When I left St Petersburg I travelled east, passing through Vologda, Vyatka and Perm before arriving in the Siberian plains. It had now been more than a year since I had last laid eyes on Anastasia and almost as long since the Tsar had become Nicholas Romanov. I arrived lean and hungry, but driven forward by a desire to see her again, to protect her. My body was wasted from my long journey and had I been in possession of a looking glass, I swear that I would have appeared a decade older than my true age, which was not yet twenty.
The journey had been fraught with difficulty. I had succumbed to a fever just outside Vyatka but was fortunate enough to be taken into the home of a farmer and his wife, who nursed me back to health and listened to my delirious ramblings and didn’t hold them against me. On my last night in their home, I was sitting by the fire and the farmer’s wife, a strong woman named Polina Pavlovna, placed her hand on top of mine, surprising me for a moment with the intimacy of the gesture.
‘You must be careful, Pasha,’ she said to me, for on my first or second day there I had been asked what my name was and in my delirious state, unable to remember, I had offered that hated pet-name of my childhood. ‘There is danger in what you do next.’
‘What I do next?’ I asked, for during my restoration to health I had told them that I was travelling back to my own family, who lived in Surgut, in order to help with the farming. ‘But I see no dangers there.’
‘When Luka and I first met, we did not have the approval of my father,’ she whispered to me. ‘But we cared nothing for it, our love was strong enough. But his father was a poor man, a person no one thought much of one way or the other. It is different for you.’
I swallowed nervously, unsure how much I might have betrayed during my illness. ‘Polina—’ I began.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘It’s only me that you told. And I haven’t told a soul. Not even Luka.’
I nodded and looked out of the window. ‘Do I have much further to travel?’ I asked.
‘It will be weeks,’ she said. ‘But they will be well. Of this, I am sure.’
‘How can you know that?’ I asked.
‘Because their story does not end in Tobolsk,’ she said quietly, looking away from me with a mournful expression on her face. ‘And the Grand Duchess, the one you love, her story has much left in it yet.’
I didn’t know what to say to this and so remained silent. I wasn’t the type to believe in superstition or the foresight of old women. I hadn’t believed it from the starets and I was not going to believe it from a farmer’s wife in Vyatka, although I hoped that what she was saying was the truth.
‘The Tsar travelled through here once, you know,’ she told me before I left. ‘When I was just a young girl.’
I frowned, for she was an elderly woman. I could scarcely believe it.
‘Not your Tsar,’ she said, laughing a little. ‘His grandfather. Alexander II. It was only a few weeks before he was killed. He came and went like a burst of lightning. The whole town came out to see him and he barely looked at any of us, simply charged past on his steed, and yet everyone felt as if they had been touched by the hand of God. It’s hard to imagine now, isn’t it?’
‘A little,’ I conceded.
I left the following day and was fortunate enough to remain healthy for the rest of my journey, arriving in Tobolsk in early July. The town was full of Bolsheviks, but no one gave me a second glance. They were not looking for me any more, I realized. Who was I, after all, except a retainer, a nobody. Any intention they might have had of tracking me down after the Tsar had been arrested had long since vanished.
Locating the Governor’s house was easy and I arrived there late in the afternoon, expecting to find it heavily surrounded by guards. I wasn’t entirely sure what I would do when I arrived. There was a part of me which had been considering simply asking to see the Tsar – or Nicholas Romanov, if they insisted – at which point I could offer to stay with the family as a servant and thereby see Anastasia every day until they were sent into exile.
However, the house was not exactly as I had imagined. There were no cars outside and only one soldier, who was leaning up against the fence, offering a deep yawn to the world. He watched me as I approached and narrowed his eyes irritably, but showed no sign of concern. Nor did he even bother to stand up straight.
‘Good evening,’ I said.
‘Comrade.’
‘I wondered … I believe this is the Governor’s residence?’
‘And what if it is?’ he asked me. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Georgy Daniilovich Jachmenev,’ I said. ‘A farmer’s son from Kashin.’
