Anastasia's Secret (5 page)

C
HAPTER
6

We departed for the trip to Moscow a week later to ask God’s blessing on the war and protection for our soldiers. Our train arrived on August 17, at a crowded and jubilant Moscow station. We made our way slowly in a file of carriages through the streets toward the Kremlin. All the bells of all the four hundred and fifty churches pealed out, but they were not loud enough to drown out the raucous cheers of the people who swarmed the streets, hung out of windows, and surged onto balconies—some even perched on low rooftops. I had never heard so many voices singing “God Save the Tsar,” our national anthem. Mama’s cheeks were pink with happiness. Olga and Tatiana tried hard to look very dignified. Alexei stood straight and tall, despite the fact that his ankle was hurting him, and Mashka and I grinned like fools. For a brief moment, it seemed that all the bad things I’d heard or that had been hinted at had evaporated with the morning mist.

At the Iberian Gate, Papa got out of the carriage and went into the chapel, as is the custom—or was at any rate—to kiss the icon of the Virgin of Iberia. When he returned, we proceeded through the gate into the Red Square. I remember the look on his face as if it had all happened just yesterday. It’s a look I have seen many times since, but have never managed to capture in a photograph. He did not look proud or triumphant. He seemed overcome with sorrow and yet at the same time content, listening to the voices of his people glorifying his name. I wonder if he had some premonition of what was to come. Perhaps he was thinking of Alyosha, who weakened visibly throughout the day, and who awoke the next morning in such pain that he could not walk.

The next morning I went to see Alexei in his room. “Are you really unwell, Alyosha?” I asked. All our teasing and tormenting ceased when he had one of his attacks.

“It’s my ankle. It hurts so terribly. I’m not as bad as I’ve been, but look.” He lifted the covers and I saw his ankle, swollen and bruised, misshapen. I wanted to touch it and kiss it and try to make it better, but even the lightest touch was agony to him. “I don’t want to miss the blessing. It’s terribly important,” he said.

When Alyosha was ill, his eyes looked much older than his years, as if all the pain he had suffered in his young life had lodged there. He was only eleven, yet he had had a lifetime of agony. “As long as you’re not moaning or can’t sit up, one of Papa’s Cossacks can carry you. You won’t miss it,” I assured him, stroking a stray hair out of his eyes.

Mama came in, already dressed in her caftan with the heavy embroidery in gold thread and wearing her imperial crown. If it wasn’t for the anxious expression in her eyes, she would have looked like an icon herself. “Baby, are you too ill to come?”

“No, Mama. I must go. Only I cannot walk.”

“Perhaps you should stay here and rest.”

“No, Mama, I am going. I am the tsarevich. I must be there.”

I had shrunk away from Alyosha’s bed while my mother was with him. When he was ill, she seemed not even to see me. This occasion was no different, until Papa came in.

“How’s your little brother?” Papa asked me quietly.

“He’s in pain, but he will come. He can’t walk, though.”

Papa nodded, then walked forward and took Mama’s hand. “I’ll send Nagorny in to help you dress in your uniform. You’ll be carried in to the service.”

“I’m sorry, Papa,” Alyosha said, looking down.

“It can’t be helped.” Papa put his hand on Alyosha’s head, then bent down and kissed him, his ornamental sword clanking against the iron bedframe. I could tell by his expression that he was unhappy about Alyosha’s attack, not just because he was in pain, but because having to be carried into the very public blessing would show weakness. At times like these, I felt sorry for my brother rather than envying him all the attention and special treatment he got. What was it all worth if he couldn’t even enjoy the smallest things in life, and if at any time he could be stricken and have to spend weeks in bed?

On our last day in Moscow we took a trip out to a famous, ancient monastery outside the city, fortified and containing thirteen churches within its walls.

“Mama says if there is time we’ll visit the hermitage at Gethsemane,” Tatiana said. She always seemed to have information from Mama that the rest of us didn’t.

“Why is that so wonderful?” I asked, thinking that we’d have enough of visiting old churches and seeing long-bearded patriarchs by visiting the monastery and we’d have little need of any other religious touring.

“Don’t you know? They have real hermits there who are virtually buried alive,” Mashka said. “They live in holes in the ground and just get their food handed to them through a slit that’s not even big enough for an arm to pass through.

“And when one of them dies—which they only know by the smell, because they don’t always take the food that’s given to them—they simply seal over the slit and leave them there.”

