Anastasia's Secret

by Susanne Dunlap

  The hours crept by more slowly than any day I had ever known. We had to sit through supper, and then the countess read aloud, until finally Olga yawned—the signal that we should all go to bed. Dr. Derevenko, who had spent the evening in our company, went to Alexei’s room to relieve Tatiana.

  When at last Tatiana came into our bedroom, I crossed to Olga’s bed on the pretext of kissing her goodnight, and whispered, “We need to talk. Come over to my bed when the lights are out.”

  They did as I asked, probably knowing that I would not suggest such a thing if it wasn’t important. Once we were all within whispering distance, I spoke quickly.

  “We have a chance to escape. But we must be ready to go tomorrow night.”

  “How?” Tatiana asked. “How can you know this? Alexei too?”

  “I cannot say, but there is one guard here who is friendly toward us, and he has planned this. It is very dangerous for him.”

  “Sasha,” said Olga.

  I stopped and stared at her in the darkness. “How did you know?”

  “You murmur his name sometimes in your sleep. Mashka tried to convince us it was nothing, but it happened often enough that I never believed her.”

  “He’s the one with the patch over his eye. That Alyosha was talking about. The one who was in Tsarskoe, isn’t he?” Tatiana said.

  I was glad it was dark so that they could not see me blush. “Yes, I know him. But he is just a guard who is loyal to us and will help us escape.” I hoped they would simply figure that Alexei knew this and was upset only because he was afraid.

  “What have you been doing, Nastya?” Olga asked the question I most dreaded. I would have to lie, for their sakes as much as mine.

  “I have only been doing what I can to save us, ever since I realized that things were not getting better here.”

  “But you knew this guard before. When did you meet him?” Tatiana sounded a little piqued. After all, she was the beautiful one.

  I paused before I answered. “We met when I was just a little girl. He has been my secret friend all these years. He has looked out for all of us. He wants to help us.” I was determined to steer the conversation to the urgent matter at hand. Talking about Sasha made me ache with sadness and tempted me to tell them everything about our love, our magical times together. But there would be no point.

  “What about Mama and Papa and Mashka? How can you even think I would leave them?” Tatiana again asked a question I did not want to answer. Nothing had changed since that time we had first mentioned the idea of escape. It was, truly, unthinkable to go away without them, not knowing if they would be safe or if they would eventually be able to join us, or if our last farewells had been just that, and we would never see them again.

  “And you heard what Dr. Derevenko said about Alyosha. He is barely able to travel with a little bit of comfort, let alone rushed and secretly. How could we manage it?”

  “Perhaps that was why he was so angry about Sasha, even if he didn’t know who he was,” Olga said. “I sometimes think he senses things none of the rest of us can, because he has come so close to death so often. He knows that if an escape is planned, he will either slow everyone down or be left behind.”

  She was right. Alyosha’s sad, wide eyes swam before me. I had to shake my head to dispel the vision. “Well,” I said, not certain what to say that would not send us around in a circle again, “I want to live. I want to be free again. Don’t you think the others would want it for us, if we had that chance? Even Alexei? I intend to be ready with my stoutest shoes and layers of clothing at eleven tomorrow night. If you choose, you may all come with me. Alexei too, if he wants. I’ll carry him myself.”

  I felt the severity of my words and wished them immediately unsaid. Perhaps Olga might take a chance with me, but Tatiana wouldn’t. She had been entrusted with Alexei’s health and safety, and she would do nothing to break that trust.

  Before I knew it, my sisters and I embraced one another in a huddle of silent tears. I wished we had one bed large enough so that we could all sleep close to each other, drawing comfort from our familiar warmth. But we gradually untwined ourselves and each went back to our narrow camp beds and tried to sleep.

  CHAPTER 33

  The next day, the commissar and a few guards came to tell us what we could bring with us and what we couldn’t.

