The Kitchen Boy Read Free

had a hand grenade hanging from his belt, and Sister Antonina, taking note of him, dared not finish the sentence.
Nyet, nyet
. As far as she was concerned, Nikolai Aleksandrovich was still her Tsar, but she dared not refer to him as
Y’evo Velichestvo
– His Greatness – for she’d be thrown in jail for that. Nor could she bring herself to call him something ridiculous like
Tovarish
or
Grazhdanin
– Comrade or Citizen – Romanov.
    Setting the basket on a small table, Sister Antonina said, “The milk is still warm from the cow. The eggs are just as fresh too – Marina herself gathered them only an hour ago.”
    “Spacibo bolshoye, sestra.”
Thank you very much, sister, I replied.
    “The butter is very good. You must try some butter on the bread. It’s so nice and sweet.”
    “Da, da, da.”
    It was then that I noticed that Sister Antonina was still leaning against the edge of the table, her eyes fixed on me, her body not moving a centimeter. I stared back. What, had I done something wrong?
    Again I said, “
Spacibo bolshoye, sestra
. I’ll take care of everything.”
    “The eggs are for The Little One,” she said, referring to Aleksei Nikolaevich, the Tsar’s son, who suffered so terribly from what we called the English disease, hemophilia.
    “Certainly.”
    Turning around, Sister Antonina nodded ever so slightly to Novice Marina. The girl edged slightly out into the hall, looked one way, the other, then offered a small nod in return. Sister Antonina, satisfied that the guard with the blond beard was no longer nearby, reached into her basket and lifted the glass bottle of milk.
    “Take this,
molodoi chelovek
.” Young man.
    Her eyes were fixed on mine, and I stepped over and took the bottle from her, which contained a
chetvert
of milk, something like two liters. And just like she said, it was still warm from the cow.
    She whispered, “Open this bottle at once. God willing, we will be back in a few days.”
    I was young and clumsy in many ways, but I understood. Since the ancient Time of Troubles, which preceded Tsar Mikhail, the very first of the many Romanovs, we Russians have used our eyes to say what our mouths cannot speak. And Sister Antonina did this, staring at me and then blinking both of her eyes. I dared not move. Rather, I just stood there, clutching the warm
chetvert
as the sister moved into the hallway, the antechamber that separated the kitchen from the dining room. There she said a few kindly words to one of the guards, who in turn gruffly escorted her to the front of the house and out. Later on, of course, the Reds killed her for that, for being part of the plan to save the Romanovs.
    Well, so, once the
sestra
and novice were gone, I turned my back to the hallway and stared down at the bottle of milk. There was something special about it, of that I had no doubt, but just what I certainly couldn’t tell. I stood there in my worn, brown pants and white shirt of coarse cotton, then swirled the milk around in its container. Everything, however, looked, well,
normalno
. I decided to take a whiff of it, perhaps even taste it, so I tugged at the cork stopper, pulled it out, and smelled the rich, creamy milk. And that was when I saw it. Rather, I felt it first – the slip of paper. A tiny pocket had been cut into the side of the cork and a small piece of paper had been tucked in, which is what I felt – the sharp edge of the paper. Knowing the danger, I glanced over my shoulder and saw no one. There were some noises in the house as the Tsar and his family started to get up from bed, but I was alone there in the kitchen, just me and the samovar, which was starting to rattle as it warmed. I tugged at the paper, pulled it out, and unfolded it. Although I could read and write back then, I couldn’t make out a single word, for it wasn’t in Russian. Rather, I recognized the letters of the Latin alphabet, but just what language I couldn’t tell – French, German, English, they were all the same to