The Castle in the Forest (26 page)

14

I
was not a leading actor during the riots just described. The Maestro had stated it directly: I was not sufficiently familiar with Moscow to command the local devils. Instead, I was to continue my watch on Nicky. I had to recognize that I had not been seen as pitiless enough to lead on the field. That pinched my vanity. I saw myself as capable of any task, high or low, but I should have known that my assignment to study the letters and diaries of the Romanovs would remain my basic role. Nonetheless, the knowledge proved of use for years to come. The Romanovs did not perish in a bloody muck of broken bones on that day, but they would certainly suffer depredations in the aftermath.

An immediate result was the lowered efficiency of the Cudgels. There were now gaps in the circle of protection they formed around Nicky. I was able, for example, to approach within reasonable distance of the Tsar when he and Alix showed up at midday to sit in the viewing stands. By grace of the passage which the Maestro had succeeded in keeping open to his thoughts, I could detect that Nicky was not only unseemly pale as he approached the pavilion, but that this pallor came from an unruly passion. I could feel its intensity. Some turn red with rage. He was pale with unspoken fury. Like Alix, his primal displeasure was directed toward the peasants. How could they have been so ungrateful, so self-destructive? Yet—heavy as chains lying upon his heart—it was his duty to forgive them. Could he call upon such a noble sentiment when he was marooned in anger? There were so many aspects to his fury. For he was equally enraged at the ineptitude of the police. And, soon enough, was furious at himself. He had not paid attention to the arrangements for security. Much of this could have been prevented. Or was that true? Had the event been inevitable? Were his fortunes cursed? He did not know. He could hardly know. That night, he wrote in his diary:

         

Up till now, thank God, everything went perfectly but today a great sin has taken place. The crowd spending the night on the Khodynka meadow broke through the barrier and there was a terrible crush, during which it is terrible to say about 1,300 people were trampled.

         

I kept studying the phrase “a great sin has taken place.” Was it the rioters or himself to whom he referred? For on the afternoon of May 18, Count Witte, who was the particular statesman Nicky listened to most, had sent word: “In respect for the dead, all festivities should be canceled immediately.” Then, Witte added, “Most particularly, the French Ambassador's Ball.” That was scheduled to take place on this very night, and it had been planned as the grandest evening of the Coronation.

Disagreement with Count Witte came quickly. Nicky's uncle, the Governor General of Moscow, the Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich, married to Alix's older sister, Ella, had taken over, among his other duties, the position of Director of the Peasants' Festival. By messenger, Sergey Alexandrovich sent a reply to Witte: “The Tsar considers Khodynka a great disaster, but would inform you that in effect it was not so great a disaster that it should darken the Coronation holiday.”

The older Grand Dukes, brothers to this Governor General, were in accord. Their sentiments, however, were revolting to Nicky's cousins, the younger generation of Grand Dukes. Indeed, Nicky's dearest friend—his first cousin Sandro, who was married to Nicky's sister Xenia—declared that the attitude of his uncles, these older Romanovs, this senior level of Grand Dukes, could only be described as “monstrous.” And Sandro's brothers, the sons of Grand Duke Mikhail, were in passionate agreement. Under no circumstances should Nicky attend the French Ball tonight. What an outrageous insult to the dead! Where was Russia's honor? The Tsar, four days into his Coronation, was ready to agree with Sandro, but just then came Uncle Alexey into the room, and this Grand Duke was the oldest remaining brother of his dead father.

“Nicky,” said Uncle Alexey, “surely you are aware that your cousins, these Mikhailovichi, and Sandro most particularly, are not people you can afford to listen to. They are young and inexperienced. They are radical. They are silly. They are worse than silly. I tell you, they will never admit it to themselves, but they are siding with unholy forces. They wish to depose Sergey Alexandrovich so they can put in one of their own as Governor General of Moscow. Think what that will do to Sergey Alexandrovich and to Ella. Your wife will be distraught that her beautiful sister Ella has to suffer this disgrace.”

I was near enough to hear these opinions. Again, the Cudgels were not about. A host of just-perished souls must have been in need of succor—perhaps the Dummkopf had dispatched the Cudgels to the morgue. This once, at any event, it was not at all difficult to stay close to Nicky.

