The Kitchen Boy

from a granddaughter of that tight Victoria! Radi boga – Dear Lord – Aleksandra must be rolling in death, knowing that those pet names for their privates have been published around the globe!

Late that very same night my uncle and I were carrying a trunk marked N.A. NO. 12 – ALBUMS, meaning it was Nikolai Aleksandrovich’s twelfth trunk, the one filled with photo albums. We proceeded from the maple living room, a very attractive, two-story room covered with bear rugs and filled with mementos – it was here the family often lunched together in private – and passed into what was known as the corner living room. It had not been redone in the stijl moderne, but rather left in the older classical style. And as Uncle Vanya and I carried the trunk around a small gilt table and two chairs, I looked over and saw Aleksandra Fyodorovna herself staring up at a large tapestry of a woman, her three young children gathered around her. It was after midnight, and despite the chaos swirling around the Imperial Family, the Empress just stood there, not so much as flinching.

“Why does the Empress stare at that rug on the wall?” I asked my uncle as we passed through the main doors from their apartments, the very doors once guarded by their faithful Negroes, the huge men dressed in turbans and colorful dress. “Who is the woman pictured?”

“Marie Antoinette,” he replied in his deep voice, leaving it at that, as if I should know.

Of course I didn’t have the faintest idea. We continued down the long hall to the rotunda, where all was gathered, but later, as I carried baggage from Aleksandra’s infamous mauve boudoir I saw a painting of the same woman hanging on the wall. As it turns out, this was the second thing I learned that night about the Tsaritsa, her obsession with violent death, which took the form of her fascination with Marie Antoinette. It seems that the Empress, so mystical, so fatalistic, had suspected for years what awaited her own family, though never in all of history has an imperial brood, the symbol of a nation, been so crudely butchered, children and servants and pets, all liquidated, all except a young kitchen boy. To hell with the kommunisty!

How strange is history. The Aleksander Palace was preserved as such, just the way the Emperor and Empress left it when they walked out the door. It was kept that way until World War Two, when the Nazis used it for their headquarters and the nearby Great Palace for a stable and garage. This was during the nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad, as Peter – Sankt-Peterburg – had been renamed by the Bolsheviki, and those were the days of utter hell on earth. It was during this time that the Gestapo assumed the basement beneath the Tsar’s wing as a place of torture, and to this day the gardens of that stately palace are filled with an untold number of bodies. At the end of the war the palace and its rooms were damaged, but not horribly so – the German booby traps were found and defused just five hours before they were to blow – and Nikolai and Aleksandra’s apartments could have been easily restored. Instead, some Soviet general decided to wipe away any memory of Nikolai the Bloody and Aleksandra the nemka, the German. And so today, only two of Nikolai’s rooms remain, his gorgeous, stijl moderne office and his cozy, warm reception room, which the hypocritical Red general kept for his own personal use.

One other odd thing, and this concerns Rasputin. Late in the fall of 1916, before my time with the Romanovs, that mysterious monk with the long, greasy hair and sharp nose finally began to understand the hatred against him, that many powerful princes and grand dukes believed he was leading the dynasty and country to ruin. In fact, he correctly supposed that he would soon be dead, or more precisely murdered. With this in mind, Rasputin wrote a note to his Tsar and Tsaritsa, which was only delivered to them after he was killed by young Prince Felix Yusopov, who was married to the Tsar’s own niece, a pretty young thing who died just a short while ago, actually, in ’67.

In his prophetic letter, Rasputin wrote:

Tsar of the land of Russia… If it was your relations who have wrought my death, then no one of your family, that is to say, none of your children or relations will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people.

Strange, is it not? Rasputin was murdered in December of 1916 – poisoned, stabbed, shot, and finally drowned. It took all of that to kill that powerful peasant, and he was right. Nikolai and Aleksandra, their children, and many other Romanovs – in total almost twenty – would be dead within the predicted time. How in the name of God did Rasputin, the holy mad monk, know this? It’s almost enough to make one a Believer.

So Aleksandra knew well what had happened to Marie Antoinette, just as Rasputin’s words reverberated in her chest with each beat of her weak heart. But let me make one thing very clear, the Romanovs never gave up hope. To the very end itself – even as they descended those twenty-three steps in the depth of that night – they never stopped praying, hoping, believing that they would be rescued by a storm of three hundred officers. Yes, there were many depressing hours in each one of those days, but Nikolai and Aleksandra kept praying to their God, kept hoping for dear friends to save them… friends, who in the end never appeared, which is perhaps not that surprising. After all, while 90 percent of the Russian people did not want them dead, the same 90 percent did not want them back on the throne either. Such was the horrible paradox – saving them would have meant restoring the autocracy, which was at that point untenable to almost all of Russia.

And so the long wait for the second note…

I found the first note to the Tsar and his family on the morning of the twentieth, and then carried a reply to Father Storozhev on the afternoon of the twenty-first. I think all of us were expecting, or at least hoping, that Sister Antonina would bring a reply on the twenty-second. Instead, she failed to appear, leaving us awash in anxiety.

How did the time pass?

Well, for starters, that morning of the twenty-second the weather on the street was glorious, sunny and pleasant, about sixteen degrees of warmth, but soon it was more than twenty Celsius inside.

“Dear Lord in Heaven,” moaned Nikolai Aleksandrovich, sweat beading on his brow, “it’s been two weeks now – two solid weeks – and they still haven’t decided whether or not we can open a window. It’s absolutely inhumane!”

“Of course it is, my sweetheart,” said Aleksandra Fyodorovna, standing behind him, a pair of scissors in her hands. “Now be still before I do you serious damage.”

“Better you than them.”

“I’ll hear no such thing.”

She’d cut his hair for the first time ever a month earlier; this was the second attempt. Just fifteen minutes earlier, Nyuta, the Tsaritsa’s maid, had laid a sheet in a corner of the dining room, then placed a chair atop that. And now Nikolai Aleksandrovich sat there trying to be still, which wasn’t his nature. Already he had paced for an hour around the dining table. He needed more time outside; a half hour once in the morning and once in the afternoon just wasn’t enough.

While the Empress was trimming his hair, my duty was to entertain the Tsarevich, and as such we were playing troika. He sat in the wheeled chaise, and I pushed, obeying his every command.

“Off into the woods – faster!” ordered Aleksei Nikolaevich.

“Alyosha!” beckoned his father. “Alyosha, I want you two to be careful. Am I clear?”

“Of course, Papa.”

As I slowed the vehicle of Aleksei’s imaginary escape, one of the girls appeared, the front of her frock all dusted white.

“Look at me, look at your Nasten’ka!” proclaimed Anastasiya Nikolaevna.

“What ever have you gotten into, dorogaya?” asked her father, entirely amused.

“Cook Kharitonov is teaching us how to bake bread.”

“Really?” said her mother, unable to hide her surprise.

“Yes, he showed us how to knead it, and it’s rising right now. I’m sure it’s going to be delicious.”

Nikolai Aleksandrovich smiled and said, “I have no doubt about that. Pretty soon you girls will know how to do everything in the kitchen.”

“I love you all and kiss you a thousand times!” she said with her usual flare as she spun and hurried off.

Aleksandra Fyodorovna smiled after her, and said, “In spite of everything, they’re growing up.”

“I suppose they are,” agreed her husband.

“I do hope Anya keeps growing, though. Her legs are too short, her waist is too thick.”