Angel on the Square (11 page)

His solemn words impressed even the Empress, and we all resolved to be on our good behavior, but we were frightened of our meeting with this man, who held our fate and the fate of Russia in his hands.

The moment I heard the Tsar say his name, I remembered how Misha looked up to Kerensky. That
made me feel a little better. There had been nothing more than the briefest notes from Misha. To Mama he said only that he was well and keeping out of trouble. To me he wrote that he was devoting his time to organizing the university students into a revolutionary committee. I didn’t dare to share his letters with Stana, for the girls were loyal to their father and hated the revolution with all their hearts.

We knew at once when Kerensky arrived at the palace. The soldiers’ caps were slapped on their heads, their shirts tucked into trousers, and their tunics straightened. As we waited, a servant whispered to us that Kerensky was having all our rooms searched. There was fire in the Empress’s eyes.

At last the double doors to the sitting room swung open. I don’t know what I expected, perhaps a great bear of a man all dressed in revolutionary red. Instead, a very normal-sized man, in his mid-thirties, looking like a schoolmaster, walked into the room. He was severe and formal and appeared very uncomfortable,
running his hand through his hair, which was cut short like the bristles on a brush. After a moment’s hesitation he shook the Tsar’s outstretched hand and acknowledged each of us with a stiff bow. He made a little polite conversation.

“You are comfortable here? Well cared for?” he asked.

The Tsar said, “Very comfortable, thank you.”

I could see that it was all the Empress could do to follow her husband’s instructions, for she looked as if she longed to pick up a vase and hit Mr. Kerensky over the head.

As Kerensky left, he said, “I regret that I must return to carry on an investigation that will take some little time.”

The investigation began the following week, and it centered around the Empress and the accusations against her as a German spy. The Tsar and the Empress were separated and repeatedly questioned. The palace was even searched for a wireless radio that
the Empress might be using to send secret messages to Germany!

For weeks the Tsar and the Empress were forbidden to speak to each other. “If you disobey this rule,” Kerensky told them, “we will have to send the Empress away.” We all knew that meant prison. The Tsar and the Empress spoke not a word, though their eyes never left each other’s face.

The investigation went on and on. The Tsar, who would willingly have borne any insults against himself, found it hard to keep his temper when the Empress was under suspicion. At first Kerensky was hostile toward both of them, but as he spent more time at the palace, his behavior toward the Tsar and the Empress grew kinder. I thought he might be seeing them as a frightened mother and father, living a simple life, tender with their children and courteous to everyone from the highest to the lowest on the palace staff.

Alexei was having more nosebleeds, and the Empress was always at his side. Kerensky must have
found it difficult to believe the dignified woman who so gently nursed her ill son could be the German spy pictured in cartoons as bathing in the blood of revolutionaries. At last he gave up the investigation and dismissed all charges of treason. Kerensky said to the Tsar, “Sir, your wife does not lie.”

To which the Tsar replied, “That, sir, is something I have always known.”

Kerensky continued his visits to the palace. One day, while we were all having tea together, Kerensky brought us bad news. He did not even wait to take the Tsar aside, but in front of all of us he announced that Lenin had returned from exile. “He’s in St. Petersburg, leading the Bolsheviks in demonstrations against our new government and against the war as well. The man is nothing but trouble.”

The Tsar was disgusted. “An end to the war would mean a surrender to Germany. The Germans will divide Russia like a birthday cake.”

Kerensky said, “The Germans know that. It was
the Germans who sent Lenin back here. He came in one of their trains. He owes them much for that, but as long as I am in charge, we will never give in to the Germans.”

Speaking in a low voice, Kerensky said to the Tsar, “I must tell you that I have abolished the death penalty.”

“But that is absolute foolishness,” the Tsar said. “If you cannot put deserting soldiers and dangerous criminals to death, there will be chaos in the army and looting in the streets.”

Kerensky nibbled at his lower lip. In an even quieter voice he said, “I did it not for the deserters and the criminals, sir, but for you.”

Angrily the Tsar replied, “If you have abolished the death penalty to save my life, let me tell you there was no need. I am ready to give my life for the good of my country.”

After Kerensky left us, we looked at one another
and were silent. The Empress was pale. The Tsar took her hand. It was several moments before any of us could speak.

In his past visits, Kerensky had reassured the imperial family that plans were under way for them to leave Russia for England, where the Tsar’s cousin, King George V, would take them in, but this time he had said nothing of England. We began to give up hope of an escape.

A few days later I happened to be near a room where Kerensky sat alone going over some papers. I lingered for a moment at the door, trying to get up my courage to speak with him. Kerensky looked up and smiled at me. When he saw the expression on my face, he said, “Is there something you want?”

