Niuta and Nikandr, Daria and Iskra moved into rooms elsewhere in the town and many of our servants lived in a house across the street from ours. We spread out, and did our best to make ourselves at home. Olga and I sewed curtains to cover the dirty windows. Friendly neighbors brought us lamps and tables and, quietly, wished us well when they thought our guards were not listening. All the rooms needed painting and the old wallpaper was peeling off the walls, but papa insisted that it didn’t matter, as our quarters were only temporary.
“Any day now we will hear that we have been offered a home abroad,” he said. “It is everyone’s wish. I have Prime Minister Kerensky’s word on it.”
We tried our best to keep his encouraging words in mind as we coped with the mess and stench of overflowing drains and toilets that refused to work.
“We might as well be living in a cave,” Marie complained. “We live like animals here!” When a kind neighbor delivered a piano to the mansion, Olga fairly screamed.
“What do we need a piano for, when we don’t even have a toilet that works! If these people really want to help us, let them clean out our septic pits!”
But of course no one wanted to do that, and the donor of the piano was thanked and our plumbing continued to be broken.
Still, for all its backwardness, the town and its people were genuinely welcoming to us. There were no jeering, gaping crowds here, no angry marching workers. Instead the townspeople of Tobolsk took off their hats and crossed themselves when they walked past our house. Some knelt on the ground. Some bowed in reverence. I never saw anyone kiss the earth when papa’s shadow fell across it, but it would not have surprised me if someone had.
Most striking of all, no one called mama a German bitch or whispered the ugly gossip that had been told and retold in Petrograd so often.
“None of that nonsense here in Tobolsk about me being a German spy or being Father Gregory’s lover!” she told us with a wide grin of satisfaction. “They know who I really am, they bow to me. Perhaps they know that their Babiushka’s abdication is about to be reversed!”
Mama had her daily moments of satisfaction, when she went to sit in the window of her upstairs room and the passers-by outside paid her respect. Papa, however, was in very low spirits for he learned that the advancing Germans had taken Riga and that his beloved Russian soldiers were in what everyone knew would be their final retreat.
We knew the worst; we were allowed to read the local newspapers and also to receive telegrams from Petrograd and elsewhere, though our guards read them first and edited out anything they did not want us to see or know. None of the news, it seemed, was positive. Though Tobolsk retained its traditional values and continued to revere the (now dissolved) monarchy, elsewhere in Russia—especially in the industrial cities—the revolution was careening farther and farther into radicalism. In the increasingly dominant soviets or committees of workers and soldiers, those who called themselves Bolsheviks were growing stronger and stronger, and were calling for “Peace, Land and Bread” while the Provisional Government was losing support.
We read of these things, and whispered to one another about them, while doing our best to maintain an orderly life of outward calm in our run-down mansion, and waiting for the first signs of the dreaded Siberian winter to arrive.
Forty-nine
The nuns of the nearby Ivanovsky convent came and went from the side door of our mansion at all hours of the day, soft-footed, soft-voiced, bringing us vegetables from their root cellar, fresh-baked loaves, even fish, always with a greeting and a blessing and making the sign of the cross with their gnarled hands.
At first they all looked alike to me, elderly ladies with lined faces under their black wimples, but as the days passed I began to learn some of their names and, whenever I was allowed, I passed the time of day with them before they left. Sometimes they came for the evening prayer service which a local priest was allowed to hold in our sitting room. At other times they came when someone in our household was sick, or when special prayers were needed.
Our guards tolerated the nuns, tripped them occasionally, sending them sprawling, their thin white legs poking out from under their long black skirts, but on the whole the nuns and the guards appeared to ignore each other. Both became familiar parts of our new environment, the nuns welcome, the guards an everpresent source of annoyance, a tormenting nuisance.
It was the nuns who brought us the newspapers, week-old newspapers with carefully worded descriptions of the worsening situation in Petrograd. We read them—or rather, papa and I read them, the others preferring to remain in ignorance—and tried to imagine the truth behind the guarded, brief accounts of riots and vigilantism, strikes and food shortages.
“How much more can the city take?” papa asked in despair as he skimmed one of the papers following our scant noon meal. Our own food ration had been cut, by order of the Provisional Government; we were given peasant fare, cabbage soup and black bread and turnips, and no second helpings were allowed to anyone, not even Anastasia who at sixteen was growing quite fat and was always hungry.
“Things were certainly very bad last winter,” papa went on, “but it appears they will be even worse when the cold weather sets in this year.”
One of the nuns came with a basket of fresh loaves and as I took them from her she whispered, “There is one among us who wishes to speak to your father.”
“Tell him to come out into the yard,” I answered. “Papa will be chopping wood as usual this afternoon and he can always use help. My sister Marie and I do our best but our piles of firewood are always small. Tell him to say to the guards that he is here to help papa chop wood.”
It was Papa’s one true pleasure: swinging his axe and chopping the stumps that were brought for him by the guards into sticks of wood to be burned in our stoves. The weather was growing noticeably colder now that November had arrived, and we knew we would need a great deal of wood to heat the house throughout the long winter.
