Anastasia and Her Sisters (30 page)

My thoughts are scrambled; I can’t think what to say. I’ve been reading her secret notebook for years, since she first fell in love with Lieutenant Voronov. In that time, as I’ve grown up
and changed, I’ve watched my oldest sister also change—from a beautiful, talented, carefree young girl into a disappointed woman filled with bitter disillusionment.

“I don’t know,” I mumble. “Why did you?”

Olga shrugs. “I’m not sure. I suppose I wanted you to share something of my
real
life. To show you that things are not quite so perfectly ordered as Mother and Father always wanted us to believe.”

Tatiana is looking from one to the other of us like someone in shock. “What on earth are you two talking about?
What
secret notebook?”

“Just some notes I made,” Olga explains, “besides our regular diaries that anyone could read, although I don’t know who would want to, they’re always so dull. This was just for me to read. But Nastya found them, and when I realized she was reading them, I decided that maybe, since she’s the youngest, she might have more choices in her life than I did, or you, or even Mashka. But as it turns out, none of us have any choices at all.”

“Don’t say that, Olya!” Tatiana orders. “You must not say such a thing! We must have faith that everything will turn out as it should. Our fate is in the hands of a gracious God!”

Olga shakes her head and says nothing.

The soldiers glare at us. “Speak only Russian!” growls the short one.

CHAPTER 24

The House of Special Purpose

EKATERINBURG, JUNE 1918

I
t is still raining when the four carriages draw up in front of a large white house surrounded by a high wooden fence with a sentry stationed every few paces. We clamber out of the carriages and rush up the stairs. Alexei and Nagorny follow from the second carriage, but the other two carriages do not arrive. What happened to the others—General Tatischev, Countess Hendrikova, and Trina Schneider? Dr. Derevenko, Baroness Buxhoeveden, Sydney Gibbes? And where is Gilliard?

There is no time to think about that now. We are caught up in the sweet joy of being a reunited family, even in the reality of our new prison. The two-story house is on a hillside in the middle of the city. The first floor has been made into guardrooms, and the second floor converted into a series of cells: the doors to the rooms taken off, and the windows nailed
shut and then whitewashed so that we can’t open them or look out. It belongs to a merchant named Ipatiev, but they’ve named it the House of Special Purpose.

There are five rooms and twelve people to share them—OTMA in one room and Mama, Papa, and Alexei in another, the rest finding beds in other rooms. All of our baggage has been taken away and put into a room on the first floor—“for safekeeping,” they tell us, grinning. We can guess what that means. Marie has hung a sheet over the doorway to our room.

Three men carrying revolvers lounge outside the rooms and watch us. These men are terrible human beings. They will not allow us even to use the lavatory without one of them following us. They have made crude drawings on the walls and smirk and tell us to be sure to look at them. It is too embarrassing for words.

In charge of our prison is a swine named Alexander Avadeyev.

“Ah, so these are the daughters of Nicholas the Blood-Drinker!” he roared when we arrived. It seems that he is always drunk. Or maybe he is always obnoxious.

We have been trying to find out what has happened to our friends and relatives. Most of the news we get is very, very bad: Mama’s sister, our aunt Ella, was imprisoned in Perm, not far from Ekaterinburg, and so was Papa’s brother, Uncle Misha. Two of his uncles and several cousins are being held in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. In the midst of this wretchedness is a single bright spot: our beloved Aunt Olga has a baby boy and is managing to survive—very happily, she wrote—somewhere in Crimea.

Now Kharitonov must take whatever food is sent over from a community kitchen and prepare our meals from it. We have tea and black bread for breakfast, and that seems to suit Papa. Occasionally Kharitonov performs miracles and makes
pirozhki
, delicious dumplings, stretching a little meat with potatoes and vegetables. Sometimes he does so well with what little he has that the soldiers help themselves to it first, and we get whatever is left. Avadeyev is by far the worst of them. He dips his filthy hands into our food, deliberately drips it on Papa, and says, “You’ve had enough, blood-sucker.”

But we are grateful for small blessings. Alexei and the fourteen-year-old kitchen helper, Lenka, play checkers and card games when Lenka has a little free time. Alexei is teaching him to play the balalaika, although he had to leave all but one behind at Tobolsk, and the one he brought is now missing a string.