“Please, sir,” I said, my voice cracking with nervousness, “I have a cousin, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gnedich, who is a revolutionary. I wonder if you know him. He often speaks of you.”

Kerensky smiled. “I’m afraid I don’t know the lad. There are many young men at the university who support us. Perhaps he is one of them. I will seek him out.” He smiled. “And are you a revolutionary?”

“I have seen much suffering in Russia,” I said. “I know there must be changes, but the imperial family are like my own.”

A sad smile came over Kerensky’s face. “Loyalty is a good thing. I wish I had more of it among my supporters.” With that he turned back to his papers, and I hurried away.

The May breezes were soft, but they did us little good. We were limited to two walks a day in the palace gardens, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. All our activity was confined to a small area. Because we had suffered all winter from a lack of vegetables, we went to work digging and planting a garden. It was a relief to be outside. At first the soldiers made insulting remarks about the Tsar as a gardener, but after
they saw how hard and with what good results we all labored, the taunts ended. One or two of the soldiers who had been farmers lent advice and sometimes a hand.

As spring turned into summer, the little flags of the radishes appeared. Next came the lettuce and spinach like a line of green soldiers. Soon Toma was out exclaiming with pleasure and filling her apron. Even the Empress sat outside in a chair, a blanket over her knees, cheering us on.

In the middle of July there was bad news from St. Petersburg. Lenin had tried to take the government away from Kerensky. He had failed and fled the country, but his mischief lived on. Half a million people marched to protest against the war. An urgent message came to the palace from Kerensky: “Pack and be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. You are no longer safe this close to St. Petersburg.”

Our fear grew as we waited to hear where we would be sent. The girls hoped it would be to their
palace in the Crimea, but when Kerensky’s message arrived, it was brief: “Take your fur coats and warm boots.”

The Tsar and the Empress exchanged looks.

“They are sending us to Siberia,” the Tsar said. We all fell silent.

Summer 1917–Spring 1918

When I was very young, I had looked forward to my eighteenth year as the year I would be allowed to go to parties. I had imagined a year filled with pleasure: ballet, theater, shopping for pretty clothes, and gossiping with friends. Instead, I would soon be on a train to Siberia. Still, when I thought of what the Tsar had lost, I could not feel sorry for myself. My seventeenth birthday came and went unnoticed. On August twelfth we celebrated Alexei’s thirteenth birthday. Because the future was so uncertain, we put our worries aside and
did all we could to make the day a happy one for Alexei. I made him a sailor’s middy blouse from one of my own blouses. Stana sewed her best ribbons on his sailor’s cap. Alexei put on his sailor’s blouse and marched us up and down the halls of the palace, much to the bewilderment of the soldiers.

The next day was our last at the Alexander Palace. Though no one spoke of it, we knew we would never again see the place where we had all been so happy. The soldiers took pity on us. For the first and last time we were allowed to stroll about the park. The acres that had once been close-cropped green lawns were now a hayfield. The water in the pond was green and slimy. Still, we hardly noticed, for the pictures we carried in our minds of what had been were more real to us than the ruins that lay around us. We wandered about, seeing the happy ghosts of our younger selves everywhere. Before they returned to the palace, Stana and her sisters picked the few flowers they could find in the abandoned gardens.

“We’re going to press them in our diaries,” she said, “so we will always have a bit of the palace with us.”

That night none of us could sleep. Mama said she would sit up with the Empress, who was not feeling well. I lay alone in our room watching the minutes and then the hours drag by on Mama’s little traveling clock, which rested on the table beside my bed. The clock, a gift to Mama from the Empress, had been made by Fabergé. When it was folded up, it looked like a Greek temple, but when you opened the golden doors of the temple, there was the face of the clock with a tiny sapphire to mark each hour. Even so pretty a way to tell time could not send me to sleep.

I lay awake imagining Siberia, that empty land of endless winter. I hated the thought of being so far from St. Petersburg and from Misha. Not knowing where Misha was, we could not send him word that we were leaving. I prayed that Kerensky would let him know.

The traveling clock showed three in the morning.
For a moment I worried that everyone had left for Siberia and I was all alone. I suddenly needed to see Mama. Throwing a shawl around my shoulders, I tiptoed out of my room and down the hallway to the Empress’s room, where I paused at the door, getting up the courage to knock. In the distance I heard the familiar sound of a sentry’s heavy boots stamping along the wooden floors. Not wanting to be caught by him in the hallway, I hastily knocked.

“Who is it?” Mama’s voice shook a little.

“It’s me, Mama.”

A bolt turned. The door opened, and Mama snatched me inside and locked the door after me. Mama, the Empress, and all the girls were there. Olga and Tatiana sat on the bed; Maria and Stana were cross-legged on the floor. Beside each one was a small pile of jewels glistening in the candlelight: ruby necklaces, fat and rosy pearls, glittering diamonds. They were stitching the jewels into their clothes.

