My Idyll Will Not Be Short
Ah, it is almost too painful to recall that triumphant afternoon as I lie here on this bed.
I will say that it seemed, after all, Niki had yielded to the ravenous nature of his grandfather who, not fully sated by his wife and mistress, commissioned from the artist Mikhail Alexandrovich Zichi pornographic engravings for further pleasure. This erotica—in one, Zichi had women impaled by winged phalluses as if the woman on her back receiving the phallus of the devil was not enough for him, that disembodied members must also be fornicating simultaneously beside him—was discovered locked in Alexander II’s desk at the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks when they ransacked the place in 1917. They later published the painting in books for all the world to see. What would the world ever come to know of this woman on her back, receiving the phallus of the tsar?
When we finished to his satisfied bellow, Niki sat up to locate his cigarettes, which were tucked, as always, in the pocket of his tunic or the pocket of his greatcoat, with him wherever he went; he put one in his holder, which was like any item he used or owned, no matter how small—a pen, an inkwell, a brush, a bottle—exquisite, made of silver or gold or inlaid with mother-of-pearl or encrusted with gems. He kept a collection of Fabergé cigarette cases in the dressing room of his bath. Did he possess any plain objects? I never saw one. The Bolsheviks couldn’t find any either when they stuffed their pockets with palace trinkets—even the embossed cakes of imperial soap made them pretty prizes. I sucked at one curled end of my hair, a childhood habit, and stared at the tsar, who sucked at his embellished cigarette holder, leaning forward every now and then to offer me a smoke, which, thanks to Sergei, I knew how to do. I would like to say I thought of the feelings of Sergei Mikhailovich at this time, not just the tricks he taught me, but I did not. I was thinking about the discouraging fact of the gold band glistening on the ring finger of Niki’s right hand and about the marvelous fact that he nonetheless lay naked in my bed. And he was now no longer a faun but a man; he wore a greater weight than he had six years earlier and grooves now scratched at the corners of his eyes, and those six years as emperor of the country and emperor of the bedroom had erased his hesitation, his reticence as a lover. I rested my chin on Niki’s thighs and made an idle fig leaf for him of my hair, while he sat against the pillows, smoking and looking out my window at the tall yellow and purple heads of the tulips in my garden, the boldest of those tulips so proud, so big, they couldn’t possibly know how the wind would peel them from their stalks before summer. Was he thinking of Sergei, whom he had just displaced? Of Alix, whom he had just betrayed? My mind was empty—pleasure and triumph had wiped it clean, but I could feel in a cupboard there a few words scrambling into formation, which then broke ranks when Niki said abruptly, Let’s walk.
He wanted us to wear little—my chemise and petticoat, his shirt loose over his breeches. He wanted to enjoy in the fragrant afternoon the nothingness of private people who can walk half-clothed in the gardens of their empty houses. I think he wanted in that moment not to be tsar or even to be himself. But my house was not empty, though to him it must have seemed to be. I had only my houseman and my cook and my yardman, but any one of them could look out a window and see Nicholas II in his billowing shirt walking beside me past the violets, the orange tips, the dahlias. And with what surprise would my servants regard him! And what would they think when they did? That the fortunes of this house were soon to rise? The tsar’s boot soles bent the grass. My bare feet skimmed the grass. At his coronation four years earlier Niki had been eclipsed by Alexandra’s height, made greater by her heels and her crown, and eclipsed also by her breadth, made wider by the stiff skirts of her court dress. By her side he, rather than she, seemed the consort, meager of stature, his chin receding into the neck of his mantle. She made him look slight, but at my side he stood majestic, his stride the stride of an emperor. It’s all in the proportions, as any scenic designer knows. A small castle on the backdrop is made to loom large in the distance. The second floor of a storefront is constructed at half the size of the first to give the illusion of greater height. A large spinning wheel dwarfs the girl. A dwarf by her side makes her a giant.
