Hi, sorry for the long wait, real life got in the way.
July 26th, 1918.
Anastasia.
I am bored. Tired of everything we do.
Maria claims she is fine every day, that we are fine, she insists. The weather is nice one day and she takes it as proof God will help us through it all.
The idea got into her head that once the war is over, the reds may simply release Olga and Alexei. She was never interested in politics before and now she has this complex theory on why it is such.
She smiles, talks, and jokes with us, she looks for Oleg in the yard, but that guard looks as if he is trying to hide himself from her every time we go outside, unless Maria catches a glimpse of him, then he tries to appear polite. She has become insufferable whenever I can´t keep up with her. But I heard her scream for papa tonight, and last night. Two nights ago she screamed for mama, she was yelling at the murderers to leave our beloved mama alone, she sounded as if our mother's murder had taken hours instead of the actual seconds it took for that bullet to destroy her skull. She never falls asleep when we do, I am woken up every night by the sound of her sobs. The bags under her eyes are similar to the ones Alexei had before he left.
Some of the soldiers returned from the front changed. They were lazy, serious, spoke slowly and with lots of pauses, only to say ´please´ or ´thank you´, their eyes were empty. You couldn´t cheer them up as much as you tried, those didn´t enjoy playing tennis, or chess, or anything as genuinely as the others. And yet, those unfortunate soldiers could act as well as any professional, they would claim to be in a particularly cheerful mood one day or the other, so that you didn´t feel ridiculous about your failed attempts at lifting their spirits. I have recently noticed, little by little, day by day, that my sisters are the same as those soldiers now, and it has broken my heart.
Maria is worse, at least Tatiana is a bad actress, Maria may believe her own lie, and the worst part is she wants me to continue being the girl who cheers everyone up, when I already realized how pointless it is.
"Why are you so serious today?" She typically asks, or the daily "How are you feeling?" or the usual "Are you sad today?" Which is ridiculous, because I am in no way acting any differently than she and Tatiana are, and we are all sad every day.
I don´t know when I started to feel this way, maybe at the beginning it was guilt for feeling nothing at times. Papa and mama were dead and I was acting to silly, sometimes sillier than ever, I remembered it is not supposed to be like that. Guilt started it, I tried to act as one would expect, quieter, solemn, reflective… a complete act at first, but then it felt so real again, like it felt seconds or hours after it happened.
It was like when there is noise outside a house, children playing and yelling, or something more dreadful, wounded soldiers crying out in pain.
You can´t hear the noise outside because you are having a chat inside with your friends, and then someone tells a joke that makes everyone laugh. The laughter goes on for a while, but it has to stop at some point, it always does, it always ends, and when it does, you can hear all the noise outside you have missed, you could distinguish its sources if there are many, there is nothing to distract you from the noise anymore until one of your friends can think of something clever to say in order to break the silence inside, something that makes you forget the noise.
The noise outside is the pain, and everyone is running out of clever things to say.
By the time I realized the pain was real, it was too late to go back to the way I was acting, I could no longer shield myself from the noise. I have stopped trying to swallow my tears every time I become sad, I have stopped trying to be funny, I have stopped trying not to be angry all day long.
Now I cry every day, and I am annoyed whenever Maria tries to console me, why can't she just let me cry? Starting to cry and stopping over and over again is becoming tiresome and stressful. I don't want to stop crying, I just want papa back.
She could also use some crying. Clearly, crying only at night isn´t working for her, because she has this stupid need to stop Tatiana and me from crying. She wouldn't able to keep her cheerful charade up if she just let us tear up in peace. She is running far behind us, she thinks she is doing better but she is far behind us, it is like she hasn´t caught up, she is like the typical last person to realize no one is laughing anymore. I used to be that person.
I told her so just now, I told her everything I thought. It just turned into an ugly fight filled with yells and ridiculous ugly sobbing.
"Just leave me alone!" I cried minutes ago. "I don't want to go outside today!"
"But darling…" She tried to respond.
"I know they are in heaven, and I don't care! I want them here! Let me be miserable!" I yelled.
"They would not be happy to see you like that".
