The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  You could say, I suppose, that M. Philippe had wrought a miracle—for me! I sat down and wrote a note to Niki, which I gave to my sister without a word and which my sister gave to her husband, Ali, to deliver to the tsar. Ali was quite close to Niki, you know. On the eve of Niki’s coronation Ali was one of five Guards officers invited to join the tsar at his uncle’s estate at Ilinskoe. My sister’s marriage could not have worked out better for me. I needed a new courier now that Sergei had vanished. And Ali personally handed to the tsar my note, which said simply: Come see your son.

  So, when the birds began their annual migration from Petersburg to the more temperate climates of the Crimea and Persia and Turkey, for the weather, which had been warm, had suddenly turned cold and soon it would begin to rain, as it does for weeks and weeks until one longs for snow, which at least brings light to the city but does not, for some reason, feel as wet, and when Niki returned from the provinces of Rishkovo and Kursk, where he had toured monasteries and hospitals and governors’ houses, the chief of police called me to say Niki would be coming to Strelna and the police would close this afternoon the highway between Peterhof and my dacha, so that Niki, before he went home, could make one last official visit, this one to me, at my dacha, where I had remained, later in the season than usual, out of sight.

  I had been waiting for him since noon, uncertain exactly when he would arrive, and by now the light had already begun to fade. When I finally heard the cry of my stableboy’s greeting and the slog of the tsar’s approach to my house from the stables, I opened the door to greet him—and there was the shock of the sight of him—tall in his papakha, his face ruddy from the cold, his eyes a sparkling blue—and I thought, Will my desire for this man ever leave me? He kissed me on both cheeks, the scent of his bath oils still present on his chilled skin, present even at the end of the day, and when I put my hands to my cheeks against the cold he left there, he laughed. My Little K, did I chill you? And I wanted to kiss the tips of his fingers but instead I took from him myself his papakha and his greatcoat, which I handed over to my houseman to clean and brush, and off the man went trembling with the honor. Niki looked at me, one part of his mouth still smiling, and he said, So, Mala, I’ve heard a rumor that you have given me a son. I laughed with surprise—our meeting was going to be lighthearted, not at all like the weather or the weather I imagined inside the palace at Peterhof. And the tsar said, Does he look like you or like me?, teasing a bit, but I detected a stress note beneath that tone—remember, I have been listening for the notes beneath a melody all of my life—and so I said, teasing also, The sovereign will himself decide, and I brought him my son, almost four months, sleeping, swaddled in his blankets, and just the sight of him sent milk to my breasts, which were bound up with strips of cloth to prevent exactly this. My maid followed me, carrying the cradle, and when she set it by the tsar, I placed my son in his arms.

  And around me it seemed the house, even the earth, wobbled. Niki bent his head over our child. My son did not look a Kschessinsky. He was made of different parts, Romanov parts. He had the tsar’s ears, which narrowed almost to a point and bent outward at the top, the tsar’s same straight, small nose, not the pug nose of some of Niki’s daughters, handed down to them from their grandmother but skipping over my son, nor the long nose of their own mother. And as my son grew, when people passed him, they would say, That must be the emperor’s son, that’s how much he came to resemble the sovereign. This Niki now was discovering for himself. Look—and he held up the baby’s palm against his own—he has my fingers, and then, as if the thought suddenly occurred to him, he opened the baby’s diaper, and at this my laughter pealed out of me like a bell and rang around the room.

  I have a son, Niki smiled. I have a son. And he looked about him as if to tell someone the news, but I was the only one there and so he told it to me.

  Yes, I said. You have a son. Niki stood with him and my son kicked spasmodically and stretched and contracted his small arms, his little fists the fists of a tsarevich, and Niki spoke.

  Maletchka, why did you tell poor Sergei Mikhailovich you were having his child?

  Did you want two sons by two mothers? I asked. Are you that greedy?

  And the tsar laughed.

  I said, What does Sergei know?

  He thinks it’s the son of the prince of Siam—or of the Hussar Nikolai Skalon.

  Two men I’d had flirtations with in 1899 and 1900.

  But since he doesn’t look Siamese, Niki said, and as Skalon is long dead, the boy must be mine. What is his name?

