The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

9

It was a Wednesday. The previous day the second note had come so nicely hidden in the cork of that chetvert of milk, and then that afternoon I’d carried out the long reply. We were all quite hopeful, even quite expectant, that Wednesday morning. We’d had no news from the outside for weeks – no letters, no newspapers except an ersatz journal that consisted of three telegrams reprinted on some greasy brown paper – but suddenly there was that candle of hope. Perhaps the world had not forgotten His Majesty after all. Though the morning was hot – “Very hot again, 22½ degrees in the room,” recorded Aleksandra in her diary – we were all quite eager upon rising, thankful to know that someone was apparently working on our behalf. Could it be that God had finally heard the long, sorrowful prayers of Aleksandra and her family? Had she finally got right her arrangements of icons?

I was in the kitchen stuffing the center of the samovar with twigs and pine cones. It was not quite seven-thirty. And the first of the Romanovs to go to the water closet that morning – accompanied by a guard, of course – was again the second daughter, Tatyana Nikolaevna. Our eyes met and said the same things: yes, perhaps today was the day, perhaps by eve we would be free. Her fine lips pursed the smallest of smiles. Carrying a sponge, toothbrush, rubber traveling bowl, and a pressed white linen hand towel, she, with the guard right behind her, passed through the kitchen, past the twenty-three steps, and to the far corner of the house. In the back of my mind I heard the door of the water closet open, close, and knew that the guard was waiting right outside the door while the Grand Duchess was performing her morning ablutions.

Several moments later, however, I heard the door of the water closet thrown open, and then Tatyana Nikolaevna, like a fast moving summer storm, swept back through the kitchen, her eyes cast to the floor. There were bright blooms of red spread across her face – again, so much like her mother whose emotions manifested themselves physically – while behind her came the guard, laughing deeply as he stroked his stringy beard. What untoward actions had he taken? Had he cornered the young woman, tried to kiss her, as one of them had tried to embrace Maria just last week?

I glanced through the hall, into the dining room. I saw nothing, but heard a flurry of low voices, the swishing of dresses. A few moments passed before Nikolai Aleksandrovich himself came storming along the same route. Wearing his army tunic and tall leather boots, of course, he passed through the kitchen, his face grave. Behind him came the same guard, still laughing, still stroking his beard. Although I was all but invisible to both of them, I watched as the ex-Tsar moved with great determination into the water closet. He remained there longer than his daughter. A good deal longer.

I lit the samovar, vented the smoke out the window. I blew on the twigs, made sure the flame was fine and strong. And then I heard Nikolai Aleksandrovich emerge, heard him march my way, his pace steady, controlled, firm. Almost like a robot he passed me by, his face stony and void of expression. Many people have described the Tsar as such, that when bad news was delivered upon him they were surprised by his lack of reaction, lack of emotion. Some great ministers and foreign dignitaries mistook this as a lack of caring and feeling, a weak-willed passivity or deep-seated fatalism. But they were all wrong. Nikolai Aleksandrovich was deeply emotional, extraordinarily caring. And also a firm believer that the Tsar of All the Russias must maintain absolute control – control of every little item on his desk, control of his own calendar and appointments, and above all, supreme among most manly things, control of his personal feelings. All this while deep inside so much was seething, all of which he expressed only to his wife. Yes, a passionate, loving man – which is made clear in the thousands of letters he left behind – but as he moved on by, not an inkling of emotion could I detect on that man’s practiced face. I did notice something, however: his hands. They were blackened, and he was rubbing them together, trying desperately to wipe something away.

Unable to contain myself, I quickly peered into the center of the samovar and saw that the blaze was going well. I then glanced into the dining room, spying nothing. While all of the Romanovs needed a guard to escort them to the water closet or the bathing room, I did not. And so that is exactly where I went, to the very place where the Tsar had just gone on foot. Passing through the house, I reached the far corner, where I paused, heard the guards’ deep voices – was that groggy one Komendant Avdeyev? – then reached for the door of the water closet. And thereupon entered a small chamber of surprise.