He nodded and turned his head for a moment, spitting on the ground. ‘Never heard of you,’ he said.
‘No, I don’t expect you would have. But your prisoner has.’
‘My prisoner?’ he asked, smiling a little. ‘And what prisoner would that be?’
I sighed. I didn’t feel like playing games. ‘I’ve travelled a long way to be here,’ I said. ‘All the way from St Petersburg, in fact.’
‘From Petrograd, you mean?’
‘If you like.’
‘On foot?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow.
‘Much of it, yes,’ I admitted.
‘Well, what do you want here?’
‘Until last year, I worked at the Imperial Palace,’ I explained. ‘I worked for the Tsar.’
He hesitated before answering. ‘There is no Tsar,’ he said sharply. ‘You might have worked for the former Tsar.’
‘The former Tsar, then. I thought … I wondered whether I could pay my respects.’
He frowned. ‘Of course you can’t,’ he said. ‘What are you, Jachmenev, stupid? You think we let anyone in to see the Romanovs?’
‘I am no threat to anyone,’ I said, extending my arms to show that I held no hidden weapons or secrets. ‘I simply want to offer myself in service to them.’
‘And why would you do that?’
‘Because they were good to me.’
‘They were tyrants,’ he said. ‘You’re crazy to want to be with them.’
‘Still, it’s what I want,’ I replied quietly. ‘Is it possible?’
‘Anything is possible,’ he said with a shrug. ‘But you’re too late, I’m afraid.’
My heart skipped a beat; it was all I could do to stop myself from grabbing him by the lapels and demanding to know what he meant by that remark.
‘Too late?’ I asked carefully. ‘In what way?’
‘I mean they’re not here any more,’ he said. ‘The Governor is in residence once again. I can ask for an audience with him, if you wish.’
‘No, no,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No, that won’t be necessary.’ I felt like sitting on the ground and burying my head in my hands. Would this torment never end? Would we never be reunited? ‘I … I hoped to see them,’ I said.
‘They haven’t been taken far from here,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you could go after them.’
I looked up at him hopefully. ‘They haven’t?’ I asked. ‘Where are they?’
He smiled and opened his hands, and I knew immediately that this information would not come cheap. I reached into my pockets and extracted every rouble I had. ‘I can’t negotiate,’ I said, handing it over. ‘You can search me if you want to. This is everything I have. Everything in the world. So please …’
He looked at his hand, counted the coins and put them in his pocket; then, before walking away, he leaned over and whispered one word in my ear.
‘Yekaterinburg.’
And so I turned and walked once more, this time south-west towards the town of Yekaterinburg, somehow already knowing that this would be the end of my journey and that I would find Anastasia at last. The villages I passed through along the way – Tavda, Tirinsk, Irbit – reminded me a little of Kashin, and I rested at some of them, hoping to talk with some of the farmers. But it was no use, they seemed suspicious of me and reluctant to talk. I wondered whether they kne
w who had travelled through their villages before me, whether they had even seen them. If they had, they said nothing about it.
It took me almost a week to arrive.
Here, the locals were even more anxious than any of the others that I had met on my journey, and I knew for certain that I had reached my destination. It didn’t take long to find someone who could point me in the right direction. A large house at the corner of the town, surrounded by soldiers.
‘A very wealthy merchant owns it,’ the one helpful man who I encountered explained to me. ‘It was taken away from him by the Bolsheviks. No one is allowed to enter.’
‘This merchant,’ I asked, ‘where is he now?’
‘Gone. Paid off. His name was Ipatiev. They took it from him. We locals still call it the Ipatiev house. The Bolsheviks call it the house of special purpose.’
I nodded and walked in the direction he had indicated.
She would be there, I knew it. They would all be there.
