The Last Romanov

by Dora Levy Mossanen

She waits, knocks again. A face appears between half-drawn curtains at a side window. The swish of approaching slippers can be heard inside, then the clang of locks and bolts and a rattling of chains. Yes, she thinks, such precautions are necessary in a town with a history of numerous upheavals, but more so in a house that boards the Tsarevich.

  The door is flung wide open, startling her. A tall, compact couple appears at the threshold. A man with an embroidered skullcap and coils of hair at his temples. A woman wearing thick stockings, with a flowered kerchief tied under her chin. The man grabs Darya’s suitcase, the woman her hand, and almost pulls her inside. Their strange, synchronized movements unsettle Darya.

  “Pavel Nikolaevich gave me directions to your home,” she stutters.

  “Yes. We were expecting you.” The gentleman brushes yellow hair from a pale forehead shadowed with a network of veins. “I am Viktor. This is my twin sister, Greta. Come in, please. Pavel said you were coming. You must be tired.”

  Darya is led into a small, low-beamed, well-lighted living room with peasant furniture upholstered with chintz. Sheer drapes flank two windows, facing the street. Outside, a stray dog sniffs at something in the middle of the road. A garbage can rattles in the wind. Dry leaves and bits of paper drift past. She is reminded of the first weeks, months, even years after she had settled in the Entertainment Palace, adrift like these leaves, certain and hopeful that the force of her grief would blow her away. Yet here she is, at last, separated from the Tsarevich by no more than a wall.

  Greta fluffs a couple of cushions on the sofa. “Please, sit. You must have had a long journey.”

  “No, thank you. I’m eager to see Alexei Nikolaevich. How did he react when he found out I was coming? He must be beside himself! Of course he is. I’ll not keep him waiting another second.”

  “But you must catch your breath first. I’ll bring some refreshments,” Greta insists, stepping out.

  “Tell me all about Alexei,” Darya tells Viktor when they are left alone. “How did he come into your care?”

  Before Viktor has a chance to address Darya’s question, Greta is back with a tray of hot tea, honey cakes, and two candles. “We’ll light the Sabbath candles. Do you care to pray with us? We are Hasidic Jews.”

  Darya struggles to harness her concern. How is it possible for Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, born into a Christian Orthodox family and raised to rule Russia, to have been educated with beliefs so different from his? She gazes from sister to brother. Pray? She should know how to pray with these people, after all. Was she not a Hebrew queen in her other life? Why, then, is she unable to pray?

  “Please,” Greta says. “Pray in your heart, if you prefer, in your own language.”

  Darya joins the two in front of the lit candles on the mantelpiece, bows her head, and prays for a stronger, more patient heart to withstand all this waiting. She has endured seventy-three years of waiting, but another minute and she might die.

  “I’ve prepared a room for you,” Greta says. “Please spend the night with us. You can see Alexei tomorrow. It’s already past his bedtime.”

  Darya’s voice rises with alarm. “It’s hardly seven. Why would he go to bed this early? Wake him up if you have to!”

  Viktor rests a hand on Darya’s shoulder. “Alexei likes photography. He wakes up at dawn to take advantage of the ideal light and works hard throughout the day. He’s usually tired at this hour.”

  “But doesn’t he know I am here to see him?”

  “He fell asleep, and I don’t have the heart to wake him up.”

  Darya slumps back in the chair, a million terrifying thoughts coursing through her mind. He has no recollection of her. She means nothing to him, less than a good night’s sleep. How else to explain his lack of enthusiasm? She meets Greta’s eyes with her own unwavering stare. “I’ll wait right here, in this very room, for another eighty years if I have to, until I see him.”

  Greta casts her eyes down, adjusts her kerchief. “I’ll wake him up then. But be prepared to meet a man who, like all of us, has been shaped by the innumerable atrocities he endured.” She walks out and shuts the door behind her.

  “How did the Tsarevich end up in Biaroza?” Darya asks Viktor.

