12

14.6.17

We are mice in a snake pit. Soldiers, now, everywhere we turn. Rough types wearing silly pointed caps with sewn-on stars. Yesterday there were gunshots outside the palace. Mama said they were shooting the goats that roam the park.

When they first arrived, the guards saluted Papa. Now they are cold and rude, refusing to look him in the eye or shake his hand. Papa is polite, but in private even he admits these men are slovenly and ill-mannered.

These are not the soldiers we once knew, not the sentries who patrolled the palace and parks, who’d happily pause their rounds to pluck a pear for Alexei; not the stately guards in shiny boots and handsome red pants who lined the streets on parade days, or the pink-cheeked sailors who manned the yacht and flirted with Olga and Tatiana. These men have rotten mouths and leering eyes.

The soldiers who convalesced within the Tsarskoe hospital were men of honor. “The Sisters Romanov,” they called us. Of course, Maria and I were too young to be real nurses—we envied Olga and Tatiana their important red crosses—but we did our best to comfort these heroes and ease their pain. Nearly every day we visited the infirmary. Checkers was the soldiers’ favorite game, or chess. Sometimes we’d read to them. For those who’d lost fingers or hands, we penned letters to families and loved ones. We plumped pillows and rolled bandages and darned socks. Back in my warm bed, their sacrifice haunted me. Once I told Papa I wished for one speck of their bravery. He smiled. “You are brave in your own way, Nastya,” he said. I try to be now, but it’s not the same.

If I am to be honest—and where can one be so, if not in her own thoughts?—then there is one soldier in particular who occupies my memories of those days. Never did I speak his name outside the hospital, afraid my sisters might tease me or, worse, tell Mama. Even from you, dear diary, I have kept this secret.

His name was Ilya Ivanovich. He was eighteen, four years older than me. Still young for a blood-soaked battlefield. Born in a copper mining village outside Yekaterinburg, he’d been wounded near Lutsk. Shrapnel mangled his left leg.

He was tall—feet nearly hanging off the cot!—and thin, though I suspect this had more to do with years of malnutrition. Set wide within a narrow face, his eyes were small, but when he smiled, how they sparkled! As if illuminated from within. Brown with a dot of green. My favorite feature, however, was his nose, long and straight with a tiny but distinct dimple at its tip. Unlike any nose I’d ever seen. I had the strangest urge to lightly place the tip of my pinkie on it—a silly thing!

The first words we exchanged are still fresh in my mind. Maria and I had arrived at the infirmary after breakfast. As usual, we drifted among the beds, acknowledging each soldier and thanking him for his sacrifice. I reached Ilya’s bed. “Mother Russia thanks you for your service,” I said, as I’d been taught.

“You speak for Mother Russia?” the boy answered. My eyes fell on his. Deep wells of sorrow in them, but a challenge in his voice.

At the time, I was stunned by this impertinence. I was a grand duchess of Russia, and yet he spoke to me as an equal. It thrilled me terribly. I must have flushed bright red because immediately he apologized for the familiarity.

This was the first time I visited with Ilya. He asked if I might come back to help him write letters; though his hands were unharmed, his head often ached and his vision was blurred. I returned the next day, and we talked, hours disappearing like minutes, until Maria came to fetch me.

Ilya’s candor shocked and delighted me. Never had I been spoken to in such an open way. He told me of the conditions in his village and others like it, about his father working twelve hours a day underground in the dark, risking rockfalls and explosions, and still unable to feed his family. At times they had only a single loaf of bread and a pot of soup to last a week. The year before Ilya and his brother enlisted, their younger sister died of smallpox. “They have everything,” he said of those who owned the mine. “We have nothing.”

In whispers, Ilya spoke of unrest, at home and later in the barracks. “The people are tired. Europe leaves us behind, and still, Russia refuses to modernize.”

“You mean the tsar refuses.”

He did not shrink from my provocation. “And the nobility, yes.”

Fire crept from my belly into my veins. It was my papa he spoke of.

“There is no progress without change,” Ilya said.

“It is God’s ordained order, not my father’s,” I reminded him.

“We are in a new century.” His kind, unflinching face held mine. “Not everyone believes in the absolute rule of a sovereign.”

These were dangerous words. I wanted to slap him, to make Ilya pull them back into his mouth and eat them. He had no idea how hard Papa worked to bring stability and literacy to the people, whom he loved.

Ilya saw the color rise to my face. “I support the tsar, Anastasia Nikolaevna,” he said quickly, placing a hand on mine. “It’s not personal.”

My name from his lips, it was more intimate than if he’d seen me undressed. The warmth of his hand on mine . . .

I felt my heart might burst.

But when you are the monarchy, it is indeed personal. This Ilya would never understand, never could understand. We do not choose our fates. I pulled my hand from his. “Grand Duchess,” I corrected him.

He bowed his head. “Forgive me, Grand Duchess.”

Forgive me, dear, as I have just thrown you against a wall. Lucky, as you are paper and leather, you cannot break.

