The Kitchen Boy

paper that would have averted all. Sure, Russia in its own clumsy, inevitable way was stumbling toward a constitutional monarchy, and because Nikolai could not see this, because he could not sign a simple paper granting a ministry appointed not by him but by his parliament, he and his family as well as about forty million others were slaughtered.

The thick, acrid smoke had yet to clear before the henchmen were upon their victims, Red vultures picking at the Imperial Family as if they were carrion. While Yurovsky was going from body to body, verifying pulses and the sort, two of the guards were in the hall, still vomiting not because of the gore but because of the foul smoke from those old-fashioned bullets. The rest of the guards forgot every bit of their ideology and searched pockets and wrists and necks for trinkets and treasures. Greed was their strongest urge, and these henchmen fed furiously upon their victims. They wanted more for themselves, and so they feasted upon those they had killed for possessing too much. Only Yurovsky stood as the pillar of the ideal revolutionary, and he flushed with disdain upon seeing the joyful looting.

He shouted, “You are to take nothing! Nothing! Now I want half of you to go upstairs and gather all the sheets you can, and I want the other half to go out to the shed and gather the shafts from the troikas.” When he saw hesitation among them, Yurovsky raised his gun. “Go!”

For a long moment, none of the guards left. Realizing he was losing control, Yurovsky took aim at one of the men.

“Leave!”

One by one, the assassins departed. Shaken by the disobedience, Yurovsky stood there, pistol raised as he guarded his royal kill. And because of this challenge, he never finished verifying the dead, specifically Anastasiya, Kharitonov, and Maria. Minutes later his men returned, and according to Yurovsky’s directions the sheets were suspended between the harnessing shafts and the bodies loaded up. With the noisy engine of the motor lorry masking the commotion, the Romanovs and their small retinue were then carted out one by one and heaved into the back of the vehicle.

The entire time I sat there, hidden in the darkness, watching, seeing with my own two eyes, and yet not believing. Not a tear did I shed, not even then. Not a whimper did I cry. Somehow fear steeled me, protected me, for had I started crying I would have been pulled from my hiding place and killed as well.

Once the last of the bodies was heaped upon the pile in the back of the truck, the biggest of the guards pulled himself onto the truck. He scrambled over the dead, pawed at them like a mad dog, and laughing, reached into a pile of Romanovs. He threw aside an arm, tugged at a bloody dress, and seized upon a fleshy prize. A moment later he leapt up and held out his cupped hand as if it were full of gold.

“Now that I have touched the Empress’s pussy I can die in peace!” he laughed and shrieked.

His joy was a call to chaos, and his comrades hooted with fiendish delight. All at once the lot of them climbed and clambered aboard, once again pulling at boots and necklaces, eyeglasses and especially watches, which Russians have always sought as a souvenir of death. Though they failed to discover the fortune of diamonds hidden in the royal corsets, the guards clambered over the carcasses of their history, desperately pawing for riches of any kind.

Suddenly Yurovsky charged out of the house, cocked his gun, and shouted, “The next man who takes anything gets a bullet in the head! Drop everything you’ve taken and get back inside – now!”

The frenzy came to an immediate but uncomfortable pause, followed by grumbling and some reluctant movement.

“I’ll be checking each and every one of you, and should I find that you’ve taken anything – anything! – you’ll be executed immediately!”

All of a sudden things began to fall. A bracelet. An amulet. Dr. Botkin’s glasses. One of the traveling pillows. The guards dropped them back onto the bodies, and these things landed with soft plops upon the still-warm flesh. From where I hid, I sensed the bodies shifting as the guards clambered over them. The next moment I saw an arm slip out from beneath the canvas top, the gold watch on that arm sparkling in the night.

The guards did as they were told. All it took was terror to whip them into control, of course, and this team of executioners leaped to the ground and hurried inside. Thereupon big buckets of sawdust were carted into the cellar room. Brooms too. And mops. They had to obliterate all signs of the crime. The Whites would take the city any day, and the Reds couldn’t leave any trace of the bodies or even the murders; all along the greatest danger to their cause had not been the possibility of Nikolai being restored to the throne – neither Red nor White wanted that – but the very real possibility of the Whites seizing the dead Tsar and his family and resurrecting them as martyrs to their cause. But of course there could be no martyrs if there were no bodies.

