Anastasia and Her Sisters (26 page)

Mama smiled stiffly. “Yes, Colonel, if you please—a spring mattress for Nikolai Alexandrovich and myself, and a grand piano for my daughters.”

Kobylinsky blinked a couple of times and bowed. “Of course, madame.”

That same day both were delivered. The mattress gained approval, but the piano was horribly out of tune. A piano tuner was promised.

It was decided that OTMA should have the large corner room next to our parents’ bedroom. Both rooms faced the main street, which used to be called Tsarskaia, “Street of the Tsar,” but the signs had been changed to read:
FREEDOM STREET
. Alexei’s room was across from ours, Nagorny’s next to it. Monsieur Gilliard; Mama’s maid, Anna Demidova; and Papa’s valet, Trupp, were given rooms downstairs near the dining room and pantry. The kitchen was a small, separate building behind the house.

Grumbling soldiers unloaded our luggage and crates and boxes from the steamer and carted them to the mansion. Mama, seated in her wheelchair, directed where each item should go. Tatiana took charge of organizing our room. We arranged and rearranged the furniture, hanging favorite pictures and icons on the walls, stopping now and then to visit our brother and our parents to see how they were progressing. That night we
fell, exhausted, onto a pile of fur coats and blankets on the floor and slept.

After breakfast the next morning we crossed Freedom Street—no one had said that wasn’t permitted—to see how the rest of our household had settled in at the fish merchant’s house. It turned out that the fish merchant had not lived there for some time, and the house had been used as a courthouse. Kobylinsky had ordered the courtroom on the main floor to be divided into cubicles. Dr. Botkin, Gleb, and Tatiana were assigned rooms on the ground floor, but Trina Schneider, Countess Hendrikova, and Papa’s two gentlemen, General Tatischev and Prince Dolgorukov, were crowded into the tiny cubicles upstairs.

Immediately the soldiers shouted objections that the prisoners weren’t staying in their prison but were roaming around freely. “You are prisoners of the state, not privileged guests! You will obey rules!” snarled the loutish lieutenant in charge of the guards, and we were herded back to the mansion.

This was the rule:
Prisoners are forbidden to leave the Governor’s Mansion except to attend a private Mass early Sunday mornings at the nearby church
.

Although we weren’t allowed to leave our enclosure, our friends in the fish merchant’s house across the street were at first permitted to cross the street to visit us. I was excited when Gleb and his sister came with their father, even though our conversation was limited to “Lovely weather, isn’t it, Gleb Evgenievich?” and “Indeed it is, Anastasia Nikolaevna, although it does seem quite warm.”

But even that one-sided liberty didn’t last. A new rule was imposed:
Only approved people may enter the Governor’s Mansion
. Dr.
Botkin would continue to make daily visits to ensure the health of the prisoners—but those approved did not include Gleb and Tatiana Botkin or Dr. Derevenko’s son, who would have been a fine companion for Alexei.

There was no use complaining to Colonel Kobylinsky. He could do nothing. Someone else was giving the orders—who, I didn’t know. When I learned about the new restriction, it was one of the worst days since our captivity had begun six months earlier. I tried—and completely failed—to hide my disappointment.

“Perhaps it will change,” Papa suggested, but I knew it would not.

Citizens of Tobolsk began to gather outside, curious to see the tsar and his family. Within days Kobylinsky had a tall wooden fence erected around the mansion, to be certain that the citizens had no contact with the prisoners. Dr. Botkin convinced Kobylinsky that the prisoners needed a place to exercise for at least an hour a day, and the colonel ordered a small yard near the kitchen enclosed for us. However, there would be no sitting out on the small second-floor balconies. We were forbidden to open even a single window as a relief from the suffocating August heat, until Dr. Botkin again insisted that it was a matter of ensuring the health of the prisoners. One by one, even the smallest freedoms were taken away.

I had hoped our guards would be different from the soldiers who had taken such pleasure in tormenting us at Tsarskoe Selo, but most were not. Many of the soldiers were sullen and disrespectful, demanding that prisoners be treated like criminals who should get what they deserved.

