Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

I walked along the black fence, and as the Russian saying goes, I felt as lonesome as a blade of grass in a field. Two trucks carrying a contingent of soldiers drove noisily past me and turned in, stopping at the two sets of locked gates. I knew they must have come to escort the family back to the train, and my tongue went numb. The bed of the truck was open; within it were the soldiers from the station, and this close I could see their uniforms were ill-fitting, their buttons at the neck undone and their shirts untucked. Some of them looked only a few years older than Vova, but the combination of their rifles and their youth made me uneasy. The young have little attachment to the past, to the history of their fathers. The gates, each one embellished with a great wrought-iron wreath, swung open, and a sentry stepped forward to wave the trucks in, then pulled the gates shut with a solid, unyielding clank.

Here, the trees had thinned and I had a clear view through the iron bars of the drive that rose slightly as it made its short journey from the gate to the palace courtyard. The trucks rumbled up to the courtyard and slowed to a stop. I could see only the heads of the soldiers now, bouncing, disembodied, as they clambered out of the trucks to the ground, their rifles floating beside them. Unholy dread had blown me to these gates, and if opportunity presented itself, I hoped God would signal me. But whose side was God now on? Not Niki’s, by all appearances. And I had spent many years tying my fate to his.

The wind made the trees hiss and that sound brought with it a chill and I was chilled also by the sight of a mass of dark figures shuffling across the courtyard. What was this? The dead fleeing a dying empire? Yes. As the mass started down the drive, toward the gates, I could see from their long dark coats and dark hats that they were the underservants, the ones who earned little notice but who were necessary to the smooth running of the palace. They had been dismissed. They were not making this trip with the tsar and his family, these kamer-diners and kamer-jungferi and komnatnlye devyushki , who after years of service ferrying plates or boiling linen were now free to find glorious employment with the new regime. Their faces were strangely emotionless, showing neither relief nor sorrow. For most of them, the palace was their home. They were being exiled just as surely as Niki and Alix were, though their journey would not be as far.

A horn bleated behind me, and I started. I turned to see a grinning soldier swerve another truck into the drive. He braked, then nudged his vehicle forward, alternately leaning on the horn and waving his arm out the window, shouting as he motioned the knot of servants out of the way. The sentries fell in to help, clearing the drive with a push here or a shove there, and I saw my chance. With a quick glance back to Sergei, watching intently beside the cart, I followed the truck through the gates. And that easily, I was one of them. A servant of the court. Wasn’t that what I had been all my life?

I was moving against the flow of the crowd, though, and so I decided I was looking for something I had dropped, and in my mind I made this a silver buckle. Ahead I could now see much more of the courtyard—the wide palace steps of gray stone, three waiting cars, long touring motorcars made especially for the emperor by Delauney-Belleville, a model the French firm dubbed Son Impérial Majesté, and it appeared that in these the emperor and his family would be escorted from the Alexander Palace. To my left glittered the gold emblems on the cornices of the Catherine Palace, and between here and there lay the green water of the pond that during the day captured the reflection of this palace, a pale yellow crescent against the blue cornflower of the sky. In the imperial menagerie, in better days, the animals given the tsar by the foreign ambassadors, Siamese elephants and South American llamas and Tyrolese bulls, had chewed at their breakfasts at this hour.

Keeping my head down, I crossed the drive to the shade of a lone, full tree, and the soldiers’ eyes flitted quickly past me, a nobody in a kerchief. Next to the first truck idled another, already heaped high with bags and boxes, and beyond it, another one still, this one stacked with rolled rugs and pieces of furniture. It seemed as if every stitch and crumb of the palace were being removed. It was not a simple matter to send a former tsar into exile. A convoy of trucks wound around the side of the palace. Soldiers stirred and coughed everywhere, squatting on the stone steps, leaning against the palace columns, strolling the sandy ground, at least sixty, seventy men in uniforms less presentable than the ones I had seen earlier, uniforms without the tsar’s insignias, without decoration, no braid, no medals. A large group of sweating soldiers heaved dozens of trunks and cases and crates into the back of the empty truck as if trying to break them wide open, while an older man, familiar to me—yes, it was Count Beckendorff, a member of the imperial suite, tall polished boots, trim white beard—supervised from the steps. Sergei had told me that although Kerensky had kept the tsar’s exact destination, departure date, and members of his retinue a secret from his ministers, the tsar’s old court knew exactly which of his suite would make this voyage east with the tsar. Word had traveled softly from one prince to another the past few days—the Countess Hendrikov, Prince Dolgoruky, and General Tatishelev would go now, the Baroness Buxhoeveden and Count Beckendorff to follow later. So thrilled was I to see a familiar face that, like a fool, I almost called out and ran to his side to enlist his help. But I knew the count, as a member of the tsar’s suite, was now as much a prisoner as the imperial family, and there would be no advantage in revealing myself to him. The soldiers hoisted the last crate into the truck and surrounded the count, who pulled some paper money from his pocket and held it out. One of the soldiers snatched it from the count’s hand and as the men circled to divvy up their pay, three rubles apiece , I heard one of them say, for three hours’ sweat , I understood the count had not been supervising the soldiers, but had bribed them to follow their orders.

The count retreated to the central hall, which, luckily for me, had been designed with floor-to-ceiling French windows, and I could watch him as he moved behind those windows among several figures, some of whom now began to file out the main entrance. These were the higher-ranking servants, the ones who would accompany the family on its flight—the valets, the chambermaids, the footmen, the cooks and assistant cooks, the wine steward. At a soldier’s shouted direction, they climbed up into the bed of one of the empty trucks, the men helping the women, and sat down on its wooden benches.

Then came the sound of muffled hooves on grass, and one black shape, then five, then another five charged over a small rise. Niki’s Cossacks were riding their mounts toward the courtyard from their barracks in the Feodorovsky Gorodok. I counted twenty-five Cossacks in all. Were they coming to save the tsar? They made a fierce sight, waxed moustaches slashing their cheekbones, long red tunics topped with silver, the tall black papakhi giving the Cossacks, already tall enough on their horses, an even greater height. In a moment, they would pull their curved sabers—the body of each blade inscribed with the gold monogram Н II, the top of each blade with the double-headed eagle—out from their leather scabbards and, whooping, raise them above their heads and bring them down on the heads of these impudent soldiers.

But that did not happen. Nothing remotely like it happened. The soldiers, instead of readying themselves against the approaching horde, barely looked up. And the Cossacks slowed their horses to a walk, sabers still sheathed, to take up positions along the curving drive. They were in the employ of the Duma. For three hundred years, the ferocious Cossacks had pledged their complete devotion to the tsar, each promising to protect the tsar and his family until the last minute of my life . Every man gave twenty years to the military, and no matter how embattled, how desperate a tsar became, he could always count on his Cossacks. Expert horsemen, master swordsmen, unparalleled marksmen, they were the mighty fist of the emperor. They were the enemy Napoleon most dreaded to face. They were the men who tied the Stolypin neckties around the necks of the revolutionaries and who with the army put down the peasant revolts of 1905. These Cossacks had loved this tsar, and this tsar had loved these Cossacks, wore their tunic, practiced the overhand sweep and deadly thrust of the klych . Even Alexei owned a miniature Cossack uniform. But Niki’s Cossacks, no longer his, were here to help escort their master into oblivion.