Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [59]
And the two younger girls, so tenderly devoted to one another, both merry, a little plump—broad in the bone, like their grandfather: Marie, a Russian beauty, and good-hearted Anastasia. For her constant readiness to serve everyone they called Anastasia “our good, fat Tutu.” They also called her schwibzik—little one.
They did not like to study very much (this is evident from the many mistakes in their diaries). The sharpest was Olga, who did have an aptitude for learning.
“Ah, I understand: the helping verbs are the servant of the verbs. Only one unlucky verb, ‘to have,’ must serve itself,” she told her teacher Gilliard.
The sentence of a girl surrounded by servants from the cradle.
They slept in large children’s beds and on cots, practically without pillows, two to a room.
They would take those cots with them into exile, all the way to Ekaterinburg; they would sleep on them that very last night. Then their murderers would spend the night on those beds.
Like the whole family, they kept diaries. Subsequently in Tobolsk, when the commissar came from Moscow, they would burn those diaries. Only a few notebooks would remain.
I am looking through the diaries of Marie and Tatiana, in the traditional scrapbooks, with gold bindings and a moiré lining (their father had started his diary as a boy in just such books). Marie’s faceless enumeration of events: “This morning church, supper in the evening with Papa and Alexei, in the afternoon tea with Ania.”
Tatiana kept exactly the same kind of diary.
Again in Olga’s diary (in a plain black notebook; she wanted to be like her father even in this): “We had tea.… We played tiddlywinks.” And so on. But one thing is surprising: it is always “we” in the diaries. They were together so much that they even thought of themselves collectively.
An enchanting detail: dried flowers remained in the girls’ diaries. Flowers from the park at Tsarskoe Selo, where they had been so happy. They took them along into exile and preserved them between the pages of their notebooks. After burning nearly all their diaries, they put the flowers in the remaining notebooks. Souvenirs of a destroyed life.
I turn the pages cautiously. If only they don’t crumble into dust, these flowers, dried once upon a time by little girls in the last carefree summer of their life.
There is a photograph in the empress’s album.
She is lying on a couch, her head flung back, her disturbing, tragic profile. Around her on little benches sit her daughters and on a pillow on the floor—Alexei. The girls are gazing at him with adoring smiles. The delicate oval of his face, the light chestnut, curling hair with a streak of bronze, and his mother’s gray eyes—the little prince. The chronically ill prince.
“Give me a bicycle,” he asks his mother.
“You know you cannot.”
“I want to play tennis like my sisters.”
“You know you dare not play.”
And then, breaking their hearts, he cries, repeating: “Why aren’t I like everyone else?”
The girls witnessed and helped their mother during his endless suffering. During the war they, like their mother, would be good nurses.
Pages from their life. Brilliant balls, the noisy life of society—how little of all this there was in the life of these first young ladies of Russia.
But then, one summer….
Aboard the imperial yacht Standart, they approached a pier in Crimea. Dressed in enormous white hats and long white dresses they were seated in open carriages, which set out in a brilliant string.
Alix’s dream had come true: on the site of the unhappy palace where Alexander III had died, where Nicholas himself had nearly died, they had erected a miracle. A white Italianate palace to replace the old wooden one; the sea stretched out from the rooms. They would remember this paradise in their Siberian imprisonment, in their freezing house.
At Livadia they took many photographs