Джейн Йолен: The Last Tsar's Dragons

The one blessing was that Alexei seemed to be taking the trip as an adventure. None of the rest of them had the heart to tell him otherwise.

She could tell the girls understood the dangers. They held back tears in public, but with her below deck, they were weepy and inconsolable.

Citizen Alexandra kept reminding herself of her German ancestors, which helped her stay—at least outwardly—steady, calm, and strong. But it was a struggle.

On the second day of the journey, the boat of exile passed by Pokrovskoye, the birthplace of the much-mourned Father Grigori. One of the other ladies pointed out his house, and it was exactly as he had often described it, and easy to identify among the izbas .

She was holding her son’s hand when they sailed past the house, and she suddenly remembered something Rasputin had said to her, several months before he was murdered. They had been speaking of illness in general, and death in particular. And he had stared at her with those mesmerizing eyes. She thought at that moment that his eyes were like whirling planets. Indeed, he had looked quite, quite mad. She’d realized then that he was no longer there with her, but somewhere else, somewhere in time, in space.

Oh, his body had been standing before her, but he was not there really. In a voice both like and unlike his own, he spoke in a harsh whisper. “Tsarina, to be clear— my death will be your death.”

And then suddenly, the prophet had disappeared, and dear Father Grigori was back. His eyes normal. He had even winked at her, which was the oddest thing of all.

Remembering this, her fingers tightened around her son’s hand so hard that Alexei cried out. When they both looked down, bruises—already the size and shape of her fingers—were brightening on his hand.

“Oh, my little tsarevitch,” she said, dropping to her knees and kissing each bruise as if she could kiss them away.

“It is nothing, Mama,” he said in a voice that was already starting to roughen, like a man’s.

They had a few months of relative quiet in Tobolsk, a time that seemed endless to them all. Once they settled in, the bourgeois people of the town treated them as if they were still great folks, not plain Nicholas Romanov and his desperate family. Not “German Alix,” as the tsarina had so often been called, and her unmarried daughters. Not “that poor boy who will never be tsar.” They tipped their hats to the tsar and Alexei, waved handkerchiefs at the girls and the tsarina. They brought the family and their few servants fresh fruit and vegetables in season.

If the family thought this was to be their long-term fate, they resigned themselves to it with a certain grace. But the government decided to punish them further by taking away milk, butter, sugar, coffee, and cream. In another country, that might not have seemed much punishment. To Russian aristos, it felt like doom.

And then in April, a man called Jakolav came to the town, and the girls immediately giggled, and one of them called him a “ jackal.” He did not understand the English and so took no offense.

His visage was like a demon’s, a long nose, and hair that never flattened down around his ears, leading the tsar to whisper to his wife: “Perhaps they are pointed!”

She responded in her own whisper, “Perhaps he is Koschei the Deathless,” meaning that character from Russian folklore that had so frightened the girls when they were little, whenever he appeared in puppet plays and ballets and stories, though Alexei—even as a sick child—seemed to enjoy it all.

But the demon, the jackal, brought them nothing to enjoy. He had basically come with their death warrants. He wanted Citizen Romanov to come with him, to leave without the family. What little protection they had was being stripped from them.

Nicholas stood, trembling with rage. “I will not go anywhere,” he said, his voice hoarse with courage.

Alexandra rose from her own chair and made her way over to him, placing her hand in his.

Jakolav protested: “I beg of you not to refuse. If you do not go with me, they will send a less scrupulous sort of man to take my position.”

Anastasia said to her sisters, again in English, “Sending a lion to take the jackal’s place!” But this time, none of them laughed. They suddenly understood the seriousness of their situation.

The jackal added, “If you do not want to go alone, you could take with you the people you desire. Be ready; we are leaving tomorrow at four o’clock.”

He clicked his heels and left, and no sooner had the door closed than the tsarina began pacing between the tsar and the chair, muttering, “Oh, God! What a ghastly torture! This is the first time in my life that I am not sure what I should do.”

The tsar was stunned. He’d never seen her in this state. It all but unmanned him, as if he’d only had strength borrowed from her all these years.

Then he snapped, “You need to do nothing, it is I—”

And that seemed to decide her. “‘I will not let you go alone. That man, that jackal,” and she smiled bravely at the girls who giggled back, “did you see that nose, that hair? He is not to be trusted.” Then she added, “We are a family. I will go with you. The children will follow after.”

He did not contradict her.

The details of how they all got to where they ended up matter little. But where they ended up was in a small, barricaded house.

None of them could see the sky from inside the house. The barricades reached the second floor, the windows were all painted shut. No one could look in. No one could look out.

Anastasia, the most daring of the girls, was driven to despair by the lack of a horizon and managed once to open a window to look out. A shot rang out, hit somewhere close. She saw that the bullet lodged in the woodwork of the window frame and slammed the window back down. She was shaken by the shot, so near, but understood then that the sharpshooter had wanted it there in the frame, not in her heart. He could have just as easily killed her on the spot.

None of them even walked by a window after that.

They were searched almost daily, a hard thing for the tsar and tsarina to endure, but the girls were even more mortified by being touched by the guards who were the same ones who leered at them as they walked to and from the single toilet. In fact, the guards wrote scurrilous messages and ribald verses on the walls of the toilet.

The girls—princesses no longer—learned to cloud their eyes as they walked by, heads still held high.

Perhaps worst of all, the family was allowed but five minutes a day to walk in the garden, breathe the air, see the sky.

Sometimes, if Alexei was doing poorly, the tsar would carry him out in his arms or on his back, almost as if he didn’t want the child’s feet to touch the bitter earth.

The tsarina rarely left the porch. She complained of aches and pains. Each day, the girls found even more gray hairs in her once luxurious crowning glory.

One Sunday, they were allowed to go to Mass. Alexei looked around at the saints’ faces in the icons. It was a small, poor church so there were only a few treasures. The girls sat shivering, four of them in the pew, not from the cold—it was the middle of July—just that something seemed ominous about the whole thing. The tsar sat forward, his elbows on the next pew, his head in his hands. The tsarina sat bolt upright, like a warrior or a martyr, hands together. But if she was praying, no sound came from her closed lips.

The following Tuesday, they were let out into the garden for their usual five minutes.

There was a kind of buzz in the air, too loud for bees, too quiet for thunder.

The tsarina looked up, hoping, praying that planes were coming to rescue them. She whispered to herself, Maybe my German cousins are at the controls.