“Why not both of us?” Varya said, following me to the sink, where I splashed my face with water to wake myself up. I lifted my shoulders in a shrug and went out after the page, tucking my blouse into my skirt as best I could while hurrying behind him.
I had no answers for Varya. I had no idea of what was going to happen next—it seemed like anything could, in this new, fatherless world—and no power to protect her, supposing she’d allow such a thing. My sister and I were close in years but little else. Not that either of us wished the other ill, but the time Varya spent in Petersburg changed her from a shy, self-conscious girl to a secretive, dishonest one. From the day she arrived in the city, my sister found it hard to endure exposure to so many staring eyes, and she never developed a tolerance to our providing fodder, as the daughters of the Mad Monk Rasputin, for schoolgirl gossip and taunts. From the beginning I understood it was our father’s power that inspired slander—if a person is conspicuous, people will say anything about him. And what point was there in taking issue with fate? Father’s persecution and martyrdom had been foretold.
Still, our growing steadily apart was as much my fault as Varya’s.
She wasn’t one to talk about what bothered her, and I shirked my duty as her older sister, avoiding the chore of slowly coaxing her unhappiness out of her head and into my lap, where I’d have to respond to what I couldn’t repair. For, once Father had decided on a thing, there was no changing his mind, and, though he remained faithful to his peasant ways, he had been set on pleasing our mother by having her daughters educated as she was, in a proper girls’ school. We had to stay with Father in St. Petersburg, and Varya would remain enrolled whether she hated it or not.
I don’t know how long my sister had made a practice of lying before I noticed that the lies she told seemed oddly useless. They didn’t get her out of trouble or get anyone else into it; they weren’t malicious. Instead, Varya’s lies seemed peculiarly lacking in consequence. I’d ask her, for example, if she’d enjoyed a concert I knew she’d planned to attend, and she’d tell me she hadn’t gone after all. Then I’d bump into an acquaintance with whom she’d spoken during the concert’s intermission. Had she been pursuing some clandestine business, it would have been the other way around: she’d have said she attended the concert to excuse an absence for a different cause, the one she wanted to hide. But if each lie alone seemed to serve no purpose, the habit of telling them amounted to camouflage. For as long as one lie went undiscovered, my sister was protected by the façade it presented, and many of them together created a kind of psychic fortress in which to hide, maybe even a new identity, a life whose terms she dictated and kept separate from Father’s and mine. It also formed, perhaps only incidentally, a barrier between the two of us. On those occasions I challenged Varya, she’d change the topic or, like a politician, answer another, different question, one I hadn’t asked. She slipped away as quickly as a wet bar of soap.
I almost didn’t see the tsarina when I entered her darkened boudoir, having been given a nudge by the lady-in-waiting when I hesitated on the threshold. She was lying on a chaise longue, and the boudoir was as rumored: the chaise was upholstered in a slippery-looking mauve chintz, the floral-patterned carpets were all shades of mauve, as were the walls, tablecloths, bellpull, curtains, and the blanket pulled up over her knees. Even her lips were mauve, and her fingertips too. I’d heard it said the tsarina had had scarlet fever as a child, and the disease damaged the valves of her heart.
“You poor, dear, brave, wonderful girl,” she said in answer to my curtsy. “The apple of your dear father’s eye. You cannot imagine how he praised you to me, how proud he was. ‘Don’t be fooled by her size,’ he’d say, ‘my little Masha is destined for great and astonishing things. The good Lord has shown me the crowds that will gather for only a look at her.’” She paused, her eyes searching mine. “I am so sorry we—you—have lost him. Poor child, you look thoroughly worn out. I’ll ring for tea, shall I?”
“I don’t—” I said. “I hardly know what to think.”
“Of course you don’t. How could you at a time like this? Did you know how your father spoke of you, my dear? Did he tell you about your future?”
“Only a little,” I said, and she frowned, faintly.
“Ah. I’d hoped that with you he had been …” She paused, perhaps searching for a word she wanted. “… more forthcoming.”
“I … I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Did he say anything about it? Your future?”
“No,” I said. “It sounds as if he may have told you more than he did me.”
“Ah.” The tsarina put a finger before her lips, as if cautioning me to keep a secret. “We—you—will have to be patient, then,” she said after a moment. “We will have to wait and see.”
I smiled in response to the tsarina’s smile, finding it hard to keep up my end of the conversation. In truth, I couldn’t think of any but one thing, my mind prodding and poking, tonguelike, at the absence of my father, pressing up against what was no longer there and trying to measure the loss. I didn’t want to contemplate his murder every minute, but I couldn’t stop adding up the days and hours leading to his disappearance as if it were an equation I could rework to arrive at a different answer, the one in which I’d had the foresight to prevent Father’s leaving the apartment that night. From my father’s death to my portion of responsibility for his death to Varya’s and my future, one fixation ceded to the next; there was our mother’s safety to worry over, and the dangers of travel versus those of remaining in Russia—
“You and your sister will live here, at Tsarskoe Selo. It was your father’s wish.”
“Thank you, your—”
“Please,” the tsarina said, and she shook her finger as though at a naughty child. “No titles. And no more curtsies either.”
I nodded. My head seemed to bob up and down on its own. Without falling back on prescribed formalities, I had little to say, and my eyes strayed to the books on the tsarina’s shelves and the paintings on her wall. History, mostly of the Orthodox Church, theology, and landscapes of mauve rivers and mauve forests and fields, mauve haystacks and mauve mountains. Suddenly, then, the overhead light went on and I saw that the tsarina had risen from her pillows. Sitting up straight as a fence post, her hand still on the switch plate, she was breathing rapidly and her eyes were frantic and bright, almost glittering. I wondered if she was suffering an attack of some kind, and I was on the point of calling for help when she reached out and seized my hand.
“I know it’s in you,” she said. Her hand wasn’t, like her words, feverish but as cold as though she had one foot in her grave. Other than suppressing a shudder, I didn’t respond to her assertion. Cryptic as it was, I could pretend I didn’t understand her meaning, and I remained silent under her stare. The voluble self I knew seemed to have parted company with me, and I felt as though I were inhabited by a stranger, her expression blank, seamless as an egg.
“That’s why he made Nikolay Alexandrovich your guardian, yours and your sister’s.” The tsarina’s eyes didn’t focus on my face so much as they approached it as they would the lid of a box. I could feel her looking for a place to pry me open and peer inside. “Your father wouldn’t have left Alyosha without having planned for his future. He sent you to us. He wanted you near the tsarevich, to keep him from harm. To heal him when he is ill and to comfort him. He sent you here for Alyosha. For Alyosha and for Russia as well.”
So I wasn’t beyond being shocked anew, as that declaration had my mouth open before I had anything to say. It was rumored the tsarevich had been a terror as a little boy, spoiled by a family and servants who couldn’t bear to deny a sick child whatever he asked, as long as it couldn’t harm him. At table he’d taken food from others’ plates, kicked and cried whenever he was disciplined. The risk that he might do himself injury while thrashing about was so great that soon even the hint of a tantrum’s approach guaranteed his demands would be satisfied immediately.