by John Boyne
‘He saved our son!’ she cried. ‘How many times did he—’
‘He did no such thing, Sunny,’ he said. ‘Blessed heaven, how he had you in his grasp!’
‘And is that why you hated him so much?’ she asked. ‘Because I believed in him?’
‘Once, you believed in me,’ he replied quietly, looking away from her now, his face scored with so much misery that I almost forgot that he was the Tsar at all and believed that I was looking at a man no different to myself. How grateful I felt at that moment that no one knew of my own involvement in Rasputin’s death; had that been revealed, the weight of the Tsar’s anger would have undoubtedly been turned in my direction and I might have found myself walking to the gallows before nightfall as a sop to his wife’s distress.
‘But I do believe in you, Nicky,’ she said, softening her tone now and reaching out to him. But he misunderstood the move, I think, and backed away from her, leaving her standing in the centre of the floor with her arms outstretched to him. ‘All I ask is—’
‘Sunny, the people hated him, you know that,’ he insisted.
‘Of course I know it.’
‘And you know why.’
She nodded and said nothing, perhaps aware at last that her five children were observing the scene, even if they pretended that nothing untoward was taking place. I glanced towards Anastasia, who was seated on a sofa, crocheting, her fingers moving carefully in and out of the fabric as she watched her parents argue. I wanted to run to her, to take her away from that terrible place that seemed to be crumbling down around us. Thoughts of Versailles entered my mind again, but I pushed them aside; I knew only too well how that story had ended.
‘Father Gregory was my confessor, nothing more,’ said the Tsaritsa finally, in an injured voice. ‘And my confidant. But I can live without him, Nicky, you must believe that. I can be strong. I am strong. With you away while this hateful war continues—’
‘And then there’s that,’ snapped the Tsar, throwing up his arms. ‘It’s too much, can’t you see it? This power that you have. You must allow others to—’
‘It is traditional for the Tsaritsa to be in charge of policy while the Tsar is away,’ she replied haughtily, raising her head in a regal fashion. ‘There is precedent. Your mother did so, as did hers, and hers before her.’
‘But you go too far, Sunny. You know you do. Trepov tells me—’
‘Ha! Trepov,’ she cried, practically spitting out the name of the Prime Minister. ‘Trepov hates me. Everyone knows that.’
‘Yes,’ cried the Tsar, laughing bitterly. ‘Yes, he does. And why does he?’
‘He doesn’t understand how to run a country. He doesn’t understand where strength comes from.’
‘And where does it come from, Sunny, can you tell me that?’ he asked, lunging towards her now angrily. They had not seen each other in months, the depth of their passion and love was well known to all, it ran through the daily letters they sent to each other, but here they were, apparently hating each other, fighting as if the whole world had conspired to rip them apart. ‘It comes from the heart! And the head!’
‘What do you know of my heart?’ she screamed, and each of her daughters ceased their sewing as she shouted this and looked at their parents in fright. I glanced towards Alexei, who seemed ready to burst into tears. ‘You who have none!’ she continued. ‘You who can think only from his head! When did you last care for what I felt in my heart?’
The Tsar stared at her, saying nothing for a moment, and then shook his head. ‘Trepov insists,’ he said finally, with a defeated shrug. ‘You cannot be in charge any more when I am gone.’
‘Then you must not go!’
‘I have to go, Sunny. The army—’
‘Can survive without you. The Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich can be reinstated.’
‘The Tsar must be at the head of the army,’ he insisted.
‘Then I remain in charge.’
‘You cannot.’
‘You will allow a man like him to dictate to you?’ she asked, astonished. ‘You will allow anyone to dictate anything to you? You who claim to be God’s anointed one?’
‘Claim to be?’ he asked, his eyes opening wide in astonishment. ‘What is this claim? Are you now saying that it is not what you believe?’
‘I am asking whether this is where we are now, that is all. You say you would not be told what to do by a peasant from Pokrovskoye, but you drop like a cur before a bastard from Kiev. Explain the difference to me, Nicky. Explain it as if I was some ignorant, ill-educated moujik, and not the granddaughter of a Queen, the cousin of a Kaiser and the wife of a Tsar.’
