During the interval we dancers retreated to our dressing rooms and to the wings to shriek and moan, and some, less concerned, to eat sandwiches!, while the audience outside made a ruckus in the small salons behind their boxes and in the hallways and foyers and smoking rooms. And as if all this were not happening, Colonel Teliakovsky came to my dressing room, as is customary, to present me with the tsar’s gift upon my retirement. The imperial present, as it was known, was normally for a man a gold watch and for a woman a jewel set in gold, the setting stamped with the crown or the double headed eagle, but I knew I would be getting a gift far better. As my father and brother bent over me, the feathered plumes of their hats skimming the bare flesh of my arms, Teliakovsky made a little ceremony of handing me the velvet jeweler’s box, and with a little trepidation and much expectation, I unlatched the clasp. What would Niki have chosen for me? Inside the box lay a coiled serpent, its scales specked with diamonds as it strangled a cabochon sapphire, the polished convex shape of the gem a smooth blue apple. The brooch, Teliakovsky told me, was designed by the empress herself for this great occasion. The serpent, Teliakovsky continued into my silence, is the symbol of wisdom.
Really.
The serpent was a deceiver, a trickster, the offerer-up of apples.
The gem is very valuable, said Teliakovsky the salesman, at least fifteen carats. A great tribute.
Tribute? This was no tribute, this was an insult, a provocation, and my retirement performance had become an inadvertent comedy full of broad slapstick and shenanigans with the audience dissolved in laughter. While my father oohed and aahed and handled the brooch as carefully as if it were a real snake, my brother peered around him at my dark face. I snapped closed the jeweler’s box and announced that I was going to dress and leave the theater, but my brother and father erupted, my brother in protest, my father in bafflement, leave the theater?, while Teliakovsky stood there with his mouth as open as the box had once been. I was Kschessinska, not some coryphée, Josef said, while my father nodded vigorously, and I was still for this last night the figurehead of the Imperial Ballet. I could not abandon it just because a few pieces of canvas did not please the antiquities out front. I’ve told you my brother was a modern man. But it was not just the scenery that bothered me. What about this brooch? I said. And Josef said, Pin the brooch to your costume and show the empress you do not care, and then he pinned it deftly to my bodice himself. There! So did I go home? No, I did not. I remained at the theater. I would dance Acts II, III, and IV. My brother had appealed to my pride. I could not walk out on my own farewell performance and I would not let Alix think her serpent had stung me.
By the time the curtain rose on the third act and the balletomanes saw the grotto of the gnomes, which looked like a thick forest of tree stumps, cut flat across, some hanging from the ceiling like stalactites and others sprouting from the stage floor, all decorum had fled the house and the audience began to whistle, to catcall, to hiss. When the gnomes led me to their rough hut to dress me in a costume of leaves, they did so to a chorus of laughter from the boxes and parterres. I had been booed before on the stage by claques loyal to Preobrajenska or more recently those loyal to Pavlova, but this differed in the totality of the disruption. Although we were not responsible for any element of the physical production, this act of protest did not punish Teliakovsky, Golovin, or Koreshchenko so much as the dancers. I and the other dance artists bore the humiliation of it, while Teliakovsky and his brethren cringed in the wings. M. Petipa stood back there, too, slightly away from them, such an old man, eighty-four years, his waxed moustache a silvery white, his face trembling and his hands made into impotent fists. And so it continued throughout each scene, each act—and as I counted them earlier, they are many. There was no escape, no retreat for me as Grand Duke Vladimir brayed from his box, Let us all go home! I could see Colonel Vintulov quite clearly as he shouted, Get rid of Teliakovsky—he will ruin the theater!, his bald head slick with indignant sweat. And in the midst of all this the emperor and his entire family sat politely in the imperial box, watching the pas d’action on the stage, though their presence there did not suppress the hubbub in the slightest. Yes, I picked my way through my delicate variations with the zephyrs and the stars, my romantic pas de deux with the prince against the backdrop of the moon. I bit into the poisoned apple and laid myself in my glass coffin. I mimed my awakening and my betrothal in a castle hall painted in bold diamond patterns and ornamentation that looked like giant pineapples and cabbages, but I did all this in a state of mortification so extreme I have no memory of any of it. In the imperial box, the women spoke to one another occasionally behind their fans. Alix smiled now and then and lifted a hand to conceal a laugh. Niki, though, watched the ballet steadily, and at its curtain, amid a frogs’ chorus of croaks and boos, I looked up at him. He pulled a droll face, Who cares?, and gave me a conspiratorial wink.
