The Lost Crown (44 page)

Olga’s eyes moisten with pride. She nods at Anastasia, who is suddenly not a
shvybzik
anymore. It tears at me all over again to see the change in our youngest sister.

“Tatya?” Anastasia whispers. Her eyes are so big. I must be frightening her terribly with my hysterics. “Tatya, it’s all right. You can’t mend everything. You shouldn’t even try if this is how it makes you feel. And anyway, there’s one thing you can fix—Mama sent me to ask you to give Dr. Botkin his morphine injection. His kidneys are killing him.”

It is as if Anastasia has ripped a scab from my thoughts. The place beneath it is tender yet, but as she takes me by the hand and pulls me along behind her, the feel of fresh air on new skin takes my breath away.

My baby sister is right. There are so many things I cannot mend. But that does not mean I can do nothing. There is so much suffering in the world, I must provide whatever small comfort I can. Even if it is only to myself.

Tomorrow will be different. Of that much I am certain.

48.

OLGA NIKOLAEVNA

4 July 1918
Ekaterinburg

A
knock wakens me, a slice of light opening like a jackknife across our bedroom. Dr. Botkin’s face appears in the crack. His round glasses glint like silver rubles as his fingers fumble to unrumple his tie. Before I can wonder why he is knocking at this hour, the thought of our dear doctor sleeping in his tie and collar stretches my yawn into a smile.

“Forgive me,” he says, a little louder than a whisper, “but the commandant has asked us to prepare to move to the cellar for safety. Shooting in the city, he says.”

“What time is it?” Tatiana asks, her voice clear in the dark. Anastasia yawns. Maria snores softly and doesn’t budge.

“Almost one thirty.” The boom of artillery echoes inside the hollow of my lungs. “Yurovsky insists there is no reason for alarm, but it may be necessary to evacuate if the conflict escalates. He asks that you please dress promptly and gather in the drawing room. No bags—our luggage will follow in the event of evacuation.”

“Thank you, Evgeni Sergeevich,” Tatiana says. “I will inform the tsar and the empress. Will you please see that Nyuta and the others are ready?”

“Konechno.”
The door closes, and it’s dark again.

From the next room, the thump of Mama’s cane on the floor stirs Tatiana from her cot. While Anastasia and I rub our eyes and fumble out of our sheets, Tatiana dresses and washes deftly in the dark. “I am going to help Mama and Aleksei. Remember to take your medicines.” I fancy I can hear her eyebrow rising with emphasis.

“All right, Tatya.”

She murmurs a moment over Maria, still a solid lump in her cot, then switches on the bedside lamp before slipping through the doorway. The light whispers over our icons and picture frames.

Together, Anastasia and I help each other into our jewel-lined chemises. “Let Mashka wear mine,” she fusses. “I’m sick to death of this heavy old thing.”

“You must still be dreaming if you think Mashka could ever squeeze into your chemise,” I tease. “Someday you may be glad to have this—these jewels are all the money we’ve got left in the world. If we really do get out of here, we’ll need it.”

She yawns wide, showing her teeth like a cat. “Why couldn’t there have been shooting in the streets
before
we went to bed?” Papa carries Aleksei. Mama leans on her cane. Behind them I lead my sisters all in a row—OTMA—just like the old days of court processions and presentations. My sisters and I each have a few little things, cushions and purses and trinkets, though Yurovsky frowns when he sees them. Even Tatiana has brought Mama’s favorite rose-leaf pillow instead of anything of her own. Dr. Botkin, Nyuta, Chef Kharitonov, and Trupp all follow a few steps behind. Stitched deep inside the cushion Nyuta carries is a box filled with diamonds wrapped in wadding—the last of our jewels.

Across the house and down a flight of stairs we file, just as if we were going for our daily walk in the garden. Dangling from Papa’s arms, Aleksei’s body swings like a pendulum all the way down the steps. When he reaches the door, Papa turns to smile at us. “It looks like we’re getting out of here.” A Fiat idles inside the gate, its nose already pointed toward the street. There are no seats in back, but the lorry’s bed is large enough to carry all eleven of us away from here, if it comes to that.

