I had the sense we could have uncovered her eyes and untied her hands and she would not have protested or screamed out or tried to get away. I guessed that she would even have knelt for us. And I wanted to do this for her, give her the chance to see her fate, but of course we had long ago decided otherwise. I led her along the path, but as we walked I couldn’t help wondering why we were doing this? What had driven us to this point? I thought maybe I should run away, at least with her, Matushka, but it would have been impossible. They would come after us both.
So why were we doing this? Oh, yes.
As one of my comrades had explained it to me, “You cannot go after a king without killing him.”
I supposed that included all of his family too. We had to be positive there was no going back. That was the least I owed my dead wife and my unborn child, wasn’t it, to make sure there was no going back?
The guards who had gone ahead of us had disappeared in the darkness, for they had hurried to the appointed spot. Meanwhile, Yuri and Nun Varvara were some twenty paces behind us, half walking, half stumbling through the dark. Looking farther back, I saw two other guards leading two more prisoners. Really, if all went according to plan this shouldn’t be too difficult, it shouldn’t take too long. They would go one after the other. So far, not one of the former royals was crying or calling out in protest, and that surprised me. How could the extermination of the mighty House of Romanov be so easy?
I hung on tightly to Matushka’s arm as we passed around a clump of birches, and then just up ahead I saw our two comrades standing there in front of the deep pit, right on the edge. We had chosen this place not just because the mine was abandoned and not just because it was so far out of town but because of that, its depth, maybe twenty or thirty arzhin. Last week I had come all the way out here to check it out, and in the broad daylight I couldn’t even see the bottom, for it was as deep as an old pine tree was tall. Equally important, the rocks along the shaft and at the bottom were jagged and hard and sharp.
In a weak voice, I said, “We’re almost there.”
I looked into her face then, that beautiful face that had enchanted so many, and saw them, her tears. One by one they were rolling out from beneath her blindfold, not a torrent but a steady flow. Her lips were trembling.
And when we reached the small platform where the other two guards were waiting, I said to Matushka, “Please… just one small step up…”
She knew the end was coming then, for her entire body started shaking, and yet she stepped up onto the platform without the least resistance. I, too, stepped right next to her and peered into the mine shaft and saw what she could not: dark infinity.
Though the words came not easily, they came with confidence as she said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
I nodded to one of the guards, who stood there with his rifle raised high, and he brought the butt of his weapon down against the side of her head in one hard blow. There was a crack of her skull, and she groaned deeply and powerfully and almost immediately started to collapse.
It was at that very moment that I pushed her, and she tumbled head over heels into the pit, her pale-gray robes billowing about her until the blackness swallowed her up. I heard her hit one side of the mine shaft, the other, and then with a loud but dull noise she fell onto the rocks at the bottom.
And then silence.
Pavel stared into the dying flames of the fire, his face blank, his eyes streaming with tears. Until that night he’d never been able to get the death of his wife out of his mind-over and over in his mind’s eye he’d seen her body blossoming with such red blood as she lay against the pure white snow. But ever since the night he’d pushed the Grand Duchess Elisavyeta he’d seen something else altogether: the image of her tumbling into the unforgiving darkness. Worse, he’d not been able to get her last words out of his mind, they haunted him nearly every minute of every day.
Across the fire, Vladimir wiped his own eyes, and asked, “And the others?”
“We clubbed them all, and one by one they went over the edge. All seven of them-next the little Nun Varvara, then the young princes and the one servant. We only had to shoot one-Grand Duke Sergei Mixhailovich, the one we’d already shot in the arm. He must have heard the grunts and groans of the others, and he put up a fight, so we put a gun to his head and blasted out his brains. As for the others, we just bashed in their heads and tossed them in, one after another.”
Pavel stared up into the sky, which was rapidly becoming lighter. All at once he began to sob as he never had, deep and furious, crying not because of what was about to happen to him that very morning but because of all that he’d done, the path of horror he’d left behind. How could he see it all so clearly now? Why had it been so hidden before? Falling off the log on which he’d sat, he collapsed on the ground, carried away by his deep, rolling tears.
His face buried in the dirty snow, he cried, “Father… how… how… could…”
Vladimir, his own face mopping wet, threw off the old, ratty blanket in which he’d been wrapped all night. Sitting there now in his black robes, he clutched with one hand the large brass cross that hung from his neck, and with the other made a sign of the cross over this poor suffering soul.
“Come to… to me, my son!” he called through his tears to Pavel.
“But… but Fa… Father Vladimir, I am unworthy! I am filthy with sin!”
“Come to me…! Rise and come to me, my son! There is still time… you must repent! Repent!”
“I am unworthy…!”
“There is no crime that cannot be forgiven if you repent with your entire being!”
“No…!”
And yet Pavel started crawling, one hand, one knee, one after the other. He sobbed as he had not since he was a child, his body racked with guilt, with despair, with regret. How could he have done that, killed so many and especially her? Toward what goal? The tears streamed down his face and dropped into the snow. He had thought he would receive satisfaction from his revenge, but all that was delivered unto him was torment. He had thought that he had killed to keep the Revolution rolling forward, so that the sins of their masters would never be repeated, but now he saw that the fury of upheaval was doomed only to repeat itself again and again. Dear Lord… how he wished that he and his wife had stayed in the countryside, how he wished they hadn’t gone to that demonstration on that bloody Sunday… how he wished he could hold his beautiful Shura in his arms and gaze softly upon their child who was never born.
“Come to me, Pavel!” called Father Vladimir.
His body heaving with sob after sob, Pavel moved on, lifting his head, seeing the cross that hung from Father Vladimir’s neck. He focused on that, this bright, shiny object that might, just might, lead somewhere, a kind of home, a kind of comfort. He saw them all-the bodies of Father Gapon, the bureaucrat in Novgorod, the blood-gasping sugar baron, the director general of the bank… and Matushka, Nun Varvara, the Princes, the Grand Duke, the servant-and he cried with every fiber of his being, wishing for his death, which was in fact only minutes away but which could not come soon enough.
With as much difficulty as if he were scaling up the mine shaft into which he’d thrown Matushka, he crawled across the ground. Finally reaching Father Vladimir, Pavel rose back on his knees and hurled himself into the priest’s lap, clutching like a drowning man at the brass cross and kissing it over and over.
He screamed, “Father, what have I done?”
Over him, Father Vladimir made the sign of the cross again and again, repeating and chanting, “Gospodi pomilui… Gospodi pomilui… Gospodi pomilui…!” The Lord have mercy… the Lord have mercy… the Lord have mercy!