Right after the curtain came down, with the dancers crowded about me, Teliakovsky presented me with the theater’s gift: a crown of gold laurel leaves, each leaf engraved with the name of a ballet in which I had over the years appeared, and wouldn’t you know, the top front leaf read, Le Miroir magique. Gold or not, I snapped it off.
Teliakovsky blamed Petipa for the whole debacle and forced him to retire along with me after that night. Petipa consoled himself with the writing of his memoirs. I remained in Petersburg and consoled myself with the triumph coming to me soon on a stage far more vast and far more public than the Maryinsky’s. I told my family all about it the next day to prepare them for what awaited me and, by association, them. The tsar has come back to me, I said, and they stared at me as if I had gone mad. They all thought the loss of Sergei and the disaster at the theater had robbed me of my reason. He comes to visit me at my dacha. My mother shook her head as if I were some sad creature. Even Julia looked askance at me and said nothing in my defense. My son is the tsar’s son, I told them, not Sergei’s, and one day he might be tsar. My father said, Mala, enough, as my brother scoffed, Your son as the Tsar of All the Russias? Does your ambition know no bounds? My judgment must have been toppled by all those grand dukes who supped at my tables and entertained themselves in my bed, he said. By no stretch of the imagination would Vova be anything more than the illegitimate son of a dancer, as marginalized by society as any other illegitimate son. Did I think that by all my tricks I could ease the circumstances of his birth? I snapped my fingers at him. My father instructed my sister to talk some sense into me. I stared at her indignantly. She had seen the letters I sent with Ali to the tsar. She had driven in my carriage past the three plots of land the tsar had purchased for me on Petersburg Island. Did she, too, think all this was fantasy on my part? Had she only been humoring little Mala? I suppose she thought that Ali had crumpled up in his fists my letters to the tsar and that my plots of land belonged to Baron Brandt, next door. I hated her looking down her long Kschessinsky nose at me. Well, she would soon see. Everyone would soon see. And everyone included Alix, who I knew would be doing her best to rid herself of me.
I didn’t have long to wait.
For as soon as the Neva began its spring thaw and the ground was broken for the foundations of my grand new house on Petersburg Island, Alix began once again promoting the canonization of the monk Serafim of Sarov. Just the year prior, she had wanted the canonization done before the birth of what she thought would be her son, but the procurator of the Holy Synod, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, had resisted. If the monk was now made a saint, she believed, he would intercede with God on her behalf and God would this time give her a son instead of a phantom. Serafim of Sarov, the monk from the Sarov Monastery who died in 1833 and who had lived as a hermit in a hut outside its walls, was said to have performed miracle after miracle in Siberia, and he had made prophecies, as well. He had predicted Niki’s reign, named him and Alix as tsar and tsaritsa fifty years before they were born, had even predicted the tsar and all his family would one day come to Sarov. Alix believed if Seraf had k
nown of her when she existed only in the mind of God, then he might also know her son, the child she was meant to have, whose spirit still waited to be called. In anticipation of this, Seraf would be made the patron saint of Nicholas and Alexandra.
