The Silent Land

by Sally Spencer

  In April the snow melted on the Neva, the roads were once more reasonably passable and it was time for the Royal Progress to begin. It was not to be a progress like that undertaken by Catherine the Great, a meeting of monarch and subjects, a voyage of discovery right into the heart of the country. Rather it was to be stiff and formal, like the Tsar himself, a ritualistic celebration of three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty.

  The Imperial family was to visit towns of historical importance, retracing Tsar Michael’s steps. First they would go to Michael’s birthplace, then on to Kostroma, where he was offered the crown, and finally to Moscow, the scene of his coronation.

  “His Majesty has ordered me to go with him,” Konstantin said.

  Of course he had. The shy, diffident Tsar was probably dreading the Progress. It was only to be expected that he’d want Konstantin, who was both his friend and his crutch, to accompany him. But what about me? My fears for the baby were growing daily. Wasn’t it equally natural that I, too, should want Konstantin by my side?

  “Ze child’s ’artbeats are perfectly normal,” the French doctor my husband had brought from Paris told me. “All zis worrying you are doing – it is nozzing but neurosis.”

  What did he know, this serious, grey-haired man? He was a doctor – but had he ever been pregnant? Did he really understand the biological link which binds mother and baby – a link which told me, with absolute certainty, that something was wrong?

  And yet even as fear held its ever tightening grip on my swelling belly, I kept silent. It was right that Konstantin should accompany the Tsar. Right that he should witness for himself the ceremonial triumph of a dynasty to which he’d dedicated his life. The child wasn’t his responsibility, and though I desperately wanted him beside me when it was born, I knew I could manage alone if I had to.

  The closer Konstantin’s departure date drew, the more unbearable it became to have him around. If I was to swim through the cold waters of loneliness, I wanted to plunge straight in, not dip a tentative toe and freeze by degrees. If he was going, then why, for God’s sake, didn’t he just go!

  How the minutes stretched, how the hours dragged. Four days left, then three, two, and finally, finally, one. Only twenty-four hours more, I told myself on that last morning. Twenty-four short hours. And for most of that time he’ll be occupied with official business. You can stand that, Annushka.

  I looked in the mirror, forced my face into a neutral mask, and went down to breakfast.

  Konstantin was already at the table. A smile played on his lips, as if something pleasant were about to happen. “I’ve arranged to keep this day free, my little princess,” he said. “How would you like to spend the time? We could go for a ride in the car or perhaps visit the museum. Whatever you desire. I’m completely at your orders.”

  I wanted him to leave right at that minute, to take his coach to Alexander Palace and not to return until the Progress was over. I was terrified that if he didn’t go soon, I’d break down and beg him to stay.

  “Anna?” Konstantin said.

  “I … I’m not free,” I stuttered. “I have household duties to attend to.”

  I glanced up at my husband. The expression on his face was one of hurt, but the second he saw me looking at him, it was gone. And so we sat there, facing each other across the breakfast table, both wearing masks.

  “Perhaps I should’ve given you notice I’d be here,” Konstantin said finally, “but I wanted to surprise you. Very well, if you’re not free, I only have myself to blame. I’m sure I can find something to keep me occupied.”

  “You’ll be going into the city, then?”

  “No. I can work just well here. It will be pleasant to be around you – even if you are busy.”

  I knew that if I touched him then, if I even stayed in his presence any longer, I’d crack. “I have a headache,” I said, getting out of my chair. “I’m going to lie down.”

  A look of concern crossed Konstantin’s face, and he rose to his feet. “Would you like me to …?” he began.

  In a second, he’d have me in his arms, and I’d be lost. “I don’t want you to do anything,” I shouted as I rushed to the door. “I just want to be left alone.”

  I locked myself in our bedroom and spent the rest of the morning pacing the floor and sobbing softly.

  Konstantin himself came to tell me that lunch was about to be served. “I’m not hungry!” I told him through the bolted door. “Go away!”

