What music would Tchaikovsky have created for me? What story—for he created the story for his ballets, too; the libretto for Swan Lake was his own pastiche of fairy tales and bits of Wagnerian operas—would he have dreamed up to suit my talents? Perhaps Undine, the ballet he had thought about composing since 1886. Perhaps I was the final inspiration he needed? But I will never know, for Tchaikovsky died in the cholera epidemic later that year. Despite the large placards mounted everywhere in the city cautioning against drinking unboiled water, Tchaikovsky asked for a glass of it in a restaurant and drank it down like a man who wanted to die, a story that astonished me then, because I was young and knew nothing yet of the shame coiled about the body of love. When I went to the apartment of his brother Modeste, where Tchaikovsky was laid out in a black suit on a low bier draped in white satin, I could not understand how a man of his age, which seemed to me then so great, could still be driven by passion. I knew Tchaikovsky loved men, but I did not know until later that he was in love with his nephew and that his love was—even worse than forbidden—not returned. Was that hopelessness also my own? Before I kissed Tchaikovsky’s pale forehead, all his thoughts of love blanched away, someone standing at the head of the coffin wiped the composer’s nose and mouth with a cloth dipped in carbolic, and we were told to spit into a handkerchief of our own after giving to him our last kiss. Was it his disease or his torment we feared contracting? The emperor gave permission for the funeral service to be held in Kazan Cathedral, for which one needed a ticket, as if it were a performance, but for this goodbye, no one needed to reserve a seat. This farewell was for intimates, his fellow artists.
No, Tchaikovsky never made a ballet for me, but there were many extant roles ready for habitation. One I especially coveted was Esmeralda, the title part in the ballet based on Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, that of the Gypsy dancer who loses her great love, Phoebus, to another woman. Though I coveted it, I would not dance it until 1899: I had not yet learned to go to the tsarevich, to the court, to get what I wanted at the theater. At twenty, I was still the obedient girl who listened to the régisseur, the maître de ballet, the directeur. Yes, I was mad to dance Esmeralda, but Petipa would not let me. Écoute, ma belle, he began when I asked him. He had been in Russia fifty years and still spoke only French—not a problem with the court, which also spoke French, but a problem for us at the theater, where other than ballet terms, which were always in French, Russian was what we knew best. No wonder Petipa was so good at mime. In his broken Russian he said to me, You love? And when I assured him that yes, I loved, he stroked his waxed moustache. Do you suffer? To which I responded, Of course not. That was the wrong answer. Only an artist who understood the suffering that accompanied love, he told me, could dance the part. He should know. He had been married twice, both times to ballerinas.
One day I would suffer, and one day Esmeralda would become my greatest role.
She Was His Doll Come to Life
But I was not suffering in 1892. The tsarevich visited me at home, sent roses and orchids to my box at the Sunday horse races at the Michel Riding School, offered up little gifts of jewelry, a gold brooch, a set of emerald earrings, which at first I declined, but when I saw how my refusals saddened him and because, after all, I really wanted those trinkets, I happily changed course. Greed made in me its triumph over manners, and not for the last time. Yes, the tsarevich’s shyness and my innocence made good partners in this long courtship. My desire for Niki was still not fully the desire of a woman for a man, but more of a child for the biggest prize that she could wave at others with glee. My parents were somewhat mollified when they saw how Niki’s courtship benefited my career, and my brother and sister titillated themselves with the possibilities such an alliance promised for them. While I accepted the tsarevich’s attention off the stage, it seemed I wore it on the stage as well, and my being a favorite of the heir heightened both my appeal and the appeal of my whole family. The balletomane subscribers fought to get tickets for the nights we four Kschessinkys were cast together in the same ballet. One night in Sleeping Beauty my father played King Florestan XIV, I Aurora, my sister an attendant fairy in the retinue of the Fairy of the Lilac, my brother Josef was Prince Fortuné, a small part as Cinderella’s porteur in the Act III divertissement.
