• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2340 0

hung back, bickering with the watchwoman, so there would be time to remove them. After all, he had a younger son named Alexei, too. The son said that Lyukhanov liked to say: ‘God can do anything.’ Evidently, though, he later told his wife everything. He kept silent for a long time, but he couldn’t hold back—he told her. Commandant Avdeyev’s sister could not understand him, though! She was a person of ideas. Like Yurovsky, like all of them. The most she could do was not inform on the father of her four children. But live with him—that she couldn’t do. So he lost his ideological Avgusta. However, the suffering in her dying hour evidently pried something half-open for her. And she forgave him.”

We were silent for a while.

I said: “But in the White Guard investigation, someone told a story from one of Ermakov’s men that he saw Alexei’s body at the mine.”

“Exactly: someone told a story from someone else….”

“By the way, Yurovsky was alarmed too; evidently the rumors about Anastasia moved him to take action as well. In 1920, when this mysterious, ‘miraculously saved’ woman appeared in Berlin, he gave the historian Pokrovsky his Note, the idea behind which was ‘They all died.’”

“Can it really be that despite all your clearly major opportunities, you never attempted to open the grave? After all, you knew where it was, didn’t you?”

He chuckled, then said, “Whether I tried to or not—it’s a horrible place, believe me. How that grave draws you all! In 1928 Mayakovsky came to Sverdlovsk and immediately wanted to see the grave of the tsar and his family. The chairman of the Ural Soviet at the time was a certain Paramonov. Later, of course, he was repressed, but—a rare case—not executed. After his rehabilitation Paramonov came back alive. He used to tell me how they took Mayakovsky to the place ‘where the family’s bodies were burned’—which was how Paramonov referred to the ‘grave.’ This was his favorite story—how he searched at the ‘burning place’ for ‘notches left in a birch.’ That day, when he took Mayakovsky, there was a hard frost and the trees were hoary, and he searched for a long time but didn’t find any notch.

As for the notches in the birches and Paramonov, all of it was confirmed later in a letter I received.

From a letter of literary scholar Kirill Sherstok in Frunze:

“When I was working on my thesis about Mayakovsky, Paramonov told me how Mayakovsky visited him twice and how they went to the last Russian emperor’s final refuge.… Paramonov said that in the poem ‘The Emperor’—about the tsar’s grave—Mayakovsky made a mistake, asserting that the emperor had been buried ‘under a cedar.’ He was buried between three birches. I asked, ‘And where is this place?’ He answered that there were two men left who knew it: he, Paramonov, and one more man, whom he did not name. I recalled Paramonov saying, ‘No one must know this,’ and adding, ‘so that there are no pilgrimages.’”

As he was leaving, my guest said: “This whole story is like a polemic with Dostoevsky. Starting with the question to Alyosha Karamazov: ‘If to erect the edifice of a happy mankind it were necessary to torture just one small child, would you agree to base this edifice on his tear?’ One Alyosha was asked this question and with the help of another slain Alyosha [Alexei] they answered.” He fell silent. “One thing, though, is clear: he will come back to us.”

I asked him to repeat that.

“I mean the sovereign emperor. It’s a banal story, though. Killing the family, those idiots preempted his return. ‘In my end is my beginning’—those words were once embroidered by his relative Mary Stuart. By the way, after this relative had her head cut off and her headless body was taken away, her wide dress rustled, and a tiny little dog jumped from it, howling. It was exactly that kind of little dog—the same breed—that a few centuries later turned up hidden—also during a murder—in the sleeve of Mary Stuart’s descendant—a grand duchess. Everything comes back, everything.”

“In my end is my beginning.” A sacrifice. Did the last emperor really understand that?

——

Of course,