I need to recruit you all for a bit of critique. This is the beginning of Maria's section. I'm wondering if it's too morose for her and should be scrapped and started fresh.
After lunch I lie down on my cot. The bedroom is empty except for Jemmy, dozing on Anastasia’s bed. Sometimes it feels like the sun never goes down here. It’s barely dark when we go to bed, and the sun is scalding when we get up. If I put a pillow over my face the room gets dimmer, but after a minute the weight and heat become too much and I throw it off again. I’m glad my hair is short. I couldn’t stand it otherwise.
I only had two years to wear my hair up before the measles. Mama let me pin it up on our last Standart cruise the summer before the war broke out, but that doesn’t count.
It’s selfish to complain. Anastasia turned sixteen just weeks before we had our heads shaved. We did manage to get one picture of her with her hair up. Olga took a photograph of her, Tatiana, and me when I was still in bed recovering from the measles. I have it in one of the albums I was allowed to bring in from the shed, but I haven’t gotten around to coloring it yet.
Mama and Papa both said the bread we made was excellent. There was only enough flour for two loaves, so Olga and Tatiana made one and Anastasia and I made the other - the Big and Little Pairs, like always. Alexei gobbled up most of one loaf. I know Anastasia would have liked some more than she had but I don’t grudge him a few extra mouthfuls. He is going to be tsar.
That’s what Mama says, at least. She says that the people don’t know what’s best for them and that as soon as we’re rescued we’ll find the people who have stayed loyal to us and everything will be all right again. I don’t know what my sisters think about that. In Tobolsk we used to stay up at night and talk about the future. We don’t do that anymore.
I can hear Olga and Tatiana working on a jigsaw puzzle at the dining room table. Their favorite is the one of the ballerinas onstage at the Maryisnki Theatre in Petersburg. Last week one of the pieces fell and Ortino gobbled it up, so now the prima ballerina is missing the right half of her face. I don’t know why they still sit there fitting the pieces together. Why make something when you know it will never be finished?
Mama and Papa are in their bedroom with the door shut. Alexei and Anastasia went into the drawing room to play chess, and Nyuta and the other servants are drifting around, reading or dusting or cleaning up after lunch.
I’m by myself.
When Olga was nine she told me to write Mama a letter asking if she might have her own room at our palace at Peterhof. I did it, adding that she should be allowed to lower her skirts up. She liked that. At the end after I signed my name I made sure to write that it was my idea to write to her. Mama thought it was very funny and had the note framed. It hangs on the wall of her sitting room at Peterhof still. At least I think it does.
My sisters talk about wanting their own rooms. At home Olga and Tatiana shared a room, right next door to the one I shared with Anastasia. After Papa abdicated and we were sent to Tobolsk we all shared one bedroom, smaller than the one we’ve got here. I think it’s much nicer this way. I like knowing we’re all together and Mama, Papa, and Alexei are just on the other side of the door. I’ve never had my own room, except when I had measles and had to sleep alone so I wouldn’t infect my sisters. Those were bad nights. The palace was dark and Papa was gone and I thought at every minute the door was going to burst open and some awful thing would happen.
I feel safer here, even though the sound of gunshots gets closer every night. As long as we are together we will be safe. That’s what Papa says, and Mama says, and Tatiana says, so it must be true.
“What are you doing lying in here all alone?” Anastasia strolls in, munching an apple. She sits on the edge of my bed, folds her legs underneath her, and holds the apple out to me. “Do you want a bite? The sisters brought a few this morning. I know they’re for Alexei but it’s been so long since I’ve had one. I don’t think Kharitonov will notice. Anyway if he does I can say it was Tatiana.”
“I’m not hungry, Nastya,” I say.
She shrugs and takes another bite. “I’m always hungry. Alexei thinks he beat me twice, but I let him win the second time. Do you think that counts as a lie?”
“No,” I say. “You’re a good sister.” And she is. The hardest thing was being separated from her when I left Tobolsk with Mama and Papa. I thought for sure Mama would choose Tatiana, but then she decided the Governess should stay behind and run things, and Olga was to look after Alexei, and Anastasia had to stay here to keep his spirits up, and before I knew what had happened I was in Mama’s boudoir and she was holding my hands and saying, “We need you with us, Mashenka. Please tell your sisters.” I didn’t want to say anything because it was so awful of me, but I was happy I was the one they chose. I couldn’t stand being separated from Mama and Papa.
None of us slept the night before we were to leave. My sisters and I sat on our bedroom floor and talked about the toys we used to play with and the Standart officers we had crushes on. Tatiana asked if I remembered the time she and Olga built a house in our playroom at Tsarskoe Selo and told me they were the mama and papa and I couldn’t come in. “You didn’t cry,” she said. “But a few minutes later you came back with all of the dolls you could carry, and you said, ‘I am the auntie and I’ve brought presents for everyone!’” My sisters all laughed when she told the story. “You were so good, Mashka,” Tatiana concluded.
I’ve never felt very good.
“One of the Letts was looking at you in the yard,” Anastasia says. “Did you see him?”
“Don’t lie,” I say.
“What’s the matter?” she asks. “Don’t you want your officer and twenty children any longer?” She pokes me in the back. “Or are you going to be a nun like Auntie Ella? Maybe you should ask the commandant if you can just go join the Novotikhvinsky sisters right away.”
Anastasia is the only one who still teases me about that. When I was small, maybe seven or eight, I told her that when I grew up I wanted to marry an officer and have twenty children. She told Olga and Tatiana, and Tatiana told Mama, and soon everyone was saying things like, “Here comes an officer, Mashka. Maybe he’s going to ask you to marry him.” No one said anything like that after that awful thing that happened on my birthday. Papa didn’t wink and Tatiana didn’t poke me and say I’d better not get married before she did.
“I’m so bored,” Anastasia says. “I want a cigarette.”
I sit up and face her. “Anastasia Nikolaevna, if Mama ever heard you say that-”
She smiles at me and raises her eyebrow until they disappear behind her fringe, then purses her lips so she looks like a fish.
I can’t help it. I burst out laughing.
“I do, though,” Anastasia continues. “I haven’t smoked one since we left Tsarskoe. Do you think any of the guards would give me some of their tobacco if I asked? There must be one, I think. When we get out of here I’m going to forget all about being a lady and do what I want. I’ll climb trees and smoke all the cigarettes in the world. And I’ll keep my hair short. I’m never going to have long hair again.” She reaches up and tousles her hair until it rings her head like a strawberry blonde halo.
