That night the divertissement Petipa devised was Les Quatre Saisons, for which he had choreographed four dances—Rose of Summer, Winter’s Frost, Bacchante, and Harvest Time, and I represented this last as an Ear of Corn. The choreography I cannot remember, but no matter, it was not a masterpiece. Vegetables do not inspire great works of art. At the Maryinsky the court was held at a distance, but Niki sat before me now on a chair next to Alix, just beyond the orchestra pit and the proscenium of the stage, which projected forward in a half circle. If I leapt from it, I could almost land in his lap, but my legs trembled so much when the stagehands cranked up the curtain I wasn’t sure I could walk. I knew Sergei was out there and I sought his face for comfort. He nodded at me, gave me the little one-sided smile, the secret smile we gave each other. Like two-faced Janus, I returned it. I stood as decoration for much of the first few divertissements, a husk of corn in my hand as a prop, and good fortune, for I could not remember whatever it was I was supposed to do whenever my eyes met Niki’s luminous blue ones. It seemed to me he gazed at me with affection.
At this close range, Alix looked, at twenty-seven, at least a decade older and she would that year consult her physicians two hundred times for her heart, her nerves, her sciatica; when these men failed to satisfy her, she would begin her long and ultimately disastrous journey of consorting with healers and holy men. All this was before her and yet one could see something of it in her face: in the exhausted expression, the grim eyes, the long nose beginning now to droop, the frizzled hair that rose like a turban from her too high forehead, the hair brushed and then pinned around the plump cloth pads that gave her coiffure its elaborate shape. Around me danced women equally unattractive—the young Anna Pavlova with her beaked nose, my plain-faced rival Olga Preobrajenska, and Petipa’s daughter, the stout Marie, who looked like a Viking warrior and who owed having a position at all to her father. No, there was no competition on the stage or off for Niki’s attention and I began to note how often and how discreetly his eyes—just his eyes—flickered to where I stood to take in my form before returning to the general action on the stage. He wanted to look at me in my shimmering gold tunic and bloomers, cut much shorter than my usual skirts, at me in my gracefully curled wig. Well, who would not take pleasure in such a sight? And suddenly I began to relish this evening. The nervous sweat that had enveloped me and soaked my hair beneath my wig began to dry and I became impatient for my turn to take center stage and dance, for the moments when Nicholas would not have to drag his eyes from me.
I remember it was Nikolai Legat, my dear Kolinka, who partnered me in my adagio and oh, he was lovely to look at then, with dark, curly hair, eyes as large as two slices of orange, and a lower lip a woman would enjoy biting. It was Kolinka Legat who uncovered for me the secret of Legnani’s endless series of fouettés by scrutinizing her during rehearsals for Act III of Swan Lake, and it was he who coached me until I too could snap my head round while focusing on a spot center front, the trick by which one could whip the series of thirty-two turns without pitching over. (I presented him with a monogrammed gold cigarette case for his trouble.) I was an Ear of Corn, but I decided to behave that night not like a cheerful vegetable in a raspy husk, but like a flesh-and-blood woman bewitched by her lover. Our formulated and regimented choreography—put one’s head together here with one’s partner’s, then turn and place this hand there and that one here—so often produced a mechanical effect in adagio, a cursory approximation of love. But tonight, and not for the last time, I decided to channel my feelings for Niki, using the unwitting Kolinka as medium. I didn’t think he, being already a friend, would mind. Perhaps I overplayed my part a bit, looking too amorously into his eyes and then turning to the eyes of the tsar so close to me. At one point, I held out my hand to the tsar before furling my arm back and touching my palm to Kolinka’s. This went on for some time, until finally Kolinka whispered from behind while supporting me in arabesque, Mala, what are you up to? I almost laughed.
And did my efforts have the desired effect? I believe so. The tsar had no eyes for Winter’s Frost, Rose of Summer, Bacchante, for the empress herself, sitting there looking at him with an increasingly dour face. I forgot to look for Sergei’s. The empress might not be pleased by what she saw on the stage, but the Ear of Corn certainly pleased the tsar.
