Autobiography

Autobiography

I have decided to tell my story. I stand firm by this decision despite a dubious audience as well as the embarrassment such an enterprise causes family members and even acquaintances. Had I known at the time of my troubles what I know now, I would not feel the need to burden (sic) you with the trivial details of my life, details that you who read this may at first flush think insignificant but which may yet well justify themselves and reward your patience if you take the time to reflect on them at a later date when, either in the throes of some despondency yourself, or at a moment of greater leisure, half asleep on your couch by a fire, they intrude on your solitude and awaken your memory to the serviceability of their mystery.

       I had been incarcerated nine months when I first met Korzanski. His name sounds Polish but I have no doubt now of his Russian ancestry. We discovered, via the circuitousness such unexpected enlightenings take, that he knew my father’s family. Someone by the name of Johan Martens had been the resident choir conductor and music teacher to Czar Alexander’s two daughters. This same Martens, at the time of the murder, occupied adjoining rooms to the Czarina on one side and the young girls on the other.

       Korzanski knew all this because he, at the time, had charge of ordering the care and grooming of the Czar’s horses and those of his guests. He tracked the comings and goings at the palace, ostensibly out of curiosity. His income, nay, his very physical survival, however, depended on alert observation. On the said day, he had been in and out of the palace doors three or four times with news of the Czar’s mood and temperament. He personally saw, he told me, the musician emerge from the Czarina’s room and enter that of the girls. Ten o’clock in the morning it was, March 22, 1916. Korzanski informed me of these details in December of 1975, the year he died. He died in prison, in solitary confinement, at the age of eighty-nine.

(To be continued)