I shivered. Who would choose such an existence? Aside from the question of bathing, I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to be away from the sunlight and air. I had a terrible fear of being imprisoned. Even the low ceilings of the basement rooms in the Alexander Palace made me start to panic if I remained down there too long. Perhaps I was spoiled by having twenty-foot-high ceilings in most of the places we lived.

I wondered if Mashka knew that what she was telling me would give me nightmares. Perhaps she did, and told me on purpose. I think I brought such things on myself with my mischievous behavior, but I never did anything that would really upset one of my sisters—except for that snowball, of course, the one with the stone in it. But as I remember, Tatiana was being rather high and mighty at the time, and I never did anything as dangerous again. Oh, well, I used to throw things at my tutors and sabotage their satchels with live toads and such. But that didn’t really hurt anyone.

Fortunately, there wasn’t time for the visit to the hermits.

We were in Moscow for less than a week, and then we returned to Tsarskoe Selo. I was glad to get back to our familiar rooms. Of all the palaces we lived in, the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe felt the most like home. Of course, Mama always made certain to have her photographs and mementos around her wherever she went, but Mashka and I—as if by mutual agreement, although we never actually discussed it—kept few belongings other than a favorite doll and some books. We made do with whatever existed in the different palaces rather than bring our possessions from place to place. I expect that would have surprised many people, who no doubt imagined us traveling around with trunks and trunks of toys and books. We did have some jewels, but they were in the charge of Mme Zanotti and worn only on state occasions, and hardly seemed to belong to us. And I must say that the playrooms in our wing of most of the palaces were stocked with just about anything we could want to amuse ourselves with—including an artificial hill for tobogganing in the Winter Palace that was even bigger than the slide in the Mountain Hall of the Alexander Palace. We often rode our bicycles around the rooms in the Alexander Palace, and it was the smallest of all our homes.

Because everything we packed for our trips was taken care of by the servants, and the household staff looked after our clothing and other belongings, it was extremely difficult to keep Sasha’s balalaika hidden. I decided it would be safer to confess something about it to Mashka. I couldn’t say that I purchased it myself, because we never had any money at all, and I wouldn’t have known how to go about it or how much to give. It had to be a gift from someone, and I settled on it having come from one of the servants whom I had heard playing it in Peterhof. People did that sort of thing for us children sometimes, although less now that we were getting older. I still remembered the old man who had come from Siberia with his tame sable. We wanted to keep it, but it was only tame for him, and when he left it behind it ran around and knocked things on the floor. I thought it was terribly funny, but we gave the creature back to the old man.

“Why would you want such a thing as a plain old balalaika when we have pianos to play here? I simply do not understand,” Mashka said after I told her and showed her the humble instrument.

“Just because it is a peasant instrument doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful!”

“Yes, I know, and you play it very well. But that is such a plain one. Not like Alexei’s.”

“What matters is the sound, not the look.” Sometimes Mashka exasperated me. She was not a snob, but every once in a while she spoke without thinking. I doubted she really had any idea of what was going on around us. “The point is, I wanted my own to play, but I want it to be a surprise to Papa and Mama. Alexei and I shall learn to play a duet. It will be something I can tease him with so he will get better when he is ill. So you mustn’t tell anyone.” It was the best I could think of at the moment.

“You’re a strange creature,” Mashka said. “But you know I won’t say a word. If they find out, though, I won’t lie.”

That was all I needed. I wasn’t sure why I felt the balalaika had to be a secret, except that if it was known I would then have to explain everything, and I didn’t want to face the teasing—even if it was good-natured—from my sisters. I realized with some shame that they might think it a wonderful opportunity to get back at me for the tricks I had played on them and the cruel things I had said about their crushes and admirers. They wouldn’t understand—or wouldn’t believe—that Sasha was simply my friend. My sisters and I didn’t really have friends except for each other, not counting the younger maids of honor, and they had court appointments that paid them to be nice to us. I wanted Sasha to be my friend alone, to like me for myself, not because he was a member of the court and it was his job.

Thoughts of the balalaika were driven out of my mind, however, by the bad news of the war. Papa came into Mama’s room, where we were all knitting and reading quietly one late August evening. His face had gone beyond pale to gray.

“Samsonov was routed at Soldau. They say we won’t know the extent of the casualties for some time.”

