“As you see,” I said to Varya once we’d lived with the Romanovs for a month or so, “there are ways other than lying to protect oneself.” My sister looked at me. It had been some time since I’d last questioned her about one of her fibs.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “And neither do you.”
THAT AFTERNOON IN THE DRAWING ROOM, Alexandra Fyodorovna treated General Kornilov with a warmth and politeness that confused the man, who kept apologizing and repeating himself, clearly worried that the now former tsarina was failing to understand the reign of terror he’d been dispatched to introduce. Once the old guard and staff had defected—this happened with a bewildering and hurtful swiftness—the Alexander Palace was closed to visitors, its doors not only locked but nailed shut, all but the main entrance and the one through which food was delivered to the kitchen. From that point forward, no package would go unopened or uninspected, no message reach its recipient in an envelope that remained sealed. OTMA could do nothing to facilitate sending a telegram or anything else.
Step by step, each action undertaken in the name of guarding the Romanovs’ safety would undermine their influence and separate them from their supporters, of whom there remained many millions, if not in the city then in the heartland. The peasants—who would become the proletariat—had never considered the tsar responsible for their poverty. The tsar was God’s anointed, just as was Christ, and they questioned the actions of neither. If they suffered, it was because the lot of mankind was to suffer, and if the men who oversaw their labor were corrupt, well, that was the devil’s doing, not the tsar’s. As for Russians who hadn’t been loyal to the tsar, most were riven. They’d worked to end tsarism, they believed absolutely that it must be brought down, but tsarism was an idea, not a man, and their satisfaction had its counterweight of grief. Many who claimed they hated Tsar Nikolay found they didn’t enjoy his mortification.
The new guard was received with no little astonishment by the Romanovs and their remaining staff, as the soldiers were—it was clear from their smell as well as their behavior—drunk. They’d stopped in the village shop that sold wine and spirits, terrorized the proprietor with their shouting and gun-waving, and helped themselves to his wares. All through the palace the soldiers went, shouting, cursing, and singing lewd songs, stabbing their bayonets into the upholstery, slicing up paintings and tapestries, and breaking whatever they didn’t steal.
It was probably inevitable that Varya and I, as daughters of the infamous Father Grigory, became the objects of coarse and sordid taunts. “Put your mouth on this and heal it,” one lout said, backing me into a corner with the front of his trousers unbuttoned and a pistol in hand. My refusal to acknowledge his words made him angry, and he pinned me against the wall. The fumes of his breath should have prepared me for how his tongue would taste. For a moment I thought I was going to be sick, but then my teeth closed down on it, proving what I’d suspected: finishing school had not, by everlastingly underscoring the necessity of a lady mastering her passions, conquered the hot-tempered girl I was. And nothing the health instructor said had warned me that a girl’s initiation into sex—my first kiss!—might be so vile. The guard pulled away, bellowing, as shocked by what I’d done as I, who was gagging on his blood and spitting it out of my mouth even as he opened his and showed me the damage to his tongue.
“Stupid slut,” he said, or something like it. The injury slurred his speech to the point that I hardly knew what he said.
For a week or more, Varya and I both endured insults and threats, but she was as good as I at acting deaf, dull, and stubborn. The Red Guard were under orders (at that point, anyway) to restrict their once-exalted prisoners without touching their persons, so once the soldiers had corralled all of us onto one floor of the family’s private apartments, they no longer could take any liberties requiring privacy. Cramped as we were, there was that to be grateful for.
DEREVENKO, WHO HAD CARED FOR ALYOSHA for eight years with a devotion that appeared sincere, had either feigned that love or lacked the character to resist what appeared to him as an immediate existential promotion. In the hours before he abandoned the tsarevich, he tested his new agency by sprawling on Alyosha’s bed and ordering him about.
“You!” he barked. “Light my cigarette. Polish my boots and shine my buckle. And when you’ve done that, go to the kitchen and get me something to eat.”
In silence, without betraying any resentment, Alyosha did all these things while his sisters and I looked on, none of us daring to protest. Dina, as Alyosha called him, sprayed crumbs over the bedclothes and wiped his greasy fingers on the satin wall covering while the tsarevich went to find the “good big traveling trunk” the sailor asked for.
“That,” Derevenko said when Alyosha came back. He pointed at Alyosha’s scale model of the family’s yacht, Standart, on which they sailed the Baltic Sea each fall. “And that. And all of those. Into the trunk with the rest of it.” Derevenko watched as Alyosha did as he was told, filling the trunk from his shelves and drawers and closets. The railway cars and sailing ships; the battalions of minuscule soldiers that marched—some of these playthings had been made by Peter Carl Fabergé and were worth inestimable rubles; the clothing the tsarevich wore for court appearances; his ikons and saints’ medals; his boots; his hairbrush and comb: whatever the sailor imagined would fetch a good price, especially those things that bore Alyosha’s initials or some other proof of their ownership, went into the trunk. When it was filled, he stood from the bed and brushed the crumbs from his shirt onto the floor.
“There it is,” he said to the tsarevich. He picked up an ornamental sword, its hilt engraved with the Romanov crest, and used his shirt cuff to polish the ruby set into the pommel. “Severance pay.” He threw the sword back onto the pile of plunder and kicked the trunk’s lid shut.
Perhaps Alyosha’s forbearance had been, as he said when we spoke about it that afternoon, more the result of shock than noblesse oblige, but I saw him differently after Derevenko’s departure; I stopped calling him “your highness.” If the rumors had been true, if he had once been a child who threw tantrums and behaved shamefully, he was no longer that overweening boy, and it was wrong to tease him as if he were.
NO ONE SLEPT that first night. The tsarina dismantled Tsar Nikolay’s dressing room and found where he had saved the letters she’d written him during their courtship, and at three in the morning had set to work burning any that seemed prudent to destroy, as her children looked on. They, as well as Varya, gave the impression of being too stupefied to comment, but I was tantalized by the letters, enough that I insinuated myself into a corner from which I could make out the words of the one the tsarina had been reviewing before she turned to poke the fire. “It’s cold, isn’t it?” I said to Tatiana, pretending I’d moved to be closer to the hearth, but neither she nor her sisters gave any indication they noticed my trespass, only a replica of their mother’s vague smile, which they had perhaps been trained to summon in response to any social awkwardness.
I would never