Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

How long would the imperial family be at the mercy of the revolutionary soldiers who guarded them—the brothers of these men pillaging and vomiting in the streets below—as the Provisional Government struggled, despaired at the task, and then finally turned the country back over to Niki. Weeks? Months? For I was sure that was what would happen. The insolent soldiers who now stood guard in the park would be hanged along with all the mutinous troops. That couldn’t happen quickly enough for me. Surely they could not hold Niki prisoner that whole time in Tsarskoye. Could Niki have foreseen any of this out there on those tracks, without view of the mob gutting his city, when he wrote, Not wishing to part with our dear son, we hand over our inheritance to our brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, and give him our blessing to mount the throne of the Russian state . And then I remembered how he had looked at Mogilev, at dinner, smoking between courses, his eyes turned inward, fatigued and stressed, his inattention to the conversation of the men around him politely disguised—did that mood fore-shadow this act of which I could not then conceive? Was he debating, Should I strive for action or remain inert? Perhaps he had returned to Peter to do the former and then halfway through had conceded to the latter.

I put down the paper and rapped on the table to get Josef ’s attention and he turned from the window. What? It was then I told Josef what I had done, that Vova was not tucked away safely at Stavka with Sergei as I had said, but was being held with the imperial family at Tsarskoye Selo, and in my brother’s face I saw this was terrible for Vova, worse than I had thought. When I opened my arms along the table and put my head to its cloth, stained with droplets of jam, even I was surprised by the violence of my weeping. My brother paced the floor while I wailed. My crying grew so loud, eventually Josef ’s wife and daughter, Celina, five years old, clutching a doll in a purple dress—a little girl who would never be embroiled in an imperial misadventure but was to be safely ensconced at the Imperial Ballet School (and now in this new world what would that be called?)—came to the tall doors of the dining room and peered in at us. At the sight of them, my big brother grew calmer and with this calm, arm in arm, came reason. No one would touch the tsar at Tsarskoye, Josef said. He was safer there than in the capital while this new Russia was configured, and so were his family and Vova. If the tsar was not reinstated, the imperial family would surely be sent away to live out the rest of their years in comfortable exile. According to the report, Nicholas expected as much, commenting after he signed his document of abdication that he would retire to the country, adding, I like flowers . A lie, I am sure. But this must have been what the poet Mayakovsky was thinking of when he wrote in 1920 the verse primers by which the illiterate peasant soldiers on the southwest front learned to read.

So , Josef said. We will have to wait and see.

But of course I couldn’t wait. When have I ever been able to wait?

The trains began running again by the end of the month, and so disguised as the new me, not Magnificent Mathilde, but Peasant Mathilde, I was able to travel in a second-class compartment the nine versts southwest to Tsarskoye Selo. I knew immediately the imperial family must be outside when I walked up from the village and saw the common people pressed to the park fence. I had heard when the family made a promenade of the palace park or, later, when the weather changed, broke ice in the canals or, desperate for some industry, worked on their kitchen vegetable garden, small groups of the curious would gather outside the black iron railings to gaze at the former tsar and the former tsaritsa in their former park, now their prison. In the past such access would have been unthinkable—the Cossack sentries would never have permitted anyone to gather and gawk, but the revolutionary guards had no such compunction. They let all who wished to come and stare. That day, the people were silent, though sometimes it was reported they jeered at the former tsar or balled up the greasy brown paper in which they had wrapped their lunch and hurled it into the park through the fence, a gift for the despot. When I arrived and stood a little apart from the crowd, I could see Niki alone of the family was in view, a soldier with a bayonet fixed to a rifle a few paces behind him, and at that sight I felt my bones turn to powder. The tsar stood on the summer landing pier, a long, wooden pole in his hand, jabbing at the ice to crack the frozen surface, so one could see the liquidity beneath it, the color, the movement, the variety of it, the very elements denied the tsar by his guards. When not harassing the family, the guards shot at the deer and the swans in the estate’s park because they were bored and because no one any longer had the power to forbid them to do so and because they believed, when the counterrevolution came from the old regime, they themselves would be hanged from gallows and the people pressed to these fences would jeer at their dangling bodies, and so why should they let anything, animal or man, live? I heard the guard call, What will you do come spring, Nicholas Romanov? , a remark that enflamed me but which Niki ignored. As the guard cackled at his own joke, a boy came into view, a boy too tall to be Vova and reed thin—Alexei, recovered now from the measles, but wasted by it. And so I continued to wait, for where there was Alexei, I figured, there would also be Vova, and so I stood, without moving, while onlookers came and went, and eventually, because I am so small and because I remained there so long and so motionless, I became a magnet. Nicholas was compelled to take note of me. He looked my way without giving any sign, but he stood still staring for long enough to attract the attention of the tsarevich, who stared where his father did and then said, Papa? I heard clearly the uncertainty and apprehension in that one question, and I knew from it that the guards must frighten and intimidate the children so used to the respect and servility which they were normally accorded. And sure enough, just as Alexei had feared, Niki’s stone-still posture drew the attention of the guard, who took a single menacing step, looked piercingly at the rabble at the fence and held up his rifle in warning, addressing Niki not as Gosoudar , Sire, but as Colonel Romanov! Niki turned away, casually, as if to show he had been looking at nothing in particular at all, but the guard, suspicious, advanced toward the crowd to see who among us had caught the tsar’s attention, who was a scout come to spring the family from their prison, for the only thing that frightened the guards more than the thought of a counterrevolution was letting their imperial prisoners escape, for which transgression they would be immediately shot by their own. As I found out later, they worried constantly about signals sent to the outside through parcels, through the turning on and off of lamps, through the single telephone line which the prisoners could use only in the presence of a guard, through the unsealed letters sent in and out and read by the commander at their ingress and egress.

I moved closer to the others at the fence and lowered my eyes, bent my knees, and shrank down beneath my hat—I was so tiny I could impersonate a child!—and as the guard, practically a child himself, paced left and right, behind him I saw Niki put a hand out to Alexei to reassure him, and then wave to someone behind the bridge, someone indistinguishable from the dark trunks of the leafless birch trees. Another boy appeared soon after, a boy who took up his own wooden pole, and together with Alexei and Niki began to pound at the ice. The shadows of the birch trees swept across the white snow, but Niki, acting with the self-discipline he had practiced for the twenty-two years of his reign, never looked in my direction again. And so in this way Niki showed me my son.