Whenever he was allowed, the tsarevich had stood at his father’s side, staring down from the balcony of the Winter Palace at endless bristling ranks of bayonet-bearing soldiers parading below them to collect their tsar’s—his father’s—blessing before they walked into battle. But that was all Alyosha knew of the city from which, he had been told, he would rule the nation he was to inherit, and for whose future he was being educated.
He’d never seen behind the pink and yellow stuccoed façades of the great avenues, never been to the Haymarket to gasp in wonder at the city’s squalid soul, a tide of beggars, drunkards, and whores washing through the aisles of market stalls like debris loosened by one of the Neva’s dependably imminent floods, each a guaranteed-to-be-pestilential deluge of cholera germs and candelabra, of corsets, croissants, chapbooks, clocks, chopsticks, and—
“Wouldn’t candelabra and clocks be too heavy for water to take away?”
“You’d think so, but I’ve seen both in the street after it receded. As well as a drowned dog with a diamond collar being undone by a drunk Dutchman dancing by.”
“Was that D, then?”
“Yes. Along with doors and dumbwaiters and, um, drawing-room chairs. And dice.”
“Now E.”
“Egrets. Eggs. Electric lamps. Elastic. Epaulets. Elephants.”
“F.”
“Fire screens, feather beds, forks, foxes, anything French.”
“Such as?”
“French beans. French bulldogs. French toast.”
“G.”
“Garters, garden gates, greengages, grandmothers, and grandfathers. Glasses, those for tea and those to look through.” George V, I stopped myself from adding to the list. We’d only just learned that the offer of asylum in the United Kingdom had been rescinded now that King George had given his too hasty invitation enough thought to realize what a mistake it might be to expose his disgruntled populace, also suffering the privations of war, to living proof that emperors could be overthrown. We hadn’t had even a week to enjoy the fantasy of being freed before it evaporated.
The early months of 1917 were the Romanovs’ purgatory, a state somewhere between death and judgment, in which they—we all—entertained hopes of escape from whatever punishment the growing strength and organization of the revolutionaries augured. The possibility of freedom was not much different for us than for souls in purgatory: it would depend upon sacrifices made by those who remained in a world to which we were barred return. Varya and I were never told specifically to avoid the topic of our collective fate, but, living in the home of a tsar, we followed the example of our hosts, and politics wasn’t something I discussed with anyone save Alyosha.
One good thing about the Haymarket, I told the tsarevich: whatever was stolen on Monday could be found there on Tuesday, displayed among the wares of merchants offering items from an “estate sale,” as their grimy placards announced. Except that the previous owners, generally speaking, weren’t dead. Maybe vendors of apples and cheese and sturgeon didn’t offer purloined goods—maybe—but the dishes and cutlery, the clocks, andirons, samovars, oil paintings, statuary, and lead-crystal stemware, not to mention the odd harp, taxidermied yak, or leopard-upholstered love seat, had been taken from a sleeping or absent owner. Anyone thorough in canvassing the goods on offer would in time come upon something he recognized. “Look,” you might hear someone say, “Aren’t those Great-Uncle Vladimir’s dueling pistols?” Or, “Didn’t that friend of yours, Anna-What’s-her-name, have a silver tea set with this exact pattern? I thought she said it was one of a kind.” And undoubtedly it had been, but, alas, once blue-white cataracts had dimmed Anna-Whoever-she-was’s brown eyes, her groping fingers never guessed that the larcenous servants she trusted had replaced her tableware, her plates and spoons and glasses and bowls, with cheap imitations.
“Why, look over there,” Alyosha said, closing his eyes as he did when pretending. “Father’s favorite shotgun.” He could be the most literal-minded boy, absolutely hemmed in by reality, and the only way he knew how to use his imagination was by closing his eyes to what was in front of them. As for the rest of the family, they seemed well practiced at being blind with their eyes wide open. Either that or they pretended optimism for one another, voicing what they knew were fantasies.
“And your sister Olga’s chess set.”
“Nagorny’s tennis racquet.”
“Botkin’s diamond studs.”
We were so bored locked up at Tsarskoe Selo—and for the tsarevich, every day he was kept in bed was yet another insult added to that of being kept hostage—that Alyosha and I made play of whatever we could and went to any length to invent amusement. Perhaps only they who have endured a similar punishment would understand.
Of course, Alyosha wouldn’t have been confined to bed if he hadn’t tobogganed down the service stairs on a tea tray. But he did, and the day after he did I overheard Botkin tell Nagorny the swelling was so bad, blood was leaking through the pores of his skin.
I’ve never encountered so eccentric and tenacious a passion in another family, but the Romanovs, save the tsarina, were, to hear Alyosha tell it (in an attempt to explain his misadventure), the most unreasonable tea-tray riders, in all seasons, under all circumstances. Were the family to pass a tempting hillock of dry grass or sand dune when they traveled together on the imperial train, Tsar Nikolay would order the locomotive be stopped and the cars backed up to the hillock.
“Just an hour,” he’d tell the engineer. “Once we’re rolling again, we’ll make it up easily.” And then he and all four girls and Alyosha (if he was well and both his bodyguards were present to run on either side of him, and if the tsarina allowed it) would tear out of the cars with serving trays and dedicate themselves to making as many trips down the slope as they possibly could within the time allotted.
Winters at Tsarskoe Selo, the tsar built a mountain of snow on the park lawn. He shoveled and shoved from all directions, the girls helping with their own smaller shovels, until he and the children agreed it was high enough. Then they all rushed in and out of the palace with kettles of water to pour over the packed snow, until their little Matterhorn developed a slick glazing of ice on one side. Up the snowy side they filed, taking turns shooting down the icy track until they were too tired to stand. Not Alyosha, of course, as mishaps were guaranteed on so hard and fast a surface. All winter long, his sisters’ shins were black and blue and covered with lumps under their wool tights, while poor Alyosha sat at a window and watched, or sat outside on a bench and watched, or, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, perpetrated some act of tomfoolery like the one that had recently lamed him. I hoped it was tomfoolery. When I looked at the stairs Alyosha had ridden down, I couldn’t see how he might have thought to avoid an accident. But if he had hurt himself on purpose, then why? What motive might excuse his courting disaster, plunging into it?
It hurt him horribly, especially when Botkin forced the leg into its brace, but he never complained. Not to me. The only people he showed his tears were his mother and Nagorny, who had been relieving himself when Alyosha snuck away and boarded the tray. When he learned what had happened, the big man wept and wrung his hands. He went before the tsar and tsarina, and on his knees he begged to be allowed to keep his position as Alyosha’s protector. As if, trapped as we were under house arrest, there were a queue of applicants waiting for the job.
ONLY THOSE WHO LIVED at Tsarskoe Selo, within the walls of the Romanovs’ carefully guarded privacy, could understand how suffocating was the pall of dread that descended in the wake of one of Alyosha’s injuries. No one raised a blind or pulled open the drapes; every light was left burning all night. Minutes, hours, days: they had significance only insofar as they tracked the progress of the tsarevich’s suffering. Servants walked hurriedly, wordlessly,