“Your mama had her jewels stolen,” Stana said.
“We don’t want that to happen to us. We might have to live off them.”

“They will expect a jewel chest,” the Empress said, “and we shall have one, but our most valuable jewels will be well hidden. They belong to the monarchy, and I won’t have them falling into the hands of the rabble.”

The doorknob rattled. The sentry called out, “Open up in there!”

In a second’s time the jewels were stuffed under pillows and carpets. There was a small closet off the bedroom. Mama pushed me and all the girls inside and closed the door on us so that we were all squashed together.

Mama opened the door slightly and said, “The Empress is unwell. I’m keeping her company. Please go away. Your presence is disturbing to her. Think what it means to her to have to leave her home tomorrow. Have a little pity.”

After a moment the door closed again, and we all
burst out of the closet, gasping for breath. The rest of the night we sat there sewing the jewels into bodices and petticoats. With the first light we were finished. An hour later the carriages came to take us to the train.

The Tsar oversaw the loading of crates of his favorite wines. Several of the palace staff traveled with us: Alexei’s doctor, valets, chambermaids, footmen, the Tsar’s barber and the Empress’s nurse, the butler and Toma and two other cooks, along with their assistants, and a sad and worried-looking Pierre, with a box full of books. I saw the looks on the faces of the palace guard as they watched the wines being loaded and all the servants climbing aboard. It seemed to me the Tsar would have been wiser to have left some of the servants and the wine behind.

So that no one would guess the real occupants of the train, and perhaps attack it in anger, the train flew Japanese flags and carried signs reading:
JAPANESE RED CROSS MISSION
.

The train had been made very comfortable for us. Stana and I wandered through the cars and hung out the windows to catch a breath of air on the hot August afternoons. It was when we stopped at railway stations to take on coal or other supplies that we recognized the danger we were in. The soldiers came though, shutting the blinds on the windows and sealing the cars.

Gruffly they announced, “It is for your protection.”

The Empress sighed. “I can’t believe the people in these towns hate us so.” Still, we followed the soldiers’ orders and remained hidden, not even daring to peek out at the towns we passed through. Once away from a station, we resumed our window watch. The Tsar, always thinking of how to make a geography lesson, spread out a map. As we followed the great distances—an inch on the map was three hundred kilometers—I grew sadder and sadder for the Tsar as I saw how great a country he had lost. I had fussed over losing a year of parties, but how must the Tsar feel
over all his lost farms, villages, cities, rivers, and mountains? At the same time I could not help wondering how one man could make decisions for so many people.

By the fourth day, when we stuck our heads out of the train windows, we felt cool air. As far as we could see, there were kilometers of flat meadows dotted with orange and yellow wildflowers, and on the horizon the white slashes of birch tree trunks against an unending blue sky. We had reached Siberia, a land that seemed at once frightening and exciting. I knew it was a place of exile, where for years criminals and those who opposed the rule of the Tsar had been banished. Now the Tsar himself was being exiled to Siberia.

In the middle of the night the train arrived at a river town, Tyumen, nestled into the silver curl of the Tura River. We were transferred onto a steamboat whose name was
Russia
. Trailing the
Russia
were two more steamboats carrying our supplies. The small peasant villages with their neat houses slipped by like
pages turned in a children’s storybook. At the end of the second day we reached the village of Tobolsk. As we neared the village, we heard church bells ringing. At first we thought it was for us, but the Empress reminded us that it was a holy day, the celebration of the Divine Transfiguration. Still, we thought the pealing of the bells was a good sign.

The number of church domes on the horizon was the first thing I noticed about Tobolsk. The village’s dusty streets were lined with simple wooden homes. The governor’s house, where we were to live, was the only good-sized home in the whole village. This house had recently been an army barracks and was quite filthy, so we remained on the steamer while the house was put to rights. I whispered to Stana how ironic it was that the governor’s house in which we would be imprisoned should be located on Freedom Street.

Our new quarters were too small for the staff. The servants had to be quartered across the street. For the first time all of us girls slept together in one room. We
sat up late at night whispering to one another. We shared clothes and quarreled and comforted one another.

We were glad of one another’s company, for this was a dreary place. Whatever our hardships in the palace, at least we had had familiar things around us. Here everything was strange and unfamiliar. When I looked out the window, nothing looked back at me in a friendly way.

At first we were allowed to walk about the grounds of the governor’s house, but the villagers’ excitement at having the imprisoned Tsar in their midst soon worried our guards. Gifts for the Tsar, cheeses and fresh eggs and sausages, began to appear on the doorstep. When we took a walk across the street to see how the servants were doing, the whole village came by to watch, many of them falling to their knees when they saw the Tsar.