The Tsar walked over behind his desk and sat down, hiding his eyes behind his hand for a few moments before looking up again, an expression of doom haunting his face. ‘The Duma,’ he said finally. ‘They demand that they are given proper parliamentary rights.’
‘But how can there be any parliament within an autocracy?’ she asked. ‘The terms are mutually exclusive.’
‘That, my dear Sunny,’ replied the Tsar with a bitter laugh, ‘is rather the crux of the thing, don’t you think? There can’t be. But I can’t fight two wars at once, either. I won’t do it. I don’t have the strength for it. And neither does the country. No, I shall return to Stavka in a few days, you will go to Tsarskoe Selo with the family, and Trepov will look after political matters in my absence.’
‘If you do this, Nicky,’ she said quietly, ‘then there will be no palace to return to. I can promise you that.’
‘Things will …’ he said, his entire body slumped in his chair. ‘Things will resolve themselves. It will just take time, that’s all.’
The Tsaritsa opened her mouth to say more, but, sensing that she had been defeated, merely shook her head and stared at her husband with pity in her eyes. Looking around the room, she focussed on each of her children in turn, her gaze darkening and softening from face to face, only brightening up when she locked eyes with her youngest child, Alexei.
‘Children,’ she said. ‘Come with me, won’t you?’
The five Romanovs stood immediately, but the Tsaritsa extended both her hands in the air, the palms stretched out flat, and shook her head; it was that rarest of occasions when she deigned to acknowledge the presence of lesser mortals in the room.
‘Just my children,’ she said in a forceful voice. ‘The rest of you, stay here. With the Tsar. He may have need of you.’
She led the way out towards her own private sitting room and I watched as the children followed her. Anastasia turned her head in my direction as she left, her eyes meeting mine, and she smiled nervously, a smile that I returned, hoping that she would find something there to offer her comfort. A few moments later, the women who acted as companions to each of the Imperial Grand Duchesses left the room and the bodyguards took up their positions outside the doors, until there was only the Tsar and me left together. There was a part of me, in my youthful foolishness, that wanted to stay and talk to him, to offer some consolation or solace, but it was not my place to do so. I hesitated for only a moment before turning to leave. He looked up as I walked away, however, and called me back.
‘Georgy Daniilovich,’ he said.
‘Your Majesty,’ I replied, turning around to face him and offering a deep bow. He stood up from his seat and stepped towards me slowly. It shocked me to see the difficulty with which he walked. He was not even fifty years old, but the events of recent years had turned him into an old man.
‘My son,’ he said, barely able to look me in the eye after the scene that I had witnessed. ‘He is well?’
‘I think so, sir,’ I replied. ‘He does not engage in any dangerous activity.’
‘He looks pale.’
‘The Tsaritsa has insisted on his staying indoors ever since the starets was murdered,’ I said. ‘He has seen no daylight at all, I think.’
‘Then he is a prisoner here?’
‘Of sorts,’ I agreed.
‘Well, we
are all prisoners here, Georgy,’ he said with a half-smile. ‘Wouldn’t you say so?’
I said nothing in reply, and when he turned his back on me, I took this as my cue to leave and began to walk towards the door.
‘Don’t go, Georgy,’ he said, turning around again. ‘If you please. There’s something I need you to do for me.’
‘Anything, sir.’
He smiled. ‘You should never say that until you know what is required of you.’
‘I never would,’ I replied quickly. ‘But you are the Tsar. So I say again: anything, sir.’
He stared at me, bit his lip for a moment in a style reminiscent of his youngest daughter and smiled.
‘I need you to leave Alexei,’ he said. ‘I need you to stop being his protector. For a little while, at least. I need you to come with me.’
I wondered whether I had imagined the knock but then it came again, more urgently; I climbed out of bed and stepped towards the door, opening it carefully so the creak would not disturb others along the corridor. Without a word she pushed past me and before I knew it was standing in my room.
