The wide, shallow expanse of the Tura River churned beneath the iron hull of the Rus, the muddy water swallowing what weak light succeeded in breaking through the low cover of clouds. As she stared down into the silt, Olga’s mind turned, morosely, to the River Lethe: were they passing through those forgetful waters even now, her family disappearing further and further from memory with each rotation of the Rus’s propellor? This morning, they’d arrived in Tyumen after three long, hot days on board the Red Cross train, the windows sealed against the driving dust of the West Siberian Plain. Though Olga had expected Tyumen, the oldest city in Siberia, to be their final destination they were escorted onto the Rus for another two days’ travel, and as they moved farther north and west up the snaking river, the guards seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, even allowing Papa to pace the ship’s deck unimpeded: they knew, as well as Olga did, that any would-be rescuers would have made their way to Crimea, expecting the imperial family to be spirited away to some foreign refuge. They knew, with a keen sense of irony that even Olga could share, that Siberia was where Russia sent those it preferred to forget.
Along the flat riverbanks, a summer’s worth of drought had starved the fields of the little color that might have made the journey scenic: dust-covered muzjiks worked the brown lands, heads bowed over the handles of their sickles. Close to shore, fishermen cast their nets into the dark water, looking up at the steamship belching black exhaust. Olga stared back, wondering whether they were aware of the ship’s curious cargo. What would they say, if they knew the slight figure pacing the deck was the Tsar of All Russia? Would they fall to their knees, as the villagers of Yaroslavl had done four years earlier, awed at the sight of their Batiushka—their Little Father? Or would they spit, offended that Nicholas the Bloody would dare to travel along their forgotten shores?
A cluster of tidy wooden houses came into view, arrayed atop the low ridge of a grassy dune, their shuttered windows adorned with flowers. Below, a worn footpath edged the riverbank, where a handful of shallow fishing vessels had been pulled up and out of the lapping water. Though there were no signs of villagers the town looked cared-for: cows lowed in nearby fields, and the comforting scent of wood fires drifted across the water. At the far end of the village, a bone-white church presided over the landscarpe, incongruously large next to the wooden houses. In any other place the church would have looked quaint, but here amidst the scattered single-story dwellings it loomed, spectrally, against the gathering clouds.
A movement between the houses caught Olga’s eye: there, beside a low-slung building, a woman tugged at the hand of her small child. Her colorful dress and headscarf marked her as a peasant—Olga recognized the style from portraits that hung in the halls of the Catherine Palace, portraits that Papa had walked past with a gleam to his eye. The real Russia, he’d say quietly, and as a child Olga hadn’t understood what he meant. Even now, the traditional Russian dress looked foreign to her, more accustomed as she was to the corsets and waistcoats of European fashion. The woman glanced at the steamship and stepped behind the refuge of the wooden buildings, the village motionless once more.
“Pokrovskoe.” Unbeknownst to Olga, Mamma had joined her on deck—she gripped the railing with one hand, the wooden edges of a cross peeking out from her closed palm as she stared at the town where Father Grigori had lived.
Olga’s heart lurched; behind her, Papa stopped his ceaseless pacing. As one, they searched the shoreline, looking for hints that Father Grigori had left a mark on his hometown. Only one two-story house peeked over the rooftops, its window-frames painted white: Father Grigori’s, perhaps? So many had traveled to Pokrovskoe to see him over the years, well-wishers and admirers, people seeking enlightenment, wisdom, comfort. In a village this small where else would they stay, other than with him and his family: his quiet wife, his three dutiful children? Olga looked away, regretting that she’d never asked him about his Siberian home.
“He told me we would visit Pokrovskoe one day,” said Mamma quietly, as the Rus smoothly drifted past the silent village. “I wonder whether he knew it would be like this.”
Olga didn’t answer as the Rus continued onward, the gentle forgetting of the river made more painful by the memory of Father Grigori’s ghost.
The onion-topped tower of the Sophia-Uspensky Cathedral came into view hours later, the city of Tobolsk revealing itself as they inched around the bend in the river. Dominated by an imposing stone kremlin that sprawled along the rise of a rocky hill, the city itself was small, its modest log houses gathering at the base of the hill like supplicants at the skirt of a saint.
Olga squinted into the drizzling mist that had dogged them the last thirty versts of their journey. Along the shore, loggers fished felled trees from the riverbank, strapping them by the dozen onto the backs of horse-drawn wagons. A regiment of soldiers flanked the harbor, motorcars and lorries lingering at the ready. It seemed that was all the welcome they were going to receive from Tobolsk: no open-armed town elders—no angry villagers either.
But there were church spires. That’s what Olga noticed as they made their way off the steamship: tall steeples that pierced the sky, their wrought iron crosses knocked lopsided by wind or winter’s snow. The sight of them was comforting as they pulled away from the gray harbor, to know that God looked to the inhabitants of Tobolsk as fondly as He did the residents of Petrograd.
