Back | Next
Contents

Interlude

decorative image


Tatiana’s Journal

I don’t know what to do. I am lost, lost, utterly lost. The weather outside has turned so warm and yet I feel so cold and dead inside.

Daniil refuses to speak to me. Even his sergeant major, to whom he always listens, says he will not discuss me and refuses to resume command.

So we sit here in the Governor’s House in Tobolsk, and in the town itself, and do nothing but train and guard the two thousand or so Bolshevik prisoners taken at the Battle of Toboltura. But for the food captured in the battle I doubt we could even feed them.

On the plus side, the river is free enough of ice now for water transport between Tobolsk and Tyumen. Tyumen is still under the Reds, of course, so we get no messages from Yekaterinburg. I have no idea of what is happening with my dearest Aunt Ella.

I don’t understand Daniil’s actions. Before he resigned and threw his epaulettes at my feet, he mentioned me “in dispatches” as “Private Romanova, T.” This is supposed to be a very good thing. Why would he do that and then resign? Maybe Ella can explain it, if we’re ever reunited.

I know Dan’s in love with me. That was obvious years ago, when he was an invalid at the hospital at Tsarskoye Selo. What I didn’t know, not until he turned his back on me, was that I feel the same way about him. I don’t even mind that I’m taller than he is. Had someone asked me five years ago if that would even have been possible, I’d have laughed.

I can’t laugh anymore, not about that or about anything.

But what can I do now? You can’t beg someone who refuses to be in the same room with you. Could I send him a letter? Would he bother to read it?

What is left to me but to try?





Back | Next
Framed