in the Cyrillic script was held in her left hand as the arthritic index finger of the right hand moved along the sentences. Through her thick lenses spectacles she searched through the page.
“Ahh, there we are! Now, let’s begin. Once upon a time many, many years ago there was in the land of the Russia Empire. Czar Nicholas II, the last of the emperors who ruled the land with a fair but hard hand.”
Her accented English words were mixed with bits of the Slavic tongue as they took us to the capital of the empire, St Petersburg. Gran told vividly of ornate palaces and splendid buildings erected by Peter the Great that were grouped around the city squares near the river Neva; just on the banks upriver, was the legendary Winter Palace, home of the Czars. She pictured the Peter and Paul Fortress on Zayachy Island with the imposing St. Peter and St. Peter Cathedral, the burial place of the czars.
We imagined the white nights of midsummer at the Summer Gardens where romantic ballets, which were performed deftly by Anna Palova and Vaslav Nijinsky to the symphonic tone of Peter Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and to the other great Russian composers. Grandmother Alica waltzed us to the grand balls held at the Winter Palace were uniformed and bemedaled gallants together with bejeweled ladies in decorative crinolines danced through the wee hours of the night
“Yet,” grumbled our grandmother in the slur of her tongue, “Times were bitter and hard for the common folk. Czar Nicholas and his entourage were blind to the debacle of the war and the misery that followed. ”
She told of the troubles in St Petersburg that followed the debacle of defeat at the hands of the German troops in that Great War. Demo bed