I refolded the letter and put it back where I’d found it. Poor Olga! I was glad that nobody expected me to be perfect, or anything other than what I was. I was the shvibzik!
• • •
This was the first Easter we would celebrate at Livadia. On Saturday my sisters and I had watched women from Yalta at work decorating eggs. They first poked a small hole in each end of the egg and blew the contents into a bowl, and then, their pots of paint and fine brushes lined up in front of them, they painstakingly painted a traditional pattern on the fragile shell. One old woman dyed eggs with onion skins and glued bits of straw to the shell in delicate patterns. Another offered to teach us how to paint eggs with a simple design, but even very simple designs were hard to do well. We made them for Papa and Mama, and I honestly believed mine were the best, because I was the most artistic one in the family.
As midnight approached on Saturday, our entire household filled the chapel, holding lighted candles. It was so quiet I could hear my heart beating. At twelve o’clock, the doors swung open and we followed the priest out into the clear night air, a solemn procession in search of the Christ. We circled the palace and returned to the chapel, and when we reached the doors again, the priest turned to us and shouted, “Christ is risen!” We shouted back joyfully, “He is risen indeed!” Bells rang out, and we entered the chapel amid clouds of incense ascending toward heaven and the sound of the men’s choir singing the ancient Easter liturgy.
This scene was being reenacted all across Russia, in every great cathedral and humble country church, exactly the same way as every year before. Mama always wept at this moment, overcome with emotion. Papa, too, had tears in his eyes.
After the long service finally ended—it was the custom to stand through it all—Mama and Papa led us across the courtyard to the palace. Tables were laden with all the delicious dishes we’d been denied for the past seven weeks. At the center was an enormous paskha, made of farmer’s cheese, raisins, and almonds and molded into a kind of topless pyramid decorated with the letters XB, which stand for “Christ is risen.” Bowls of red-dyed eggs and tall cylinders of kulich, a sweet bread, surrounded the paskha. Everyone in the household came to receive the traditional three kisses from their tsar and tsaritsa and to share in the feast.
Every year Papa ordered Fabergé, the court jeweler, to create special “eggs” for Mama and Grandmère Marie. The tradition had begun with my grandfather, who’d ordered a jeweled egg for my grandmother every year until he died. Papa continued the tradition, making a little ceremony of presenting Mama with hers. Each exquisite egg opened to reveal a surprise inside. Papa never knew what the newest eggs would look like, or what was hidden inside. He left it up to Monsieur Fabergé.
One year, before I was born, the jeweler created the Great Siberian Railway Easter Egg. The route of the railway across Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok was outlined in silver on the surface of the enameled egg. Inside was a scale model of the train, only a foot long. The locomotive, made of gold and platinum with a ruby for a headlight, pulled five cars, accurate to the tiniest detail. We loved all the fabulous Easter eggs, but that was a favorite.
The egg Papa gave Mama this year was enameled in blue, overlaid with the Romanov crest, the double-headed eagle, in gold. When you pressed a little button, the egg opened to reveal a miniature portrait of Alexei in a frame studded with diamonds and a tiny crown, orb, and scepter. Monsieur Fabergé called it the “Tsarevich Egg.” It wasn’t as exciting as the Great Siberian Railway, but it was beautiful and Mama loved it.
On the Monday after Easter, children from the village of Yalta and surrounding farms came to Livadia, and my sisters and I handed out miniature kulichi made by our bakers. The little boys bowed and the little girls curtsied, and they kissed our hands. Marie, who always adored children, was in heaven.
• • •
One fine sunny day, Olga and Tatiana made plans for a motorcar excursion through the mountains to a waterfall, with a stop by the road for a picnic. Chef Kharitonov and his assistants packed wicker baskets of food and drink along with linens, silver, and crystal goblets. Several officers of the Standart, including Commodore von Dehn and Lieutenant Voronov, were invited. Lili, Aunt Olga, and Monsieur Gilliard were eager to go. Mama declined, but Papa was agreeable, as always. A caravan of motorcars would drive to an designated stop. Servants would prepare the picnic while we climbed to the falls.
