The lodge at Spala did not look like much of a palace, being long and aging and ugly, the bottom story measured off by evergreens clipped into pyramids, the top by tall windows, side by side by side. The forest appeared to be penned back from it by a scalloped hem of clipped brush. As we drew closer, Niki, with a wave of his hand, sent Vova back to walk with Josef. When they were out of earshot, Niki gestured upward to a curtained balcony at one end of the lodge above a veranda. Alexei is dying up there. I believe I began to bite at my nails while he went on, those eyes scintillant, that face such a fine mesh of lines. It was the second week of Alexei’s suffering, he said. Blood had begun to fill the cavity between his groin and his left leg to the point where the child had no choice but to draw his knee to his chest, but still the bleeding did not cease. The doctors alternately raised and lowered the springed frame of his bed to help him sit up or lie down, but in neither position, in no position, Niki said, could the tsarevich find comfort, and the blood began to press on the nerves, causing Alexei spasms of pain so great that he had begun, between shrieks, to beg to be allowed to die, crying, Bury me in the woods and make me a monument of stones. But the worst was the hemorrhage in the stomach, which the doctors could not stop either and from which he would soon expire. He was feverish and delusional, his heart was feeble, and he was so white-faced it seemed there was no blood left to circulate about the rest of him, but as he was a child and they did not want to give him morphine, his only relief was to faint. All this was the result of an unfortunate poke by the oarlocks when Alexei had jumped into a boat at Bielovezh, causing a small swelling that they thought had healed until he took a carriage ride here at Spala on one of the bumpy, sandy roads like the one we had walked together.
Niki said he could not bear to enter his son’s bedroom, where Alix sat in an armchair day and night, without weeping. Though each day there was a hunt and each evening there were many guests to dinner, where on a makeshift stage his daughters performed for their entertainment, behind the painted canvas of that show hung a very different scene. Just the day before, Baron Freedericks, the minister of the imperial court, who oversaw all court protocol and carried out all Niki’s instructions, had persuaded the family the tsarevich was so sick it was time to publish a bulletin announcing this to prepare the country for his death, and this bulletin had appeared in all the newspapers this morning. That was what I had seen in the gazeta at the train station. Another bulletin had also been prepared to announce his death. As Niki talked, we approached the house, and Niki paused to point out the green canvas tent in the garden, the fabric rippling in the dark wind. Up until today the weather had been warm, the tsar said. But now, as if in preparation for the tsarevich’s death, the season had turned. The simple tent had been made into a chapel and now with the official announcement of Alexei’s illness, all churches and chapels in Russia would hold prayer services twice a day. As Josef led Vova into the tent to see the altar, Niki said to me simply, Come with me.
Niki took me a half verst into the deep forest of tall, thin trees, birch trees with their white peeling trunks so tall and close together one could disappear within them, Niki holding up his torch to light the way. Everywhere I stepped, a root or a vine twisted under my shoe. On Niki walked, now and then offering me his hand or his elbow, and just as I was about to ask how much farther, he abruptly stopped counting off his paces and looked down. Before us lay a small grave, freshly dug, and by it a loose pile of stones. Niki knelt, picked up a pebble from the ground, and put it in my hand. The stone was cool and moist, and my fingers closed around it. The forest around us listened, waiting, and I heard myself exhale, slowly. Niki said not one word; his torch crackled and snapped. We stood there a minute, an hour, a year until I understood: this grave was for Alexei and it was meant to disappear, to be swallowed by the forest. We turned away from it, finally, and Niki led me back to the green tent, where Vova and Josef lingered. I tried to catch Josef ’s eye. What did he know? Everything, probably, and he considered it a curse I’d brought on myself. Niki took us to the white-paned doors of the lodge, where Niki and Josef thrust their torches into the ground at either side. We went into a hallway that smelled of damp and offered little light. We passed a small room that held two chairs with backs like the antlers of giant stags, a dining room with leather chairs pulled up to a long table, a dark covered porch spotted with wicker furniture. Everywhere we walked, we left a trail of gritty sand. Josef followed as Niki, Vova, and I went up a narrow wooden staircase. At the top of it Niki touched my elbow. We walked along a hall, and when we came down the corridor two young girls in costumes ran by us—one in full pirate regalia, the other in a white dress and white cap—and opened a door and then we could hear it, a long, low moaning sound. The tsarevich. The door closed. Niki’s face pleated itself into a thousand furrows, and by the time we reached the curtained outdoor balcony at one end of the long hall by that door, he was a thousand years old.
A woman sat in a wicker chair on that balcony in the almost dark amid a miasma of stripes—striped fabric on the low walls, striped curtains floor to ceiling, striped cushions of the chairs. Alix. She rose. She wore a sable coat against the cold, its thick cuffs bracelets at her wrists. Her hair, which I had remembered only as red-blonde, had many gray strands now mixed with the gold at the temples, her hair parted in the center and crimped and arranged into large poufs at the sides of her head. We were the same age, but I was a girl and this was a grandmother, a German grandmother, whose skin had loosened and thickened at the jowl, whose nose had begun to hook, and whose eyelids now formed hoods. I gripped at the stone I still held in my hand. Why, Alix looked more like a man than a woman, as some women do when they age. At the theater, men always played the hags, the Baba Yaga, the Carabosse. This was Alix, the princess from Hesse-Darmstadt? She did not contrive to make her anguished face say anything but what she felt. She looked down at my son, the little boy with the big eyes I held in front of me, my arms across his chest, and smiled sadly at him.
And Niki said to me, See how we suffer.
When Josef himself brought our luggage up the back passage to the bedroom adjoining Alexei’s, where we were to sleep, I understood we were unofficially here.
When are we going to hunt? Vova asked.
And my brother answered, Later. The tsar’s son is very sick.
When will he be well?
I don’t know, Josef told him, and he looked at me and shook his head, as if to say, Look where your idyll has brought you now, and then he looked at that adjoining door, and I understood that our immediate proximity to the tsarevich was purposeful, that at the exact moment of Alexei’s death, he would be carried into this dark room and from there to the forest while Vova was pulled from this bed and ferreted into the sickroom, with Niki and Alix beside him, and he would be proclaimed miraculously healed. I supposed Niki believed he could appropriate my child as he appropriated the best furs, timber, vodka, and caviar for the profit of the crown. After all, I had long ago and foolishly offered my son to him. But my ambitions for Vova then had always involved me, as well—my marriage to Niki, my son and I together brought to the palace. Now I could see that Niki and Alix had been stitched together so tightly by the tragedy of their son’s illness that there would be no sending of Alix to a convent and no divorce, no matter what happened to their boy. So all that remained of my long-ago fantasy was this tale by Dumas, in which my boy was required to assume the identity of another.