The Last Romanov (29 page)

He is unaware that Little Servant is in the distillery in the garden, engaged in sampling vodka, and Darya is bathing in the banya, shampooing her hair with eucalyptus oil and Bulgarian evening primrose. As she has done every day for the last twenty-five years, she twirls his opal wedding band around her finger and relives the joy of the first time she gave herself to him. Avram! Her first and last love. She had immersed him in the imperial banya, a rite she insisted they perform despite having no imminent wedding plans. Youth and arrogance blinded her to the enormity of the risk she was taking that day, allowing a Jew, no, tempting him, into the inner sanctum of the Imperial Court. Still, despite all the suffering she caused them both, she does not regret that day. How she had delighted at that first glimpse of his arousal, unexpected and utterly delicious.

He turns his back to the door and descends the steps he had climbed an hour ago. He is having difficulty breathing, the pain in his chest excruciating. The bullet is dislodged, and traveling toward his heart.

He pulls a revolver out of his coat pocket and aims it at his pain.

According to rumors, his still warm body was discovered at the threshold to the Entertainment Palace. Since there were no known relatives, the body was dispatched to a mass crematorium designated for war victims. Other rumors say that a passing peddler attempted to give him a proper burial, but in view of the fact that the artist had committed suicide, he was refused a Jewish burial.

And an overwhelming number of bystanders swear that at a certain moment and time, they witnessed the painter's prostrate body cloaked in a white light emanating from within. In a matter of seconds, and in front of their disbelieving eyes, nothing remained of him but a phantom glow that illuminated the entire Entertainment Palace as if it were a sacred shrine.

***

Darya wipes her wet cheeks, rubs her stinging eyes. She curses the banya, the berries, Little Servant, and his vodka. Why did she have to bathe that day, at that specific hour, gorge herself on berries? She is a patient woman, after all. She should have sat at the door, waited for years if necessary, left her door wide open for Avram. She should have known he would come.

Viktor retrieves a brown-wrapped parcel from a drawer and hands it to her. “Uncle Avram left this for you,”

She takes her time opening the package, ripping layers of wrapping off to reveal the treasure inside. A portrait of hers she had not seen before, smaller than any of his other paintings. She is swirling in white veils that fall over her hair and face, the sheen of her raven black curls and golden eyes palpable behind tiers of gossamer. Her joy illuminates the canvas. She is a bride. She allows herself a rare instant to treasure this moment so masterfully captured beneath a cloud of veils, to acknowledge his love, his hunger for her, perhaps stronger than for his art. She passes her palm over the signature, smiling at his message:
Fare
Well, My Opal-Eyed Bride.

He appears at the threshold, tall and elegant, silver curls coiling at his temples, an embroidered skullcap kept in place with hairpins. He holds on to the doorframe with one hand; the other seeks the locket strung with a leather strap around his neck. Greta gives him an encouraging nudge forward. He tugs at the camera hanging from his shoulder. Takes a few guarded steps toward Viktor and reaches out to seize his hand.

“Alexei, Loves. It's me, Darya!” She controls the urge to cross the room, hug him, squeeze him to her chest.

He tilts his head and gazes at her with startled eyes from which the smile has long fled, checks her from head to toe: her hat pulled down over knitted brows, the threadbare jacket with ermine trim, the velvet skirt. “Mama? Is it you, Mama?”

“Not Mama, Loves,” she whispers, removing her hat and letting loose her silver curls that remain as wild as they were in her youth. “Look at my eye! Take a good look. Don't you remember how you liked to touch my strange eye?”

He reaches out a finger to trace the outline of her face, her chin, the bridge of her nose, the length of her eyebrows, around one eye, then the opal eye, without displaying the slightest surprise. He fumbles for his camera case, retrieves a Polaroid, the lines on his handsome face deepening as he twists a black knob. He raises the camera to check her through the viewfinder.

Long before he opened his mouth to utter a single word, she knew that something is terribly wrong with the old Tsarevich, with his faraway gaze and disconnected gestures.

She is dumbstruck and grieving anew, hope taking flight, crumbling around her like ancient ruins robbed of their flimsy buttresses.

He lets out a sudden sound of surprise, lowers the Polaroid, takes a few steps toward her, and bends to take a closer look at the amulet pinned to her blouse. He breaks into a wide smile. “Darya! Is it you?”

“Yes, yes, Loves! Your Darya! Look at you! Handsome as ever. Come! Give me a hug!”

He does not step into her wide-open arms but continues to stroke the amulet. “You found it? Where? Tell me.”

Her hand springs up to her chest. “The amulet?”

“Yes. Can I have it?”

“Of course, Loves. If you want it.”