  “My understanding is that our uncle found him half-dead in a house during the revolution, concealed somewhere behind boxes. A dog was at his side. Maybe the dog dragged and concealed him, perhaps a sympathetic revolutionary did it, no one knows. Anyway, Uncle hid the Tsarevich with a family of peasants somewhere near Ekaterinburg. When it was safe to move about, Uncle brought him here to Papa and Mama. The Bolsheviks had their hands full in the big cities. Biaroza was the last place they were thinking about. Mama and Papa raised Alexei for twenty-three years. Greta and I were thirteen when our parents died at the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, when the Germans captured Biaroza. The three of us—Alexei, Greta, and I—were left alone. We went into hiding in a hayshed with the animals. At first, it was too dangerous to move around much, especially for Alexei. German and Russian soldiers were everywhere, and later, well, this is home, and we didn’t want to leave.”

  Darya struggles to sit still. She is a tangle of nerves, unable to deal with the seed of doubt hardening into certainty.

  Viktor gestures toward the door. “Come with me, please. I want to show you something.”

  She musters all of her strength to follow him across a narrow hallway. The walls on both sides are crowded with photographs: scenes of Biaroza engulfed in a desolate dawn, portraits of peasants carrying their scant wares, sad-eyed children playing in an alley, a shopkeeper dropping a coin into the outstretched hand of a beggar, a bald-spotted puppy. She slows down to better observe the forlorn photographs that seem to be layered in smoke.

  “Alexei’s,” Viktor replies to the question she has not voiced. “He is quite a photographer.”

  Viktor opens a door, ushers her into a dining room, stepping aside as if the room is not large enough to accommodate this woman’s passions.

  Darya’s hand springs up to her Fabergé necklace. Her cane rattles to the floor.

  There, facing her on the wall, is a rendition of the baby Tsarevich. His blue-gray eyes, fair hair, and dimpled-cheeks are a vision of health. Perhaps no other painting, Darya muses, managed to achieve its potential as well as this painting of the Tsarevich in the arms of White Thighs Paulina. Not only did the painting give the Tsarina great hope when she needed it most, but it also caused the revolutionary bastards to bristle with a million indignant questions.

  Darya reaches for the cane, but Viktor fetches it for her. She gasps. In front of her unbelieving gaze, leaning on a simple wooden easel on the opposite side of the room, is another portrait.

  In this small home in Biaroza where her Tsarevich lives, she has her face to the portrait Avram was most proud of and her back to the only portrait he was ashamed of.

  She steps close, touches the canvas, the scar on her forehead that mirrors the scar Avram carried like a defiant introduction to the persecutions he endured. She is lounging on a satin-covered dais, her nipples swollen, the soft curve of her waist and chiseled hip half-lit by a chandelier. Her eyes gaze back at the painter with a blend of wonder and adoration.

  Throughout the years, several of Avram’s paintings were purchased by museums. Many found homes in palaces and aristocratic mansions. But this one he kept for himself. He believed this portrait, more than any other, revealed the energy, passion, and confrontations that transpired between the two of them, the artist and his model, during their hours spent together.

  “You must have known Uncle Avram well,” Viktor says.

  “Not as well as I should have. How in the world did he acquire this portrait, the Madonna and Child?”

  “I don’t know why he disliked this one,” Viktor says. “It’s a lovely portrait, isn’t it? He spent a great deal of time and energy searching for it. He bought it for an exorbitant price from a Bolshevik commandant, I understand. Someone named Vasiliev.”

 
That bastard Vasiliev! Darya curses under her breath. It was not enough that he invaded the Alexander Park, disinterred Rasputin, set fire to everything in his path, but he had to plunder the Lilac Boudoir too. “Have you more of Avram’s paintings?”

  “No. But he painted a lot after the revolution. He produced numbered lithographs, posters, and ceramic replicas of your portraits. They became very popular. He made friends in high places, ready to do him some small and large favors in return for one or another of his paintings.”

  “I followed his success in the newspapers. He became rich.”

  “But he was always lonely, up until he died in 1943.”

  “Twenty-five years after we parted,” Darya murmurs. She crosses her arms over her breasts. “Maybe he wasn’t that lonely. He certainly knew where to find me. I was waiting.”

  “He tried. More than once. The first time, the newly formed Cheka arrested him as he was approaching your doorsteps. They were following Lenin’s orders, imprisoning dissidents and confiscating right-wing bourgeois art. Uncle Avram fit the profile. And you, because of your loyalty to the Romanovs, were under constant surveillance. Uncle Avram tried to contact you a year later, when he was released from prison.”

