July 20th, 1918.
Tatiana Nikolaevna Romanova.
"Mama! Papa!" Masha yells in her sleep. I open my eyes and sit up on the bed. Olga is getting up as well.
I leave the bed and open the curtains. It is still dark. "What is it?" I ask Maria, returning to the bed where we have slept. "Did you have a nightmare?"
She flinches when I touch her sweaty forehead and then starts squirming in her bed, covering her face with her forearms and screaming.
"It was just a dream," Olga soothes Maria, caressing her hair. "You are safe, it is all right darling, mama and papa are watching over us from heaven, you are good." Very gradually, Mariaʼs struggle ends.
I remember our days working as nurses. They seem so far away now. My technical skills were unmatched by the other beginners, and I was good at keeping my stomach full and the actual nursing in a way Olga never was, but she had a special touch when it came to comforting soldiers who were in pain.
My poor sister Maria finally opens her eyes. She is crying and struggling to breathe but seems less scared than before.
"Are you all right?" I ask, and she nods, closing her eyes for a second. "Do you want to talk about it?"
Maria straightens up and sits on her bed. "It was just… all that happened, in the basement," she sobs, pausing often to take deep breaths, "but this time, they stabbed me, like Anna, with the bayonets… oh God, it was so painful! It was so painful! It all felt so real!"
I hear someone knocking at the door and accidentally let out a short shriek before jumping. Three days ago now, I remember. We were awakened at midnight. I gather up my courage, take a few deep breaths, and walk to answer the door.
I exhale. It is Anastasia, who seems nervous.
"What is wrong, darling?" I ask her.
"It is Alexei, he had a nightmare," she answers.
"Can you help me by comforting him yourself? Maria also had a nightmare."
"He doesnʼt let me go anywhere near him, he asked specifically for you, he sounds very upset."
"All right, can you go talk to Maria for me in the meantime?"
She nods and enters the room before I leave to see what is wrong with Alexei.
My baby brother is sitting on the bed, crying. I turn on the lights too see better, which startles him. The room is filled with card and board games he has played tonight with Anastasia.
"What is it sunbeam?" I ask him, getting closer to the bed. "Did you have a nightmare? You can tell me", I encourage him, but he just keeps sobbing.
I approach, intending to sit right next to him, but then I feel the smell. He lowers his head in shame when he realizes I have noticed, looking much younger than his age at that moment. Poor thing, he must be so embarrassed. That nightmare must have scared him a lot. He was three years old the last time he wet the bed.
He probably feared Anastasia would tease him.
"Donʼt worry," I say as carefully as possible. "The commander told me where his room was just in case, so I will ask him to let me grab your other clothes, they must be dry already. If he doesnʼt have any extra sheets, you can sleep on my bed. The important thing now is that you get a quick bath, and you canʼt stay in those wet clothes."
"But where will you sleep?" He asks.
"With Olga, donʼt worry about that."
"But I donʼt want you to wake the commander! What if he gets angry at you?" Poor darling, thinking about that.
"He won't", I ease his fears. "This is part of his job."
Oo
Commander Antonovich is indeed a bit grumpy when I knock on his bedroom door and wake him up, but he doesnʼt complain as he answers in his blue pajamas. The hardest part is having to explain the reason why I need the sheets and the clothes for my brother. At first he thinks a counterrevolutionary group has come to take him and starts grunting to me in an aggressive manner. It is probably the lateness of the hour that makes him come up with such wild ideas. I only manage to convince him otherwise by telling him the truth.
"Please donʼt mention this to my brother or any of the other guards, he would be mortified," I implore the commander.
"Donʼt worry", he reassures me. "I will not mention this again. I remember the same thing happening to my daughter after my wife died in a trolley car accident. My little girl barely made it out there alive. She was ten and was gravely injured but fortunately recovered. She is around your age now, actually."
"Thank you, commander, and I am sorry for your loss," I say.
By the time I am back upstairs with the clothes and the sheets, the little pair has fallen asleep on Mariaʼs bed, cuddling each other. Olga is sleeping on hers.
