She showed their tickets to a steward and they found their way to their tiny cabin, two levels below deck. Val didn’t dare go out into the open air again until the ship’s horn sounded and she could feel them moving out into the harbor. If Tony came now, he’d be too late. She felt the tension begin to melt.

They climbed hand in hand up the metal stairs onto the deck to watch as the ship glided slowly past the Opera House on their right, Taronga Zoo on the left, and out toward the shimmering vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

Chapter 23

Petrograd, winter 1921

AFTER MARIA AND PETER LEFT THE FARM IN THE Urals, they headed west in the wagon they had taken from Svetlana and Joe, foraging for food and sleeping huddled under piles of blankets and coats in remote barns. Peter kept a fire going through the night, but still the raw cold ate into their flesh. It was dangerous cold, the type Maria knew could kill. They cocooned the little ones between them, but Maria often woke with excruciating pain in her fingers and toes, shivering convulsively.

Once they were far enough away that Peter felt confident the Cheka—the Bolshevik secret police—would not track them down, he began taking casual work on the new collective farms. Under Lenin’s agricultural policy, such farms were only supposed to hire family members but most flouted the rules when they were shorthanded. Peter was a tireless worker with an encyclopedic knowledge of the land. Sometimes a farmer took him on because he had tips about how to rid a crop of pests or to uproot stubborn weeds, or a suggestion for improving the milk yield of a herd. He was the last to leave the field at night, first out in the morning, and he got along with the other workers, careful not to threaten their jobs.

The family never stayed long in one place but moved on, gradually heading toward St. Petersburg, where Peter had heard there were plenty of jobs in the burgeoning new factories. Maria dreamed of simple things: a roof over their heads, running water, a bed. Her past life as a Romanov was like a mirage; whole chunks of time faded from memory.

Once they reached the city, early in 1923, Peter joined long lines of country folk applying for work at labor exchanges: laptis, the townsfolk called them disparagingly, after their woven bark shoes. He was eventually assigned to a pig-iron factory, where iron ore, charcoal, and limestone were melted together at high temperatures and black smoke belched from tall chimneys.