MAY 29, 1918, YEKATERINBURG
I’ve been here almost a week. (Father, Mother, Maria, and a few servants arrived on April 30, in the vanguard. Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, Nagorny, Botkin, and I followed three weeks later, as I’d bumped my knee on Katya’s bed frame and Botkin wouldn’t allow me to travel before he was certain there would be no further “complications,” as he calls them.)
They’ve painted all the upper story’s windows white so we can’t see beyond the high wood fence around the property. I noted the fence as we were taken to the house from the train station. Clearly they’d only just built it, anticipating our incarceration on the premises, as the lumber was new and yellow. There are few excursions outside for us, who are locked on the second floor, the guards directly below us. Sometimes one will bang the butt of his rifle on the ceiling, just to give us a start. Each day from three until four in the afternoon we are escorted outside to a “garden,” where we may walk and breathe fresh air, Mother and I both in our wheeled invalid chairs. There is no vegetation that hasn’t been trampled underfoot by the guards, a dozen or more of them, each carrying a revolver as well as rifle and bayonet. They enter our quarters whenever they please, without knocking. Already they’ve seen Olga undressed. There are two machine guns, two that we have seen, one on the balcony outside the room I share with Mother and Father and another on the roof. Across the street is a barrack with one hundred and fifty men inside.
The official name of our lodgings is “The House of Special Purpose.” Rather grand, isn’t it? I wonder if all totalitarian regimes don’t share a fondness for euphemism. A man named Ipatiev used to own the building. I asked our footman, Trupp, what kind of man Ipatiev was, and he said he was a military engineer. I asked again and he said he was a rich Jewish burgher, whatever that means. It wasn’t what I was asking, and I suppose it doesn’t matter, only that a White Army engineer might not like to have his house used for such a “special purpose” as this.
Although, judging from our reception at the train station, Yekaterinburg is thoroughly Red. Not one of the ten thousand revolutionary soldiers stationed here (that is the number reported by the Reds themselves) made any effort to subdue the mob.
“Show us the Romanovs!” people kept shouting, which, as Mother pointed out, is arguably better than their asking that we be handed over to them to do with what they would, but it made me feel that much more a criminal and a freak to hear people screaming for a look at us. It wasn’t any different from the way crowds flocked to the Kunstkamera’s Cabinet of Curiosities when the Fiji Mermaid came to St. Petersburg. Everyone wanted to see her, even if all she was was the top half of a dead monkey and the bottom half of a dead fish sewn together into a creature that never existed.
That’s exactly what they are, the Romanovs: a false family at which to peer and shudder. The Romanovs resemble us physically. In fact, they look just like us. But they have nothing to do with us, with the human beings we are. They’re made up—made up by other people, people who don’t know us, who’ve never met us—and the parts they’ve sewn together are worse than dead monkeys and dead fish. The Romanovs are a family about whom horrors are written and illustrated. Drawings of women who look like my mother and sisters fornicating with a satanic rendering of Father Grigory, who drinks blood from a wine bottle he extends to my mother’s lips, and drawings of a man supposed to be my father without any clothes, which doesn’t matter as he hasn’t any private parts to cover. Those are in my mother’s hand; she holds them as if making a toast, blood running down her white wrist.
He’s a good person, Trupp, you can tell from his face. He’s old enough for the lines to have set in their habitual expression, which is one of patience, benign. He reminds me of a squirrel. It’s partly those funny ears, with the reddish hair growing up off them in pointed tufts, but his eyes have a quizzical look, and he moves with sudden energy. He seems unaffected by the situation in which he finds himself, the officers always insulting and high-handed, punishing him for what he can’t help. Ordering him around for the fun of it. When it seems imminent I’ll give him this volume. A shot in the dark, Nagorny would call it, but if anyone can figure out how to smuggle it out, Trupp can.
JUNE 4
I don’t know why I told Masha that Mother had prostituted herself to Father Grigory. It was disgusting of me. And of course there’s no way to apologize now.