Sergei told me later that in the Hermitage gallery Niki had leaned toward him beneath a Rembrandt after the main courses and salad but before dessert while lighting up his little yellow cigarette to say, Mala looked very beautiful tonight. Which Niki expected Sergei, pleased by the tsar’s approbation, to dutifully repeat to me. And Sergei was pleased, but he was also wary.
What would happen next?
A meeting of sorts.
It was only a few months later that the chief of police called to tell me the emperor would be passing by my dacha on the road from Peterhof to Strelna at one o’clock and that I must be sure to be standing in the garden where the tsar could see me.
It was the first of such calls, which time would teach me to receive with greater dignity than I did that day. When I put down the receiver I screamed. Then I ran about, for I had little time, sprinting around the garden from this bench to that flower bed, trying to decide which perch would offer the best sight lines from the road. I believe I even considered sitting on the top of my fountain, but I ended up choosing the obvious stone bench, upon which first I sat and then I stood, on tiptoe, so eager was I to be certain Nicholas could see me over the clipped hedge that divided my garden from the road. In the heat the air seemed to me to be swirling and liquid, thick with the sea lapping at the bottom of my garden, which was suddenly and ferociously in bloom, as happens in Russia—after the long winter, the sudden spring, so sudden it shocks one. I felt a bit like one of the dwarves or Africans kept by the old Russian counts for amusement—or worse, like one of the unfortunate serfs forced to paint herself white and pose in the garden like a statue as her master rode past.
At the sound of Niki’s approach I stood on tiptoe and arranged my hair, which I had pinned only half up, leaving the bulk of it down my back like a young girl who has not yet been presented—it was my garden, I reasoned, where one could expect to be left alone, and so if my hair was in charming dishabille, it seemed circumstances might allow it. Girls dance without wigs now on the stages of Paris, London, and New York—but for me that is hard to imagine, one’s hair is as private as the hair on one’s body beneath a tutu; to expose one’s head to an audience is like undressing before it. No. I always wore a wig. But not for this impromptu program.
The sovereign’s carriage at last appeared over the edge of the hill and its appearance surprised me—I had been expecting Nicholas to approach on his horse. And then I saw: the empress sat in the carriage beside him. The empress? Why? Did she feel Niki needed a chaperone on his ride by my dacha? As they neared, I curtseyed and they bowed, but I saw her eyes were on him as he inclined his head toward me, one hand raised against the sun. A bit of a smile, forced, flat. Nothing from her but that bent head. They passed. And I understood it all. She had bristled at his ogling of me at the Hermitage, and they had fought and he had denied it and she had insisted on this ride by my dacha for the purpose of watching his face, to see if her suspicions were correct, that Niki was tiring of her, of her illnesses and of her predilection for producing girls, and that his thoughts were curling back to me. And Sergei—Sergei must have known this and yet he must have been concealing it from me in order to keep me for himself. Selfish. I said a quick selfish prayer myself to the back of Niki’s carriage, the wheels raising yellow dust mixed with pollen, praying that the one minute in which Niki’s carriage rode past my garden would be long enough to remind him of the color and texture of my hair and the alabaster sheen of my skin, which I once pressed beneath his brown body, browned from his naked summertime dips in the Black Sea, and, more important, that his face would reveal his memories of this and that he would fail his test, fail it miserably.
