The two boys were followed by the doctor, Botkin, in his blue coat, and a thin man in a hat with a cheap black band which I recognized from Vova’s gleeful description. This must be the children’s French tutor, M. Gilliard. Two other men I recognized, as well, Prince Dolgoruky and General Tatishelev—both of them frequented the ballet. At a sudden shout, we all turned back to the palace. One remaining servant had called to another for help lifting the empress in her wheelchair through one of the French windows onto the terrace.
The wheelchair astonished me. What had happened to all the energy with which she had nursed the children just a few months earlier? Alix now looked drugged, and perhaps she was, by those same helpful, soothing drops Dr. Botkin had squeezed into the children’s mouths when they were all so sick with the measles in February. She wept as the two men struggled with the chair, her body swaying this way and that, until one of them lifted the empress out of the chair and carried her, the long, wide sleeves of her blouse flapping, down the sloping ramp to the courtyard. The other trailed behind, pushing the empty rattan wheelchair with sharp, hard jerks, letting its wide, thin wheels make a rattle over the flat, gray stones. Niki was the last to step through that window. He paused on the terrace, his bearing slightly stooped, until, with conscious effort, he squared his shoulders, the better to balance on them the weight of his family in their solitary exile. Even the horses seemed to still as Niki scanned the scene before him. He gazed at me but his eyes didn’t linger. I was just another subject, come to watch the tsar’s departure. I saw him study the sunrise over the park the Russians had once called Sarskaya Myza—or high farm—and this farmstead had become, for a time, the tsar’s private paradise. And now his expulsion east. Oh, why had not Niki insisted on going to the White Palace in Livadia or to his brother’s estate in Orel, both estates Kerensky perhaps could have been persuaded to reconsider?
I watched Niki walk down the long ramp and take Alix’s arm at the bottom of it, for without her chair she had stood, hesitantly, seemingly afraid to walk, and together, they followed the boys into the first car. Niki helped each of them into the open carriage and onto the three rows of high-backed leather seats. Colonel Kobylinsky climbed onto the box at the head of the running board and turned toward the Cossacks. To them, he need not say a thing. They knew their roles; a few of them guided their horses in front of and alongside the tsar’s car and along the two others as escort. And now, as the soldiers swarmed aboard the remaining trucks in that long convoy, I realized that I would be left behind if I did not act. There would be no later moment. A Cossack gestured with his big arm that I should move out of the way, down the drive, stop gawking. Babushka! Me—a babushka! So I wasn’t invisible. He urged his horse toward me. Everyone is leaving. I nodded and began walking backward, then sideways, trying to keep my eyes on the family seated in the first of the Son Impérial Majestés, the Cossack and his black horse shadowing me, the trucks and cars and horses circling the courtyard, clop, clop, clop, making their way around the light sand to the drive proper, the Cossacks’ horses keeping pace with the slow turning of the wheels. I supposed they would ride with them all the way to the station, the last assignment of the tsar’s retinue.
The sun gave a luster now to everything, the buttercream palace, the blue cornflower sky, the black doors of the automobiles, the chocolate eyes of the horses upon which the Cossacks sat. The park birds had begun to herald this exodus which was to have been made in the desolation of night, but which was now taking place, thanks to Russia’s short summer nights, less safely, in plain view. And in this sunlight I was plainly walking backward toward a life I couldn’t conceive continuing without my son. What would I tell Sergei when I reached the bottom of the drive, Sergei who hoped his Magnificent Mathilde would bring back our beautiful boy? How could I tell him the truth of my failure? But now, with the column starting down the drive, the truth was all I had left.
And so I stepped in front of the first vehicle and the Cossack beside it, waved my short arms, and began to yell in my vulgar-sounding Russian—yes, I admit it, I speak more like a peasant than like a boyar, even in the French I acquired in exile this is the case, so perhaps my costume was not so much an impersonation as a revelation of my truest self—Stop! Wait! And at the unexpected sight of me the lead Cossack halted his horse and the drivers braked their vehicles to stare at this demented woman, and to them all I cried, I want my boy!
Would he bring his whip down on me as I had seen his comrade do to that poor man on the Troitsky Bridge in 1905? Like a mechanical toy, wound almost to breaking, I began to repeat over and over—I want my boy. I want my boy—until the Cossack looked back in bewilderment at one of the trucks that held the soldiers. From within the cab, someone shouted at him to move the old woman, and the Cossack spurred his horse forward. But when I stood my ground, instead of trampling me, he simply reined in his horse. I could hear both of them breathing and I raised my hands to him.
He called over his shoulder to Kobylinsky, standing on the running board of that first car, She wants her boy. The Cossacks let their horses stamp their huge feet and shake their long manes impatiently to signal me there was only so much of this foolishness they would allow. What is the delay? Move the woman, called a voice from the back of the line. I saw Niki lean forward in his seat, squint in my direction to take in my small shape, and abruptly straighten up. He had recognized me. But I could tell that Vova had not, as he peered around at the soldiers surrounding the motorcar. And then Niki pushed open the door and stepped out, walking forward past the lanterns fixed to the front of the hood, with Alix protesting from her seat; and at the tsar’s movements, the soldiers, all brass buttons and alarmed caps, began jumping down from their trucks, racing forward with raised rifles and fixed bayonets. Kobylinsky held his hand up to Niki, Her son must have left earlier with the underservants.
Her son is not an underservant, Niki said. He is part of my suite, and he gestured to the interior of the carriage to Vova, who sat next to Alexei on the middle seat. Kobylinsky looked clearly perplexed—Why would the tsar have a peasant boy as a member of his suite? Why would the tsarevich have the son of a peasant as a playmate?—but he said nothing, looking at Vova and then over at me. Niki studied my face as the soldiers converged about him, and I thought, Niki is not going to give Vova back to me, he still thinks as Sergei does that he will return to Peter in the fall, he thinks I’m acting precipitously, he doesn’t understand that Kerensky, with one shift of the winds, will soon be running for his own train to save his own skin. But then Niki reached into the car and took Vova’s hand and Vova climbed out onto the running board and jumped down.
He stood very close to Niki, pressed tightly against him in a posture of filial intimacy that set the soldiers to shouting, Look, that is the heir. This is a trick—their worst nightmare come true, someone in the imperial family was about to slip from their grasp. One regiment was posted at the station, but two remained here, and so there were many men to make a commotion and over it Niki held Vova to him with one arm around his shoulder, and Kobylinsky stepped back on the running board and called, futilely, to the excited soldiers, Move back, but his soldiers had no intention of moving back now, and they surrounded the cars, calling, Who is this boy? and, Where is the heir?, as if wondering for the first time why the tsar’s entourage counted in its number two boys instead of one. And I thought, What game is this? Surely they know who is who—they had been guarding the family for months. It was only later that I would learn that these men had been newly assigned to accompany the family, and what help were imperial portraits and genealogical charts (if these men had ever laid eyes on such things) in sorting out the bedraggled human reality of their prisoners? In Siberia the guards would take photographs of the family and servants and assign each one an identity card which, ridiculously, had to be produced on demand.