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By Root 2316 0

had become a nun, but she had not lived in a convent, and she had taken her vows in secret. The secret nun left behind many amazing photographs—Tsarskoe Selo, the palace at Livadia—the whole antediluvian world that had drowned in eternity. She also left watercolors drawn in the last empress’s hand, as well as drawings by the last tsarevich and letters from the tsaritsa and her children. This was Anya. Having lived more than half the twentieth century, Anna Vyrubova departed this life.

With her went an era.

AFTERWORD

(NEW MYSTERIES?)

A mountain of new readers’ letters—agonizing letters. I keep trying to put an end to the book, but they keep coming.

The niece of Elizaveta Ersberg, the tsar’s family’s parlormaid, wrote again: “A few words about my aunt’s fate after the execution of the tsar’s family. When Kolchak took Tobolsk, Elizaveta was called in for questioning to the commission of the jurist Nikolai Alexeyevich Sokolov (who turned out to have been a schoolmate of my father’s at the Third Grammar School). Elizaveta arrived in Ekaterinburg with the advance White troops. She hired a boatman and searched for the bodies in a pond and in some swamp (she had received information) but found nothing. Then through the Red Cross mission she traced—via the Far East, Japan, America, France, and Denmark—the tsar’s mother, Empress Marie Feodorovna, who gave her a subsidy, then went to Russia via Switzerland and Czechoslovakia in November 1928. She was allowed back into her homeland at my father’s personal request to Molotov. At the border Liza was given a written undertaking to appear at the Cheka in twenty-four hours. When she came, she was given a written undertaking about not disclosing the facts of the life of the tsar’s family and the circumstances connected therewith….

“Now about the story of my aunt’s friend, Anna Demidova, apparently shot in the Ipatiev house.

“No, Anna Demidova’s story did not end on the day of the execution, and here is why I draw this conclusion. My father loved to take photographs, and we had a box of negatives with views of parks in the country and on that background photographs of friends. There were many pictures of Aunt Elizaveta in the company of Demidova and other tsarist servants. Therefore I knew Anna Stefanovna’s face very well and can see her now right before my eyes. Average height, plump, with a rather common, round face, her hair sleeked back at the temples and a headdress on the top of her head….

“Even before Aunt Elizaveta’s return to Russia, I was taken to visit her sister. To amuse me, they got out an album for me with a beautiful onyx binding—Aunt Elizaveta’s album. In it were at least ten photographs of Demidova. I already recognized her. But who this was in the album—a tall, lean, pockmarked woman—they couldn’t tell me; Aunt Elizaveta could tell me. Christmas 1929, when Aunt Elizaveta was home, we went to visit our aunts. Once again I asked for the album and began leafing through it—but all the photos of Demidova, even in groups, had vanished or been smeared over. To my question about where the photograph of ‘papa’s fiancée’ was, my aunts began hushing me, and when I inquired about the tall, pockmarked woman, Elizaveta said that she was a very good person but she died. And I cried.

“My aunts died from hunger on the same day, March 12. They had been supposed to be evacuated, and their passports had been taken away at ZhAKT [Housing Office], but they didn’t go. And no one would give them bread ration cards without a passport. (Thus the tsaritsa’s parlormaid died of hunger.)

“Demidova’s story surfaced later. I was working in a plant (54 Lermontov, Leningrad). In 1968 a master compressor technician came to see us in shop number 17—Demidov. I saw him for the first time and was dumbstruck. Where had I seen that face? And suddenly I knew—Anna Demidova. I sort of joked, in conversation with him, that if he put on a bonnet he would look like a lady I knew. I asked if he wasn’t related to Anna Stepanovna Demidova. He replied, ‘Not Stepanovna, Stefanovna—she was my father’s