But, oh, if I could go back! If I could hold Ilya’s hand more tightly instead of casting it off out of pride. If I could tell Papa what Ilya had told me, about the suffering, the unrest . . . but there’s no use in such thoughts.

At our next visit, Ilya didn’t speak about politics. Instead, we talked of books. My friend had learned to read in the army. His favorite novelist was Tolstoy. I told him I’d read Count Tolstoy but much preferred the French and English novels M. Gilliard and Mr. Gibbes had us read. We discussed the role of the author in society. He believed a writer’s responsibility was truth; I believed it was beauty.

When I was with Ilya, I felt the quickening of a part of my soul I hadn’t known existed. He treated me not as a silly child or a princess but as an equal. His challenges thrilled me, and I felt he found in me depths that no other person, not even Mama or Papa or Father Grigori, had considered before.

“It is ironic,” he said one day. His corner of the ward was quiet. “Since I was a boy, I heard stories of you, prayed for you, spoke your name. For years, your picture hung in our home.”

He pointed to an official imperial portrait on the wall opposite his bed. I blushed and remembered the day the photograph was taken, remembered Alexei was in pain and Mama insisted Maria and I wear our pearls and bows, though I put up a great fight. We were only children in the photograph, and I was embarrassed to think Ilya thought of me this way.

“It’s as if everywhere I turned, you were there,” he continued, “and yet, it’s only now that I really see you.

“You look sad,” he said. “Have I made you sad?”

“No,” I assured him, and found his hand beneath the crisp white sheet.

“It’s what we all want, is it not,” he said, eyes sparkling, “to be seen?”

“And what do you see?” I asked. “A supposed princess with ragged nails and a lack of social graces?”

“I see a girl who thinks and feels deeply. Who is more than she believes she is allowed to be.”

Under the sheet, his fingers wove through mine.

And then the day came when Ilya was gone.

Like any other morning, I came to the infirmary. I can’t say why, but my heart beat faster that day, like a bird in my chest. I had brought books from our library: Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and an old exercise book from our classroom. Ilya wished to learn English while he convalesced. But when I arrived at his bed, it was empty, the sheet pulled tight where the mountain range of his body had once been.

I was distraught. Had his health taken a turn? Had he been released? Sent back to the front? For days, food lost its taste, so unlike me that even Papa noticed, but my pride got the best of me, as well as my fear of a scolding—or worse, teasing—if my family discovered my feelings for Ilya. I could not bring myself to ask the head nurse where Ilya had gone, so I bore my pain silently. There was enough real suffering in that hospital already.

And now, of course, we are here. Ilya is gone, and I am a prisoner in my own home.

There are times I swear I hear his voice or glimpse the seashell of his ear pass around a corner. I turn and rush after him only to find another soldier, a Soviet soldier who wishes me imprisoned, or worse. I wonder, did Ilya join the revolt? Is that his grave in our park, his funeral march whose strains reached my ears? “I support the tsar,” he told me, but there are many whose suffering has been twisted by others.

Wherever he is, my Ilya, I wish him well.

Now I have told you, and I am not sure if I feel better.

Yours,

Anastasia

Until her name passes Evan’s lips, I don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath. Even ninety years later, Anastasia’s longing hangs in the air, like perfume after its wearer has left the room. There’s a part of me that feels wrong for reading Anna’s private grief. It feels a lot like trespassing. But that’s why she left these diaries in a trunk in her attic, isn’t it? She knew one day they would be found. And as Ilya said, it’s what we all want: finally, to be seen.

Is it what I want? Katie’s words on the playground come back to me: You’re not yourself when you’re around him. I still haven’t heard from her, and this annoys me for so many reasons, but one of them is the fact that I desperately want to tell her about my aunt’s story.

I sweep the frustration aside and clear my throat. “It’s so sad,” I say, of Anastasia’s words. “Couldn’t she have found him? Her father was the tsar—at least he still was then.”

“She was royalty at a precarious time for the monarchy. A common soldier wouldn’t do. If she had married, her husband would have been chosen for political reasons.”

A scarf lies on the floor beside me, a gift from Katie’s last trip to China. “But that’s stupid,” I say, wrapping the silk around my knuckles like a boxer preparing for a fight.

“That’s a monarchy.”

“It’s unfair.”

“Unfair, yes,” Evan reasons, “but some people believe there are things more important than love.”

“More important than love?”

“You don’t believe there’s such a thing?”

“No.” I square my chin. “No, I don’t.”

“Peace, prosperity, geopolitical security?”

“Ilya was just as worthy as some stupid prince or duke. Worthier, even. He saw the girl, not the princess.” I’m preparing for his infuriatingly reasonable response. “Maybe he wasn’t the person everyone would have picked for her; he wasn’t rich or educated or politically connected—”

“I agree.”

“That’s some patriarchal bull—wait, what?”

“I agree,” Evan says matter-of-factly, lips twisted into a smile. “You thought I wouldn’t.”

“No,” I huff. “You’re just all . . . rational and logic-y. I didn’t figure you for a romantic.”

“‘Logic-y.’ What’s that worth in Scrabble?”