By now she had lost all patience with the church. She did not care if Seraf did not meet the standards for sainthood. She did not care if his body was decomposed, when the corpse of a saint should be sweet and uncorrupted. When Bishop Anthony of Tambov, himself of the province where Seraf had lived, protested the glorification, Alix insisted the bishop be posted deeper into Siberia, like a silenced revolutionary. She told the procurator, Everything is within the emperor’s power—even the making of saints. Finally, Niki had to step in: the canonization must be done if only to calm the tsaritsa. I knew Niki was only trying to pacify her, to make his eventual break from her easier if she believed they had tried everything and she had failed him utterly. So the church declared that hair, teeth, and bones were enough evidence of sainthood, in which case, of course, every corpse lying in a tomb would qualify; and despite the hundreds of letters of protest, the Holy Synod presided over a canonization it did not want. Let Alix canonize every wandering monk in all of Russia, I thought. Not one of them could guarantee her a son.
In July, while the beams and supports of my palace were being raised, the entire imperial family rode the train to the Arzamas station in the middle of absolutely nowhere and from there they climbed into open carriages to journey to Seraf’s old monastery. Peasants, thousands of them, lined the unpaved roads, and Niki stopped the convoy to let the people greet him, kiss his hands, touch the sleeves of his tunic, call to him, Batiushka, Father-Tsar. Before his return to St. Petersburg, over a hundred thousand peasants would gather to see Niki in all his divinity, and he had been carried through the crowd on the shoulders of his aides so the people could see him without trampling each other. Little brothers, Niki called to them as he tried to make his way through the crowd before his adjutants finally lifted him to their shoulders. Each day there were miracles and cures in the cathedral, at Seraf ’s cabin in the wild, by the stream where seventy years before Seraf had scrubbed the dirt from under his fingernails. Children were cured of epilepsy, men with withered legs could walk, etc., etc., and Niki and Alix visited that miraculous stream themselves on their third night in Sarov. Naked, they submerged themselves in the dark, chilled water, guarded at a distance by a few discreet officers of the cavalry. Meanwhile, my house and I had become the subject of intense gossip in the capital. Drawings of its projected design appeared in the journal Architect. I had sent them to the editor myself!
Was I worried by all the miracles and prayers and bathings in streams? Not in the least. Not even in October when I learned Alix was pregnant again.
My house was built in the art nouveau style all the rage then—the pale brick shone like yellow gold in the sun, ironwork wreaths and boughs draped themselves above the many windows, the glass walls of the winter garden reached two stories, these windows closed by bronze latches I ordered extravagantly from Paris. My White Hall could host a concert. Yellow silk kissed the walls of my small drawing room, fumed oak the large. I had a dining room, a billiard room—for the tsar loved his billiards—a study, a dozen bedrooms upstairs, a kitchen and wine cellar below, a wing for the servants, a carriage house, stables, and a barn with a cow so my little tsarevich could drink fresh milk. The balcony of his room overlooked Kronoversky Prospekt. I hired a dvornik—a housekeeper—two footmen, a pantry man, a chef, two cooks, a scullery maid, a boiler man, a chauffeur, two maids for me, and a valet for Vova. My house was completed in the summer of 1904. I sold No. 18, English Prospekt to Prince Alexander Romanovsky, Duke of Leuchtenberg and one of Niki’s many relations, and only when I crossed the Troitsky Bridge to Petersburg Island did my family then believe what I had been telling them. I even became the subject of a new ditty that circulated throughout the capital:
Like a bird you flew over the stage
And without sparing your legs
Danced your way to a palace.
Yes, let Niki stand by Alix’s side for her confinement, for I had danced my way to a palace.
And I would be in it, perhaps in a posture of repose on one of the chaises in my White Hall, when Niki came there, rather than to my dacha on one of his surreptitious visits, to tell me Alix had given him another girl, named Ekaterina or Elizabeth or Elena, or that yet again there was no baby at all! I would try not to whoop in triumph, I, Mathilde-Maria, have won!