Luckily for us, there were some who didn’t share those feelings. Several soldiers grew fond of Alexei and invited him and Papa to the guardhouse to play checkers. One was a young soldier named Anton Ivanovich, a homely boy with an eye that turned inward and a nose that dripped constantly. Anton was assigned to the guardhouse with various duties. Sometimes he delivered mail or brought messages, and sometimes he was the one to unlock the service door to let us out to the yard for exercise and to lock the door again when our time was up and we’d been ordered back inside.

If anybody could make friends with these lonely men and boys who were far from home, it was Marie. She learned their names and the names of their mothers and wives and children. They told her about their lives before the fighting began. Anton Ivanovich confided that he struggled to send money to his widowed mother and crippled sister. Marie soon got in the habit of giving him little gifts now and then.

“Naturally he’s in love with you, Mashka,” I teased. “And maybe you’re in love with him as well.”

“Don’t be silly, Nastya,” Marie scolded. “I try to help him because he’s kind to Alexei. But promise me you’ll say nothing to Tanya, because she’ll try to make me stop.”

I promised.

The townspeople themselves were hospitable folk. Local farmers, merchants, and housewives sent fresh butter, eggs, sausages, and sugar, and nuns brought vegetables from the convent garden—a delicious change from the shortages everyone was suffering in Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo. Whatever came to us, Kharitonov and his kitchen helpers managed to transform into
a good meal. I watched from our upstairs window as men and women passed below, occasionally glancing up and removing their caps as a sign of respect, some even making the sign of the cross. If they noticed Mama sitting by her window, they bowed to her. To the people of Tobolsk, Papa was still the tsar, Mama was the tsaritsa, and Alexei the tsarevich. I suppose that meant my sisters and I were still grand duchesses, but I didn’t much care about that anymore.

“We must have patience,” Papa urged almost daily. “Thanks be to God that we are alive and together.”

He believed that our friends and Romanov relatives were secretly making plans to rescue us. Alexei was convinced that one of these nights we’d be awakened by loyal Russians who had come to save us—maybe not to go home to Tsarskoe Selo or to Livadia, but to a place where we would be welcome. In time the Russian people would understand that Papa was still their
Batiushka
, and they would rise up and demand that he be recognized again as the Tsar of All the Russias.

“It might not be exactly as it was before, but it will be
very good
,” Alexei said firmly. “I am absolutely sure of it.”

“Absolutely positively?” I teased.

“Absolutely positively and no doubt whatsoever!” he insisted passionately.

•  •  •

It was not easy, OTMA living in such close quarters, four of us and our camp beds and clothes and pictures and books all in one room. I thought I knew exactly where Olga’s
Advanced Mathematics
notebook was hidden—in a box under her bed, although possibly wearing a new disguise. But Olga had no
privacy for writing, and I had almost no chance to see what she’d written, if she had written anything.

Then one day when everyone else had gone out into the small fenced yard to play at an improvised croquet set and I had volunteered to run back to Mama’s room to fetch her shawl, I seized the chance to look for the notebook, and I found it.

How do they do it? I practice on a piano that is laughably out of tune and try to lose myself in the music, in order not to think. Meanwhile, Mashka charms the soldiers with her questions about their families, Tanya plagues us constantly to keep our room neat, Papa and Lyosha play checkers with the soldiers, and Mama writes letter after letter to Anya, to Sophie Buxhoeveden, to Countess Benckendorff, to Lili. And poor Nastya! She appears to be suffering from lovesickness, but at least she has stopped making her usual annoying jokes.

I ignored the “annoying jokes” part, but “suffering from lovesickness”? Had she noticed what I had tried so hard to conceal?

Olga had written more, but there was no time to read it. They were calling to me from the yard, and I stuffed the notebook back in the box under her bed and ran downstairs. Then I remembered that I had forgotten to fetch Mama’s shawl.

CHAPTER 21

Making the Best of Things

TOBOLSK, AUTUMN 1917

T
he single best thing that happened last summer was Gleb’s promised surprise. He was writing a story about a twelve-year-old bear named Mishka Toptiginsky who was trying to free the imprisoned tsar of Mishkoslavia and restore him to his throne. Gleb illustrated the tale with watercolor paintings. All the characters were animals: The guards were monkeys, but there were also dogs, cats, pigs—all perfectly pictured in uniform—and a cigar-smoking rabbit-mayor of the city.

