Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

The sun was high by the time we reached the capital and Vova said, Why aren’t we going home? when Sergei turned the cart up Spasskaya Ulitsa toward Josef ’s apartment, our home for now. When I told him our own home had been taken from us and that I had just now gotten it back and that it was empty of furniture. Vova could not quite grasp this. All I had gone through these past months was a novelty to him.

What about our dacha? he asked.

The soldiers are using it as a club, but w e will have it back, too , I told him.

And Vova said, And the tsar will have his house back from the soldiers as well?

And Sergei spoke, Yes, of course. Yes.

When? Vova asked. How long will it be before the tsar comes back?

A few months. When things are settled here.

I think it will be longer than that , Vova said, after a pause, because they packed so many things . Another pause. I’m not going to join them, am I?

Kerensky later said he had picked Tobolsk because he believed there the tsar would be safe, and because the choice of Siberia as a place of exile would most likely satisfy the agitators—had their comrades not been sent there for the last hundred years? They may have been, but the revolution itself had not yet traveled those three thousand versts east to the backwater town of Tobolsk. The imperial family was given the old governor’s mansion there, a dirty, boarded-up house, only thirteen rooms, hardly a mansion. The walls were painted and papered for them, their carpets unrolled and beaten and laid, their furniture dusted and polished and arranged in the various rooms, but still the girls were four to a room and the toilets overflowed, and I thought of Alix, who, out of modesty, used to cover her toilet at Tsarskoye with a cretonne cloth to mask its form and function. The townspeople, as Kerensky had expected, were respectful of the former tsar and sent over in welcome butter, eggs, and sugar, tipped their hats when they passed the front door. And when the family walked from the mansion to church, their route from the former to the latter flanked by two lines of revolutionary guards, the townspeople gathered to see the processional and fell to their knees at the appearance of the emperor. The stupidity of the people for loving their tsar infuriated the guards, whose commander finally decreed that the family could no longer walk to church. Mass would be said for them privately in the house.

That evening I put my son to sleep in Josef ’s daughter’s bed, which was the bed of a child and my son’s feet hung over the end of it—Celina would sleep with her parents—and Vova asked me then, finally, about the puppy he had given Sergei in December. So his stay at Tsarskoye Selo had not wiped his mind completely clean of our life together—how easily we could all be washed away from him, slipping from his fingertips down some dark drain, how easily Niki’s plan could have worked. The puppy is now almost a dog , I told him, and he is at Stavka, a mascot there, Sergei tells me . My son smiled and I covered him halfway with a blanket. When will we go home? he asked me, and I said, Soon . Sergei is here now and he will fix everything .

I studied the sleeping son I had not seen for six months. The small pink lamp on Celina’s dresser revealed the light black hairs scattered above his upper lip and between his thickening brows; his nose stood large in his face. He wore a thin, sleeveless undershirt, unfamiliar to me, and around his neck a thin velvet cord; a small bump at the neckline of his shirt hid something. I teased out the lump and found a homemade paper pendant: an oval shape with a photograph of Rasputin on the front and a hand-printed prayer on the back. I stared down at the face of the staretz Rasputin in the palm of my hand. This picture had been touching my child’s skin. The electric eyes, pale gray in the black-and-white photograph, stared out from that face framed by the wild hair. I turned the photograph over and read, Dear Martyr, give me thy blessing and remember us from on high in your holy prayers . The family’s executioners would find an amulet like this on each one of the children’s bodies when they stripped them in the forest twelve miles from Ekaterinburg in order to burn their clothes and conceal their identities. I understood that this amulet was meant to protect Vova, and that Alix, Rasputin’s most fervent disciple, had probably given it to him. It meant that she feared for Vova as she feared for her own children and that she loved him as she loved them. When did she hang this around my son’s neck? When he was sick with measles? The day Niki abdicated? Or was it on the very night Niki returned to his family from Stavka as Colonel Romanov , when a band of revolutionary soldiers broke into the little chapel Alix had had built at Tsarskoye as Rasputin’s tomb, dug up Rasputin’s corpse, stuffed it in a piano case, and drove it to the Pargolovo Forest, where they soaked the body and the case in kerosene and set it on fire? Vova told me that in the night the wind had howled and he and Alexei had thought it sounded like a man’s voice wailing, but they didn’t find out until the next day from his big sister Olga what had happened.

No, a photograph of Rasputin was not enough to save the Romanovs. The humble name Kschessinsky was much better protection. With a pair of my brother’s small manicure scissors I cut the necklace from my son’s neck.

When I went out into the sitting room where Sergei waited for me, I said to him, We need to leave Peter .

But it was early September before Vova and I could get permission from Kerensky to leave the capital, and while Sergei agreed I should go to Kislovodsk, sixteen hundred versts south of the capital, where we would have at least the Vladimirichi to help us, he would not go with us and I could not persuade him otherwise. Some adults must remain in the capital , he said, while the children try to rule Russia . Should there be a reversal of fortune, a few Romanovs should be there to receive it. And if that happened, Vova and I could return. And if that did not happen, Sergei would join us in the south and we could go to his estate in the Crimea or over the Caucasus in Georgia, to Borjomi.

We said goodbye to Sergei on the last day of September 1917 at the Nikolaevsky Station, the station named for Nicholas I, the Iron Tsar, who had faced down his mutinous guards in the Senate Square, who had created the secret police, who had ruled Russia with an iron fist for thirty years. Would he not laugh in disbelief to see us now in flight from a legion of peasants and workers? At the station the attendants stood at the train doors and porters in big fur caps and tall boots collected bags and workmen in sheepskin jackets and felt boots moved about the tracks, loading the luggage or coupling the cars. It was raining and it was dark, and Sergei sat with us on a sofa in the first-class waiting room, wearing his thick military greatcoat without his epaulettes. I supposed Kerensky now used the imperial waiting room, with its suite—sitting room, dining room, and bedroom—where the imperial family could rest or eat or sleep, and where Emperor Kerensky could now do the same. When he had returned to Peter from a trip to the front, I heard he had insisted on being met at the station by an honor guard, as were the tsars. A train whistled from somewhere down the line and soon we could feel the trembling beneath our feet that meant the train would soon arrive. The stationmaster stood on the platform along with a few peasants in their peaked caps and their long greasy beards. A boy sold kvass , a woman pushed a samovar on a cart. All as it had been two years earlier, three years earlier, before the war, when we still had a tsar. A bell rang and Sergei escorted us from the waiting room and helped us up the high step onto the train and down the narrow passage to our compartment, where I took a seat against the glass and Vova the one next to me. Sergei compulsively smoked one cigarette after another, taking a new cigarette from his case before he had fully exhaled the smoke from the last. It was warm in the compartment, a steamy heat, and then when the blast of heat dissipated, the compartment grew slowly cold until the next blast once again warmed the car. When the second bell rang, Sergei put out his last cigarette and bent to embrace Vova, who pressed his lips to Sergei’s, and then Sergei and I kissed cheek to cheek. I am embarrassed to recall I was trembling. We still had to travel six days through Tver, Moscow, Bobriki, built on the manor of Count Bobrinsky, and through territory Kerensky had deemed too dangerous for the tsar to travel. We would, in fact, be stopped just past Moscow by a mob of deserters who declared we were all free! and we would barricade ourselves in our compartment against the exercise of their freedom. Then through Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don, and finally to Kislovodsk, in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.