In the courtyard beyond, the air sweeps over me as if the night has let out a sigh at the sight of us. Suddenly I can’t remember the last time I was outdoors after dark, and my skin seems to gasp with relief. Ahead of me in the moonlight, wisps of Mama’s disheveled hair stand out like a halo of spider’s silk.

After only a few breaths of night, we snake back into the house through another door, down another short flight of steps. On the landing, a stuffed bear and two cubs watch us pass with their glass eyes. One by one, Mama and my sisters and I cross ourselves as we pass. “Poor things,” Maria murmurs behind me. At the bottom, I’ve counted twenty-three steps to the basement—one for each year of my life, though my birthday isn’t until November.

Yurovsky leads us across the sunflower seed-scattered floors of the guards’ quarters to a bare room behind a set of paneled double doors on the far side of the cellar. I’m not certain until I find the bullet hole in the ceiling—we’re directly below the room my sisters and I share upstairs. Finely striped yellow paper covers the walls, but the only light comes from a bare bulb dangling above us. Overhead, the swoop of curved plaster crowned with a beaded burgundy frieze reminds me a little of the cove-ceilinged basement rooms back home in Tsarskoe Selo. There’s an arched window, and another set of paneled double doors across from us. It’s almost attractive in here, for a cellar. I wonder why they haven’t used it, instead of crowding all the guards into the other chambers.

Mama takes in the empty room all at once and swivels on her cane to face Yurovksy. “Why are there no chairs?” she asks, gesturing to Aleksei, stranded in Papa’s arms. “Is it forbidden to sit?”

The commandant says nothing, but returns with two bentwood chairs like the ones my sisters and I keep at the end of our cots. He places them below the lightbulb. Papa eases Aleksei into one, and Mama sits down beside him. Tatiana takes her usual place behind Mama, slipping the rose-leaf cushion against Mama’s back before resting her hands protectively on the back of the chair. Maria, Anastasia, and I cluster nearby. Yurovsky shuts the door, and the faint smell of Dr. Botkin’s cologne slowly veils the back of the room. There is nothing to do but wait.

In spite of the tremor of excitement beneath my ribs, one yawn after another finds its way down my throat. Maria and I lean against the wall; a nudge now and then keeps her from dozing off. My ears perk up when footsteps tap along the linoleum-covered corridor—the sound of boots, close together and out of sync, like a pack of clumsily shuffled cards. They gather outside the double doors, then stop. Why so many, and what are they waiting for?

Beside me, Jemmy peeps out from the purse in Anastasia’s arms, panting and trembling the way she does before a storm. If the poor sweetheart weren’t so frightened, I’d have to scold Anastasia for sneaking her down here. “Probably the artillery rumbling,” I whisper.

Out in the courtyard, the lorry’s engine revs and backfires. I flinch like Jemmy, startling Maria awake again, then smile at myself. It’s been almost three months since I rode in a motorcar. The wind in my face, the road bumping under us, the stars overhead as my sisters and I jostle together— for those few moments, I wouldn’t even think about where they’re taking us. It won’t be long now.

The paneled door opens and Yurovsky steps inside, his hands fisted in his coat pockets. Behind him, nine men file in, forming two lines before us—four hunched in front, six with their backs to the door. Only a few faces are familiar. Curiosity whirs in the space between us.

“Please stand,” the commandant says.

Our sleepiness falls away. Mama glares at Yurovsky, levering herself up on her cane. Beside me, Maria inches back as Papa takes a step forward, placing himself in front of Aleksei. There’s not a word as we face each other, but the air feels charged, metallic. My skin buzzes like a thousand thoughts as I begin to realize that my body senses something my brain can’t grasp.

All their hands are behind their backs.

With a flash of motion that severs my thoughts, Yurovsky pulls a scrap of paper from the breast pocket of his leather jacket and reads:

“In view of the fact that your relatives continue their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet has decided to sentence you to death.”

A flurry of panic erupts around me, but nothing penetrates. Only a haze of sounds brushes against me. Yelps from Mama, my sisters. Papa turning back to Yurovsky, his mouth moving.
What? I can’t understand you. Read it again, please.
Yurovsky’s voice once more, like a needle on a gramophone. Papa, still asking,
What? What?

