Read The Kitchen Boy for Free Online Page B

each cot was carefully covered with a striped slipcloth, and at the foot of each bed stood a simple chair on the back of which was carefully draped a light blouse. The blouses were identical, I noticed, because the girls so often wore identical clothing. Though their clothes had more than likely come from the fashionable dressmaker, Lamanova of Moscow, nothing they ever wore was very racy, never for a daughter of Aleksandra.
    Losing my nerve, I hesitated, for I had not been invited into these rooms. As I stood there, my eyes glanced over their things – next to each cot stood a small bedside table on which sat books and Bibles, an assortment of icons, and a few glass bottles filled with, I assumed, perfumed waters. The orderliness of the room ceased at the walls, however, for on the wall above their beds each great princess had tacked a jumble of mementos, primarily photographs. The snapshots were mostly of their mama and papa, their dogs, a favorite soldier or two, the Livadia Palace – a large white palace overlooking the Crimean Sea, which Anastasiya Nikolaevna had told me was their favorite home – but there was also a handful of sketches and watercolors the girls themselves had done. Sure, the
komendant
had recently eliminated their favorite pastime, photography, by confiscating the girls’ square, wooden Kodaks, but they were still drawing, and they were all reasonably capable at this.
    An attractive electric chandelier hung from the ceiling – it looked like a bouquet of flowers hung upside down, with the blooms fashioned in colored glass. That was where the electric bulbs were, in those glass blooms, and I passed beneath this fixture. Even though I was being extremely bold, even brazen, by entering these rooms uninvited, I pressed on, my feet shuffling across the brown linoleum that covered the floor.
    “Aleksandra Fyodorovna?” I called, my voice quivering with nervousness.
    This next chamber – their room, where the Emperor, the Empress, and the Heir Tsarevich slept – occupied the front of the house, with two windows facing Voznesensky Prospekt and Ascension Square, and two windows on the side facing the lane. It was a fairly good-sized room, certainly befitting a well-to-do merchant, and it was filled with some polished wooden desks and tables, a wardrobe, a few chairs, one of them soft and upholstered. The walls were covered in pale yellow striped wallpaper, with a frieze of flowers at the top. There was one larger bed, and there to my right-
    “Zdravstvoojte.”
Hello, he said in a sheepish voice.
    I was as surprised to catch him as he was to be discovered, for Aleksei Nikloaevich was not only out of bed, he was standing on his own and holding a small wooden box. We’d all been told that he couldn’t walk, that if he went anywhere he either had to be carried or taken in the rolling chair, yet…
    “You won’t tell anyone that I’m up, will you, Leonka?” he pleaded. “Especially Mama – she would be very angry.”
    Before I could say anything the pallid boy aimed the wooden box at me, looked down into it, and pushed a button.
    I said, “I thought the
komendant
took away all the cameras.”
    “All except mine. I have a secret place where I keep it hidden.”
    To be sure, he didn’t walk well, and the Heir quickly hobbled over to his bed and jumped in. He wore a white nightshirt, and when he pulled a white blanket over his legs he was like a ghost disappearing into a cloud. Working as quickly as a thief, he took hold of a wooden table that stradled his bed and brought it closer to himself. He pushed aside a couple of books and some paper that lay on the table, and then removed the glass plate from the camera and put in a fresh one.
    “Now you take my picture,” he said, handing the apparatus to me.
    “But…”
    “Don’t worry. It’s easy.”
    As he sat there in bed, propped up by several pillows, he quickly told me how to do it, take a photograph, which I had never done before.