A short, energetic man in a thick fur coat and tall fur hat was admitted into the yard shortly afterward and, picking up an axe, set to work reducing the stubborn stumps to firewood. I thought he looked familiar but couldn’t remember where I might have seen him before. As soon as I overheard him speaking to papa, however, I knew him at once. It was the Prime Minister, Kerensky!
I went over to him, but before I could speak he put a finger to his lips.
“Please, Miss Tatiana, I beg you not to address me. I am not who you think I am.”
“Then who are you?”
“A traveler passing through Tobolsk on my way to Murmansk.”
“As far away as that!” papa said. “Tell me, traveler, where did you begin your journey?”
“Petrograd.”
“And how is my old haunt?”
Kerensky shook his head.
“As bad as I have ever seen it. When I left—I left in a hurry, I can tell you, I was very lucky to get out of the city alive—” he stopped talking, aware that one of the sentries was strolling closer to us. When the man strolled away again, he resumed, his voice anxious. “When I left, the streets were full of looters. Every house was being sacked, every wine cellar raided. No one was doing any work. The trains were not running. There was no food in the marketplaces. The soldiers were refusing to restore order. Imagine! The men of the Preobrazhensky regiment refusing our command to go out into the streets and shoot the looters!”
For a time the prime minister and papa and I continued our work in silence.
“Who is in charge now?” papa asked at length.
“No one—legally. The Bolsheviks rule by terror. They call themselves the Military Revolutionary Committee.”
“But what about the Provisional Government?” I asked in low tones. “What about my friend Constantin?”
Kerensky shook his head.
“The Provisional Government doesn’t exist any more. The Bolsheviks drove us all out of the palace where we were holding our meetings. Then they made their great
announcement: all private property has been abolished.”
“What?” Papa, astounded, sank his axe into a stump with a resounding whack.
“It is the Bolshevik leader’s dream, the evil one they call Lenin. He says everything is the property of everyone. No one can keep anything for himself.”
Papa sat down on a stump and gazed into the distance.
“Don’t they know that can only lead to anarchy? To a jungle state, where the powerful take all, and the weak are butchered?” He raised his gaze to Kerensky’s face but Kerensky merely rolled his eyes and shook his head.
Two of the guards, who had been wrestling with each other and paying little attention to us, now remembered their duty and came closer. Papa immediately got up and resumed his chopping, while changing the subject, his voice taking on a matter-of-fact tone.
“I’m told the winter is even harsher in Murmansk than it is here. Tell me, what will you be doing there?”
“I am a scientist. I research the walrus herds. Did you know that a walrus can grow tusks that are four feet long?”
“My sister has a necklace made from walrus ivory,” I put in. “But she never wears it.”
The guards began to move off again. When they were far enough away, Kerensky resumed his serious message.
“I came here to warn you. You are in more danger than ever now. And you are on your own. No foreign government is going to take you in, now that the Bolsheviks are in control. They imagine that the Germans will conquer Petrograd and restore you as tsar. That the Germans will force you to order all the radicals killed.”
“They would not have to use much persuasion to make me do that!” papa said through gritted teeth.
“Before that can happen, the Bolsheviks will order your death. You must find a way to escape.”
Papa’s shoulders sank. “As to that, all is in the will of God.”
“The Bolsheviks have outlawed God.”
For another few moments we worked in silence. I could tell that papa was growing tired. The terrible news Kerensky had brought was weighing on him. He was far from being an old man—he was only forty-nine in the year that we moved to Tobolsk—but he was beginning to have the worn, frail look of age, and much as he enjoyed physical exertion, it fatigued him more than in the past, and he had to take cocaine to revive himself.
“You there!” one of the guards called out. “You’re slow! Look at that pitiful pile of wood! You’re going to freeze all winter!” The others laughed, then started to sing. They often sang revolutionary songs in their rough voices, slapping their thighs in time to the music. The songs were always about liberty and the triumph of the workers.
“Is there no one to stand up against these Bolsheviks?” papa asked Kerensky at length. “Here in Tobolsk God is still in his churches, and people still own their houses and their fields. Nothing has changed.”
“That is why we arranged to have you moved here, because the revolution has not yet reached Tobolsk. But it is coming—and soon—and in a more violent form than ever. There is a bloodbath in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks are murdering everyone who opposes them, even the union members and the soldiers who refuse to obey their orders.”
“They are murdering soldiers?”
“By the hundreds.”
Papa turned his head away. I had no doubt he was in tears.
My one thought was, Michael is still a soldier. Was he safe?
“Do you know anything of the Fifth Circassian regiment, and of an officer named Michael Gradov?”
“No. But if he is not a Bolshevik then he is in danger—or more likely, he is already past danger. He has already met his fate.”
My heart stopped.
“But you can’t be certain. He may have escaped.”
“One can always hope—even against all the odds,” Kerensky admitted, with a faint smile. “Was this Gradov a radical?”
“No. In fact he was a member of my household,” papa said.