"I am not feeling the way they would be happy to see me!"
"I just want to cheer you up, it breaks my heart to see you like this, I love you too much." Lies. She looked so pathetic as she said that; choking with sobs, lips trembling.
"Well, I never asked to be consoled, thank you very much, I will tell you when I need it".
Tatiana ignored us the entire time, she was weeping by herself in her bed showing us her back, as if pretending we didn't exist. Before, she would most definitely have scolded us for fighting, does she care anymore? I tried so hard to make it better for her but she just keeps getting worse. Everything is different now, even the simplest of things. I hate this. I don't want to see what goes next. Nothing is the same, the perfect way I loved. I don't want to be myself anymore.
I lay on my bed in the aftermath of the fight, weeping silently. Maria is sobbing loudly in her own bed. After I dared her to go chase soldiers around in the garden now that mama isn't here to stop her, she ended up too distraught to do so.
I see Denis lean in our room, his stupid grin disappears when he realizes we are crying. I roll my eyes. I have chatted and played cards with him about an hour each day and now he thinks he can just come and visit whenever he pleases.
I am too tired for this, I just want to drown in my own misery and never return. I throw my pillow at him as I frown, it doesn´t hit him, but flies outside the room.
Denis gets the message and goes away. Good.
I stay sobbing for hours, without exaggeration. My sisters go down to get dinner, I don't follow them. They try to scold me. I defy them, and I easily win, not even Tatiana has the energy to convince me eating is important, as if we had a future. Maybe I will lose some weight after all.
What are we going to do now? Whatever outcome I imagine when we are taken out of here is so bleak. No papa around to talk and joke with us, to read to us. No mama to pray with us, none of her warm smiles whenever we sang or played or said something funny. No more four of us again, at least not like we acted before, not while wanting to act like that, instead of doing it for the sake of cheering everyone up, I can´t even do that anymore, Tatiana is like half of herself. I am a failure.
We have spent almost two years imprisoned, and nothing has ever been quite as hard as having to spend a week and a half trying to get it into my head that we will never receive a letter from papa and mama explaining how their journey has been so far, and telling us that they miss us, that they hope we will all be together again soon.
It is in my head now, and it is too painful.
Then there is Olga and Alexei. I can´t do anything about it, I can´t help them, I can´t write to them, I can´t even accept it or grieve because they may be alive, where does that leave me? What am I supposed to do with this? It is too much, I can´t take a day more.
I want it to be over, I want God to stop taking things from me…
I should pray.
I will accept I have lost everything God, if you just give me time to understand I have. As I pray, I remember the times I did with my mother, or when I guided Alexei to do it properly since he was a toddler, imitating the way Maria did the same, and mama praised us for it. I don´t think I will ever feel more pain than I do now.
Has an hour passed? Two? Is the pain making time go slower? Why are my sisters not back?
The flow of tears hasn´t stopped. I taste the salt in my cheeks. I like the taste of tears, they remind me of saltwater when I swam with papa and my sisters in Finland, or Crimea.
I have grown bizarrely bored. Even sinking into my own misery gets old.
I see two legs standing right before me. Denis. I didn´t hear him enter.
"Mmm…I… uhm, just leaving…" he mumbles as he awkwardly tip toes with a pillow in one of his hands across the room. The way he jumps with one leg and leaves the pillow quickly before going back to tip toing like a ballerina would have made me laugh days before. "This… here".
He hesitates as he approaches the door to leave, and looks back at me as if to see what I am doing, or more curiously, as if to make sure I haven´t done anything in his absence. Then he looks at me with sadness in his eyes, while hiding his lips, avoiding eye contact and looking at the floor every time I answer his insecure stare with a stern one.
He is so clingy, and now increasingly awkward, he is either childish enough to want to play every day, or he has fallen in love with me. I think it is the former, it is never me that men pay attention to when my sisters are around.
"Don´t you have somewhere to be?" I ask.
"Oh, sorry!" He exclaims, my question made him jump as if I had scared him from behind. "Well, my…my shift has ended", he explains in an apologetic tone. I nod in an equally awkward manner.