Orders were given to build a tall wooden fence around the house. After that we were confined to a
narrow strip of muddy ground with no flowers and no trees. The Tsar was restless. At last he summoned one of the two officials who had been sent to supervise the soldiers. “Would it be possible to have some wood to chop?” he asked.

Since they had pictured the Tsar as pampered and useless, the officials were startled, but they promised the Tsar he should have his wood. After that we saw them peeking around corners at the spectacle of the ex-Tsar of all the Russias happily chopping wood.

The wood was welcome, for the autumn was a chilly one. In a single October day the birch trees appeared to turn yellow and lose their leaves all at once. In other autumns Stana and I had gloried in the fragrance of the majestic bonfires set by palace gardeners. Now we begged the soldiers to bring us a handful of the fallen birch leaves. We made a little pile of the leaves and set them afire, breathing in the frail wisp of smoke that came from our frugal fire.

Mama and I waited anxiously for word from
Misha, but nothing came. There were rumors that Lenin was back in Russia trying to overthrow Kerensky’s government and set up one of his own, but St. Petersburg was far away. The quarrels that went on among the revolutionaries seemed to have little to do with us. Still, I could not help recalling Misha’s words: “If Lenin takes over, I will pray for the Tsar and his family, for they will need my prayers.”

Snow began to fall. The birds, all but a flock of ravens, flew off. Our windows frosted over, closing out the world. In November we had our first taste of the Siberian winter. There was no way to keep the rooms warm. The icy wind crept through keyholes and window cracks. The water in our washstands froze. At night we piled our coats and sweaters on our beds to keep warm. We all had colds. We were all sneezing and coughing. The Empress pleaded with one of the officials to board up some of the cracks in the old house.

“There are shutters in the girls’ room, but they are
stuck fast and won’t close,” she said.

One day at the end of November four or five workmen arrived. They were a motley lot of various ages. One of the younger ones, whose face was nearly invisible, covered as it was by a stocking cap pulled down over his forehead and a scruffy beard crawling up his cheeks, marched into our room to tackle the shutters. With nothing better to do, I lingered to watch the man. He seemed not to know what he was about. He tugged at the shutters and gave them a few random blows with his hammer. After a moment he turned around and whispered, “Close the door!”

Frightened, I was about to run for Mama when the man pulled off his cap and said, “Katya, don’t you recognize me?”

I hurriedly closed the door and flung my arms around Misha. He held me tightly. When he let me go, I saw on his face the old smile, but a second later he was all seriousness.

“I managed to get leave from the army. Things are
very bad. Kerensky is defeated. It all happened in one day. They sent the ship
Aurora
down the Neva. It was flying the Bolsheviks’ red flag. It fired on the Winter Palace, where all Kerensky’s ministers were hiding out. Lenin and his Bolsheviks took over the railways and the bridges. The country is theirs. I was never a friend of the Tsar’s, but a hundred tsars would be better than one Lenin. Now the Bolsheviks are hunting us down, getting rid of anyone who supported Kerensky. My dearest friend was brutally shot and two others are in prison. Each day the Bolshevik newspaper prints a list of those who have been executed. Each day the list grows longer.”

He took my hands in his. “Katya, I must leave at once. I’m here only to warn you. I heard where you were through someone on Kerensky’s staff. I have only a moment or two. I must tell you what I know, and you must tell the Tsar. Lenin means only harm to the Tsar. England has refused to take the imperial family. King George is afraid having the Tsar in England will
remind his people that they, too, could have a revolution and get rid of their King.

“Katya, you and Aunt Irina must leave while there is a chance. Don’t go back to St. Petersburg. The Bolsheviks have installed themselves in the mansion. It is nothing but a shambles. What’s more, they are arresting the Tsar’s family and friends. Tell Aunt Irina to go to The Oaks. Her people there will hide you. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

“But what of the Tsar and his family?” I managed to get out. “What will happen to them?”

Misha shook his head, but before he could answer, we heard footsteps. He moved away from me only seconds before the door was flung open. “What are you doing, you lazy man?” a soldier demanded. “What’s taking you so long?”

Misha said, “I’m finished, tovarich.” He hurried out the door.

The moment he was gone, I rushed to Mama and the Tsar and Empress. I poured out Misha’s story.

The Tsar shook his head. “It could not be worse,” he said. “I was a fool to abdicate. If I had known it would be Lenin who would take my place, I would never have done it.”

Although Misha said he was leaving Tobolsk at once, I stood by the upstairs windows, peering over the fence, hoping for a glimpse of him. I knew that Mama would never leave the Empress. We would have to share the Tsar’s fate, whatever it was.