After Dina took my things—as if I cared to keep my toys—I found copies of handbills with dirty pictures in my room. He’d thrown them all over, dozens of them. It’s taken me some time to understand myself (it’s more than fourteen months since Dina left), but it was those pictures that provoked my bad behavior. Saying what I did to Masha—perhaps I was frightened it might be true, perhaps I was testing her. Or maybe I was just being an idiot out of boredom. Whatever the reason, I am ashamed of myself.
Here in the “House of Special Purpose,” no one escapes humiliation. The guards have drawn pictures of Mother and Father Grigory on the wall inside the water closet we are to use. No one’s allowed to relieve him or herself without accompaniment to the lavatory door. Once whoever it is has gone in, the guard stands outside and waits. “Have a good long look,” he says each time he takes one of my sisters, and he sings lewd songs outside the door or comments on any noise he might hear through the door. He made sure all of us heard his telling Tatiana he’d love to give her “the ride on his pole” she’d “begged for”—speaking in his version of a stage whisper, guttural and almost wet, as if to suggest drooling—but he was “under orders not to fornicate with the prisoners.”
It didn’t matter that the idea was preposterous, that whatever he said reflected only his vice and not hers, as we all knew Tatiana was innocent. Suddenly her ability to perceive every torment as a sacrifice, a thing she could endure for the sake of her faith, for Christ, collapsed, and for two days now she has refused to get out of bed. She pretends she doesn’t hear Father’s cajoling or Mother praying for her. Unless she really doesn’t hear anything. It’s odd to see her, of all my sisters, sinking into apathy. If I’d ever anticipated such a passage as the one we are enduring, I’d have guessed Anastasia would be the first to succumb to despair, but she just goes on reading or sewing or, unaccountably, conjugating Latin verbs.
“What are you doing that for?” I asked.
“Be quiet, Alyosha,” she said. “Now I have to start over.”
As for Tatiana, she remains curled on her side, her face averted from the doorway, from anyone who speaks to her, and her eyes fixed on one of the painted windows, staring at the white square. She will end in making herself ill by refusing to ask when she needs to go to the water closet. It’s just a matter of time.
At dinner, soldiers walk around the table and spear what they want from off our plates. Especially Father’s. Every time he tries to lift his fork to his mouth, Avadyev—he’s the commanding officer—intercepts it with his dirty-looking pocketknife.
“Haven’t you had enough of the Soviet’s generosity, bloodsucker?” he says, and he laughs as Father replaces his cutlery on his plate and leans back in his chair, tells the man to please help himself.
JUNE 12
Nagorny has been executed. A guard tried to take my chain with the saints’ medals. I’d left it looped around the bedpost—that rule Mother has about never wearing anything around my neck when I’m sleeping—and had forgotten to put it back on. Nagorny stopped the guard, told him it belonged to me, and took it out of the man’s hands. Within minutes he’d been arrested and taken away in an automobile. The next day Avadyev brought the chain back, its gold links and medals crusted over with blood. “Here,” he said. “Your nanny has paid for your trinkets.”
I didn’t imagine revolutions advanced by subtleties, but I thought it would just be us they shot, not Nagy or anyone who wasn’t a Romanov. Now I’m grateful Masha isn’t here. I like to imagine she’s somewhere wonderful, America perhaps, and that she’s happy and has enough to eat and beautiful dresses to wear and a stable full of horses. Now it’s I who lie in bed at night and imagine her saying good night to them one by one, just the way she used to dream of doing in the ship that carried the Wild West Show. I hope Soloviev isn’t ever unkind to her, but I can’t hope she’s grown to love him.
Their killing Nagorny so unreasonably, for protecting me, for the crime of caring for me, has made me feel that much more friendly to the idea of being dead myself.
