Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Two Rolls-Royces raced down the mounted line, and I recognized the first as one of the tsar’s own; as it passed I saw Kerensky sitting within. I knew his face, with the bulbous nose and hair like a thicket, though I had not seen him in person, but only on the postcards he had distributed everywhere, as if to say to the people, as the tsars once had, Know me, love me . He stepped out of the Rolls—the new leader arriving to bid his predecessor a polite farewell?—and then another man emerged. I recognized him, as well: the tsar’s brother Mikhail. The grand duke must be here to say goodbye, with Kerensky acting as monitor, that is, unless Mikhail was going with the family—but why would he go with them? He had been tsar for only three days and Kerensky, reportedly, had been so pleased by the grand duke’s aborted term that he had called Mikhail a patriot . The presumption! Another man followed them up the palace steps. It was the officer from the train station, Colonel Kobylinsky.

Mikhail entered the palace but Kobylinsky paused on the steps to survey his soldiers, who watched him but didn’t rise to attention or salute. He made a curt gesture. Eight soldiers eventually stirred themselves and climbed into the trucks to start the engines. Gears protested as the drivers battled the transmissions, then, after a few false starts, they lurched toward the gates, the servants holding on to one another on their benches, the crates rattling. The evacuation had begun.

Mikhail reemerged with Kerensky, head bent, hand over his eyes, to hide what, his tears? Relief at the fate he had averted for himself with his act of patriotism , the fate his brother the tsar now faced? Kobylinsky shook both Kerensky’s and Mikhail’s hands and closed the car door after them; the car made a slow circle, went down the drive, and was gone.

Kobylinsky waited until the gates were closed again and then motioned the soldiers to form a cordon around the few motorcars that remained. The soldiers reluctantly made an asymmetrical half-circle around the perimeter and two uneven rows from the bottom step to the cars. Several of the Cossacks exchanged glances at this slovenly formation, and I understood that, slovenly or not, this was the gauntlet through which the imperial family must pass, and that I must get inside the palace, quickly, now , and request my private farewell with Vova before these cars were loaded. I stepped away from the tree and started toward the palace. But I had waited too long.

Out from the circular hall of the Alexander Palace and down the stone steps came Niki’s daughters, flanked by Colonel Kobylinsky. The girls all wore wide-brimmed, black straw hats and what must have been wigs, for the hair that had been shaved from their scalps in March surely could not yet have grown back to these lengths, and in their white shirts and long, tweed skirts, they seemed quite adult, which, of course, they must now be! The oldest, Olga, had to be almost twenty-two, my age when Niki trimmed my heart down to nothing to marry Alix. Was it possible I had lived so many years? One of the girls carried a little lap dog and when it struggled out of her sleeve and made to run away, a soldier gave it a kick, the muzhik , and it ran, yapping, back to her. Colonel Kobylinsky stared at the offending soldier but said nothing.

The colonel settled Olga Nikolaevna in the first open car and the three other girls were joined by a woman who must have been Countess Hendrikov, the only female courtier making the journey at this time, in the second. Then came the boys, both of them, tall and thin in their just-adolescent bodies, their hair cut in identical unflattering styles, a short fringe of bangs drawn across their foreheads. The man who led them from the house did not seem to be a revolutionary soldier but some sort of valet in sailor garb, one of the sailor nannies, the dyadi Nagorny or Derevenko, though the boys would soon be too old for nannies and would need batmen or valets. Vova looked so much older, so much taller! They had each celebrated a birthday in captivity. Vova’s fifteenth was marked, he wrote Sergei, with a cake sprinkled with lilac petals, and Alexei’s thirteenth by a special procession of clergy from Our Lady of the Sign, who had carried with them a holy icon, which even the revolutionary soldiers had felt compelled to kiss. So there was some element of the old world they still respected. Vova walked close beside Alexei, the two probably inseparable now, as they moved quickly down the line of soldiers who stared openly at them. If I pushed through that line, I could hold my son in my arms, but I knew our embrace would be violently broken, so I remained silent. Not yet, but when?

The two boys were followed by the doctor, Botkin, in his blue coat, and a thin man in a hat with a cheap black band which I recognized from Vova’s gleeful description. This must be the children’s French tutor, M. Gilliard. Two other men I recognized, as well, Prince Dolgoruky and General Tatishelev—both of them frequented the ballet. At a sudden shout, we all turned back to the palace. One remaining servant had called to another for help lifting the empress in her wheelchair through one of the French windows onto the terrace.

The wheelchair astonished me. What had happened to all the energy with which she had nursed the children just a few months earlier? Alix now looked drugged, and perhaps she was, by those same helpful, soothing drops Dr. Botkin had squeezed into the children’s mouths when they were all so sick with the measles in February. She wept as the two men struggled with the chair, her body swaying this way and that, until one of them lifted the empress out of the chair and carried her, the long, wide sleeves of her blouse flapping, down the sloping ramp to the courtyard. The other trailed behind, pushing the empty rattan wheelchair with sharp, hard jerks, letting its wide, thin wheels make a rattle over the flat, gray stones. Niki was the last to step through that window. He paused on the terrace, his bearing slightly stooped, until, with conscious effort, he squared his shoulders, the better to balance on them the weight of his family in their solitary exile. Even the horses seemed to still as Niki scanned the scene before him. He gazed at me but his eyes didn’t linger. I was just another subject, come to watch the tsar’s departure. I saw him study the sunrise over the park the Russians had once called Sarskaya Myza —or high farm—and this farmstead had become, for a time, the tsar’s private paradise. And now his expulsion east. Oh, why had not Niki insisted on going to the White Palace in Livadia or to his brother’s estate in Orel, both estates Kerensky perhaps could have been persuaded to reconsider?

I watched Niki walk down the long ramp and take Alix’s arm at the bottom of it, for without her chair she had stood, hesitantly, seemingly afraid to walk, and together, they followed the boys into the first car. Niki helped each of them into the open carriage and onto the three rows of high-backed leather seats. Colonel Kobylinsky climbed onto the box at the head of the running board and turned toward the Cossacks. To them, he need not say a thing. They knew their roles; a few of them guided their horses in front of and alongside the tsar’s car and along the two others as escort. And now, as the soldiers swarmed aboard the remaining trucks in that long convoy, I realized that I would be left behind if I did not act. There would be no later moment. A Cossack gestured with his big arm that I should move out of the way, down the drive, stop gawking. Babushka! Me—a babushka! So I wasn’t invisible. He urged his horse toward me. Everyone is leaving . I nodded and began walking backward, then sideways, trying to keep my eyes on the family seated in the first of the Son Impérial Majestés, the Cossack and his black horse shadowing me, the trucks and cars and horses circling the courtyard, clop, clop, clop, making their way around the light sand to the drive proper, the Cossacks’ horses keeping pace with the slow turning of the wheels. I supposed they would ride with them all the way to the station, the last assignment of the tsar’s retinue.