We walked all the way along my private road to the gulf, and his silence was so deep I thought wildly that when we got there perhaps he would expect us two fornicators to drown ourselves. The wind lifted his shirt and my chemise, but when we reached the water, he stopped walking and he made no motion to rope me to a big rock and roll me into the surf. No. He had in mind to talk. Whatever he wanted to say, he wanted to say here, outside, as if he did not want to be held accountable for these words, but to let the wind over the water take them from him as he spoke. Alix has been seeing a spiritual advisor, a Monsieur Philippe, and he has assured her she will bear me a son. He turned his face to me. He said this last child would be a boy. At the sight of yet another baby daughter in Alix’s arms, Niki told me, he had had to excuse himself from Alix’s bedside and walk the Peterhof palace park to master his disappointment. His sister Xenia’s reaction? My God, another girl! It had been six in the morning, but the dew had already dried from the speckled planes of the flowers, and Niki’s hope and faith had dried up along with it.
I had heard of M. Philippe Nazier-Vachot, the butcher’s assistant from France. All of Petersburg had heard of him. He lectured, in his ungrammatical French, about the heavenly orbs and the earth, which was once, according to him, a globe of fire, and offered up prophecies, all the while asserting, I am nothing in myself, I am the receptacle of God, I act in the name of the divine. His women disciples called him Master and they revered his psychic powers, believed that if he proclaimed them invisible they were so. Why, they would not even greet one another in the streets, for each believed herself as invisible as M. Philippe had promised, and therefore could not be seen by the others. If M. Philippe promised Alix she would bear a son, she would flatten herself beneath the tsar every night to make it so. But Niki had lost his taste for making love to Alix, he said, these six years of illness, paranoia, and desperation stripping from him his patience and his desire. Even her increasing mysticism he met with dismay. My mother barely speaks to her, my father, if he were alive, would have her put away. Niki had begun to use his study as a refuge, his ceaseless paperwork as barrier, darkness as tool of last resort. When it was her time of the month to conceive, he told me, grimacing, he managed his part by conjuring up his memories of my body, which was, here and now, exactly as he recalled it, exactly as it had been when I was twenty. And here he kissed my arms. Well, of course, I had not had four children and I was a dancer—an occupation that preserves the body better than a dip in formaldehyde. But I did not say any of that. Let him think what he wished about the marvelous condition of my beauty and the decrepitude of hers. Let him kiss the length of my arms. No, I reveled in his words. All this was what I had waited to hear, the thoughts too private for the tsar to reveal to Sergei, impossible to reveal given Sergei’s relations with me, relations Niki could halt with a word. If the tsar wished to reassume his place in my bed, Sergei, of course, would be nudged from it. Did I think, Where is the lighthearted young officer I fell in love with ten years ago and who is this beleaguered man in his place? No, I did not. I thought only about how I couldn’t wait to run back to my family, and to my father in particular, to tell him, The tsar still loves me! You were wrong. My idyll, after all, is not so short!
All those long summer afternoons of 1901, when Alix and her four daughters lay down all unknowing at Peterhof for their naps, Nicholas would set aside the papers his ministers had brought him from Petersburg in the special leather pouch stamped with the imperial insignia, and he would mount his horse and ride the twelve versts to my dacha. He had asked me to empty my house that summer for his visits—Sergei was with his regiment at Krasnoye Selo, I hosted no parties, invited no one to stay, gave my servants each afternoon off—and so there was no one to see us when we walked into the woods in search of the mushrooms Sergei
had had planted for me or when Niki himself filled my birch-bark basket with the black and brown caps, which I would stew with butter and cream. I did not have my father’s culinary talents, but I could do this much for the tsar. We would sit on the veranda and eat with our fingers, like two children left to their own devices while the adults went out visiting. Before we went to bed, we licked each other’s fingers clean. The fingers he once licked of butter are puckered now and dry, but not then, and not his either. That summer I did not wear my cup of beeswax nor did the emperor wear a sheath, and though he said nothing I knew what he wanted, a son, against the drip, drip, drip of all those girls. The sun rises before five in that month and makes a leisurely arc across the sky, and because the sun took so long a roll west, our afternoons together were endless; our lovemaking was slow and long and breathless in the heat. When it neared the dinner hour, only then did he rise from the bed, and I drew him a bath in the dacha’s biggest tub, which still was not deep enough or long enough for him. In the bathrooms in each of his apartments in each of his palaces had been installed a sunken tub in which he