Anastasia's Secret

by Susanne Dunlap

  At first, the vapor of boiling bleach made my eyes sting. It took a moment for the tears to clear from my eyes. Once they did, I peered through the dense mist and saw Sasha. He did not see me. He was gazing, rapt, at a stout laundress with her sleeves rolled up to her shoulders and her arms red from the hot water. With ease she plunged her arms up to her elbows into a milky vat and hauled out a lump of fabric that must have weighed fifty pounds with all the water it had absorbed. She slung it, hardly spilling a drop of soapy water, onto a washboard over another vat and began squeezing it out.

  “Ahem!”

  I jumped. In my turn I had become so fascinated watching the laundress that I had taken my attention away from Sasha, and he had crept around behind me and surprised me. For a moment, his unpatched eye danced with mischief. Then as if he remembered he had much to be bitter about, his hand flew to the patch over his bad eye and he frowned. The wound near his mouth had almost fully healed, the only evidence of it a fine, red scar that was not very noticeable when he smiled, but that became more visible when his mouth settled into any other expression.

  “I miss seeing you every day,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  He smiled and patted my shoulder. I shrugged his hand off angrily before thinking about it. “What?” he said. “We aren’t friends anymore now that I’m not helpless and in bed?”

  “No, I didn’t mean that, only…” I couldn’t explain to him that I found his treatment of me annoying. It was as if he considered me a little child. I thought we had gone beyond that at least to being real friends, but here he was, looking down at me again.

  “Don’t be cross with me, Nastya. I have something important to say to you.” He stood a little closer to me. I held my breath. What could he have to say? I was so young! Did he feel something for me? As I had begun to feel for him? I didn’t dare hope. I remembered Mashka, sighing over her lieutenant, and all they ever did was bow to each other and smile.

  “I’m going back to the front.”

  At first, what he said passed by my comprehension, it was so completely different from what I expected. When I recovered my composure, my first feeling was anger. “Why must you go?” I asked. “Can’t wounded soldiers be allowed to rest awhile? We’ve hardly had any time together!”

  “I have to do it, for my career. My family is not wealthy or educated. If I expect to have a future, to be able to support a family one day, I must excel now.”

  “But you’re the one who says it will all be over! That the war is a foolish show. Why are you trying to impress someone who may not matter, if all happens as you say?”

  He shrugged his left shoulder toward his patched eye as if to say, you have to ask? It was a new gesture, just started since he had recovered. It infuriated me. “Don’t try to understand, Nastya. You can’t have any idea what a normal person’s life is like. You’ve been so protected you’re more like a child than a young lady.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I was furious at him for calling me a child. I would soon enough be fourteen, and after all I had seen in the hospital I no longer felt young.

  “Look at you in your nursery dress. They don’t want to let you grow up. They think of you as their little girl. Can you imagine what they would say if they knew all the things I told you?”

  I blushed. That way he had of referring to my parents and the court as “they.” But he was right. I think Mama kept me in Olga and Tatiana’s castoffs so she wouldn’t feel old herself. Marie too was still in short skirts, but she didn’t seem to mind. I, on the other hand, wanted to wear long skirts and heels, and fall in love.

  Then Sasha did something that took me completely by surprise. He grasped me by both shoulders, looked straight into my eyes, said, “I may never see you again,” and then kissed me hard right on the mouth. I couldn’t say anything after that.

  He gave me a peculiar little smile, the same smile he had when the slash on his cheek was still stitched and it hurt him to lift that corner of his mouth. He touched his cap in a cheeky salute, then turned and walked away. I watched him disappear into the fog of laundry steam we’d been standing in. It was a picture I wish I had been able to capture. He looked for all the world like a fallen hero ascending into Valhalla through the mist, just as in the epic poems we read in the schoolroom.

  I was too numb to cry for him. So many went away and never came back. Both Olga and Tatiana had had news of young officers who had courted them falling in the field against the relentless German artillery. I thought my one friend had escaped that fate. Now, he was running toward it again with both arms open.

