Baby in the Palace - PART II
“Aleksei, you know you can’t.”
“I want to learn to play tennis like my sisters.”
“But you know, it’s too dangerous for you to play.”
“Why can’t I be like other boys?!”
Yet there were positive consequences as well, if one can say that positive things may come out of such suffering. He matured considerably, far beyond his years, after the incident. His intellect developed very quickly, as did his emotional and spiritual side. He became tremendously compassionate -- something he would have become anyways, no doubt, yet the level to which he was able to understand and suffer for the suffering of others was unusual for a boy his age. And finally, there grew a very special relationship between him and his mother -- a relationship that had existed anyhow, as he was her youngest child and only son, but which developed more rapidly than it could have, reaching incredible spiritual depth and understanding. When the Emperor Nicholas II left for General Headquarters in 1915, after the start of World War I, Aleksei felt himself to be “the man in the house,” and, as Pierre Gilliard said, “it was delightful to see the grown-up way in which he would look after the Empress when they went to church or to some functions together. He would help her to rise, or would unobtrusively push a chair towards her, as the Emperor might have done.”
Aleksei began to dream a great deal after his illness, and to think about things that children his age usually avoid. His own entreaty -- “When I am dead, it will not hurt anymore, will it, Mama? When I am dead, build me a little monument of stones...” -- would never leave the memories of his family. Perhaps he remembered it too. But it is certain that he began to learn to face death, to understand it at least theoretically. On one occasion, it has been recorded that Olga, his eldest sister, walked into his room to find him sitting motionless and peaceful before the window. Quietly, she asked him what he was doing.
“I like to think and wonder,” was his reply.
“About what?”
“Oh, so many things. I enjoy the sun and the summer... Who knows whether one of these days I shall not be prevented from doing it?”
Aleksei cuddling with
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