Their motorcar rattled along the streets, lurching heavily as it hit grooves in the softening ground. Mud seeped from the duckboards that lined the streets, running in rivulets beneath the uneasy foundations of the houses. Prosperous until the Trans-Siberian railway rendered it obsolete, Tobolsk had faded into insignificance and the shift in its fortunes showed. The wooden houses looked unkempt, the white stone of the beautiful cathedral dingy. Huddled against the rain, a man in rags lifted a hand in supplication, hoping for a kopeck from a passerby. Olga recalled a story Pierre Gilliard had once told her about Potemkin Villages, pasteboard façades intended to conceal the sight of poverty from Catherine the Great. She recalled the towns they’d passed during the tercentenary: scrubbed stone and freshly painted railings, healthy peasants waving their enthusiastic approval of the tsar and his family. Was this what Russia truly looked like: cloud-covered and muddy, grave faces and deprivation?
“Remember, children,” said Papa, watching out the window as they wheeled beneath the shadow of the kremlin, “this is a new life for us, but it is also a new opportunity. We will make the most of this.”
“God will provide,” Mamma muttered, her eyes darting as she took in the town’s churches.
Their new house was an austere white building with little in the way of ornamentation beyond a small gingerbread trellis over the entrance. Originally the home of the city’s governor, the mansion—newly christened Freedom House by the soldiers who had accompanied Olga’s family from the Rus—was imposing, with square windows and a modest balcony: nothing like Livadia or Alexander Palace. Olga supposed they had Kerensky to thank for the fact that it was more than a hovel: Kerensky, their jailor and protector, too far away to help now. Too far to intervene, should circumstances prove problematic.
Their first afternoon at Freedom House was chaotic. Alexei and Anastasia raced through the rooms piled with tapestries and trunks as soldiers penned in the hard-packed street around the building with a high wooden fence. The second floor of the mansion was earmarked for Olga and her family; the first was occupied by a bristling contingent of soldiers who had accompanied them from Petrograd, while the family’s servants and retainers took over the house across the road. Olga’s parents had a modest bedroom, and Alexei a suite across the hall—Olga and her sisters, meanwhile, were housed in a large corner bedroom, their iron cots shipped and set up, camp style, in the four corners of the room.
Anastasia was already starting to make her mark on the space by the time Olga had finished exploring the rest of the house, having claimed the cot closest to the window. Her traveling trunk open, Anastasia was spilling its contents out on the bed: photographs and icons and trinkets, letters from friends and hair ribbons.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, unfolding a hastily rolled shawl. She stepped up on the bed, her dusty shoes leaving a print on the mattress as she pinned the shawl above her headboard. “You know I prefer being near a window. Isn’t this exciting, sleeping all together like this? We’ll stay up into the night, talking, playing cards...”
“You might regret being close to the window when it’s thirty degrees below freezing, Shvybzik,” Olga replied as she lifted her valise onto the bed closest to the iron brazier.
Anastasia turned, her smile caught behind her long curtain of hair. “When that happens. I’ll crawl in with you,” she said, “and when the stars are bright, you can crawl in with me and we’ll watch them together. Deal?”
Tatiana and Maria walked in, their suitcases banging against their shins as Maria erupted in protest at Anastasia’s perfunctory claiming of the best bed. “Deal,” Olga replied as she opened the heavy clasps of her valise.
Within, an ivory chess piece sat nestled in the folds of a silk handkerchief; she took it out, her breath catching in her throat as she set it carefully on her bedside table. She folded the handkerchief and turned to face the brazier, determined not to let her sisters see her cry. She inhaled heavily, the ghost of a long-ago conversation echoing in her head. Tobolsk was the price she’d paid for the decisions she’d made: the decisions they’d all made under the assumptions that the life they’d lived—their friendships, their faith—was inviolable. Built on stone, rather than sand.
“Olga?” Tatiana sidled over, letting the argument between Maria and Anastasia mask their conversation. “Are you alright?”
Olga hastily wiped her cheeks. “Of course,” she replied. “I just needed a moment. That’s all.”
“Look!” Maria’s voice cut Tatiana’s reply short. “Come to the window!”
Olga looked out onto a flat street. From the front of the house, they could hear the sound of steady hammering as the guards completed the fence, cigarette smoke marring the fresh scent of rain on grass. Directly below, soldiers milled on the lawn, their guns held loosely as they watched the road.
It was clear to Olga that word of her family’s arrival had spread through Tobolsk. On the wooden boardwalk opposite, a crowd had begun to gather: old men and their wives, hats in hand as they stared up at the windows of the house.
Anastasia’s voice was hushed as she clutched the windowsill. “Do we wave?”
Olga’s heart swelled at the sight of the silent vigil. “No,” she said. It was a peaceful gathering, but a dangerous one. What if the soldiers turned violent? There were no likely rescuers out there, not a single young face amongst the crowd. Indeed, one white-haired gentleman was looking at the house with an expression of such fervor on his lined face that Olga was sure he would sink to his knees, if only his creaking legs would allow him to get back up. It was a gathering of the old guard, watching their way of life fading into the past. “Best to leave them be.”
She turned back to face the room, despair and hope fighting for prominence in her breast. They were far from home, far from the life they’d known—but they’d not been forgotten. Not yet.