The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  You must see how I could not let conscience overwhelm expediency—not that I ever had—and on Sergei’s return I said only that I had rested those summer weeks while he was gone at Krasnoye Selo, putting the troops through their exercises, absorbed by that world of men, weapons, and uniforms to which all Romanov males periodically retreated. If Alix had not given birth that summer, Niki would have been there with him, with all of them, instead of rolling around in bed with me, his Cossack bodyguards playing cards in my stable the only witnesses to what were supposed to be the tsar’s long rides through the countryside. Yes, I took Sergei back into my bed with a haste and a false ardor that made him smile. Yes, I licked at him with my black tongue and I rubbed my ash, coal dust, and sooty pebbles all over him, and he only smiled and said, How you’ve missed me, Mala, before my body spit him into a sleep where he lay spent, so terrifically unaware of the malignancy of me.

  By late October, my body had begun to change in ways only I could notice but soon enough Sergei would, as well. The theater season began, too, and though I could hide my pregnancy for now beneath my high-waisted tutu if I took care with the profile I presented on the stage—thanks be to God we did not perform in the leotards of today—eventually, I would have to withdraw from the season with some excuse of illness and with a more intricate fabrication for Sergei. I chose a gray afternoon as we rode in his carriage on Nevsky Prospekt during the usual promenade—in a few years more the carriages would be joined by motorcars, but for now we shared the wide boulevards with bicycles and drozhkis and horse-drawn taxis called izvozchiki and troikas and electric streetcars. I wore, like all women who rode in these contraptions, a veil that shielded my hair and face from wind and grit. Better to be veiled when one is two-faced. The rains of September had gone; the November snow had not yet arrived. It was neither here nor there, a good day for a lie. Strolling about us were officers in their winter uniforms with gray mantles, men in greatcoats and dark caps with cockades to signify their rank, students in their black cloaks, peasant men in belted tunics and sheepskin jackets, muzhiki in red shirts. Peasant women in kerchiefs carried their children, and governesses—foreign ones and Slavic girls—led their charges by the hand or in a small parade and the ones with infants pushed elaborate buggies. I touched at my hair, at my wrists, at the spot beneath my collarbone. As I opened my mouth, the tall slender windows of the city watched me from the four-story buildings that lined the streets. Sergei, I’m carrying your child, I said, and the hot words scorched the material of my veil. I held my breath. Would he believe me? He turned to me, his bearded face suffused with joy. Ah, yes. He believed me. Terrible. We had to hurry to my house on English Prospekt to drink to the child’s health, Sergei pouring the vodka into the little jeweled glasses Niki had bought me as a housewarming present ten years before.

  But don’t pity Sergei too much. He could have offered to marry me yet he did not. A morganatic marriage to me would have jeopardized his income and his titles. But he would put his name down as father on the child’s birth certificate, give my child his patronymic, which no Russian child can be without. It was like an identity paper, and with Sergei’s patronymic, Sergeivich, my child’s future would be assured.

  Unfortunately, of course, I gave birth a month too soon, in June, at Strelna, during the white nights, in the heat and privacy of my dacha. In an act of deliberate impudence, I had covered the walls of my bedroom in a silk with the same floral pattern Alix had selected for her bedroom at Tsarskoye—green wreaths dotted with pink flowers, each one tied up with a pink ribbon, or so Roman Meltzer, designer to the crown, had described it to me—and the flower-and-leaf-covered walls seemed to breathe with me as I paced. Sergei, alarmed by what he thought was this emergency of a premature delivery, had called in his brother Nicholas’s private doctor (for Nicholas, in addition to being a homosexual, was an inveterate hypochondriac), a doctor who demanded I lie flat on my back in bed, a command I promptly disobeyed. I could not obey him. Instead, like a peasant woman, I walked the room, my fingers sliding against the silk walls, the green leaves as prickly as if they were real leaves beneath my wet fingertips, the bright print of the flowers and bows deepening and seeming to bleed. This kind of pain was unknown to me, this pain tightening across my abdomen, this pulling at my tailbone. Peasant women in labor, I’d heard, tied themselves under their arms with rope and hung themselves from the rafters of a barn to enlist gravity as midwife. I understood the impulse. Some gave birth in the fields, stepping away from their plows to squat. But I had a doctor who treated the imperial family and who implored me to lie in a dignified manner flat on my back.

