Aunt Olga disapproves of Papa’s decision, and so does Grandmère Marie, and probably our other relatives as well. They believe Papa is needed here, as sovereign of the people, and not at the front, because they say he’s not really a military man. But none of this means a thing to Mother, who agrees with everything Fr. G says.
I continue to hear stories from the servants that Fr. G has improper relations with many of the great ladies of Petrograd and Moscow and who knows where else. His behavior toward me and my sisters is always correct, but I do sometimes get the uneasy feeling that he is undressing us with his eyes.
That last part bothered me: undressing us with his eyes. Why would he want to do that?
• • •
After Papa moved his headquarters and took command of the army, he and Mama began to talk about allowing Alexei to join Papa in Mogilev. They discussed it for days. Papa thought it would be good for Alexei to see more of the country he would some day rule as tsar, to be exposed to masculine influence instead of being surrounded by females who treated him like a china doll. Mama was deeply afraid that something awful might happen to Alexei while he was at Mogilev, that he would seriously injure himself again, but she also believed the presence of the eleven-year-old tsarevich would do tremendous good for the morale of the troops, and also for Papa.
So it was decided. Papa and Alexei left for Mogilev in October, with Alexei’s two doctors, his two sailor-attendants, and Monsieur Gilliard as his tutor, because Mama insisted that he not fall behind in his studies.
Marie and I were still spending long hours at the lazaret, reading to the wounded men, writing letters for them, even teaching some of them to read, and simply keeping them company. How lonely those soldiers must have felt! Then we passed exciting evenings at Alexander Palace knitting woolen socks and sewing shirts for the soldiers. I didn’t dare complain about the dullness—I’d risk a ferocious frown and a barrage of sharp words from Tatiana, all about “duty” and “sacrifice.” But I did wish I could have gone with Alexei and Papa. I envied my brother.
I was thrilled when Mama announced that we were going to visit them. Anya traveled with us. I found this annoying, but Olga felt even more strongly about it:
I’m not sure why Mother has insisted on including Anya in this excursion. Since her accident Anya is plumper than ever, wears the most dreadful clothes and hats, needs a crutch to get around, and—this is what is so embarrassing—behaves like a schoolgirl with a crush whenever she is around Father. I suppose the best thing about Anya, from Mother’s point of view, is that she shares her devotion to Fr. G. He can do no wrong! And not all of Mother’s friends share that opinion. Aunt Ella has deep reservations about him, as does Grandmère Marie, but Anya is on her side, and that must be why Mother puts up with her.
We traveled to Mogilev on the imperial train, a day’s journey, and the train was our home once we’d reached our destination, because the mansion where Papa and Alexei stayed was too crowded to allow for visitors. Alexei could not wait to show us his quarters: He shared Papa’s bedroom, sleeping on an army cot next to Papa’s and closest to the stove. There was a small table by the window where they played dominoes in the evening. “I usually win,” Alexei boasted.
Papa was busy during the mornings of our visit, meeting with the officers, reviewing troops, and so on. Mama seemed content to sit and gaze out over the river. Sometimes she asked to be driven around the town of Mogilev and out into the countryside, taking two of us with her, and stopping now and then to chat with the peasants.
Just before one o’clock each day, several motorcars arrived at the railroad siding and drove us to the mansion for luncheon with the officers. I enjoyed those luncheons, because Papa seemed so calm, so relaxed, almost his old self, now that he was among the officers and men who were fighting for Russia. In the afternoons we were taken on tours of the area and had a chance to speak with the soldiers. At the end of the day, another fleet of cars was sent to our train to fetch our maids and the dresses and jewels Mama wanted us to wear for dinner with the officers.
“Nothing too bright or elaborate,” she said. “This is wartime and we aren’t attending a ball, but a feminine presence is surely good for the men’s morale.”
When the weather was mild, the officers organized hikes and picnics for us, and one day we boarded a launch and took a long, leisurely cruise on the Dnieper. “I’m sure they need time to relax more than we do,” Mama declared. “We’re doing them a favor coming here.”