Yet I had no sooner unpacked my clothes in my wardrobe room—each outfit numbered by a little plaque above it—when the great guns of Peter and Paul began to fire the traditional salvos that signaled a child had been born to the tsar. It was July 30. I ran to my son’s balcony and turned my ear toward Hare and Admiralty islands. No one in Peter listened more fervidly for their number than I. Ninety-nine. One hundred. One hundred and one. One hundred and two. And the guns did not stop. I thought at first I had miscounted, or perhaps I had been tricked by echoes peculiar to the location of my new house, but the salvos continued, so many of them and for so long that I knew I had not been a fool at arithmetic but a much bigger sort. By the 150th, I was weeping. By 210 I had composed myself. By 300 the telephone began ringing—have I mentioned I had the prestigiously low telephone number of 441?—but I did not take any of the calls from the artists at the theater or from my ridiculous family who wanted to say, Do you think it is true?, and who had no idea the disaster this event meant for me. By afternoon confirmation that the tsar had fathered a son appeared in every newspaper: By the manifesto of 28 June 1899 We named as Our successor Our beloved brother the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, until such time as a son was born to Us. From now on, in accordance with the fundamental laws of the Empire, the imperial title of Heir Tsarevich, and all rights pertaining to it, belong to Our Son Alexei.
Alexei. They had named him after Alexei Mikhailovich, Alexei I, Alexei the Peaceful, Peter the Great’s father, the gentle tsar Niki had long admired. It was an unusual name for a Romanov, for a family so full of Konstantins and Nikolais and Vladimirs and Mikhails and Sergeis and Alexanders, but Niki worshipped the last Muscovite tsar, the last one before his European-loving son Peter stamped out the old Russian customs, had all the men shave their beards and the women put on corsets, and set the two down to dine and dance together as they did in la France. Why, at his own coronation Niki had sat on Alexei’s throne encrusted with 750 diamonds! But there was a reason the family had only sporadically given that name to its sons. The name belonged not only to the father of Peter the Great, but also to Peter’s son, the son Peter had clandestinely murdered when he began to suspect his son might be plotting against him. This murdered Alexei was the one the people remembered when they began to whisper about the bad-luck name for the poor boy born to that woman who had come to them from behind a coffin.
I folded the newspaper back over the tsar’s ukase. I went up the small staircase of seventeen steps that led to my bedroom suite in this house that was so newly mine and might so soon be mine no longer. I went into the very grand blue-and-silver mosaic-tiled bathroom that housed the great sunken tub I had built for the tsar and in which no one had yet bathed, plugged the drain, and turned on the faucet. I climbed in fully clothed, my plan unfolding before me as I enacted it. The water slowly covered my body, saturated first the fabric of my dress, then even the elaborate layers of my underskirts, and finally the silk of my chemise, my corset cover, and the canvas of my corset, all of which acted as weights. As the water rose, my hair and then my arms began to float toward the surface and when my head was fully submerged, I looked out at the rippling bathroom, its silver-and-blue mosaics shot with little rivulets of light. They would find me here, preserved like an oddity from Peter the Great’s Scientific Museum, and my plaque would read Former Mistress of Tsar Nicholas II. I should have worn a better dress, but too late for that now. I should have been holding a crucifix in my hands, but too late for that, too.
I opened my mouth to breathe in the water but at the influx of bathwater rather than air, my body exploded in outrage and I shot up, coughing. It appeared I did not have what it took to die, to disappear, which would clearly be better for everybody, except, perhaps, my son, now eating bits of chopped apple in the kitchen with my cook. With me gone and the tsar occupied with his legitimate son, Vova would in short order be adopted by my sister and shunted off into the ballet school like everyone else in my family, where he would vanish into that warren of a theater and emerge sixty years later an old man with a gold watch. Was there no other career for a Kschessinsky? No. Apparently not. Only if I were alive could I ensure this would not happen. Only if I were alive could I make certain Vova had the life he deserved. So I stood up, my skirts weighing a hundred kilos, and wringing what water out of them I could, I hoisted my leg over the edge of the tub. Dragging my dress behind me, I sloshed my way in my sodden shoes to my bedroom to pack for Strelna, as if it were time for my usual summer holiday. There I would figure out what to do next.
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 17