The Kitchen Boy

“It would be fun, I promise. Really, it’s not too hard. It just takes some practice, that’s all.”

Staring down at him, I couldn’t help but pity this sickly boy whose empire stretched barely beyond the limits of his bed.

“Everyone should know how to play shahmaty,” pleaded the boy, desperate for any kind of diversion.

“Perhaps, but…”

Just then I heard heavy, firm steps. Boots. It was one of the guards heading this way.

“I can’t, not right now,” I said.

“Please… don’t say anything.”

“I won’t.”

Even as I ducked out of the room, the boy was deflating, falling back onto his bed, where he all but disappeared beneath his sheets and into his despair. Shahmaty – the shah is dead. How prophetic it now seems. I should have let him teach me. Instead I was perhaps the only Russian who didn’t learn to play chess until he was an adult.

As it turned out I wasn’t sent out after more food. Had we any force meat, cook Kharitonov would have prepared makarony poflotsky – macaroni navy-style – but instead he made a simple macaroni tart sprinkled with dillweed.

We served lunch at one, just as we always did; life for the royals had always been and was still terribly regimented. I must say that no one starved, not by any means, but toward the end the food was very plain. That day we had watery bouillon first and then the macaroni tart. Bread, butter, and tea as well. Actually, vermicelli and macaroni were nearly all that the former Empress could or would eat, and honestly, she partook of so little that I don’t know how she managed to stay alive. Toward the end she had grown so terribly thin that even her tea gowns hung like sacks on her. Yet neither she nor any of the others ever complained. They suffered well, those Romanovs, they truly did. They read their Bibles and their religious works, they prayed to their icons, and they suffered very well indeed. As Aleksandra wrote to her friend Anna:

The spirits of the whole family are good. God is very near us, we feel His support, and are often amazed that we can endure events and separations which once might have killed us. Although we suffer horribly still there is peace in our souls. I suffer most for Russia… but ultimately all will be for the best. Only I don’t understand anything any longer. Everyone seems to have gone mad. I think of you daily and love you dearly.

It was that day too that Kharitonov made a compote for lunch, a stew of dried fruits – apples and raisins – which greatly pleased the Tsar.

“Just delicious. There’s nothing better than honest Russian food – so wholesome. Honestly, I tell you, people always used to serve me fancy French food with rich creams and sauces, and I don’t miss any of it at all. Give me good, solid Russian food any day!”

I heard nothing more about the note the rest of that afternoon, nor the rest of the evening, as Nikolai deliberated what to do. On the one hand, a response to the letter meant taking a large risk – what if they were caught? Would that give the Bolsheviki perhaps what they were looking for, an excuse either to throw them all in a real prison or the unthinkable, grounds to shoot the Tsar himself? On the other hand, if the Romanovs didn’t reply did that mean they would lose their only chance at being rescued?

As it turned out, no action was taken until the afternoon of the following day, the twenty-first. As usual I assisted cook Kharitonov in cleaning up after lunch, and no sooner was I was done than the woman servant, Anna Stepanovna Demidova – Nyuta, we called her – came to me in the kitchen.

“Leonka,” she said, staring at me as if she were peering into my very soul, “would you be so kind as to help me? I need some assistance.”

“He’s finished here!” bellowed Kharitonov.

That’s the way it was. Any time anyone needed to take care of a lowly task, they called me. “Leonka, help us wheel Aleksei Nikolaevich into the other room, please.” “Leonka, be so kind as to bring some water.” “Leonka, fetch some wood.” “Get this… get that…” “Start the samovar.”

So none of the others thought anything of it, not cook, nor even the guard who was lingering in the room just beyond. And yet I knew something was up, for again it was the look, the way Demidova spoke to me more with her eyes than her voice, and I quickly followed her through the service hall where I slept every night across two chairs. Entering the dining room, we found the youngest daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasiya, known simply to her family as Nasten’ka, sometimes Shvybz. At seventeen she was such a cute girl, always a twinkle in her eye. It’s no wonder, either, that it was she who spawned that cottage industry of silly speculation – did she really escape?! – for if any of the Romanovs had wanted to hoodwink the Bolsheviki it would have been her. Oh, how she would have loved to outfox them and escape to Europe! Of her, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna – the Tsar’s sister who fled as far as she could from the Reds, finally dying in 1960 in an apartment over a Toronto barbershop – said, “What a bundle of mischief.” Yes, the girl was a royal rascal, rather like you, Katya, when you were so young and given to playing in the woods and on the beach. That’s right, she was a real tomboy, infecting her family with her joie de vivre, again so like you, my granddaughter, who have been such a star of happiness to us. And this energetic Anastasiya often wrote to her father, always beginning with “My darling sweet dear Papa!!!” and always ending with “A big squeeze to your hand and face. Thinking of you. Love you always, everywhere!” And in those letters she told her father, Tsar of All the Russias, about the worms she was trying to breed or the problems she was having with her big sister, very unroyal problems like, “I am sitting picking my nose with my left hand. Olga wanted to biff me one, but I escaped her swinish hand.”

Anyway, that day young Anastasiya sat at the dining room table, dressed in the same light blouse and dark skirt that she’d been wearing for days. With a book open before her, she sat there pretending, rather poorly, to read. Her eyes darted over at me, and she grinned ever so slightly in conspiracy. I understood, but didn’t smile back.

In silence I continued behind Demidova, who led the way into the doorless room of the grand duchesses. One of them was in there too, Maria Nikolaevna. “Mashka,” that was her nickname, though sometimes in English they called her “Little Bow-Wow,” because she had the blind devotion of a dog. She liked so to please everyone, to take care of everyone, to do exactly as everyone wished. She wanted nothing more in life but children, scores of them.

Maria Nikolaevna was sitting on one of the metal cots, a Bible perched on her lap, but I could tell she wasn’t reading either. She looked briefly at us and then stared into the dining room. It was then that everything was perfectly clear: the girls had been set up like a warning system. I doubt it was Nikolai who had thought of something like this. He just wasn’t cunning enough, not the former Tsar. But she, on the other hand, well, surely this was the doing of Aleksandra Fyodorovna. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I had little doubt that Olga and Tatyana were stationed elsewhere in the house, ready to drop a book or cough or somehow telegraph the approach of one of the guards. And when I followed Demidova into the next chamber we found the former Empress standing right by the door, awaiting not only our arrival, but any signals as well.

“Spacibo, Nyuta,” thank you, said Aleksandra Fyodorovna to her maid, “that will be all.”

“Da-s,” replied Demidova who bowed her head slightly and retreated.

The Empress ushered me in, resting a hand on my back and gently steering me toward her husband, who sat at a desk. I glanced to my immediate right, saw the boy, Aleskei Nikolaevich, staring at me from his bed. In front of him was the same table, covered with various distractions, including some needlework, which the Empress had taught him, for she firmly believed that idleness was illness’s sister. That was the English side of her, I’m sure. Something she got from the old Queen.

So upon my entry the Tsar rose from his small wooden desk, where I might add not a single item was out of place. During his reign he never had a personal secretary, which was a point of pride to him, but to me now seems absolutely foolish. After all, the Tsar’s duties concerned one-sixth of the earth’s surface, not filing, not addressing envelopes.

The Tsar stood and pulled me into his sphere with those remarkable eyes. He cleared his throat, stroked once the trademark of his face, his beard.

“Your idea turns out to be quite a good one, molodoi chelovek,” young man, said the