The happiest I ever saw Nagorny was on those occasions my health took a turn for the better. When I could walk after a period of lameness, when I could play outside with the dogs, when he was at last allowed to take me into the park—a few times I caught him crying on such occasions. “Why, Nagy,” I’d say, “Nagy! For whom are those tears?” And he would brush me off. “They are nothing,” he’d say, “a bit of soot in my eye.” And I was young enough and ignorant enough to believe him when he told me sailors didn’t cry.
I feel sorry for the rest of us—Father, Mother, my poor pale sisters who sit grimly sewing and sewing, hiding jewels in their corsets. Poor Botkin and Trupp. They aren’t even guilty of being Romanovs. I’ve known I was about to expire ever since I was conscious—really, I have no memory of being without the looming threat of extinction—so this situation, this particular punishment for the rest of the family, is simply more of the same for me. Before Nagorny was killed, the only thing to cause me true unhappiness had been separation from Masha. Even Katya, much as I still long to feel her touching me, was just a pastime.
I think I understand something. If complete enlightenment demands relinquishing the self, then complete enlightenment implies the acceptance of mortality. Not that there isn’t more to being enlightened than accepting that our lives are brief and end when we die. But I do think it’s a requirement. Whether by temperament or circumstance, I am more Buddhist than Orthodox, not that I’d let on to Mother. I admit I felt a flare of hatred for Mother and her religiosity when the chain and medals were returned to me. “Trinkets.” It was the right word for them. I never believed Father Grigory’s gift had anything to do with God. Not her God anyway. And she doesn’t believe in anything that doesn’t belong to her God. It’s funny—I think I loved my mother better when Masha was with me, when she turned everything into stories. She made all of us more sympathetic. She made us out to be braver and kinder, with flaws that were delightful. Like Mother’s cloud.
I was so eager to discover everything I could about lovemaking, and I liked it as much as I expected I would, but now, here, I’d trade all my afternoons with Katya for one of Masha’s stories.
JUNE 21
It’s suffocating in this house—at least it is on the second story, because they won’t allow us to open the windows, not even a crack, and the nights have been as hot as the days. We move around the rooms taking care not to brush against one another, that’s how humid and sticky it is. Inasmuch as we move at all. I can’t tell how much of our apathy is in response to the heat, how much a symptom of our waiting for what everyone still refuses to talk about. The condition that used to apply only to me, the tacit agreement that none of us would speak of my dying, has grown to include all of us.
A man named Yacov Yurovsky has replaced Avadyev. Trupp says Yurovsky is a member of the secret police. The courier who brings our meals from the barrack across the street told him so. There’s no kitchen here. There used to be, when Ipatiev lived here, but they’ve turned the entire ground floor into offices, a headquarters of some kind. We all preferred Avadyev. He was not a professional, and this reassured us. He was cruel, but in fits, and seemed incapable of organized action. Spearing meat with his knife, singing dirty limericks—these demonstrated the caliber of his talents. Yurovsky is different. He is a man who makes his living murdering people. Just as others do plowing fields or mining coal. A job, nothing more, nothing less. He stopped once and stroked my hair, patted my shoulder, and told me he had a boy my age. The unnerving thing is, it wasn’t an act of cruelty. He didn’t do it to remind me that there were other boys in the world who were going to go on living, boys whose fathers could protect them. In order to be cruel you have to possess emotions. What he said—it was something that crossed his mind, that’s all, and he saw no reason not to say it aloud.
Yurovsky has replaced Avadyev’s guards, to whose particular nastiness we had grown accustomed, with a new lot of men, Hungarian prisoners of war. Apparently the Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution determined that Russian guards were too likely to feel a vestigial sympathy for the former tsar and his family. I’m sure the commission considers the replacements ideal. One of them spits at Father.
Be ready was the message written on a slip of paper rolled up and hidden inside a tube whittled out of a cork. It arrived with supper, stoppering a bottle of milk. When Anastasia found it, I saw a spark of light flicker around the room, through everyone’s eyes, and then go out.
