fifty miles away and the Allies had to stop them.
“But you can't go now …” Zoya cried. Tears filled her eyes in spite of her attempts to be brave. “You just got here!” He had only arrived that morning, and after six months without him, she couldn't bear to see him go so soon. But there was no choice. He had half an hour to report to the headquarters of the military police on the rue St. Anne. He barely had time to take her home, before they escorted him back to General Pershing. But to Zoya, it seemed cruel beyond words to have had so little time together before he went back to the front to risk his life again. And like a small child abandoned, she sat in her living room and cried late that night, as her grandmother brought her a cup of tea to console her.
But the tears she shed for Clayton were nothing to the tears she shed a few days later. On the twentieth of July, Vladimir appeared at the apartment with a solemn face, and a copy of Izvestia, the Russian newspaper. Zoya sensed instantly when she opened the door that something terrible had happened, and she felt almost ill as she escorted him inside and assisted her grandmother from the bedroom.
He began to cry as he held the newspaper out to her. He looked like a heartbroken child, his white hair almost the same color as his face, and repeating the same words again and again.“… They have killed him … oh my God … they've killed him …” He had come directly to them, they had a right to know, after all they were Romanov cousins.
“What do you mean?” Evgenia looked at him with horror, and rose halfway in her chair, as he showed her the notice in the paper. On the sixteenth of July, the Tsar Nicholas had been executed, it said. He had been shot. And it said that his family had been moved to safety. Moved to where? Zoya wanted to scream … where is my beloved Mashka? … where are they? … almost as though she knew, Sava began to keen softly, as the three Russians sat and cried for the man who had been their father, their Tsar … and was the two women's much loved cousin.
There were the sounds of sorrow in the room for a long time, and at last Vladimir stood and walked to the window, his head bowed, his heart heavy almost beyond bearing. All over the world the Russians who had loved him would be crying, even the peasants in whose name the dreaded revolution had been mounted.
“What a terrible, terrible day,” he said softly. “God rest his soul, he whispered, and turned to the women. Evgenia looked a hundred years old, and Zoya was deathly pale, the only color in her face the fierce green eyes, red-rimmed with tears, which still fell silently down her cheeks. All she could think of was that last morning in Tsarskoe Selo when he had kissed her good-bye and told her to be good … “I love you, Uncle Nicky,” her own words echoed in her head … and then he had told her he loved her too. And now he was dead. Gone forever. And the others? … she read the words in Izvestia again … ‘The family has been moved to safety.”
CHAPTER
24
July seemed to drag by like a nightmare. The fact that Nicholas had been killed seemed to weigh on them like an unbearable burden. Their gloom never seemed to lift anymore. All over Paris, Russians were grieving for him, as the war waged on around them.
Zoya was invited to a wedding celebration for one of the ballerinas she knew. Her name was Olga Khokhlova and she had married Pablo Picasso a few weeks before at St. Alexander Nevsky, but Zoya had no desire to go anywhere now. She wore the few black dresses she had, and was in deepest mourning for her cousin.
In August, Diaghilev cabled her once again, this time with an offer to join his troupe for a tour in London, but she still couldn't leave her grandmother, and she didn't want to see anyone. She could barely make herself go to work, which she did each day, just so they could put food on their table.
And in September, the Allies pressed ahead once more, and within a few weeks, the Germans were attempting to negotiate peace with them.