“Aleksandra Fyodorovna?” I called, my voice quivering with nervousness.
This next chamber – their room, where the Emperor, the Empress, and the Heir Tsarevich slept – occupied the front of the house, with two windows facing Voznesensky Prospekt and Ascension Square, and two windows on the side facing the lane. It was a fairly good-sized room, certainly befitting a well-to-do merchant, and it was filled with some polished wooden desks and tables, a wardrobe, a few chairs, one of them soft and upholstered. The walls were covered in pale yellow striped wallpaper, with a frieze of flowers at the top. There was one larger bed, and there to my right-
“Zdravstvoojte.” Hello, he said in a sheepish voice.
I was as surprised to catch him as he was to be discovered, for Aleksei Nikloaevich was not only out of bed, he was standing on his own and holding a small wooden box. We’d all been told that he couldn’t walk, that if he went anywhere he either had to be carried or taken in the rolling chair, yet…
“You won’t tell anyone that I’m up, will you, Leonka?” he pleaded. “Especially Mama – she would be very angry.”
Before I could say anything the pallid boy aimed the wooden box at me, looked down into it, and pushed a button.
I said, “I thought the komendant took away all the cameras.”
“All except mine. I have a secret place where I keep it hidden.”
To be sure, he didn’t walk well, and the Heir quickly hobbled over to his bed and jumped in. He wore a white nightshirt, and when he pulled a white blanket over his legs he was like a ghost disappearing into a cloud. Working as quickly as a thief, he took hold of a wooden table that stradled his bed and brought it closer to himself. He pushed aside a couple of books and some paper that lay on the table, and then removed the glass plate from the camera and put in a fresh one.
“Now you take my picture,” he said, handing the apparatus to me.
“But…”
“Don’t worry. It’s easy.”
As he sat there in bed, propped up by several pillows, he quickly told me how to do it, take a photograph, which I had never done before. Photography was still very much a folly of the nobility, and I’d rarely seen a camera, let alone held one. The Romanovs, on the other hand, were fanatics. They’d all had cameras. They’d always been snapping away. Because of this and their extensive diaries and letters, the Tsar and his family were better documented than any of today’s most famous people. And these things – their writings and something like one hundred and fifty thousand family snapshots – are still kept not only in the archives in Moscow, but also at the libraries of Harvard and Yale.
Once the young Tsarevich explained, I stepped back several feet, aimed the thing, and repeated what a photographer had told me when he’d taken my one and only portrait, “Now say eezyoom.”
Rather than saying “raisin,” Aleksei Nikolaevich remained silent, staring oddly at me and raising both hands, palms out. I operated the shutter, made it open and close, and then just stood there, afraid to move.
“It’s done. You took the picture,” advised the Heir. “Here, now give me the camera.”
I did as the Heir asked, of course, passing him the wooden Kodak. Wasting no time, Aleksei Nikolaevich took it, turned, and reached around the white, metal railings of his bed’s headboard. I moved forward, watched as he leaned over and plied away a piece of the tall mopboard, revealing a secret hiding place. Inside the dark wooden compartment sat the Heir’s treasures, pieces of wire, some rocks, coins, a few nails, and a few folded pieces of paper.
“This is where I keep my special things,” whispered the Heir as he pushed his camera into its hiding place. “You never know when we might need some of them.”
Aleksei Nikolaevich had to give the Kodak a good shove, but it fit, just barely, and then he set the mopboard back in place, tapping it with his hand. He loved collecting little pieces of things, small bits of tin, rusty nails, wine corks, rocks. And in that regard he was just like any other little boy, curious, energetic, always fiddling. Of course, in every other respect he was entirely different. Before his father’s abdication lackeys were always falling over him because he was the Heir Tsarevich, and his family, too, was loath to deny him because he was so sickly. So he was indulged, rather spoiled, and also not as well educated as he should have been because he’d lost years of study due to his bouts of bleeding. On the other hand, he was compassionate because he knew pain, real pain, and real suffering too. Yet even in those bouts when it looked for sure as if he would die, he was never given morphine, not even as his screams of pain rattled the palace windows. That poor child had traveled to the bottom of life and back again, and naturally that had had a profound effect on him. I liked him. In another world, in another time, we would have been true friends. Rasputin had predicted that if Aleksei lived to age seventeen he would outgrow his hemophilia, a brilliant dream the Empress lived for and perhaps the only one that kept her alive. Had this happened, had he matured into a healthy young man and become tsar, he would have been one of the greatest, for while his father found his wisdom too late, Aleksei Nikolaevich had found his much too early.
“You can’t tell anyone about our hiding place. It’s our secret. Agreed?” said the Heir, studying me with a naughty grin.
“Agreed.”
From the side of his bed he grabbed a game board. “Do you want to play shahmaty?”
I shrugged, a bit ashamed to admit, “I don’t know how.”
“I could teach you.”
“Well…”
“It would be fun, I promise. Really, it’s not too hard. It just takes some practice, that’s all.”
Staring down at him, I couldn’t help but pity this sickly boy whose empire stretched barely beyond the limits of his bed.
“Everyone should know how to play shahmaty,” pleaded the boy, desperate for any kind of diversion.
“Perhaps, but…”
Just then I heard heavy, firm steps. Boots. It was one of the guards heading this way.
“I can’t, not right now,” I said.
“Please… don’t say anything.”
“I won’t.”
Even as I ducked out of the room, the boy was deflating, falling back onto his bed, where he all but disappeared beneath his sheets and into his despair. Shahmaty – the shah is dead. How prophetic it now seems. I should have let him teach me. Instead I was perhaps the only Russian who didn’t learn to play chess until he was an adult.
As it turned out I wasn’t sent out after more food. Had we any force meat, cook Kharitonov would have prepared makarony poflotsky – macaroni navy-style – but instead he made a simple macaroni tart sprinkled with dillweed.
We served lunch at one, just as we always did; life for the royals had always been and was still terribly regimented. I must say that no one starved, not by any means, but toward the end the food was very plain. That day we had watery bouillon first and then the macaroni tart. Bread, butter, and tea as well. Actually, vermicelli and macaroni were nearly all that the former Empress could or would eat, and honestly, she partook of so little that I don’t know how she managed to stay alive. Toward the end she had grown so terribly thin that even her tea gowns hung like sacks on her. Yet neither she nor any of the others ever complained. They suffered well, those Romanovs, they truly did. They read their Bibles and their religious works, they prayed to their icons, and they suffered very well indeed. As Aleksandra wrote to her friend Anna:
The spirits of the whole family are good. God is very near us, we feel His support, and are often amazed that we can endure events and separations which once might have killed us. Although we suffer horribly still there is peace in our souls. I suffer most for Russia… but ultimately all will be for the best. Only I don’t understand anything any longer. Everyone seems to have gone mad. I think of you daily and love you dearly.