Then one night at the theater, between Acts II and III of Coppélia, my long girlhood ended. I and my father’s friend Stukolkin, who was playing Dr. Coppelius, a role my father himself often played, had just exited the stage—I as Swanhilda dressed up like the doll Coppélia, which the lonely doctor had made for himself as a daughter—just as Geppetto in the fairy tale Pinocchio made for himself a puppet to be his boy. Swanhilda had tricked the doctor into thinking she was his doll come to life, and Stukolkin had mimed his shock and then his fury at being tricked, and I thought his panting as he ran after me as the curtain lowered to be for comic effect. His rubber pate glued to his head, two big white tufts of hair shaking above each ear, spectacles teetering on his nose, he began to grip at the flats backstage right and with the other hand grope at his left arm. Beneath his orange makeup his skin made a shiny white sheath. And then, with a dense sigh, he collapsed, the piece of painted canvas he had been clutching swaying free as his hand opened, and when he fell, victim of a heart attack, he shook all the props on the stage and the hay-thatched cottage itself. In those several moments as I knelt by him in my doll costume I saw his eyes behind those fake spectacles grow dull. The thick face paint stood on his skin like a porcelain mask and with his dull pupils he looked like a doll. The columnists would eulogize him the next week: He died like a soldier at his post, serving the art he loved passionately to his last minute. Was this what I wanted—a life lived only on the stage? And a love affair that seemed to dwell there also, just for show? For Swanhilda had dressed up as Coppélia not only to fool the poor befuddled doctor but also to win back the attention of her beau, Franz, who had become mesmerized by the pretty new doll the doctor had posed, as if reading a book, on the balcony of his house. For the tsarevich, I understood I, too, was a pretty doll posed on my balcony, the Maryinsky stage, or the smaller stage of my parents’ house, where I must appear to be a thing worse than a doll—a child! If I wanted the tsarevich to see me as a real woman, I would need to break away from my parents’ embrace. I would need my own house—and quickly! For, after all, one does not live forever.
Of his own accord, Niki might never have suggested this. It was in his nature to drift, a small sailboat in warm, currentless water. Our little love affair would eventually have ended in the tall reeds of a marsh when he became enamored of someone else, perhaps an opera singer or a kamer-freilini, a lady-in-waiting at court. But it was not in my nature to drift. So after an evening of impassioned kissing, at my signal, of course, Niki agreed with me that, yes, he supposed it was time I had my own house. And so I learned—Niki the sailboat needed a push.
The tsar, Alexander, was not happy about this development. Niki’s dalliance with me had suddenly become too serious for him. A flirtation with a clean Polish girl, the young dancer, Kschessinska II, yes. An interlude, yes. But take her as a mistress, set her up in a house, no. The emperor was notoriously straitlaced. The joke in the capital was that Alexander III was the only husband faithful to his wife. He did not want the heir apparent to set up a household in Petersburg with me, give me children, as his two uncles had done with their dancer-mistresses, as his own father had done with Princess Ekaterina. My father felt the same, of course.
I remember standing outside the door of my father’s study for some moments, gathering my courage to tell him of my intention to set up household with the tsarevich, my intention and my father’s hopes for me about to collide. I was not a girl from the lower classes. My parents traveled in the best Polish Catholic circles. My godfather was M. Strakatch, who owned the largest linen shop in Petersburg. My parents expected me to make a good marriage. My mother, I thought, being a woman, would understand what I had to do for love, but I was wro
ng about this; she would turn away from me for years, refusing even to see my new house. When I went to Liteiny Prospekt to visit my family, she stayed in her room and sent out no message—but I could not foresee any of this. No, outside that study door I worried only that I would break my father’s heart. So I hesitated. I wanted in those moments to crawl into the study and lay myself beneath my father’s big table as I had as a child, when just the warmth of my father’s feet and the sound of his breath as he wrote or drew designs on paper for some of his inventions would provide an unfathomable comfort. I wanted to be a child again, to sit on the hands of a clock as they moved backward. I stood there so long my sister, Julia, whom I had left waiting in our bedroom, came to check on me. When she saw me standing there stolidly and silent, a mushroom under the beeches waiting to be picked, she raised her own hand to rap on the door. She believed the tsarevich’s liaison with me guaranteed good fortune for our family. So she pushed past me into the room and told my father what I was afraid to tell him. Mathilde is going to be kept by the tsarevich. We three stood in silence as the clock ticked, the pendulum swung, the cuckoo bird slid out of the clock on its tongue of wood and gave twelve cries. An omen. The cry of the cuckoo tells you how many years you have yet to live. But this was a wooden bird, housed in a clock. My father’s face rimpled above his great waxed moustache, the elegant erect posture eroded. Finally, my father said, You understand the tsarevich can never marry you and your idyll will be short? I nodded. I understood but I did not understand. Who at nineteen could? Hidden up my sleeve was the bracelet of sapphire and diamonds the tsarevich had given me in anticipation of our new estate and the gold clasp pinched impatiently at my skin.
Do the parents of all mistresses suffer as mine did? Did the father of the ballerina Anna Kuznetsova cry when Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich built for her what was to become my house?