  It was half-past three before Vera knocked. “You must eat something, madam,” she said. “If not for your sake, then for the baby.”

  “Later. I’ll eat later.”

  “The master told me before he went out to make sure that you ate something,” my maid persisted.

  I felt as if a great weight had been lifted off me. “You say he’s gone out?”

  “Yes, madam. About half an hour ago. He said not to expect him back until after dark.”

  “Have a tray made up for me. Something light. Perhaps a chicken salad. I’ll eat it in my sitting room.”

  I was safe – at least for a while. I unlocked the door.

  In the bedroom, hiding from Konstantin, I’d told myself I wasn’t hungry, but once the salad was put before me, I discovered a ravenous appetite. I felt stronger when I’d eaten – and I needed to. My problem had not gone away. It was already dark outside, and Konstantin would be returning soon.

  I stood up and examined myself in the mirror. Eyes puffy from crying, complexion blotchy, but a little make-up and a short rest would repair most of the damage. You’ve been acting like a coward, I told my reflection. Konstantin planned a free day to please you, and all you’ve done in return is to make him unhappy. I’m ashamed of you.

  I’d make it up to him, I promised. There were only a few more hours until the Progress began, and for that brief period I would be the girl he had married, the girl – I believed – he had become fond of.

  I was still in our cosy sitting room when Konstantin returned. Smile, I ordered myself as I heard his unmistakably masterful footsteps in the corridor. Smile and pretend that everything’s all right.

  I had a speech prepared but the sight of him temporarily robbed me of words. He was in full-dress uniform – and he looked grim. “I have been to see the Tsar,” he told me.

  “I’m sorry about this morning Konstantin,” I said, recovering. “Pregnant women get irrational and …”

  Wait! What was that he’d said? He’d been to see the Tsar?

  “I didn’t understand what was upsetting you at first,” Konstantin continued, “but when I realized, I knew what I had to do.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You need me here. I’ve asked His Majesty to excuse me from the Progress.”

  “And he said yes?” I gasped.

  Konstantin nodded gravely, as if he were acknowledging a death in the family. How miserable he must have been feeling! For three hundred years the Mayakovskys had served the Crown, and never once in all that time had one of them questioned or tried to avoid a direct order from the Tsar. And now Konstantin had – because I’d been weak. I thought my heart would break.

  “It’s my place to feel guilty, not yours,” my husband said sternly. “I could have saved you a great deal of suffering if only I’d been a little more thoughtful. I should have known where my duty lay long ago.”

  But what about his duty to the Tsar? And what if Nicholas was so angry that he banished Konstantin from his favour? If my husband wasn’t allowed to serve his monarch, he would die.

  “What exactly did the Tsar say to you?” I asked urgently. “How did he behave?”

  A new wave of misery swept over Konstantin’s face as he relived the interview, and then, miracle of miracles, a smile came to his lips, his wolf-hunt smile, as if in trying to find the right words for me he had amused himself. What a fighter that man was!

  “I can’t remember his exact words,” Konstantin lied. “Let’s just say he was gracious – but displeased.”<
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  I ran across the room, threw my arms around his neck and buried my head in his chest. “Do you hate me?” I sobbed. “Do you hate me for what I’ve made you do?”

  Konstantin stroked my hair. “Of course not, little princess.”

  “But you’ll miss the Progress, and I know how much you wanted—”

  “Hush now,” Konstantin said soothingly. “The Progress will be a great spectacle, but in this very house something even more wonderful is going to happen. A baby will be born – a baby who will bear my name. I want to be there when it happens.”

  May came, and the ice floes from Lake Ladoga sailed gracefully through Petersburg on their way to the sea. The trees were in bud, the birds were building their nests. All of nature seemed to be following its proper timetable – except for my baby. Though it was now a huge lump in my stomach, though it had caused my feet, ankles, hands and face to swell, and even my vision to become blurred, it refused to come out.

