The Kitchen Boy

put three loaves on the maple table. Next I headed directly for the WC, planning to fetch the note from its hiding place and secretly return it to the Tsar, telling him how I’d single-handedly averted disaster. So I went into the small WC, shut the door and dropped the hook into the little eye. I climbed atop the toilet, stuck my hand back there, but when I reached behind the pipe… I found nothing.

Nyet, nothing.

There was absolutely neechevo behind the pipe. I suppose it wasn’t much more than an hour earlier that I had carefully hidden the note back there, but now to my dismay the little envelope had vanished. And so overcome with panic was I that I nearly vomited. I clawed at the walls, searched the floor, looked everywhere, hoping it had merely dropped out and was lying around. In desperation I pulled at the back of the toilet itself, even opened the tank, but there was no trace whatsoever of the Tsar’s note to his loyal officers. My only hope, of course, was that the Tsar himself or someone else from the family had found it.

I hurried out of the water closet, through the kitchen, and into the dining room, where I found the Tsar and Tsaritsa playing a game of bezique.

“Do you realize Doctor Derevenko hasn’t been allowed in once since the new komendant?” she bemoaned as she studied her cards.

“We will keep asking. And asking.”

“Baby’s going to take a bath tonight. Imagine, it’s only his second since Tobolsk.”

“In case you hadn’t heard, the komendant says we bathe too much. We must stop this continual washing, it’s not a good habit, or so he claims,” said the Tsar with amusement. “After all he’s-”

“-a trained medic.”

They both started chuckling.

I cleared my throat.

Nikolai Aleksandrovich turned to me, and exclaimed, “Ah, Leonka, all is well?”

I felt their eyes upon me, both the Tsar’s and the Tsaritsa’s. So hopeful they looked, so yearning for good news. I wanted to cry, I wanted to shout out, for by the simplicity on their royal faces I immediately understood that, no, it wasn’t them who had found and claimed the note! Dear Lord in Heaven!

Seeing my confusion, the Tsar asked, “Your trip to the Soviet for khleb was a success?”

Had there not been a guard by the window I’m sure I would have burst into tears and confessed my stupidity. Had we been alone I’m sure I would have dropped to the floor and admitted how terribly I had failed, blurting that the note most surely had fallen into the hands of the Reds who guarded us. As it was, there was nothing I could say, not only because of the nearby Lett with rifle and hand grenade, but… but… truth be told, because I was far too much of a coward.

My voice shaking, I muttered, “Da-s.”

While the Empress was not a well-educated woman and by no means wise, she was extraordinarily perceptive, and if she called you a friend then she cared for you with her entire being. She knew something was wrong. And seeing me shake, she immediately rose to her feet and pressed her hand to my forehead in a smothering, motherly way.

“Nicky, the boy’s burning up.”

She immediately summoned Dr. Botkin, who pronounced the onslaught of grippe, and as such I was immediately sentenced to the back bedroom, the far corner one. I was covered with blankets, offered tea and broth, both of which I declined. I just lay there, terrified of what I had done, what would happen, and wanting so much to confess and beg forgiveness. Instead I lay there all evening unable to speak. Much to my amazement, however, everything else seemed to proceed with complete normalcy. Aleksei did in fact have his bath, the family retired early, the wind came up, and somewhere in the depth of the night I heard both thunder and the report of artillery.

And I lay there, listening for that elusive whistle and praying, Please, please come tonight. Please come and carry us away this very eve…

By morning it seemed but a dream – or rather a nightmare that passed like the midnight storm – for nothing had changed. I woke cool and calm. First the Empress herself checked on me, feeling again my forehead, and then the doctor did likewise. I was pronounced healthy, surprisingly healthy. Meanwhile, it was noted that Aleksei had come down with a slight cold – caught from me, they speculated – and it was hoped he would recover just as quickly.

This was the sixteenth, of course. July 16. The day thereof. Yet as far as I could tell there were no suspicions, no thoughts or fears of what was to come. At least not by any of them, the family. This I knew because I studied them all day long, trying to figure out who had found this stupid note. I could learn nothing, however, and the time just progressed into another boring day. I suppose it was infinitely better that way, better they didn’t suspect, better they couldn’t conceive of anything as terrible as that which would transpire that very night.

That morning eggs, milk, and thread were again brought from the monastery. Sister Antonina and Novice Marina came early, but I did not see them. Rather, they left the foodstuffs with the guards at the front door. And while a good many eggs they did in fact bring, we received only ten. The evidence of the other eggs – all forty of them – I was to see only later.

Otherwise, for the rest of the day the Empress and Olga, her eldest, madly continued “arranging medicines.” It was late that afternoon too that they completed the long and difficult task of individually wrapping every diamond in cotton wadding and then densely packing and stitching those little bundles between two corsets for the girls to wear. And just in time too. That night, when Yurovsky woke them, the grand duchesses would slip on their corsets, each of which was packed with no less than 10,000 carats. They would get dressed, sure that three hundred officers were charging to their rescue, and Aleksandra would think herself so smart, so clever.

And yet a horrific cloud of doubt must have hovered in the Tsaritsa’s mind…

While Nikolai was a slave to fate, Aleksandra believed in the duality of the prophecies, that what was written in the Bible of ancient times applied as well to her, a fallen queen. In the afternoon while Nikolai was pacing outside in the garden for his thirty minutes, Aleksandra and her second daughter, Tatyana, remained inside reading of the prophets’ gloom, including: “Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith the Lord.”

As for me, I became less worried as the day wore on. As far as I could see, no one in our suite had found the note, nor had Yurovsky or any of the guards apparently discovered it, for there was no recrimination, no horrible scene. Little did I know, however, that the note had in fact been found by the Reds and that the entire day telegrams were flying to and from Moscow demanding that Nikolai be “immediately destroyed.”

16

Lenin denied it all.

During those tumultuous days, those violent days, when the outside world couldn’t tell what happened to Nikolai and Aleksandra, Lenin claimed that the ex-Tsar was safe, that the rumors of their murders were only a provocation and “lie of capitalist press.” But Lenin knew. Of course he did, for on that day, Tuesday July 16, 1918, he authorized not only the execution of Nikolai, but the entire family, including all the girls and the boy. That was what kind of man he was, a cold-blooded murderer. I spit on the bastard’s body, which to this day lies like a pickle in a glass coffin on Moscow’s Red Square. A shrine to a mass murderer, that’s what it is.

I never learned who discovered the envelope I hid in the bathroom, but it soon fell into Komendant Yurovksy’s hands, who in turn sounded the bloodthirsty alarm. And the discovery of that note from the Tsar to his would-be rescuers, his “Officers,” caused a terrible fright among the kommunisty. Expecting imminent defeat and seeing monarchist spies in every shadow and around every corner, some of the Reds fled into the forest and hills. Others slipped out of town and secretly crossed over enemy lines, where the double- crossing bastards swore allegiance to the Whites. Yet others, a core group of Reds, gathered at the American Hotel, a fine brick building down by the train station. It was there, in room number three, that these bloodthirsty Bolsheviki celebrated, for at last here it was, their excuse, and to Moscow they issued an urgent request: