The Romanov Bride (22 page)

“He hid behind one of the cupboards and wouldn’t come out,” whispered one of my comrades to me, “so we had to shoot him in the arm.”

Apparently the Grand Duke Sergei had put up quite a struggle, screaming that he knew we were going to kill them. Now, however, all of them were quiet. There was no crying, no screaming. And so we set off toward Sinyachika. Somewhere along the way Matushka started singing “Magnificat,” and Nun Varvara and several of the young princes joined in. Later they sang Sviete Tixhi, and their voices were soft and pleasant in the dark night.

We saw no one else, we passed no other carts. Along the way we crossed through a large pine wood and when a wind came up you could hear the needles whistling.

The trip took almost two hours.

Of course we didn’t take them all the way to the Upper Sinyachikhensky Works. That was just a story. Instead, our destination was the Nizhni Seliminski mine shaft, where they used to dig for coal or ore or something, but which had long been abandoned. The mine itself was just a big hole in the ground, and it was very deep, which was why we had chosen it as the perfect place.

Quite some time later, all according to plan, we came to a small clearing just off the side of the road, and we pulled the carts in there, one after the other. The night air had cooled pleasantly, and now it was I who looked up into the sky, searching for something but unable to see it, to find it. There was nothing there. Did that mean it was just as Marx said, that there was no god and religion was just the opiate of the people?

“We’ve reached our destination and will walk the rest of the way,” I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling.

Yuri and I climbed down from the front of our cart, went around and helped Matushka and Nun Varvara from the back. Meanwhile, two other guards went quickly ahead-they were supposed to wait for us there, on the edge.

“We have to walk about two hundred paces,” I said, taking Matushka by the arm. “I’ll guide you.”

“Spasibo,” said Matushka as I took her by the arm.

We were first, Matushka and I, and after us came Yuri guiding the short nun. Their eyes were still blindfolded and their hands still tied behind their backs, of course. The path was narrow and kind of rough, but I did my best to steer Matushka, warning her of a rock, a turn, a hole.

Almost halfway there, Matushka said, “Tell me, Pavel, is the night still clear? Can you still see the moon and the stars?”

“Yes, it’s perfectly clear,” I replied, even though the clouds were moving in.

“Good, then I’m happy.”

I had the sense we could have uncovered her eyes and untied her hands and she would not have protested or screamed out or tried to get away. I guessed that she would even have knelt for us. And I wanted to do this for her, give her the chance to see her fate, but of course we had long ago decided otherwise. I led her along the path, but as we walked I couldn’t help wondering why we were doing this? What had driven us to this point? I thought maybe I should run away, at least with her, Matushka, but it would have been impossible. They would come after us both.

So why were we doing this? Oh, yes.

As one of my comrades had explained it to me, “You cannot go after a king without killing him.”

I supposed that included all of his family too. We had to be positive there was no going back. That was the least I owed my dead wife and my unborn child, wasn’t it, to make sure there was no going back?

The guards who had gone ahead of us had disappeared in the darkness, for they had hurried to the appointed spot. Meanwhile, Yuri and Nun Varvara were some twenty paces behind us, half walking, half stumbling through the dark. Looking farther back, I saw two other guards leading two more prisoners. Really, if all went according to plan this shouldn’t be too difficult, it shouldn’t take too long. They would go one after the other. So far, not one of the former royals was crying or calling out in protest, and that surprised me. How could the extermination of the mighty House of Romanov be so easy?

I hung on tightly to Matushka’s arm as we passed around a clump of birches, and then just up ahead I saw our two comrades standing there in front of the deep pit, right on the edge. We had chosen this place not just because the mine was abandoned and not just because it was so far out of town but because of that, its depth, maybe twenty or thirty arzhin. Last week I had come all the way out here to check it out, and in the broad daylight I couldn’t even see the bottom, for it was as deep as an old pine tree was tall. Equally important, the rocks along the shaft and at the bottom were jagged and hard and sharp.

In a weak voice, I said, “We’re almost there.”

