“IF YOU REFUSE, we’ll die not knowing what all the fuss is about.”
“You’re not even fourteen, Alyosha.”
“I am, almost. And you’re just eighteen.”
“That’s what I’m saying. I haven’t had any experience either.”
“But that’s what I’m saying, Masha. We don’t have time to waste.”
On the afternoon of the day the Romanovs learned they were to be exiled east, over and beyond the Urals, Alyosha and I began an argument we wouldn’t resolve before we were separated. It was about sex, of course.
Alyosha put my hand on the “ache in his lap” so I could feel how hard was the torment I caused him. “It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong under ordinary circumstances,” he said. “As we’re going to be murdered, we’re excused from conventional morality.”
“You think virtue is relative? That it isn’t absolute?”
“Naturally I do. There are no virtues other than those we invent and manipulate to suit our needs.” He was sitting up in bed, his leg free from its brace, and he had his arms crossed and wore his most patronizing expression. “An obvious example,” he went on, “is our executing murderers at home while we decorate those soldiers who are the most prolific murderers when we wage war. How can you reconcile those two facts without a moral code that’s relative?”
It was the end of July. Alyosha was well enough to be allowed out of bed for most of the day, and we were sitting together in one of the few rooms allotted the imperial family, under the guard of two humorless soldiers in gray woolen uniforms, bayonets at the ready. The announcement of imminent exile was accompanied by a doubling of our “protective” security, whose drabness made it hard to remember the tall glossy Abyssinians dressed in red and gold as anything other than a quaint decoration. I couldn’t imagine how or where Alyosha thought we could be alone with each other, and I said so.
“Outdoors, in the Chinese theater, or one of the hothouses.”
“Nagorny,” I said. “You can’t go outside without him.”
“I can get rid of Nagorny.”
“How?”
“He does anything I say, as long as I don’t run about and risk falling down. Haven’t I managed to banish him almost entirely from our afternoons together? I’ll tell him we’re reading and that he’s to leave us alone. He can sit on a bench. Smoke. Drink tea. It doesn’t matter what.”
“I don’t think Nagorny likes me,” I said, changing the subject.
“He’s jealous, that’s all.”
“What does he have to be jealous of?”
“The time we spend together. Remember, he stayed when Dina left. He chose me over his freedom. Come on, Masha,” he said, when I was silent. “We’ll be careful. We’ll bring our books and sit and read and they’ll get bored and fall asleep just as they always do.”
As grim as they looked, the new guard of revolutionary soldiers had turned out to be as lax in discipline when sober as they were when drunk. After all, as any of them would happily tell you, there was no incentive to behave any better than they did. Guarding that Bastard Decadent Tsar and his Shamelessly Corrupt Family wasn’t the appointment they wanted—not if they weren’t allowed to maim and murder them—so what were they to do but smoke, drink, play cards, and break things? No excitement whatsoever, as the fools weren’t going to try to escape. To hear the family members talk, they didn’t even know they were going to be assassinated—a thing as simple as that, a thing anyone could have guessed. If that didn’t prove they were fools, what would?
And what hoity-toity toplofty fools, too good to fight back, too polite to object to being mistreated. Really, they didn’t seem to be proper adults, even. Why, hadn’t Nikolay Alexandrovich celebrated the thaw by pedaling out of his castle on a bicycle? Consider a thing like that, a tsar on a bicycle. No wonder Russia had come upon such dire times, when tsars went around on bicycles. Just like a little boy he was, in his cap and coat, following the path, when one of the guards thrust his bayonet forward.
It could just as well have been a branch, because all the man did was stick it through the spokes of the back wheel. The bicycle came to a sudden halt, and the tsar in his little-boy cap flew over the handlebars and landed on the path.
He wasn’t tall, the tsar, so perhaps that was some of it, but God have mercy—well, there’s no God anymore, there’s only the Soviet, so mercy upon him, whatever the source of that mercy. Although perhaps it was a thing of the past: mercy. Certainly it was in short supply. Anyway, mercy on us, the tsar looked about ten years old. Even a mustache and beard couldn’t disguise the friendly innocence in his eyes.
But wait, surely that was the affectation of a clever manipulator. All the world knew he was a bloodthirsty savage who cared nothing for the suffering of his people. The savage picked up his cap, dusted it off, picked up his bicycle, dusted it off, and he smiled. Perhaps he intended this to be disarming, but it wasn’t as if smiling proved his forbearance, or his virtue, or even his manners. It didn’t admit to any of the countless crimes he had perpetrated against the proletariat. All it proved was deceit. Either that or weakness. That turning-the-other-cheek shit, it was exactly that: shit. A fairy tale the moneyed class fed the workers to make them humble, to make them believe there was a world-to-come after they’d been trodden down, broken, and exploited in this one.
The tsar got back on his bicycle, tried to ride off to the left, and, when the guards closed ranks before him, tried to go right. But the guards opposed him at every turn, and he dismounted and wheeled the bicycle back to the Alexander Palace. The tsar could do nothing without half a dozen guards following him. When he did, at long last, receive permission to ride on his bicycle, the sound of armed soldiers running behind him, jackboots crunching on the path, killed whatever pleasure he might have taken in the excursion, and he didn’t ride it again.