could completely immerse himself. In my mansion on Kronversky Prospekt I would build him such a tub, but we are two years from there yet. We take our bathing seriously in my country—every estate had its own bathhouse and the blocks of every city were dotted with them—bathhouses complete with Persian carpets, wood paneling, potted palms, and male attendants bearing trays of brandy and cigars. The men, smoking and drinking, would dip in the pool. Then they sat in the sauna while the pages beat them with birch twigs or else they retired to a private room where a page would allow himself, for a fee, to be corrupted. For Niki, I served as such a page, and in my dacha he folded his limbs into my tub, where I poured in the oil he loved of bergamot, bitter orange, and rosemary, and sponged him first with that water and then with fresh as he lay there, cigarette between his teeth, head back against the porcelain rim. The window above the tub let in air pungent with grasses, pine, and birch, the scent seized and intensified by the steam rising from the water. In this sweet haze his fingers would play against my fingers and sometimes he would turn his face to me, and I would begin then to dread his leaving, the emptiness of the dacha once he had, and the specter of Sergei, which seemed to walk the rooms at the tsar’s exit. I would sometimes run after it to say, I’m sorry. You know he was my first love. Sometimes my fingers would drum the rim of the tub in anticipatory dread, and the tsar would calm my fingers with his own. Finally, though, Niki would have to stand, water sluicing off his body as the waters in the fountain at Peterhof sluiced down the gilded body of Samson, the estate and the evening there a relentless slice of boredom to which the tsar must now return, to face dinner, embroidery, reading aloud, perhaps the showing of a film from which, at the empress’s insistence, the indecorous moments had been removed. To all this the tsar was subject, as he was subject to the continuing predictions of M. Philippe, who assured him that for Anastasia to have been born when all signs of the sun and moon and stars pointed to the birth of a son must mean that she was marked for an extraordinary life. The next child would most certainly be a son, for Anastasia had paved the way. And through all this nonsense, the tsar kept his silence.
Poor Anastasia. I met her briefly in Paris, in 1928, with my husband, in the compartment of a train at the Gare du Nord, eight years after she had been fished out of that Berlin canal and given her name as Frau Tchaikovsky. Yes, Anastasia had had an extraordinary life, though I doubt M. Philippe could have foreseen its exact dimensions. None of the Romanovs but Niki’s sister Olga would see her, and then denounced her as a fraud. Olga had known Anastasia best, having been the one member of the family still visiting Niki and the girls even as late as 1913, when the family summered, as usual, at Livadia, where she gave Anastasia painting lessons. But it was hard, you see, to know for certain if Frau Tchaikovsky was in fact Anastasia, as girls change so much in appearance between the ages of twelve and twenty-seven, even girls who had not seen their families murdered and who had then crawled across Russia to Berlin. And as Niki and Alix broke completely from the rest of the family after the tercentenary of 1913 over the issue of Rasputin, no one saw the girls after that. By 1916, Niki was no longer even exchanging Christmas presents with his brothers and sisters and cousins and their families. But I saw Anastasia, in 1917, just before Niki abdicated. She was then almost sixteen. And so, I knew it was she in the train compartment. Or, rather, I knew an opportunist when I saw one. And why should she not have her opportunity? What harm was there in it? I stepped from the compartment and said, I have seen the tsar’s daughter. In 1967 I said it again to the French director Gilbert Prouteau for his documentary Dossier Anastasia. He came to film right here in my bedroom. He addressed me as Princess. I was considered an expert, an insider, an authority on the Romanov family. More of an authority than he knew. Yes, I told M. Prouteau, she had the tsar’s eyes. I could not mistake them. I knew those eyes very well. Ah, that made M. Prouteau very happy.
So. So. Where am I?
At the end of that summer of 1901, just before the emperor was due to join Sergei and the court for maneuvers at Krasnoye Selo, I knew I was pregnant. If I was pregnant with a son, this would change the tsar, me, and the country. So to prepare the way for this announcement, I brought the tsar sturgeon, black bread, and caviar to his bed. I found his cigarettes. I drew his bath. I would tell him while he lay in the tub, when his mind was relaxed and his heart open to me. In my mind’s eye I could already see his smile, his slow disbelief turning to comprehension, and the birth again of hope and faith: he would have a son. When I came to the bedroom to tell him his bath was ready, he was still lying on his back, smoking, his slow exhalations sending long shots of smoke up to the high ceiling, which then disappeared halfway there. At my entrance, the tsar sat up and stubbed out his cigarette on the small porcelain dish with the remains of the bread and cleared his throat. Mala, he said, I have something to tell you. And so, of course, I let the tsar speak first.