So I heard Sandro's brother Nikolai Alexandrovich. So soon as Uncle Alexey marched off, he was ready to speak. “Nicky, I beg of you, do not go tonight to the French Ball. Recognize what I am saying. Whether we like it or not, we are still living in the shadow of Versailles. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette could dance all night because they were naïve. They had no sense of the approaching storm. But we do. We know!

“Nicky, search into your heart. What happened, has happened. The blood of these men, these women, and these children will remain forever upon your reign. That is unfair, because you are good, you are kind. I know, if you could, you would revive the dead. But you cannot. So, Nicky, you must show your sympathy to their families. Your allegiance to them. Your respect. How can you allow the enemies of this regime to be able to say that our young Emperor was engaged in dancing through the night while his slaughtered subjects were still unburied?”

His eloquence succeeded. Nicky now knew that he did not want to go to the Ball. But his cousin was unable to maintain the high level of his argument. He soon surrendered to rage. “Why, I would ask,” he went on, “didn't Sergey Alexandrovich anticipate how great was the need for police? Any fool could have told him.” Soon enough, he was suggesting that nasty tricks had been played. Could he have been listening to the same rumors we had generated? In Moscow, the word was out. Many were being told that the Governor General had siphoned off Coronation funds to pay his gambling debts. It was not true. Sergey Alexandrovich was not guilty. It happened to be his assistant. (The fellow was not only in debt to gamblers, but to us—one of our Russian agents. Indeed, it was this assistant to Sergey Alexandrovich who had initiated the rumor that the Governor General was corrupt.)

Poor Nicky. If he had one weakness, it was that he could not hold two opposed ideas in his mind long enough to decide which might have more to offer. Just as he was in the midst of giving real attention to cousin Nikolai's fine speech, so two of his uncles came back to the room. They proceeded to explain, and in the sharpest terms, that it would be an international insult should Nicky not be present at the Ball. The French Embassy had made expensive preparations. The absence of the Tsar and Tsarina would affect relations between the two countries. “Nicky, we depend upon the French alliance. For that alone, you must attend. The French take pride in measuring themselves by the sanity they can muster in crises. They detest sentimentality. They are proud of their
froideur.
If you are absent, they will see you as a womanly creature, swayed by compassion, exactly when we are in need of sound diplomacy. Foreign policy must not be affected by accidents.”

Nicky attended. He had the first dance of the evening with Countess Montebello, who was the wife of the French Ambassador, and Alix danced with the Count. In his diary, Nicky left this comment:

         

The Montebello Ball was very magnificently done, but the heat was unbearable. We left after supper at two o'clock.

         

Meanwhile, the Governor General of Moscow was smiling. He was enjoying the Ball. Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich had a favorite saying: “It does not matter how awful the day has been. One must possess the character and the wit to be able, when the music is lively and your drinks inspire, to enjoy an evening to the full. That is also our duty.”

Sandro and his brothers had long been aware of Sergey's credo. So, on this night, they found his presence doubly intolerable. They made a point of leaving at the moment that dancing began. Uncle Alexey spoke out loudly: “There go the four imperial followers of Robespierre.”

I was content. The Maestro would be pleased. He would also be amused, I was certain, when he learned that I had been able to insinuate myself into the Royal Chamber that night. Yes, I had reached the Bedroom. The Cudgels were in more disarray than I could ever recall.

For a few minutes (just before the Cudgels returned and I hurried to decamp), I was able to insinuate myself a little further into Nicky's mind, and I can report that he felt doomed. Doomed and damned. He knew this with certainty. It would take more than two decades to confirm what he knew on this night, but this night he knew. He was truly appalled. He told Alix that it might be his duty to retire to a monastery, where he could pray for the victims. It was no way to speak to a wife on a night so full of a sense of doom. It may even account for the letter Alix would yet write to her friend the German Countess Rantzau.

         

I feel that all who surround my husband are insincere. And no one is doing his duty for Russia. They are all serving him for their career and personal advantage and I worry myself and cry for days on end as I feel my husband is very young and inexperienced—of which they are taking advantage.

         

How much more she might have wept if she had known what the ladies in Moscow were saying about her.

Before the Coronation, she had made a critical mistake. She had confided to her closest Lady-in-Waiting that she adored Nicky. “I love him so much. I call him secret names.”

“What are these secret names?” asked the Lady-in-Waiting.

“Oh, I cannot tell you. They are so secret. I call him many sweet words, usually in English. For me, that is a warm language. Most hospitable.”