Once rescue was announced, how fine a treat to watch us as we begin, with each hour that passes, to lose hope. Like pulling wings from an insect, or chasing ants with a magnifying glass’s concentrated beam of sunlight, seeing them try to outrun the burning white dot. Little experiments in inhumanity. There is no means of escape, and they know this better than we do, afflicted as we are with hope. So why not have a bit of fun and slip a note inside a milk bottle’s cork, see how the message affects the prisoners’ morale?
Bastille Day. Masha took me by surprise, asking if I’d taken the tea tray down the stairs to injure myself on purpose. I might have talked about it with her—I wish I had, maybe it would have helped me understand myself better—but I felt suddenly so naked and read like a book. I’m not sure I convinced Masha it was an accident. More likely, she grew as sick of the topic as I and gave up asking. Once she did, I put it out of my mind. It’s only during the past weeks here in Yekaterinburg, imprisoned and insulted and ordered about as we hadn’t been before, that I’ve found myself puzzling over it.
I didn’t plan to do it, I know that much. I was walking with Nagorny, up and down the corridor, both of us dutifully taking exercise for the benefit of my health. We were talking about the Red Guard. Only hours before, one of them had deliberately knocked my father off his bicycle.
“What happened?” Olga asked when Father came in, but he didn’t answer her; he went straight to his dressing room to change his clothes. I suppose none of us children might have learned the truth had I not badgered poor Nagorny to tell me why Father was upset, why his clothes were torn and dirty. But I did. I always could get him to do as I asked, and on our walk up and down and back and forth I chipped away at his refusal. “Nagy,” I said. “Why should you know something about my father that I don’t? He is my father, after all.” For the first few laps he remained obdurate, his mouth shut tight in a line, shaking his head no. But I wouldn’t leave off until he told me what had happened.
“You’re … you’re not upset, then?” he said, once he had told. I don’t know what he expected. Tears, perhaps.
“I don’t know what I am,” I said, and I didn’t, at least not then. We had stopped at the service stairs. Nagy asked me to wait there, as he had to use the water closet. “I’ll be back straightaway,” he said, and I nodded. I saw that someone had left a tray on the table near the landing, and as soon as Nagy was out of sight—as soon as I was out of his sight—I picked up the tray, set it on the top stair, sat on it, pushed off, and rode down.
It was just like Masha to believe I’d martyred myself for the rest of the family. She couldn’t help subscribing to the conceit that suffering had ennobled me rather than making me that much more spoiled. I can’t think why else she might conclude I’d hurt myself.
I’ve interrogated myself until I’m dizzy trying to remember what I was thinking. I know it wasn’t that I came up with the idea to shift everyone’s attention off our hopeless situation by creating a new crisis. Nagorny went to the toilet, I picked up the tea tray and rode it down the stairs. I didn’t steer it into the newel post. It was going too fast for that and, anyway, I just—I don’t know, it seemed more that the tray took me than I took it.
I behaved like the stupid child I was, and then Masha made it out to be something noble and manly like she did when I didn’t protest Dina’s mistreating me. Had the tray not been there, had I not grown up begging to join in whenever Father took OTMA tray-riding, I might not have done anything at all. But there it was, a moment’s solace, and I took it without thinking about anything but that. Masha was right about its being a distraction, but I’m afraid it was for myself, not the others.
JULY 15
I’m of two minds about having pushed myself on Masha the day we said goodbye. I was glad to have had that little bit more of her, but it’s hardly the parting I would have chosen. She told me she liked our kissing, and she did allow me to take liberties with her, but she was capable of lying out of generosity.
Although maybe it was better to be spared that kind of thing—a private goodbye fraught with worry and grief. I couldn’t stand to see her cry, and I know she hated it when I did. And what if she didn’t cry? What if I cried and she didn’t and we both learned that I didn’t have the kind of hold over Masha that she did on me?