Romanov(19)

Undeterred, Mamma asked, “What of my medical kit? If Alexei gets any worse, we will need what is left of our morphine supply.” Her hand drifted to her head. Alexei wasn’t the only one who needed—or used—the morphine. Mamma’s headaches and weak heart were equally as crippling as his hemophilia.

“We may be exiled, but we can still make requests.” Papa opened the paper and read it as calmly as he’d spoken.

I wished I could keep my peace the way he did. It was as though he bore no animosity. I tried to be like him, but sometimes I felt as though a small ball of hate lurked in the back corner of my heart—waiting to spring out and consume me.

Mamma returned to Alexei’s room. Tatiana and Maria returned to the pups, and Olga returned to her mending—the only entertainment she had in this prison of ours.

Papa and I were alone.

With the Bolshevik soldiers busy dealing with the angry people and sifting through our belongings, an opportunity finally rested before me. Was it . . . time?

I watched Papa read his paper. Did the same turmoil exist inside his chest? He was too calm to show it. I was too stubborn to show it.

Seeing his form steadied my fire—his mustache quirked at an angle while he contemplated the contents of the paper, his legs crossed the way they always were when I would find him reading in the library. We were together again.

He finally looked up, and his mustache wiggled above the crack of a smile. His eyes went squinty and my heart melted all the way out my slippers. Papa folded the newspaper and patted his knee.

I was sixteen. An exiled princess. A child no longer. Still, I strode across the room and settled onto his lap, linking my arms around his neck. No amount of age, pride, or maturity could stop me from loving my papa with the heart of a little girl. I kissed his cheek and we stayed that way for several seconds, soaking in each other’s company. Me wondering—for the hundredth time—how our beloved country could have missed his sweetness and demanded his abdication . . . and even his death.

“How is my little shvibzik?” Papa asked.

We’d exchanged little more than family talk since my arrival. This time was ours. “I put eggs in the Tobolsk soldiers’ boots.”

Papa dragged a hand down his face, but I still caught a glimmer of amusement. “What will I do with you?”

“You will let me stay on your lap and we will discuss the prose of Pushkin all the day long.” My voice remained playful, but the slight tension in his posture told me he read the subtext.

I swelled with pride. Now he knew I’d succeeded in his mission for me. I wanted to tell him the entire story—the why behind the eggs in the soldiers’ boots and how I hung out of a carriage and vexed Olga so severely that she burst into tears. I wanted to tell him how I winked at Yurovsky as we left the station with the Matryoshka doll snug in my corset.

But even without the details, he sought the story victory. “Did you bring any Pushkin novels with you?”

“Most of them are packed in our Tobolsk trunks that are being examined by the soldiers.” I picked a piece of fluff off his linen shirt. “But I brought one with me on the train so I would not perish of boredom.”

“That’s my girl.”

I plucked the newspaper from his hand, opened it, and blocked our faces from view of the hallway. “What now, Papa?” This, I whispered in German. From my repertoire of Russian, English, German, and French, I figured German was the language a common Bolshevik would least understand if he walked in during our conversation.

Papa peeked over the newspaper. I already knew no guards were in sight and the dogs were yapping, so we were safe. For the moment.

“You must keep it with you, Nastya. It was a gift to Mamma and me when we were newly married from the greatest spell master, Vasily Dochkin. There used to be seven layers. Every layer holds a . . .”—he dropped his voice even lower—“spell.”

“But how do you open them? And how many layers remain? And what is in them?” What made Papa claim it was our family’s salvation?

“Each layer opens when the spell is ready. There are three remaining layers—”

“Citizen Nikolai!” Commandant Avdeev called from the doorway.

My brain startled with a zing, but my well-trained muscles kept my body still. My weight on Papa’s lap kept him from startling too badly. Good thing I held the newspaper, because Papa would have crumpled it.

I lowered the paper casually, trying not to allow my disgust at Avdeev’s informal title for Papa to show. “Dobroye dyen, Commandant,” I said in Russian.

“Your trunks from Tobolsk shall be brought up shortly. I expect them organized by evening.”

I hopped from Papa’s lap, indignation singeing my tongue, but Papa rose and gave a little bow. “Of course, Commandant.”

No. No! I wanted to push away Papa’s humility, pull him straight again, and remind him how much more of a leader he was than tipsy Avdeev. But his humility was why he made such a good leader for our family. Wise. Humble. Papa.

An example to me.

I still didn’t bow. I couldn’t make myself. Not yet.

Avdeev held a bottle of liquor, possibly from one of our trunks. He stepped aside to let Zash and Ivan haul in a trunk of Papa’s journals, then took the bottle with him to his office and shut the door.

Zash lowered the trunk carefully. His gaze burned my skin as he returned to the stairway for another trunk. It must have been difficult for him to load our belongings into our home of exile when it seemed like excess to a common soldier such as him.