While all of this cleaning up was going on, I stared at the dead arm swinging back and forth, the gold watch on that arm ticking this way and that against the side of the Fiat lorry. As if mesmerized by Rasputin himself, I was drawn out of the darkness, and I inched forward. They say that a Russian cannot believe with his eyes what he cannot touch with his hand, and against my own will I was drawn forward. Without even thinking, I reached out. I reached out and clutched the arm of Batyushka, the Dear Father. I held onto his muscular arm for but a moment. And then I pulled at his watch. When my hands came away, not only did I clutch something as brilliant as the sun, but my fingers were sticky red with his death.

Minutes later, after great confusion, the motor lorry finally made its departure. Once again I trotted after it, hiding in the vehicle’s night shadow as it passed through the gates. Of course I should have fled, but that never occurred to me. Not once. I should have taken off across the square, but somewhere I understood that the end of the tale had not yet come. And so like a pathetic dog I trotted after my dead master as the lorry moved through the dark, muddy streets of Yekaterinburg.

Da, da, da, like a faithful dog I chased after that motor truck that was overflowing with all those troopy, those bodies. With a driver, a single guard, and Yurovsky seated up front, the vehicle proceeded so very slowly that I had no trouble keeping up, and when it drove all the way around the far side of the race track, I took the shortcut and actually had to wait for it to pass. When it headed northward on the dirt lane to the village Koptyaki, I trotted after it. Usually it was only carts and wagons that moved along here, peasants bringing their fish or game to sell in town. But not tonight… not tonight…

I had no idea of its destination, but I ran after the motor lorry, and the vehicle barely creaked along, certainly not faster than a cart itself. A few versts from town one of the wheels sank into a deep hole, then rose quickly out of it, hit a stone, and the whole back of the lorry bounced violently. That very instant a black heap of something was thrown from the rear of the truck, landing with a near silent thud on the dirt road. At first I couldn’t imagine, but then it bolted through me, seized my heart. Gospodi, Dear Lord, one of the bodies had been hurled from the lorry onto the ground.

I froze in horror, then bolted forward, hurried to this sack of death lying so still in the rutted road to Koptyaki. Da, da, it was a body. That much was clear. And not Dr. Botkin. And not one of the ladies. No, it was the Heir Tsarevich Aleksei Nikolaevich. A rag doll of a body… that was all that was left. He was the mirror of me, this boy was. We were about the same height, the same age, and there he lay, twisted and crumpled, his military tunic torn, his face so… so…

Gospodi, Dear Lord, when I knelt to him I saw the side of his head all black and shattered. His right ear was gone, blasted away by the two bullets that Yurovsky had fired point blank into the side of his head. Da, da, the bullets had pierced the skull, not blowing it apart, really, but surely exploding through his brains and out the other side. But his face…itwas…

My stomach turned, slithered like a snake up the back of my throat. I turned away, then immediately looked back. Yes, it was him, there was no doubt, even though it was almost impossible to tell, for they had slashed his face with bayonets, beaten it with rifle butts. Mother of God, this boy, who had so yearned to play shahmaty, well, there was nothing left to gaze at but slaughtered meat and bone hanging, dripping, into the earth of Siberia, so… so mutilated was he.

I couldn’t move. I stared down at this grossly killed boy, the Heir to the throne of Russia, and the blackest of terrors filled my every pore. I wanted to die. I wanted someone to blow my own brains out, to blast this sight from my mind, but then… then the truck started picking up speed, started moving quicker. And all of a sudden another one fell out. I looked up the road and saw another body tumble from the back of the truck. It just… just fell like a sack of wheat onto the road.

I didn’t know what to do. Once again I looked down to the Heir, saw his perforated body, knew that the future of Russia was dead beyond a doubt, and then I gazed up the road at the next dark pile that was yet another