‘Anastasia,’ I said, looking outside for a moment to make sure that she hadn’t been followed. ‘What are you doing here? What time is it?’
‘It’s late,’ she said, her voice betraying her anxiety. ‘But I had to come. Close the door, Georgy. No one can know I’m here.’
I shut it immediately and reached across for the candle that I kept on the windowsill. As the wick took light I turned around and noticed that she was wearing her nightdress and gown, an outfit which may have covered her entire body but nevertheless offered a distinct erotic charge, suggesting as it did the proximity of bedtime and intimacy. She was staring at me too and only then did I realize that I was dressed even more improperly than she, in nothing but a pair of loose-fitting shorts. I blushed – invisible, I hoped, in the candlelight – and retrieved my trousers and shirt as she turned around to offer me some privacy.
‘I’m decent now,’ I said when I was dressed. She turned again but seemed to have lost her train of thought somewhat, as had I. There was nothing I wanted more than to take her in my arms, remove my clothing once again, and her nightgown, and wrap my body around hers in the warmth of the blankets.
‘Georgy …’ she began, but then shook her head and looked as if she might cry.
‘Anastasia,’ I said, ‘what is it? What’s the matter?’
‘You were there today,’ she said. ‘You saw it. What’s going to happen, do you know? There are so many terrible rumours going around.’
I took her hand and we sat side by side on the edge of my bed. After the Tsaritsa had taken Anastasia and her siblings from the parlour earlier in the day, I had sought her out in order to tell her of my conversation with her father, but she had spent the afternoon under the tutelage of Monsieur Gilliard and I had not been able to find a suitable excuse to go to her when her lessons were over.
‘Olga says that everything is coming to an end,’ she continued, her voice filled with desperation. ‘Tatiana is nearly hysterical with worry. Marie hasn’t been the same since Sergei Stasyovich left. And as for Mother …’ She offered a small, angry laugh. ‘They hate her, don’t they, Georgy? Everyone hates her. The people, the government, Trepov, the Duma. Even Father seems to—’
‘Don’t say that,’ I said quickly. ‘You must never say that. Your father adores the Tsaritsa.’
‘But all they ever do is fight. He was not home from Stavka a few hours and you saw what took place. And now he is going back tomorrow. Will this war ever end, Georgy? And why have the people turned on us so?’
I hesitated to answer. I loved her desperately, but could think of any number of reasons why the Imperial Family had found themselves in this position. Of course, the Tsar had made many mistakes in the way he had pursued his aggression against the Germans and the Turks, but that was as nothing compared to how the subjects he claimed to love were treated. We in the royal household travelled from palace to palace, we stepped on board lavish trains, we disembarked from sumptuous yachts; we ate the finest food, wore the most luxurious suits and gowns. We gambled and played music and gossiped about who would marry who, which prince was the most handsome, which debutante the most flirtatious. The ladies dripped with jewels that they wore once and discarded; the men decorated their impotent swords with diamonds and rubies and dined off caviar, getting drunk every night on the finest vodka and champagne. Meanwhile, the people outside the palaces were desperate for food, for bread, for work, for anything which might make them feel more human. They shivered in the frost of our Russian winter and counted the members of their families who would not survive until spring. They sent their sons to die on battlefields, while a woman they considered more German than Russian controlled the lives of the people. They watched as their Empress consorted like a whore with a peasant they despised. They tried to express their anger through demonstrations, riots and a free press, and were cut down at every turn. How often had the hospitals been filled with their wounded and dying, after the Tsar’s men had sought to ensure the pre-eminence of the autocracy? How many journeys to the graveyards had they made? These were the things I wanted to tell her, the explanations I wanted to give, but how could I, when she had never known any life other than the one of extraordinary privilege into which she had been born? She who was destined to marry a prince some day and spend her life as an object of veneration. And who was I to offer such explanations anyway, when I had spent two years among these people, enjoying their luxuries, revelling in this fantasy that I was one of them and not simply a retainer, a disposable lieutenant who could be despatched to any corner of Russia on the whim of an autocrat?