Samsonov was one of the generals. I didn’t know which armies he commanded, but my heart pounded against the walls of my chest. Moments passed in utter stillness, no one daring to breathe or break the silence. At last, Tatiana, the practical one, spoke. “What does this mean? Why did it happen?”

Papa dropped into a chair and passed his hand across his eyes as if he wanted to erase a vision of something horrible.

“He advanced too far too fast. But it was not his fault. We don’t have the means of supply. We are not sufficiently mobilized.”

I had been sitting with my mouth open, and when I tried to ask my question, I found that my tongue and throat were so dry I could hardly squeak out a word. Eventually I said, “Which army did he command?” wondering how much I could ask without giving away that I had any personal interest in the answers.

“The Second,” Papa replied.

Sasha’s platoon formed part of the Second army and he was in the Thirteen Corps.

“They say casualties were particularly heavy in the Two and Thirteen Corps.”

For a moment I saw white spots before my eyes and the room began to darken. Since I had never fainted before, I didn’t know that’s what was happening. Tatiana jumped up and came to me, pushing my head down between my knees. Gradually my normal vision returned. “Are you all right, Anastasie, dear?” I heard Mama’s voice at first from far away, but when I felt her cool hand on the back of my neck, I took a deep breath and sat up.

“Yes, I am fine. I don’t know what came over me.”

“It’s a shock. To all of us.” Papa stood and paced around the room. He was disturbed, I could see that. But in a way that had more to do with Germans being on his territory than about the thousands of men who had died. I think it was then that I realized how right Sasha was. Papa loved Russia, but he was separated from it by a cushion of something—his ministers and advisers perhaps. Russia was too big to fit into his mind, too big to fit into anyone’s mind, like a very, very large number, or the distance of the nearest star besides the sun from the earth.

Mama, with her long experience of tending to Alexei night and day, immediately made the leap to what I imagined in my worst nightmares. “They will need nurses to tend to the wounded. Tomorrow we shall begin our training, Olga and Tatiana and I.”

“What about us?” I asked. “What will Mashka and I do?” I pictured us sitting at home knitting socks night and day while everyone else was being really useful.

“You will visit the wounded and read to them.”

And that was all the discussion we had about it.

C
HAPTER
7

Our first casualties started streaming into the hospitals in late August, changing our daily pattern of life as it had never before been changed. Every day I dreaded that I would come upon Sasha in one of the beds next to which I sat and read, hour by hour. Not that I did not wish him out of the battle and back near me. It was more complicated than that. I was afraid of how he might have been wounded. Afraid to see him maimed, changed forever.

“I want Tatiana to read to me,” a young soldier on the point of death said as I opened a volume of Pushkin. I had heard that many times by then. The ones who were going to die especially wanted my sister Tatiana’s beautiful face to be the last thing they saw on this earth. I usually answered, “Tatiana’s assisting in an operation and cannot come. She will visit tomorrow.” Then the soldier would turn his head away and close his eyes. I don’t know whether they listened or just shut themselves off. The ones who moaned softly with pain that no one could relieve were the most difficult. I sometimes lost my place in the book, and then others around me who had been paying attention would protest, and I would have to go back and find where I had gone wrong.

It’s not that I was ugly. Nor am I now. In fact, I have been told the opposite. It’s just that Tatiana grew into such a beauty that she quite eclipsed the rest of us. Tall and willowy, with almond-shaped, gray green eyes and a perfect nose, a mouth with lips not too full but, as I once overheard one of the soldiers say, begging to be kissed. I am shorter and a little on the plump side compared to my sisters, and my hair persists in kinking into unruly curls. I’m just one of the grand duchesses, not usually singled out for any kind of comment. Even Mama, who makes an outward show of treating us all the same, scolds me for not being as graceful as Olga and Tatiana, or as sweet tempered as Mashka.

Mashka and I didn’t have to nurse, only read and comfort the men, as Mama said. That was bad enough. Some of the men hardly looked wounded, the ones in the convalescent ward who had been mended quickly and were destined to return to the front. But we also saw men whose faces had been half blown away by shells. Many were missing limbs or had holes in their stomachs too big to simply sew up, waiting for surgeons with enough skill to patch them together. The first few days I was there, it was all I could do not to run off and vomit. The smell, if nothing else, would have overpowered me. Burned skin has a particularly horrid scent. And then there’s the festering gangrene, more and more common as the hospitals—even the one in the Catherine Palace—ran out of supplies to keep wounds sanitary and as it took longer and longer for the wounded to be transported back from the front.