I looked into her face then, that beautiful face that had enchanted so many, and saw them, her tears. One by one they were rolling out from beneath her blindfold, not a torrent but a steady flow. Her lips were trembling.

And when we reached the small platform where the other two guards were waiting, I said to Matushka, “Please… just one small step up…”

She knew the end was coming then, for her entire body started shaking, and yet she stepped up onto the platform without the least resistance. I, too, stepped right next to her and peered into the mine shaft and saw what she could not: dark infinity.

Though the words came not easily, they came with confidence as she said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

I nodded to one of the guards, who stood there with his rifle raised high, and he brought the butt of his weapon down against the side of her head in one hard blow. There was a crack of her skull, and she groaned deeply and powerfully and almost immediately started to collapse.

It was at that very moment that I pushed her, and she tumbled head over heels into the pit, her pale-gray robes billowing about her until the blackness swallowed her up. I heard her hit one side of the mine shaft, the other, and then with a loud but dull noise she fell onto the rocks at the bottom.

And then silence.

Pavel stared into the dying flames of the fire, his face blank, his eyes streaming with tears. Until that night he’d never been able to get the death of his wife out of his mind-over and over in his mind’s eye he’d seen her body blossoming with such red blood as she lay against the pure white snow. But ever since the night he’d pushed the Grand Duchess Elisavyeta he’d seen something else altogether: the image of her tumbling into the unforgiving darkness. Worse, he’d not been able to get her last words out of his mind, they haunted him nearly every minute of every day.

Across the fire, Vladimir wiped his own eyes, and asked, “And the others?”

“We clubbed them all, and one by one they went over the edge. All seven of them-next the little Nun Varvara, then the young princes and the one servant. We only had to shoot one-Grand Duke Sergei Mixhailovich, the one we’d already shot in the arm. He must have heard the grunts and groans of the others, and he put up a fight, so we put a gun to his head and blasted out his brains. As for the others, we just bashed in their heads and tossed them in, one after another.”

Pavel stared up into the sky, which was rapidly becoming lighter. All at once he began to sob as he never had, deep and furious, crying not because of what was about to happen to him that very morning but because of all that he’d done, the path of horror he’d left behind. How could he see it all so clearly now? Why had it been so hidden before? Falling off the log on which he’d sat, he collapsed on the ground, carried away by his deep, rolling tears.

His face buried in the dirty snow, he cried, “Father… how… how… could…”

Vladimir, his own face mopping wet, threw off the old, ratty blanket in which he’d been wrapped all night. Sitting there now in his black robes, he clutched with one hand the large brass cross that hung from his neck, and with the other made a sign of the cross over this poor suffering soul.

“Come to… to me, my son!” he called through his tears to Pavel.

“But… but Fa… Father Vladimir, I am unworthy! I am filthy with sin!”

“Come to me…! Rise and come to me, my son! There is still time… you must repent! Repent!”

“I am unworthy…!”

“There is no crime that cannot be forgiven if you repent with your entire being!”

“No…!”

And yet Pavel started crawling, one hand, one knee, one after the other. He sobbed as he had not since he was a child, his body racked with guilt, with despair, with regret. How could he have done that, killed so many and especially her? Toward what goal? The tears streamed down his face and dropped into the snow. He had thought he would receive satisfaction from his revenge, but all that was delivered unto him was torment. He had thought that he had killed to keep the Revolution rolling forward, so that the sins of their masters would never be repeated, but now he saw that the fury of upheaval was doomed only to repeat itself again and again. Dear Lord… how he wished that he and his wife had stayed in the countryside, how he wished they hadn’t gone to that demonstration on that bloody Sunday… how he wished he could hold his beautiful Shura in his arms and gaze softly upon their child who was never born.

“Come to me, Pavel!” called Father Vladimir.

His body heaving with sob after sob, Pavel moved on, lifting his head, seeing the cross that hung from Father Vladimir’s neck. He focused on that, this bright, shiny object that might, just might, lead somewhere, a kind of home, a kind of comfort. He saw them all-the bodies of Father Gapon, the bureaucrat in Novgorod, the blood-gasping sugar baron, the director general of the bank… and Matushka, Nun Varvara, the Princes, the Grand Duke, the servant-and he cried with every fiber of his being, wishing for his death, which was in fact only minutes away but which could not come soon enough.

