Vova jogged ahead of me to greet him, oblivious to the great changes in Sergei, holding the puppy out to him happily in his two hands. The ribbon Vova had put around the puppy’s neck at the start of our journey was long unraveled and gone. It’s for you. To keep you company! You can call it Kiska. Vova grinned, offering up his most recent inspiration. Sergei embraced him and then inspected the black-haired puppy, a spaniel just like Alexei’s. When I reached him, Sergei kissed me, and I felt absurdly comforted by the heft of him, by his familiar scent of tobacco, oranges, and whiskey, and I put my arm through his while Vova took Kiska on a wild run around the frozen, muddy courtyard, which had in the center of it a round fountain. The spouts of the fountain were the open eyes of porpoises, and in the summer those spouts must shoot streams of water, but now Vova picked up a stick to thrust into the empty eye holes.
On the opposite side of the wooden fence, a few boys called to him, peasant boys on a trek back from the river. Vova ducked through a broken and leaning section of the fence to join them, the puppy yapping hysterically as he followed Vova’s stick. Sergei and I watched through the splintered planks as the four of them hurled Vova’s stick like a baton for the puppy to retrieve but Kiska hadn’t learned yet to return it, so inevitably the boys would give chase, laughing as the puppy avoided them with quick zigzags across the field. I’ve missed him, Sergei said. The whiskers under Sergei’s nose looked frozen. I’ve told my brothers everything I have should go to Vova when I die, and I said, Why are you talking about death? You’re not going to die. But Sergei didn’t answer me, calling out to Vova, It’s too cold, let’s go inside, and to me he said only, Niki wants to see you before dinner.
One of the commanders had given us use of his quarters, a two-room hut, and from there Sergei led us to the governor’s house, to the two rooms Niki had taken for himself. As we passed through the big dining room, I saw the long table was already being set for dinner, the round carved legs poking out from beneath a short white tablecloth, the rough planked floor and clapboard walls illuminated to the last splinter by the wall of windows at the far end of the room. Niki sat waiting for us in his study at an enormous mahogany desk, every inch of it etched and carved and ornamented. This room, after the brilliance of the dining hall, seemed blindingly dark—the stripes of the damask paper on the walls made a dull mirror; a lone dark chair crouched like a dwarf against the back wall. Niki rose to greet us, his face at first sepia, but then as he neared me, rosy, as if he were a photograph being painted over with color while I watched. Or perhaps I was that painter, and I felt myself color, too. He kissed my peach hand, shook Vova’s, now almost the size of his own, and asked him about his studies, Was he learning French and geography? And did he like his subjects? He put a hand on my boy’s shoulder as he listened, and now and then Niki looked over at me and smiled, and I thought, Do I look as old to him as he does to me? Because I was now forty-four, the age when a woman is well into her long, reluctant goodbye to the beauty she has worn as a right since she was sixteen.
Sergei stayed behind in the study when Niki showed us the other room in the house he had taken for himself, as if this next room, the carpeted bedroom, were too personal, too private for Sergei to enter, though we could, and he took from Vova the puppy. A camp bed had been placed by the great porcelain stove at the side of Niki’s own bed, and through the window opposite, half-open, we could see the windows of the city hall and hear the noise in the street below, voices, the occasional car or cart. This was a town, after all, not a battleground. The cot was made up with a striped cover, the pillows plumped at the head as if expecting a visitor, and beneath the cot lay a leather box which Niki gestured Vova should open. Within the box Vova found some colored marbles and lead soldiers—toys that must have belonged to Alexei and which he had left behind. Vova looked at the tsar and Niki nodded that he should play with them, and Vova glanced at me, uncomfortable. He was fourteen now, and except for planting soldiers on his battle map, he did not play with toys anymore. It was clear, though, from his nod, that Niki saw Vova as the twelve-year-old Alexei, still child enough to be engaged by the lead men. Vova looked down and then with a small smile, he took the box to the chair by the window and began to line the soldiers along the window ledge. Vova understood. If the tsar wanted him to be twelve, he would be twelve. Niki smiled as Vova made the marbles into cannonballs to fell the soldiers. Ah, if only our regiments could fight the Germans with that ease. Why, we had hoped to be in Berlin by Christmas 1914! All over by Christmas, everyone had said. Two years had passed since then.
Niki watched Vova pensively, shifting, his uniform wrinkling across the front. His boots bore dried mud. Every afternoon, Niki said, he would drive to the woods or walk by the Dnieper River, sometimes alone, sometimes with Sergei. He had begun, while here alone at Mogilev, to contemplate the colorlessness of life without Alexei. Rasputin had promised that Alexei would at thirteen outgrow his illness, but the doctors he spoke to last month had contradicted this, and the disease had certainly showed no sign yet of abating. Each month brought Alexei some new pain to his joints or brought him a headache or a fever. Each movement brought with it the potential for hemorrhage. And now with Rasputin’s death, Niki said, what was to prevent the next hemorrhage from being a fatal one? Alix had wept for days after Rasputin’s murder, now that catastrophe was certain for her son. She had read the congratulatory letters and telegrams between all their imperial relations, notes confiscated by the secret police, and she knew they stood alone. He and Alix had come to accept that Alexei would not live long now and certainly would not be able to serve as tsar. And, Niki said, it was not only Alexei’s life that was in danger; Alix’s was also, for different reasons. She had written him, Don’t let them send me to a convent. Don’t separate Baby from me. Had I heard the rumors? I nodded. Did he not know I had heard them all practically firsthand on the sable-covered bed at the von Dervis palace?
He had, Niki told me, decided to return to Peter at the end of December, to take charge of the roiling matters in the capital, and then to send Alix and the children to Livadia Palace in the Crimea, after Russian Christmas, where they would stay for a few years, until the war was safely over, until order had been brought both to the State Council and to the State Duma or else that two-chambered parliamentary body would be permanently dissolved. Eventually, according to his plan, Alix would return to Petersburg, but Alexei, if he still lived, would remain behind, tucked away, just as his English cousin George V and his wife, Mary, had concealed their sickly epileptic son John, just as Alix’s sister, Irene, had hidden her hemophiliac son Henry. And there, just as John and Henry had, Alexei would eventually die.