"Well", I say as I raise my eyebrows and look at him and then at the door, about to tell him to go, buy I change my mind, something more important occurs to me. "Are you even allowed here?"
"I, I… don´t know", he raises and lowers is shoulders. "I have never been scolded for this."
"So that new commander is nothing special then, huh?" I say, and I notice a creeping blush in his cheeks.
"The new commander gave us lots of new rules, but didn´t mention this."
"Really?" I ask, and I wipe my nose and face. "What sorts of rules?"
"Mostly about checking people who leave and enter the house, he also considered putting limits to the time you can spend in the garden".
I almost instinctively curse this new commander out loud, I almost call him pig and a bore, but another part of me wins. I don´t care anymore, so I only nod slowly and stare at one of the other beds.
"I am sorry about your father and mother", he says so quickly that only the context, and some scattered words allow me to understand the whole sentence. "And siblings". He adds those last words even quicker. I feel like someone is squeezing my heart.
"Thank you", I say without looking at him as I nod, this time faster, it is the polite thing to do. More tears fall.
"Well, I will leave you to it", he says as he walks away.
I am bored, I wish I could play with Denis. I could, of course, I wouldn't enjoy it. Well, it is complicated, I would, but it is definitely agony at the same time, to laugh when you are dying inside. What relieves you from boredom does not do the same for the sadness or pain, it makes them worse once it is over. The noise is louder when everyone is done laughing.
Only forgetting all about everything and everyone would make me feel better. Only being someone else.
"Wait!" I yell, but Denis is already walking down the stairs, which is no impediment. He quickly returns, his eyes are wide open, as if he had been caught doing something wrong.
"What is it?" I ask.
"What?" He repeats.
"Let´s play that stupid, dumb, silly, useless, annoying, card game".
"It doesn´t seem like you want to play".
"Let´s go", I say after rolling my eyes.
I wipe my tears, go to the bathroom to blow my nose before returning. We play with our regular deck of cards, Denis suggests some kind of game where your card has to match either the number or the rank of the card in the center, if none of your cards match you have to get as many as necessary from the bunch. Whatever.
After I leave my one of my cards in the center, Denis has to take a card, then another one, and another, he smiles at me nervously as if he had risked his life´s savings in this game, I smile back with amusement until he finally pulls out a card with the same number as the one I just left. I have the perfect card for it.
"Ow!" He exclaims. "How come you have the best luck?"
"I don´t know why you care so much", I say as I stretch and lay down on my back. "This game is boring, we play it all the time".
"It is one of the only things we can play, let´s go to the other room…"
"I already told you a thousand times I don´t want to!" I almost scream as I sit up again. It is so frustrating. "I don´t want anything to do with it. You can go if you like." I shoo him away with my hand. He hesitates but eventually leaves, when I hear him moving stuff around the pain returns stronger than ever my eyes fill with tears. I breathe in and out deeply, I wipe my eyes before the tears fall.
He returns after a while with the board for colorito, and I burst into tears. I run away out of embarrassment and lock myself in the bathroom, hoping he won´t be there when I get out. I sit on the lid and cry.
After a long time, just when I thought he was gone, he knocks at the door gently.
"I am sorry about it… it probably makes you feel sad now that…" Denis sounds indecisive about what he is about to say. I can´t believe he took all this time to decide whether he was going to talk to me.
"You make literally no sound, are you a ghost or something?" I try to tease him, and I realize how stupid my voice must sound with a congested nose. "I thought you had already left".
"I also know what it is like, you know? Everyone has lost someone nowadays, I am sorry".
What is it about people trying to comfort you that makes you cry again? I stand up and go to the sink, I look at my puffy red eyes in the mirror, at the tears still coming out, at my nose. Pathetic, I need more toilet paper.
"Let me guess, your father?" I inquire in a tiny voice. "Because of the war?"
Just as he is beginning to answer, I blow my nose loudly, and without planning to, the noise I make doesn´t let me hear his reply. This makes me let out a sad giggle, if that is even possible.
"I am sorry, can you say that again?" I ask, and I can hear him laughing on the other side of the door.