Yet how can I speak of the horrors I saw when I recall that my mother and Tatiana actually stood by while the wounds were dressed? Even Alexei once held a basin so that the pus from a wound could drain into it. Mama assisted in the operating theater as well, carrying amputated limbs and administering drops of anesthetic. When I remember her calm compassion, her ability to face the grimmest circumstances without flinching, I cannot imagine why people believe her capable of betraying Russia.

We nursed and read, and the war continued. As news came in, Papa was incensed at what was happening. “Those damned generals are more interested in their careers than in cooperating with each other!” he roared one night when we had all returned from our day in the hospital, exhausted and disheartened.

“What is wrong, Papa?” Olga asked, the only one who was likely to get an answer.

“Our telegraph lines do not go far enough to reach the First Army, which has pushed well into Prussia. And the generals fight over corps and contradict each other’s orders like children fighting over lead soldiers. If they would only keep to the plan. And I expected so much more from Nicholasha.” He was speaking of our uncle, Nicholas Nicholaevich. In all, with brothers and cousins and uncles, there were nineteen grand dukes in our family. Even I got them confused sometimes.

In those early days of the war, Papa would spend all day in his study with his advisers. Every day when we returned home for luncheon I could hear them talking and arguing. Once I saw inside briefly when a colonel threw open the door and stormed out. Papa’s office was full of trestle tables covered with huge maps. I could see flags stuck into them at different places, and my father leaned over them and studied them intently, as if they might solve a great riddle if he looked long enough. But at the end of each day he locked his study and pocketed the key. None of us—not even Mama—were allowed in to see what he was doing.

The war had an odd effect on everyone in Russia. At the beginning, wherever we went we heard blessings called out, just as in Moscow only with not quite as many people. “The Tsar and Russia! Victory over the German foe!” echoed after us as our carriage or motorcar passed. I didn’t recall hearing such jubilant, enthusiastic greetings since the time I was a very young child.

But as the war went on and people grew tired of the death and hardship, the reaction cooled. I assumed that what affected everyone else were the same feelings we were having: anxiety about the war and sadness at the terrible waste of life. I had no idea then that there could be any other cause for the unenthusiastic greetings we got when we went anywhere.

But still, despite the horrors I saw every day in the hospital, the war seemed far away and a little unreal to me. All these wounded soldiers were strangers. They did not exist in my life except as wounded or dying or recovering, and that was really everything I knew about them. I became quite good at telling who would live and who would not. It’s something in the eyes, a distance from the here and now. One poor fellow breathed his last right in the middle of a conversation with me, as if he had only just paused to think of the right word to say. I sat by his lifeless body for a long time, hoping I was mistaken, until a nurse came and pulled me away.

I thought of Sasha in every spare hour I had. I had heard nothing from him—I didn’t expect to. We didn’t say anything about writing at our last meeting in the camp. His face haunted me, and I desperately wanted to see him smile again. Every day I wondered where he was, whether he was cold or had enough to eat. I had no way of asking without admitting to knowing him. There were some platoons kept in reserve, I heard. How I prayed that his was one of them!

I kept picturing him walking into the garden, wearing his smart Semyonovsky uniform and his impish smile, waiting to tease me and tell me how they had all gotten lost and missed the action, and now were sent back to Petrograd to form part of the palace guard again. Sometimes I managed to convince myself that my pleasant daydreams were true.

That is, until I discovered with horror that they were not.

On my way into the convalescent ward in the hospital in the Catherine Palace on a beautiful September morning, I passed the orderlies carrying newly arrived wounded soldiers on stretchers, as I did every day. This seemed like a particularly badly wounded lot. Their bandages were dirty and ragged, and so many of the wounds were gangrenous that even though I had accustomed myself somewhat to the smell, I nearly fainted from it.

I had an unconscious habit of scrutinizing each face I could see, thinking
thank God
each time I realized they were all strangers, not Sasha. But that day, one of the faces caught my attention in an odd way. The left side of it was completely covered with bandages. A dark brown spot of congealed blood made it look as though a child had painted a crude eye on the white linen. The other eye was exposed, but closed. Something in the shape of the nose and the color of the skin, a trace of light freckles and delicately flared nostrils, struck a chord in me. Just as the orderlies were about to wheel the gurney down the corridor that led to the operating theater, the unbandaged eye opened, and I knew in an instant it was Sasha.

