“WHAT IS THAT NOISE?” Alyosha asked, not on the first or even the second day we heard the sharp cracks that echoed so they seemed to come from all directions at once, but after it had gone on for more than a week.
“Don’t move it,” I said. For several hours a day, Alyosha’s leg was forcibly straightened and strapped into a brace to keep the swelling from crippling his knee. It was on a Monday that he’d hurt it. April 2, 1917. I know because he recorded such events in a journal, which came into my possession after his death.
“I’m not moving.”
“You are. I’m not blind, you know.”
“What difference does it make? We’ll all be dead in a month. I don’t know why they don’t kill us now. Shoot us all and confiscate every last trapping of decadent tsarist rule. Get it over with, why don’t they?”
Either Alyosha—it must have been the nickname, Sunbeam, that led me to mistake him for an optimist, before fate threw us so continually together—was a secret cynic or his father’s forced abdication had turned him into one. Preoccupied by a crisis no adult could manage, asking every day—when he wasn’t too sick to care—for news of the provisional government’s success in holding revolution at bay, Alyosha seemed far older than his years, and he spoke his mind without regard to what his audience might think. I liked his refusal to euphemize as the rest of his family did, pretending our incarceration in the Alexander Palace was something akin to a pause between acts. As if we were taking a break backstage, changing our costumes as the props were adjusted, practicing lines for an upcoming scene. The arrival of the White Army, for example.
“Matryona Grigorievna! What is making that noise?” Alyosha said. “You hear it, don’t you? Yes, I see by your face that you hear it.”
“Your father chopping, that’s all.”
“Father chopping what?”
“Wood, of course,” I said. “What else?”
Tsar Nikolay was finishing what he’d started the day after Alyosha’s fall and the bleeding it caused: cutting down a grove of poplars. Trees he’d planted himself, as a boy, on the periphery of the horse cemetery where Alyosha’s pony, Bucephalus, had been laid to rest like all faithful servants of the Romanovs, under a proper headstone carved with his name and the dates of his birth and his death.
Tsar Nikolay—we were to call him “Colonel Romanov” now—wasn’t felling trees wildly, as if in a rage. That would have been less unnerving. In this, as in all else, he was his methodical self. He used an ax to take down a single tree, directing its fall away from the grove and onto the adjacent park lawn, where he sawed off its branches, cut them and its trunk into logs of a uniform length, and split those whose circumference might prove unwieldy for whoever tended hearth the following winter. Dogged by two guards, he carried wood by the armload and stacked it neatly near one of the palace’s sealed-off service entrances, and he gathered the smallest branches into tidy bundles of kindling, which he tied with twine. Only when he had dismantled all of one tree into firewood, delivered it to the woodpile, and raked away the remaining litter of twigs and leaves did he turn his attention to the next. He walked among the trees in the grove, took a cigarette from the case he carried in his right pocket, and lit it while looking at their boughs, peeling a bit of bark away from a trunk with his thumbnail, deciding which, after the cigarette was smoked away, would be the next to go under his ax.
All of us held at Tsarskoe Selo—everyone except for Alyosha and the tsarina, who had begun her months of prostration—had ventured outside, under guard, to learn what was causing the noise. The four Romanov girls; Dr. Botkin and Anna Vyrubova; Nagorny; my sister, Varya, and I; the two valets and six chambermaids, the footmen and the cooks, the butler and the laundress; the grooms and the stable boys; old Count Fredericks, who discomfited everyone with his silent weeping: eventually everyone found a discreet vantage from which to watch the former tsar of the Russian Empire work away at killing his trees with a deliberation that seemed to imply he anticipated a use for the wood they’d yield. Did he picture the fires it would afford those living there the following winter? Could he have imagined he and his family would remain in the Alexander Palace for that many more months? Guests of the Bolsheviks? Perhaps he thought we’d all be preserved as an exhibit, like the panorama of savages at Petersburg’s Kunstkamera or, better yet, on the midway of a traveling circus, with a banner over our heads that proclaimed, The Romanovs and their Two Wards, Matryona and Varvara Rasputin, Daughters of the Mad Monk Grigory Rasputin. Newly minted Soviets would pass before us, thrilled and disgusted by the decadence of monarchists who extracted their lavish comforts from the suffering of the proletariat. Until the Soviets became not so newly minted and found themselves jealous, a credible response from a worker dressed in drab, with an apartment upholstered in drab, who ate drab food and rinsed it down with cheap vodka.
“Perhaps it is hard,” I said to Olga, who was standing one afternoon with Varya and me, where her father couldn’t see us if he happened to look up from his chopping and sawing. “Perhaps it is unsettling, not to have governing to do.”
“He planted those trees with his brothers,” Olga offered by way of an answer. “They are nearly forty years old.”
Forty isn’t old for a tree, but poplars grow quickly. These were taller than the Alexander Palace by now, spaced evenly and well apart, as if they’d been planted with an eye to felling them, the space required to swing an ax. After the tsar chose a tree, he stood beneath it for a moment, looking up into its branches. Then he pulled his ax from where he’d left it, the blade sunk into one of the fresh stumps, and paced out the direction of the fall he’d planned for the tree, starting with his back at the base of its trunk and setting the heel of one boot immediately before the toe of the other, close enough to touch, heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, his eyes cast down as he walked, watching his feet.
“What is he doing?” I asked Olga.
“Thirty-five paces. I’ve been counting and it’s always thirty-five.”
“But for what?”
“For the stake.” Olga stood with her arms crossed before her, frowning.
“The stake?”
