Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Sergei bellowed and snapped the reins to turn the swaybacked horse, and after a hesitation, it lurched forward, straining to get the oversized wheels of the wooden cart in motion once more. Sergei cursed and leaned forward to slap the horse’s rump, hard. The horse snorted, its scrotum swaying gently as it took each heavy step. From the animal’s bowed legs and protruding ribs, I could see we would plod all the way to the Alexandrovsky Station. I turned back to ask the peasant if he had another horse, a faster one—but the man was gone, having vanished into the surrounding forest with his newfound wealth before we could change our minds and turn his pockets inside out. I took a deep breath. We wouldn’t make it by midnight. We’d be lucky to make it before the sun rose. But Sergei and I said nothing to each other, nothing aloud. We would go on because there was nowhere else to go.

By the time Sergei and I arrived at the Alexandrovsky, the sky had changed from ebony to magenta to the marble green that preceded dawn. The family had boarded a train for the abyss of Siberia more than five hours ago. The station house glimmered in this almost light, the building a yellow-and-white slice cut from the yellow-and-white cake of the Alexander Palace, now empty. I used my hands, elbows, and knees to ratchet myself down from the cart, Sergei laboring to keep up with me as I made for the big station doors, twice the height of a man, and from there to the tracks on the other side. Behind me, Sergei called that Vova would be fine, that he could learn where the family was taken, we could still get him back, but my terror made me deaf. I stepped out onto the small platform by the two tracks to sniff the scent of my boy, ready to lie down on the empty tracks that had guided him away from me. But, to my astonishment, the platform was a crush of people.

On the tracks waited a long gray train that flew the Japanese flag—it was not, in fact, Japanese but an ordinary passenger train that bore a placard, Red Cross Mission , though the train was not on a mission of mercy. It was more poorly disguised than we were. Milling about the platform was half a regiment of Russian soldiers in their brass-buttoned tunics, rifles slung over their shoulders, taking long pulls on their cigarettes. The uniforms looked new, as if issued for this particular assignment. Sergei put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me back against one of the tall, many-paned station windows; while we watched from this recess, an officer with a high forehead and a small moustache emerged from the train and descended to the platform to speak to the soldiers. That’s Colonel Kobylinsky , Sergei said to me quietly. He’s a war hero, detailed to Tsarskoye to oversee the family.

Although I could not hear Kobylinsky as he spoke to the men, it was clear from his posture and from the relaxed stances of the soldiers that the train’s departure was not imminent. In fact, there was not the slightest hint of tension. The imperial family must not yet be on board. Perhaps the family had not even left the palace. I turned to Sergei, my face a question, and he said, If Kobylinsky’s still here, they haven’t left yet .

By some holy miracle, the family must still be at Tsarskoye. I would later learn it was no holy miracle. The same revolutionary railway workers who had stopped all the trains had refused to shunt and couple these, suspecting the tsar was being spirited out of the country, an action they were determined to prevent: the tsar was a prisoner of the revolutionaries, he was to stand trial, he was not to live out his life in some comfortable exile. It had taken Kerensky multiple calls to the rail yards, shouting into the receiver in his loud, excitable voice, to prod the men—who now by new habit questioned all authority and respected none.

We need to go , Sergei said to me softly.

The streets of the town of Tsarskoye were quiet. In our cart, we passed the racetrack, the storage houses and slaughter yards, the cathedral, the police station, the post office, all the municipal buildings that made the little town hum so efficiently when the tsar was still tsar. Sergei knew the streets well—Malaya, Kolpinskaya, Stredniaya, Sadovaya, Dvortsovaya—having traveled them all in his Rolls-Royce in happier days, following the tsar with the rest of the court—and all the streets we rode lay like a well-pressed apron, its strings tied up neatly in front of the massive compound of Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar’s Village itself. The imposing mansions of the former court made a silent honor regiment for our approach. I prayed that we would not see the family and its entourage barreling toward us in their motorcars in a race to the train station. Before I could lift my hand or shout a name, they would be gone, and Vova would be whisked away from me again, like a cruel joke.

Sergei began to rehearse aloud a plan to rescue Vova, choreographing bold dashes, feints, flanking maneuvers, but just like all of Russia’s battle plans, his relied more on fantasy than on reality—an overestimation of our strengths, a fatal underestimation of the enemy. Finally I cut him off.

We are two. Do you hear yourself?

Sergei started to protest, then fell silent.

The wheels of the wagon groaned and sounded as if they would splinter.

Listen to me , I began. If there were fifty soldiers at the station, there will be a hundred more at Tsarskoye. If they see you, they will recognize you and believe you part of a plot to save the tsar. You could be arrested. Or shot.

Or, and this I did not say, they might—enraged still by the ammunition shortages of the war in which they had served—lynch him on the spot; lynching had become a far too common practice in Peter. There would be ten thousand by the end of the year alone. A mob would capture a thief and cut off his hands, snatch up a murderer and throw him into the Neva to shoot him when he tried to climb out, tie up a borzhui and string him by the foot from a tree the better to torture him.

I watched Sergei stare ahead, jaw set.

These men have never attended a ballet in their lives. I will be just another old woman to them.

The black wrought-iron fence that enclosed the Tsar’s Village abruptly rose before us and Sergei pulled the cart over on Dvortsovaya, not far from the mouth of the short drive that led up to the palace gates. I could hear the trees high above me shuffling their leaves like hands to cards and that wind also dispatched the sweet scent of lilacs planted by a half-dozen empresses over the span of the last two centuries. The last time I was here, it had been winter, snowflakes spiraling like ice insects around the lamps mounted high on either side of the palace doors. I had left my son behind at Tsarskoye in March, but I could not leave him behind now in August.

Until this moment, my mind had been playing out my worst imaginings for Vova again and again, like a scratched gramophone record, but the needle had been lifted and uncertainty filled the emptiness. There would be guards at the gate. What would I say to persuade the guards to let a member of the tsar’s suite go free? And what if Niki had no intention of letting him go? An idea began to form, in its own way as foolishly simple as Sergei’s battle plans were elaborate—I would simply ask for a chance to say goodbye to my son. Surely they would give an old woman that, and from there, what? No matter. I needed to get only there. The end would take care of itself. I only had to invent the beginning. And the beginning lay ahead of me. Against the pink sky behind the birch trees that lined the road, I could see the top of the yellow-and-white palace.

As I got down from the cart, Sergei said, Mala, vot zapomni—now remember —and I nodded, yes, yes, I would call to him if I faced any danger.