by Ariel Lawhon
Dova wakes at the sound and pushes herself onto her hands and knees. She is bleeding everywhere. One of her ears is gone. Three fingers on her right hand are missing. But she stands anyway. A soldier fires, but his gun is empty, so he goes after her with his bayonet, stabbing her repeatedly as she runs along the wall. Yakov stops to watch the horrific scene, head tilted to the side, curious about how she could still be alive. By the time Dova falls, the soldier is sweating, and then he too bends over and retches onto the bloody, gore-covered floor.
“Please,” Olga says, reaching a hand toward Semyon. She sounds like a tiny, frightened bird. “I will do anything. Just don’t kill me.”
“Shoot her,” Yakov says.
Semyon looks ill. His eyes are wet and glassy and he’s sweating. Semyon gags twice but presses the back of his hand against his mouth, then lifts his rifle and sets it against his shoulder. He takes a deep breath. His eyes are focused, not on her face, but on the wall behind her.
“No.” Olga shakes her head. Begins to sob. “Don’t.”
I do not beg as Yakov raises his pistol. But neither do I watch. I close my eyes and wait, hoping for instant darkness. They fire.
It sounds like tiny bombs going off beside my ears, and it feels like a punch in the ribs. One after another after another, each knocking the breath from my lungs. I feel others tear through my upper arms and my thigh. The side of my neck. My collarbone. But nothing pierces the corsets. Mother’s ridiculous jewels form a diamond-hard barrier that protects my heart and lungs.
Tatiana gurgles beside me. Her eyes are desperate as she presses her hands to the wound in her neck. Blood pours through her fingers and down her blouse, unstoppable, unrelenting. And I see her life drain away with each frantic pump of her heart. Seconds later she is gone, without a word, collapsed to the floor beside me.
My eyes sting. My lungs hurt and I can’t get a full breath. My ribs are broken. I taste smoke and dirt and blood. I hear the dying, last breaths of those I love. When I reach for Olga’s hand she does not squeeze it back. It lays limp in mine, slick with blood.
Yakov stares at me, disbelieving, then points his pistol at my head and pulls the trigger again. A vacant click as the hammer strikes air. The gun is empty, but he tries again and again, furious. On the fourth attempt he throws the pistol against the wall and yanks a bayonet from the hand of a stupefied soldier who stands looking at the remains of my tiny, helpless brother.
“Why won’t you die?” Yakov screams, then rushes me with a feral howl.
I do not think it is mercy that causes him to lift the butt of that rifle and bring it down hard against my temple. I think he does not want me to fight back while he stabs me. The man is exhausted from slaughter, overwhelmed by the sheer work required to kill eleven people.
Darkness swallows me immediately. And I am glad because it blunts the rise and fall of that bayonet, sparing me every brutal slash of Yakov’s blade. But I am not dead. Not yet. And I do not stay unconscious for long.
· 35 ·
Anna
PRAYING TO DIE
1918
There is blood everywhere. On her face. Her hands. Her clothes. It covers the floor and the wall behind her. She can taste it in her mouth and smell it in her hair. Like rust and salt and liquid warmth. She can feel it streaming from her body. There is also pain. Pain beyond reckoning or explanation. It feels as though someone has pulled white-hot coals from the bowels of hell and placed them at dozens of points along her body. Her temple. Her collarbone. In the dip beneath her right shoulder. Ribbons of fire on her abdomen and across her thighs. Flames sear her calf and her left ankle. The blaze wipes the breath from her lungs and every coherent thought from her mind.
“Stop moving,” a male voice hisses in her ear. The words are distorted, as though they come from a great distance. “Stop screaming.”
Anna doesn’t realize she is screaming. She feels the burn in her lungs, the panting, but she can hear nothing except the bizarre, undulating sound of his voice and a faint ringing. It is as though her ears have been stuffed with cotton.
“I can’t help you if you’re screaming. You have to be quiet. Please.” Again that voice, desperate, begging now. He grips her under the arms and pulls backward, dragging her across the floor. Taking her somewhere away from this carnage. Away from this blood.
* * *
—
Anna is naked. Laid out flat on a table in a cold room beneath a single, flickering lightbulb. Someone is touching her, running a wet cloth across her wounds. Dabbing gently. Hesitantly. Trying to soak up the blood.
“There’s so much.” It’s that same male voice she heard earlier. Moments ago? Hours? A lifetime? Time has lost all meaning. The voice is clearer now. Panicked. “It won’t stop.”
Anna tries to open her eyes, but her lashes are glued together with clumps of something thick and sticky. She sees only a ribbon of light and figures moving within it. Male and female. Older and younger. Steady and unsure.
“We have to stitch the wounds.”
“I don’t—”
“You don’t have a choice,” the Woman admonishes. Her voice has the gravelly sound of someone who is capable of doing what needs to be done. “But first we have to remove the debris.”
A finger presses against the wound in her thigh, and Anna can feel the little shard of metal slice farther into the muscle. “We’ll start with this one. Hand me the tweezers.”