Since Dr. Botkin’s medical bag was routinely searched, he smuggled Gleb’s story to Alexei, page by page, in his boot. The arrival of the latest pages became the highlight of our day, and we read and reread the latest installment and examined every detail of the exquisite watercolors. Alexei adored it, of course,
because it was especially for him. I loved it because it was my only contact with Gleb.

The hot, dusty summer ended, and the September weather was actually quite pleasant. Alexei had not been sick for some time. The mansion was crowded but fairly comfortable. Kharitonov and the other servants made sure that we followed the same schedule we always had. We were making the best of things, as Papa said we must.

And the single best thing that happened this autumn was the unexpected arrival of Mr. Gibbes. After we’d left for Siberia, he was finally permitted to collect his things from the palace, and he set out on the long journey by train and boat for Tobolsk. Now here he was, sitting with us in the governor’s mansion, drinking tea and eating little sugar cakes sent by the convent nuns, telling us only the amusing stories of all that had happened since we’d last seen him. The other stories—the not-so-amusing ones—could wait until later, he said.

We talked until dinnertime, chatting in English because Gibbes’s Russian was still shaky. With our two tutors here, Dr. Botkin and Mama’s and Papa’s friends, for short periods our life was a little like it once was.

“The next time Colonel Kobylinsky inquires if we need something,” Tatiana suggested, “Nastya should ask if he could provide a stuffed aurochs, one of those long-horned wild oxen that used to scare us in Bialowieza. Maybe one for each of us, and we could pretend that we’re in the Polish hunting lodge we used to complain about, instead of a prison in Siberia.”

We were laughing so much—even Olga!—that two of the guards stomped into our sitting room, demanded to know
what we were laughing at, and ordered us to speak Russian.

As long as Colonel Kobylinsky was in charge, we felt reasonably safe, but at the end of September that changed. Two civilian commissars, Pankratov and Nikolsky, arrived. These government officials had authority over us, and over the colonel, too. Pankratov was politely formal and seemed, if not to like us, at least not to despise us. Nikolsky was just the opposite—bad-tempered and ill-mannered. Whenever there was a chance to be insulting or mean, he seized it.

Papa was starved for news of what was happening in Petrograd and Moscow and the rest of the world outside Russia, and he asked several times if he might receive newspapers. Pankratov promised to see that newspapers would be brought, but none were, except the local paper, which had hardly anything in it except items about events in Tobolsk. Papa couldn’t even find any news of what was happening in the war with Germany. He clutched at stray wisps of rumor. Was Russia winning or losing? He didn’t know.

Nikolsky took pleasure in telling Papa that Prime Minister Kerensky, whom Papa had admired and trusted, had been forced out by the Bolsheviks, the militant group that had opposed the Provisional Government and hated our family. The Bolsheviks had taken over and were running everything. Kerensky had left Petrograd and gone into hiding. We wished we knew where he had gone, and if he was somehow plotting to return. There was no point in asking Pankratov or Nikolsky, and Colonel Kobylinsky didn’t seem to know any more than Papa did.

We heard that a man named Lenin had enormous sway over events, but Papa dismissed that as baseless rumor—he
thought that Lenin, and another man, Leon Trotsky, were simply German agents sent to disrupt the army. When Nikolsky told Papa that those two were now in power and running the government, he refused to believe it.

My father was deeply distressed. Our beloved country was clearly going from bad to worse. He regretted that he’d abdicated. “I believed I was doing what was best for Russia,” he said sadly. “And in fact I have done her an ill turn.”

Mama tried to soothe him, assuring him he had done all he could, but he could not be comforted. He was weeping, and I had hardly ever in my life seen my father cry.

•  •  •

We had classes every morning with our tutors, just as if we were living in Tsarskoe Selo. Every afternoon we walked back and forth, back and forth, in our little enclosure for an hour, although for Papa that was not nearly enough physical activity. After dinner a priest came from the nearby church we were no longer allowed to attend and said our evening prayers with us. We sewed and knitted and listened as Papa read aloud. The days grew shorter and the weather colder. Petrograd felt like a million miles away and Tsarskoe Selo existed only in a dream.