and burning. Now, that I have experienced far worse, I admit, that doesn’t sound so terrible. But then, we all began to feel the winter doldrums and recalled that in this part of the world people had been known to end their own lives because of the odd change from light to dark, and the inability to do much but try to stay warm. It was in this climate—emotional and physical, that Alexei committed his most foolish prank. It almost cost him his life, and definitely altered the course of our history.

  On one dark grey afternoon in April, Alexei took his sled indoors, and to divert himself, “sleighed” down the staircase. The great crash that ensued injured his leg and set off the most horrific hemorrhage he’d suffered in many years. For days, we hovered, Mama in continual prayer, over what we feared was his deathbed.

  He began to recover, and even now has yet to walk again. He is carried everywhere, to this date.

  The main catastrophe followed directly upon this—our separation. It was because of Baby’s fragile condition that we were unable, when the order came, to leave Tobolsk “en famille.” The unprecedented occurred: our family divided, and I was separated from my sisters.

  On April 25, we were told that we must move again, “for our own safety.” We were distant from Moscow and Petrograd. It had taken weeks for news to reach us, and we were late to know that the second revolution, the so-called October Revolution, had succeeded and the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Ily
ich Lenin, were in power. This government was far harsher than its predecessors—the Provisional Government and the Menshevik. Exactly how much they hated and disdained us I could not gauge from our distant prison in the primitive piney land of Tobolsk, but I would soon find out.

  LEAVING TOBOLSK

  The transfer order was for Papa alone to be transported. The expected destination: Moscow to stand trial. We can never know now but it is possible that the new government, the Soviet under Lenin, might have permitted the entire family and our suite, the servants, tutors, ladies-in-waiting, and the good doctor, Botkin, to travel with Mama and Papa but Alexei was too ill to be moved. He was bleeding again at the knee—we had all seen the swelling. He had to lie still until the new hemorrhage stopped or the journey could cause what we have always feared for him—a fatal bleed.

  All that last night in Tobolsk, Mama paced and muttered. I heard her cry out her tortured thoughts—if she let Papa go, we might never see him again.

  “Baby could die if we move him,” Mama told me, reciting her grievances as a liturgy against “them.” “They decree that Papa leave here to stand trial, but they will not say where they will take him. They can do anything to him, take him anywhere. They might cause him to disappear. Mama’s voice was shaking.

  “How can they make me choose?”

  I know Mama prayed—I saw her kneel before the icons in her bedroom, and I heard her insistent murmur as steady as the needling snow that stung our window frames at the Governor’s House.

  Mama was forced to choose between her child and her husband.

  She made her decision at midnight, in the hallway outside the bedroom I had shared with my sisters for eight months. Mama tapped on the door and whispered for me. “Marie.”

  My name alone; it was unusual, the first sign of what was to follow. She stood, pale and shaking, on the doorstep.

  “One of you must go with Papa and me.” Her voice cracked. “The others must stay with Alexei. I have decided—I must go with Papa.” She wept as she said “Papa.”

  “They could do anything to him. Under force he might say or even sign papers of confession to their imagined crimes.” I knew what she meant. Last March Papa had signed the abdication papers when he was alone under pressure, away from her. He imagined he had saved Russia, saved us but we all know what we dare not say aloud—Papa lost Russia, and we have lived in captivity, in uncertainty ever since…

  I could l hear Baby crying as we left. I tried not think of his final words, but I will never forget them.

  “I am not afraid of dying—I am afraid of what they will do to us.”

  How could they force Mama to choose between her husband and her sick son? There could be no correct or humane choice. Both my father and my brother needed her, perhaps to save their lives.

  Mama and I could still hear Alexei cry, even as we turned away from the house and walked to the carriages. I felt like sobbing but I watched Mama—if she could control her face then I could too. I could see her shoulders shake; her face seemed to crack with the strain. She held fast to my elbow, but she did not weep or look back. I felt rather than heard Alexei’s cries. They struck like blows at my spine.

  “Marie,” she repeated. I heard my name, spoken this time, as a plea.

  When Papa abdicated, we knew he might be shot, executed outright. When that didn’t happen and we were kept prisoners at home in the Alexander Palace and allowed our familiar rooms if not all our privileges, we had exhaled a collective sigh of relief. Then again in Tobolsk, we endured a period of adjustment and found meaning and pleasure again in our daily lives. We had settled into a new version of the Mauve Room and resumed our old hobbies and habits. I had become, if not content, habituated and had no desire to leave for the unknown. But what real choice did I have? As a dutiful daughter, I had no choice.

  The new sudden journey into the unknown was different in so many ways. Even the new commissar Yakovlev, whose duty was to escort us, seemed surprised by the travel order to depart before the river ice thawed and the snowdrifts melted. I heard Yakovlev shout, “Can’t we wait a few weeks, for the river ice to melt? This will be so difficult!”