THE REST OF us were not so unfortunate. We were watched, but by fewer guards and from a greater distance. So Alyosha could assume the guards wouldn’t pose a problem. But what of ignorance? It’s always a problem.
“What then?” I said to Alyosha. “Neither of us knows … knows how.”
“I do. I mean, I think I know enough.”
Perhaps he did. The kiss he gave me before we parted, the one that turned out to be our last, was unexpectedly adult, as if I were kissing a man rather than a boy. And, while we did not sacrifice our innocence, over the next weeks I allowed Alyosha’s hands into my blouse, as I might not have had he not begun to convince me that what he feared was true: he and his family, and perhaps the rest of us as well, would be killed. It was a matter of time, that was all.
“Don’t you see?” he said. “It’s the first step. Removing us from the capital, sending us out of sight and out of the public’s mind.”
“They’ll probably take us too,” I said. “Technically, as wards of your father, we are part of the family.”
“Technically, your blood isn’t Romanov. It isn’t flowing through decadent tsarist veins.”
“Technically, I’m the daughter of a man assassinated for his alleged deviltry.”
“Assassinated by monarchists determined to save the faltering empire. As it’s generally assumed your father helped topple centuries of depraved Romanov rule, the revolutionaries may ask you to accept a medal in his stead. Have you asked what will happen to you and Varya?”
“No. If there was anything—any definitive thing, like a decision one way or another—I’m sure your mother would tell me.”
“Unless she had a choice in the matter and could have let you go but didn’t, on my account. Then she might feel guilty and avoid telling you.”
“But, Alyosha, there’s nothing I’ve done to help you. Just seeing me makes her cry.”
“Oh, she cries all the time anyway, Masha, you know that. I wonder if it isn’t a nervous affliction. Really I do, don’t look at me that way. Besides, you’ve been my friend, kept me company.”
“Well, yes, but—”
“You’re the first I’ve ever had, Masha. Don’t you know that?”
“No, I …” With all of us locked up together as Russia descended into anarchy, no one had seen any friends. Not that this was an excuse, and I didn’t offer it as one. “I should have,” I said.
“Because,” he went on, “the secret had to be kept. And even if it could have been told, Mother thought it was asking for me to be injured, there being no way to prevent boys from being boys. Oh, Masha, don’t look like that. There were adults who befriended me. Nagorny. And Derevenko. I considered him my friend before he … before he left. But, other than my sisters, there’s never been anyone remotely near my age. That’s why you seem not so much older than I. That and your height.”
“You mean my lack of height.” I was small enough that by the time Varya was twelve, she got the new dresses and handed them up to me. “Anyway, Alyosha, you know what’s to happen if we are left behind. I’m to be foisted on that charlatan.” And at that we both fell silent.
I DID MARRY THE CHARLATAN Boris Soloviev, as my father told me I would. Boris had made a career of conducting séances in St. Petersburg, bilking women of their jewels in return for messages from their departed.
“Oh, Father, honestly!” I’d said when he told me, and I laughed, thinking he was teasing. I jumped up from where I was sitting and dropped into his lap, tweaking his beard to tell him what a fine joke he’d made, even if it was at my expense. But he took my hand away from his face and held it.
“Masha. He is a wealthy man. Tsar Nikolay will make sure that—”
“He’s a fraud! How can you suggest something so … so … so obscene as to shackle me to such a person!”
Father’s grasp tightened, so that I had to pull my hand away, he held it so tightly. “I am telling you, Masha—”
“I know what you’re doing. I know very well. You’re making sure I understand there is no other Grigory Yefimovich by foisting me off on the adult equivalent of a conjurer hired for a child’s birthday. You think I don’t know a shameless mountebank when I see one? You think I don’t know there is no other like you?”
“Masha,” Father said again. I closed my eyes; Father took my face in his hands. I covered my ears; he pulled my hands away from them. He wouldn’t allow me to avoid hearing what he had to say and what I always denied because I couldn’t bear to listen.
“Masha, child. My death is foretold. I am dead already. I won’t live to see the coming year. And Russia will descend into civil war, brothers killing brothers, women fighting like men, bearing arms. You’ll need help if you are to escape.”
Seventeen is too old to stamp your feet and bury your head in your father’s chest and cry the way little girls do. But he waited until I’d stopped, until I’d gone to the sink and washed my face and smoothed my hair, before he asked me to write a letter for him, one he would give Tsar Nikolay to be opened on the occasion of his death.
“Thank you,” he said when I handed him the page to sign. He pulled me into a hug and kissed the top of my head. “Don’t fret, Masha,” Father said. “He won’t live to be thirty.”
“How old is he now?” I asked, and he laughed and I tried to laugh. But to leave my father’s home and make one with Boris—it didn’t seem possible to endure such a punishment. I never could decide whether or not to mention the letter to the tsar; that was one reason I’d avoided inquiring about my fate. For Varya to go home to Siberia in the care of a chaperone while I was to be traded away like chattel didn’t seem any fairer now than it had when I wrote out my father’s wishes.