1919
PERHAPS THIS WILL sound quaint or old-fashioned, but Zoya and I took rooms in separate houses on the hills of Montmartre in Paris, with opposing views so that we could not even wave to each other before we went to sleep at night or blow a kiss as the last action of the day. From hers, Zoya could look out towards the white-domed basilica of Sacré-Coeur, where the national saint had been beheaded and had died a martyr for his country. She could watch the crowds ascending the steep steps towards the three-arched entryway, hear the chatter of the people as they passed beneath her window walking to and from their places of work. From mine, I could see the peaks of St Pierre de Montmartre, the birthplace of the Jesuits, and if I strained my neck, I could observe the artists setting up their easels in their street studios every morning in the hope of earning enough francs for a humble dinner. We had not intended to surround ourselves with quite so much religion, but the rents were cheap in the dix-huitième and two Russian émigrés were able to blend in without comment in a part of the city already swarming with refugees.
The war was drawing to a close during those months as peace treaties began to be signed in Budapest, Prague, Zagreb and then, finally, in a railway carriage in Compiègne, but the previous four years had seen tens of thousands of Europeans flooding into the French capital, driven there by the advance of the Kaiser’s men into their homelands. Although those numbers were dwindling by the time we arrived, it was not difficult to pretend that we were simply two more exiles who had been forced westwards, and no one ever questioned the truth of the stories we had prepared.
When we first arrived in the city after a painful and seemingly endless passage from Minsk, I made the mistake of assuming that Zoya and I would be living together as man and wife. The idea had been much in my mind as the countryside of my birth began to pass me by and be replaced by cities, rivers and mountain ranges I had only read about, and in truth I was both anxious and aroused by the thought of it. I spent much of the journey choosing the correct words with which I might introduce the subject.
‘We need only take a small flat,’ I proposed, ten miles outside of Paris, hardly daring to look at Zoya for fear that she would recognize the disquiet in my face. ‘A living area with a kitchen attached. A small bathroom, if we’re lucky. A bedroom, of course,’ I added, blushing terribly as I said the words. Of course, Zoya and I had yet to make love, but it was my fervent hope that our life in Paris would provide not just independence and a new beginning, but an introduction to the pleasures of the sensual world as well.
‘Georgy,’ she said, looking across at me and shaking her head. ‘We cannot live together, you know that. We are unmarried.’
‘Of course,’ I replied, my mouth so dry that my tongue was sticking uncomfortably to my palate. ‘But these are new times for us, are they not? We know no one here, we have only each other. I thought perhaps—’
‘No, Georgy,’ she said, determined and biting her lip gently. ‘Not that. Not yet. I cannot.’
‘Then … then we will marry,’ I suggested, surprised that I had not considered this idea earlier. ‘But of course, that is what I meant all along. We will become husband and wife!’
Zoya stared at me, and for the first time since she had fallen into my arms a week before, she let out a laugh and rolled her eyes, not to suggest that I was a fool, but at the foolishness of my suggestion.
‘Georgy, are you asking me to marry you?’ she said.
‘Yes, I am,’ I replied, beaming with pleasure. ‘I want you to be my wife.’ I tried to kneel down, as tradition demanded, but the space between the benches in the railway compartment was too small to make the movement graceful and while I managed finally to prostrate myself on one knee, I was forced to turn my head to look at her. ‘I have no ring to offer you yet,’ I said. ‘But you have my heart. You have every part of me, you know that.’
‘I know it,’ she said, pulling me up and pushing me back to my seat gently. ‘But are you asking so that we might … so that …’
‘No!’ I said quickly, embarrassed that she could think so badly of me. ‘No, Zoya, not that. I am asking you because I want to spend my life with you. My every day and night. There is no one else for me in this world, you must know that.’
‘And there is no one else for me either, Georgy,’ she said quietly. ‘But I cannot marry you. Not yet.’
‘But why not?’ I asked, trying to overcome the note of petulance which was creeping into my voice. ‘If we love each other, if we are promised to each other, then—’
‘Georgy … think, please.’ She looked away, having practically whispered these words to me, and I felt immediately ashamed of myself. Of course, how could I have been so insensitive? It was unconscionable of me to have even suggested the union at such a time, but I was young and drenched in love and desired nothing more than to be with this woman for ever more.