I’
m sure he meant to come to me, soon, and alone, but that spring of 1900 while he lingered in the Crimea, where he should have been safe from the cholera and typhus of Petersburg, Niki was stricken with the latter. Niki called Peter the bog, and he left it behind each spring for the fragrance and the blossoms of the Crimean tropics, the lilies, the lilacs, the violets, the orchids, the wisteria and roses and magnolia, left behind Peter’s flooded streets and gardens and stairways. For in the late spring the Neva rose as the ice melted and water flooded the city. Rats swam through the rivers made of the streets, long tails a whiplash in the eddies, their basement houses drowning pools. Disease had become a problem now that the city had become clogged with factories and the factories clotted with the peasants who left their villages at the end of the summer harvest to look for work and ended up staying here year-round, shackled to all the new industries: the metalworks, the engineering works, the electrical plants. You’d see whole families, women in their homemade blouses and kerchiefs, men with their bowl haircuts and filthy beards, and this was a new phenomenon in Peter, not the peasants, for we always had peasants there, working as our maids and chauffeurs and stable hands and bath attendants and laundresses and prostitutes, but these peasant families working at the factories now crowding up to English Prospekt and spotting the Vyborg side of the city, filling the adjacent Little Neva with their waste. The workers slept together in flophouses or cellars or stairways or shared apartments, sixteen to a room, or they slept on plank beds in the factory barracks or on makeshift mattresses of dirty clothes piled by the side of their machines, and they filled the backyards of the tenements with excrement, and that was why we had so much typhus and cholera all of a sudden in our city.
I’ve told you Tchaikovsky died of cholera from the drinking water? Well, even the tsar’s daughter Tatiana would grow sick one year from the water. I had to pinch my nose when I stepped out of my house at No. 18 and I no longer wanted to stroll by what were now the putrid canals and river. Unfortunately, in the early 1900s disease lurked everywhere in beautiful Peter, and it surprised even the tsar, while his ministers refused to build the suburban housing that could help alleviate the crowding and the disease, saying, But we’re an agrarian society, when clearly what we were was something else entirely. Russia’s land, not much of which was fertile, was so over worked the peasants couldn’t farm it. In 1892, the peasants in Simbirsk starved in a famine so terrible that when a charity sent children’s clothes to the province, the clothes were returned. There were no children left to wear them. You can see why over the next decade peasants flooded the cities.
And from this devastating famine the sentiments of the Decembrists of 1825, long suppressed, were reawakened. Those nobleman officers who had fought Napoleon alongside the peasant infantry saw that the foot soldiers they commanded were men, who deserved to be treated by the regime as men, not as serf beasts. And now, this new generation at the end of the century, a generation of intellectuals and students and revolutionaries, saw the same and said so. They demonstrated against the regime and joined the Union of Liberation, the Marxist Social Democrats, the Social Revolutionaries, and so just as his father had, Niki was forced to repress what threatened the crown. He hunted down and conscripted, exiled, or imprisoned the groups’ leaders. Did I think of these things then? Ponder the unjust treatment of the peasantry or the need for a constitution? I wish I could say yes, but I had more pressing concerns.
For I heard that while in the Crimea nursing Niki, Alix discovered she was pregnant again, and she told the family she was certain that she was carrying, this time, a son. This news from Sergei—that Niki was gravely ill and that Alix was carrying a son and heir—had me halfway between frustration and despair. Her pregnancy and his illness were her great victories, her chance to revive his flagging affection for her with his gratitude. What an opportunity! She could have designed no better one and she must have known this for she kept a steady vigil by Niki in the darkened bedroom. If only the tsar had been this sick with me—I would have nursed him so well I would have won him over completely! Sergei told me Alix reported Niki was so weak he could not crawl from his bed to his dresser. The light hurt the tsar’s feverish eyes and one small ray sent spasmodic pain through his neck, back, and legs. He was so weak he could not hold a spoon or a pen or scratch out the few words of a ukase. If only when he opened his aching eyes he could have seen me before him with the spoonful of broth and the cool rag for his forehead. But he saw Alix. The old palace at Livadia, always humid and moldering, seemed to be decaying about them. The whole of the Great Palace was dark, covered up by shrubbery and arcades and loggias all run over by honeysuckle and wild roses and ivy, which shut out the sunlight—and the mahogany paneling of the interiors