  As I lay beneath the sheet that protected my modesty and blinded him, with his unwashed hands he periodically checked the progress of my labor. I would be sick with childbed fever for a month following the birth from his ministrations, my body weak and rubbery and my brain dark. My sister was the only one I could stand to have in my humid bedroom, the only one in my family not mortified by the disgrace of my confinement. While Sergei paced on the veranda, she distracted me, retelling from memory the old stories she used to read me when I was a child, the Russian fairy tales, about Grandfather Frost whose breath makes thin icicles and who shakes the snow to the earth by rustling the long hair of his beard, about the Snow Maiden who rises from that snow and melts each spring, about Baba Yaga, the witch who inhabits a house that stands not on stone or dirt but on chicken feet, and so the house could be turned to face north, south, east, or west, depending on Baba Yaga’s fancy. But any way I turned, north, south, east, or west, I found only pain.

  Somewhere during this long day children played in the gardens of the villas around me and lovers took little green boats across the lakes between the islands and the boatmen sang for pay, and on a barge a concertina band played as it did on summer evenings, and on a veranda I could not see a gramophone was cranked and bits and pieces of its music turned to splinters and pierced the air. At night there was no sun but also no darkness, the sky streaked magenta, blue, and pearl; the yellow of the Russian virgin’s bower with its spidery bell-shaped blossoms did not disappear and the birds did not hide themselves. I did. In my room the wet heat came off me and no number of cool towels could stanch it. Although there was only Julia in my room, I saw others—the shadows and outlines of bodies, the flicker of a face—just as I sometimes see today, now that the dead are arriving to sit with me. By the early hours of the night I understood I might die; my labor was going on too long. I was being punished for my duplicity, which I longed now to confess, and I began to pray, Gospodi pomilou, Lord have mercy on me. But my body was strong—I had my father’s robust health and I would have his longevity, though I did not yet know this—and finally, between one and two in the morning, the earth opened between my legs and my son was born.

  My sister caught my boy as I squatted silently, clinging to a bed post, while my doctor smoked cigars with Sergei in the next room until the baby’s cries hurried him in, and she and I whispered to each other, It’s a boy, it’s a boy. And though she shared in my delight, she did not know the whole truth of it. Look at his fingers, look at his feet, look at his face, his beautiful round face. My son had the wide Russian face of most Romanov babies, and a widow’s peak of hair that lapped at his forehead. My sister held him to me so I could kiss him there. By age six, he would retain only the broad forehead; the rest of his face would narrow, chiseled into a long triangle. I whispered lyubezny, my dear, and milenki, my little darling, to the son I had dreamed of having. If I were married, I would have lit then for him the candles I saved from my wedding, as a symbol of his parents’ love to light his safe passage through the world. If I were married, I would wrap my child in the shirt his father had worn just the day before today, another old Russian custom to symbolize the father’s protection offered to his newborn. But there were no candles or shirts for my son.

  And when the doctor ran from the room to tell Sergei that the baby was a boy and, no, quite robust and certainly full term, S
ergei, my sister said—for she had followed the doctor with the baby in her arms—blanched, for he could count backward as well as I to the summer he was gone. He put out his cigar and, without even looking at the baby she held, went to the stables, and to my sister’s amazement, saddled his horse and rode away from the dacha, from Strelna, from me. I suppose I had thought nothing could take him from my side. The doctor’s a liar, I railed to my sister, he’s trying to ruin me, as I struggled up from the bed in time to watch from my window as Sergei rode his horse through the garden and, I worried, might ride it into the sea. It looked as if God would punish me, after all.

