The Kitchen Boy Read Free Page A

me.
    Only much, much later did I learn that it said: “
Les amis ne dorment plus et espèrent que l’heure si longtemps attendue est arrivée..
.”
    All the notes, even the replies from the Romanovs, were to be in the French. I didn’t memorize any of them back then. And of course I thought them lost forever, so I was greatly surprised when a few years ago I opened up a book and there they all were, every single one of the secret notes, completely reprinted. All this time, all these years, the original note that I had pulled from that cork – as well as the next three – had been carefully stored in the Gosudarstvenyi Arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii in Moscow. Sure, as incredible as it may seem, these notes are still there in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, proving beyond a doubt that there’d been a plot to save the Imperial Family.
    Da, da
, Katya,
vnoochka moya
– granddaughter of mine – for a brief while there’d been a candle of hope in the note that read:
     
    Friends are no longer sleeping and hope that the hour so long awaited has come. The revolt of the Czechoslovaks threatens the Bolsheviks ever more seriously. Samara, Cheliabinsk, and all of eastern and western Siberia are in the hands of the provisional national government. The army of Slavic friends is eighty kilometers from Yekaterinburg. The soldiers of the Red Army cannot effectively resist. Be attentive to any movement from the outside; wait and hope. But at the same time, I beg you, be careful, because the Bolsheviks, before being . Be ready at every hour, day and night. Make a drawing of your three bedrooms showing the position of the furniture, the beds. Write the hour that you all go to bed. One of you must not sleep between 2:00 and 3:00 on all the following nights. Answer with a few words, but, please, give all the useful information for your friends from the outside. You must give your answer to the same soldier who transmits this note to you, .
     
    From someone who is ready to die for you,
    An Officer of the Russian Army
     
    Ever fearful, I carefully folded up the small note and slipped it in my pocket. This was something important, something dangerous, something for the Tsar, but I just went about my business, unloading the basket. I took out the eight eggs – brown and not so terribly big – and the pale butter, which was in a little billycan covered with a torn piece of oil cloth. And as I waited for the large brass samovar to boil, my face beaded with sweat, my heart raced, and my mind struggled for a course of action. I couldn’t just barge into the Tsar’s bedroom while he and Aleksandra Fyodorovna were getting up.
    Suddenly a voice behind me boomed, “Well, Leonka, so the fire’s lit and the water is heating?
Ochen xoroshow
.” Very good.
    It was cook Kharitonov, all groggy and yawning, his shirt a mess, his oily hair sticking up. He hadn’t shaved in almost a week, but then I hadn’t had a bath in almost a month. Komendant Avdeyev didn’t allow us to make that much hot water, although Nikolai Aleksandrovich had been granted a bath of nine liters just the day before.
    I thought I should tell him, but I remained quiet, for even then I understood the importance of the note.
    And so I lied, “Yevgeny Sergeevich has asked for a glass of water.”
    I was referring to Dr. Botkin of course. Dr. Yevgeny Sergeevich Botkin, the Tsar’s personal physician, who had voluntarily followed the family into exile and imprisonment.
    Kharitonov puffed out his lower lip. “So do as the good doctor requests, lad, and take him his glass of water.”
    The drinking water was in a large crock covered with a cloth, and I took a dipper and ladled water into a thin glass with a chipped rim. Saying nothing more, I headed out, clutching the glass in both hands because I was shaking so. As I skirted the dining room, I saw one of the
Bolsheviki
leading the Tsar’s second daughter, Tatyana Nikolaevna, to the water closet on the far side of the