They even welcomed us in the guard house and invited us to play draughts with them.
But this is not Tsarskoe Selo. We can no longer walk out in the open. Instead we must be satisfied with a very small kitchen garden. It is not just the lack of space that is so stifling. It is being under observation. Soldiers from the Second Rifle Regiment look down upon us from their barracks.
We’ve been on display our whole lives, but that was different. That was when we left the much-cherished isolation of our home. If we had any illusions about being captives, they are now all gone, at least for me. I feel fate tightening its grip on us in so many ways.
It started, not with the size of the house or the yard. Those were just physical manifestations of something far more sinister.
It started in September with Commissar Pankratov and his deputy, a narrow, stubborn, and cruel man named Nikolsky. Commissar Pankratov is a man of gentle character. He is well-informed and has made a good impression on my father. He has been kind to us children.
Mr. Nikolsky however, scares me. He delights in tormenting us, in inventing fresh annoyances that he trots out anew each day. He ordered Colonel Kobylinsky to take our photographs and had numbered identity cards made for us. We must carry them, as if we were inmates in some vast prison, as if our guard haven’t been with us for years.
It’s a bit of revenge, you see. And although I didn’t see it at first, it became more obvious as time passed. On November 15th the provisional government was overthrown. It was one of many events that disappointed my father.
He had abdicated to save Russia. But instead, he’d made way for Lenin and his acolytes to destroy the army and corrupt the country. I knew that that decision would haunt him forever not just because he failed to save Russia, but because it had also harmed his people and his country.
As the weeks passed, what little news we’ve gotten has worsened. We told ourselves that we didn’t have the entire picture, so things weren’t as bad as they appeared. We knew that we didn’t have enough information to predict the consequences of what was going on in the world. That puddle of light that surrounded and defined our existence wobbled and shrank and cast false shadows as the storm intensified, as the flakes of snow turned to barbs of ice, as the temperature dropped and the sun hid like it was never going to rise over us again.
And behind that intensifying storm was our kind Commissar Pankratov. One wouldn’t have expected kindness to come from someone who was an acolyte of the Bolsheviks. But he had good intentions: intentions that blinded him to what he was doing.
In my heart I know he did not do it to harm us. I can’t imagine that the thought would have occurred to him. He was an enlightened man. He thought that introducing the soldiers to liberal doctrines would make them good citizens and patriots in a post-imperial Russia. He planted those seeds of thought in their minds with all the right intentions. But a thought-seed’s success depends on the type of soil in which it is planted. And when it was planted in the men of the Second Regiment, the one unit of the guard that were not “our guard” but our guards, that seed bore ill fruit.
Commissar Pankratov’s liberal ideas and good intentions infected these men—like so many others throughout Russia—with Bolshevism. They formed a Soldiers’ Committee whose decisions overrode those of Colonel Kobylinsky. It was at that moment that they ceased to be a military unit and became petty tyrants. We were the unfortunate recipients of their tyrannies. It must’ve been intoxicating to them, to have such power for the first time in their lives. It was then that I learned—through the pain they brought to my mother—that the tyranny of the many is no different than the tyranny of the few. It is the same tyranny that these men supposedly detested.
I couldn’t believe that Colonel Kobylinsky allowed it. It wasn’t until later that I understood why. These kinds of committees, known as soviets, were cropping up all over the country. Peasant soviets. Factory soviets. Village soviets.
It was in this environment that we, nevertheless, worked on making the most of our lives. We had always been, very much, about our family. We continued going to services, rising very early to walk surrounded by soldiers to the dimly lit church across the street. Alone, we prayed.
We continued our lessons, sometimes in the large hall, sometimes in my room or Alexei’s. We girls took turns taking care of Mama, who was often unwell. We organized games and amusements. The cold forced us together in the drawing room, taking turns on the sofa, for we weren’t given enough wood to heat the entire house. The dogs begged for our laps and we were grateful for their warmth and companionship.
When Mama was well she did needlework or played with us. This family peace, this being out of the public eye, something that we had once craved for so earnestly, became bittersweet and soured as our isolation continued.
We spent long months knitting woolen waistcoats for our entourage. I’ll never forget Monsieur Gilliard with his piercing eyes and stiff wing collars, his distinctive twirled moustache and goatee, as I handed him his waistcoat on Christmas Eve. I’ll never forget how my hands trembled with foreboding. I took that foreboding and hid it, not wishing to spoil the evening.
Chapter Two
Jambol, Bulgaria
They always seem so big at first, thought Mueller. I remember, too, when I was terrified at the though of taking off in one of these.
The idle thought made Funktelegraphie-Gast—basically, “Signaler” or “Signalman”—Wilhelm Mueller smile as he stood with the rest of the crew and watched their zeppelin, the L59, emerge from her hangar in all her gorgeous, lumbering majesty. Like the rest of the men around him, Wilhelm wasn’t new to the harrowing, thrilling world of zeppelin aviation, so he knew very well that while L59 might seem incredibly vast as one stood on the ground and watched her fill the sky overhead, quarters inside the military airship gondola would be cramped at best. He and his fellow crewmen were close, but they were about to get a lot closer over the next few days.
Wilhelm’s best friend on the crew, machinist Gustav Proll, jostled Wilhelm from behind, recalling him from his woolgathering.
“She’s out,” Gustav said, nodding his head toward the zeppelin. Wilhelm glanced up again to see that the dirigible had, indeed, slowed to a stop outside her hangar, and the tow team was busy tying down her mooring ropes. “Time to go.”
Wilhelm nodded and clapped Gustav on the shoulder as the two of them started across the wet grass of the launch field. Storms yesterday and the day before had delayed this moment, but the clear cerulean expanse above them meant the wait was finally over. The mission would launch today. Here and there, members of the Bulgarian ground crew called wishes for good fortune in accented German. Wilhelm and the other men accepted these as their due, sometimes nodding in thanks as they climbed up and into the various crew compartments.
The familiar miasma of engine exhaust reached out and wrapped around Wilhelm as he pulled himself up into the forward control compartment. He felt Gustav tap him on the calf in farewell as the machinist remained below and walked aft toward the hellish external compartments where the L59’s monstrous engines smoked and screamed and propelled them through the sky.
Not for the first time, Wilhelm thanked his lucky stars that he’d been trained as a wireless operator, and therefore got to spend most of his time in the forward control compartment. They could still smell the engine fumes, but it was nothing like the noisy, vibrating, hellish environment of the engine compartments.