garments, appeared more than startled upon the ambo. His big, wide face was red, his eyes darted about with worry, but I smiled gently before him, determined to remain calm, for there was naught that I could do but accept my fate. I fully expected to be taken away by these men, yet I tried to exude a kind of calm as my sisters poured into the church, for I had no wish to sow anxiety among my loved ones.
“There is nothing to fear,” I said, slowly moving through the clouds of incense and smoke toward the front. “And, please, I will tolerate no tears.”
Reaching the altar, I stared upon the beautiful images lining the iconostasis and crossed myself. As gracefully as I had once curtsied before king and queen, I then dropped to my knees, bowing all the way over and pressing my forehead upon the cool, soothing stones. It was there that I remained on my knees throughout the brief service, repeating the prayers, crossing myself, rising and falling over and over in humility and devotion. My sisters in the choir sang like angels, and this, too, gave me strength.
With the conclusion of the brief service, I came to my feet, and kissed the gold cross which Father Mitrofan held before me. One by one all my sisters did likewise, and as I stepped aside I was more than pleased to see the revolutionaries do likewise. Good village boys that they had once surely been, they each received Father’s blessing. This also warmed my heart and gave me a kind of hope that one day Russia would heal itself.
With the Te Deum concluded, I turned to these men, and said, “Father Mitrofan will now escort you about my buildings. I ask you to please look wherever you wish and to take however much time you may need. When you have finished your search, you will find me in my reception room, and from there I will go with you, just as you have requested.”
I could see in their eyes that these men had been softened by the service, that something no longer burned within their souls, or at least not as hotly as before. Or was it a kind of reluctance, was that what I sensed? Not one of them moved, not one of them met my gaze.
Finally, the leader, the one with the mustache, rather sheepishly said, “The truth is that if we take you today, Matushka, we will have no place to keep you, no prison. So… so, I think, yes, perhaps, it would be best if you stayed here. But we must do our search. We still need to look everywhere.”
“Most certainly,” I replied with a warm smile. “Please look wherever you wish. It is my hope that you completely satisfy yourselves.”
They headed off and were gone a good long while, verifying, inspecting, and checking virtually each and every room of the obitel, from the orphanage to the operating theater, the kitchens to the apothecary. An hour later I was called out from my reception rooms, and there, in my snow-covered gardens, I found the six men.
“Are you satisfied that you saw everything?” I asked.
“Yes,” replied the mustached one, as several of his compatriots nodded in agreement. “We found nothing, so we are leaving now.”
“Very well.”
Of course they hadn’t found anything, neither Germans nor spies, bullets nor guns. Such things were anathema to all that I and my work stood for. The search was nevertheless important, because now, perhaps, the story would go round that a group of revolutionaries had had a thorough look-see through our community and found virtually nothing of interest. Hopefully this time the truth would circulate instead of all those awful black lies.
I escorted the men, and as we neared the gates, I quietly said, “Thank you for allowing me to stay where I am needed.”
There was not a reply from one of them, and they, perhaps a touch embarrassed, filed silently past me and onto the street, where their two lorries awaited. Upon seeing the search committee emerge from my gates, the mob burst into excited song, this time the “Marseillaise.” But the song quickly fell away, for the search team was emerging with no screaming princess, no spies, and not a single weapon.
As sole explanation, the mustached one loudly proclaimed, “This is just a women’s monastery, nothing else!”
All boarded the lorries and off they went, singing yet again with revolutionary fervor. Once they were gone, I tightly closed the gates. For a moment I paused, wondering if now was in fact the time to lock the gates and barricade ourselves from the outer world. I reached to do just that, but decided quite otherwise. Beyond our walls there were so many in such great need.
Turning around I saw my dear Nun Varvara, her hands clasped at her waist, standing there and looking supremely relieved.
With a large smile upon her face, she said, “Very well done, Matushka.”
I smiled as well and with a light shrug, boasted, “Once again it seems that we are not yet worthy of a martyr’s crown.”
Chapter 38 PAVEL
We pulled the tsar by his prick from the throne, and it was a big surprise what happened after that: the Germans sent Lenin back to Russia. It was true. They put him in a sealed train, they gave him hundreds of thousands of rubles to make a revolution, and they snuck him through Finland and back into the country. Which meant Lenin was the only real traitor, financed by none other than our enemies who wanted only one thing: to get Russia out of the war.
All this I found out at a secret meeting that fall in Moscow. The Comrade Trotsky told me everything, that all the rumors were true. He also told me that if I talked about it at all, if I spread word of it, they would shoot me like a dog, a bullet in the back of my head. Without saying anything, I thought how funny this was-everyone had gone after the ex-empress because they said she was working for the Germans, but in fact it was our man, Lenin, who worked for them. I understood all this but it didn’t bother me. I didn’t care how Lenin had come back from his hiding in Switzerland.
“All I care about, Comrade,” I told Trotsky right to his face, “is three things: Land to the peasants! Factories to the workers! Peace to the soldiers!”
“Exactly! Kerensky and his Provisional Government are keeping us in the war, but we have more important things-we haven’t finished the revolution of the proletariat!”
No, we hadn’t. There was lots more to do. Many, like Trotsky, were even calling for complete equality for the Zhidki, which was just what Trotsky was, one of them, a Jew man. Such interesting times.
Those months were chaos, the capitalists demanding one thing, the socialists another, and then that summer Lenin even had to flee again because suddenly Kerensky sent his men to arrest him. But our hero got away, he slipped right out of town. No one knew quite where he went-had he run all the way back to Switzerland?-but later they said that he’d scurried toward the Finnish border, where he dived into a haystack. They said he stayed hidden there almost all the way until the real Revolution but I think maybe he lived somewhere else, in a hidden dacha or something.
Da, da, da, and finally that fall a great miracle happened: The Great October Revolution!
The second Revolution was so different from the first, the February Revolution. The second, the October Revolution, was much wilder. In Moscow there was shooting from the roofs and battles on the street, us Bolsheviks trying to kill as many Kadets as we could. From everywhere you could hear the rat-tat-tat of machine guns, and there was one big, long battle near the Arbat where there was a military academy and where so many of the wealthy bastards lived. Villa after villa was burned, and there were bodies lying everywhere. For the first time tank trucks rumbled the streets, too.
It was during this time and on one great day that they gave me a big, important task. More than anything the Revolution needed two things: weapons and money. That was why on one particular morning they sent a group of Red Guards marching on the Kremlin. At the same time they sent me and four comrades to one of the big banks that did, they said, all sorts of business with the warmongers and foreign capitalists. My instructions were very clear: Grab nagrablenoye!
Not too very long after it opened we went into this bank. Actually I went first, dressed all special in a black leather coat that they gave me and instructed me to wear. They didn’t want me to look like the peasant that I was, they didn’t want me to look suspicious. So they made me look pretty good, and in I went through the big brass