I carry my brother to the bathroom, which is a lot harder for me to do that than it is for Masha. He is only slightly shorter than Anastasia, and I can't carry her anymore. He bathes all by himself while I wash his dirty clothes in the sink.
"Does Anastasia know?" He asks shyly as I put the shirt over his head.
"No darling, she doesnʼt suspect a thing", I reply, and he sighs a breath of relief. "But you must know she would never tease you for something that is upsetting to you." He nods unsurely.
"She wouldnʼt", I insist. "But I still would never tell her, or anyone, if you donʼt want me to."
My sister has a heart of gold, and her antics usually cheer everyone up. Anastasia doesnʼt act the way she does for the sole purpose of making people feel miserable.
"My left arm hurts," Alexei complains once I have finished helping him dress.
"Is that the arm you landed on when the brute pushed you?" I ask, and he nods. "I am going to take you to Anastasia's bed while I change the sheets of your bed, and then I am going to sit with you and massage your arm until it feels better, all right?"
My brother nods.
"You have nothing to be ashamed of, dear", I assure him. "You were just scared. It can happen to anyone. Even some of the wounded in our hospital confessed to it, did you know?" It happened to me, I am too much of a coward to utter out loud.
He weeps silently, lying on Nastyaʼs bed as I work on his. As I finish changing the sheets, my brother speaks again:
"Pushing the bayonet away also hurt", he pants, "falling off, the chair... also."
"I know," I sympathize with him. "That man, Ermakov, is a beast." His lip starts trembling as soon as I mention that cursed name. Alexei breathes deeply two times in an attempt to control himself before a sob finally escapes his throat.
"Hey, it is alright," I sit by his side and soothe him by holding his hand. "Is that what your nightmare was about?"
He nods, wiping away his tears uselessly, as they are quickly replaced. "He… he, he yelled."
"He yelled at you while he was trying to stab you?" I ask him. He shakes his head.
"Yelled, he had shot, Nagorny, while trying, to stab me!" He finishes amidst pauses to breathe, necessary due to the incessant sobbing. God! He cried out in fear the word 'stab'.
I donʼt know what to say. I donʼt even know if I am surprised. They murdered our friends along with our parents. They are more than capable of doing what he described. My own tears start falling. How can they be so cruel to people whose only crimes are friendship and loyalty? I realize, horrified, that all of our friends still in custody are also in danger, maybe even our friends in the hospitals, our former servants, all of the friends we have ever gone to parties with, the ones that used to visit us… our acquaintances? I donʼt know what constitutes a good enough reason to deserve death for these people.
"I am sorry, and I donʼt want to give you false hopes, but it is possible he was only claiming that to hurt you and brag." I know it isnʼt true, but I say so anyway.
"My fault," Alexei mutters.
"What? No! Why?!" I exclaim.
"If, I werenʼt, so, so sick, all the time, I wouldnʼt… I would, not, have needed him, still, and they wouldnʼt, have, killed him," my little brother laments, pausing after almost every single new word he utters. He then rubs his red eyes and keeps sobbing. He can barely talk, and just trying to has driven him to exhaustion.
He is breaking my heart with those words.
"That is nonsense!" I exclaim, taking his hands away from his eyes. "Nagorny loved you, he loved all of us, and he would have followed us even if you were a healthy boy who had outgrown him years before. The only people to blame are the ones that killed him, do you understand? And even if he had died because of your illness, you must know darling that nobody blames you for that."
Alexei nods, still looking unsure.
"What if, they kill, all of our friends?" He whimpers, his voice higher than before. "Like Mr. Gibbes and Mr. Gilliard and Trina…"
"We will pray for them", I tell him, wiping away my own tears and then his. "It is the only thing we can do right now."
We pray until his sobbing transforms into silent tears. I have to reassure him that, at the very least, our foreign friends such as Gilliard and Mr. Gibbes shouldnʼt be in any danger. I massage his arm and knee as gently as I can to help him a bit with the pain. He tells me they hurt a lot.