  “The house you will stay in is smaller than this. You may bring camp beds and linens, blankets, some of the household items you brought, and one bag of personal possessions. These must be inspected before you leave, to ensure that you are not stealing any of the items that belong to the Governor’s House.”

  Our mouths dropped open at this suggestion. It was Nastinka who first managed to speak. “The grand duchesses and the tsarevich were not brought up to steal!”

  “To whom do you refer, Comrade Hendrikova?” Rodionov said, his face reddening to an even deeper hue. “There are no such things as grand duchesses. I see before me only individuals with an unfortunate alliance to the monarchist counterrevolutionaries.”

  The countess was about to speak again, but Olga went over and took hold of her arm. “Comrade Commissar is right, Madame. We are all the same.”

  “Might I bring my balalaika?” Alexei asked. He was again sitting up, since the journey was settled on, and the doctor thought he had better try to get a small amount of exercise. There had been no more outbursts. He didn’t mention Sasha. But he also would not meet my eyes when we spoke.

  He alone of all of us saw the coming change not as laden with fateful significance, but as a reunion with Mama, Papa, and Mashka. It was his joy at looking forward to that which made my own decision stick in my heart. Olga and Tatiana kept looking at me with beseeching eyes. I could hardly bear the thought of leaving, going off to the unknown without my family, the dearest friends I had known for all my life.

  Sasha had managed to get another brief message to me, telling me to meet him in the alley where we used to meet, what seemed like years ago but was only a few months. In those days, I had the thrill of love to give me wings. Now my feet were like leaden weights, and my heart like a lump of dry bread. My only remaining hope was that Sasha would come with me. Surely he would not send me off by myself, to face uncertain dangers? Yet what if he did? Could I go alone?

  I kept my clothes on underneath my nightdress and waited until the house was asleep. I knew that Olga and Tatiana would not be, that they were waiting for me to go because they would want to give me their blessings, but I couldn’t bear to take leave of them. I was afraid it would break my resolve. I slipped out of bed quickly, trying to get out of our room before they realized I was gone, but Olga was just as fast. She caught me and gave me a fierce kiss and embrace. “I love you, darling Nastya!” she whispered. A moment later Tatiana was there.

  “Forgive me!” I felt a sob force its way into my throat. “I have to go!”

  They released me, and I left the room, slipping silently with my small bag through the house, letting myself out the door and around the side to the alleyway, feeling as if my life drained away as I went. I could hardly see for tears.

  As I turned into the alley, I nearly collided with Sasha.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, wiping my face with his handkerchief.

  “How can you ask? I am about to leave my family, everything I have ever known, for a long, long time!”

  “You are about to leave so that you can live the rest of your life!” He sounded angry. “Do you know how dangerous it was for me to plan this escape? Do you have any idea what they will do to me if they discover I helped you?”

  “Aren’t you coming with me?” I asked, shocked into tearlessness.

  He threw his hands up in exasperation. “No! I shall have to lead the hunt to find you. Only then will I be able to take them the wrong way, so you have a chance to reach your destination.”

  So, I was to be alone. I had never done anything, traveled anywhere, alone. Going away always meant an army of people: sisters,
brother, parents, servants, maids of honor. Even coming from Tsarskoe Selo had been the same in its way. All at once I felt much younger than my almost seventeen years.

  “How can you hesitate? Do you have any idea what you may well face in Yekaterinburg? The reds will take no pity on you because you are young. You and your family represent everything they hate with an irrational hatred that lusts for blood.”

  “You frighten me,” I said. Sasha had never spoken to me like this.

  “I mean to frighten you!” he said, then held me to him in a crushing embrace. I felt his tears on my head.

  “Will I never see you again either?” I asked, feeling as though I was about to jump off a high mountain peak and hoping to land without hurting myself. That’s how impossible everything seemed at that moment, no matter what I did.

  “Perhaps we will meet again,” he said, softening his voice. “But you must see that it does not matter. You have so much ahead of you. It’s your choice now. Choose the future! Choose life!”

