The Kitchen Boy

“I don’t know. There’s nothing… nothing! I’m going to have to request permission for you to go again to the Soviet.”

And with that I shrank away, leaving cook Kharitonov to rant and rave. Wanting to alert the Tsar that I might be sent out of the house, I snuck from the kitchen in search of Botkin. Entering the drawing room, however, it was very quiet, meaning that the Emperor, his four daughters, and the doctor were still outside in the scruffy garden, where today they’d been allowed thirty minutes to pace in the fresh air. But what about Aleksandra Fyodorovna, who so seldomly went out? Not too long ago I’d seen the maid, Demidova, straightening up the dining room, but where was she, the Empress?

I passed from the living room, through the dining room, and directly into the room shared by all four girls, my eyes glancing over the nickel-plated cots they had brought with them from their palace in Tsarskoye. I’d heard Demidova say they were exactly the same kind of camp beds their great-grandfather, Aleksander II, had used in the warring he had done against the Turks, and that’s what they looked like too. Army cots. Each bed was perfectly made by the grand duchesses each morning, yet each bed was slightly different, one with a flowered shawl placed squarely in the middle, another with a red and white Ukrainian coverlet neatly arranged. The metal footboard of each cot was carefully covered with a striped slipcloth, and at the foot of each bed stood a simple chair on the back of which was carefully draped a light blouse. The blouses were identical, I noticed, because the girls so often wore identical clothing. Though their clothes had more than likely come from the fashionable dressmaker, Lamanova of Moscow, nothing they ever wore was very racy, never for a daughter of Aleksandra.

Losing my nerve, I hesitated, for I had not been invited into these rooms. As I stood there, my eyes glanced over their things – next to each cot stood a small bedside table on which sat books and Bibles, an assortment of icons, and a few glass bottles filled with, I assumed, perfumed waters. The orderliness of the room ceased at the walls, however, for on the wall above their beds each great princess had tacked a jumble of mementos, primarily photographs. The snapshots were mostly of their mama and papa, their dogs, a favorite soldier or two, the Livadia Palace – a large white palace overlooking the Crimean Sea, which Anastasiya Nikolaevna had told me was their favorite home – but there was also a handful of sketches and watercolors the girls themselves had done. Sure, the komendant had recently eliminated their favorite pastime, photography, by confiscating the girls’ square, wooden Kodaks, but they were still drawing, and they were all reasonably capable at this.

An attractive electric chandelier hung from the ceiling – it looked like a bouquet of flowers hung upside down, with the blooms fashioned in colored glass. That was where the electric bulbs were, in those glass blooms, and I passed beneath this fixture. Even though I was being extremely bold, even brazen, by entering these rooms uninvited, I pressed on, my feet shuffling across the brown linoleum that covered the floor.

“Aleksandra Fyodorovna?” I called, my voice quivering with nervousness.

This next chamber – their room, where the Emperor, the Empress, and the Heir Tsarevich slept – occupied the front of the house, with two windows facing Voznesensky Prospekt and Ascension Square, and two windows on the side facing the lane. It was a fairly good-sized room, certainly befitting a well-to-do merchant, and it was filled with some polished wooden desks and tables, a wardrobe, a few chairs, one of them soft and upholstered. The walls were covered in pale yellow striped wallpaper, with a frieze of flowers at the top. There was one larger bed, and there to my right-

“Zdravstvoojte.” Hello, he said in a sheepish voice.

I was as surprised to catch him as he was to be discovered, for Aleksei Nikloaevich was not only out of bed, he was standing on his own and holding a small wooden box. We’d all been told that he couldn’t walk, that if he went anywhere he either had to be carried or taken in the rolling chair, yet…

“You won’t tell anyone that I’m up, will you, Leonka?” he pleaded. “Especially Mama – she would be very angry.”

Before I could say anything the pallid boy aimed the wooden box at me, looked down into it, and pushed a button.

I said, “I thought the komendant took away all the cameras.”

“All except mine. I have a secret place where I keep it hidden.”

To be sure, he didn’t walk well, and the Heir quickly hobbled over to his bed and jumped in. He wore a white nightshirt, and when he pulled a white blanket over his legs he was like a ghost disappearing into a cloud. Working as quickly as a thief, he took hold of a wooden table that stradled his bed and brought it closer to himself. He pushed aside a couple of books and some paper that lay on the table, and then removed the glass plate from the camera and put in a fresh one.

“Now you take my picture,” he said, handing the apparatus to me.

“But…”

“Don’t worry. It’s easy.”

As he sat there in bed, propped up by several pillows, he quickly told me how to do it, take a photograph, which I had never done before. Photography was still very much a folly of the nobility, and I’d rarely seen a camera, let alone held one. The Romanovs, on the other hand, were fanatics. They’d all had cameras. They’d always been snapping away. Because of this and their extensive diaries and letters, the Tsar and his family were better documented than any of today’s most famous people. And these things – their writings and something like one hundred and fifty thousand family snapshots – are still kept not only in the archives in Moscow, but also at the libraries of Harvard and Yale.

Once the young Tsarevich explained, I stepped back several feet, aimed the thing, and repeated what a photographer had told me when he’d taken my one and only portrait, “Now say eezyoom.”

Rather than saying “raisin,” Aleksei Nikolaevich remained silent, staring oddly at me and raising both hands, palms out. I operated the shutter, made it open and close, and then just stood there, afraid to move.

“It’s done. You took the picture,” advised the Heir. “Here, now give me the camera.”

I did as the Heir asked, of course, passing him the wooden Kodak. Wasting no time, Aleksei Nikolaevich took it, turned, and reached around the white, metal railings of his bed’s headboard. I moved forward, watched as he leaned over and plied away a piece of the tall mopboard, revealing a secret hiding place. Inside the dark wooden compartment sat the Heir’s treasures, pieces of wire, some rocks, coins, a few nails, and a few folded pieces of paper.

“This is where I keep my special things,” whispered the Heir as he pushed his camera into its hiding place. “You never know when we might need some of them.”

Aleksei Nikolaevich had to give the Kodak a good shove, but it fit, just barely, and then he set the mopboard back in place, tapping it with his hand. He loved collecting little pieces of things, small bits of tin, rusty nails, wine corks, rocks. And in that regard he was just like any other little boy, curious, energetic, always fiddling. Of course, in every other respect he was entirely different. Before his father’s abdication lackeys were always falling over him because he was the Heir Tsarevich, and his family, too, was loath to deny him because he was so sickly. So he was indulged, rather spoiled, and also not as well educated as he should have been because he’d lost years of study due to his bouts of bleeding. On the other hand, he was compassionate because he knew pain, real pain, and real suffering too. Yet even in those bouts when it looked for sure as if he would die, he was never given morphine, not even as his screams of pain rattled the palace windows. That poor child had traveled to the bottom of life and back again, and naturally that had had a profound effect on him. I liked him. In another world, in another time, we would have been true friends. Rasputin had predicted that if Aleksei lived to age seventeen he would outgrow his hemophilia, a brilliant dream the Empress lived for and perhaps the only one that kept her alive. Had this happened, had he matured into a healthy young man and become tsar, he would have been one of the greatest, for while his father found his wisdom too late, Aleksei Nikolaevich had found his much too early.

“You can’t tell anyone about our hiding place. It’s our secret. Agreed?” said the Heir, studying me with a naughty grin.

“Agreed.”

From the side of his bed he grabbed a game board. “Do you want to play shahmaty?”

I shrugged, a bit ashamed to admit, “I don’t know how.”

“I could teach you.”

“Well…”