How many times have I replayed in my mind the different unfolding of events had I spoken first! For what he told me was that Alix was pregnant again and that M. Philippe, la surprise grande, had declared with dead certainty that this time she would have a son. I would have laughed had I not been choked by a spasm in my larynx that kept me from either breathing or speaking. Probably a good thing, for if I had spoken, I’m sure I would have said something to regret, as always. I felt the way I did a thousand times over when trumped, unexpectedly, at vint. Why, our afternoons together had been just another wild troika ride across a great plain, and that ride had brought us to this same place. I had been deceiving myself all summer. I had not had Niki to myself as I had thought. I had counted on his fidelity for at least the eight weeks that followed the birth of Anastasia in June, at least until Alix stopped the bleeding that follows childbirth. But no, the French butcher’s son and the German baby-making machine had not waited even that long before their quest for an heir began in earnest once again. There were three of them in the bedroom at each coitus, Alix and Niki in the bed, M. Philippe in the corner, intoning some prayer. I am nothing in myself. I act in the name of the divine.
But for once I did not behave impetuously. I did not shriek at the emperor for relishing a diversion with me while still at the labor of sleeping with his wife. I did not pitch at him the hard sponge which I held in my hand. No, I closed my mouth around my secret. I, who had never kept a secret in my entire life, who ran to my father, to my sister, to this grand duke or that to prattle on about every perceived injury or splendiferous triumph—why, the hour after the tsar bedded me in 1893 I gave the telephone exchange my sister’s number so I could crow to her—yes, the details of that night flew from my mouth, but this summer and its secrets lay under my tongue and had no feathers. I thought, Better to wait, let Alix have another daughter, and then I will tell the tsar I had had his son.
So, Niki dressed and left me that day for the Great Review at Krasnoye Selo knowing nothing, and I have
no memory of what else he said to me or what I said to him, whether he took the bath I drew for him or not, whether I watched him dress or not, or whether we kissed goodbye. I knew only that he would return to Alix and remain by her side during her confinement, and I would not see him for a long time. As soon as he disappeared over the bridge, I began to worry. What if I did not have a son? Another daughter would be of little interest to Niki and that lack of interest would not be enough to counter the scandal I was certain to endure. Not that I was that much afraid of scandal. Still, this would be scandal on a far grander scale than Will Mathilde wear a hooped petticoat? In this scandal the tsar had returned to his mistress and given her a child.
Society women who carried illegitimate children as the result of an affair retreated from public life, went abroad for the birth if they could, and adopted out their children. A woman who was a mistress gave birth at home and raised her child at the fringes of society, employing her protector’s connections to ennoble her child or find for him a place at court, in the Guards, or in the diplomatic corps. Even the child of a servant and an aristocrat could find some position—why, the governess of the tsar’s own children was such a one as that. And girls who had no protection, such as the poor girls in the ballet who had been made pregnant by the young officers who abandoned them, well, those girls were dismissed and went home to their families, and each in her own way struggled with the disgrace. I did not fit exactly into any of those categories. I was a mistress, but my child did not belong to my protector. I was a dancer who had been made pregnant, but my impregnator was not a young officer but the tsar. If Alix and I both had sons, she would campaign to send me and my son into exile, probably to Paris to live side by side with Ekaterina Dolgorukaya and her son who had some claim to the throne. But what if I were not carrying the tsar’s child? What if I carried the child of, say, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich? If I had a daughter, Sergei would find her a husband from one of the great Russian families, for I would not subject her to the limited life of the theater, and if I had a boy, well, the possibilities were endless for a boy. My child could study at the Alexander Lyceum or at the Corps des Pages. He could join the Guards. He could have a career at court. And if Alix should have another daughter, well, that would be another story still. My son could be tsarevich. But for now it was better for my son to be the son of Sergei Mikhailovich.
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 14