  When I told him, Niki said immediately, We shall call him Vova, using the diminutive. We. So Vova would not be adopted by my sister and her husband. Niki put the baby in his cradle and then he knelt, abruptly, before me and kissed my hands, and at this, the heavens released their heavy rain, which rushed to meet the treetops, the grass, the roof, the windows, the doors, the cobblestones, the garden, the High Road, its cousin the gulf, and the rain also fell upon the crowns of the triple-headed golden eagle on the cupola of the Grand Palace at Peterhof.

  By the first snowfall, Niki had bought for me three plots of land on Petersburg Island, across the Great Neva, across from the Winter Palace, at the corner of Kronversky Prospekt and Great Dvorianskaya Street. The purchase of the land was kept secret. It was not registered in my name so as not to draw attention to the 88,000 rubles paid for it, which everyone would know that I—abandoned by Sergei Mikhailovich—could not afford. This side of the city owned no metal works or electricity plants or printing presses, only a smattering of new mansions amid the old wooden houses that Peter the Great had once decreed were to be the only type of house to be constructed in this part of the city, as the granite from Finland, the marble and travertine from Italy and the Urals, the porphyry from Sweden, and the sandstone from Germany were to be used only for Admiralty Island, for the imperial section of Petersburg, demarcated by its canals, the Fontanka and the Moika, and by its avenues, and by the two palaces of the tsar, the Winter and the Summer, and by its stone. And so until 1830, little else was built on Petersburg Island but wooden shacks for the workers, a wooden fort, a wooden house where Peter himself had lived while his city was assembled. Even after that, the land remained barely developed. But when the Troitsky Bridge was finished the next year in 1903, it would connect the island to Peter proper and the building of mansions would begin in earnest, and mine would be one of the best of them, built by the court architect, Alexander von Gogan, and taking a silver medal from the city for its art nouveau design. From my new property, Vova and I would look across the Neva to the Fortress of Peter and Paul, the Summer Garden, the Champs de Mars, the Vladimirichi Palace, the New Mikhailovsky Palace, to the Winter Palace itself.

  So that Niki could visit us discreetly, whenever he wished, he planned to have a tunnel dug beneath the Neva, stretching from the basement of the Winter Palace to the basement of my new palace. I hear that visitors to my mansion, now the State Museum of Political History, to this day ask to see the entrance to the secret tunnel that once linked the palace of the dancer Kschessinska to the palace of the tsar. Political history does not interest them. I interest them. The secret passage, the underground tunnel, was not without precedent, given our Russian winters. In Moscow, tunnels connected the Yusupov Palace and the palace of Niki’s uncle, Sergei Alexandrovich, with the Kremlin. In 1795, a five-hundred-foot tunnel was dug between the basement of the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo and its kitchen, located on the other side of the garden. In 1814, the engineer Marc Brunel proposed to Alexander I that a tunnel be built under the Neva, and when the emperor decided to build a bridge instead, Brunel built a tunnel under the Thames. So the Neva would now have its tunnel, and Kschessinska would soon have her palace. Until then, I would have to satisfy myself with Niki’s infrequent visits to my dacha, where I lingered, out of sight, as out of sight was the only place Niki could see me, and where, once or twice, I managed to persuade him to spend a genial hour in my bed. Yes, yes, I agre
ed. I must be patient. But patience, I will admit, was not my strong suit.

  Almost all the great emperors had two wives, you know—Mikhail Romanov, Alexei Mikhailovich, Feodor Alexeyvich, Peter the Great. Not that Niki said anything directly about this to me, but I understood it to be a possibility, as he must also. Of course, the first wife must be disposed of. Peter the Great’s first wife did not have the grace to die, and so after almost a decade of marriage he forced her to move into a convent and take the veil. Later, Peter married a peasant girl who worked in the regimental laundry. It was her son who became the next tsar. Did you know that at the end of his short life, Niki’s grandfather was maneuvering to make Ekaterina the empress, to place in the line of succession their son, Georgy, instead of the son of his first wife, Alexander, Niki’s father? Alexander II had never liked the cool reception the children of his first wife gave to his second one—or to his children with her. What would the country and his family bear? Could he pass over the thickset Alexander in favor of his delightful Georgy, son of the love of his life? Niki would have to maneuver equally delicately. Yes, first he would make me a palace. Then he would give me a title—Princess Krassinsky-Romanovsky. Then he would pack Alix and her herd of girls off to Paris—or return her, daughters hidden under her big skirts, to Hesse-Darmstadt, where they could all become Lutherans if they wished. Yes, if Alix did not want a second wife for Niki she would have to give him a son. Tant pis.