quickly absorbed whatever light pierced that fortress. Against even that, Alix shut the drapes and so shut out the world. Alix’s panic had stolen from her the pains of her weak heart and her sciatica, the pain that usually kept her in bed or confined to a wicker wheelchair, and now she had energy, the frantic energy terror provides. While her children and Xenia’s ran back and forth along the “imperial trail,” the brambled path between Livadia and Xenia’s palace of Ai Todor, a progress Alix normally assiduously monitored, she sat instead in her sweat-soaked muslin feeding the tsar spoonfuls of soup, relieved only by Mrs. Orchard, the one servant she fully trusted, this her own nanny whom she had brought from England when Olga was born to help her carve order from the free-flowing splendor of our long Asiatic Russian summer days and the long darkness of our winter ones. Mrs. Orchard had been there when the black cyclone of diphtheria had sucked up Alix’s mother and sister and then let them fall back down lifeless, and surely with Mrs. Orchard by her God would not dare take her husband from her as well. Without him, she had no center to her world, only these children, these tinies, little leaves, the oldest of them five, and this baby inside her, a life of so few weeks it did not yet have a discernible shape and without Niki would have no discernible future. She knew what would happen: if Niki died she would be consigned to one of the palaces to quietly raise the children of the former tsar, while someone else moved into Tsarskoye Selo, Peterhof, Livadia, the Grand Kremlin Palace, her appanage and those of her children reduced and their places at court pushed upstage, against the water. Instead of being grand duchesses, her daughters would be merely princesses, and her son, instead of tsar, a prince. Here in Petersburg, Sergei told me, Count Witte and Baron Freedericks and the grand duke uncles and great-uncles were already conferring about the line of succession and the dowager empress was maneuvering to have Niki’s brother Mikhail made heir to keep Vladimir or Nikolasha from crawling onto the throne. Niki’s brother George, who had been the heir apparent, had died the year before, in the Caucasus, at Abas Tuman, where he had been living quietly, isolated from the family, hoping the climate would cure him of his tuberculosis. But no such luck. He had had a hemorrhage while riding his bicycle and he was found by the side of a road by the attendants charged with his care, dead in the shadow of the great Kazbek mountain. And now the tsar’s handsome but foolish youngest brother Mikhail must quickly be declared heir, for how likely was it that Alix would produce a boy? Not likely. No, Mikhail was heir and he would remain so until Alix produced a boy. The family rose up against her in a dress rehearsal of their complete retreat from her a decade and a half later, when they would plot to force Niki’s abdication and her own confinement in a convent. This time the family merely stirred and rustled and strutted, but from this, Alix understood that Niki’s family were her enemies. But if the tsar recovered and she had a boy, they would have to walk on their knees to her.
And so Alix put her lips to the whorl of her patient’s ear and whispered: Make me regent for your son. Declare your brother only temporary heir, not tsarevich. Ignore your mother. I am sure I am carrying a boy. I had to give her credit: she was not without plots and schemes and capers. And in his superheated dreams Niki, too, could see what she saw, the landscape of disempowerment, trees without leaves, stalks w
ithout flowers, smoke and ash. Even I, in St. Petersburg, could see it—for that future was also my own and it rolled toward me with the news of Niki’s illness. I might never have a chance to complete my destiny with Niki and I had so many plots and schemes and capers myself. I had seen Alix as my nemesis for so long I forgot to worry about assassination or illness. Many people died of typhus. I might never see Niki alive again. I tried to bring up the picture of him as he rode past my dacha, but I kept seeing my own self in my white dress with my pretty long hair instead. I should have worn a ribbon. I lay on my bed at Strelna one whole day in my nightgown—an eternity!—waiting for news of the tsar’s death, but that news never came, and, after all, how long can one stay in bed? I had to get up. And so, eventually, did the tsar.
By December, he was sitting up in his chair.
By January, he was back in Petersburg, to the relief of his mother and brother, and to the concealed disappointment of his grand duke uncles and older cousins.
By June, he was at Peterhof, where on the fifth of that month, to the curses of the entire imperial family, Alix gave birth to her fourth daughter, Anastasia.
And by the end of June, Niki rode the Volkhonsky High Road to my dacha at Strelna. His two Cossack bodyguards remained at the stables while we walked together back to the house, the wind trying to take from us our clothes, which we would take off soon enough, small leaves and twigs making targets of our faces and bodies, the whole afternoon suddenly aroar.
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 13