Now all the hope of freedom vanished, and I often in despair pressed my body against the damp wall that held us prisoners, wondering if ever we would see the sunshine break through this wall again.
XXVI
FEAR AND DREAD
After the incident with Yurovsky over the intercepted letters, almost overnight Mother’s hair turned white. She became weak and could hardly walk without leaning on someone’s arm. Even when prayer bolstered her spirit, her hands shook and her voice faded into a whisper. For one month she suffered untold agony, refusing to believe that we had been betrayed. Yet she said, “It is God’s Will.” In these words we could sense her craving for the Holy Communion which brought her the calmness of God’s spirit. Father would look at her and turn his face aside so that his falling tears would not be seen. It was his quiet way of bearing himself that carried along the rest of us. He dropped his head, but not for long. Once more he would hold himself erect, determined to look beyond these cruel conditions to the time when Russia would once more believe in him and repent. For each other’s sake we tried again and went through each day with renewed faith in God and hope for the morrow.
Here we never went out to Church. The priest came to us only twice. Whatever services we had, we held them ourselves. Mother read aloud from the Bible; the rest of us chanted the prayers. We had our own service every day. The comfort of the homemade service lifted us all and gave us satisfaction. Morning, noon and evening we refreshed our faith in God. Religion was our nourishment, especially to Mother. There is no book as precious as the Bible and nothing will ever be able to take its place. It is the Word of God and will never die. Even the hovering guards listened in quiet, their heads bowed. We were astonished.
At last the hard shell of the guards began to crack and out of the cracks oozed a crude shame. In their rough way they tried to atone for their treatment of us. They extended pity when all we wanted was to be left alone. They even gave us some of that by lessening their intrusion into our privacy. Mother called it victory—an answer to our prayers. But when it was discovered that they were becoming lenient, they were, much to our sorrow, promptly removed. The last part of June or the beginning of July they were replaced by the toughest, lowest crew imaginable. These men were beasts. We tried submissiveness, courtesy, but to no avail. When they saw the comfort we derived from our daily services they took away our Bible. But they could not take away our faith. Mother said, “This is another test. Is there not enough of Christ in us to do without the Bible?” But Mother was more shaken than I had ever seen her as she said this. Father looked at the guards and accepted the humiliation.
The men were so unshakeable and cruel. Now we no longer saw or heard them. Their inhuman treatment had built a wall around us, a wall of fear, hard and dark on the outside, soft and mystical inside. We became a world apart, detached from mundane things. Our bodies touched the ground, but our souls were far above in God’s world. Each day of persecution lifted us higher. We were helping Christ to carry His burden. We were marked to suffer, for Russia.
In our last days our privacy was so uncertain we never wholly undressed. The men were there with a repulsive curiosity. Instinctively we drew our skirts aside as one draws away from vermin. The new guards were not Russian at all. We heard every kind of language: Polish, Latvian, Hungarian, German and Yiddish. In the dining room, carelessly thrown on the table, we saw German newspapers which we did not touch. The guards were ready for any trouble, their expressions were filled with accusations.
Yurovsky took a fiendish delight in drawing the family into conversation. The evil in his soul came through, to scar his face. We wanted to hold ourselves aloof but we did not wish to anger him. His mouth was always full of saliva and every time he spoke we feared it would fly out at us. Yurovsky, Sverdlov, Goloshchekin and Medvediev with four Letts and Hungarians searched the entire house. They pulled out all our suitcases, books and pictures and examined every nook and corner, and by the time they were through searching, the house was in complete disorder.
Father read a great deal in order to get his mind off the humiliating surroundings. He wondered if we could memorize such and such a passage, hoping thereby to relieve our nervous tension. He still believed that the fate of our family and Russia was in God’s hands. His belief was a great comfort to us, and helped to carry us through the dark nights. At length our Bible was returned to us.
Yurovsky came into our quarters one day with a cigarette in his mouth. As he stood in front of us, he pulled out a match from his pocket, struck it on the sole of his shoe and lighted the cigarette. It was not hard to recognize it as one of Father’s gold-tipped, Russian double-eagle cigarettes. These cigarettes were made especially for Father by Benson and Hedges with his name on them, but Father had not used many of these during the war. Yurovsky wanted Father to see him smoke this long, slender aristocrat of cigarettes, hoping to hurt his feelings. When he finished smoking he left the gold-tipped butt on the ashtray for us to see. We girls also noticed he wore some of Father’s clothes, probably taken from the trunks in the attic. His appearance was always untidy, no matter what he wore, and his shirt was always open at the neck. From his bushy, black eyebrows he looked out sideways, never straight into one’s eyes.