“Ah! Well then, the Committee would be sure to show him no mercy.”
Hearing Kerensky’s words I could not suppress my own tears. My dearest Michael, killed by the Bolsheviks! The ugly, hateful Bolsheviks! In my fury I spat in the direction of the guards, who once again came over to where we were standing.
One of them kicked our carefully stacked pile of wood, scattering the sticks in all directions.
“Pick that up, Romanov! You’ve made a mess! And you”—he indicated Kerensky—“get going.”
After the briefest hesitation, Kerensky saluted my father, nodded to me, and left.
Papa bent down and began picking up the wood and re-stacking it.
“Help me, Tania,” he said. “Just help me, and ignore the men.”
“But papa—”
“This is what we must do, right now. Don’t think about anything else. Just help me.”
I did as he asked, despite the anger, sorrow and fear that churned within me. Despite my urge to fling the wood at the guards, to kill them all, to take as terrible a revenge as I could against those who, I dreaded, had killed my Michael and were bent on destroying everything and everyone I loved.
Fifty
What is this doing here!!”
He burst into the yard where we were chopping wood one frigid afternoon, a thin, scruffy man in dirty clothes with long red hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He ran toward Iskra, who was playing with a sled on a small mound of snow near us, and grabbed her roughly, frightening her and making her scream.
The lounging guards came to attention at once.
“Put her down!” I cried.
“Get rid of this at once!” the redheaded man shouted to the nearest soldier, tossing the writhing Iskra to him so carelessly that I was amazed she did not fall onto the snow-covered ground. “Take it inside. Find the mother. Shoot her.”
Now it was my turn to scream.
“Don’t you know that any outsider can be used to carry arms, or messages? No one can be admitted to this compound. No one, do you hear!” He harangued the guards, his long red hair flying around his sharp-featured face as he spoke, the menace in his voice clear and terrifying. The guards cringed.
Papa put down his axe and approached the crazy man—for that is how I thought of him at that moment. He held out his hand.
“Romanov,” he said.
“Do you think I don’t know who you are, exploiter? Tyrant! Monster!”
He turned his back on papa and walked up and down slowly in front of the guards, who stood stiffly in formation, hands at their sides, unmoving.
“Rabble!” he hissed. “We must get some real guards in this place. Red Guards. Dedicated revolutionaries. Not you slipshod amateurs, who allow anyone and everyone to enter what should be a sealed prison!”
The head guard stepped forward. “Sir, I—”
The redheaded man slapped him so hard that he staggered. He stepped back in line.
I had stood frozen in place while this went on, shocked by what I was seeing. But then my wave of paralysis passed.
“You can’t shoot that child’s mother,” I said. “She has done nothing wrong.”
He looked me up and down, then went back into the house, leaving us alone. I began to follow him but papa restrained me.
“No, Tania. Confronting them is not the way.”
“But papa, he’s insane, whoever he is.”
“Remember what our visitor told us, the one who is on his way to Murmansk. A new group of revolutionaries have come to power. He must be one of them.”
We soon learned from our guards who the redheaded man was. They seemed eager to share what they were hearing.
“They call him the Bayonet. No one knows how many he killed in the bloody days after the Bolsheviks took over in Petrograd. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. He has the blood lust.”
“They say he went insane while he was in prison. He was confined for fifteen years. Fifteen years alone, starving, craving food and light and heat. It’s enough to make any man insane. Now he sits on the
new Commission, the one they call the Cheka.”
“I had not heard of that,” papa remarked. “What is the Cheka?”
“The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. The Cheka is deadly. They kill people, then they find excuses for what they did. That’s what we hear.”
“They kill anybody they dislike. The Bayonet does not spare anyone.”
But he did, in the end, spare Daria and Iskra—only to order them locked in the basement of our house, in a sort of prison-within-a-prison, bitterly cold and damp and with only a single small stove to warm themselves by. A stove that worked badly and was poorly ventilated.
I thought of them there, night after night, huddled together in the cold and dark, and the thought weighed on me like lead, lowering my spirits still further. For I was already very low indeed. After what Kerensky had told us I dreaded that Michael had been killed in Petrograd, and I thought, once I am certain that he is dead, once I hear that terrible, final news, I won’t want to live.
How can I describe the cold of that severe winter? I am Russian; I know cold. But the deep, penetrating, numbing cold of Siberia was new to me. It swept down upon us in a vengeful tide of ice, wind and darkness. It held us in its painful grip. It overwhelmed and weakened us, in body, mind and spirit.
Though we were indoors we felt the cold as if we had been caught shelterless in an unending storm. The cold came in right through the walls, coating every surface with a rime of frost. Whatever we put on the floor froze solid. Our feet turned blue inside their double coating of thick wool socks and felt boots.
The pipes froze and we had no water except meltwater from the ice. We boiled ice in a pan on top of our one stove, which we kept choked with firewood. The ice grew tepid, and melted, but the water never boiled—the air was too cold. So we had water to drink but no hot water to bathe in; we were both cold and dirty, and this added to our misery.
The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold) Page 26