  To prepare for my fabulous future, I decided to retire from the stage (as if anyone could forget I had once danced upon it) at the end of the season. In 1700, perhaps, the empress could be a laundress, but in 1900, she could not be a dancer.

  My sister had already retired with my parents’ blessing, although she had done this after twenty years at the theater and with the receipt of her pension. But when I went to Liteiny Prospekt to tell my father that I would retire, he was not happy with this latest enterprise of mine. I trapped him in the ballroom where he gave his dancing lessons—the little children were just filing out, ribbons crooked in their hair, to meet the governesses who stood in the anteroom holding their charges’ fur-lined coats and fur-trimmed felt boots. The large ballroom stood luminous and humid and within it my father a tall willow in a frock coat. Those at the theater who gave ballroom lessons wore white ties and tails to do so, sometimes wearing them even to rehearsals if they had scheduled themselves too tightly, and these men were known as the frock coat set. My father looked thin, a little too thin, in his frock coat. He was getting old, I saw. Just four years before, he had celebrated sixty years on the tsar’s stage. He had received so much tribute that it took four stagehands to hoist each chest of gold plates and silver cups from the orchestra pit to the table set out on the stage, where, at the interval, the curtain remained raised so the audience could appreciate the great esteem in which my father was held.

  At that time I thought, My father will dance forever, but now I could see he would not. In a voice smaller and much less bombastic than my usual one, I told him of my plans, and before he spoke, he took a small towel from the chair by the mirror and carefully wiped at his face, wiping off his smile as well. I knew then what he said would not be good luck and good wishes. No. Mala, he said, your sister, bless her, was a good-enough dancer. Let her play the mother. For you, Mala, you are a different story entirely. Remember, from your art comes your power. Perhaps that was where he garnered his power, but I now had another source, one less ephemeral than art, and I would not give up my son to my sister, no matter how my parents pressed me. As a dancer one must eventually retire, but I could live into an old age greater than my father’s and still die an empress. My father must have seen the obdurate look on my face, for he folded the towel over his shoulder and held out his arms to me. Come, Maletchka, he said, and for a few moments we took on the ballroom for a waltz; in the doorway a few students lingered to watch the tall man and the tiny lady make their slow, graceful circuit around the bare room, where they themselves, just a few minutes before, had struggled to execute the polonaise, the mazurka, the quadrille, this very waltz.

  The Magic Mirror

  I know you probably would agree with my father that I was far too great a talent to leave the stage, but I must tell you the fashions of the stage were so rapidly changing, so it was not only for my son that I wished to leave it. The new director of the Imperial Theaters was Colonel Vladimir Teliakovsky, who had been director of the Moscow Theaters and an officer in the Household Cavalry. I had hoped he might, being an old-style aristocrat, have, as well, old-fashioned tastes, but unfortunately, when it came to art, Teliakovsky was a modern man, one who proceeded to open his purse to even more free artists—that is, artists not on the imperial payroll—than had his predecessor Volkonsky. And so it was not with a heavy heart that in early 1903 I returned to the theater to dance for one last triumphant time in a ballet mounted in honor of my retirement from the Imperial Theaters, for I could not retire quietly, just slip away after my confinement and the birth of my son. No, I had to first return, and then retire in style, raking my tribute off the tables on the stage.

  Petipa had planned the ballet The Magic Mirror while Volkonsky was still director of the Maryinsky, and perhaps if it had been produced under his aegis the ballet would have been a success. But Teliakovsky now hired the modern artist Alexander Golovin, one of those avant-garde painters known as les décadents to create the sets and Teliakovsky allowed his own wife to design the costumes and the modern composer Arsery Koreshchenko to write some of his new symphonic music, and these parties carried with them in their mouths and ears and eyes a taste for the new century, the twentieth century of which we were all so newly, and some of us reluctantly, a part. Yet The Magic Mirror itself was not a modern ballet, but a nineteenth-century féerie, what Petipa did best, what I did best, a ballet of four acts, thirty scenes, and innumerable tableaux, its libretto based on Pushkin’s retelling of the German fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, save that in Pushkin’s version the dwarves were gnomes. The ballet was nineteenth century, its audience nineteenth century, our circa-1860 blue and gold theater, named for Alexander II’s first wife, Maria, nineteenth century. Our attendants, standing stiffly at the sides of the aisles and flanking each doorway costumed in their powdered wigs, red livery, and high white stockings, harkened us back a century earlier even than that. And the balletomanes this theater served did not like innovations in music or set design or costume any more than they would like the other innovations of the new century, the political ones that threatened to strip them of their wealth and status.