‘Things will resolve themselves,’ I whispered, echoing her father’s earlier words as I took her in my arms, while not believing them for even a moment. ‘There is a cycle of disillusionment and—’
‘Oh Georgy, you don’t understand,’ she cried, pulling away from me. ‘Father has ordered the entire family to Tsarskoe Selo. He says that he will be staying at Stavka for the remainder of the war, that he will fight on the front line if he has to.’
‘Your father is an honourable man,’ I said.
‘But the rumours, Georgy … you know what I am referring to?’
I hesitated. I knew exactly what she meant, but I did not want to be the first to say the words that were bouncing off every gold-encrusted wall in the palace and every filthy street in St Petersburg. The phrase that every minister, every member of the Duma and every moujik in Russia seemed to want to hear.
‘They say …’ she continued, swallowing a little as she struggled to get the words out, ‘they say that Father … what they want is for him to … Georgy, they say that he will have to renounce the throne.’
‘That will never happen,’ I said automatically and she narrowed her eyes, trembling before me.
‘But you don’t even seem surprised,’ she told me. ‘You’ve heard of this, then?’
‘I’ve heard it said,’ I admitted. ‘But I don’t think … I can’t imagine it will ever come to pass. My God, Anastasia, there has been a Romanov on the throne of Russia for three hundred years. No mortal man can remove him. It’s unthinkable.’
‘But what if you’re wrong?’ she asked. ‘What if he is no longer Tsar? What will happen to us then?’
‘Us?’ I asked, wondering who this ‘us’ was. She and I? Her brothers and sisters? The Romanov family?
‘Nothing can happen to you,’ I said, smiling to relieve the tension. ‘You are a Grand Duchess of the Imperial line. What on earth do you think—’
‘Exile,’ she whispered, the word like a curse on her tongue. ‘There is talk that we will be sent into exile, all of us. My whole family. Turned out of Russia like a group of unwanted immigrants. Sent to … who knows where.’
‘It won’t come to that,’ I said. ‘The Russian people would not allow it. There is anger, yes. But there is also love. And respect. Here in this room, too. What
ever happens, my darling, I will be there with you. I will protect you. No harm will ever come to you, not while I’m around.’
She smiled a little, but I could see that she remained anxious and she moved slightly away from me on the bed, as if considering whether she might not return to her own room now, before she was discovered. To my shame, I found myself entirely aroused by her presence in such an intimate setting, and had to struggle with every demon in my body not to take her in my arms and push her on to the mattress, smothering her body with my kisses. She would let me – I thought that, too. If I asked her, she would let me.
‘Anastasia,’ I whispered, standing up now and turning away from her so that she might not see the expression of desire on my face. ‘It’s fortunate you came here tonight. There’s something I need to tell you.’
‘There was nowhere else I wanted to be,’ she said, softening now. ‘At least when we are at Tsarskoe Selo there will be more opportunities for us to be together. That is one good thing.’
‘But I won’t be at Tsarskoe Selo,’ I said quickly, determined that the simplest thing to do was to say the words and be damned. ‘I can’t come with you. The Tsar has relieved me of my duties with regard to your brother. He wishes me to return to Stavka with him.’
The silence in the room seemed to last for an eternity. Finally I turned around and saw her expression. A thin streak of pale-blue moonlight was piercing my window, dividing her face in two.
‘No,’ she said finally, shaking her head. ‘No.’
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ I said, feeling the tears spring up behind my eyes. ‘He has ordered me and—’
‘No!’ she cried again, and I looked towards the door anxiously lest she be overheard and her presence here discovered. ‘You can’t mean it. You can’t leave me on my own.’
‘But you won’t be on your own,’ I explained. ‘Your mother will be there. Your sisters, your brother. Monsieur Gilliard. Dr Federov.’
‘Monsieur Gilliard?’ she cried, appalled. ‘Dr Federov? What use are they to me? It’s you that I need, Georgy, you. Only you.’