  “That was a terrible year,” Darya says. “Lenin’s Red Terror was in full force, and people were executed in plain sight. I couldn’t bear to go out.”

  “Uncle Avram tried to see you again. I think it was his third or fourth attempt, I’m not certain. A bullet meant for someone else lodged in his lungs. Doctors decided to leave the bullet in place. It would have been too dangerous to remove it.”

  Viktor Bensheimer takes a deep breath, adjusts his skullcap, and hands Darya Borisovna a glass of ice water. “He survived that incident too. He had survived wars and revolutions, prison, torture, and bullet wounds. He was sixty-three and had seen enough of the world. He decided to travel to Ekaterinburg again.”

  ***

  Avram Bensheimer stands in front of the main entrance to the Entertainment Palace. He passes his hand over the massive door in front of him; the weather-beaten, cracked oak has lost all semblance of its past glory. The brass hinges are dull and rusted. Despite the heavy doors and thick walls that separate him from Darya, the eucalyptus and clover scent of her hair is all around him. He raises a hand, wincing at the pain from the bullet lodged in his lung, which left him with an imperceptible limp, compromising his feline walk. He lets his hand fall to his side, takes a long-drawn breath and knocks twice, harder the third time when no answer comes. He steps away from the door that remains closed in his face. Disappointment, rage, and sadness curdle within him.

  He is unaware that Little Servant is in the distillery in the garden, engaged in sampling vodka, and Darya is bathing in the banya, shampooing her hair with eucalyptus oil and Bulgarian evening primrose. As she has done every day for the last twenty-five years, she twirls his opal wedding band around her finger and relives the joy of the first time she gave herself to him. Avram! Her first and last love. She had immersed him in the imperial banya, a rite she insisted they perform despite having no imminent wedding plans. Youth and arrogance blinded her to the enormity of the risk she was taking that day, allowing a Jew, no, tempting him, into the inner sanctum of the Imperial Court. Still, despite all the suffering she caused them both, she does not regret that day. How she had delighted at that first glimpse of his arousal, unexpected and utterly delicious.

  He turns his back to the door and descends the steps he had climbed an hour ago. He is having difficulty breathing, the pain in his chest excruciating. The bullet is dislodged, and traveling toward his heart.

  He pulls a revolver out of his coat pocket and aims it at his pain.

  According to rumors, his still warm body was discovered at the threshold to the Entertainment Palace. Since there were no known relatives, the body was dispatched to a mass crematorium designated for war victims. Other rumors say that a passing peddler attempted to give him a proper burial, but in view of the fact that the artist had committed suicide, he was refused a Jewish burial.

  And an overwhelming number of bystanders swear that at a certain moment and time, they witnessed the painter’s prostrate body cloaked in a white light emanating from within. In a matter of seconds, and in front of their disbelieving eyes, nothing remained of him but a phantom glow that illuminated the entire Entertainment Palace as if it were a sacred shrine.

  ***

  Darya wipes her wet cheeks, rubs her stinging eyes. She curses the banya, the berries, Little Servant, and his vodka. Why did she have to bathe that day, at that specific hour, gorge herself on berries? She is a patient woman, after all. She should have sat at the door, waited for years if necessary, left her door wide open for Avram. She should have known he would come.

  Viktor retrieves a brown-wrapped parcel from a drawer and hands it to her. “Uncle Avram left this for you,”

  She takes her time opening the package, ripping layers of wrapping off to reveal the treasure inside. A portrait of hers she had not seen before, smaller than any of his other paintings. She is swirling in white veils that fall over her hair and face, the sheen of her raven black curls and golden eyes palpable behind tiers of gossamer. Her joy illuminates the canvas. She is a bride. She allows herself a rare instant to treasure this moment so masterfully captured beneath a cloud of veils, to acknowledge his love, his hunger for her, perhaps stronger than for his art. She passes her palm over the signature, smiling at his message: Fare Well, My Opal-Eyed Bride.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  He appears at the threshold, tall and elegant, silver curls coiling at his temples, an embroidered skullcap kept in place with hairpins. He holds on to the doorframe with one hand; the other seeks the locket strung with a leather strap around his neck. Greta gives him an encouraging nudge forward. He tugs at the camera hanging from his shoulder. Takes a few guarded steps toward Viktor and reaches out to seize his hand.

