The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold)

by Carolly Erickson

  I gasped, and looked down at my bloody hands, the hands that had reached for the sawed-off limbs and lifted them. Was I infected? I wiped my hands on my apron, making the matron laugh.

  “Do you really think you can wipe away germs?”

  “No, of course not. We were taught about hygiene, and antisepsis, and—”

  “It is one thing to be taught in a class, and quite another to learn about sickness and death inside a hospital, where there are real germs and real blood!”

  She snatched the pillowcase out of my hands. “Give that germridden thing to me! Now, before we both get sick, follow me to the incinerator and watch me burn these remains to bloody ashes!”

  Thirty-two

  The first of the wounded soldiers to reach our hospital from the killing fields of East Prussia were the gallant Red Hussars and the elite Chevaliers Gardes, the proudest and finest of my father’s many regiments. They straggled in, some limping, supported on the arms of servants or orderlies, some on stretchers, many simply crowded into wagons or carts, feverish and half mad with pain, lying side by side in their own filth, and left at the entrance to the admitting rooms.

  The doctors did what they could, saved as many as they could, but every day the death carts came to the back door of the hospital—the door used for food deliveries and waste removal—and more corpses were piled in and taken away.

  They named it the Battle of Tannenberg, that monumental struggle in August of 1914, and with every fresh wave of wounded and dying men the horror of the terrible battle revealed itself to us.

  “We were surrounded,” an officer in the Red Hussars gasped to all who would listen as he was being examined. “We couldn’t escape them, there were so many. The ground was all marsh, it gave way beneath our feet, beneath the weight of the great guns. We sank into the quicksand. The guns were lost.” He looked up at the doctor who was pressing on his chest and stomach, making him wince, then around at the nurses.

  “So many died. So many were taken prisoner by the Germans. The dirty Germans! The shame of it! The dishonor!”

  We all felt it—the dishonor of great Russia being humiliated, her brave soldiers slaughtered by the arrogant, soulless wicked demonic Germans and their Austrian allies.

  We hated all Germans and everything they were associated with in those early days of the war: we hated Wagner and his operas, German chocolates, German books and the German language—a language my mother, raised in Darmstadt, spoke far more fluently than Russian.

  (I did not hate Adalbert, of course, or any other German I actually knew, except for Cousin Willy. It was only the Germans I did not know that I loathed.)

  Papa changed the name of our capital from the Germanic St. Petersburg to the Russian Petrograd. Olga’s little dog Fritzie became Ivanka. Mama no longer called papa “Liebchen” but “dorogoi,” which is darling in Russian.

  With a new demon to despise and fear, there was a sudden decline in speechmaking against papa and his ministers. The workers’ newspaper Pravda was outlawed and many of those papa called “agitators” were exiled to Siberia. Even Daria, with her great animosity toward my family and toward Romanov rule, turned all her passion into volunteer nursing and support for our soldiers.

  Ever since the night Father Gregory attacked her and I came to her rescue, Daria had stayed close to me, along with little Iskra, volunteering at the hospital and staying near me at Tsarskoe Selo wherever I went. She never went back to the ironing room and Niuta got permission from mama to let Daria become a maidservant in the nursery.

  As the Russian war losses mounted there were more and more bereaved families clamoring for someone to blame. Mama, who for years had been called the German Bitch, was at the top of the list. Oh! The dreadful things that were said about her! That she was a German spy, that she made money from the Russian losses, that she was collaborating with the enemy and weakening papa with her hectoring and badgering.

  To my amazement, all the slander and pamphlets and speeches directed against her only served to make mama stronger. There was none of the constant illness or weakness I was used to seeing in her, none of the awful air of surrender and wan desire for oblivion I had witnessed in the sanatorium in Berlin. Instead, mama threw herself energetically into war work, not only nursing in the wards (where the men sometimes spat on her and swore at her, so great was their contempt for all Germans and for mama in particular) but turning parts of the great palace at Tsarskoe Selo into a new hospital and organizing her own hospital train to bring men there from the front.

