Princess

The names were all waiting for her and for a fleeting moment they seemed to be welcoming smiles after a long time away from home. She wondered who paid for the stone, perhaps the government, another relative, a grandparent, aunt or uncle. Natasha had no way of knowing if there was any other family.

The stone was rough and crumbling, a mass grave with all their names listed, one under the other. No heart-felt epitaph – gentle father, loving mother, innocent children – just dates, '55, '62, '82, '84, '87, and all of them with the same date of death 1988, January 16th.

Natasha tried to remember it, recall the blinding heat and harsh cold of the Russian winter, wind howling in her ears, mixing with the screams of her dying family but – nothing. There was nothing.

Abram, Darya, Feodor, Nataliya, Katya.

Mother, father, brother, sister abstract ideas which, for all Natasha knew, might never have existed at all. She wondered if this was, in fact, the right grave. How could she know if the Red Room did not scrub out her identity so fully that they stole this dead little girl's name and gave it to Natasha? Perhaps there really was the dust of a four-year-old child beneath the hard ground. Perhaps this was just yet another dead end.

There was no possible way of knowing. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe she could adopt this dead family as her own regardless of the truth, just as the Red Room adopted Natalia and molded her to their own needs.

She hadn't thought to bring anything to lay by the grave.

"Bozhe moy, what an untidy little girl you are, Nataliya. Put away your things or you will have none of the treat your father has brought home for supper."

She hurriedly gathered the brightly painted, wooden toys littered across a cold, dusty floor. She tucked smiling face after smiling face, with painted red cheeks and circular blue eyes, of the matryoshka doll inside their outer shells with a twist and snap of the head.

"Your father has brought varenye for our bread tonight. Although I do not how he managed to get it. Gospod' znayet how he spoils you."

The records were almost impossible to dig up, lost among all the thousands of dead peasants in the messy records of the Soviet Union. Natasha tried to find the charred foundation of the apartment complex but she was unable to locate it, lost among regrowth and rebirth of the city. The small family of five were never known by these indifferent children of the new age, and long forgotten by the wizened, wrinkled elders who had tasted the thick, rich redness of borscht in chipped bowls night after night, been acquainted with hard work in the fields, toiling at the infertile ground with hoes and rakes, who remembered what coming home to loss meant, if they could remember coming home at all.

Death had been so common. The Romanovas were lost among the multitudes, their identities swept away with a curl of watery ink upon a faded page, forgotten even by their surviving daughter. What did they look like, sound like, feel like? What did they call each other? Did they laugh, cry, fight, love? Had she known that love?

The soft, warm hand ghosting across her cheek. A finger put to rough, whiskery lips. "Hush, Nataliya, you mustn't wake malyutka."

"It is so small," her voice whistled between a gap-toothed smile.

"Not it, Nataliya," a woman's voice, weak but happy, head lying damp upon the pillow. "A girl. Your sister. Katya."

There was a stone, domed church in the center of the graveyard, a brown Synagogue meant to be a symbol of hope but was merely a stark reminder of everything lost in the midst of the dirty, mist-shrouded graveyard surrounding it.

She was Jewish.

Natasha remembered she had been Jewish and the thought buried itself deep into her stomach like a frozen blade.

"Have you said your prayers tonight, ryzhaya lisa? Come then, let your father hear you."

Blagosloven Ty, Adonay, Bog nash, Tsar' vselennoy, kotoryy zakryvayet glaza vo sne, moi veki v son. Pust' eto budet Tvoyu volyu, Adonay, Bog moy i Bog moikh predkov, lezhat' menya v pokoye, a zatem, chtoby podnyat' menya s mirom. Davayte ne trevozhnyye mysli ne rasstraivat' menya, ne zlyye mechty , ni trevozhnyye moya krovat' budet polnym i vsya v ochakh Tvoikh. Daruy mne svet, tak chto ya ne splyu snom smerti, ibo eto Vy, kto osveshchayet i prosveshchayet. Blagosloven Ty, Adonay , kotorogo velichiye dayet svet Vselennoy.

"Praised are You, Adonai, our God, Ruler of the universe, who closes my eyes in sleep, my eyelids in slumber. May it be Your will, Adonai, My God and the God of my ancestors, to lie me down in peace and then to raise me up in peace. Let no disturbing thoughts upset me, no evil dreams nor troubling fantasies. May my bed be complete and whole in Your sight. Grant me light so that I do not sleep the sleep of death, for it is You who illumines and enlightens. Praised are You, Adonai, whose majesty gives light to the universe."

"Amen, ryzhaya lisa."

"Amen, Papa."

Neither could she recall whether or not she cried, the night when the Red Room snatched her from the biting wind, watching her life dissolve into ashes that floated away on the wind like snowflakes. She stared at the grave impassively. There were still no tears within her to bother wasting on these silent, unknowing strangers.