“Why can’t I go home with Varya?” I asked Father.
“Because,” he said.
“Because what? I’m not a child, to be given an answer like that.”
“Because your destiny is not in Russia.”
“Not if I’m to be dragged off by … by that … that … illusionist!”
“What?”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“You know I do. But it isn’t so easy for those of us who can’t see into the future.”
“Is that what you think?” he said. I shook my head. His was, of course, the harder vision, including, as it must have, the ends of all of us, his son and daughters and the wife he loved, the homeland for which he died.
“Isn’t there something, please?” I asked. “Any little thing you might tell me? A tiny hint?” Father was strict about his ability to prophesy. He wasn’t, he’d tell anyone who asked, a fortune-teller. The heavens would close before his eyes, he’d say, refuse to reveal another thing to a man who squandered a gift of the Spirit, and if anyone argued he’d quote First Corinthians straight on to Second until that person gave up and went away.
“No hints. Only this: you will, like your father, use the talents the Good Lord gave you.”
“What talents? I don’t have any talents!”
“Of course you do.”
“No I don’t. Tricks on horses, that’s all. Somersaults. Riding backward. What’s the use of that?”
But Father had said all he would say.
YEARS LATER, during one of our fiercer fights, Boris asked me why I hadn’t written my own intentions into the letter, if I’d been opposed to the idea of marrying him. It took me a minute to understand so preposterous a question. What answer did I have for my husband, other than the truth?
“If you imagine I’d consider such a thing,” I told him, “you have no idea who I am or who my father was to me. Even now, years after his death and married to you, my allegiance is to him, not you. He told me what I was to do and, trusting in his wisdom, I am doing it.”
Aside from that, only a stupid person would try to deceive someone who could hear her thinking.
I guessed Boris was a bona fide fake the moment Father introduced me to him. The next moment I knew it. Too proud of his chicanery to keep the details of its accomplishment secret from the woman he expected to become his wife and whose pedigree—the daughter of Rasputin!—would enhance his ridiculous enterprise, Boris gave me a tour of his tricks. The switch on which he stepped to produce rapping noises across the parlor from where he sat receiving news from the beyond. The darkroom where he made the “documentary” photographs cherished by his bereaved patrons, the ones he took of them sitting alone on a velvet-upholstered love seat, unaware of the proximity of a ghost—the evocative white blur Boris added when making the prints.
“See how simple!” he said. He showed me what looked like a tiny flyswatter, demonstrating how he waved it between the negative and the photographic paper, preventing light from darkening part of the paper’s coating of emulsion. The print this produced revealed a “ghost” sitting or hovering next to the widow. She might not feel his presence, but her husband was there at her side just as he had always been. Though she was lonely without him, missed his physical being, she need not feel bereft—for he hadn’t left her after all. Whoever she was, when she left Boris’s séance parlor and “World Famous Photography Studio,” she felt an emanation, an ectoplasmic hovering, a cold draft or a phantom hand at her waist, even a cool kiss upon her lips as she fell to sleep that night.
“I’m giving them what they want, Masha,” Boris said when I asked if he wasn’t troubled by being dishonest about so serious a matter. “I’m providing solace. Proofs of the afterlife. Even the Christ hasn’t done that—not for nearly two thousand years, anyway. Ha!”
What point was there in arguing with such an egoist? Crystal balls were for women, Boris thought. He had his monocle, his cape, and carried a cane with Anubis, Egyptian god of the dead, for a handle. The top half of Anubis was a jackal and the bottom half a man, and before the dead could enter the underworld he weighed their hearts to determine their worthiness.
In the years before the Bolsheviks seized the city, St. Petersburg was a playground in the throes of the kind of decadence—determined, desperate—that presages collapse. As if the aristocracy knew apocalypse was imminent and, also knowing there was nothing to prevent its arrival, stayed up drinking and dancing and inhaling cocaine when they could get their hands on any, distracting themselves by whatever means they found. Spending money in a frenzy on champagne, caviar, jewels, gowns. On parties with full orchestras, themed costume balls excusing all manner of ostentation: hostesses riding through ballrooms on gilded elephants, servants dressed up like gondoliers or Vikings or pharaohs. Spiritualism was the fiercest rage, with a choice of séances to attend on any given night, but only Boris happily took advantage of mothers who’d lost sons at war or stripped a widow of her savings in trade for a message from her dead husband.
I didn’t like the idea of being joined until death divided us to a man whose métier was equal parts deception and self-importance. But by the time an Orthodox priest had muttered his shibboleths over our heads, splashed us with holy water, and ordered us to kiss, Russia was dying, my father had been murdered, my mother, sister, and brother were lost, and Alyosha and his family were a few thousand miles closer to their deaths. Petersburg had been looted and burned. As Father foresaw, the jewels Boris had amassed proved useful for bribing border-control agents and all the other opportunists and thieves lying in wait at the countless stumbling blocks en route to freedom. As the gods in heaven could see from on high, we left a glittering trail behind us, and I thanked him—Father, I mean—each time Boris handed over another bracelet or earring he’d earned with his lies.