Royal Roulette and Graveyard Vodka

Gatchina is one of a handful of provincial palace towns scattered oustide of St. Petersburg, and in its somber (by Russian imperial standards) palace lived a host of tsars, including Alexander III, who hunkered down here after his father, Alexander II, was blown to bits in the city by terrorists. It's also where his son, the last Tsar, Nicholas II, spent a great deal of his childhood. 

One of Gatchina's most roulettian part-time residents was Natalia Brasova. While entangled in a cumbersome second marriage, she and Grand Duke Michael (Nicholas II's younger brother and second in line to the Russian throne) fell in love.  They would gladly have married but Michael, as a member of the royal family, was strictly forbidden from espousing a divorced woman of non-royal status.  They solved this dilemma with an undercover marriage in an orthodox church in Vienna in 1912, some five years after their first meeting. Upon learning the news, Nicholas promptly removed Michael from the line of royal succession and banished him in disgrace. Thus, the newlyweds spent the pre-war years gallivanting around the various watering holes of Europe and had they only been content to stay there, the story would have ended more happily. But in the patriotic fervor that erupted with the outbreak of World War I, Michael received permission to return with Natalia, and so the story finishes abysmally, as did so many stories of Russian nobles who did not manage to escape the red terror of revolution.  First held under palace arrest in Gatchina, 

Michael was subsequently deported a thousand miles east to the remote city of Perm, where he had the honor of being the first Romanov to be unceremoniously shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918. His body has never been found .  

Natalia managed to avoid the revolutionary bloodbath by feigning tuberculosis in prison where she had been held for ten weeks: the authorities transferred her to the prison infirmary, from which she made a successful jail break. Then with the help of a false passport, disguised as a nun, she embarked on an odyssey fraught with danger and uncertainty, from Petersburg to Kiev, and thereafter via Odessa, Constantinople, Marseilles, to a safe haven in England. As funds dwindled, she moved to Paris, where the cost of living was less extravagant.  There, in the city of light, this woman, who had waltzed with royalty, died destitute in 1952 in a charity hospital. 

Meanwhile, it's the Saturday preceding Trinity Sunday, the day on which the mystery of the Holy Trinity is celebrated in Russia.  It is also a customary time to trek to the cemetery to visit the beloved dead.

And as Tour Guide Natasha's family is originally from Gatchina and a passel of her relatives lie buried in this town, we head there by bus and then wander down the quiet shady streets to the municpial cemetery. The weather is bucolic, purveyors of fake flowers are out in full force, and the cemetery is bursting in green, as we wend our way along narrow paths to Natasha’s family gravesite. Her great aunt, grandfather, father, and brother are all buried here. What? Brother? I gasp inwardly. There it stands, written in stone, "born 1980, died 2003 -- you took all joy and happiness with you." What could possibly have happened? 

Natasha sets to work laying the small table that, along with a humble bench, is a permanent fixture at many Russian grave sites: she's brought a simple white table cloth, pickled cucumbers, bread, cheese, cherries, tomatoes, sliced green peppers, handiwipes, and, naturally, vodka. 

"Ach, they all liked vodka," she sighs, as she pours the clear liquid into plastic glasses that she sets at the edge of each grave. She also pours us both a glass, and we stand, meditatively looking at the gravestones, then dip our fingers into the vodka and symbolically splash the graves. 

Natasha starts reminiscing and I ask about her brother, whose face, etched in stone, smiles back at me. "He was murdered," she replies. 

I gulp again. Good heavens! It seems the poor man was shot by his half-brother in some sort of youthful vendetta. Natasha waves her hand, and says something about "banditsky" dealings. 

Then referring to the Russian proverb which states that "between the first and the second glass, the gap is short," she pours another round of vodka, and points to her great aunt's grave, saying, "She was like a mother to my mother, she was my true grandmother.  

It turns out that at the beginning of the World War II, Natasha’s twenty-year-old grandmother was, oddly,   (Natasha hints at a romantic liaison in high places) the vice-mayor of the town.  The first thing the Nazis did when they took Gatchina in 1941 was to shoot the real mayor. But Natasha’s grandmother, her baby daughter (that is, Natasha’s mother) and the great aunt managed to escape on a train of refugees heading for distant Tatarstan. At some point along the way, a handicapped girl wanted to clamber onto the train, but no one would let her, believing her to be a harbinger of  ill luck. Natasha’s grandmother took matters into her own hand and pulled the girl into their car. That night, the Germans bombed the train, every car was hit, except the one with grandma, great aunt, and the handicapped girl. Nonetheless, somewhere further along that arduous journey, grandma died and was buried near the train tracks in a vast desert, with no marker, nameless. 

"My mother never even got to stand by her grave,“ mused Natasha, "and that’s how my great aunt, at the age of sixteen, became my grandmother.  She raised my mother on her own...  Okay, well, God likes trinities, let’s have a third round.“

We sit a while longer looking at the mute grave stones, then pack up the leftovers, and as we slowly make our way to the exit, we pass hundreds of other roulettian histories that are not easily decipherable. 

For example, Serezhenka Koptov, who for some unimaginable reason died at the age of two. 

P.S. What became of Natasha's mother, the daughter of the twenty year old Vice Mayor who died in the middle of the desert?  She's living on (where else?) Long Island. After her husband passed away and was buried in the Gatchina Municipal Cemetery, she took a two-week trip to New York to visit a friend. As they were walking along the beach, an Italian man came up to her and said, "Let's get married."  "But I can't even speak English," she replied. "That's all right, we don't need to talk, we'll just look at each other."  And so, indeed, it came to pass.