Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

I was still sitting there with that notebook when I heard Josef call out my name, Mala, Mala , and I went to the top of the staircase. Josef and Sergei stood at the bottom and Josef said tightly, Sergei’s just heard from his brother , and I thought, why is he speaking for Sergei? When I looked to Sergei he said, Niki and the family are being moved at midnight tonight , and then I understood. Josef had meant to prepare me for bad news.

They were being moved? Moved where? My fingers curled themselves around the notebook and I started down the stairs. Did Kerensky fear the loyalists would put Nicholas back on the throne? Or did he worry the Bolsheviks would try to stage another putsch and that this time there would be none of the meteorological luck which in July had brought the heavy rain to put out the chaos? Nothing this time to keep back the crowd that had shattered the windows and splintered the doors of the Tauride Palace and had almost lynched the Social Revolutionary leader Chernov in his black frock coat right in the street before his comrade, the Menshevik Trotsky, intervened, giving one of his impromptu speeches to the crowd from the bonnet of a car? Pride and Glory of the Revolution, you’ve come to declare your will and show the Soviet that the working class no longer wants to see the bourgeoisie in power. But why hurt your own cause by petty acts of violence against casual individuals? And thus having hypnotized the crowd, Trotsky announced, Citizen Chernov, you are free! Was Kerensky afraid that this month or next month at the Tauride or Tsarskoye or the Winter Palace, the crowd would drag out the tsar, the ministers of the Provisional Government, possibly even Kerensky himself and beat them all to death or string them up in the trees? I looked into Sergei’s face, trying to guess what he thought of this news. I could already tell what Josef thought, what Josef always thought: anything to do with the Romanovs was a bad idea.

Where are they moving them? I asked Sergei. Sergei shook his head. They were told only to pack warm clothes.

Warm clothes? Niki’s mother, sisters, cousins were now all in the south, in the Caucasus and the Crimea. Niki would not need warm clothes there.

But they were going south, to Livadia Palace , I said.

There’s too much unrest along that route , Sergei told me. The steppe is empty. They are probably taking them east . And at the look on my face, he said, Kerensky promises the family can come back by the fall, once the Constituent Assembly has met, and Niki will be free to go where he wishes .

I looked at Josef, who was shaking his head, and then at Sergei. I took the notebook I was carrying and put it into his hand. Look, look at this . And I opened it to the page that said,

We fully regard civil wars, wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave owners, serfs against landowners, and wage workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive, and necessary.

Sergei read the lines and then tore the page out of the notebook, crumpled the paper in his fist, and threw it down. I pointed to the paper ball. They want a civil war .

Sergei smiled. Where is this writer now? Chased out of your house so quickly he didn’t even have time to take his big speech with him.

But the writer had gotten into my house. In 1905 he had not gotten this far. By 1918 he might be writing on manuscript paper instead of schoolbooks, issuing his own ukazy from the tsar’s desk in the Winter Palace where Kerensky now sat. I thought, Only you Romanovs cannot imagine a Russia without you . While the Romanovs left in Peter were dreaming, in Siberia, with the droves of mosquitoes in summer and the cold so extreme in winter only reindeer skins could help a man withstand it, Niki and his family would be shrunk into such tiny figures on the horizon eventually they would be not even seen, this former tsar , with his former sons. In the outlier of Siberia their guards, drunk on vodka and far from the moderating reason of Kerensky, could turn surly from the boredom of their inglorious posts, and no one from the capital or the old court, no Vladimirichi, no Mikhailovichi, no Alexandrovichi, would hear the imperial family cry out if they were suffering. And how would I hear my son’s cry as it flew over the Urals, across thousands of miles of empty steppe, from whatever small town Kerensky saw fit to stash the family? I could see already the Tura and Tobol rivers, the endless versts, a meadowland in this season but an ice sheet soon enough. And so I said to Sergei, Take me to Tsarskoye. Vova cannot go with them to Siberia.

Halfway to the Alexandrovsky Station near Tsarskoye Selo, our train, which had left the Warsaw Station in Petersburg at 8:00, with plenty of time to reach Tsarskoye before midnight, inexplicably slowed to a stop in the middle of nowhere. All trains to Tsarskoye had been temporarily halted, our conductor said. We would wait. One hour slipped into two, before Sergei and I realized that our train was being held back purposely: the secret of the tsar’s departure, Kerensky’s great secret, was no longer a secret, and the radicalized railroad workers all along the Warsaw line, hearing the rumors, suspicious, must have decided to refuse to allow any trains into Tsarskoye, no doubt to keep any friends of the Romanovs away until the train chosen to carry the family away had set out. And at this, I began to paw at the sleeve of Sergei’s tunic.

We climbed down from the back of the last car onto the great plain upon which Petersburg also sat, these versts between the capital and Tsarskoye being a small collection of villages and country estates before one reached Krasnoye Selo and Tsarskoye itself. It was late enough now even in a Russian summer to be dusk, and Sergei took the lead as we trudged back toward the village we had just passed. The peasant clothes my brother gave us—my light cloth coat and kerchief, Sergei’s soft cap, loose tunic, and baggy pants—would, I hoped, make us look as if we belonged on foot. Sergei limped ahead of me; his arthritis, which had swollen the knuckles of his fingers, had also torched his joints so that he moved tenderly, back bent. As we followed the track through a thick wood of fir trees, I found myself falling, my grace and balance useless on this ground churned by roots and gullies. Eventually we found a rutted dirt road and Sergei said the village was down below, let’s hurry. Every few minutes I called to Sergei for the time and he checked his watch in its leather pouch: 10:30, 10:42, 10:56, and finally he said, Mala, don’t ask . It was 11:04 when a peasant driving a horse and wooden cart appeared. Sergei limped forward to hail him and I watched their pantomime. Sergei’s arms moved, the peasant, capless but wearing the classic bowl haircut, shook his head, bangs flapping, and gestured to the open back of his cart. Was he offering us a ride? Sergei then brought out his purse. I’d heard that when Niki went out riding these country roads each afternoon at two o’clock, he would stop and speak to the villagers he passed, and that, knowing this to be his habit, peasants from this district and beyond would line the road to beg a favor from the tsar or to hand him a petition, knowing Nicholas liked to honor all these requests. Their Father Tsar loved a supplicant, loved to grant permission. I edged closer. Sergei placed a thick pad of rubles into the callused hands of the peasant. The man wore a short navy blue coat and beneath it a tunic and trousers almost exactly like the ones my brother had given Sergei, but too filthy to be worn by someone merely playing a part. We should have dirtied Sergei’s face and hands with a pot of black makeup from the Maryinsky storage room. Even Father Gapon, in hiding in Petersburg after the debacle of Bloody Sunday, had known to cut his hair, to shave his beard, and to paint his face with theatrical makeup in order to avoid discovery and arrest. We had not had the time to create verisimilitude, though that would matter more later; for now Sergei’s rubles had been real enough. The old peasant lowered himself to the ground and Sergei gestured to me, Come . As he helped me up onto the driver’s bench, the man stood unmoving, staring blankly at the small fortune in his big hands. Surely the world had gone mad, when one was tossed great mounds of money for a rotting cart and a broken-down horse. Was this the new order of things?