The sound that comes rattling up Anna’s throat is inhuman and involuntary. Animalistic. There are so many places on her body that hurt. A hundred fires burning on her skin. But this one suddenly flares to life, bigger than all the others. She can feel the wet, warm trickle of blood slip down her thigh as the tweezers plunge into her flesh and pull the ragged chunk of metal from her body. And then the small clink as it’s dropped into a glass.
“You have to pick,” the Woman says. “Extraction or stitches. I can’t do both.”
His voice is tremulous when he answers. “Extraction.”
“Try to keep your hands steady. It will hurt her less that way.”
“Isn’t there anything we can give her?”
A snort. “Does this look like a hospital to you?”
“She’s in pain.”
“She’s lucky to be alive. But she won’t be for much longer if we don’t work quickly.”
A warm hand presses against the tiny mound in her belly. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Yes,” the Woman says, and then they go to work, prodding her body, inch by inch, plucking chunks of metal from muscle and bone. Once each wound is cleared, a needle is pushed through her skin. Perforations and sutures. Over and over. At some point Anna passes out completely, her body goes limp, her last thought a prayer for death.
· 36 ·
Anastasia
THE FOUR BROTHERS MINE, NEAR EKATERINBURG, RUSSIA
1918
Tomas was the third soldier who entered our compartment that night on the train as we rattled toward Ekaterinburg. Tomas who slid the door shut behind him and promised no one would hurt me. Tomas who risked extending his hand to a ferocious and protective Jimmy.
“You can put that paper knife away,” he whispered. “I know you keep it in your boot. I’ve seen it. I have a gun and no one can get past that.”
“Tomas.” I had no voice at all. Nothing but a wretched, terrified squeak.
I saw him shift forward but he stopped. Tomas very slowly slid the rifle from his shoulder and leaned it against the wall beside my berth. He folded his hands behind his back. “Are you all right, Alexey?” he asked.
A muffled sob from the upper bunk. “I think so.”
“What about Joy?”
“She’s scared.”
“Are you scared too?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being s
cared. But you’re safe now, I promise. Do you believe me?”
Alexey didn’t answer right away but finally he said, “I think so.”
“Are you tired?”
“Yes.”
“You can go to sleep. I won’t let anyone in this cabin. I promise.”
Tomas stood by the door waiting to hear Alexey’s breath settle, waiting while my sisters’ screams turned to muffled cries, and then defeated silence. He stood there waiting for almost an hour watching me, and only when my brother began to snore did he speak again.
“Will you let me hold you?” he asked. “I hear your teeth chattering. I know you’re terrified and I cannot bear it.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“There is nothing you can do, Anastasia. Let me hold you. Please.”
I nodded.
Tomas moved slowly toward the berth. He offered his hand to Jimmy again, asking his permission as well, then scratched him between the ears. Only when Jimmy began to wag his tail did Tomas sit beside me. He pushed the hair away from my face and the tears away from my cheeks.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, gently stretching out beside me. “I couldn’t stop this.”
“It isn’t your fault.”
“It’s wrong,” he whispered in my ear. “And I am sorry.”
“You’ve already said that.”
“I will say it all night long.”
That’s when the tears came. Hard, guttural, chest-heaving sobs. The kind of crying that leaves your throat raw and your eyes stinging. Tomas let me come unhinged. He let me wail and beat my fists against his chest. And when I was spent, he wrapped his arms around me and whispered in my ear. He stroked my hair. And he apologized a thousand times as the night stretched long.
Neither of us slept. And we did not talk. Every time I flinched at some noise he pulled me tighter. Every time one of my sisters cried out in pain he set his palm over my ear. Every time a soldier laughed in the corridor he damned them to hell. And twice when the door to our cabin opened he flew from my berth and grabbed the drunken soldier by the throat and growled that I was his and he didn’t share. We were not bothered again after the second attempt.
Tomas waited until the car grew quiet and then he waited longer, making certain the threat had passed, before he slipped away. He did not say good-bye and I did not thank him because such words were useless. He could only spare one, so he spared me. He saved me that night on the train to Ekaterinburg.
But Tomas could not save me tonight in the cellar. I had my chance. I could have gone with him. It was insanity to stay. I know that. But we would have been discovered sooner or later. Yakov would have stopped at nothing to find me. And the price would have been Tomas’s life as well. But he is still alive. And he has Jimmy. That will have to be enough.
I am roused again when Yakov and his men begin unloading the bodies from the back of the truck. But I cannot open my eyes. I cannot move. Nor do I know where we are. Dawn will be here soon, and the men are nervous, rushing through their work. Greedy hands rip off my corset in the dark, searching for jewels. Once every bit of treasure has been plundered from our bodies they drag us, wrapped in sheets, toward the entrance of an old, collapsed mineshaft. It is not ideal. But they are running out of time.
“Just put them in,” Yakov says. “We’ll come back later and bury them.”
My ribs explode in agony when they toss me onto the cold, hard ground. I want to scream but I can’t. Beneath those shattered ribs one of my lungs has ceased to work entirely, and the other is slowly filling with liquid. Gurgling. Every breath shallow, strained, and heavy.
