The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  But I found Krasnitzky changed, too. When I took a stroll on the roads I knew so well from childhood or along the familiar sandy path by the swift-running river Orlinka, if I should happen to pass a peasant from the estate he gave me only a curt nod, and I felt even that was offered reluctantly. And after all the kindness my father had shown to them! Our neighbor found a wall of his barn smashed one morning; another one had his farming tools stolen. Other neighbors complained the peasants were measuring the land and pretending to divide it up between them, and they did not stop their chatter even when their squire walked by. And so, reluctantly, I curtailed my walks and stayed closer to our dacha. My boy was old enough now to toddle alongside me to the fringe of birch trees, to yank up the mushrooms I pointed out and drop them, some of them squashed and others in bits, into my own bark basket carved long ago with my initials, MMK. In the evening’s soft light I rocked him on my lap or my mother took him onto hers, while we gazed at the trees that rose twice as high as our roof. My father gave Vova a pet pig, which Vova would take on a walk as if it were a dog, a rope leash to pull it and a stick to prod it, and he would call to me to watch him strike the animal until I had to take the stick away from my miniature Ivan the Terrible. Because Vova was so particular at table, my mother spoiled him by cutting his food into shapes—an acorn, a butterfly, a rabbit, and coaxed him to eat as only she could, with honeyed words and a few twirls of the spoon, and after dinner, she and I taught him durachki, which means little idiots, the card game learned first by all Russian children. At night Vova slept in my bed, covers thrown back, face flushed; underneath that red fever the sun had tinted his white skin brown. I lay awake beside him sometimes for hours, while the wind shifted the limbs of the trees, the top page of a sheaf of paper, the hem of a tablecloth, the tea in a glass. I felt as if I were a girl again and Vova were my much younger brother, but this was not the life I had envisioned for him, slow summers with Petersburg’s Catholic circles. Just ten versts away, at Tsarskoye Selo and at the palaces lining the avenues leading to it, the imperial family and the court had also retreated from the unrest in the capital, but those ten versts might have been ten thousand versts, so far had my life drifted from theirs. At Tsarskoye Selo, I’m sure the trees also grew lush and green and stirred with the wind as they bent over the canals Empress Elizabeth had once intended, before the project had been abandoned, to lead all the way to Peter, so the tsars could be rowed the nine versts to the capital like pharaohs on a barge. In the Alexander Palace there, I imagined Niki spent his days as we did, playing cards with his children, perhaps bezique and aunt, reading aloud from the novels of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev, pasting photographs into his picture albums. But I did not hear from him and had not for almost a year now, though money was regularly transferred into my account each month by Baron Freedericks. By midsummer I had grown restless and dispirited, and then my spirits were destroyed further by calamity.

  During a dress rehearsal for Sleeping Beauty this past season, a trap door on the stage had abruptly snapped open and my father, who had had the bad luck to be standing on it, dropped through. He arrested the plunge with his elbows at the very last moment, but the shock of the fall, like a curse in a fairy tale, had cracked his robust health; the unrest in the capital and in the theater only ruptured it further. The doctors had put him to bed, as if whatever was wrong might mend itself there, but for eighty-three years my father’s life had been predicated on motion, and he refused to lie flat with the covers drawn up. Yet, once out of bed, he told me, he felt the parts of him seemed to be assembled in some manner that was not quite right, that he moved like a mechanical man, metal bones covered over by paper. Though none of us could see this, assuring him the summer at Krasnitzky would cure him, who knows his own body better than a dancer? My father died suddenly in July, a month after our arrival. He had lain down with a headache and when my mother sent me to check on him, I couldn’t rouse him. I said to myself, He is just sleeping, and I crawled next to him on the bed and curled my arm around him, laid my face by his face from which I had inherited so many features, and then I looked out the window at the blazing blue sky. I thought, If he does not get up, I will not get up.

  It was 1905, twelve years after the cuckoo in his study had called out twelve times as I struggled to tell him of my plans to become the mistress of the tsarevich.

  My father had come to Petersburg in 1853, and he had danced for four emperors—Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II. My father was in Peter even before the Maryinsky! He had watched the circus burn down in 1859 and the Maryinsky Theater rise in its place. He had given me his adopted city and his theater and this life, and I could not imagine any of it without him. At Ivanov’s funeral a few years earlier, in 1901, my father had sighed, Very few of us oldsters remain, and now they were one fewer. Perhaps I could close my eyes and when I opened them my father would open his. I closed mine to try my magic but then I was afraid to open them. My mother eventually came looking for us both and had to slap my hands and call to the maid to help pull me from the bed.