My parents would never visit No. 18, English Prospekt, out of principle. I had two floors, and behind the house two walled gardens, one a pleasure garden flush with flowers, the other a working one, with a row of vegetables, a stable, a barn, and just beyond that second stone wall lay the palace of one of the tsar’s many uncles. Look how close I slept now to the Romanovs! Niki’s great-uncle Konstantin had hoped to marry his mistress, but the tsar refused him permission to divorce his wife. Of course, Konstantin could have done so anyway, but he would have been stripped of his title, his income, his property, his country, and then what would he have? A new wife living with him in exile. Small compensation. So instead, he suffered in comfort his mistress’s uncertain position and those of his five children. Eventually, though, before his death, he managed to have her and her children ennobled by the tsar’s ukase. In Russia one’s place can at any moment change. A tsar’s decree was one way. For women it was done through marriage. For men by climbing the ladder of Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks. One entered state service at the fourteenth rank, and with each year one accumulated more chin, or rank, until one reached the fifth rank and earned the right to be called Your Honor. After that, the top four ranks were filled with men appointed there by the tsar, and those men were given hereditary titles. Such a man was not a member of the imperial suite, he was not a prince or a baron, but he was a nobleman and had earned the right to be addressed as Your High Excellency or Your Excellency, and his name would be added to the list from which invitations to the twelve balls at the Winter Palace were drawn. Anna and her children had been given those rights. Why could they not eventually be mine?
Yes, No. 18, English Prospekt was an address with a rich history, a history particularly resonant for me, though from its hard lessons, I, of course, learned nothing. Because the old grand duke, a navy commander with a pretty face, expected, always, to be assassinated like his brother Tsar Alexander II—mutilated on the street by bomb-throwing revolutionaries, the People’s Will terrorists—for the ground floor he’d had specially crafted steel shutters, as thick as the steel hulls of the ships he ruled. The rooms on the ground floor were otherwise outfitted fashionably in the European style, with heavy mirrors, French consoles, and delicate sofas. The bedroom I took for my own was the only room I bothered to change. Like a girl who fusses over one of her dolls and neglects all the rest, I changed not one iota of any other room in the house. For me, the bedroom was the only room of any importance—my fate would be determined there. Would I be worth the rubles Nicholas was prepared to spend on me?
For he paid my rent and paid also the salaries of my three servants—three, while the Winter Palace has six thousand when the imperial family is in residence—and this was the gossip of the capital. I remember one evening coming home from the Maryinsky, I passed my brother Josef on his bicycle, wearing his gray felt over-shoes and a fur-trimmed greatcoat, and he called to me that I should hurry, that someone on the street had told him the tsarevich was already headed to my house! The whole city knew my business. In the theater that year on Nicholas’s name day the audience laughed when the baritone in Iolanta sang, Who can compare with my Matilda? If the court only knew that at Niki’s visits to my house of ill repute he sat not by me on the small sofa, but by himself in the Louis XIV armchair opposite, as if we were formal acquaintances and he had laid his card on the salver in the entry. The setting of our new house inhibited rather than advanced our flirtation. I realized too late: here is a man who likes to dream of love, who likes the idea of a woman, but not the woman herself, who prefers a white-skinned ballerina who dances on the other side of the footlights, a mistress who is a virgin and lives in her father’s house.
I had made, perhaps, a mistake. I had miscalculated. But there I sat in the house he paid for. And there he sat, in his evening clothes, his frock coat with the gold braiding, his broad white shirtfront with the starched collar that cut a sharp vee. His body drawn away from me, he smoked his thin cigarettes in his holder with his left hand and with his right he stroked his moustache as he told me he would be tormented his whole life if he took my virginity, that if I hadn’t been a virgin he would not have hesitated to make love to me. Even in my naïveté, I knew this to be an excuse, though for what I was not sure. What purpose had I and this house if not consummation? Why had he rented it for me—out of courtesy because I had asked him to?
I began to wish I had never moved away from my parents’ house. I missed the bedroom I shared with my sister and our late-night family dinners when we had all returned from the theater, where, talking over one another, we would vie to tell my mother whose wig had slipped and who had forgotten what step and where a stagehand had begun to crank up the whirlwind and send branches and leaves flying before his cue. My father would employ his considerable talent as a mimic to demonstrate exactly how Pavel Gerdt, a little old now at almost fifty to play the Prince in Swan Lake, had come down flat-footed and huffing from a single, effortful leap. Why, he was so old that when Petipa had choreographed the pas de deux for him and his Swan Queen, the adagio had to be made a pas de trois, with the prince’s friend Benno to do most of the dancing of it while Gerdt did the lifting as the ballerina’s porteur. We would laugh, just the family, intimate and happy with one another, and my father would eventually bring out a bottle of cognac, but now I was alone, sitting awkwardly with this cipher in a frock coat, and they were still together, ignorant of my foundering. But I could not go back and face the humiliation my retreat would bring, my retreat as public as my advance, the gossip that even with privacy and opportunity I had been unable to lure the tsarevich to my bed. And, worse, I took it as proof that his feelings for me did not match mine for him, and I thought by force of will I could make his grow. And so I began to badger him, always an attractive behavior in a woman. When, I asked him, when, will you sleep with me? He told me, Soon, soon. And I would say, How can you say you love me?
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 5