  My mother came to visit me at Strelna for the first time the day after my son was born. She had never come to my dacha before or to English Prospekt, out of moral principle, but when my sister reported I was sick and all alone, having been abandoned by Grand Duke Sergei, my parents’ worst fears were realized and my father dispatched my mother to nurse me and then bring me home. For now, Sergei still paid the expenses of my house and dacha, but who knew how long he would continue to do so and how could I afford either on a dancer’s salary? My parents wanted to move me back to Liteiny Prospekt with my illegitimate son, whom they said my sister and her new husband would adopt. For Julia had married her beau, Baron Ali Zeddeler, that very year and she had become a baroness, and I, for all my conniving, was nothing but my parents’ disgrace. My mother sat by my bed, and in my sickroom I breathed in her soft skin and her lilac scent. Too ashamed to look at her, I slept or pretended to. I was too weak to talk or to eat. My mother had to feed me by tipping a spoonful of broth into my mouth as I lay there, just as Alix had done for Niki. Then my mother tucked my son into bed with me and crooked my arm around him, cinching us so close I could not help but inhale the intoxicatingly sweet smell of him. I was lucky, she told me. I had a healthy son. And whatever shame his birth caused me could not compare to the pain of a stillbirth or a dying child. I’ve told you she had thirteen children. What I didn’t tell you was that she buried five of them, my brother Stanislaus when he was four years old, and four other children in their infancies, children from her first marriage. She had had to place each little child in a box in the ground and let the rain pour over him, let the sun bake the earth but leave him cold. That, she said, was unbearable, not this. And I suppose it had been, for looking at this round-faced infant, his mouth working as if to suck even in his sleep, I could not imagine him in a box or anywhere but in the crook of my arm. Niki’s father, on the twenty-first anniversary of the death of his second son, Alexander, an infant who had not been even one when he died, wrote to his wife of his intolerable pain that their boy was not with them, that he was not there to enjoy his days with the other children, their other boys, that they would never have their angel with them in this life, that this was a wound that would never close. Alexander III. The bear with a trunk like a barrel, a forehead like a stone wall.

  Sergei, too, had lost what he thought was his child and his grief was so great it drove him over the hedge in my garden and onto the High Road. Ali had told my sister that Sergei had wept to the tsar that I had betrayed him, that I had given birth to a son of another man and that he was now lost, and that the tsar had held him and said nothing. But Niki must have known then that I had given him what he had wanted. At times it seemed the tsar and then Sergei appeared at the foot of my bed on horseback, thundering over me, and then like Hades, one of them swept up my son, and, cloak flying, made off with him while I wailed and walked the empty ground they left behind. I left a damp mark wherever I lay in my bed, and when eventually I recovered, the bed was thrown out, the mattress burned, and every piece of furniture and each wall wiped down with disinfectant.

  When I was well enough to lie on the couch, Grand Duke Vladimir began to walk to my dacha each afternoon to visit me, to stroke my hair, and when I could sit up, he read to me, and when I could hold cards, we played mushka, and when it came time for the baby to be christened and I had no name for him—I could not call him Sergei, and I could not, though I wanted to, call him Nicholas—the grand duke said, Give him my name. On that day, July 23, he presented my son with a cross hung on a platinum chain, the crucifix itself a dark green stone hacked from the Urals and polished in a Petersburg shop. And so I knew Vladimir would protect me and that I would be able, despite my disgrace, to return to the stage. His attentions to me, of course, did not go unnoticed, and the rumors began that my son was his, and Miechen tightened her lips whenever someone whispered my name. Would she tighten her lips still further if she knew Niki was my son’s father, my son’s paternity pushing her yet one square further from the throne?