During this visit, Marie met a lieutenant who was serving as officer of the day at headquarters. His name was Nikolai Dmitrievich Demenkov, and the next thing I knew, my sister was showing serious symptoms of being in love. Somehow she managed to arrange opportunities to meet him “accidentally.” “Kolya” became part of our regular conversation, as in “Kolya says” this, and “Kolya did” such and such. I missed no opportunity to tease her about him.
At the end of ten days we kissed Papa and Alexei good-bye and boarded our train again for the trip back to Tsarskoe Selo. Papa made plans to take Alexei on a long tour of the battlefront, from end to end. Alexei, who had been marching around at Mogilev in the uniform of an army private with leather boots up to his knees, was beside himself with joy at the prospect. It was hard for Mama to leave Alexei behind, although she must have been pleased to see how happy he was with his life there—the life of a man. She also had a hard time leaving Papa, because she was always lonely without him. And Marie was downcast as well, for an obvious reason: Kolya.
We were welcomed back by our pets—Mama’s dog, Eira, Olga’s cat, Vaska, Alexei’s dog, Joy, and my spaniel, Jimmy—but learned the sad news that Tatiana’s French bulldog, Ortino, had sickened and died. Tatiana had so loved that misbehaving little dog! But her friend Dmitri Malama had already been informed of the death, and before Tatiana had even dried her tears, a replacement bulldog arrived at the palace. She named the new puppy Ortino the Second.
I asked her, “Do you love Dimka as much as you love the puppies he’s given you?”
Tatiana glared at me and answered in her stern Governess voice, “What a ridiculous question, Nastya! Loving a dog is not the same as loving a person.” Then she softened a little, picked up the new Ortino, and nuzzled him. “This is not a good time for falling in love,” she said. “Dimka is going to the front, and who knows when I’ll see him again.”
I knew what she meant: “If I’ll see him again.” Our men were dying by the thousands. Tatiana was right: It was not a good time for falling in love.
• • •
A few weeks after our visit to Mogilev, Mama got an urgent telegram from Papa. Alexei had a nosebleed—the result of a terrific sneezing fit while they were traveling to Galicia, where Uncle Nikolasha had had his brilliant victory, to inspect regiments of the Imperial Guard. The bleeding wouldn’t stop, and Papa was bringing him home.
We were with Mama at the station to meet the train when it arrived close to midnight. Alexei’s bandages were soaked with blood, and he was so pale he looked as though he might be dead, except that his eyes were huge with fright. The doctors did everything they could think of, cauterizing the tiny blood vessel in his nose, but nothing seemed to help. The bleeding went on and on. We thought certainly that this was the end and that Alexei was going to die. In a panic, Mama sent for Father Grigory.
We were kneeling around Alexei’s bed, praying with all our hearts, when Father Grigory quietly entered the room. Mama uttered a low moan, but Father Grigory laid a hand on her shoulder, and with the other hand he made the sign of the cross as he gazed down at my brother. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said gently. “Nothing will happen.”
Without another word he walked out of the room and left the palace. Within minutes Alexei was sleeping peacefully. The bleeding had stopped. The crisis was past.
Perhaps Father Grigory, known as Rasputin and hated by so many people, actually was a miracle worker. Or maybe it had just taken a while for the doctors’ efforts to succee
d. I didn’t know. All I knew for certain was that Alexei was alive and he was getting better.
CHAPTER 14
A World Turned Upside Down
TSARSKOE SELO, 1916
On New Year’s Day, at Mama’s urging, Alexei started keeping a diary, “just like Papa does.” He had a curious habit of writing about things he’d done before he actually did them, like describing what he’d eaten for dinner before he even sat down at the table. He claimed that he didn’t always have time later, and anyway, what difference did it make?
“Writing in a diary every single day is boring,” he said. “My life is boring,” he complained, adding wistfully, “unless I’m at the front with Papa, and then it’s not.”
The important thing, Papa told him, was to be diligent with his diary. “Someday,” he said, “your future subjects will want to know what your life was like before you became their tsar.”