I think this pain either started or increased along with the nightmare. The hemorrhage and the pain that follows it never manifest immediately after the accident that causes them.
I massage him for a long time, and he says it helps, but his whimpers and yelps betray him. I donʼt have anything else to help the poor thing though, and I would be too ashamed to wake the commander a second time to ask him if he has morphine. Maybe I will, tomorrow.
When I am about to leave for the other bed, he tearfully asks me to stay, and I donʼt have a heart to refuse him. I let him hug me as tight as he would his teddy bear when he was younger, and I stroke his hair until he falls asleep. He smiles sweetly with his eyes closed as I do it. It makes me smile as well.
"I got him, mama", I whisper as I look up at the ceiling. "I will take care of him."
When I wake up, I find Alexei still sleeping peacefully next to me, as if nothing had happened. He didn't have any other nightmares, and the pain in his arm and leg wasn't terrible enough to keep him from relaxing, at least not tonight. Thank God.
My arm just feels numb because Alyosha has rested his head on it, so I have to move it around for a while. It is quite funny.
The commander enters each of our chambers briefly for roll calls, and just as he is leaving, Anastasia comes running into the room I was at and hugs me so tightly she may suffocate me. "I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!" She exclaims, kissing me on one cheek every two times she utters the words 'I love you'.
I hug her back with an incredulous frown, but then I smile. Perhaps my baby sister is running out of ideas on how to bother me. Poor thing.
"I love you too Nastenka", I say, unsettled by this sudden display of affection, "but hurry up, we have to get ready."
She doesnʼt pull away or say anything else as she keeps hugging me. I embrace her back, more genuinely this time, closing my eyes. My dear little one has suffered so much… and she needs her older sister. Maybe she is just shy about saying it, and so she is joking, as usual, to get her point across.
I tower over her, and despite being so skinny, I want to try this one last time. I lift her from the floor just for a second during which she squeals in surprise before her shoes touch the ground again.
"I love you too", I kiss her forehead. "The priest is coming soon, so I am going to bathe first."
My little sister is still shaken up and laughing when I pull away to go to the bathroom.
"And clean up the mess you left last night, Anastasia!" I yell before stepping into the shower.
Oo
Yet again I spend more time in the shower than I should. I curse myself for it. Once I start crying in there I canʼt stop, which is why I turn off the faucet before I am done shedding my tears. I will waste all of the water in the world if I wait for them to stop flowing.
When I return from the bathroom, I find all of my siblings crying as well. All of them except for Olga, who is consoling Shvibzik. They are sitting side by side on one of the beds of our room.
Anastasia is sobbing louder now than she ever has except immediately after that horrible nightmare took place. I look into my older sister's eyes in silent gratitude.
Also sobbing, Masha is sitting on the other bed, kissing Alexei's hair over and over again and rocking him just like she did yesterday, the day before, and…
I let out a gasp at the memory of that cellar.
The only thing that takes longer than my daily eternal shower is for Maria to stop rocking Alexei as if he were a baby. Because he is hiding his face in Maria's chest, Alexei's cries aren't as loud as Anastasia's, but I can tell they would be otherwise.
If our parents hadn't been brutally murdered, I would have already explained to both Maria and Alexei that he was getting too old for those childish things. I will never do so now.
What my baby brother wants more than the throne of Russia he will never have. He will never see our gentle and loving mama ever again, or be held in the strong arms of our father. He can take as much time as he wants. Maria can as well, as she seems to need this just as much.
When Olga stands up to go to the bathroom, I take her place comforting my little sister. This time, Anastasia doesn't try to hide her love and need for me with humor.
"I will be like your mother now, do you hear me?" I promise her. I feel her nod and hug me tighter. She keeps sobbing.
Oo
My siblings and I bathe and prepare ourselves early to be ready for obednya, which we have downstairs. We eagerly take part in the much-needed ritual. Galina also joins.
It is a very melancholic affair as a whole though. We cry the entire time. During the sermon, as we pray for our parents. We weep discreetly, but we do. We are not allowed to talk to the priest. I almost try to apologize to him with my sight for our endless tears.
