We climbed down from the back of the last car onto the great plain upon which Petersburg also sat, these versts between the capital and Tsarskoye being a small collection of villages and country estates before one reached Krasnoye Selo and Tsarskoye itself. It was late enough now even in a Russian summer to be dusk, and Sergei took the lead as we trudged back toward the village we had just passed. The peasant clothes my brother gave us—my light cloth coat and kerchief, Sergei’s soft cap, loose tunic, and baggy pants—would, I hoped, make us look as if we belonged on foot. Sergei limped ahead of me; his arthritis, which had swollen the knuckles of his fingers, had also torched his joints so that he moved tenderly, back bent. As we followed the track through a thick wood of fir trees, I found myself falling, my grace and balance useless on this ground churned by roots and gullies. Eventually we found a rutted dirt road and Sergei said the village was down below, let’s hurry. Every few minutes I called to Sergei for the time and he checked his watch in its leather pouch: 10:30, 10:42, 10:56, and finally he said, Mala, don’t ask. It was 11:04 when a peasant driving a horse and wooden cart appeared. Sergei limped forward to hail him and I watched their pantomime. Sergei’s arms moved, the peasant, capless but wearing the classic bowl haircut, shook his head, bangs flapping, and gestured to the open back of his cart. Was he offering us a ride? Sergei then brought out his purse. I’d heard that when Niki went out riding these country roads each afternoon at two o’clock, he would stop and speak to the villagers he passed, and that, knowing this to be his habit, peasants from this district and beyond would line the road to beg a favor from the tsar or to hand him a petition, knowing Nicholas liked to honor all these requests. Their Father Tsar loved a supplicant, loved to grant permission. I edged closer. Sergei placed a thick pad of rubles into the callused hands of the peasant. The man wore a short navy blue coat and beneath it a tunic and trousers almost exactly like the ones my brother had given Sergei, but too filthy to be worn by someone merely playing a part. We should have dirtied Sergei’s face and hands with a pot of black makeup from the Maryinsky storage room. Even Father Gapon, in hiding in Petersburg after the debacle of Bloody Sunday, had known to cut his hair, to shave his beard, and to paint his face with theatrical makeup in order to avoid discovery and arrest. We had not had the time to create verisimilitude, though that would matter more later; for now Sergei’s rubles had been real enough. The old peasant lowered himself to the ground and Sergei gestured to me, Come. As he helped me up onto the driver’s bench, the man stood unmoving, staring blankly at the small fortune in his big hands. Surely the world had gone mad, when one was tossed great mounds of money for a rotting cart and a broken-down horse. Was this the new order of things?
Sergei bellowed and snapped the reins to turn the swaybacked horse, and after a hesitation, it lurched forward, straining to get the oversized wheels of the wooden cart in motion once more. Sergei cursed and leaned forward to slap the horse’s rump, hard. The horse snorted, its scrotum swaying gently as it took each heavy step. From the animal’s bowed legs and protruding ribs, I could see we would plod all the way to the Alexandrovsky Station. I turned back to ask the peasant if he had another horse, a faster one—but the man was gone, having vanished into the surrounding forest with his newfound wealth before we could change our minds and turn his pockets inside out. I took a deep breath. We wouldn’t make it by midnight. We’d be lucky to make it before the sun rose. But Sergei and I said nothing to each other, nothing aloud. We would go on because there was nowhere else to go.
By the time Sergei and I arrived at the Alexandrovsky, the sky had changed from ebony to magenta to the marble green that preceded dawn. The family had boarded a train for the abyss of Siberia more than five hours ago. The station house glimmered in this almost light, the building a yellow-and-white slice cut from the yellow-and-white cake of the Alexander Palace, now empty. I used my hands, elbows, and knees to ratchet myself down from the cart, Sergei laboring to keep up with me as I made for the big station doors, twice the height of a man, and from there to the tracks on the other side. Behind me, Sergei called that Vova would be fine, that he could learn where the family was taken, we could still get him back, but my terror made me deaf. I stepped out onto the small platform by the two tracks to sniff the scent of my boy, ready to lie down on the empty tracks that had guided him away from me. But, to my astonishment, the platform was a crush of people.
On the tracks waited a long gray train that flew the Japanese flag—it was not, in fact, Japanese but an ordinary passenger train that bore a placard, Red Cross Mission, though the train was not on a mission of mercy. It was more poorly disguised than we were. Milling about the platform was half a regiment of Russian soldiers in their brass-buttoned tunics, rifles slung over their shoulders, taking long pulls on their cigarettes. The uniforms looked new, as if issued for this particular assignment. Sergei put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me back against one of the tall, many-paned station windows; while we watched from this recess, an officer with a high forehead and a small moustache emerged from the train and descended to the platform to speak to the soldiers. That’s Colonel Kobylinsky, Sergei said to me quietly. He’s a war hero, detailed to Tsarskoye to oversee the family.
Although I could not hear Kobylinsky as he spoke to the men, it was clear from his posture and from the relaxed stances of the soldiers that the train’s departure was not imminent. In fact, there was not the slightest hint of tension. The imperial family must not yet be on board. Perhaps the family had not even left the palace. I turned to Sergei, my face a question, and he said, If Kobylinsky’s still here, they haven’t left yet.
By some holy miracle, the family must still be at Tsarskoye. I would later learn it was no holy miracle. The same revolutionary railway workers who had stopped all the trains had refused to shunt and couple these, suspecting the tsar was being spirited out of the country, an action they were determined to prevent: the tsar was a prisoner of the revolutionaries, he was to stand trial, he was not to live out his life in some comfortable exile. It had taken Kerensky multiple calls to the rail yards, shouting into the receiver in his loud, excitable voice, to prod the men—who now by new habit questioned all authority and respected none.
We need to go, Sergei said to me softly.
The streets of the town of Tsarskoye were quiet. In our cart, we passed the racetrack, the storage houses and slaughter yards, the cathedral, the police station, the post office, all the municipal buildings that made the little town hum so efficiently when the tsar was still tsar. Sergei knew the streets well—Malaya, Kolpinskaya, Stredniaya, Sadovaya, Dvortsovaya—having traveled them all in his Rolls-Royce in happier days, following the tsar with the rest of the court—and all the streets we rode lay like a well-pressed apron, its strings tied up neatly in front of the massive compound of Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar’s Village itself. The imposing mansions of the former court made a silent honor regiment for our approach. I prayed that we would not see the family and its entourage barreling toward us in their motorcars in a race to the train station. Before I could lift my hand or shout a name, they would be gone, and Vova would be whisked away from me again, like a cruel joke.
Sergei began to rehearse aloud a plan to rescue Vova, choreographing bold dashes, feints, flanking maneuvers, but just like all of Russia’s battle plans, his relied more on fantasy than on reality—an overestimation of our strengths, a fatal underestimation of the enemy. Finally I cut him off.