My first instinct was to simply run after the gurney, but what if I was mistaken? What if I so longed to see Sasha that even a faint resemblance brought him to mind? Yet I knew I had to find out for certain. “Sister,” I said to the nurse who was leading me away toward the ward where I was expected to go and read, “There is something I must do right away!”

She turned her weary eyes upon me as if to say,
I have no time for capricious grand duchesses
. “Yes, Anastasia Nicholaevna?”

“Please excuse me—my mother—” I couldn’t formulate any other excuse to get away in the direction of the operating theater. I had lost all capacity to think of words, conscious only of the feeling of my heart dropping into my stomach.

She frowned, but I knew she would not deny me. I hurried without running—I had been told that in the hospital only a hemorrhage was cause for running. Nonetheless, I walked fast enough to catch up with the orderlies just as they were pushing the gurney through the swinging doors—the swinging doors beyond which I was not allowed. The two men handed their cargo off to the nurses on the other side just before I reached them. I wanted to defy regulations and go in, but I had been told that to do so could endanger the lives of those undergoing surgery. The next best thing, I decided, would be to find out from the orderlies what they knew about the wounded soldier they’d just dropped off.

These orderlies were men I had become quite accustomed to seeing. They made an odd pair. One was small with a sharp chin and round eyes, a nose that was a little too long for his face, giving him the appearance of an oversized rodent. The other was as exaggeratedly large as the other was small, with a stomach that protruded so much that he had to lean forward slightly to push the gurneys and carry stretchers. I never heard them talk to each other. Once the wounded started streaming in almost everyone was too busy to utter a word that wasn’t necessary. They had already started walking purposefully back to the admitting ward to take another soldier to treatment and I had to call to them three times to get them to stop.

“Excuse me!” I said, finally raising my voice. They turned and looked at me with the same expressions of astonished impatience on their faces, despite how completely different they looked. “That boy—soldier—you just brought in. What happened to him?” I asked, breathless.

They turned their heads toward each other at the same moment and then looked back at me. The ratlike one spoke, surprising me with his rich, deep voice. “We don’t know. They come in so fast, and we take them where we are told.” He touched the hank of hair on his forehead as if doffing his hat to me, then the two of them turned to walk away again.

“Please!” I called out. “Who would know?”

“You might try downstairs at admitting.” He gave me this information without turning around.

Of course that would be the right place. But would they know his name? Or whom, among the many hundreds that day alone, I was talking about?

I made my way against the tide of incoming wounded, some walking and weary, clutching arms or sides covered with dirty bandages, others, like the one I feared was Sasha, carried by on stretchers or rolled on gurneys and already looking past help. Still I pushed determinedly toward the doors where the overworked admitting nurses kept lists and checked off names.

I should have been ashamed for putting my needs above the others then, but I could think of nothing but my desperate desire to know: was it Sasha, and what had happened to him?

“Please, Sister,” I said, trying to be as polite as I could, “I would like some information about one of the wounded soldiers.”

Without looking around, she snapped, “Who sent you? Don’t you see we barely have time to get them in?”

“It’s important. He might be—”

“A sweetheart? A husband? A brother? They all are!”

At that she turned toward me, her hand raised as though she would cuff me on the ear for my impertinence. I stood as tall as I could and stared her down. I admit, a little part of me enjoyed the look of horror that washed over her face when she saw me.

“Forgive … Your Imperial Highness …” While she was fumbling for words and turning bright pink, another nurse came over.

“She’s no different from any of us. It’s an accident of birth. She’ll have to wait her turn.” The second nurse was short and coarse, her hair bobbed beneath her cap. She looked young, but her eyes were old.

“You’re right, of course, but I desperately need to know something.”

The second nurse pushed the first back to work and planted herself in front of me. “Know what?”

“About a soldier they just carried upstairs. I think I know him. I want to know what happened to him.”

“Hah! I doubt you can be acquainted with any of this lot! From the lower ranks mostly. No one who’s likely to have penetrated into your sheltered world.”

Now she was making me angry. “Is this part of what you call my sheltered world?” I gestured around the stinking, filthy mass of incoming wounded. “I come here every day to help. I’d nurse, but I’m too young, so I read to them.”