The Kitchen Boy

“It amazes me still to this day how quickly the empire fell to pieces. One day the people are kissing the ground upon which the Tsar’s shadow has fallen, the next they are hacking apart his body. Nikolai merely put down his scepter and walked away, and literally overnight a three-hundred-year old dynasty evaporated – poof, gone! – with no one lifting a finger to save it. Ironic that the Soviet Union collapsed just as easily, which proves it was no better, that the cure, kommunizm, was in fact far worse than the disease itself. Now, I can only hope, those days are over, and just maybe that’s true. After all, it took nearly one hundred years for the insanity to fade from France after their revolution.

“So, anyway… where was I? Oh, sure,” he said, leaning forward and checking the tape, which was whirring away. “I must continue my dark story. You must listen while I tell of the terrible things I saw the night the Romanovs were murdered. I have lived with this story every day, every moment of my life, yet never did I want these events to cross my lips. But now, because of recent developments, tell I must. You see, the night the Romanovs were killed, I chased after the truck that was overflowing with troopy – carcasses – as it slowly headed down that dirt road to village Koptyaki.

“But I will get to all of those gruesome details. Now, just listen as I return to the morning of June 26,1918.”

9

It was a Wednesday. The previous day the second note had come so nicely hidden in the cork of that chetvert of milk, and then that afternoon I’d carried out the long reply. We were all quite hopeful, even quite expectant, that Wednesday morning. We’d had no news from the outside for weeks – no letters, no newspapers except an ersatz journal that consisted of three telegrams reprinted on some greasy brown paper – but suddenly there was that candle of hope. Perhaps the world had not forgotten His Majesty after all. Though the morning was hot – “Very hot again, 22? degrees in the room,” recorded Aleksandra in her diary – we were all quite eager upon rising, thankful to know that someone was apparently working on our behalf. Could it be that God had finally heard the long, sorrowful prayers of Aleksandra and her family? Had she finally got right her arrangements of icons?

I was in the kitchen stuffing the center of the samovar with twigs and pine cones. It was not quite seven-thirty. And the first of the Romanovs to go to the water closet that morning – accompanied by a guard, of course – was again the second daughter, Tatyana Nikolaevna. Our eyes met and said the same things: yes, perhaps today was the day, perhaps by eve we would be free. Her fine lips pursed the smallest of smiles. Carrying a sponge, toothbrush, rubber traveling bowl, and a pressed white linen hand towel, she, with the guard right behind her, passed through the kitchen, past the twenty-three steps, and to the far corner of the house. In the back of my mind I heard the door of the water closet open, close, and knew that the guard was waiting right outside the door while the Grand Duchess was performing her morning ablutions.

Several moments later, however, I heard the door of the water closet thrown open, and then Tatyana Nikolaevna, like a fast moving summer storm, swept back through the kitchen, her eyes cast to the floor. There were bright blooms of red spread across her face – again, so much like her mother whose emotions manifested themselves physically – while behind her came the guard, laughing deeply as he stroked his stringy beard. What untoward actions had he taken? Had he cornered the young woman, tried to kiss her, as one of them had tried to embrace Maria just last week?

I glanced through the hall, into the dining room. I saw nothing, but heard a flurry of low voices, the swishing of dresses. A few moments passed before Nikolai Aleksandrovich himself came storming along the same route. Wearing his army tunic and tall leather boots, of course, he passed through the kitchen, his face grave. Behind him came the same guard, still laughing, still stroking his beard. Although I was all but invisible to both of them, I watched as the ex-Tsar moved with great determination into the water closet. He remained there longer than his daughter. A good deal longer.

I lit the samovar, vented the smoke out the window. I blew on the twigs, made sure the flame was fine and strong. And then I heard Nikolai Aleksandrovich emerge, heard him march my way, his pace steady, controlled, firm. Almost like a robot he passed me by, his face stony and void of expression. Many people have described the Tsar as such, that when bad news was delivered upon him they were surprised by his lack of reaction, lack of emotion. Some great ministers and foreign dignitaries mistook this as a lack of caring and feeling, a weak-willed passivity or deep-seated fatalism. But they were all wrong. Nikolai Aleksandrovich was deeply emotional, extraordinarily caring. And also a firm believer that the Tsar of All the Russias must maintain absolute control – control of every little item on his desk, control of his own calendar and appointments, and above all, supreme among most manly things, control of his personal feelings. All this while deep inside so much was seething, all of which he expressed only to his wife. Yes, a passionate, loving man – which is made clear in the thousands of letters he left behind – but as he moved on by, not an inkling of emotion could I detect on that man’s practiced face. I did notice something, however: his hands. They were blackened, and he was rubbing them together, trying desperately to wipe something away.

Unable to contain myself, I quickly peered into the center of the samovar and saw that the blaze was going well. I then glanced into the dining room, spying nothing. While all of the Romanovs needed a guard to escort them to the water closet or the bathing room, I did not. And so that is exactly where I went, to the very place where the Tsar had just gone on foot. Passing through the house, I reached the far corner, where I paused, heard the guards’ deep voices – was that groggy one Komendant Avdeyev? – then reached for the door of the water closet. And thereupon entered a small chamber of surprise.

Russians can be witty. They can be cruel. And they find keen delight in the grotesque marriage of the two. Many things had I heard in jest about Nikolai – “We had a revolution not because we wanted a limited monarchy, but because we had a limited monarch” – but here on the walls of the water closet were things that my youthful mind had never conjured. On the wall across from the ceramic sink was painted a demonic man, his hair long and scraggly, his beard twisted and foul. He was naked, and rising from between his legs was a gigantic, erect penis which he was shoving into the crack of a woman who herself wore nothing but a large, bejeweled crown. Above him was written the name “Grisha,” while on her crown was enscribed “Shura.” Sure, in this tiny chamber the angry Red guards had portrayed the man they believed had soiled the dynasty and brought down the empire, Grigory Rasputin, fornicating with that traitor to the motherland, the German bitch, Empress Aleksandra Fyodorovna. Nearby, watching the scene with robust delight, was an effeminate, chubby, bearded man with droopy breasts – the Emperor Nikolai II – who sat in a tub overflowing with German marks and American dollars. It was done in big bold strokes of black paint. Permanent paint. That much was obvious because the Tsar had used a wet hand to try to wipe it away, though it had proved impossible to do little more than lightly smear the graphic mural.

But there was more.

Most of the guards had never before seen a toilet, let alone used one, and had taken to using this one by standing on the seat itself and squatting. In light of the numerous muddy footprints left behind on the seat, the Empress had had her maid place a cultured sign above the toilet that read: “Be so kind as to leave the toilet as clean as you found it.” But that did little good, because most of the guards couldn’t read, either. In any case, to the side and written directly on the wall was a little ditty:

TO ALL HIS PEOPLES NIKOLAI SAID

AS FOR A REPUBLIC, GO FUCK YOURSELVES INSTEAD

SO OUR RUSSIAN TSAR CALLED NICK

WE DRAGGED FROM HIS THRONE BY HIS DICK

To myself I mumbled aloud the last two lines – “Tsaria russkogo Nikolu, Za khuy sdernuli s prestolu” – and I began to shake. Such rudeness was unbelievable – to this day it’s still forbidden in Russia to even publish the word khuy. And, I started to cry, not so much out of fear, but because for the first time I grasped how horrid a world lay ahead if, in fact, I survived.

Yes, the image and little ditty remained all the way to the end, and, in fact, were added to as the days fell