Another flash—Yurovsky and his squad answering with open fire.

I cross myself and close my eyes.

Where we go next, we go together.

EPILOGUE

To maximize efficiency in the small space of the cellar, each of the ten executioners had been assigned a specific victim to dispatch. In the passion of the moment, however, nearly all of them first took aim at their former emperor, collapsing Nicholas II almost instantly in the barrage. Dr. Botkin, Kharitonov, and Trupp also fell in the first volley, struck down by straying gunfire. Behind the tsar, Alexandra had not quite finished making the sign of the cross when a shot to the head toppled the empress to the floor.

Smoke, plaster dust, and gunpowder already filled the crowded room, obscuring all but the victims’ legs and choking the executioners’ lungs as they fired into the haze. Some of the killers lurched from the room, coughing and vomiting while screams and sobs ricocheted inside.

All five of the imperial children were still alive.

One of the girls, probably Maria, had broken away during the first volley and lay wounded in a corner by the locked storeroom doors. The other three sisters huddled together in the opposite corner while a man called Ermakov attacked Aleksei with bullets and bayonet. Despite the Bolshevik’s brutality, the thirteen-year-old boy, it seemed, would not die. Unknown to his murderers, the jewels hidden under Aleksei’s khaki tunic apparently deflected Ermakov’s shots and blows until Yurovsky dispatched the tsarevich with two shots to the head.

Next, the two men advanced on the grand duchesses. Anastasia somehow fled to Maria’s corner, leaving the Big Pair to face Ermakov and Yurovsky. First Tatiana, then Olga fell to point-blank head wounds, though some of the killers would testify that their bullets initially bounced off the girls’ torsos “like hail.” Turning to the opposite corner, Ermakov attacked Maria and Anastasia with his bayonet, but again, the jeweled chemises seemed to protect at least one of the girls until Ermakov finally gave up and finished them both off with his Mauser.

The maid Anna “Nyuta” Demidova, who at some point fainted near the Little Pair, was the last to die—yet another victim of Ermakov’s savage bayonet.

Almost from that moment, rumors of survival began to surface—perhaps because the burial of the imperial family spiraled into a grisly two-day farce involving mechanical breakdowns, drunken Bolsheviks, multiple grave sites, and nosy peasants. Some accounts say that one of the younger grand duchesses showed signs of life after Yurovsky and another man checked the scattered bodies for pulses. Another reports that Maria or Anastasia suddenly sat up screaming as she was being hauled from the cellar to the waiting truck. At one point the Fiat loaded with bodies became mired in the swampy forest outside Ekaterinburg, forcing Yurovsky to leave the victims’ remains behind to scout ahead for the mine shaft where he intended to dump the imperial corpses.

Throughout the ordeal, the executioners were tantalized by the discovery of yet more diamonds, pearls, and loops of gold wire peeping from their victims’ torn clothing. Only Yurovsky’s threats to search and shoot anyone found guilty of theft kept the men from succumbing to temptation. By the time the burial was complete, Yurovsky’s desk stood heaped with valuables collected from the corpses; the diamonds alone weighed eighteen pounds. Everything deemed of value—diaries, letters, and photograph albums as well as jewelry—was shipped to Moscow. What remained of the Romanovs’ possessions were pilfered by the guards, burned in the stove, or tossed down the latrine pit.

Strangely, Yurovsky’s own accounts of the murders state that he first attempted to burn two of the bodies, then gave up and buried the remaining nine together. For years, it seemed as if this might have been only a cover-up to disguise the disappearance of two of the victims, although the only corpse found during the White Army’s investigation was that of a small dog, believed to be Anastasia’s Jemmy. In short, the story of the Romanovs’ murder is riddled with gaps that opportunistic pretenders were eager to fill with tales of escape. The Bolsheviks themselves paved the way by initially refusing to report the murder of Alexandra and her daughters; even the “officer letters” were a cruel hoax perpetrated by the Romanovs’ guards to create a pretext for the execution.