  Within a day, my brother and his wife, Sima, and my sister and her husband, Ali, converged at Krasnitzky, and at the supper table that night, after we had drunk too many glasses of vodka and cognac, and had laughed over my father’s habits, the face he made while seated in his dressing room gluing on his horsehair beard, drawing his lips wide in a ghoul’s grimace, or the time my brother came stomping through the kitchen and sank two of my father’s kulichi, which he then had to build up with a tower of icing so sweet no one could eat the cake at all, or the way my father had sat all three of us down—me, Julia, and Josef—to lecture us as if we were third-year students about the sedition at the theater, reminding us that we were Kschessinskys, servants of the tsar, and we served at his pleasure, and how we had sat in our chairs, cowed, not even Josef daring to look up. And as we were laughing at ourselves, my brother pushed aside his plate and said perhaps my father should have called in all the workers on the estate that day, as well, sat all of them down in chairs beside us, for from what he heard today, the peasants could have used this lecture. And then Josef sang for us a tune he’d heard that afternoon while walking along the river:

  Nochyu ya progulivalsya po okrugeh

  Ih mne ne vstretilsya nih odin bogach

  Pust tolko popadetsya mne khot odin

  Ih ya razmozzhu yemy cherep.

  At night I strut around,

  And rich men don’t get in my way.

  Just let some rich guy try

  And I’ll screw his head on upside down.

  I listened to it, wondering, Who was the rich man they sang of—my father? Was it his head they wished upside down? And then, after a moment, I pushed Josef’s plate back at him, all the pleasantness between us dimming, and cried, See what you have wrought? You killed him, trying to turn his theater upside down. And he said, I? Because I refuse to take orders from Teliakovsky like a slave? I cannot lie beneath the emperor and his cousin as you have, Mathilde-Maria, and from that position give my orders. And I said, Ha! Some Bolshevik! I see you picked a princess to marry—because his wife was Serafima Astafieva, the daughter of a prince who served as a general in the Imperial Army, so Josef did not always turn up his nose at the court but kissed the fingers of some members of it—and then my mother’s tears and my sister’s shushing sent my brother from the table so we could scream at each other no further.

  But because of the troubles Josef so supported we could not travel to Warsaw to bury my father by his own father as he’d wished. I had always thought of my father as a real Petersburger, but perhaps my father, a Pole from one of the empire’s duchies, had never felt truly comfortable in Russia’s hard embrace, which had left Poland, as my brother put it, poor, broken, and depressed. Why, Poles hated the Russians so much that if one used Russian to order a meal in Warsaw, the waiters refused to hear it. But we could not take my father home. The Russian countryside was on fire. The trains were not moving. And so we coul
d not move his mother’s body, either, which had lain in a Petersburg cemetery all these years and which my father wanted buried with him and his father in Warsaw. We had no choice but to take my father’s body back to Petersburg and place his coffin in the crypt of St. Stanislaus until the maelstrom of that summer subsided. Ivan Felix Kschessinsky would have to continue to lie alone in the family vault in the Powalsky Cemetery, waiting for his wife and his son.

  The court sent a wreath and the emperor sent a note of condolence to the family.

  It was not until early autumn, after Niki finished his hunt and noted in his ledger the number of deer and pheasants bagged, that he seriously turned his attention to the great unrest. Have you ever seen those beautiful watercolored records of the imperial hunt? A sheet of card stock, forty-eight centimeters long, bore the illustration of a fall/winter scene—a muddy river flowing through a snow-covered field, a wood of fir trees and orange-leaved birch to one side, a sleigh, men in winter dress, dogs, and in brown ink the tally of pheasant, partridge, hare, and deer, the record signed by the head of the Imperial Hunt. The Old World. Niki kept these records in his Gothic Revival library at the Winter Palace. He liked order, hated disorder. The year 1905 was nothing if not disorderly, but you would never know it from the record of the hunt for that year. Yes, it was not until October, after the hunt, that Niki could bear to lift his head and look at the disturbances, at which time he reluctantly sued for peace with Japan in order to bring his army home to turn it on his people. Hadn’t he given them enough time to settle down on their own? But because Russia was a country of many millions of souls and each soul had a voice, there was no end to the clatter. The army brought order to the cities, which the police and local regiments could not seem to establish, and then it restrained the peasants in the countryside. Niki called the army out three thousand times to help the Cossacks—who forced the peasants to remove their caps and scarves and bow down to them, after which they executed the men and raped the women—finally put down the peasant uprisings. What the army could not finish, Niki’s new minister of the interior, Petr Arkadevich Stolypin, did. Stolypin, with his balding pate and ridiculous waxed moustache, might be one of Niki’s aristocratic ministers, but he refused to be one of Niki’s sycophantic courtiers—he wouldn’t accompany the tsar on his annual hunt, for example, as did the rest of his suite, so Niki never really liked Stolypin, but Stolypin was effective. He had so many thousands of men hanged—fifteen thousand—to restore order that the people began to call a noose Stolypin’s necktie and the train cars that hauled the forty-five thousand revolutionaries to Siberia Stolypin carriages. And though I more than anyone wanted to see order restored, I was uncertain about the means. Surely this brutality could only make Niki’s people further hate him. On the other hand, look at his grandfather, who offered reforms and had been killed in the street for his trouble. That is what attention and forbearance brought. Regicide. So Niki cracked the whip and his people bowed their heads and this was the end of the first revolution, though most people know only of the second, in 1917. But really, I see now, there was just one.

