Everywhere I saw tents with bunches of garlic strung at the front flap, an old Rus amulet against epidemics, and this epidemic was typhus, the same illness that had nearly killed Niki so long ago right here in the Crimea. When the pharmacy ran out of medicine, it began to sell Orthodox medals to the most desperate, usually parents of young children. The rest of us hung garlic and held our breath when the ambulance trains brought the sick and the dead to the station, where we, for lack of anywhere else to go, remained in our railroad cars on the tracks. The general inspector, at Andrei’s prodding, found me a saloon car, with two beds and a lavatory, to live in. Of the living, I asked for word of Sergei Mikhailovich. Of the dead, I could ask nothing, but I looked into their faces to see if he was among them. From my compartment window each day I saw the corpses of the typhus victims lifted from the arriving trains, put unceremoniously on carts, and dragged to the cemetery. I chased after them like a ghoul, arm over my nose, for a peek. We tied the cuffs of our sleeves tight against crawling lice, we put kerchiefs over our mouths, and we waited for a ship to take us across the Black Sea. But every boat had a problem. One was too small to take more passengers. Another was going only across the Black Sea to Turkey, which the Bolsheviks had already declared as the Turkestan Soviet Republic and which was embroiled in various tribal uprisings. On another ship the voyagers already had typhus, and yet another asked for more than we could pay. We were trapped in the rail yard, which slowly, with the rain, turned into an enormous mud hole. It seemed the wind was wet with ice and, like the figure painted on a Maryinsky backdrop, filled its cheeks with the cold air and blew it down through the tracks, and we resorted to sawing up telegraph poles to burn for fuel. Each cold evening Andrei came from his mother’s first-class compartment to my tiny carriage to visit and sip tea or the occasional hot chocolate with me and Vova, who sat there silently, glowering, until, I swear, he seemed to wear the face of a muzhik grimacing at a borzhui. And we did look like peasants, for by now I had only two dresses left and my son one outfit and a coat. In the mornings, in the bleak light, I stepped out on the ice, my heels cracking the thin sheets that lay over the mud, and at the dark corners of the station the stray dogs emerged for the scraps from our dinner the night before. How they ran to me when I called them, thin, ribs visible beneath their fur, spots of mange covering their legs, their backs, even their faces. Yes, we were as ragged as those dogs, and I pitied them as I could not afford to pity us.
In February, through old friends from better days at the British consulate, Miechen found herself and Andrei a place out of this tumult on an Italian luxury liner, the Semiramisa, bound for Venice; Andrei trudged down to my car through the mud to tell me they would leave tonight, that he could not allow his mother to travel alone but that she had been unable to secure passage for me or Vova and what could he do about that? This was her lie, of course, but I’m certain Andrei believed it to be true. He handed us a small package of biscuits from the British canteen and then sat, awkwardly, on the springed seat opposite, one leg crossed over the other, showing us his empty hands. I pursed my lips at him. Of course, she did not want to secure passage for us—what better way to rid Andrei of me than to allow the nightmare that was Russia to swallow me whole. And my son. Vova opened the paper package and began to eat without offering Andrei a bite and I did not correct his manners. Once Miechen and Andrei left the Caucasus, Vova and I would sink into this crowd of refugees, our privileges lost. We had no connection to the British consulate and who among the sick and desperate aristocracy remembered or cared that I was once prima ballerina assoluta of the imperial stages? No, my power, what remained of it, extended only to the Romanovs I had bedded, two of them either imprisoned or dead and the third about to sail out of sight. And though I fantasized about Sergei’s escape from Alapayevsk, what if he never arrived at this dock and Vova and I were here waiting for him still when the Bolshevik cavalry rode up over the hills, ringed this small city, and began to imprison, execute, or starve any formers they could scoop up in their red caps? They might put me in a cage on a cart and drag me from village to village to dance like a monkey on a chain, the tsar’s former dancer, and my son they would take out into the woods and shoot straightaway. No, though I would like to say I waited faithfully for Sergei until certain death, until the Bolsheviks on horseback raced their way up those hills, I did not. No, I was more like the Messieurs Sabin and Grabbe and Leuchtenberg, members of the imperial entourage of Nicholas II who’d slunk away when the tsar’s train from Pskov drew into the Tsarskoye station in 1917 after his abdication, much more like Dr. Ostrogorsky, who, after years of treating the imperial children, who had even gone all the way to Spala for the tsarevich’s great hemorrhage!, told the empress that the roads to the palace were much too snowy and slushy for him to travel now that the family was under house arrest. No, I would not wait for Sergei in Novorossiysk. Vova and I must have passage out.
And so, while Andrei remained behind with my biscuit-eating son, I slogged up the muddy, icy path to Miechen’s battered train car, mounted the steps, and rapped on the door. One of her staff admitted me to her sitting room, which was hung with blue drapes looking a bit soiled now, as were the narrow frosted glass windows that alternated with larger, smeared ones, the carpet, the embossed leather lining of the compartment walls, the blue upholstery of the chairs. How difficult it was even for Miechen to keep up appearances—difficult for her, impossible for me! But still she held court here, her brass samovar steaming amid the grime, her tulip-shaped reading lamps aglow. She sat in the largest chair in the small room, three dogs in her wide lap, wearing a heavy black shuba and a long gray scarf which she had wound several times around her neck. Her face was a mushroom, heavy and bloated, her jaw now thick as a man’s, the nose broad, and clipped incongruously to her ears, as if to remind one of her original sex, were a pair of pearl drop earrings. At my entrance she lowered the fruit knife she had been using as she read to cut the pages of her book. She did not smile to greet me, not that I expected her to. She hated all her sons’ women and we knew it; she called us, Andrei told me, the harem—me, Boris’s mistress, Zinaida, even Kyril’s wife, Victoria—all odalisques. Miechen blinked those eyes, hooded like a lizard’s, at me. She showed no surprise at my appearance, although it was the first time we’d ever been alone together. Perhaps she knew I would come, knew that I would not accept my omission from the Semiramisa manifest without a fight—when had I ever allowed my name to be scratched off a list?—yet she gave not the slightest sign of pity or regret that my son and I would be left behind in this crumbling country to a fate that looked bleaker each day.
She said to me only, I have no time to visit.
If Miechen had spoken kindly, I might have lost my nerve, but the tiny tip of a smile she used to punctuate her remark acted like her fruit knife to cut the page from my imaginary script. And so I began, I began with my son, my son of suddenly, felicitously indefinite parentage.
Your husband was always a dear friend to me, I said, and her lips became paper thin. A very dear friend.
I stepped closer, taking care to use the small stage of this car. He visited me often, as you know. We shared lunches, dinners. Breakfasts. He interceded on my behalf many times. Why, he even arranged my performance at the coronation gala, over the protests of the dowager empress herself. But of course you know that, too.