  For the rest of the spring I went through the motions of getting up, dressing, going to the hospital wards, and attending state occasions once or twice. There was no question that year of taking a cruise on the yacht, or a vacation at Livadia in the Crimea. Instead we traveled wherever there were hospitals nearby, restlessly roving from Tsarskoe Selo to Peterhof to Petrograd, where much of the Winter Palace had been given over as hospital wards, and occasionally as far afield as Moscow. The war took up everyone’s time. Until our other troubles started, that is.

  Funny that I can look back now and think of the wartime as somehow better than what followed. It seems insensitive to be nostalgic about a time that condemned so many young men to pain and death. Yet because everyone at court was so consumed with the war, it enabled me to be more independent. I also learned much that I would never have known before. That knowledge—and Sasha’s influence too—had begun to show me the world beyond the closed walls of the imperial court. It was a very troubled world.

  For a while, we thought perhaps things were going better. In 1915 the army had had some successes against the Germans, and our casualties were not so heavy as they had been the year before. Papa said that the factories were producing munitions at a faster rate, and that transportation routes had been improved so that they could more easily get supplies to the army. “I don’t want another fiasco like last August,” he told Mama while we sat quietly and knitted socks and mufflers to help stock Mama’s sklady, the warehouses that supplied linens and all other necessities to the troops at the front lines. “Thirty thousand brave Russians killed in a single battle. Tens of thousands taken prisoner. It tears at my heart to think of it.”

  Papa had taken to eating quickly, and when he came to join us for our late-night supper, he paced back and forth, never sitting quietly in his chair. This worried Mama, who was frailer than ever with her heart condition. I watched her big, hazel eyes follow him, sadness nearly spilling over their brims. The more agitated Papa became, the more pale and withdrawn was Mama. I never was able to understand how people could have circulated such horrible rumors about her. She was as kind as could be, although when Papa asked her opinion she gave it firmly. At times he even changed his mind about something because her argument was so convincing. That certainty of hers was comforting when I was younger. Yet I could see how it might be taken as blind stubbornness by someone who disagreed with her, and I assumed that was how she managed to disturb so many people despite her quiet place in the background.

  And for several months, it seemed as if perhaps, as Sasha had predicted, the war would end quickly and everything would go back to the way it was before. In two years I would come of age. I wanted a ball and a diamond necklace—just as Olga and Tatiana had been given. But it was not to be.

  During the summer, the news of worker unrest reached us. A telegram came for my father while we were eating our dinner one sultry August evening, a year after the first offensive of the war. A servant brought it on a tray and bent forward at the waist in the way servants have, his lips barely moving as he spoke so that only Papa could hear. Papa nodded and took the paper off the tray, snapping it open and smoothing it out on the table. Before he could read it, he put his glass to his eye. I watched his face change from its normal, rosy color to something that looked as stormy as a thundercloud.

  “How dare they! Don’t they understand we are in the midst of wa
r? Don’t they appreciate that I raised their wages? They are better off than they have ever been, ungrateful wretches!” He stormed out of the dining room. The footman barely had time to open the door for him.

  Mama, who had hardly touched a morsel on her plate, was pale and shaking. “I shall go to my room. Come in later to read if you like,” she said to us all, attempting a smile.

  “Let me help you, Mama.” Alexei stood—he had grown so tall, and been much less ill lately—and offered her his arm. That left me and my three sisters alone at the table. We sat in silence for a while. I don’t know what the others were thinking, but I was wishing that Sasha had not gone back to the front, that I could send him a message to meet me and talk things over.

  It was Tatiana who surprised us with information. “The workers are earning more, it is true. But the price of bread and flour and other necessities has gone up well beyond the increase in their wages. And supplies of food are scarce because of the war. Little wonder there have been riots in the streets.”

