Interlude
Tatiana: The Staircase
I rushed towards the ruckus coming from the stairs.
With our snow hill gone, boredom had gripped Alexei and he’d decided to make a toboggan out of a rug and used it to slide down the stairs.
Something had gone wrong and he’d hit his knee. Papa came into stairwell, terror hiding in his face. Relief flickered across it, but it was short lived. Alexei’s hands squeezed tight around his right knee. He was hunched over, his jaw clenched tight, a hiss of breath escaping in gasps.
I’d seen this before, when he’d fallen and hurt something in his groin. He’d been in agony for days as what would have been a muscle pull or a bruise for any of the rest of us, swelled up with pooling blood.
“I just want to be a real boy,” Alexei said, his voice filled with equal measure of pain and frustration.
“You are a real boy,” Papa said, “not Pinocchio.” It was an attempt to lighten the mood, to make Alexei feel better, the tone soothing and struggling so very hard to be humorous.
“No, I’m not.” It was as if someone other than Alexei spoke. Someone older. Someone harder. Someone wounded in a way that would never heal. “Even a wood puppet can slide down stairs without breaking.”
The ache in my chest grew, swelling until I thought my heart would be crushed. But no. It kept beating, despite the look on Alexei’s face, the one that said he’d be better off as a puppet, a lifeless thing that could feel no pain.
I took a step back as Papa drew Alexei into his arms. Tears pushed into my eyes. I blinked them back.
Blinked and held them in with a swallow. I knew then that I’d never forget the look on Papa’s face. That gentle face now lined with worry unlike I’d ever seen before. It may have been Alexei who’d hurt himself, but the fall had wounded Papa as well.
His face was like a mask. I realized then and there that it was a mask of glass that he’d been wearing all along. It was cracked, spiderwebbed by tiny fissures that had been welded together again and again, sanded over, polished. But this crack, this fissure, had made all the previous ones stand out as if they had never been fixed.
Since Alexei was a baby, his illness had cast a shadow over Papa’s reign. What was to be his joy, his heir, had been twisted into a weapon to be used against him. A weapon he loved so much he would allow it to destroy us all. This weapon—my beloved brother, for I loved him with all my heart—was why we had isolated ourselves from the world, wrapping our family in a cocoon of secrecy. If his illness were to become known then Russia had no heir. We had hidden Alexei from the world, and the world from ourselves. And it had all been for nothing. Papa was no longer tsar. Alexei was no longer his heir, no matter how much some of the men still thought of him as such.
It had all been in vain. If we’d only known then, what was to come.
And then it hit me. What if Alexei was my child? Would I have done things differently? Could I bear a child knowing that this would be his life?
I shook my head.
No, I would not.
I loved children. I loved being around them, whether siblings, cousins, or strangers. But I wasn’t Mama. I didn’t have her strength.
Mama who had such a high sense of duty, who had been wholly devoted to her maternal obligations, who lived and breathed for her family. Who was often so preoccupied with her burdens that she seemed absentminded, who lost herself in a melancholy reverie, who became indifferent to the things about her.
It had cost her—us—because the sensitive, loving soul that was Mama was, to outsiders, nothing but a cold and haughty empress. Her enemies had used the mask she wore to cover her sensitivity and to project reserve, against her. They had twisted everything that was good about Mama and used it to turn her into a weapon against Papa, against the empire, and there had been nothing anyone could do about it.
Even as the thought formed I knew it to be false. Mama and Papa had chosen not to do anything about it. They had chosen to believe that what others thought about them didn’t matter. That was not a luxury a Romanov could indulge in. If only they had learned it sooner.
Dr. Botkin came into the stairwell. He examined Alexei, who was rocking back and forth now, blinking back tears.
Papa moved around Alexei and grabbed him under the arms. Dr. Botkin grabbed his legs. Alexei’s breath hitched.
I moved aside to let them pass and allow them to take him into his room.
I knew what awaited my sweet, charming brother. Blood would pool under his knee and spread down his leg. His skin would swell. The pressure from the blood and the swelling would press on the nerves. He would moan and cry as the pain grew worse with each hour.
Just like the last time when he’d fallen and hit his knee, there would be nothing to alleviate his suffering. Nothing anyone’s tender love and care would cure. Papa no longer needed to steal moments out of his schedule to come in and distract him with stories. He could be with him the entire time, but that would likely make it worse for the both of them.
And worse for Mama as well. She too had no duties to tear her from her son’s side. They would both don those glass masks as they tried to comfort and amuse him, dying inside a bit at a time.
Alexei would burn, hot to the touch, delirious with fever. He’d groan piteously, his face unrecognizable in its deathly whiteness. All of his suffering and distress would come out, balled up into one word: “Mummy.”
And Mama would kiss his hair, his eyes, his forehead as if those loving touches could ease his pain or bring back the life that was always threatening to leave him.
How did Mama bear it? The impotence? The anguish of knowing that she herself was the cause?
Before, my sisters and I had lessons to distract us. But no more. We too would sit with Alexei and let the glass crystallize on our faces until the masks became who we were, until we could not pull it down for anyone. And inside would be the knowledge that any one of us girls could be in that bed had we been born boys. That any son of mine might inherit this terrible disease for which there was no cure—only tears and pain and death.
The cycle would repeat itself. Just as it had with Mama’s uncle, her brother, her nephews. Death pursued all men, but it paid particular attention to the men of my family, taking up residence in their very blood.
Would Alexei come back from this fall as he had from all the others? As if he had forgotten his suffering? As if he was safe from death’s pursuit? How long before his heart no longer filled with hope? How long before the gates of death finally closed behind him?