  My husband was in constant attendance, as were the French doctor and the two Russian ones who had been brought in to assist him. They fussed over me and checked the baby’s heartbeat. They held whispered conversations in corners. It was all to no avail. The baby was not ready to face the world yet, and that was that.

  My wilful child gave in to nature suddenly, in the middle of May. The contractions, once they came, were rapid and painful.

  “It eez going to be a very queek birth,” the French doctor said as I bit down on the rope.

  His Russian colleagues agreed. “Perhaps we should give her chloroform.”

  I shook my head violently.

  “It eez perfectly normal,” the Frenchman assured me. “Queen Victoria ’erself took it at two of her confinements.”

  My body was burning up, needles of pain were being driven into me from all sides, but I desired no drug. I wanted to see my baby as soon as possible – to find out the awful truth. With all my remaining strength, I wrenched the cord from my mouth. “Bugger Queen Victoria!” I screamed.

  The French doctor gasped, as if scandalized. “Madam, I am not suggesting it merely because it eez fashionable,” he said, in a maddeningly logical tone. “What we are talking about ’ere …” He looked between my legs, and his voice changed. “Poosh,” he urged me. “Poosh!”

  I ‘pooshed’ with all my might. Each muscular contraction set my lungs on fire, and I gulped in the new air like I was drowning.

  “Poosh ’arder!” the French doctor said. “’arder!”

  I saw the head, round and pink, and could not believe that it had ever been inside me. I saw the trunk, looking so small, so insubstantial for such a large skull. And finally, as the Frenchman moved backwards, I could see the legs.

  “Is it all right?” I asked. “Is my baby all right?”

  And then I blacked out.

  I was alive, I was sure I was alive, yet I was floating in a sea of darkness. As a first, cautious experiment, I flexed the muscles in my hand. They seemed to be performing satisfactorily. A second step. I moved my arm and felt the sheets caress my knuckles. I placed my hand on my leg – both registered the pressure. I appeared to be bodily intact.

  My eyelids were glued together, but I forced them open and saw a blurry ceiling. Not infinite space, then. Not black nothingness.

  The ceiling became sharper. I could make out the carvings. And more – I recognized them. The ceiling of my bedroom. Therefore, I was lying in my bed, the bed where, sometime in the past – who knew when – I’d given birth to my baby.

  I turned my head painfully to one side and saw Konstantin, my marvellous husband, holding the baby in his arms! A warmness – a deep love I’d never known before – welled up in me.

  Yet the small voice in my head would still not be silent. “Look at the baby,” it whispered. “Is there anything wrong with it?”

  The infant was wrapped in the white lace shawl which had once held Konstantin, and his father before him. Its head was as red and as wrinkled as a blood orange, but that’s how new-born babies are, and it was beautiful to me.

  The eyes! I gazed at the eyes, looking for the signs of slowness which mark the in-bred village idiot. They were as clear and understanding as any eyes could be expected to be after the adventure of ejection into a strange, incomprehensible world.

  “It’s a boy,” Konstantin said. “We’ll call him Nicholas after my father and in honour of the Tsar.”

  Just as if it were his own child! My love filled the room, encompassing both Konstantin and the baby in a blanket of devotion, drawing them closer to me. Whatever the circumstances of the baby’s conception, however unusual the nature of my marriage, we belonged together. We were a family – a little universe of three.

  I would have thought it impossible that anything could destroy my happiness at that moment, that anything could douse the flames burning inside me. But Konstantin knew of something which could. And he, my kind loving husband, who would have suffered agonies himself rather than see me receive the slightest hurt, had no choice but to deliver the blow.

  “You must try to be brave, Anna,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked fearfully. “What’s the matter with Nicky?”

  “The doctors say that nothing appears to be wrong. All the muscles are perfectly functional – but a message from the brain doesn’t seem to be getting through.”