  In order to raise money to equip her new palace hospital and pay for the operation of the train she made speeches before women’s groups, met with wealthy donors and exhorted her aristocratic friends and relatives to donate.

  “See, Tania,” she said to me one morning, taking me aside so that others would not overhear us, “I have a letter from brother Ernie, with a bank draft, to support my hospital! Ernie has such a good heart, he isn’t like Cousin Willy at all. He writes that he is appalled at the losses on the German side and wishes the war would come to a swift end.”

  “If only Cousin Willy would listen to him.”

  Mama shook her head. “No, not Cousin Willy. But Ernie is a natural diplomat. I would not be surprised if he had the ear of some of the imperial ministers.”

  Her face fell. “Oh, Tania, I just had the most terrible thought. What if Cousin Willy sends Ernie to fight, and on the Russian front! What pain that would give me!”

  She was concerned, not only for Ernie, who was a civilian, but for her sister Irene’s husband Henry who was an admiral in the German navy, and her sister Victoria’s husband Louis who held a parallel position in the British navy. Our family, divided against itself; it was a fearsome thought, and it preyed on mama’s mind, as she continued to work tirelessly to increase the number of wards in the palace and to equip them with beds and blankets and medicines and—yes—more incinerators for the ghoulish work of disposing of mutilated body parts.

  The awful Battle of Tannenberg was over by September, and long before Christmas we had to admit, privately, to ourselves and one another, that Russia was losing the war. Despite some gains on the Austrian front in Galicia and the Carpathians—gains the Austrians quickly reversed—our armies were in retreat, and the wounded soldiers we encountered daily were full of complaints about shortages of guns and shells and shrapnel, shortages of rifles and cartridges, shortages of oats and hay for the horses and nourishing food for the soldiers themselves. The striking workers in what I must now call Petrograd had gone back to the factories and were laboring extra hours to provide war materiel, but the demand was far greater than they could fill.

  Shortly after Christmas papa met with his principal officers and ministers and emerged shaking his head.

  “We simply were not prepared,” I heard him say to himself. “We did not realize what it would be like, all that would be needed.” He retreated to his isolated spot on the Children’s Island and walked there, in the snow, for hours.

  A rumor spread through the capital that the Austrian army, which was advancing eastward, would soon be in Petrograd. There was an exodus of sorts. People crowded into the train stations hoping to ride the trains to Kiev or Moscow or even Siberia, away from the oncoming enemy. But the trains were filled with soldiers, and what space there was, after the soldiers were loaded on and off, was allotted to food and necessary supplies. There was no room for ordinary passengers.

  The cry of “The Austrians are coming” became more clamorous. Servants hurried through the halls of the palaces removing statues and paintings and valuable tapestries, packing them in crates and hiding them in hastily dug earthen cellars, hoping to keep them from the enemy.

  Amid it all, my sisters and I, and mama at times, went on with the exhausting, dirty, disheartening, endless work of nursing, for more and more soldiers were delivered to our wards daily, until there were no beds to hold them all and makeshift clinics had to be set up in haste, without proper staff or equip
ment. Many nights Olga and I worked on, long past the end of our shifts, until exhaustion overcame us, and we simply fell asleep on mattresses in the nurses’ anterooms without even taking off our uniforms.

  Marie too worked long hours some evenings, though as she was only fifteen in that first year of the war I thought three days a week quite enough time for her to take from her studies. I could not really keep track of Anastasia; sometimes she was there with us, helping out, sometimes not. She still bred worms in the palace attic, and occasionally, to our disgust, brought her best wriggling specimens into my bedroom or Olga’s to show them off. Mama could not abide them and said they gave her nightmares.

