Robert Alexander: The Kitchen Boy

Clutching the tape recorder in one of his thin hands, with the other he grabbed the arm of the wrought iron chair and pulled himself forward. With no small amount of effort, he pushed himself to his feet. And then he simply stood there, swaying like a flag in a gentle breeze. Once he’d gained his balance, he started across the flagstones, one hesitant step at a time. At the house, he pulled open one of the French doors, lifted up his foot, focused all his attention on the effort, then stepped into the grand central hallway, a gallery of sorts, that ran from the front to the back of the house. The living room lay immediately to his right, and he carefully made his way into this grand room with its dark-beamed ceiling and matching woodwork. At the far end stood the focal point, the large, stone fireplace amputated from some French château, while a palace-sized Oriental carpet in deep reds and blues ran from one end to the other.

As he moved slowly through the room, Misha wondered what his granddaughter was going to do with it all, these antiques, the oil paintings, the Tiffany sterling and Steuben crystal bric-a-brac that May and he had collected over the decades. Perhaps she and her husband would keep everything, perhaps they would sell it all. He didn’t much care, these common things didn’t matter. However, the numerous Fabergé items – including the little jade bulldog with the diamond eyes that sat on the coffee table and the cobalt blue enamel opera glasses of the Tsaritsa’s sister perched over there on the piano – were an entirely different matter. He’d left detailed instructions in his will, and he prayed Kate would follow his precise instructions. If only his story would induce her to do just that.

On the far side of the living room Misha moved through an arched opening and into his library that was filled with two red leather chairs, a large desk, and a massive built-in walnut bookcase that held his entire collection of books on the Russian royal family. Focused on the task at hand, he went directly to his desk and put down the small black tape recorder, laying it next to a manila folder – his dossier – which contained a variety of historical documents. Sure, a thousand truths, that was what it was going to take to convince his Katya, daughter of his son, which was precisely why he’d carefully collected copies of letters and diary entries and telegrams from that time. And he would not only read from these, but leave the complete dossier for her to peruse, even scrutinize.

Wasting no time, he sat down, opened the top desk drawer, and withdrew a sheet of letterhead. He then took a gold ink pen, and wrote:

August 27, 1998

My Dearest Katya,

This tape and these documents are for you. Perhaps together they will help you understand the complete picture. Please forgive me. Yours forever with love and devotion,

Dyedushka Misha

Satisfied, he laid aside the pen and paper. And now he had no choice but to continue, to press on to the end. He reached for the small tape recorder, held the microphone to his dry lips, turned the machine back on, and slid into the past.

“Yes, so as I was saying, my sweet one, I know what happened that horrible night the Romanovs were murdered. But the truth of the matter is that the beginning of the end of my Nikolai and Aleksandra commenced a few weeks earlier, which is to say I’ll never forget the twentieth of June, 1918, the day we received the first of the secret notes.”

It was as warm as only Siberia could be in the summer – humid, buggy, stifling. You’d never expect such a warmth in Siberia, but the northern sun, which had only set for a few brief hours, was already rising high, and in a couple of hours it would be hot, so very hot, in the Ipatiev House. To make matters worse, all the windows on the main floor had been painted over with lime and we hadn’t been allowed to open a single one, which greatly irritated Tsar Nikolai. In the past few days it had been like an oven, really, all of us crammed in there without any fresh air blowing through. And it smelled so… so stuffy. That wasn’t just from the samovar or from our cooking, either. No, it was the guards who roamed our rooms at will, the guards who perhaps bathed only at Easter and on their birthdays. They were so stinky, I say kindly. Greasy and filthy. For two weeks the former Emperor had been asking – just a single window, just a little fresh air, that was all the former Tsar wanted for his family, but the Bolsheviki have always proved inept at making the simplest of decisions, except of course when it comes to purges and murder. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for him, for Nikolai Aleksandrovich. One day he commands one-sixth of the world, the next he isn’t even in charge of a single pane of glass. Plus the Tsar had been suffering from hemorrhoids – he’d been in bed one whole day earlier that week. I’ve been told it was hereditary.

Sure, my sweet Katya, we know many intimate things of those last weeks. In the dossier – the one I’ve made for you – I have part of his diary, in which Tsar Nikolai himself wrote:

Thursday, June sixth. My hemorrhoids gave me terrible pain all day, so I lay down on the bed because it is more comfortable to apply compresses that way. Alix and Aleksei spent half an hour in the fresh air, and after they returned we went out for an hour.

Aleksandra – his Alix – was more circumspect, less trusting, but not Nikolai. He wrote everything in his diary, including their plans to escape.

So that was the way it was when the first of the four notes came, all of us stuck there in that stuffy house that smelled of unwashed guards and soup that had been reheated too many times. And that was how I became involved. After all, the Tsar of all the Russias – even if there’d been a revolution – never opened his own milk bottle. Konechno, nyet . Of course not. That was my job, me, Leonka, the kitchen boy. Sure, and my morning duties also included getting the samovar going and greeting the nuns who brought us additional foodstuffs. For a long while no sisters had been permitted into The House of Special Purpose, which was how the Bolsheviki had rechristened the Ipatiev House, but then all of a sudden they were bringing us milk and eggs and bread a few times a week. Komendant Avdeyev, who was in charge before Yurovksy took over, changed his mind out of the blue. I think he was bribed. I think Rasputin’s daughter, who lived in a village not far away, gave him money.

The Ipatiev House was fairly new, but constructed in the style of old Muscovy with an elaborate facade and exaggerated cornices. It sat on the side of a small hill, with the main living quarters on the upper floor facing Ascension Square in the front, and the service rooms in the lower level opening onto the garden in the rear. Built of brick and big stone that was whitewashed, the house was topped with a low, green metal roof. It wasn’t like the governor’s house in Tobolsk town, where the Romanovs and all of us had first been kept in Siberia. That was more like a summer palace, while this, the Ipatiev House, was more like the home of a well-to-do merchant. Yet even though it was supposed to look like the home of a boyar – an old nobleman – it was in fact a modern house with indoor plumbing and even electricity, including electric glass chandeliers that came to life with the turn of a switch. This house stood, as a matter of fact, all the way until the 1960s, when a young Boris Yeltsin ordered it demolished because it was becoming a secret shrine for monarchists.

And so, early that morning of the twentieth I was going about my duties not in the main kitchen down below, but in the makeshift kitchen that had recently been set up for our use on the main level. I was as thin as a reed and fairly tall for a fourteen-year-old, and yet I was still not big enough for my large feet, which caused me no end of awkwardness. My cheeks were large and rosy with youth, and after I had stuffed the center chimney of the brass samovar with charcoal and pinecones and bits of straw I huffed and puffed on a glimmer of fire. I was just getting it lit, just attaching the vent to the outside, when in walked our Sister Antonina and her young novice, both of them dressed in a waterfall of black. A good share of the nun’s face was swathed – the black head cloth covered her forehead, went around her eyes, and the folds of her wimple came up just under her mouth, so that even her chin was covered. A pink, plump windshield of a face – that was all you could see of our sister, a dumpling of a nun who was not only a good deal shorter than me, but who seemed so terribly ancient. The novice, on the other hand, was not so severely dressed; she wore a black gown and black head cloth, but her face was not covered.