  “Alexei, Loves. It’s me, Darya!” She controls the urge to cross the room, hug him, squeeze him to her chest.

  He tilts his head and gazes at her with startled eyes from which the smile has long fled, checks her from head to toe: her hat pulled down over knitted brows, the threadbare jacket with ermine trim, the velvet skirt. “Mama? Is it you, Mama?”

  “Not Mama, Loves,” she whispers, removing her hat and letting loose her silver curls that remain as wild as they were in her youth. “Look at my eye! Take a good look. Don’t you remember how you liked to touch my strange eye?”

  He reaches out a finger to trace the outline of her face, her chin, the bridge of her nose, the length of her eyebrows, around one eye, then the opal eye, without displaying the slightest surprise. He fumbles for his camera case, retrieves a Polaroid, the lines on his handsome face deepening as he twists a black knob. He raises the camera to check her through the viewfinder.

  Long before he opened his mouth to utter a single word, she knew that something is terribly wrong with the old Tsarevich, with his faraway gaze and disconnected gestures.

  She is dumbstruck and grieving anew, hope taking flight, crumbling around her like ancient ruins robbed of their flimsy buttresses.

  He lets out a sudden sound of surprise, lowers the Polaroid, takes a few steps toward her, and bends to take a closer look at the amulet pinned to her blouse. He breaks into a wide smile. “Darya! Is it you?”

  “Yes, yes, Loves! Your Darya! Look at you! Handsome as ever. Come! Give me a hug!”

  He does not step into her wide-open arms but continues to stroke the amulet. “You found it? Where? Tell me.”

  Her hand springs up to her chest. “The amulet?”

  “Yes. Can I have it?”

  “Of course, Loves. If you want it.”

  “Yes, I really do.” He unlocks the locket from around his neck and takes out a small piece of ambergris. “See, just a tiny bit left. When it’s finished, I’ll start bleeding again. But now that you brought my good luck amulet, I’ll be fine. Remember how you stopped m
y bleeding?”

  Yes, she remembers all too well. She remembers the different concoctions of ambergris that had successfully stemmed his bleeding, remembers how the amulet became part of his uniforms when he was a child, present in formal photographs, there when he played with his sisters, his companion every waking hour. Even when the two sailors of the imperial navy were assigned to follow him everywhere, to protect him from falls and injury, he did not step out of the palace without his good luck amulet.

  Having been deprived of a normal childhood, he, too, had searched for a miracle in small things.

  As if they are back in the Crimea, and she has just dressed the young Tsarevich in formal attire on his way to the inauguration of the Livadia Palace, she detaches the amulet from her dress and pins it to the lapel of his coat.

  He wraps his arms around her and covers her face with kisses, her cheeks, her forehead, the back of her hands. “I thought I killed you too. I murdered them all, you know. Is this why you didn’t come to see me?”

  “What are you saying?” Darya exclaims, unable to rein in her shock. “Who did you kill?”

  “Mama and Papa and Tatiana and Anastasia, all my sisters, and you know—all of them.” He flops down on the sofa and pulls her down beside him, hugging his camera to his chest.

  “No, Loves, don’t ever think like this. I was there. You didn’t do anything wrong.” She strokes his hair even as she reprimands herself for resorting to the childlike voice of decades ago, when he was a small boy.

  “But I did. I’ll tell you what I did if you won’t punish me.”

  “What a thing to say, Your Majesty,” she says, bowing her head. “Who am I to punish you?”

  He gazes down at his hands that hold the locket. “They all died after I lost the amulet that day in your apartments. I don’t remember exactly what day, I think it was a week ago, or today maybe. I found a monster on your bed, a turtle, or the whale with the tummy ache that cries a lot. It was slippery and smelled of father’s tobacco and mother’s leather gloves. I prodded its tummy with the amulet’s pin. Don’t get angry. You promised. I just wanted to take the pain away and make the whale all better. But it suddenly swallowed my amulet. And then Papa went away to war. Mama cried a lot. We were sent away and became prisoners. And everyone died.”