  He pushed me toward a gate that led out of the alleyway. I could see someone standing beyond it, clearly waiting to conduct me on the first stage of my journey. I took two steps toward it, then turned.

  “No.”

  The word felt solid. Secure. This—this furtive flight in the dead of night—was not what I wanted. I wanted to stay, I wanted to see my mama and papa again, to go through whatever my sisters and brother would go through. I had no choice. I could not choose nothing, which is what leaving would be. “No,” I repeated.

  Sasha let his arms fall to his side. He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can ever do anything again to help you. You’re not thinking clearly. Just go, Nastya! Go!”

  Even as he said it, he walked toward me, and before I knew it, we were in each other’s arms, and he was kissing me as he used to. I closed my eyes and imagined for a moment that we were back in Tsarskoe, before the killing, only we were in the garden, in the open air, not underground at night, hidden away from everyone.

  When we stopped kissing we continued to hold each other. I couldn’t bear the thought of letting go of him. I looked up into his face, seeing there an expression that meant love. He loved me, in all my awkward imperfection. As I loved him. “I want to see your scar,” I said, realizing that I must look at it if I were to know him as he was then.

  Sasha slowly let go of me, felt for the edges of his eye patch with his left hand, and lifted it to his forehead. It was dark enough that I couldn’t see every detail of the ridges that converged where his eye used to be. For a moment, I imagined the young boy I met when I was just a girl, with mischief dancing in both eyes. I stood on my tiptoes and kissed the hardened spot tenderly, then gently slid the patch back down to cover it again.

  “I could never go away without you,” I whispered. Sasha took my face between his hands and kissed me gently on the lips.

  “That heart of yours has undone you, sweet Nastya,” he said. He backed away, holding my gaze. After a few steps, he turned away from me and walked in the same, slow pace toward the guardhouse. I watched him go, half expecting him to turn around, grab my hand, and run with me out of the gate.

  But he didn’t. He opened the door of the building where his quarters were, and then shut it behind him. For a moment I stood shivering, alone, before I too turned and went back into our prison.

  I was still in a daze, not quite certain what I had just done. I passed through the darkened rooms to the bedroom I had shared with my sisters for eight months, and crawled in between the sheets I had left only a few minutes earlier, knowing that something had changed in me forever.

  “I knew you wouldn’t do it,” whispered Olga. “I’m glad you’re staying, darling.”

  CHAPTER 34

  It felt odd to leave the Governor’s House by any door other than the one to the yard. The archbishop had sent a horse and carriage to take the four of us to the dock, so that Alexei would not be too uncomfortable, and I could see the horses pawing the street, impatient to be gone. The carriage was simple and black, but at least it had springs, unlike the rough carts that had taken Mama, Papa, Mashka, the prince, and Dr. Botkin to Tyumen the month before.

  We all had to leave in order, our names checked off as we went. Rodionov and his men were coming along to guard us on the voyage. We three sisters stood in the hall and waited. I had little sensation of time passing, still not fully in the moment after the night before. Alexei sat in a wheelchair. Nastinka, General Tatischev, Dr. Derevenko, Zhilik, Trina, and Isa—who all this time had not been permitted to stay with us but was to be accompanying us now—all went out and ascended the carts that were to take them and a few possessions to the Rus. Once they had gone, a few servants, mostly locals who had been hired by the Soviet to do the things we were either not allowed to do or incapable of doing ourselves, started walking to the same dock.

  Rodionov took a roll call one more time before leading us out the door, as if he could not simply count to four and know we were all there. Once outside, eight guards surrounded us. I drew in my breath sharply. At the front of the group was Sasha. Sasha. He had his back to me. I could see his sandy hair beneath his cap, recognize the set of his shoulders. His way of walking was still the same. I wondered if he could feel me staring at him, if he too thought about the previous night, my near escape, our last embrace.