With as much difficulty as if he were scaling up the mine shaft into which he’d thrown Matushka, he crawled across the ground. Finally reaching Father Vladimir, Pavel rose back on his knees and hurled himself into the priest’s lap, clutching like a drowning man at the brass cross and kissing it over and over.

He screamed, “Father, what have I done?”

Over him, Father Vladimir made the sign of the cross again and again, repeating and chanting, “Gospodi pomilui… Gospodi pomilui… Gospodi pomilui…!” The Lord have mercy… the Lord have mercy… the Lord have mercy!

They would have stayed that way for a good long while, but suddenly the two men, the sinner and the priest, were ripped apart. Before Pavel knew what was happening, two camp guards grabbed him and yanked him to his feet. A third took Father Vladimir by the arm and pulled him up.

“It is time,” said Father Vladimir to Pavel, his voice strained.

“Yes, it is time,” repeated Pavel, looking up and through his tears seeing the first of the daylight.

They were shoved along then, pushed and kicked by the guards toward a large hole some forty paces away. As he stumbled, Pavel was glad for this, glad that all would soon be over. Four years ago he had questioned one of his superiors, and in turn had been accused of anti-Soviet activity. For this he’d been sentenced to ten years at the Solovki Camp, which had been transformed from the ancient Solovetsky Monastery into a concentration camp, nearly the first of the USSR ’s many Gulags. In an attempt to get out of heavy work in a quarry, however, last month Pavel had become a “self-cutter,” amputating three of his own fingers.

For that his sentence had been changed: to be shot.

Similarly, Father Vladimir, having refused to stop preaching and consequently charged with spreading anti-Soviet propaganda, had received a similar sentence: to be shot.

As they now trudged along, Pavel looked up and on the thick brick wall of the monastery saw a red banner proudly proclaiming the popular slogan: Cherez trud domoi! Through work you will get home! But Pavel didn’t want to go home, for his home and his heart were long gone. He just wanted to escape to another world where he was sure to face eternal damnation.

A few paces later Pavel and Vladimir were led to a deep, wide hole they themselves had dug over the past week. They had finished just yesterday, and then the killing had begun.

“Gospodi!” For the sake of God, gasped Father Vladimir, staring with horror into the pit.

Pavel couldn’t believe it, either, the sight of so many bodies dumped in there. Forced to line up on the edge of the mass grave, the first ones were shot not ten minutes after Pavel and Father Vladimir had finished digging, the bodies falling this way and that into the pit. Even Pavel, now staring down at the bodies, was surprised at how many had been killed since just yesterday-sixty or seventy men and women, and over to one side a black mound of maybe twenty priests. The killings went on and on all the way until nightfall, at which time Pavel and Vladimir were told they would be shot with the first break of day.

Yes, they had been given one more night, and on that long night Pavel had told his story not only of her, the beautiful Grand Duchess, but of the Revolution for which he had killed and which would now kill him.

Knowing that they had but seconds left, Pavel reached over and took hold of Father Vladimir’s hand, and with a trembling voice said, “Thank you for listening to me, Father.”

The priest, turning slightly, raised his free hand and made a quick, awkward sign of the cross, saying, “Your confession has been heard.”

“But… but I do not wish… I do not deserve… to be forgiven.”

“That, my son, is not your decision, but His.”

Before Pavel could say anything else, he sensed it, the hard, cold barrel at the back of his head. The tears coming to his eyes, he looked up, saw the beauty of the blue morning, the sun streaking the sky, and he wondered if her thoughts had been like this in those last moments: of fear and hope and relief. And he wondered, too, if they, the Grand Duchess and he, would ever meet in the next life so that he might bow at her feet.

And then the shot came so quickly that he didn’t even feel it, let alone hear it, and his body tumbled forward, falling onto the many who had fallen before him.

It is easier for feeble straw to resist mighty fire than for the nature of sin to resist the power of love.