Russians can be witty. They can be cruel. And they find keen delight in the grotesque marriage of the two. Many things had I heard in jest about Nikolai – “We had a revolution not because we wanted a limited monarchy, but because we had a limited monarch” – but here on the walls of the water closet were things that my youthful mind had never conjured. On the wall across from the ceramic sink was painted a demonic man, his hair long and scraggly, his beard twisted and foul. He was naked, and rising from between his legs was a gigantic, erect penis which he was shoving into the crack of a woman who herself wore nothing but a large, bejeweled crown. Above him was written the name “Grisha,” while on her crown was enscribed “Shura.” Sure, in this tiny chamber the angry Red guards had portrayed the man they believed had soiled the dynasty and brought down the empire, Grigory Rasputin, fornicating with that traitor to the motherland, the German bitch, Empress Aleksandra Fyodorovna. Nearby, watching the scene with robust delight, was an effeminate, chubby, bearded man with droopy breasts – the Emperor Nikolai II – who sat in a tub overflowing with German marks and American dollars. It was done in big bold strokes of black paint. Permanent paint. That much was obvious because the Tsar had used a wet hand to try to wipe it away, though it had proved impossible to do little more than lightly smear the graphic mural.

But there was more.

Most of the guards had never before seen a toilet, let alone used one, and had taken to using this one by standing on the seat itself and squatting. In light of the numerous muddy footprints left behind on the seat, the Empress had had her maid place a cultured sign above the toilet that read: “Be so kind as to leave the toilet as clean as you found it.” But that did little good, because most of the guards couldn’t read, either. In any case, to the side and written directly on the wall was a little ditty:

TO ALL HIS PEOPLES NIKOLAI SAID

AS FOR A REPUBLIC, GO FUCK YOURSELVES INSTEAD

SO OUR RUSSIAN TSAR CALLED NICK

WE DRAGGED FROM HIS THRONE BY HIS DICK

To myself I mumbled aloud the last two lines – “Tsaria russkogo Nikolu, Za khuy sdernuli s prestolu” – and I began to shake. Such rudeness was unbelievable – to this day it’s still forbidden in Russia to even publish the word khuy. And, I started to cry, not so much out of fear, but because for the first time I grasped how horrid a world lay ahead if, in fact, I survived.

Yes, the image and little ditty remained all the way to the end, and, in fact, were added to as the days fell away, with slogans like, “Crush the Crowns of the Tsar, Tear Apart the Old World,” “Death to the Blood Drinker,” “To Hell with Kapitalizm,” “Crush International Imperialism.” All these did the Romanovs see in the water closet. Day after day, whenever they went to relieve themselves, they were surrounded with this hatred. I have no idea what they thought, what they felt, as they – father, mother, son, and daughters – went into that small chamber one after the other and sat there alone and half-naked as the hatred bore down upon them from all sides. And yet, the Romanovs suffered well. Not a protest did they make, not a word did they complain. They read their Bibles, they chanted their prayers, they bowed to their icons.

Yet that morning there was still a chance of rescue. And a chance meant hope. No, Nikolai did not want to be rescued from that special house and restored to the brilliancy of the Romanov throne, of this I am absolutely certain. If so many of his peoples felt locked in the chains of poverty, then he felt entrapped by the riches of the dynasty, which is to say that peasant and Tsar alike were liberated by the revolution. Yes, many have said, and I do believe it to be true, that Nikolai bloomed after his abdication.

The call of nature ruled all, of course, and one by one all of the Romanovs visited the water closet by eight of that morning, that is to say within the thirty minutes left before our inspection. Not a word of protest did they make, however – at least not outwardly, not that could be heard by any of their guards, or even us, their small retinue, consisting of Dr. Botkin, the maid, Demidova, the footman Trupp, the cook, Kharitonov, and me, the kitchen boy. I watched all the rest of them – the Empress, the Heir Tsarevich, and the other three daughters – as they passed through the kitchen to the facilities, escorted, as they all were, by a guard. To generalize, if they appeared full of trepidation as they headed for the toilet room, then they seemed shocked upon their return. In all that I’ve learned, the thing that surprised Nikolai and Aleksandra the most about his abdication, the one aspect that crushed their hearts, was definitely not the loss of power and wealth, but the realization of how widely hated they were. And by this I mean not by the court, but the narod – the masses – whose emotions were so deeply stirred by the centuries of inequity and darkly spiced by the poisonous propaganda of the Bolsheviki.