  I surveyed the untouched meat and vegetables on our plates. It would be enough, I knew Sasha would say, to feed a family for a week. If only there were a way to give our extra food to others. But that was foolish. Nothing changed at court. No matter how little we ate, the lavish table was always heavy with food.

  And yet change was coming. Fast. Those riots felt like the beginning, but in my heart I knew things had been simmering below the lid of everyday life for a long time. I could see it in the servants’ eyes. I could read it in the troubled look on my mother’s face, in the angle of her head as she bent over her needlework. I could feel it in the biting cold of my morning shower, sense it in the confusion of my dreams. For a while longer I was able to pretend it didn’t exist. But, a year later, that simply wasn’t possible anymore.

  CHAPTER 10

  The workers’ revolt was short-lived, but the war continued and in the autumn of 1915 took a turn for the worse. We were forced to retreat, drawing the German army onto Russian soil.

  “Sukhomlinov assured us at the beginning of the war that our supplies were adequate to the task of meeting this foe. For his miscalculation, he has been relieved of his post.”

  Papa paused to sip his evening tea, but we knew there was more to come than the expected news of the chief general’s dismissal. He had that pensive air, and his eyes gazed off over our heads.

  “He should have been convicted of treason,” said Mama, although she leaned back on her chaise with her eyes closed, a cloth soaked with lavender water on her forehead.

  “No. He was ignorant, not traitorous. My cousin could not bring himself to get rid of him, nor any of the others who have proven incompetent. And therefore I have come to an important decision.”

  He put down his cup and stepped away from the window where he had been standing. Autumn was advancing, and there was a smell of decay on the breeze that came through the opening. Mama sat upright, taking the cloth from her forehead. We all waited for him to continue.

  Before he did, he walked over to Alexei, who had a book in his lap that he wasn’t actually reading. “I shall take the supreme command myself,” Papa said.

  “Oh, Nicky! Must you?” Mama’s face turned a shade paler.

  Papa placed his hand on Alexei’s shoulder. “And since my son has been better lately, he shall come with me to Mogilev, and review the troops at my side.”

  Mama often got her way with Papa, but she also knew when it was futile to try. She lay back again, and simply murmured, “Very well. But if he is at all sick he shall return to me at once.”

  Papa walked over to Mama and kissed the top of her head.

  That evening when Mashka and I retired, I took Sasha’s balalaika out from the back of my wardrobe. So far, with all the time we spent at the hospitals and doing charity work, I had not been able to find a moment to play it. Something about that day and my father’s decision made me feel like I needed to play it, that it would connect me to Sasha, make me feel less alone and bewildered.

  Mashka sat up in her bed, writing a letter to one of our cousins in England. I unwrapped the balalaika, and very quietly touched the strings. I turned the pegs to tune it, and started to pick out a folk melody, pressing my fingers down on the frets, sliding them along to get the smooth, lyrical sound so characteristic of that simple instrument. The strings cut into my fingertips, which had lost what few calluses they had had through lack of playing. I didn’t mean to strike a mournful melody; it was simply what came to mind.

  “Nastya, dear, must you?” Mashka said.

  She was right. Such songs were too sad for right now. I put the balalaika away for another day.

  Taking the little things and making them big. Expanding the significance of everyday moments to have something of the eternal in them—it’s very Russian to do that. And yet, at court, it was the opposite. Mama always seemed to be trying to take the big and make it little. She chose the smallest palace in Tsarskoe Selo, the Alexander Palace, for our principal home. She always seemed to be attempting to be domestic, hiding away from the public, pretending we were a family just like any other. She almost succeeded.

  After he took over command of the armies, Papa was away for great lengths of time, off near the front where the fighting went on unceasingly. I didn’t really think his advisers would let him put himself in danger. Nonetheless, those were anxious times. Not having him at home made me feel very exposed, even though we didn’t see him that much when he was there, except at tea and in the evening. He wasn’t a formidable character. Not very tall, and slightly built. In some ways, Mama appeared more imperious than he did. He had been trained in battle, was a colonel by rank, but I doubt he had ever killed anyone, or come close himself to being killed. But somehow just having him near reassured me.