A small stuffed whale Ryan once won at the fair becomes an easy missile. Evan ducks, throwing up his hands.

“Logical,” I say.

“You know, nerds need love, too. ‘Love is life.’ Tolstoy.”

My cheeks flame. “I never called you a nerd!”

“I never said I was in love. . . . And you were thinking it.” A full-blown smirk dances on his face now as he opens the journal again to read. “June fifteenth, nineteen seventeen . . .” He pauses. “And, you know, if you throw one more thing at me, I’m going to have to quit because of workplace harassment.”

I had told Evan that the Romanovs’ house arrest didn’t sound so bad, but as the entries creep toward August 1917, anxiety settles like dust over Anastasia’s words. The move the empress had feared becomes reality. The provisional government orders the family away from Tsarskoe Selo.

We’ve been instructed to pack our things, Anastasia writes. Whatever does not go with them—clothes, toys, photographs, books, personal effects, and diaries—will be sent by steamship to England. If their cousin King George will not save their lives, at least he will save their belongings.

30.7.1917

How does one choose what to take when leaving her life behind? What is valuable then?

Some of our belongings have been confiscated; the new government says the property of the emperor is the property of the people. Most of our clothes will go to England, as well as the furniture, some books, and you, dear diaries. I pray we’ll meet again, but Mama says we must focus on what is needed for the future rather than on the past.

They tell us we leave tomorrow, by train. Those in charge will not reveal much, Papa says, but that we are headed for Tobolsk.

I bid you adieu, dear diary, and surer travels than ours. Wish me—and your successors—good luck. I believe we’ll need it.

God keep you until we meet again,

Anastasia

“Tobolsk,” I say. “Where’s that?”

Evan’s face is once again grim.

“Siberia.”

When Evan leaves to help his grandmother with an errand, I am determined to find historical sources that will confirm details in the diaries. Through an internet search, I stumble on an article from the New York Times, March 1918. “Captivity Affects Romanoff’s Mind,” reads the headline. An introduction to the article says it draws from an intercepted letter written by the tsarina to a friend and from a report by one of the Red guards stationed with the family. It describes the family’s residence in Tobolsk: four small rooms and four large rooms, the largest only five yards by three, “furnished in the simplest manner,” with no water, no electricity, no bathrooms, and heat from primitive brick stoves. The ground floor is occupied by a company of soldiers. “Where are the spacious reception rooms of Peterhof and the Winter Palace, with their surcharged magnificence?” the article asks, almost wryly.

The Princesses possess in all only four costumes, and are obliged to be contented with those. As regards their jewelry, they were forced to leave it all in Petrograd . . . There is little to say about [their] life. . . . Tatiana spends much time reading French literature, particularly novels, as do others in the family. Olga is much interested in housekeeping. . . . The Princesses can move freely about the town, without special superintendence, but, naturally, not without being followed step by step by the secret police, who perform their duty as discreetly as possible. On the contrary, the heir-apparent is closely guarded.

The article quotes the former tsar as observing, “My life has always been that of a prisoner.” I wonder if this is how Anastasia felt also. Her words echo in my mind: We do not choose our fates. And Olga’s: Fake it.

There’s a part of the story I’ve avoided reading: accounts of the actual murders in Yekaterinberg. I know enough to know they will be grisly. The books from the library sit in a tower on my desk. From the bottom, I grab one called The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. A chilling title. Only it wasn’t, I think to myself, every Romanov’s final chapter.

For the next hour, I read gruesome details about a twelve-man firing squad shooting men, women, and children at point-blank range. I read about bullets ricocheting off walls and boots stomping heads and limbs, about bayonets and rifle butts disfiguring faces beyond identification, about moaning and smoke and “rivers and pools of blood” amid chaos. It is stomach-churning and terrible, and it is not fiction. Steeling myself, I search the internet for photos of the “House of Special Purpose,” what the Soviets called the Ipatiev House, the building in Yekaterinberg where the murders occurred. One comes up, black and white, of the basement where the family and their servants were killed. Striped wallpaper is pierced by bullets; plaster has crumbled from the wall in front of which the family stood. The room is smaller than I imagined.

After the massacre, the bodies were loaded onto trucks and driven into the surrounding forest. A party of drunk local workers in peasant carts, supporters of the new Bolshevik government who happened to meet the assassination party on the road, helped the soldiers strip, douse with acid, and attempt to burn the bodies before throwing them down an abandoned mine shaft, followed by hand grenades. Details of the murders were recorded in two major accounts: one by the Soviet executioner himself, Yakov Yurovsky, published decades later; and another by investigator Nikolai Sokolov published in 1924. Sokolov was hired by the White Army, supporters of the tsar, after it retook Yekaterinburg—tragically, just a week after the murders—to determine the fate of the family. He used forensic evidence and local testimonies.

Reportedly, one of the peasants who met the soldiers in the woods, disappointed that he didn’t get to kill the tsar himself, joked, “Why didn’t you bring them alive?”

He wasn’t aware that at least one of the Romanovs possibly was.