One bleak day Kharitonov asks my sisters and me if we would like to learn to make bread. It turns out to be quite interesting—measuring the flour, mixing the yeast and water, and then the magic of watching the dough rise, and the delightful feel of sinking one’s fingers deep into the dough and kneading it. Even the horrible guards behave more like human beings when the odor of baking bread wafts from the oven, and they beg for a piece of it before it has a chance to cool.

We wash our own clothes, a chore that at least gives us something useful to do, but where to put our underthings to dry that the brutish guards won’t make obscene remarks about them? Mama says we must always wear our double brassieres
and corsets with the jewels stitched inside, or they will be found—the guards go through everything. The garments are very heavy, and the weather is growing hotter every day.

Avadeyev has hired a couple of young girls from town to scrub the floors, which are always a mess from the guards tracking in muck and mud on their boots. It would not occur to them to take them off and leave them at the door, or at least to clean them off before they come upstairs. What pigs!

The girls, Elizaveta and Irina, were shy around us at first, but when we ask about their families they become eagerly talkative. Elizaveta’s brother is a guard at the prison, and she lets it slip that three of those who traveled with us—General Tatischev, Countess Hendrikova, and Trina Schneider—are now prisoners there. We are shocked to hear this, but we dare not ask questions, because the guard we despise most is waving his revolver around and Avadeyev appears to be drunk, as usual.

When there is a chance, I whisper to Elizaveta, “What about the others?”

“Don’t they tell you anything?” She shrugs. “I guess it doesn’t hurt to tell you that—unless I get caught.” She jerks her head toward the guards. “They’re living in the railroad car,” she whispers.

The railroad car? We hope for more information, but it will have to wait. The guards are singing some filthy song to shock us. Elizaveta shouts something crude to the swinish guards, and they shout back and bray with laughter.

And so it goes. The guards enjoy taunting us and sneering at Papa and thinking of obscene things to say in front of us and Mama, to see if they can get us to react. Nagorny did not
disguise his loathing for them, and now it has come to a very bad end. My brother had a gold chain hanging near his bed with some holy medals attached to it, and one of the worst of the guards decided to take it. “What does a filthy rich boy like you need with another gold chain?” he snarled, and that was too much for Nagorny.

“You will not take it,” Nagorny told the man. “It is not yours to take.”

“I’ll take what I damn well please,” the guard growled.

Nagorny seized him by both arms. “And I said you will not.”

“Arrest him!” the guard shouted, and the other guards stepped forward and forced Nagorny down the stairs.

We have not seen him since, and Alexei cannot stop crying. Papa tries to reassure him that Nagorny will surely be released, but Olga says under her breath, “They’ll shoot him.”

I hope Olga is wrong, but I’m afraid she is right. Now, every morning when we are allowed a half hour of exercise behind the house in the bleak space they call a garden, it’s Papa who carries Alexei down the stairs and puts him in a chair, where he watches with big, sad eyes as we walk back and forth, back and forth, until the thirty minutes are up. His great pleasure is when Lenka comes to visit and plays checkers with him.

On my seventeenth birthday I find
The Adventures of Anastasia Mouse
and kiss the pictures Gleb drew for me a year ago. When I remember the conversations we once had, I am comforted. I remember the promise we made, “now and always,” and find joy in knowing that he loves me and I love him. But that joy vanishes like smoke when inevitably the
reality closes in around me and I know that I will never see him again. When I’m frightened—that’s most of the time now—I retreat to happy memories and try not to
think
.

Then Papa receives a letter—he’s not sure who wrote it—asking which windows are ours, how many armed guards there are and where they’re posted, and advising us to be ready at a moment’s notice. Papa replies with the information, along with where the guns are mounted and how many men are guarding us. Mama believes that Father Grigory’s son-in-law, or possibly someone else, has organized a rescue, and our hopes are raised—everyone’s but Olga’s.

Days pass, nothing happens, and our hopes fade one more time. Having no news of any kind of the outside world makes the unknowing even worse.