‘I am sorry,’ I said quietly, a few moments later. ‘I didn’t think. It was thoughtless of me.’ She shook her head and I could see that she was close to tears. ‘I won’t … I won’t speak of this matter again. Until the appropriate time, that is,’ I added, for I wanted to be clear that this was a subject which would not be forgotten. ‘I have your permission, Zoya, to speak of it again? At a future date?’
‘I will live in hope of it,’ she replied, her smile returning now.
In my mind, I considered that we were now engaged and my heart filled with happiness at the thought of it.
And so we arrived at the hills of Montmartre and knocked on doors in search of rooms for rent. We had no bags, we had no clothing other than the rags on our backs. We had no belongings. We had little money. We had arrived in a strange country to start our lives over again, and every possession that we acquired from that moment forward would reference this new existence. Indeed, we had brought nothing at all from our old lives, except each other.
But that, I believed, would surely be enough.
We celebrated Christmas twice that winter.
In mid-December, our friends Leo and Sophie extended an invitation to us to join them for a meal on the twenty-fifth, the traditional day of Christian celebration, in their flat near the Place du Tertre. I was concerned at how Zoya would cope with such festivity and suggested that we ignore Christmas entirely and spend the afternoon walking the banks of the Seine, just the two of us, enjoying the rare peace that the day would offer.
‘But I want to go, Georgy,’ she told me, surprising me with her enthusiasm. ‘They make it sound like so much fun! And we could do with a little fun in our lives, couldn’t we?’
‘Of course,’ I said, pleased by her response, for I wanted to go too. ‘But only if you’re sure. It may be a difficult day, our first Christmas since leaving Russia.’
‘I think,’ she replied slowly, hesitating for a moment and considering the matter carefully, ‘I think perhaps it would be a good idea to spend it with friends. There will be less time to dwell on unhappy things then.’
In the five months that we had been living in
Paris, Zoya’s personality had started to change. Back in Russia, she had been lively and amusing, of course, but in Paris, she had begun to let her guard down more and was free with her enthusiasms. The alteration suited her. She remained entirely unspoiled, but had become open to the pleasures that the world had to offer, although our financial state, pitiful as it was, ensured that we could take advantage of little of it. However, there were moments, many moments, when her grief resurfaced, when those terrible reminiscences stormed the barricades of her memory and brought her low. During those times she preferred to be left alone and I do not know how she fought her way through the darkness. There were mornings when we met for breakfast and I found her pale, her eyes ringed with dark circles; I would enquire after her health and she would shrug off my questions, saying that it was hardly worth discussing, that she had simply been unable to sleep. If I pushed to know more, she would shake her head, grow angry with me and then change the subject. I learned to allow her the space to confront these horrors by herself. She knew that I was there for her; she knew that I would listen whenever she wanted to talk.
Zoya had met Sophie at the dressmaker’s shop where they were both employed and they had quickly become friends. They made simple, plain dresses for the women of Paris, working in a store which had provided functional clothing throughout the war. Through Sophie, we became acquainted with her painter boyfriend Leo, and the four of us made up a regular quartet for dinner or Sunday-afternoon strolls, when we would cross the Seine in a spirit of great adventure and wander through the Jardin du Luxembourg. I thought Leo and Sophie were terribly cosmopolitan and rather idolized them, for they were no more than a couple of years older than us but lived together in unapologetic harmony, betraying their passion even in public with frequent displays of affection that I confess embarrassed but excited me.
‘I’ve cooked a turkey,’ Sophie announced that Christmas Day, placing a strange-looking bird on the table before us, part of which seemed to have been in the oven for too long, while the rest remained curiously pink, an extraordinary trick that made the entire dish appear quite unappetizing. However, the company being what it was and the wine flowing as it did, we cared not for such niceties and we ate and drank all night long, Zoya and I looking away whenever our hosts exchanged their long, expressive kisses.