It came out. Bit by bit. At last, it was in the air—her secret. The big secret that the Lady-in-Waiting swore she would never pass on to a soul. And the Lady-in-Waiting did not—not for a day or two. Then she told it to her dearest friend, and in turn this lady swore that she could be trusted altogether and forever.

In the event, the dearest friend did not feel free to give the secret away too quickly. It took a few nights before she told one friend and then another. They, too, took a vow of silence but did not wait as long before transgressing their oath. Moscow's society was soon snickering over the Tsarina's much-avowed love of English. Anyone who had a reputation for knowing what others did not know was now familiar with Alix and Nicky's secret words to each other. “Lovy, Boysy, Sweet One, My Soul, Manykins-mine, Sweetie, Pussy-mine.”

After they finished laughing at Alix, one of the ladies felt bound to remind the others, “She comes to us from behind a coffin. She carries misfortune.”

For that matter, the Governor General of Moscow was now called “the Prince of Khodynka.”

15

I
n the week that followed, there were eight days of fetes, dances, receptions, state visits, and musicales. On May 19, there was a banquet in Alexander Hall in the Kremlin, and on the twentieth, the Governor General of Moscow gave his own ball. The twenty-first brought the Moscow nobility together at the Hall of Columns, Prince Trubetskoi as host. Four thousand guests appeared. On the twenty-second, Nicky and Alix made a state visit to the Troisky-Sergeyevsky monastery, and on the morning of the twenty-third, Nicky gave twenty thousand rubles as a first installment on a children's home for the orphans of Khodynka. That evening, there was dinner with the English Ambassador at a palace ball in the St. Andrew Hall of the Kremlin. Thirty-one hundred guests. The Germans, laying low, gave no more than a musicale at their embassy next evening, which was followed by a palace dinner for all the ambassadors on the twenty-fifth. For conclusion, they were back at Khodynskoe Field on the twenty-sixth to witness a military review. The pits had been filled by then. It was another brilliant day, and Nicky's carriage was drawn by six white horses. Thirty-eight thousand five hundred sixty-five enlisted men marched in company with two thousand officers. Sixty-seven generals watched.

By now, I was awaiting orders to leave. I did not know if I could acclimate myself to Hafeld after these exceptional days in Moscow, but the Maestro was quick to tell me: “Respect Hafeld. It is important.” There was no reason to believe or disbelieve him—his real opinion was, after all, concealed within his impenetrable bearing, but I can say that on my arrival back to Austria, I did feel better than I had in years. Khodynskoe Field had been the largest operation in which I had participated for a long time. Or so it seemed.

It is sad that few devils are permitted to retain much memory, but the Maestro employs the same principle as Intelligence agencies. No one in Intelligence is supposed to know anything about a project until there is a need to know. We, in turn, are not encouraged to remember whatever we will not use for a new project.

Since I believe that I have been a devil for many centuries and have risen in rank and been demoted, it could be asked why, with such a history, I still learned a good deal while in Russia. It is because a newly gained sophistication fades once a venture comes to an end. So we develop many new qualities of mind, but soon lose them. What is curious here is that the Maestro allowed me to keep these recent experiences intact. Khodynskoe remained in my memory and my morale stayed close to excellent. Returning to the Hitler family, I could, given our success in Russia, believe again that the Maestro's aims were not small for this client, this young Adolf Hitler.

Filled now with a lightness of spirit altogether apart from the heaviness that is requisite to being loyal when there is no choice, I felt elevated upon my return to Hafeld. Soon enough I no longer thought about Nicky or Alix. Where was the need? If in future I was to be called back to Russia, the necessary recollections would be reconstituted.

In fact, it is interesting that I had such thoughts, for, indeed, I was sent back in 1908, and would remain in Russia intermittently until the murder of Rasputin eight years later—that incomparable Rasputin, a most exceptional client. He was able to work in the closest union with me, but did insist upon continuing as well in the service of an astute and elevated Cudgel. What wars we had over Rasputin and the exceptional ins and outs of his soul.

I may yet look to portray these exceptional events, but that is not for this book. All large interruptions concluded, I now wish to record what happened to Alois, Klara, and Adolf over the next nine years. That will bring a close to this literary venture. For the present, then, we are back at the farm.

From here, I can see the path that leads to Der Alte's house.