  I was rudely shaken out of my thoughts after we had taken only a few steps when all at once the two houses we had occupied erupted with sounds of tramping feet and smashing glass. The guards from the guardhouse and the barracks—some three hundred of them—swarmed into the Governor’s House and the Kornilov house where the suite had been lodged. It seemed only seconds until they poured back out again, carrying clocks, books, furniture, and icons—anything that was not fixed in place. Six men even mounted the carriage we were supposed to ride in and whipped the horses to a frenzy, so that they took off at a gallop, scattering dust all over us.

  “Those are our things! That was Mama’s icon!” Olga said.

  “That was the carriage we were supposed to take!” Tatiana yelled.

  “There is no personal property now. You are fortunate you are being allowed to take anything other than the barest necessities.” Rodionov’s smug expression made it evident that far from condemning the actions of his men, he fully condoned them. I saw Sasha’s neck go red. At least he did not—

  “Oh!” I cried out, seeing a man struggling to get out of the door with an armload of booty from the Governor’s House that included Sasha’s balalaika. I had begged to be allowed to take it, but they would not let me, and now it was being stolen.

  The thief staggered quite close to us so that Sasha could not avoid seeing the instrument. Sasha couldn’t acknowledge that the balalaika was his, or he would risk exposing his connection to me. I thought I saw the vein in his neck pulse and his jaw tighten, but he could do no more than just watch the fellow take it away.

  “Well, it appears you will have to walk to the dock,” Rodionov said, once the looting had stopped. Tatiana kept a firm hold on the handles of Alexei’s wheelchair. For a moment I thought the commissar was going to insist that Alexei also walk, but no one who saw my brother would have thought him remotely capable of such a thing at that time. He hardly had the energy to react to the thievery of the guards, other than to sigh and look down at Joy, who was curled up in his lap.

  The streets were lined with curious people. No one said anything or made a move to approach us as we passed—I supposed the armed guards were enough to prevent that. And unlike our earliest days in Tobolsk, no one made the sign of the cross as Alexei passed either. Nowadays, people were likely to be shot on the spot for such displays of counterrevolutionary zeal.

  We’ll see Mama and Papa and Mashka soon, I kept repeating to myself. We’ll all be together again. We can be strong together. Sasha will find a way to help us all escape. I had to believe it. I had to persuade myself that I hadn’t given up my only chance of freedom.

  Single file
, with Tatiana pushing Alexei, we walked onto the gangplank to the Rus. I couldn’t help remembering what hopes we’d had on the way to Tobolsk. Rather than constricting, the journey had felt freeing. We had started out with a sort of pattern of life that didn’t disagree with us. It was only over time that things had changed so much for the worse. Our circumstances had been strangled around us so slowly that each added restriction merely adjusted my sense of what was normal, until it was almost impossible to imagine living any other way.

  Now, I think it’s the going back, the retracing of our steps, that reveals how far we have fallen. We are confined and kept out of sight, with only small portholes through which we can see the Siberian countryside passing by. Rodionov told us it is for our safety, but he said it with such glee that I didn’t believe him. And we have been told we cannot lock our doors at night, while Alexei and the tutors and suite must lock theirs. What can it mean?

  And what about Sasha?

  I only see him when he happens to be among our immediate guards. When the others aren’t looking, our eyes meet now and again in a way that gives me hope. We cannot speak to each other, and so I try to put as much as I can into every shared glance without looking for very long, willing him to see the love I have for him. I begin to understand how much he risked for me. Perhaps if I were someone else, I might have taken the chance. But in a life like mine, where the only bonds of affection are to my family and to a man who has been one of our captors almost as long as he was my friend before that, there is no choice. Without those people, I am only a tiny fraction of myself.

  But I still hold out hope that in this frightening world where anything bad could happen any moment, something good might just as easily occur. Sasha almost succeeded in getting me safely away. Maybe he will think of something else in Yekaterinburg, for all of us.