I saw Olga and Tatiana exchange quick glances, and I could guess what they were thinking: Will Alexei live long enough to become tsar?
Papa returned to Mogilev. Alexei did not go back with him, and that made both of them sad. It took Alexei a long time to recover from those awful setbacks. Who could imagine that a person could almost die from a sneeze!
We resumed writing to Papa every day. Marie asked him to give her regards to Kolya. She even signed her letters “Mrs. Demenkov,” which I thought was terribly silly. When Demenkov was reassigned to the palace guards and could often be seen from Mama’s balcony, Marie found constant excuses to stand there, waiting for a chance to wave and grin at him and even shout down at him. She persuaded Anya to invite him to tea, and we were all present to observe her flirting. There was nothing subtle about it. And she was overjoyed when she spotted him in church and got to talk to him when we came out. He was not the handsomest boy I’d ever set eyes on, being somewhat chubby, but he did seem pleasant and sweet.
• • •
Marie, only sixteen, was still too young to be concerned about a future marriage, but Tatiana would be nineteen in a few months, and Olga was twenty, certainly old enough. If it had been a challenge before the war for our parents to come up with approved suitors, it was now practically impossible.
Then, apparently out of nowhere, Olga got a marriage proposal from Grand Duke Boris Romanov, a son of Papa’s oldest uncle. I hardly knew him, because he wasn’t included in any of our family gatherings. He was thirty-eight and going bald. It was well known that although he was a military man and supposedly in charge of a Cossack regiment, Boris had so far avoided doing any actual fighting. He had a son my age, but he hadn’t married the boy’s mother. Mama said Boris had a reputation for flirting with married women and doing things that shocked and appalled her.
“All Boris cares about is taking his pleasure wherever he can find it,” Mama sniffed. “Many a woman has shared Boris’s life!”
Mama and Boris’s mother could not stand each other. They were exact opposites. His mother, Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, ranked third in the Empire, after Mama and Grandmère Marie, and she loved to entertain at great parties in her grand palace on the Neva. She had sent the marriage proposal jointly with her son.
“That woman is always looking for ways to raise the standing of her profligate son,” Mama said bitterly. “But she will not do it through any daughter of mine.”
And that was the end of that.
• • •
Mama and Olga and Tatiana put in long days at the hospital, and Marie and I spent mornings with one or another of our tutors. Every day Pyotr Petrov brought us the latest war news that had come in on the telegraph, and we resumed moving the pins on the big map. When we got good news and the pins moved in the right direction, we were buoyed and cheerful—we were winning the war! But the good news didn’t last, and everything began to go wrong again. Workers went on strike, there were shortages of food, revolutionaries stirred up trouble, and everyone seemed unhappy with everyone else.
Marie longed for a glimpse of her Kolya. She had begun having conversations with him on the telephone, forbidding me to come anywhere near while she murmured and giggled into the receiver. “This is private, Nastya!”
The day came when Kolya received his orders to go to the front. Marie decided to make him a shirt, and every evening for a couple of weeks she concentrated on her sewing. When she’d finished the shirt, she wrapped it with one of her handkerchiefs dabbed with a few drops of her lilac-scented perfume, to remember her by. She arranged to spend a few minutes alone with him, and I suspect that they kissed and made promises to write. After their last time together she looked so sad and puffy-eyed that I couldn’t even tease her that Lieutenant Demenkov would go into battle smelling like a flower.
We didn’t see much of our cousin Dmitri Pavlovich, which I thought was a shame, because he was always so amusing, so charming—even Mama said so. She was quite fond of him, but she complained about him, too. She thought he was spending too much time in Petrograd, drinking and carousing with Irina’s husband, Felix, and she advised Papa to order Dmitri back to his regiment.
Olga had a very low opinion of Felix. “He’s nothing but an idler,” she said. He had gotten out of joining the military through a law that exempted only-sons, although he did enter the Cadet Corps and even went through officers’ training and liked to parade around in his brown uniform—but he avoided joining a regiment. Olga visited Irina at their main palace on the Moika River and noted that Felix had converted one wing into a hospital for wounded soldiers. “Probably Mama shamed him into doing even that much,” Olga said.