  “Tell me!” I screamed. “For God’s sake, tell me!”

  Konstantin drew back the shawl and revealed the child’s legs. They looked wonderful, those perfectly formed, chubby little limbs. My husband took a fold of flesh between his thumb and forefinger and gently twisted. When he released his grip, I could see a red mark on the soft, new skin.

  “You understand?” Konstantin asked.

  I understood. Oh God, I understood. What Konstantin had done wouldn’t have hurt any infant, but it would have surprised it. It would have made the child squirm or kick and cry out. My baby had shown no reaction at all. My baby could feel nothing – nothing – in his legs.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Time can’t be measured only by the clock and the calendar. A few minutes spent nervously waiting for a contact on a dark street corner can seem like a day. An hour’s lovemaking is often over in a second. And the first few months of my little son’s life were the longest I can ever remember.

  How happy he made me in some ways, this bright, cheerful child who I held close to me, whose tiny heart beat against my cheek. But what sadness I felt at the same time, knowing that if he did not start to move his perfect little legs soon, they’d wither away until they were nothing but dried-up stalks.

  Konstantin was driven to distraction. A succession of doctors from Petersburg and Moscow – and later Prague and Budapest – paraded through the palace, examined young Nicky, and then shook their eminent heads.

  “There looks to be nothing physically wrong with the child.”

  “Then why can’t he move his legs?”

  “Perhaps a brain malfunction. It may correct itself soon.”

  “Or it may never correct itself?”

  “That is a possibility we must be prepared for.”

  After the doctors came the faith healers and divines, holy men who were said to have performed miracles in some obscure corner of the Empire.

  “Put your faith in God,” said a wandering seer from the Ukraine. “In time, God will cure him.”

  “We must wait until there is a full moon,” explained a turbaned Easterner. “Then, precisely at midnight, we must kill a frog and while its legs are still twitching, we must cut them off and place them on your son’s.”

  And Konstantin, the most logical, the most rational of men, submitted to the ritual – because he was utterly desperate.

  Konstantin spent hours by the crib, the baby’s ankles in his big strong hands, moving the legs up and down as if Nicky were pedalling a bicycle, and all the time crooning in a soft, pleading voice, “Come on Nicky. You can do it.”

  The baby would look at him and
gurgle, but without the help of his adoring father, the legs would not move.

  The time I could spare from my baby, I gave willingly to the Revolution. Work among the urban poor was a new life to me, and for it I assumed a new persona.

  When I left the palace it was as Princess Anna, dressed in all the finery that Konstantin had lavished on me, but near the Litovsky Barracks, I’d check quickly over my shoulder and disappear down an alley which led to the back door of the bakery. There, amid the steam and the flour dust, I changed into a muhzik dress, headscarf and felt valenki and became Lyudmila, one of the dispossessed.

  The bakers were Bolshevik sympathizers, but aside from knowing they were helping the cause, they were kept in ignorance of what I was doing. They were not even sure whether I was a lady pretending to be a peasant, or a peasant pretending to be a lady. And neither was I.

  The meetings of the Narva Mill Bolshevik Cell were held in a series of dingy rooms in dilapidated boarding houses on the edge of the industrial district. Aside from Sasha and myself, there were four other members of the cell – an old man with grizzled grey hair whose job it was to sweep up at the mill, two young mechanics and a woman loom operator. For the first few months, the cell seemed to do nothing but talk about the golden future which lay ahead, and the treacheries of the Mensheviks who were attempting to undermine it. Talk, talk, talk – I thought we would be still be talking on our way to our graves.

  And then the miners in the Lena gold field changed everything.

  The miners put in a modest pay claim – and they’d have settled for less – but the management refused to negotiate. During the demonstration which followed, the police opened fire and scores of the workers were killed. News of the massacre spread rapidly round Russia.

  “They’ll never listen to us,” workers whispered to each other. “If we want something, we have to take it.”