  A significant detachment of the elite guards remained at Tsarskoe Selo even though Papa wasn’t in residence. Yet I couldn’t help feeling they were a bit less vigilant in Papa’s absence. Especially because Alexei had gone with him. We girls were of no importance. Except my mother, who, as tsaritsa, was Papa’s representative in all government matters when he was gone. Yes, she was important. The secret police and the servants rarely took their eyes off her when she was in a room. What did they expect? I wondered. What were they looking for?

  Mama did her best to manage without Papa there, which meant she had to greet diplomats and receive members of the Duma. She wrote letters every day, some personal and some matters of business. The rest of us wrote letters to friends who were away. Most especially to Papa and Alexei. Mine were full of silly things I thought they would find amusing. They were childish, not because I felt like that much of a child, but because I understood that Papa wanted to think of me that way. It was my place in the family.

  Mama’s heart was weak, and the constant activity tired her. No one outside the family was allowed to know of her condition, and so when she canceled meetings or did not receive people, they thought her rude and remote. I heard them myself once. A countess had come to plead for a government position for her son, but had been turned away by the servants with no explanation. I knew Mama would write to her later and do what she could, but the damage was done. “She’s above us. Probably spending all her time with the Germans, plotting the downfall of Russia!” I heard the lady say. I doubt she ever knew how wrong she was.

  I did not repeat what I heard to anyone. It would have done no good. Mama believed that everything was going along for the best, and refused to believe reports of unrest or trouble. I doubt she could have managed if she had. Her main concern was that she had to neglect her charities when so much else fell upon her. Mashka and I tried our best to visit the hospitals since Mama couldn’t, Tatiana carried on with her nursing and her refugees, and Olga helped with her charities. The time went quickly.

  I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that with so many pressures on her, and without Papa to talk things over with, Mama turned to Grigory for comfort and advice. He rarely came to the Alexande
r Palace, but although Anya spoke in a kind of code with my mother—as much to baffle the secret police as to keep their conversations from us—I knew that she was the constant link between Mama and Rasputin. She carried letters from Mama to the starets, the holy man, in his lodgings in Petrograd, and Mama received letters from him by the same courier—although not nearly as many as she wrote. It did not occur to me that there was anything wrong in this, since Rasputin had always been kind to us, and usually ended up making Alexei feel better too.

  One blustery October afternoon, soon after we had all returned from our nursing and visiting, Anya came in to speak to Mama. They stole off to a corner of the room where I could not hear what they were saying, but I knew instantly by the joyous look on my mother’s face that it had to do with Rasputin. I was not surprised, therefore, when his tall, gaunt figure entered the parlor. He took three steps toward Mama and bowed. A servile, old-fashioned bow that let his long, lank hair practically drag on the floor.

  “Daughter,” he said when he rose, and took her hands in his. They both closed their eyes and stood together for what seemed a long time, then he spoke again. “Courage. God has great deeds for you to accomplish. So long as the tsar is upon his throne, no harm can come to you and your family.”

  What he said sounded impressive enough, but when I thought about it later, it meant nothing, and might have been uttered by anyone.

  “Won’t you take tea with us?” Mama said. I was vexed. I always looked forward to tea as a time when we would be alone together. Even the suite—Lili, Isa, Nastinka, the maid of honor on duty, and the officers of the palace guard—normally did not join us. Isa and Lili were usually on errands visiting hospitals for Mama, and we had seen less of Anya recently, who was off doing secret things of which I knew little.

  We sat in glum silence as Mama filled the cups from the samovar, all sorry that we could not chatter happily about the people we had seen that day as we normally did. Mama didn’t say anything to us about it. Perhaps she interpreted our lack of courtesy as religious awe.