Natasha whirled around at a sound behind her, hand flying to the holster hidden by her coat. Her hand relaxed when she saw him standing silently behind her, arms crossed over his chest, wool hat pulled over his ears. He was staring at the grave, not at her.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

Barton's eyes traveled up from the tombstone to meet hers, steely gray in the cold, but there was a ghost of a smile on his lips. "You don't have to do everything alone, you know, Romanoff."

"Tell me, what does Nataliya want as a story before she goes to sleep?"

"V tantsevali obuv', Papa, though Feodor does not like it."

"No matter what your brother thinks. I shall tell it just for you, moya malen'kaya krasnaya lisa." He was perched on the end of her bed, lumpy, stiff mattress sagging under his spindly weight. Her soft, small hand curled around his knobby knuckles.

His voice was soft and creaky, words well-rehearsed:

"There were once twelve princesses, each more beautiful than the last and they slept in twelve beds in the same room. Every night, their doors were locked by the king so they could not get out and be lost, but in the morning, their dancing shoes were found to be worn through as if they had been dancing all night.

"The king was much puzzled by this and sent word to the kingdom that any man who could discover the princess' secret might have his pick of the king's daughters in marriage. A young soldier returned from the war and wished to have the eldest princess as his wife. She was the most beautiful of the princesses, with hair as red as the embers of a fire and eyes dusky gray as ash."

A rough hand brushed soft red bangs off her forehead. A giggle in the dark.

"So the soldier perched himself outside the window of the princesses' room so he might gaze upon them from afar and discover where they went. The soldier waited on his perch like a bird of prey until the very stroke of midnight when all twelve of the girls dressed themselves in the finest of dancing gowns and escaped from the locked room by a trapdoor in the floor. The soldier stole into their room as deftly as any assassin and followed them through the passageway which led them to a lake as clear as crystal surrounded by three groves of trees. The first grove had trees of silver as fine as the twine of a bow, the second of gold as lithe and true as a shaft, and the third of glittering diamonds as strong and sharp as the point of an arrow.

"Here the twelve sisters danced to a dreamlike music of harps and flutes as though hypnotized by the sickly sweetness of the melody, and the soldier was transfixed by the beauty of their swirling gowns and limbs as graceful as swans. But it seemed to the soldier there was something disconcerting in the princesses' dance, almost as if they were puppets being prompted by the whims of their master, or else spiders approaching their prey with a carefully precise, erotic tread.

"The princesses danced until their shoes of silk and ribbon were worn through and they were obliged to leave. The soldier followed them back through the grove and to the passage of the trapdoor, but not before he broke off a pointed leaf of a diamond tree as a token he might show the king for proof of the princesses' strange adventure.

"The eldest princess was the last in the line of her sisters and before she disappeared back through the trap door she seemed to wake from her dream and, looking around her in shock of her surroundings her eyes lighted upon the soldier, standing behind her with the leaf clasped in his hand.

"The soldier, afraid the princess might flee, approached her gently, offering her his leaf as a tiding of peace. The princess accepted his gift and threaded the diamond leaf as a necklace with a strand of her own red hair, and there it hung from her neck looking like the pointed arrow which had pierced her heart. The soldier entwined his fingers in hers and the princess pressed her lips tenderly to his own.

"Together they confronted the king in the morning and, true to his word, the king granted the soldier the eldest daughter for his wife. The soldier took the princess away from her sisters. And the princess and soldier fled to a far-off land where they could live in the freedom of their love."

"It is a sad story, Papa."

"Yes, ryzhaya lisa, sad in parts but also very happy I think. Do you know why?"

"No, Papa. Unless you mean because the soldier rescues the princess."

"True, but it is not so much, I think, that the soldier rescues the princess, but that she learns to rescue herself."

"But then she leaves all the rest of her sisters."

"Yes, ryzhaya lisa, but there is good and bad, happy and sad in every story – just as there is in life. Someday you will come to realize it."

"I suppose, Papa."

"Yes my little princess. And now you must shut your eyes and go to sleep."

"Papa?"

"Yes, ryzhaya lisa?"

"I should like to have a pair of silk shoes and dance like the princesses."

"Of course, ryzhaya lisa, in the morning you may have them. But first, you must sleep." Chapped lips pressed against her cool forehead, gently tuck the covers to her chin. He blew out the stump of candle sitting by the bed, the smell of smoke curling in the air. The door creaked as it shut and his footsteps padded gently on the floor as he left her. And then there was silence as thick as the darkness that surrounded her, lulling Nataliya to sleep.

End

Note: I've spelled the Russian phonetically rather than using the Cyrillic alphabet. The translations are as follows:

Malyutka – little one

Bozhe moy – my goodness

Gospod' znayet – Lord knows

Varenye – jam-like syrup made of fruit to put on bread or cakes.

V tantsevali obuv' – The Danced Out Shoes (or the fairytale of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses," slightly altered for this story)

Moya malen'kaya krasnaya lisa – my little red fox

Ryzhaya lisa – red fox