"You are very likeable", Denis mutters quickly again when he is done laughing, then he says something else just as quickly, something hard to grasp from this side of the door, I think it is something corny that has to do with not wanting me to be sad.
"So, was your father a soldier?" I ask as I throw the toilet paper in the trash.
"More less, he never actually got to the front. He died during a training accident, he would have been part of a cavalry regiment, he was really patriotic".
He sounds almost ashamed of it. I feel sorry for him, at least the families of the soldiers that died at the front can, as a consolation, tell everyone that their loved ones fought bravely died willingly for the motherland. His father died because of bad luck, and mine was murdered for no reason, died for nothing. He wasn´t even allowed to fight for his country like he would have liked to. He didn´t even have time to understand why, he was confused, they just…
"How do you accept it?" I cry again, my voice must sound like it, at least he can´t see me. "How do you just accept you won´t see your father again and continue living? I don´t think it is possible".
"I don't… accept it, I guess I just refused to think about it, now I can, the memory is distant enough, I do miss him, but I distract myself whenever I do."
It is different for me, I always think about it, I can´t stop, I was there. It is something I can´t control. I see them every night, I think I once had a nightmare while I was awake.
I hear footsteps, someone is climbing up the stairs, it is probably my sisters. It is only a pair of feet I hear though.
"What are you doing here? Don´t you have somewhere to go?" A man says, it is one of the guards. Sounds like the voice of one of Oleg´s friends, the dark haired one he talked to a lot during his birthday, Igor Vladimirovich. Denis´s voice is shakier than ever when he answers back:
"I… I was just leaving, sorry."
Igor tries to open the bathroom door, when he fails, he speaks loudly to me:
"Was he bothering you?"
"No!" I state, he must have heard my sobs. "No, I just became melancholic."
"We are not supposed to go upstairs except on the mornings", Igor keeps talking, now to Denis again, his voice sounding further away as he and Denis go down the stairs. "I didn´t realize there was a special exception for you, young man. The new guy seems stricter, I am just trying to watch out for you, what would your mother do if you got in trouble?"
When I return to my room there is no colorito nor cars to be seen, a relief, but I kind of hope Denis does return with the cards someday.
After praying for Olga and Alexei, I decide to take a nap, but my sisters return when I had just laid down and closed my eyes, before I can fall into a deep sleep.
"Shh", I hear Maria murmur. "Look, poor baby, she had more than one nightmare yesterday, she needs this". The way she mentions my nightmares annoys me a bit, as if she didn´t have them as well, but I don´t mind as much, her concern also makes me feel a rush of affection.
I think Tatiana is standing right next to the bed I am sleeping in now, I can almost see her smile down at me.
"We will tell her once she wakes up", Tatiana says, also murmuring. This is too much.
"Tell me what?" I say as soon as I straighten up, way too suddenly I can see now, because Tatiana jumps and shrieks, and Maria looks spooked as well. Tatiana puts a hand to her heart, I smile at that.
Tatiana and Maria smile at each other once the fright is gone. They look different, these are genuine smiles, not the "cheering everyone up" type.
"What is it?" I ask. Maria and Tatiana seat on each side of my bed, leaving me in the middle.
"Maria, go close the door first", Tatiana says as her smile grows wider. Maria begins talking once she returns:
"We received a letter from Olga darling. She is free, she is safe, and she assures us that there are people coming to set us free as well soon." My eyes fill with tears, different tears, tears of relief. My prayers have been heard, I have hope now, and one less thing to worry about.
"And Alexei?" I ask. "Is he with her?" Their smiles slowly disappear and my heart starts beating faster. No, God, no. Two tears fall, but I wipe them away.
"Don´t worry, Nastya", Maria says as she rubs my shoulder. "Olga didn´t mention him in the letter, but it is probably implied he is with her."
"What do you mean it is implied?" I inquire with increasing anxiety and annoyance. "That is not how we write letters! Whenever we sent letters to papa, and Alexei happened to be with him, we mentioned him in the end as well, we used to send him and papa kisses."