  No one who has not been a nurse in wartime can possibly know what it was like for us, called upon as we were to confront and try to assuage so much human damage. The sight of suppurating wounds, covered by stinking bandages that had to be changed hourly, the wounds growing slowly septic because they could not be kept clean. The vomit and urine and blood, torrents of blood it seemed, that poured out during operations. The crazy patients with head wounds who babbled and shrieked and knocked the food out of my hand when I tried to feed them. The thankless labor of changing blood-soaked sheets. The stench of the bedpans. The haunting look of a man with shell-shock, a grey-faced look, the eyes vacant, the features ravaged. The screams and moans. And most of all, the sight of grown men, strong men, men in uniform, crying piteously like children and calling for their mothers.

  Oh, how I welcomed the occasional feel of Constantin’s kind hand on my shoulder and his voice in my ear, saying, “Rest, Tania dear. Rest now.”

  Blessed rest, how I needed it. For the sheer drudgery of the long days exhausted me, my feet were sore, and always wet (how I longed for clean, dry warm feet!) and my back ached terribly, since matron, in addition to demanding that we always wear clean, starched aprons, refused to let us sit down in the wards lest we appear idle.

  My hands swelled, my face was chapped, my ankles were constantly swollen—but at least I never came down with a serious illness, though I was hourly exposed to dangerous germs. That, at least, was something to be thankful for.

  Yet I confess that sometimes, at the end of a long day, my compassion spent, my overworked body in full rebellion, all I could feel was revulsion. Revulsion at the waste of life—for many men died before my eyes simply because there were not enough doctors or nurses to care for them, or medicines to give them. Revulsion for the cadaverous, delirious dying men, revulsion for war and the men who make war, and, in my worst hours, revulsion for everything and everyone, even my beloved father, who had brought this horror of war upon us all.

  Thirty-three

  They brought him in on a stretcher, a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy with a wound in his chest and another in his forehead. He was pale and weak, but conscious. He reached out his hand to me and said, in the accent of the south, “Please, give me water.”

  I took his hand and squeezed it, to give him comfort, and I saw then that he was beautiful.

  “Chest wound!” the doctor called out. “No water.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the boy, still holding his hand.

  “Please,” he said again, more weakly this time, and then he lost consciousness.

  Oh Lord, don’t let this one die, I prayed, and for the next hour I stayed by his bedside, while his wounds were cleaned and tended and the doctor probed and prodded for the bullet that had lodged under his breastbone.

  “Is he going to live?” I asked when the hasty, unhygienic operation was over.

  The doctor shrugged. “If he is strong, and has good nursing. Make sure he has clean bandages.”

  “Can I give him water when he wakes up?”

  “You can give him vodka for all I care,” the doctor said wearily, and went on to the next emergency.

  It was spring, 1915 and I would soon turn eighteen years old. The river ice was groaning and cracking and the air held a faint warmth. Amid the bleakness of war the earth was awakening, and would soon flower.

  The Germans were coming closer and closer and our Russian losses were mounting ever higher. Petrograd was filling with thousands of refugees, fleeing the fighting and taking shelter where they could, beneath bridges, in the porticos of shopping arcades, in the parks, anywhere they could huddle together for warmth against the cold wind and sleet, anywhere they could try to stay dry.

  The newspapers did not print the worst news—that a large part of Russian territory was now in German hands, and that, in the west, our allies the British and French had lost five million men to German assaults, with some seven million wounded—but we knew. Constantin, who had been appointed to a position in the war ministry, was well informed, and so were many of the doctors that worked in mama’s hospital at Tsarskoe Selo. Through them we received much unwelcome news, augmented by the rumors that flew from street to street and mouth to mouth in the capital.

  I stayed by the boy’s bedside all that afternoon and long into the night, feeling his bandaged forehead to see if he had a fever, listening for any obstruction in his breathing, still holding his clammy hand. He bled from his chest wound and I changed his bandages. In the night I had an impulse to talk to him, hoping that the presence of a caring person and encouraging words would help to prevent him from sinking into a terminal state as so many patients did following an operation. I had seen it so often: the still living bodies that seemed to shrivel as I watched, the skin yellowing, the eyes half open, half closed, only the whites showing. The fretful hands plucking at the bedclothes. Then only stillness, and presently the stench of rot . . .