Olga was almost giddy with excitement when we set out mid-morning in a light fog. By the time we reached the stopping point, the fog had lifted. Papa and Aunt Olga found a suitable clearing in a grove of trees not far from the motorcars for the picnic. We started up the dirt path through the pines, Papa leading the way. He always walked much faster than the rest of us. The sound of the falls became louder as we climbed. Olga, usually as agile as a cat, seemed to need help getting over rocky parts of the path and lagged behind. Fortunately, Lieutenant Voronov was there to offer his hand. Marie and I gathered pink and white wildflowers just coming into bloom, and I took advantage of these pauses to glance back at the laggards. Olga frowned when she saw me looking.
By the time we caught up to Papa and whoever had managed to keep up with him, we were out of breath and ready for a rest, but they had finished smoking their cigarettes and were ready to start off again. Gilliard had his camera ready when we reached the roaring falls, the spray capturing rainbows in the sunlight, and he snapped pictures of us balanced on the rocks with the falls in the background. Olga required even more assistance from the lieutenant when we started down again.
The servants had prepared a fire, threaded cubes of lamb on green sticks, and roasted the shashliki over the hot coals. Count Smolsky, Lili Dehn’s father, who had an estate near Yalta, was waiting with a hamper full of wine from his vineyard. Out of the wicker baskets came vegetable salads, dumplings stuffed with mushrooms, and black bread to spread with fresh cheese. I was ravenous, as usual; Marie, too. Olga didn’t sit with Voronov—that would have been too obvious—but she could hardly take her eyes off him, and she barely noticed what she was eating.
The men’s conversation turned to politics, as it often did. I watched Olga watching Pavel Voronov, who was listening to the talk when he wasn’t gazing back at Olga. Commodore von Dehn asked if anyone had had any news of the strikes that were spreading across Russia, workers walking off their jobs.
“And who knows just whom some crazed anarchist will target next!” Count Smolsky grumbled. “I do hope, Nikolai Alexandrovich, that you are doing everything possible to protect yourself and your family.”
“I have an excellent security guard,” Papa said mildly. “The best in the world.”
I thought of the stone-faced Cossacks who even now were lurking nearby.
“Nevertheless, one must take every precaution. These are dangerous times.”
Aunt Olga, who had been listening silently, joined the conversation. “It isn’t just the workers and anarchists we must be afraid of,” she told them. “I’m acquainted with a cavalry officer who says he’s observed rising unrest among the peasants as well.”
“I don’t fear the peasants,” Count Smolsky said. “I treat mine well. They’re devoted to me.”
“You’ll see that everything will be fine,” Papa said. “We’re planning to celebrate three hundred years of Romanov rule next year. I expect a demonstration of loyalty to the crown as it’s never been seen before.”
Aunt Olga sighed. “I hope you’re right, Nicky.”
Late in the afternoon, as we boarded the motorcars for the drive back to Livadia, Papa called out, “Next time, we’ll ride horses to the falls!” Everyone but me seemed to think that was a fine idea. I was not an especially talented equestrienne, and I often believed that horses had taken a dislike to me.
I was sure Olga would try to arrange it so that she rode in the same motorcar as Pavel. When it didn’t work out—that was really too much to hope for—I knew she was disappointed, but she was happy that he would stop at Livadia
for tea.
Admiral Chagin of the Standart was waiting with Mama when the motorcars arrived. He bowed and kissed Papa’s hand.
“Your Imperial Majesty, I regret to bring very sad news,” the admiral said. “The British luxury liner Titanic, four days out of Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York, struck an iceberg in the North Sea just before midnight Sunday. She sank in less than three hours.”
“But she was believed to be unsinkable!” Papa exclaimed.
“Alas, she was not. The loss of life is thought to be great. Of the more than two thousand aboard, well over half have been lost.”
Papa sat down suddenly, his head in his hands. “It’s difficult to grasp what has happened,” he muttered. Then he said that we must all pray for the souls of those who had lost their lives.
The tea was brought, and the conversation continued about the tragedy—how it could have happened, which ship had answered the SOS and picked up the survivors in lifeboats, what was known of the captain.