  Who was this Yakovlev? We had not seen him before. Commissar Yakovlev was the emissary from the new government led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. What was Lenin’s true intention toward us? What orders did Yakovlev follow?

  Commissar Vasily Vasilevich Yakovlev— “What to make of this strange new character?” Papa said when the new commissar appeared at the house, with the orders to take him away. “He is swarthy; he looks away, will not meet our gaze.”

  Papa regarded each representative of the successive revolutionary governments with a mixture of curiosity and mistrust. Mama looked more askance. “I don’t like his look,” she told me. “He is not well bred.”

  Commissar Yakovlev interested me in his intensity. He had a deep introspective look—I did not think he was a cruel man. I have learned to tell the difference. I have a physical symptom—my knees tremble when I am looked at by some of the Bolshevik men. I can see what they want in their eyes—desire without redemption—the “raping stare,” Olga calls it. We girls avert our gazes from such looks. We have heard their crude remarks.

  Mama has said, again and again: “Never, never remove your underclothes.” Sometimes Shvybz has even joked with us, saying at bedtime in a mock Mama voice, “Don’t remove your corset!”

  Mama had been explicit in telling us what we have to fear.

  “Wear the heavy corsage at all times.”

  We all have rashes under our breasts; the corsets scratch, and the boned stays dig into our flesh.

  Mama faced two terrible choices in leaving Tobolsk. The first was to separate from Alexei, and the second was to select me, from amongst all the daughters, to accompany her and Papa to the next unknown destination.

  I was amazed that Mama chose me as the one daughter to accompany her and Papa on this journey. I imagined she would take Olga as the eldest, who was also so like Papa, or Tatiana, who is most like Mama and perhaps the greatest comfort to her, or even my Shvybz, Anastasia, as the littlest girl. Perhaps it was Papa this time, who wanted me to share the journey?

  “Our angel. You are the best of us,” Papa whispered to me and I felt an emotion I did not anticipate—pride. Our Lord, forgive me this pride. I should feel nothing but humility in such circumstances. Yet, I knew this was an honor, to be the one to go with them, to help them.

  Only once before was I alone chosen—on that frozen March night, now over a year ago, when troops surrounded our house and Mama went out to speak with the palace guards, to ask them not to defect but to protect us. But her choice that night was an involuntary one—I was the only child who had not yet fallen ill.

  The night we left Tobolsk was different. We left, as was now the custom, at three a.m. The predawn departure added to our disorientation—was that their purpose? The single benefit of these nocturnal wakings and travels was that it really was almost possible to believe these were hallucinations. It was all so very unreal—the heavy knock at the door, being woken and led outside. Whatever dream I had that was interrupted was not quite banished as I stumbled, only half-conscious, into the grey-white of the snowy night.

  What an odd party of other sleepwalkers they allowed us, only a few of the servants—the two old men, the footman Sednev and Papa’s ancient valet Chemodurov, and poor, sweet, but alas, stupid—forgive me! —dear, loyal Nyuta. Papa was allowed only Prince Valia Dolgoruky as a companion; General Taitschev was left behind, along with most of the suite, and all the tutors. Mama was permitted Dr. Botkin for her health—the commandant at least observed that Mama could hardly walk and was wrenched from her wheeling chair. What could Dr. Botkin do? I heard him whisper, “There may be nothing I can do, but I will be honored to accompany you.” The good doctor carried his great black leather medical bag, filled with vials of smelling salts, poultices and potions.

  As we gathered outside the Governor’s House to depart, I coul
d still hear Alexei crying within and I turned one last time to see my dear sisters’ faces in the doorframe— three pale ovals… For a moment, I felt my hope falter. My foot slipped on the snowpack and I almost fell, which would have brought Mama crashing down with me. Only the fact that I must help Mama made me catch myself—I did not lose my balance or my grip on Mama’s elbow.

  Last time the family was moved, we were allowed to take all the dogs. This time, the dogs stood at the doorway and whimpered alarms. Dogs sense danger—the oddness of this new situation. We always set forth en famille. Would our family ever be together again? Would Mama, Papa and I ever see the dogs again? Their plaintive howls seemed to express their canine fear.

  We, the newly reduced suite and Mama, Papa and I, walked out into the snow-covered world outside the Governor’s Mansion toward the carriages which cast spiked, black shadows on the white ground. We were preceded by our own shadows as a funereal procession. I was aware of lights coming on across the street in Freedom House. I looked up and could just make out the rest of our suit—the tutors and ladies-in-waiting, silhouetted in the golden light of the windows as they looked down at us. Dr. Botkin’s daughter, also named Tatiana, called out “Papa!” I turned to look—Dr. Botkin walked behind us. I turned and saw the good doctor make the sign of the cross. He had visible tears which at once froze into tiny icicles. My eyes stayed trained on Papa’s back. He walked slightly ahead of me, with the commandant Yakovlev, our escort on this new journey. Papa and Yakovlev would occupy the first cart, the carriage ahead of ours. Papa was to ride separate from Mama.