“Yes, I really do.” He unlocks the locket from around his neck and takes out a small piece of ambergris. “See, just a tiny bit left. When it's finished, I'll start bleeding again. But now that you brought my good luck amulet, I'll be fine. Remember how you stopped my bleeding?”

Yes, she remembers all too well. She remembers the different concoctions of ambergris that had successfully stemmed his bleeding, remembers how the amulet became part of his uniforms when he was a child, present in formal photographs, there when he played with his sisters, his companion every waking hour. Even when the two sailors of the imperial navy were assigned to follow him everywhere, to protect him from falls and injury, he did not step out of the palace without his good luck amulet.

Having been deprived of a normal childhood, he, too, had searched for a miracle in small things.

As if they are back in the Crimea, and she has just dressed the young Tsarevich in formal attire on his way to the inauguration of the Livadia Palace, she detaches the amulet from her dress and pins it to the lapel of his coat.

He wraps his arms around her and covers her face with kisses, her cheeks, her forehead, the back of her hands. “I thought I killed you too. I murdered them all, you know. Is this why you didn't come to see me?”

“What are you saying?” Darya exclaims, unable to rein in her shock. “Who did you kill?”

“Mama and Papa and Tatiana and Anastasia, all my sisters, and you know—all of them.” He flops down on the sofa and pulls her down beside him, hugging his camera to his chest.

“No, Loves, don't ever think like this. I was there. You didn't do anything wrong.” She strokes his hair even as she reprimands herself for resorting to the childlike voice of decades ago, when he was a small boy.

“But I did. I'll tell you what I did if you won't punish me.”

“What a thing to say, Your Majesty,” she says, bowing her head. “Who am I to punish you?”

He gazes down at his hands that hold the locket. “They all died after I lost the amulet that day in your apartments. I don't remember exactly what day, I think it was a week ago, or today maybe. I found a monster on your bed, a turtle, or the whale with the tummy ache that cries a lot. It was slippery and smelled of father's tobacco and mother's leather gloves. I prodded its tummy with the amulet's pin. Don't get angry. You promised. I just wanted to take the pain away and make the whale all better. But it suddenly swallowed my amulet. And then Papa went away to war. Mama cried a lot. We were sent away and became prisoners. And everyone died.”

Darya covers her eyes with her hands. So it was not a conspiracy, after all. The Tsarevich himself had shoved his amulet into the ambergris, where it remained buried for decades, right under her ignorant nose.

Suddenly his eyes light up and the mischievous boy of another era reappears. “You know what I did that night?”

“What night, Loves? There were so many nights.”

“No! There's only one night. The night of bullets. I snatched a bit of ambergris out of the pillow you gave me and hid it in my fist for a very long time, until Avram gave me this locket for my ambergris.” He holds up the locket that had been hanging around his neck.

An icy wind stirs in Darya's heart. She opens her purse, snaps it shut, then opens it again, digging her hand in. She can hardly bear to think of Alexei suffering as he has. She finds the kerchief-wrapped ambergris in her purse and hands it to him. “Here, Loves, replenish your locket. There's more in my suitcase, more than you'll ever need. You'll never run out of ambergris again.”

He fumbles with the latch to unlock his locket. He does not ask how she survived that night or how she managed to find him. His world is enclosed in his head and in the four small rooms in which he wanders, his camera in constant frenzy as he searches for knickknacks—metal sheets, electrical wires, copper coins, nails, and pieces of rope to fashion primitive toys. On rare instances when unsolicited snatches of memory emerge, he locks himself in his room and sucks on a piece of ambergris until blessed amnesia takes over. The mind of a thirteen-year-old resides in the body of an old Jewish man who remains imprisoned in the cellar of the House of Special Purpose on the hot, humid night of July 16, 1918, when his family was slaughtered.

Darya tosses the blanket off and, in the same clothes she traveled into Biaroza the day before, sits on the edge of a bed and rubs her eyes. She did not sleep all night, although the Bensheimers made every attempt to make the guest room comfortable. A vase of wild flowers and a jug of water stand on a coffee table in front of a sofa. A portable heater warms the room. Extra blankets and pillows are piled on a reclining chair. But such amenities mean nothing when decades of search have led her to this bitter truth.

Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov is a damaged man.

He is not up to the task of ruling Russia.

And she is not up to the task of redirecting her loyalties.

She, too, remains a hostage to her dreams and nightmares, to bathing rituals that take her back to her youth with Avram, to berries that keep her hope alive and her will steadfast.

She spent so long trying to find the Tsarevich that it never occurred to her that he might not want to be found.

The cold wind in her heart develops into a blizzard, and she fears she is about to die. Die at the worst time and in the last place she wants to be buried.