“How terrifying that must have been!” said Anya, helping herself to more buttered bread. “Like the time several summers ago when the Standart struck a rock while we were at tea!”
Though I was only six when it happened, I remembered very well how frightened I was. It had felt as though we’d smashed into something. There was an awful noise, teacups and teapot and plates flew through the air, and alarm bells sounded, a horrible racket that made us even more frightened. The crew immediately lowered the lifeboats and helped us into them, Derevenko carrying Alexei, other sailors looking after Mama and us girls, Papa staying as calm as could be. Mama was terribly upset, and although Papa pretended he was not, he did seem short-tempered, and that was unusual for him.
We were taken to another ship and waited to find out what had happened. “I really thought it might be an assassination attempt,” Papa said now. “Of course it turned out to be nothing of the kind. A submerged rock tore a hole in the hull.”
“As the iceberg did to the Titanic,” Mama said. “Imagine the terror of those people.”
We grew quiet again. There seemed to be nothing more to say. Admiral Chagin promised to bring any further news of the fate of the passengers of the Titanic, and he and the other officers took their leave and were driven back to the Standart.
In Olga’s notebook I read this:
An excursion today to a beautiful waterfall, hiking up a steep and rocky trail that required dear Pavel’s assistance. He took my hand and even squeezed it several times. He is so handsome, so intelligent and kind! I was VERY bold and suggested that we might slip away for a few minutes after tea when the others were discussing politics, or whatever it is they talk about, and look at the new gardens just coming into bloom. It would have given us a chance to speak privately and would not have been improper, though Mother might have thought otherwise. But no—Chagin was here with awful news about an English passenger ship that sank, so many dead, and it was so sad and depressing that the tea ended more like a funeral. It was a very great tragedy and I pity the victims, but I’m disappointed that I did not have even one moment alone with P. all day! I tell myself that we will be here in Livadia for another month, and perhaps something good will happen in that time.
We celebrated Tatiana’s fifteenth birthday at the end of May with a luncheon in the pavilion. Many neighbors were invited and came. I hoped that the emir of Bukhara might also come, but he did not. Then there was a rush to pack up and take the train back to Tsarskoe Selo. I watched Olga closely, but unless she was cleverer than I think she was, she never did get that moment alone with Pavel Voronov that she yearned for.
CHAPTER 5
On the Sea and in the Forest
BALTIC AND BIALOWIEZA, 1912
For the few weeks we were at home in Tsarskoe Selo, Papa was kept busy with official duties. Years earlier, after peasant uprisings, he had allowed the creation of an elected assembly, called the Duma, with a prime minister that would take part in governing Russia. Even though he’d permitted it, Papa hated the whole idea. He believed that as tsar, he was the appointed representative of God in Russia—the autocrat, the emperor, the Little Father of all the Russian people. It was God’s will that the tsar and the tsar alone must rule. Now the men of the Duma wanted to meet with him to discuss certain matters. This had him fuming.
“I want nothing like the Parliament the English have,” he told Mama. “I don’t see how my cousin George can possibly rule as king of England with Parliament constantly interfering.”
Mama completely agreed with him. “Being the king of England is not at all the same as being the Tsar of All the Russias,” she said. “It doesn’t begin to compare.”
Even so, the prime minister had finally persuaded Papa to meet with the members. Papa was so busy with his meetings that my eleventh birthday was almost ignored—just a luncheon for the family. Grandmère Marie came from St. Petersburg, but I noticed that she and Mama didn’t have much to say to each other. Nothing had changed there.
At last his duties were finished, Papa gave a speech to the assembly as he had been asked, and at the end of June we boarded the Standart for our summer cruise in the Baltic Sea.
First we sailed to meet Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany on his yacht, the Hohenzollern. We called him Cousin Willy, because he and Papa were distant cousins, and he and Mama were first cousins—their grandmother was Queen Victoria. Mama had been very close to her mother’s mother, and it annoyed Mama to no end that Willy loved to brag tearfully about how the queen had died in his arms. After Papa and Cousin Willy had a long talk together, the rest of the family—except for Mama, who was feeling tired and ill and didn’t much like Cousin Willy anyway—went over to the German yacht. The Hohenzollern was a little smaller than the Standart but larger than our other yacht, the Alexandria, which we used in places where the water was not deep enough for the big yacht. Cousin Willy told Papa that he’d be happy to get the Standart as a gift, and Papa laughed as though he must be joking. But I didn’t think Willy was joking at all—I thought he really meant it. It wasn’t always possible to tell if Willy was serious or not.