"You must remember, dear", Tatiana interjects before Maria can speak, she uses her typical Governess voice on me, "that we don´t understand the whole situation right now, we don´t know how Olga was rescued or anything, her main priority right now must be our own rescue, not communicating and sending each other kisses as if we were on a leisure trip."
I genuinely hate her right now, I am dying of worry, one less thing to worry about is not enough. This is not good news yet.
"Is it even Olga?" I inquire. "Give me the letter", I request as I extend my hand, "I want to see what words she used".
"We don´t have the letter anymore darling", Tatiana explains. "We broke it into tiny pieces and got rid of it in the toilet before it got to the wrong hands, but it was Olga´s, darling. Any of us would have been able to recognize her handwriting. She will be the only one to send us notes, to make sure we know it is her and not someone else trying to set us up."
My heart sinks, I can´t believe they did this to me, I can´t believe that they would dispose of the only evidence they had that Olga is still around, maybe close to our home, safe and sound. I lay down and cover myself with the blanket again.
I would have kissed that letter so many times, I would have imagined every moment of Olga writing it. I scream with my mouth closed. I hate them. I hate them.
"Shvibzik, enough", Maria tells me gently as she touches my head from over the blanket. "We can tell you everything it said, you can help us plan our next steps".
"It is not the same! I wanted to see if I could find something between the lines, I wanted to see it with my own eyes!" I scream at them, still with my head covered. How could they care so little about me?
"Well, you didn´t want to come down to have dinner", Tatiana states in a scolding tone. "If you had been there, you would have also helped us and Galina wash the dishes, you would have been there when she gave us the letter."
I groan. I feel they have betrayed me, but I feel so curious about what will happen next, how did Galina even get the letter inside? Still, it would hurt my pride so much to just let this slide. It was a piece of Olga, I would have liked to read it for myself.
"We couldn´t go upstairs for you Shvibzik", Maria explains, "it would have raised suspicions".
I slowly uncover myself, and realize I am crying. Perfect. Tatiana sees and immediately hugs me.
"My darling", she says as she squeezes me. "It is just this time, we promise, but you have to eat, all right? I know how you feel, I don´t want to wake up sometimes, but you have to eat".
Her warmth reminds me of mama and I sob. I put my arms around her to my great shame.
"Do you want to know how Galina smuggled the letter?" Maria whispers. I roll my eyes, then I slowly smile at her and nod as Tatiana pulls away. "It was hidden inside the layers of an onion, can you believe it? They searched her but didn´t suspect a thing, the agent who did it knew what he was doing".
"Agent?" I ask.
"Yes", Tatiana explains. "The people who are helping us are British agents, see Nastya? And you said uncle George was an idiot".
"He must be the one behind all this", Maria adds.
I smile, but still think he is an idiot. Late, he was too late.
"So what is the next step?" I inquire. "What do we have to do?"
It is Maria who explains we have to gather information on the security of the house, draw a sketch of the inside of the mansion putting special emphasis on windows and what can be seen from them, and explain the routines of the guards as well as our own, among other things.
"We can ask Oleg and his friends, and Denis, right Shvibzik?" Maria requests as she looks straight at me with her huge opened eyes, which are filled with hope.
"Sure", I say as I shrug.
"But we have to be discrete", Tatiana adds, "and act as if we are just naturally curious about their daily lives without being too pushy, will you write everything down?" The last question is directed at Maria, who nods.
"No one would understand your handwriting", Mashka jokes, me and Tatiana smile.
"But how will we smuggle it out?" I point out. "It is not like Galina can just use another onion, it would be suspicious for her to leave with it for no reason when she lives in this house."
"Forget smuggling it out", Tatiana says, "we don´t even know where we are going to write it down, we aren´t allowed to write letters, do you think asking commander Ignat Iliaovich for paper, brushes, pens, and paint or ink in order to pass time would raise suspicions?"
"I don´t know, but what else can we do?" Maria replies. "Maybe we should only ask for paper, brushes and paint, no one would think we are using them to write as well".
"Sounds like a good start", Tatiana says. "Maybe we will come up with something better eventually."