  During this time, also, my sister told me Sergei had begun an affair with a woman he had known a long while, Countess Barbara Vorontzov-Dashkov, who had married into an old and important family of Moscow boyare, long associated with the court, and at this news my heart shrank like a desiccated old nut in its shell and it rattled there in its place behind my rib cage. Niki’s father had years ago bought the old Vorontzov estate in the Crimea, with its waterfall, its pine tree forests, its view of the Yalta harbor, and its French château, done Third Empire–style, and Sergei and Niki had played there and at the Winter Palace and Gatchina with Barbara’s future husband, Vanya. They, along with the other Vorontzov-Dashkov children, the Sheremetiev children, the Dariatinsky children, had run on the palace lawns, ridden the miniature railways, taken tea at the Huntsman’s Lodge. Niki and Vanya had each married, but Sergei had not. And now Vanya was dead and his wife was a widow and in her Sergei found another vulnerable woman to love. I did not know whether the countess visited Sergei at his palace or he called on her at her mansion on the English Embankment. I did not know if their lovemaking involved a bed or a garden bench, the sound of a clock chiming or the smell of crushed rose petals, but in 1905, the countess went to Switzerland, where she quietly gave birth to Sergei’s son, whom she named Alexander. At his birth, he was adopted by the countess’s friend Sophie von Dehn. Why did the countess not keep her son? Why did her liaison with Sergei not end in a marriage? Wait, and I will tell you.

  Now August 1902.

  I sat on my veranda, my tiny son, my faithful little man, in my arms, and I prayed one thing over and over, that Alix would have a daughter.

  But prayers are rarely answered as you request. For Alix, alas and alack, had that summer no baby at all.

  In early August, Alix began to bleed and though she bled and bled, there was no baby. It was, the doctors said, simply her Mrs. Beasley, as she called her monthly, after nine months of what she had thought was a pregnancy. When her waist had thickened and her breasts had swelled, she had refused all those medical doctors access to her body. She had admitted only M. Philippe, who had pressed his hand to her womb and said, You are with child. And she had not wanted the doctors to contradict this, to in any way impede the progress of the necessary, the essential fantasy, and so only M. Philippe, who had been decreed here in Russia by one of Niki’s ukazy a doctor of medicine and who had been made a state councilor, observed the progression of this phantom pregnancy. I suppose even a tsar’s decree cannot make a doctor of a charlatan. Perhaps Alix had guessed where Niki spent those long summer afternoons while she nursed Anastasia, and so she had hastened too soon to try for another child. Her pregnancy had long ago been announced and all the country was awaiting the birth of the tsar’s fifth child. When a bulletin was published, finally, on August 20, explaining away the hysterical pregnancy of the past year as a miscarriage, the wildest rumors began to circulate in the capital: the empress had given birth to a monster with horns, to yet another girl who was spirited out of the country, to a stillborn buried on the grounds of Peterhof under cover of night. I ask you, was the truth of it any less fantastic?

  No, there was no child buried or sent away. That fate belonged to M. Philippe, with the black hair and the black moustache. At last Niki had had enough of the znakhar. Philippe’s last words to them: Another will come to take my place.


  His prediction was not as outlandish as you might imagine. The sorcerer, the holy fool, the idiot muzhik, the peasant through whom God speaks, the madman who is not mad but prescient—these are men for whom Russia has long had tolerance. Wearing rags and chains, they wander from village to village on pilgrimages, fed by handouts, sleeping in the open or by a borrowed fire, begging a few kopeks from some peasant or prince who hopes to buy a bit of grace. On occasion, these fools and spiritualists were brought to a palace to pray or to rebuke or to heal. In the Petersburg of my time, the two princesses from Montenegro who married cousins of the tsar—they were known as the black sisters—brought with them to Russia along with their dowries their interest in the occult. It was they who brought Mitka the Fool, Philippe Vachot, and, finally, Rasputin to the palace. In Montenegro, they claimed, witches and sorcerers lived in the forests and they could speak with the dead and see the futures of the living. They and their friends at court held séances in closed rooms or hung on the ravings of spiritualists in trances. Alix, the German-English Alix, found all of this to be nonsense, until her desperation for an heir reached a high-enough pitch, until she turned one wall of her bedroom into an iconostasis before which she prayed, as if in church, for God to give her a son, and then the gates to Tsarskoye Selo swung open to these peasants, these startzy, to whom she surrendered utterly.