She tidies her clothes in front of the full-length mirror, then steps closer to examine the fan of wrinkles girthing her eyes, the sad turned-down corners of her lips, the burst of tiny lines around her mouth, and for the first time in her life, sees herself as the old woman she is. Did the deterioration begin decades ago when she left Tsarskoe Selo and entered the House of Special Purpose, a week ago when she left Ekaterinburg for the Sheremetev Estate, or yesterday when she came face to face with Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov?

A hesitant knock at the door startles her. She checks the green fluorescent numbers on the clock on the bedside table. Five a.m. She crosses the room and opens the door.

Wearing yellow checkered pajamas, uncombed hair falling over smoky eyes, Alexei offers her a timid smile. “Can I take your photograph?”

He sets on the coffee table a clothbound portfolio tied with twine, the cover embossed with the image of Moses. He directs his attention to the black focus knob on the camera, concentrating with the seriousness of a mathematician, fully engrossed in the process of manipulating the universe enclosed in the frame of his viewfinder, a tiny world over which he rules as he once had over the Alexander Palace. He begins to snap one photograph after another, capturing her forced smile, then her impatience at the consecutive flashes of light that startle her eyes shut, the frantic clicking of the camera that rattles her already frayed nerves, and her annoyance with pointless, expensive cameras that deliver immediate photographs like some sort of easy birth.

One by one, he pulls photographs out of the Polaroid and arranges them on the coffee table. First three, then six, eight, on and on. Every now and then, he locks his puzzled gaze with hers, wondering why she has stopped smiling, whether she is sad or upset at him.

He arranges the photographs on the tabletop, observes the developing images as they come into focus. Slowly, carefully, he shifts them around as if he is assembling a puzzle and it's of utmost importance that each piece fit properly into the other.

She traces the growing rows of pictures, arranged in some order that eludes her. The collage seems to highlight a slow, inexplicable deterioration at the corners of her eyes, dark crescents under them, a sagging of her once round chin, a slight drooping of her arched eyebrows.

She slumps back on the sofa, holds her head in her hands, feeling faint and disoriented. “I am confused, Loves. Tell me what your pictures are about.”

“About you, Darya.”

It occurs to her that just as Avram's paintings had introduced her to the young evolving Darya, these photographs, brutal in their bluntness, reveal the desperate woman she has become. Her hand plunges into her purse for a bit of ambergris to drop in her mouth, but finding none, she throws her shoulders up in resignation.

“Tell me, Loves. Are you happy here?”

“Happier now that I have the amulet and more ambergris.”

She shuts her eyes to ponder the profound simplicity of his reply. It never occurred to her that happiness could hinge on so little. A sense of peace she has not experienced for a long time washes over her. She wraps an arm around his shoulders and shuts her eyes to better enjoy a feeling of warmth that permeates her opal eye.

“Darya, are you still angry with me?”

“Don't say that, Loves. I'm never angry with you. Do you remember our ritual? Good. Bend your head. Just like this. Now, repeat with me. You'll grow up to live a long, healthy life. You'll become our Tsar and rule until you are a hundred years old. I'm impressed. You remember every word. And here's a kiss to keep you doubly safe.”

He smiles, a perplexed smile, as if not certain whether he is allowed to give free rein to his joy, to his sense of unexpected euphoria.

“What are you thinking, Loves? Do you want to say something?”

“Will you take me with you?” he asks.

“Oh, Loves! Nothing would make me happier. Nothing in the world!”

She suffered the Bolshevik Revolution, civil wars, and seventy years of Communist rule to hear these words from the Tsarevich. Yet she opens her mouth and says, “But this is your home, Loves. And I'll have to go back to mine. An old woman like me can be a great nuisance. I can't take care of you.”

“But look at the photographs, Darya. You are not old at all.”

She is taken aback by yet another developing scenario spread out on the tabletop, the closeup of her eyes that stare back at her from the photographs. A look of gentle acceptance floods her right eye, yet it is the left that makes her realize that what she felt in her opal eye just now is connected to the photographs. She holds one picture up to the light, places it back on the table, and leans over to scrutinize the rest. She rises to survey the reflection of her eye in the sheen of the lacquered tabletop, in the windowpanes, and one last time in the mirror. “Am I going mad, Loves? Is this true, or am I imagining this?”

“Your eye?” he asks without a shred of surprise.

“You see it too?”

“Of course. It happens all the time.”

“People change in your photographs?”

“For real. See, you're not broken anymore.”

“Thank you, Loves. It's wonderful to see myself and you…well…everything in a way I didn't before.”

She unclasps her necklace, strokes the enameled Fabergé egg, and snaps it open to inhale the sweet and bitter scent of her joys and sorrows, the ups and downs of her two lives. She locks it around Alexei's neck. “Here, Loves. Now you have two lockets.”

She digs out the pouch of jewels from her purse and plants it in his hand. “Give this to Viktor and Greta. They raised you well.”