The Castle in the Forest (33 page)

^{placed by an army of contractors who had decorated Moscow with lights and false fronts for the Processional on May 9. Representatives of the caterers, plus the Society of the Hunt, the Moscow Racing Club, and even (for their centuries of service since the time of Peter the Great) a few leaders of the long-established German colony in Moscow came filing by. After this, Nicky and Alix were able to enter the palace and preside over a feast for the honored representatives of the common people. Inserting his remarks between choruses of cheers, Nicholas II spoke to these plebeian elders: “The Empress and I heartily thank you for your expression of love and dedication. We do not doubt these feelings are shared by your fellow villagers. Care for your welfare is close to my heart.”}

^{I happened to look at the time. To me, this is no more than a phrase. I do not need a watch. No devil is ever without a clear sense of the hour, the minute, even the second. So I can state that as the Tsar was making this speech, a simultaneous event occurred at a morgue—a devil reported the exact time of the other occasion. Two of the corpses that had been laid out on morgue tables happened to rise up out of their comatose state. They even cried out in unison. From opposite ends of the room! They had appeared to be dead, but now they were obviously alive.}

^{If I mention these upstarts, it is to emphasize the conjunction of the two occasions. I would even learn that Alix was suffering her own climax of foreboding at what had to be close to the same moment. To each of the guests who came forward, she had smiled and bobbed her head, still a pouter pigeon. She was, however, living in terror. She was filled with a thought that her own death was near and so was Nicky’s. In what danger was her husband! She even allowed herself to feel some open wrath against the Russian people. Why, she asked herself, had they felt so obliged to riot? She even said to her husband, “There is little courtesy among our Moujiks.” Nicky did not know whether to be offended or pleased that she spoke of
our
Moujiks. (These thoughts I received at second hand from a special Russian devil who maintained his entree to one of Alix’s ladies-in-waiting.)}

^{A half mile away from Petrovsky Palace, some soldiers were laying out the last of the victims, and on those far fringes of Khodynskoe Field, other hundreds of peasants and Muscovites were searching for lost family. Meanwhile, Nicky proceeded from table to table offering greetings to the villagers as they ate their Poltava Borscht, their veal with fresh greens, cold whitefish, roast spring chicken, duckling, fresh and pickled cucumbers, dessert, fruit, wines.}

^{Back in the stands, jugglers and Gypsy dancers were performing for the gentry. Ice cream was being sold. And behind the hutches, corpses were still being laid out in rows while distraught relatives kept staring into the battered faces of those cadavers who had perished hours ago but might, despite all disfigurement, still retain a recognizable feature. A few of the disappointed even laid a copper coin on the cold chest of a stranger. In some places, piles of bodies remained in a heap, fifty here, twenty there, arms and legs at outraged angles, filthy clothing. Doctors knelt in the dust to see if anyone stirred. All of a sudden, one of the dead was no longer to be counted as dead. He rose up. His wife, who had been weeping beside him, began to beat herself on the breast. “God is here!” she screamed, “God is here! God has saved you!” But another family, just fifty feet away, engaged in false mourning for the demise of a long-lived family patriarch, were now shrieking. For that old tyrant had also opened his eyes. “The Devil sent you back, you monster!” his aged wife cried out.}

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.}

^{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 Em-}

^{peror 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.”}