Read Online The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander - Free Book Online Page A

English style, the Empress’s favorite, a taste acquired, of course, at the court of her granny. Yet all of this beauty was not what impressed me so. What first astounded me was the number of photographs, pictures of aunts and uncles and cousins and children that covered the walls and virtually every tabletop. Such was the importance of family to her. But then I saw her obsession, her sickness – all the icons. The walls of their sleeping alcove were covered from floor to ceiling with hundreds of religious pictures. Pictures of the Virgin Mary. Saint George the Dragon Slayer. Saint Nicholas. Saint Michael. Big, silver-covered icons. Little jewel-encrusted portraits of every saint imaginable. On and on. There was not a square inch that was not covered with an icon through which God was supposed to work, a window for him to reach from the high heavens to the lowly earth. Aleksandra was continually arranging and rearranging them too, as if she only had to get the order correct for God to hear her fervent prayers.
Nyet, nyet
, not
normalno
. Not at all. Even I recognized this, young as I was. She was more than a fool for God. She was a fanatic. Why, after giving birth to four daughters she was desperate to bear a boy, an heir, and to achieve this she had the monk Serafim of Sarov canonized. And after that grand ceremony Nikolai and Aleksandra crept down to the spring where the monk was known to have worked miracles hundreds of years earlier. And there, in the dead of night, they bathed naked, just the two of them. The next day there were a number of known miracles – children healed of terrible maladies, a blind woman who regained her sight, an invalid who walked for the first time in ten years – and soon thereafter Aleksandra became pregnant with Aleksei. Some say it was an act of God Himself, but why would he do such a dark thing, give Russia such a troubled heir? Rather, I think it was this inescapable Russian fate.
    But, sure, while our Empress was cold on the outside, she was at the same time wildly passionate on the inside, and in this way so very, very Russian. In the carnal sense, she and the Emperor were the most loving of couples; in their early letters to one another there is even mention of their pet names for their genitalia. And this, from a granddaughter of that tight Victoria!
Radi boga
– Dear Lord – Aleksandra must be rolling in death, knowing that those pet names for their privates have been published around the globe!
    Late that very same night my uncle and I were carrying a trunk marked N.A. NO. 12 – ALBUMS, meaning it was Nikolai Aleksandrovich’s twelfth trunk, the one filled with photo albums. We proceeded from the maple living room, a very attractive, two-story room covered with bear rugs and filled with mementos – it was here the family often lunched together in private – and passed into what was known as the corner living room. It had not been redone in the
stijl moderne
, but rather left in the older classical style. And as Uncle Vanya and I carried the trunk around a small gilt table and two chairs, I looked over and saw Aleksandra Fyodorovna herself staring up at a large tapestry of a woman, her three young children gathered around her. It was after midnight, and despite the chaos swirling around the Imperial Family, the Empress just stood there, not so much as flinching.
    “Why does the Empress stare at that rug on the wall?” I asked my uncle as we passed through the main doors from their apartments, the very doors once guarded by their faithful Negroes, the huge men dressed in turbans and colorful dress. “Who is the woman pictured?”
    “Marie Antoinette,” he replied in his deep voice, leaving it at that, as if I should know.
    Of course I didn’t have the faintest idea. We continued down the long hall to the rotunda, where all was gathered, but later, as I carried baggage from Aleksandra’s infamous mauve boudoir I saw a painting of the same woman hanging on the wall. As it