So the inspection that morning was a somber affair. The only visible sign of stress among the family were Aleksandra’s eyes, which were swollen red, and her pale skin, which was all blotchy. But while she was deeply disturbed that morning, perhaps deathly afraid, she would not betray herself, she would not allow her captors that victory not simply over her persona, but most importantly over her faith in the greater glory of Bog. God. She knew as well that she had to be strong for her children, the children whom she had always tried to raise properly so that they would not folly in their wealth and exulted status. To them she wrote:

Learn to make others happy, think of yourself last of all. Be gentle and kind, never rough nor rude… Show a loving heart. Above all, learn to love God with all the force of your soul and He will be near you… Your old Mama

Standing according to our rank, from Tsar to Tsaritsa, Heir to grand duchesses, then all the way from doctor, maid, and down to me, the lowest of all, that morning inspection was the most somber of any to take place in The House of Special Purpose. We stood in the dining room, in front of the large fireplace, all of us seething with rage and fear, but none of us saying a word, because we took our every cue from the Emperor and Empress. When they crossed themselves during a church service, so did we. When they dropped to their knees and bowed their foreheads to the floor, so did we. And that morning, during that inspection, both Nikolai and Aleksandra stood ramrod straight, their lips pinched tight like a champagne cork holding all within lest all explode. And so did we.

“Noo… noo…” Well… well… mumbled Avdeyev, looking us up and down.

Big and heavy was he, his hair a mess, his face unshaved. Actually his eyes were red as well, though certainly not from crying. Nyet, we knew there had been much drinking last night, for there’d been so much shouting, so much hooting and singing. And that was surely when the drawings had been made on the walls of the water closet.

“So…” began Avdeyev, his voice all coy, obviously fishing for some kind of reaction to the drawing and the ditty, “any questions, any problems?”

“Nyet-s, Aleksander Dimitrievich,” respectfully replied the Tsar.

Avdeyev stared long and hard into Nikolai Aleksandrovich’s face. One of the guards across the room openly laughed, and Avdeyev’s bloated lips swelled into a puffy, purple smile.

“Neechevo?” Nothing? “Really? No questions of any sort?”

I glanced over, saw the Tsar’s face bloom crimson, noted his chin begin to quiver. Was this it? Had the Tsar reached the end? Could he, would he, burst with this last teeny bit of needling? And if so, if he fell, what did that mean for the rest of us? What hope would there be?

“Nyet-s, voprosov nikakix.” No, there are no questions, tersely said the Tsar, holding his head as well as his voice steady, good soldier that he was.

Avdeyev shrugged and turned away, saying, “Very well, then go ahead and have your morning tea.”

Groaning and rubbing his head, the komendant lumbered off, making his way back to the main guard room on this level, where, I imagine, he laid back down and went to sleep for a good long while.

Meanwhile, cook Kharitonov and I prepared the tea, which was served in the dining room. Black tea, black bread, and a bit of butter. They all sat down – the seven Romanovs, Dr. Botkin, and only reluctantly, only after all the others had taken their seats, Demidova and Trupp. Sure, cook and I brought everything out to the table and sat down as well. That morning we were short just three things, two teaspoons and one butter knife, so the cutlery went around the table. But it went around in silence, for hardly a word was spoken during the meager repast.

Immediately after breakfast Nikolai Aleksandrovich retired with his son to the drawing room, where they sat with Dr. Botkin, who, though much improved, was still weak from his attack of the kidneys. In his beautiful voice, so clear, so resonant, the Tsar read aloud, as was his frequent custom, and that morning he read to his son and his friend, Botkin, the twelfth volume of Saltykov, Poshekhonskaya starina, The Old Days of Poshekhonye. And soon the work of Russia’s richest satirical writer – this one poking fun at the old landed gentry and bureaucrats alike – began to lift the morose cloud, filling the rooms of the Ipatiev House with small, but such significant peals of laughter.

And the womenfolk?

All morning they “arranged things.” Aleksandra, her maid, and four daughters worked more furiously than ever, sewing secretively in near-constant shifts. I suppose given the notes we had already received and the very real possibility that we might at any moment have to flee, it seemed the only wise course. So Aleksandra disappeared into her bedroom, where in the heat of the summer she sewed away. A few minutes later Olga Nikolaevna went to assist her, an hour later Demidova, and so on.

Thus passed that painful morning, each of us in our own way trying to comprehend what lay ahead of us. Never, however, did I imagine so dark an event as would take place. Then again such a thing as a chistka – a cleansing, a liquidation – was a new concept, one that would be played like a black refrain throughout the history of the Soviet Union.