In March we had a visit from another Dmitri, Dmitri Malama, who had given Tatiana her first Ortino, now dead. Dmitri sat beside Tatiana in the mauve boudoir with the new Ortino he’d given her romping around, three sisters listening to every word, and Mama observing every move.
Mama called him “my little Malama.” “What an adorable boy he is still,” she told Lili Dehn, “even though he’s become a man. He would have made a perfect son-in-law. Why are foreign princes not as nice as he is?” It’s hard to say what Tatiana was thinking. She was the last to let anyone know.
Easter was disappointing. We’d expected to have Papa with us, but he could not leave Mogilev. He felt he had to spend all his time now with his troops. The Fabergé egg that year was terribly ugly, made of steel and mounted on four bulletlike legs. Papa called it a Military Egg. I hoped he didn’t have such an awful-looking thing sent to Grandmère Marie. She’d have hated it.
• • •
In May Mama was finally persuaded to let Alexei join Papa at Stavka. Alexei was overjoyed—not only to be back with Papa and the men, but also to be promoted from private to corporal and have a second stripe sewn on his sleeve.
Father Grigory was spending more and more time with Mama, and Mama insisted she didn’t know what she’d do without his advice. “Your papa relies on me to keep things going as smoothly here as possible,” she said. “He has so much to do as commander-in-chief of the army—someone at home has to attend to the behavior of some of those awful men in the Duma. They do everything possible to thwart him at every turn. And just as Papa relies on me, I rely on Father Grigory to suggest which ministers can be most helpful and which ministers are a hindrance and must simply be sent on their way.”
We listened and nodded, not saying anything. But Olga had serious worries:
I hope the advice Fr. G gives Mother is good, because she does just what he says. She writes long, long letters to Father every day, so I have to believe he knows what is happening.
Mother seems blind to everything going on around her and deaf to what so many are saying. At the hospital, many of the soldiers, even those to whom she has been kind, speak about her disrespectfully. Even the doctors are unkind! She works so hard, and to hear them refer to her as Nemka is painful. They laugh behind her back, forgetting that I’m there or maybe not caring if I overhear them, suggesting that she and Rasputin—Fr. G—do the most disgusting things together. I don’t
mean just discussing the war and the Duma!
Tanya and I considered trying to warn her about what people are saying, but my sister believes it would do no good and will only anger her. I suggested speaking to Father when he comes home next, but Tanya thinks he already knows what lies people are repeating and is powerless to stop the lies and to stop Mother’s reliance on Fr. G.
I read that passage and cried, forgetting that I might be discovered with Olga’s notebook. But maybe it didn’t matter if I was caught. Maybe my older sisters would realize that I was no longer an infant and should be included in conversations about matters that at my age—I was now fifteen—I was certainly old enough to understand. Marie was a different story. She still believed absolutely in the goodness of Father Grigory—starets, man of God, and worker of miracles.
As I put Olga’s notebook away, I wondered if she already knew I was a regular reader. Maybe this was her way of letting me know what was going on without actually talking about it. Or maybe I was just making excuses for prying into her private world.
• • •
There was one bright spot in the midst of the gloomy war news. Aunt Olga finally persuaded Papa to allow her to divorce Uncle Petya and marry Nikolai Kulikovsky, the cavalry officer she’s been in love with for years and years. In November they were married in the Church of St. Nicholas in Kiev. Unlike her elaborate wedding to Uncle Petya—I suppose he is no longer our uncle—this was a simple ceremony. Grandmère Marie, who was now living in her palace in Kiev, Aunt Xenia, Uncle Sandro, and the officers of Aunt Olga’s Akhtyrsky Regiment, as well as nurses from the hospital she had founded, were the only guests. Aunt Olga sent us a photograph. She’s wearing a plain white wool dress with a little white embroidery, a wreath of flowers on her head, and a short veil. Kolya is dressed in his uniform.
I so wished we had been allowed to go to that wedding, but Mama wouldn’t hear of it.
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