The soldiers shuffle away, the truck roars to life, and then I am alone, each breath hard-won and coming more slowly than the last. My family is gone. Botkin. Dova. Cook and Trupp. Every one of them dead. And I would think this a great mercy but for the sound of the cannons in the distance and the barking of a dog nearby.
· 37 ·
Anna
THE MUNITIONS FACTORY
1918
Anna doesn’t mean to drop the grenade. It is cupped in her palm one moment and the next it is falling in a strange, slow arc, tumbling end over end like some sort of dislodged pineapple. She knows that she should reach out and grab it, that she should stop it from smashing to the scuffed concrete floor. But her body is frozen and her thoughts sluggish, stuck on the telegram she received this morning and the two dozen words that irrevocably altered her life:
The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your fiancé, Hans Nowak, was killed in action in Amiens, France, on August 9.
Anna cannot command her limbs to obey the order that her mind is shouting. So she watches the grenade fall, then bounce and skitter, the slim silver pin flying from the arming mechanism. The grenade comes to a stop where her supervisor stands ten feet away, his back turned, shouting instructions into the busy, clamoring factory. Anna knows that there are seven seconds from when the pin is dislodged to when the grenade explodes, yet she does not move. Does not speak.
It is as though her mind was cleaved upon reading that telegram: one half eerily calm and the other disintegrating into myriad pieces that ricocheted inside her skull. But between these two halves a curtain was drawn, and Anna’s conscious mind was trapped on the still, quiet side, unable to process the horrific reality that Hans is dead.
Six seconds. Anna pushes against that dense barrier in her mind but she cannot access the necessary panic or the words to warn her supervisor. She cannot step away or run.
Anna walked the two miles to the factory today. She donned her cap and apron like she has every day for the last year. Stuffed wool in her ears to muffle the incessant rattle and clang of the machinery. She went to her place at the end of the assembly line and for two hours she did her job, unable to think or cry or feel. All emotion muffled, all reality blurred. There was only the work in front of her, the ability to do the next thing.
Five seconds. She may as well hear the tick of a clock in her mind, counting down until the people in front of her are obliterated.
Hans was so alive, so warm, so intimate just a few months ago, pressed against her in the dark, whispering and laughing in her ear, hands exploring all the swells and hollows of her body. He cannot be gone from her. She did not feel his passing. August 9 came and went without so much as a shudder in her soul. Without any sense that he had slipped away. How could she not have known? It shouldn’t be possible. And yet, somehow, it is. Hans is dead, and he will never know that she carries his child, that a piece of him has taken root inside of her.
Four seconds. She tries to speak but still the words do not come.
So Anna did her job all morning. And then she lifted the grenade from its place within the assembly wheel and checked the safety mechanisms. Striker, lever, and pin. She rolled it over in her hand, examining the compact metal ball. It was identical to the others except for the fact that the triggering pin was loose, pulled an inch out from the shell.
Three seconds. She lifts her hand. Tries to wave. Tries to get her supervisor’s attention.
When Anna first noticed the loose pin, she looked around the room for her supervisor. That is protocol. He is the only person on the floor who is allowed to reset the pin. In all the time that Anna has worked here he has had to do it only three times, and never for her. But just as her supervisor’s name formed on her tongue there was a nudge deep within her. A gentle, prodding poke. An acknowledgment of existence. Not so much a kick, but a greeting. Hans’s child saying hello. She gasped. The grenade fell from her hand.
Two seconds. The curtain in her mind shudders and splits apart at the realization that she too is about to die. Hans’s child is about to die. There is no time to run or scream or hide. No time to pray. The only thing she can do before her entire field of vision detonates into blinding white light is fold in upon herself and press her hands aga
inst the small, firm swell of her belly.
Hellfire.
Thunder.
Shrapnel.
A cloud of red as her supervisor is eviscerated before her eyes.
Franziska Annalie Schanzkowska is blown backward into the wall, jagged bits of metal ripping into her temple, torso, and thighs.
I Told You So
Oh, don’t look at me like that. I never promised you a happy ending. I have lived long enough to know that such things do not exist. In the end there is only the truth, and it isn’t my fault that you don’t like it very much. I warned you about this at the beginning. I said you might not forgive me. But you insisted on hearing this story anyway. Everyone does. You’re all so enamored with the legend. Yet here is what you, and all the others, fail to understand: there would be no legend without me. I am the one who stopped her from being a tragic little footnote in history. I kept Anastasia Romanov alive for decades.
She needed me.
You don’t like to hear that, of course. But I did what I did, and I am not sorry for it. Don’t you understand what it is to suddenly know that everything is lost and that you are left entirely alone? Can you see, then, why I persisted down this path? My fiancé dead. My body ruined. My child taken from me. You would have done the same thing in my position.
And, like me, you would have enjoyed it for a while because it was fun. Luxurious. People giving you things. Throwing money at you. Bowing. This new life so different from anything you’ve ever known that you become addicted to it. What little guilt you feel is assuaged when you see how desperately they want this fiction to be true. How badly they want their princess to be alive. So you let them take up your cause, to begin fighting your battles. Then, many years later, you wake up and realize it’s too late. You can’t back out now. Your only choice is to embrace the lie, to become it.