Cousin Willy had pale gray eyes—cold as ice, I thought—a loud voice, a barking laugh, and an amazing mustache with ends that turned up like the handlebars on a bicycle. Papa told us that a barber went every morning to Kaiser Wilhelm’s dressing room and waxed his mustache to make the ends stand up properly. I couldn’t help staring at it.
“It’s rude to stare!” Tatiana scolded.
“But Cousin Willy wants to be stared at,” I said. “Why else would he have a mustache like that?”
I did know better than to stare at his left arm, which was small and undeveloped. He had his jackets designed with a special pocket so he could hide it.
The conversation was odd because Cousin Willy spoke German to Papa, Papa answered in French, and they both spoke English to the rest of us. Cousin Willy joked with me, telling me that he thought every day should be celebrated as his birthday. “Then you must be very old indeed, Cousin Willy!” I said, and that made him laugh: Har har har!
After dinner he handed out gifts to each of us: silver dresser sets for Olga and Tatiana, porcelain dolls (as though we were children!) for Marie and me, and a miniature of the Hohenzollern for Alexei. Then we had to watch a boring film showing Kaiser Wilhelm, dressed in tall black boots, a white cloak, and a helmet with a fierce-looking spike on top, marching back and forth in front of a regiment standing at attention, Kaiser Wilhelm on a battleship with sailors standing at attention, and Kaiser Wilhelm in a very large motorcar.
Marie and I were falling asleep as our launch took us back to the Standart, but when I heard Olga whisper to Tatiana, “Can you imagine, Cousin Willy once courted Aunt Ella!” I was instantly wide awake. “He used to send her love poems when he was a student.”
“Ugh!” Tatiana said. “He’s a pig! How could she even bear to be around him?”
“She couldn’t! She once told me that,” Olga said. “He was so insulted when
she rejected him that he vowed to marry some other princess as soon as he could.”
I scrambled to sit closer to my older sisters. “So did he?” I asked. I loved this kind of gossip.
“He did,” Tatiana said. “A German girl, even though his family said she was a nobody. And Aunt Ella married Papa’s uncle, Grand Duke Sergei.”
“But after Uncle Sergei was blown to bits by a revolutionary’s bomb, Aunt Ella became a nun and founded the Convent of Mary and Martha in Moscow,” Olga whispered. “You were only three when that happened, Nastya. You wouldn’t remember.”
I hated it when Olga and Tatiana talked about things that I was too young to remember. But I would learn that some things were better not to remember.
• • •
After the visit with Cousin Willy, we cruised near the coast of Finland, dropping anchor in a small bay we’d named the Bay of Standart, near a special island where we went for long hikes and had picnics on the beach, Alexei played in the sand, and Papa swam in the icy water and played tennis on the court he’d had built. Mama stayed on the Standart, reading and embroidering and chatting with Anya. A few times, she was carried ashore and made comfortable in a shady spot, where she continued with reading and embroidering and chatting with Anya.
Grandmère Marie arrived on her yacht, the Polar Star, for the celebration of her name day in July. She and Mama politely ignored each other, but the rest of us were happy to see her and glad of an excuse for a party. The balalaika orchestra played, and we danced the mazurka and the polonaise on the deck with the ship’s officers as our partners. Olga tried, not very successfully, not to show just how happy and glad she was.
She finally got what she had wanted all along: Lieutenant Voronov kissed her! I, naughty child that I was at age eleven, had made it my mission that summer to spy on them. Olga must have known what I was doing and simply decided to ignore me, thinking I would tire of the game. Generally I didn’t like being ignored, but in this case it served my purpose. I was lurking in the shadows by one of the great funnels when her big moment came.
Anastasia and Her Sisters Page 5
