Anastasia's Secret by Susanne Dunlap

word. Eventually I said, “Which army did he command?” wondering how much I could ask without giving away that I had any personal interest in the answers.
    “The Second,” Papa replied.
    Sasha’s platoon formed part of the Second army and he was in the Thirteen Corps.
    “They say casualties were particularly heavy in the Two and Thirteen Corps.”
    For a moment I saw white spots before my eyes and the room began to darken. Since I had never fainted before, I didn’t know that’s what was happening. Tatiana jumped up and came to me, pushing my head down between my knees. Gradually my normal vision returned. “Are you all right, Anastasie, dear?” I heard Mama’s voice at first from far away, but when I felt her cool hand on the back of my neck, I took a deep breath and sat up.
    “Yes, I am fine. I don’t know what came over me.”
    “It’s a shock. To all of us.” Papa stood and paced around the room. He was disturbed, I could see that. But in a way that had more to do with Germans being on his territory than about the thousands of men who had died. I think it was then that I realized how right Sasha was. Papa loved Russia, but he was separated from it by a cushion of something—his ministers and advisers perhaps. Russia was too big to fit into his mind, too big to fit into anyone’s mind, like a very, very large number, or the distance of the nearest star besides the sun from the earth.
    Mama, with her long experience of tending to Alexei night and day, immediately made the leap to what I imagined in my worst nightmares. “They will need nurses to tend to the wounded. Tomorrow we shall begin our training, Olga and Tatiana and I.”
    “What about us?” I asked. “What will Mashka and I do?” I pictured us sitting at home knitting socks night and day while everyone else was being really useful.
    “You will visit the wounded and read to them.”
    And that was all the discussion we had about it.

C HAPTER 7
    Our first casualties started streaming into the hospitals in late August, changing our daily pattern of life as it had never before been changed. Every day I dreaded that I would come upon Sasha in one of the beds next to which I sat and read, hour by hour. Not that I did not wish him out of the battle and back near me. It was more complicated than that. I was afraid of how he might have been wounded. Afraid to see him maimed, changed forever.
    “I want Tatiana to read to me,” a young soldier on the point of death said as I opened a volume of Pushkin. I had heard that many times by then. The ones who were going to die especially wanted my sister Tatiana’s beautiful face to be the last thing they saw on this earth. I usually answered, “Tatiana’s assisting in an operation and cannot come. She will visit tomorrow.” Then the soldier would turn his head away and close his eyes. I don’t know whether they listened or just shut themselves off. The ones who moaned softly with pain that no one could relieve were the most difficult. I sometimes lost my place in the book, and then others around me who had been paying attention would protest, and I would have to go back and find where I had gone wrong.
    It’s not that I was ugly. Nor am I now. In fact, I have been told the opposite. It’s just that Tatiana grew into such a beauty that she quite eclipsed the rest of us. Tall and willowy, with almond-shaped, gray green eyes and a perfect nose, a mouth with lips not too full but, as I once overheard one of the soldiers say, begging to be kissed. I am shorter and a little on the plump side compared to my sisters, and my hair persists in kinking into unruly curls. I’m just one of the grand duchesses, not usually singled out for any kind of comment. Even Mama, who makes an outward show of treating us all the same, scolds me for not being as graceful as Olga and Tatiana, or as sweet tempered as Mashka.
    Mashka and I didn’t have to nurse, only read and comfort the men, as Mama said. That was bad enough.