“Yes, to test himself.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling dim-witted but no closer to understanding. We were far enough away that the precaution was unnecessary, but the two of us spoke in whispers. Something in the tsar’s manner, in what appeared, even from a distance, to be an occupation demanding the focus of a surgeon, kept us standing at attention, absolutely still, our voices hushed.
“Watch,” Olga said. “See, there, he’s planting it.” I nodded, still mystified, as he took a piece of wood from his pocket and drove its point into the ground with the ax head. “A skilled woodsman can fell a tree with precision enough to drive a stake into the earth. Each time, after Father picks a tree, he plants a stake he cut from the previous one.”
“Did the tsar and his brothers grow up here, at Tsarskoe Selo?” I asked, wondering at the education such an expertise implied.
“No, at Gatchina Palace, where they were raised like little soldiers. They slept on camp beds and had no hot water for bathing and ate black bread without jam. I guess they must have spent a summer here.”
The tsar made the first notch quickly, chopping with controlled ferocity. Each time the blade bit into the wood, the trunk shivered, the twigs and new pale leaves at the top shook. The second notch, opposite the first, required a more measured attack, as even a novice woodsman knows it is imperative to leave exactly the right width of wood for a hinge, that narrow bit of trunk that gives way with a crack as the tree starts to come down.
I’d forgotten how eerie and mournful are the keening sounds that come from a falling tree, the whining cries that follow the crack. Once, they had been familiar. My father said it was the grieving of the tree and her sisters, crying as her spirit was forced to separate from her wood. “Look,” he said to me, when I was a little girl. “Do you see there, how her spirit remains with all her branches and just as tall as before?” And I would nod, believing I saw it too, even though such things were invisible to anyone who wasn’t my father.
By the time the tree hit the ground with a jolt we felt through the soles of our shoes, Tsar Nikolay had stepped away from any chance of being struck by its butt, should it kick back. He buried the blade in a stump and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to blot his red face before walking out to where the newly downed poplar lay on the lawn.
“He did it!” Varya said. She squeezed Olga’s hand. “He hit the stake.” And he had. I watched as he searched among the leaves and branches to check his accuracy.
Olga showed my sister more affection than I could, for if Varya’s lies protected her from my prying into her soul, they made us more strangers than sisters. I felt sorry for my sister, orphaned and prevented from returning to our mother, as she may have felt for me, but we looked at each other now from a distance. I suppose her hiding herself from me inspired my hiding from her. The separation between us did allow me room to observe how our father’s murder had diminished Varya, who looked slighter and younger than she had before and behaved more like a child than a young lady of sixteen. It was the opposite of Alyosha’s response to the changes forced coincidentally upon him, as if my sister and the tsarevich were balanced on either side of a celestial fulcrum, allowing them a mysterious transference that gave him the years she’d lost. Under house arrest, my sister and I shared a bedroom with the four Romanov sisters, a bedroom far too small for six. Still, I saw little of Varya during the day, as she was always with Olga and the others, while together Alyosha and I killed the hours leading to what he anticipated would be our deaths.
“How do you think they’ll do it?” I’d ask him when he was too morbid to be diverted from his imaginings—from the astute analysis and prediction I mistook for imaginings.
“Well, it isn’t as if they’ve exhibited any originality, not with respect to violence, anyway. I guess they’ll shoot us.”
“It’s fast,” I said, “being shot to death.” In the silence, Alyosha looked at me searchingly. Finally I added, “At least it is if you’re not Grigory Rasputin.”
“Yes. I imagine it will be. Fast, I mean, for the individual. I hope they have the decency to kill us all at once. It’s the only thing I worry about, really, the idea of one of us having to watch while the others die.”
“You think they’d save you for last?”
“Not necessarily. But I wouldn’t want that for any of us.”
“OF THE FOUR,” Alyosha told me, after Tsar Nikolay had left his ax buried in a stump and come in for supper, “Father’s brother George was the tallest. More physically imposing. More intelligent. Grandmother’s favorite. ‘Tall, handsome, and full of fun,’ she always said. He died before I was born. In the arms of a peasant woman in Abbas-Tuman, where his physician sent him to take the waters.” Given his own precarious health, Alyosha was understandably enthralled by the medical crises of others, especially those that involved bleeding.
“He was weary of being a prisoner of tuberculosis and so he took his motorcycle out for a ride, but then he collapsed on the road and the peasant woman saw and tried to help him. He coughed up blood all over her skirts.”
“I suppose,” I said, “the not-so-hidden message of the story is that Alexei Nikolaevich is tired of being a prisoner of hemophilia and looks forward to adventures of his own, even if they are to kill him.”
Alyosha said nothing but looked, without expression, at the foot sticking out from the bottom of the leg brace. There were sounds other than those of trees being murdered he wanted drowned out.
We could hear the tsar in his study during the evenings, alone and laughing. For years he’d kept a little wood box in which he saved jokes his brother George had told him when they were boys. In his deliberate and meticulous hand, Nikolay copied each one out on a scrap of paper, perhaps planning to commit them to memory and then use them himself on an audience for whom the jokes would be unfamiliar. Or maybe Nikolay Alexandrovich preserved them as a solace he guessed he’d need: the voice of his brother encouraging him to laugh no matter how dire were his circumstances.
“I think he must ration out the pathetic old things,” Alyosha said, “so they last him longer.”
“You’re hard on your father,” I said.
“He’s weak. Not like yours.” Once again, Alyosha recited what had already—instantly—become the last act of my father’s hagiography. His voice was steady but I thought his eyes looked bright. “Enough cyanide to finish off ten horses. A dozen bullets. An ax to the head. And still they had to drown him.”