  I wanted this boy to live.

  So I talked to him, about anything that floated into my mind in those late-night hours: about how strong he looked and how I was sure he would recover, about how I wondered where his home was and how old he was and how many were in his family, about how I would be happy to write to his parents for him if he liked and tell them how he was doing as soon as he began to recover.

  When I ran out of thoughts about the boy, whose forehead, I was glad to notice, was not getting hot and whose breath came and went evenly, I began to talk about myself. I told him about Adalbert, how he was at sea on a battle cruiser and how he had gotten word to me, through a diplomat friend, that his ship had foundered in an engagement with the British off Dogger Bank. How Adalbert had wanted to marry me but my father had said no. (I did not reveal, even to a sleeping patient, who my father was.) Yawning, I told him about the elephant and how I rarely got to see him just then, because of my spending so much time at the hospital. Running out of things to say, and becoming increasingly tired, I told him about my sister Olga and her tiresome search for the man whose name started with a “V,” the man she had been expecting to marry ever since the night she had thrown her slippers over her shoulder and they had formed a “V.”

  In the end my eyelids grew very heavy and I began rambling about how spring was coming, spring was just over the horizon, and perhaps with the greening of the earth, peace would come.

  Toward morning I dropped off to sleep, sitting on a chair beside the boy’s bed (hoping matron would not catch me and chastise me for sitting down), my head resting on the bedclothes.

  I was awakened by a voice.

  “Do you have any chocolate?”

  I sat up, my eyes bleary.

  The voice came again, a warm, resonant voice, from the bed. “Do you have any chocolate? Nut chocolate, the kind in the blue wrappers.”

  “So you’re awake then,” I managed to respond. “How do you feel?”

  “Hungry. And thirsty.”

  He was pale, but his eyes were clear and his voice steady. He didn’t look at all like someone about to die. His smile, ah, his smile! I cannot describe it, but in that moment, as I smiled back, and took his outstretched hand, I was changed.

  “Tania,” I said.

  “Michael.”

  So simple, so sudden, was the exchange between us—and yet, it held everything. It held our future.
r />   “I know the kind of chocolate you mean. Swiss chocolate.”

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t seen any Swiss chocolate since the war began. But I can bring you water, and soup.”

  He drank the cool water I offered and let me feed him nearly an entire bowl of vegetable soup with a few bits of meat floating in it. Meat was a rarity for us in those lean war times; even at Tsarskoe Selo we had only small portions of ham and chicken and mama said it was important that we not have luxuries (meat being then a great luxury) that were denied to others.

  After he ate, he slept again, and I left his bedside, going through the ward and doing what was necessary, changing bandages and cleaning bedpans and helping with the men brought in that day from the hospital trains. Between tasks, however, I found myself returning to Michael, to see that he was all right. And when my shift ended, I went into the nurses’ room and washed my face and pinched my cheeks to give them color and dampened the hair around my face to make it curl more tightly. I straightened and smoothed my apron, regretting the stains that darkened it and wishing I had a clean one.

  Just then Olga came into the room and sank down on the sofa, putting her feet on a stool.

  “Ooh, my feet,” she groaned. “I don’t think my ankles will ever be normal again.”

  “Olga, do you have a clean apron I can borrow?”

  “Why? It’s time to go home.”

  “I’m going to stay a little longer tonight. I would feel better in a clean apron.”

  She looked suspicious.

  “All right, what is it? What’s going on? Is it that Constantin again? Are you meeting him?”

  “I’ve told you, Constantin and I are friends. Nothing more.”

  “That’s not what Aunt Olenka says.”

  “She’s mistaken.”

  Olga continued to look at me quizzically from under her blond brows. “There’s one in my basket. You can borrow it. But you have to give it back to me tomorrow, washed and ironed.”