“I thought you were someone special, Sasha-a man who loved poetry and words. I assumed you were someone terribly open and honest-a man who wasn’t afraid of his own heart. And yet I find no complete truth in your words, not a scrap of honesty, not a-”
“My grandfather was a serf,” he began, in a plain matter-of-fact voice, “who, after he was liberated, started building barrels, cutting and sawing and hammering them one at a time. They were wonderful barrels, the best. My father-Igor Pavlovich is his name; I wish you could meet him-eventually took over the business. Today it’s a real factory, the largest barrel factory in Novgorod. Actually, our barrels are used for shipping almost all the soap flakes in our province.
“As for my mother, Olga, she is the daughter of a priest. She’s nice, she can read. I have one younger sister. And I had a young brother, Anton, but…but he was killed.”
When he ventured no details, I asked, “How? In the war?”
Sasha shook his head. “Anton was twelve, I was fifteen…we were playing on a frozen creek. There was open water up ahead, and he told me to come back. But I wanted to look into the water and see if there were any fish. Just then I saw this huge one, a sturgeon, which used to be plentiful but by then were very rare. I couldn’t help but step forward. And that’s when the ice broke. I fell in and sank like a rock. I would have gone right to the bottom if Anton hadn’t jumped in and pulled me up. Do you understand? He was my baby brother, and…and he saved me! He pushed me up on the ice, but when I reached over to grab him his hand slipped and he was washed away by the current. The water…it was so clear, so cold…the last I saw of him were the bottoms of his felt boots…”
“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out and touching him on the arm.
“What can I say?” He let out a deep enormous breath. “It broke my father’s heart. My world changed after that from one of simplicity to, quite frankly, one of torment. It was all my fault, of course. I was the older one, the big brother, the one who was supposed to look after him.”
“And that’s why you write, to ease you conscience?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been looking for answers ever since.”
“So tell me, Sasha, you’re not a terrorist or a revolutionary, are you?”
His brow furrowed and he turned away. “I can’t talk about it.”
“Are you a deserter?”
“Maria, please…I’ve taken an oath.” He turned back to me and took my hand in his. “There’s only one thing you have to know-that I want you to know: I never betrayed anything you said to the woman who tried to kill your father, I never spoke to her or even laid eyes on her before those moments. Please, you have to believe me when I say I’ve never done anything to hurt your family, and I never would. I can’t leave with you thinking otherwise.”
“Then-”
Suddenly a herd of deep voices emerged from the other room, and Sasha immediately stiffened. Had I been followed after all?
“Maybe one day I can explain, Maria,” he whispered, as he pulled away. “Maybe one day you’ll understand. I hope so. I don’t know if we’ll ever see each other again, but-”
“Don’t say that!” Determined not to lose him again, I said, “We have to talk more. There’s an alley that comes to the rear of our building. Meet me there at the back door in two hours.”
“But-”
“Don’t worry, that door isn’t guarded, no one will see you. I’ll come down and we’ll go somewhere and talk. You can’t keep running in and out of my life like this. Meet me there, agreed?”
He nodded quickly, glancing toward the noise coming from the other room.
“Two hours!” I reiterated. “And if you’re not there, if you don’t show up, don’t ever dare try to see me again.”
“I’ll be there, I promise.”
Now came the sounds of heavy boots pouring into the little teahouse. In a panic, Sasha pecked me on the cheek, turned-and disappeared.
CHAPTER 11
I sat there for a few minutes, wiping my eyes on the sleeve of my cloak. When I returned to the front of the chai’naya, I saw not a group of military police or secret police. Rather, they were factory workers, come in for a glass of tea and some hot blini to warm their bones. But Sasha was already gone.
Would he really come to our house in two hours’ time? I had to believe he would, for the thought that he wouldn’t was almost too painful to bear. I knew, of course, that if he didn’t show up, I would have to end it all, whatever hopes and dreams I had. But at least he’d told me what my heart needed to know-he hadn’t, after all, betrayed me. I believed him. Even more, I believed that he cared every bit as much for me as I did for him.
Shaking my head, I hurried from the teahouse and into the chilly air. Within minutes I was making my way once again along the Fontanka. As I stared across the frozen waters, I knew something had been rekindled, something I had thought long extinguished. I knew that what I felt was going to burn a good long while, if not forever. And it was going to hurt, of that I was sure.
But I had a task to do, did I not? Although I was tempted to return home and wallow in self-pity, I continued toward Nevsky Prospekt, my pace slower than before, my thoughts far sadder. In the harshest way, I had come to understand that Papa was a lover of a great many, something I knew for certain I could never be. Indeed, I was beginning to realize my heart had been stolen by one person and I doubted if I would ever recover it-even if I never saw Sasha again.
As I approached 46 Fontanka, the palace of the very noble Galitzine family, I glanced up and saw the elegant figure of Countess Carlowa herself staring anxiously, it seemed, from the center box bay window on the second floor. She’d been pointed out to me before, so I knew it was her, and there she now stood in a long blue silk dress with a strand of pearls draped from her neck. She turned and glanced down at me on the sidewalk, and our eyes met for the briefest of moments. I knew of the sadness overwhelming me, but what of her? Why did she appear so anxious? Who knew what lay ahead for either one of us-for her, married into a branch of the Romanov family, and for me, daughter of an infamous peasant-but right then I couldn’t help but sense that she too felt as if we were treading a quagmire. Was Peter the Great’s beloved city, built by thousands of pathetically downtrodden serfs on nothing but swampland, about to open up and swallow the entire Empire? Perhaps. Rumor had it that even the Dowager Empress had fled the capital.
Glancing ahead, I spotted the massive bronze horses of the Anichkov Bridge, poised so elegantly at each corner, and, beneath them, seemingly in miniature, a sleek black horse pulling a fanciful sleigh across the Fontanka. Rather than proceeding as far as Nevsky, however, I stopped at the rear of the corner building, the huge red Sergeeivski Palace, which the Tsaritsa’s sister had all but abandoned after her husband was assassinated. Leaving her glittering position, the Grand Duchess Elizavyeta Fyodorovna had founded a monastery outside of Moscow, and now this most impressive palace was inhabited by her nephew and onetime ward, the young and dashing Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich.
I ducked through a narrow rear gate and into a dark alley that ran directly behind the palace, whereupon I immediately encountered a line of some thirty or forty destitute and freezing souls. Nearly half of them were soldiers, some missing both legs, some only one, while the rest were impoverished women and babushki, the entire shivering lot awaiting the grand duke’s mercy and maybe a tin cup of hot soup and a slice of black bread. Even in my simple cloak I was better dressed than any of them-indeed, some of the soldiers weren’t even wearing coats but stood there with filthy blankets over their shoulders. As soon as they spotted me weaving in and around them, a small charge rippled through the group, and any number of filthy, begging hands were thrust into my face. While these pour souls stood nearly freezing to death down here, I wondered what the young grand duke’s French chef was preparing for him upstairs on the belle etage. Caviar and veal, accompanied by a pleasant Baron de Rothschild wine? Crab and goose pate, served with an elegant French champagne?
Papa had strictly warned me to avoid such indigent groups, which, as the war dragged on, were cropping up all over the city. And he was absolutely right. I shouldn’t be back here mingling with them, not because they might attack me but because the threat of typhus and typhoid was growing day by day. From the moaning and hoarse