Our only source of information is Elizaveta, who comes once a week to mop the floors and occasionally passes on some scrap of news. She tells us that Dr. Derevenko, Gibbes, and Gilliard, along with Sophie Buxhoeveden, who have been living in the fourth-class train carriage, were ordered to leave Ekaterinburg. She thinks they returned to Tobolsk.

Suddenly the drunken, loutish Avadeyev is gone and his drunken, brutish guards with him, replaced by a new group. We’re not sure who these men are. Their leader is Yakov Yurovsky. He is not drunk, his behavior is quite proper, but Papa doesn’t like him at all. “This is a specimen lacking a heart,” Papa says. He thinks they’re members of Cheka, the secret police.

Marie says, “When we are rescued—” and Olga interrupts, “We are not going to be rescued, Mashka.”

“Don’t say that, Olya!” Tatiana orders. She’s twenty-one now, still OTMA’s bossy “Governess.”

Marie bursts into tears, and then we’re all crying.

•  •  •

I have finished my prayers and am falling asleep when someone taps on the doorframe. I hear Dr. Botkin’s voice on the other side of the sheet Marie hung there. “Get up and dress quickly.”

“Maybe we’re being taken somewhere,” Tatiana guesses.

I put on my corset and the double brassiere under a dress and jacket with jewels hidden inside. At the last moment I pick up the piece of green sea glass that Gleb once gave me and drop it into my pocket. Jimmy barks, and I pick him up.

Papa is already in the hallway. He’s carrying Alexei, still half asleep and clinging to Papa’s neck. Papa looks haggard, his kind eyes tired and sad. Mama, her expression grave, mouth set in a severe line, leans on Anna Demidova’s arm. The maid carries a pillow with jewels stuffed deep inside. Trupp and Kharitonov appear, nervously smoothing their hair and adjusting their jackets. Dr. Botkin’s glasses glitter in the lamplight.

“Where’s Lenka?” Alexei asks sleepily.

“Yurovsky sent him this morning to visit an uncle in the country,” Kharitonov explains.

“But if we go without him?”

“Don’t worry,” the chef assures Alexei. “They tell me he’ll be back tomorrow.”

Papa looks us over and nods. “Come, then,” he says.

Marie clutches my hand, and we follow our father down the stairs to whatever fate awaits us.

Epilogue

ANASTASIA’S FATE

O
n July 17, 1918, Anastasia’s voice was silenced forever.

Anastasia and her family, their loyal friends, and the family dogs were ushered into a small room on the ground floor and told to wait. When Nicholas asked for chairs for Alexandra and Alexei, Yurovsky called for chairs to be brought, and the three sat down, with the others standing behind them, arranged as though they were posing for a photograph. Moments later Yurovsky returned with the Cheka squad, a dozen soldiers armed with revolvers. The commandant offered a short statement:

“Your relatives have tried to save you. They have failed, and we must now shoot you.”

The soldiers began to fire. Nicholas was killed almost at once, and so were Alexandra and Alexei, but Anastasia and her
sisters in their jewel-stuffed corsets and clothing that acted as bulletproof vests were not so easy to kill. The soldiers fired round after round until, at last, all were dead. Anastasia was the last to die.

The bodies, wrapped in sheets, were carried off in a truck, dismembered, burned, and soaked in acid—a process that took three days—and the remains were hastily buried in a shallow grave in the forest. The murderers were convinced that they had gotten rid of all traces of the Romanov family. But they were wrong.

Years later, in 1991, the bones were dug up, and DNA testing proved the identity of some of the victims. When more bones were found nearby in 2007, the rest of the victims were identified. Eighty years to the day after the murders, a funeral was held and the remains reburied at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, where Romanov tsars have been buried since ancient times. Bells tolled and a nineteen-gun salute rang out.

•  •  •

On the same day that the tsar and his family were murdered in Ekaterinburg, the tsarina’s sister Ella and several uncles and cousins were thrown into a mine shaft and grenades tossed in after them. The tsar’s brother, Mikhail Alexandrovich, had been shot a few months earlier. Several other Romanov uncles and cousins were executed by firing squad the following January.

General Tatischev, Countess Hendrikova, and Trina Schneider, who had traveled from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg but then were removed from the train and imprisoned with Prince Dolgorukov, were all shot in September 1918.