Olga and I stare at each other every now and then, feeling as if we could read each otherʼs thoughts. Maybe we do sometimes.
"If only mama were here", I 'tell' her, or, "it doesnʼt feel as good without them", she 'replies'. It is still a joy to finally receive communion, the only experience that, now I realize, never truly changes. Union with Christ is always so. Olga starts glowing.
I tell my sisters about what troubled our brother last night, and so we pray for the safety of our friends and family during and after the service. I feel miserable when the priest leaves, but my mind is at ease, at rest for now.
We break the fast and Masha chats with Oleg as we eat. He is supposed to be watching over us as he did yesterday.
They are recalling games they played as children and discussing the usual differences between the things little boys and little girls play. Galina, Nastya, Alexei, and even Olga join the conversation occasionally. I am glad Oleg isn't talking to my sweetest sister about anything indecent.
We don't cry, and even our faces are a bit less swollen after having slept. It is curious how for minutes we act as if nothing bad had recently happened, only to go back to the same pathetic state in seconds.
"When I was a little girl, I played with both girl toys and boy toys," Nastya comments.
"That is because you liked to play with Alyosha more than me," Masha pouts at Anastasia, pretending to be upset.
"That is not true!" Anastasia protests. "I clearly remember I played with you most of the time!"
Alyosha nods in agreement.
"You remind me of me and my brothers when we were little," Oleg smiles at Maria. "We also had arguments as little children because of jealousy, but at the end of the day we all loved playing together."
"Wait until I tell Ivan Skorokhodov", Nastya whispers in my ear. "He will be very jealous." I can't help but smile, widely and properly so, perhaps for the first time since our ordeal. My little Shvibzik says the silliest of things in the most inappropriate of moments.
I can hear Commander Pavel Antonovich arguing behind us, and I am able to tell apart little of what he says. I am sure the word "Moscow" was used though, I am just way more invested in the conversation taking place at the breakfast table. I want to feel at ease.
I know Commander Pavel Antonovich is angry with two other men. They arrived too early, Pavel claims. The three of them go downstairs at the end of the argument. Olga is the one who brings my attention to it.
"Commander Antonovich looks stressed about something", she tells me, sending chills down my spine. When Olga thinks something is important enough to point out, it means it probably is.
A few minutes go by and Pavel Antonovich is back upstairs. He enters the living room accompanied by two strange men who are wearing black leather jackets and caps. They both have serious and stern expressions.
"Sorry for the interruption", Pavel says in a low tone of voice. "These two young men come from the Moscow Cheka. Olga Nikolaevna, Tatiana Nikolaevna, could you please accompany us to my office please?" He then looks around the table as if unsure about something. Finally, he adds: "Maria Nikolaevna can come as well."
The three of us stand up slowly and follow the men to the office downstairs, where the two newcomers remain standing as my sisters and I sit in front of Pavel's desk. Pavel also sits.
We all stay silent for a while. More than a while.
I look at the clock on the wall. I look at Pavel, at my sisters, at the men. I look at Pavel again. No one is talking yet. The tension soon becomes unbearable.
"We have orders to take the former tsarevich to Moscow", one of the Chekists finally states. The announcement takes a few minutes to sink in.
This can't be happening. It is too much for only a few days… not again. My mind settles on this not being true. It can't be.
No one says a word, but the two Chekists smirk at us. Olga and Maria's eyes fill with tears before mine do. I don't believe the news yet. Not the way they have been presented to us.
"But we are coming with him, right?" I calmly venture. Maybe we have just misunderstood what the man said.
"No", the other Chekist asserts. "Moscow has different plans for the women."
Silence again, for one minute or two. It makes no sense after what we have suffered and endured. It makes no sense after everything we have been through.
It makes no sense, but it finally hits me. It took a while though. I must have looked like some kind of idiot.
"But why? What do you mean?" I inquire. My eyes well up with tears. "What do you want him for? He needs us!" My voice breaks as I exclaim that last sentence.
