Anastasia's Secret by Susanne Dunlap Page B

thoughts and feelings, she still recognized that I had them.
    Whatever the case, the spring of 1916 was much happier than our previous two had been, and not only because I knew that Sasha, with his blind eye, would probably not be sent to the front lines to fight. We all—my mother, sisters, and I, and the suite—went away on an extended visit to the south, to see the hospitals and sklady there and make sure the soldiers and wounded on the Galician front had all that they needed. We were within a stone’s throw of Livadia, but Mama would not let us go there because she said it was too self-indulgent to do so when the country was at war. I think it was mostly because she couldn’t bear the thought of being there without Papa and Alexei, who spent much of their time at Mogilev.
    Still, the warm weather was heavenly. The war seemed farther away around Sebastopol, even though the German fleet had entered the Black Sea, and we had to black out the windows on our train at night along with all the lights in the cities and towns, fearful as everyone was of possible air raids.
    After that we went to Eupatoria, a very exotic seaside town that remained largely Mohammedan. I will never forget going to a service of thanksgiving at the mosque. We were invited specially, women not usually being permitted in the mosques. The chanting was beautiful, although I didn’t understand it. We went to a synagogue too, and heard the psalms chanted in Hebrew. I wished I could have talked to these strange, different people more, but we were hurried from one place to another. So many people seemed to want to see us.

    Perhaps the most extraordinary time was in the summer, though, when we took the imperial train to Mogilev to visit Papa and Alexei at the front. It wasn’t really the front, in that there was no fighting nearby. But occasionally we could hear the distant guns, like thunder.
    I remember the first time we actually heard them, in fact. We had pulled into the siding where our train would stay, as the train was the only suitable accommodation for our family in the vicinity. We sisters all dressed to go to the nearby villages, where we were told we could talk to the people and see if they needed anything. These villages were so small that most of them did not even have names. And there were several within a short walk, so we split up into our usual two pairs, accompanied by a few guards to keep us safe, so we could get to as many as we could.
    “I can hear someone chopping wood in the distance,” I said to Mashka, who was convinced that we had become lost in looking for the first village we were to visit. The guards who accompanied us simply followed, not offering much help. Perhaps they were secretly laughing at us.
    “That’s better than nothing, I suppose,” she answered, cross with me again.
    We continued toward the sound, and it did, in fact, turn out to be our village—more a hamlet, really. About a dozen thatch-roofed cottages surrounded a well. Each cottage had a chicken coop and manger behind it, sometimes inhabited by goats, sometimes by a cow. We approached a fellow chopping wood at the back of one of the cottages. He didn’t hear us coming, and so I had to say, “ Zdravstvuytye !” very loudly a few times before he looked up. When he did, he made the sign of the cross. I suppose he thought we were ghosts!
    I stepped forward, being a little braver than Mashka about these things, and tried to explain who we were and why we were there. He said he knew the emperor was at Mogilev, but did not expect the grand duchesses to have braved the journey from Petrograd.
    As we spoke, people began to filter out of the cottages and from the surrounding woods. By the time we had discovered that the fellow’s name was Botichev and that he had a wife who was out at the market, five strong sons who were off fighting the war, and a daughter who stayed home to help, quite a crowd had gathered. There were several girls our age among them. At