  Petipa himself had complained the costumes made caricatures of the dance artists: his immortals were wrongly costumed as nymphs, his court ladies sported contemporary dress that made them all look like café singers, the gnomes resembled hunchbacked trolls, the prince in his gymnast’s clothes was a dressed-up circus horse. During rehearsals Petipa fretted about the ballet that he should have done instead, Salammbo, which he had wanted to mount before Volkonsky left, but Volkonsky had canceled it, and now Teliakovsky had forced Petipa to use these decadent free artists whose determination to modernize would destroy his creation. Poor Petipa. Teliakovsky endeavored to soothe him. No, no, M. Petipa, the ballet is perfection. Yet Petipa knew that his dryads and flowers and zephyrs and stars and queens and kings and peasants and gnomes must be cushioned in a setting appropriately antiquated, and that, deprived of it, they became absurdities, as did the ballet master himself. Not to mention the ballerina.

  I, of course, played Snow White, the Princess by Her Father the King’s Previous Marriage. You see, families were full of previous marriages where the new wives wielded power over the children of the former wives and contrived to put their own children on the throne! The entire imperial family of 1903 Russia, old wives, new wives, recycled wives, and various permutations of children, were assembled in their boxes to witness my last performance on the Maryinsky stage. My father and brother, who were performing with me that night—for my father
played Her Father the King and my brother Josef a Polish magnate in full court regalia—crowded at the curtain peephole with me. We did not know whom to look at first—Niki or his mother; Alix or her two oldest daughters, the grand duchesses Olga and Tatiana; Niki’s sisters or their husbands—and the grand ducal boxes were full, as well, of Niki’s uncles and cousins, his father’s brothers and uncles and cousins, the Konstantinovichi, the Vladimirichi, the Alexandrovichi, the Nikolaevichi, the Mikhailovichi—why, even Sergei had come to the theater, though I saw he was there with a woman by his side, Countess Vorontzov-Dashkov, I presumed, an hourglass of jewels, silk, and compensation. Yes, it was a full conflagration of Romanovs gathered here to mark my exit! How astonished they would be—all but Sergei—if they knew of my plan to vault from this stage to their boxes, right to the imperial box! My father could drag me from my post as peephole spy only just before the curtain was raised.

  The first act went well enough—a garden tableau in which men and women weave baskets and garlands and present them to the queen, the king, and the courtiers at their entrances—and for this scene, at least, Koreshchenko had composed a traditional and melodious waltz. When I entered, I bowed to the tsar, who nodded to me, and at his nod Alix frowned, and then to the audience at large, and at last to my father, the king, and to my subjects. I had my figure back, which all of Peter could see, and nothing, not even a scandal that would pitch any other dancer off the tsar’s stage, could unmoor Kschessinska from the beautiful trappings of her theater. Act I, Scene I—all was well. But when the scene shifted to the palace park, the laughter began, provoked by the sight of a tall bush painted rather impressionistically on the canvas with wild daubs of green and yellow splotched here and there. The court was accustomed to seeing meticulous depictions of vegetation with decorously overlapping leaves and stems, and it was as if that one bush pricked at the dream of make-believe and the audience did not like one bit being awakened by something so little like a kiss. The snickers began and worsened when Petipa’s daughter, not Marie, but Nadezhda, tant pis, began to mime. The Stepmother Queen is delighted with the magic mirror a merchant displays, a mirror with the power to reveal the image of the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. Petipa’s daughters were character dancers rather than classical ones, but even in that category their talents were more limited than most. Despite their father’s grace, they grew to be big clumsy bosomy girls, and so Nadezhda’s miming was bad enough, but when the wicked queen gazed into the tall mirror and asked her famous question, Who is the fairest of them all?, just as the quicksilver of the mirror held my own image, the mirror abruptly shattered, shards of it making a brittle waterfall, pelting us as we struggled to continue our scene. A piece shaped like an arrowhead attached itself to the silk threading of my pointe shoe, and like a peasant farmer who stepped in manure, I had to shake it off. In their efforts to avoid the glass, the other dancers began to bump into one another and one courtier and then another fell flat on his derriere and the audience, at this point, began to laugh outright and then to talk, which we on the stage perceived only as a buzz that rivaled the discordant music from the orchestra pit.