"Our intentions are none of your concern," the Chekist replies, and Pavel directs a sad, pitiful look at us.
"You knew this!" Olga fumes at him. Tears are rolling down my older sister's cheeks, but her voice remains unbroken. She stands up, pointing her index finger directly at the commander. "You knew since we arrived! That is why you complained about the time but didn't look surprised to see them!"
Antonovich commands her to sit back down with a cold, firm tone of voice I had never heard him use before. Olga does sit, but not without first giving Pavel a look that, knowing my sister, can only be interpreted as pure sheer hatred.
"This is too cruel! Ridiculous! My brother is sick!" Masha cries, suddenly sounding like mama. "We don't know any of you people! Don't you have children? Have a heart!"
Quickly. I have to think of something to say. We canʼt overpower them, we are completely defenseless, but I can reason with them. I must convince them somehow. There must be a solution to this.
"Please comrades," I plead with them using their language. "Let us keep our brother, we will not cause any trouble."
"He is not a threat to you anymore," Olga adds, looking down at her feet to appear humble and endeavoring to control her rage. "He is just a typical boy his age whose everyday concern is not getting bored. He is not interested in using his claim against you. I can assure you there is nothing he thinks about less."
I nod at the men, genuinely supporting what my sister just said. I hope they have taken her argument seriously.
"If you let us live with him in exile, we promise to never come back", I weep, directing an apologetic look at Olga, who doesn't want to leave Russia. Due to the present circumstances, however, she doesn't protest or even react to what I said.
"He is still young", Olga persists, sounding desperate. "We will touch the subject of our past only when necessary, we will find someone to teach him another trade, or send him to some foreign university. We will even try to make sure he marries a foreign commoner. By the time he turns 21, the very idea of interrupting his normal life to go back to Russia in order to use his claim will be preposterous to him, he will…"
"You must decide which one of you will tell the boy he is leaving", Antonovich cuts in.
There isn't a solution, I know this now.
They forced papa and Alexei to remove their epaulets. They split our family apart for no apparent reason at Tobolsk. They kept us in seclusion with the windows painted white at Ekaterinburg. They murdered our parents. They stripped us of our clothes, our jewels, and our dignity. There was nothing we could do or could ever have done.
Now they are taking our baby brother as well, and there is still nothing we can do. I am tired of accepting everything so meekly like I am supposed to, like papa told me I should. I am tired of being a prisoner. I am not strong enough.
"If none of you will tell him, we will," one of the new men says. He nods at his partner, who nods back. Both Chekists rise from their chairs and step towards the door. Masha leaves her own seat immediately and places herself in front of them.
"No! Please!" She implores them, bawling her eyes out. She is about to beg on her knees, but I will not allow that. I rush to my little sister and hold her up, hugging her tightly in order to comfort her.
The two Chekists keep walking towards the door.
"He is only a cripple!" I yell at them, feeling disgusted instantly after daring to utter that word. Mama hated it. The tears run down from my eyes faster.
Masha pulls away from the hug and looks at me, her big blue eyes filled with tears of horror and concern.
"Wait!" Maria shouts. The men stop by the doorway. "I will tell him." She walks through the door sobbing, the two Chekists following her closely behind. Perhaps too closely.
Olga hasn't left her chair. Her stare is empty. If it werenʼt for the tears in her eyes, I would have assumed she no longer cares. Her face changes immediately when she looks at me again. My older sister breaks down completely, bursting into sobs as she stands up to hug me.
We canʼt bear to listen to the conversation that will ensue between the little pair and Alexei. The two of us sit in the corner of the office, hugging and sniveling as Antonovich works on his papers and occasionally stares at us with pity. He then starts using the telegraph.
I canʼt block their reactions out. They reach my ears even coming from the big living room upstairs. Their cries of fear are worse than I expected they would be.
I feel so ashamed, I have failed my poor mama. Oh, how she would suffer if she could see! Her baby boy! All alone! And for God knows what reason!
I didnʼt even have the courage to be the one to tell him.