  Finally, thanks to Niki, was I able to move my father and his mother to the family vault by train from Petersburg to Warsaw, on the railway line Emperor Alexander III had once built so he could travel from Petersburg to his white-walled palace at Gatchina, south of the capital, and then the track was extended and extended until it reached the old capital of Poland, once a great nation with its own king, now its capital just an outpost of the Russian empire. My father arrived for the last time at the old railway station there with its circular archways, its latticework along the portico, its slanted slate roof off which the rain could sluice. And it was raining when we arrived, as it often does in early autumn, the pinks and greens, the peaches and yellows, of the buildings around us drenched by the weeping sky to the zenith of their coloration. We stood, my brother, his wife, Sima, my sister with her husband, Ali, my mother, and I, holding Vova’s hand, in the vaulted main hall of the station. My father’s body and that of his mother were loaded onto the cortege that would be drawn to the Powalsky Cemetery. There is no other way to approach a cemetery than by horse and carriage. The stately approach echoes the heartbeat and allows one to prepare. Why do you think the cars we use today for funeral processions slow to a crawl as they follow one another on the long trek from church to graveyard? The cars move at a horse’s pace. I have been now to many funerals and I have had time to think about these things. All along the streets, from the station to the cemetery, my father’s fans—he had never neglected them, making an annual pilgrimage to Warsaw to perform—stood weeping, hats removed, for as my brother later wrote to his son: tears of gladness or of sorrow show the feeling and heart of a man, only in Poland are people accustomed to love those close to them, to become attached to them and esteem them. They did not blame my father for devoting his life to the entertainment of the Russian tsars. And now that that was done, they welcomed him home.

  The Powalsky Cemetery is one of the most beautiful cemeteries in Europe, you know. It rivals the Père Lachaise here in Paris. In Père Lachaise, death feels orderly, but in Powalsky death is wild, rustic, the cemetery paths leaf-strewn, its trees massed closely together, as are the graves and monuments, many of them slabs marked by a simple cross. Stone angels fly with wings outstretched; stone women draped in togas point to the sky; stone men stand in hooded robes or stretch out a hand to the passersby. Join me. At some crypts a statue weeps, at others the door bears a knocker—so you can knock for whom, the soul? Or perhaps the soul itself opens the door, knocker clapping, to make its way to heaven. The peasants buried their dead with a candle and a bread ladder, but we buried my father with a crucifix in his hands. My brother closed the bronze door to the chapel I had built over the crypt with my Romanov money, and he embraced his wife and my sister embraced her husband, and I took my mother’s hand. However many imperial bodies I have lain beneath, I have observed the great moments, the ceremonial moments of my private life, alone. And when my Romanovs observed the great moments of their private lives, I was not with them either; I was, always, the shoe under the bed.

  Before we left, I picked up pebbles from around the crypt and pulled thick green leaves from the trees there, and these I put in my reticule.

  When we returned to Petersburg from Warsaw, my sister went with her husband to their house at No. 40, English Prospekt, just down the street from where I had once been kept by the tsarevich a thousand years ago, and my brother went with his wife to their twelve-room apartment at No. 18, Spasskaya Ulitsa, and I, who had no husband, who had never had a husband, went home alone with my grief and with my son to my dacha at Berezoviya Alleya in Strelna. I went out to the veranda, and I remember there I could smell the gulf and real autumn swiftly coming and behind her, the long, long winter. I rolled the pebbles I’d taken from my father’s grave around and around in my hands. The peasants left breadcrumbs, not pebbles, on the graves of their relatives at Easter, and when the sparrows flew down to eat, the peasants knew the souls of their loved ones were well. A fairly certain way to comfort oneself about the dead, no? The peasants believed heaven existed in some faraway cleft of the Russian steppe, where long green grass swayed and rivers of milk bubbled and foamed unseen by the living. And what kind of heaven did dancers believe in? An abandoned theater where their souls amused themselves all day in face paint and magnificent costume, perpetually playing the parts they had played here on earth to a decaying house?

  When I heard the sound of a horse’s hooves on my front drive, I opened my hands in surprise—I was expecting no one—and my pebbles rolled across the wooden porch floor. I crouched, as desperate to find them as if they were my father’s bones, when a man’s boot appeared, first one, then the other on the whitewashed planks. The boot belonged to Sergei Mikhailovich, and when I looked up into his bearded face, he said kindly, What are you looking for, Mala?, as if he had never been gone or had been gone for just an afternoon, instead of three years, a
nd had come upon me kneeling on the porch. I wanted, suddenly, to kiss him as answer, for how could I explain to him why I was trying to gather up these little stones? But I didn’t have to explain. Because I wanted them, he knelt beside me and began to collect them, and all at once I found the tears that had eluded me in Warsaw. He let me cry as he squatted there on the porch. He had heard of the death of my father, he said, and he had come here to Strelna on the day I was to return from the funeral to offer his condolences. He knew what my father had meant to me.

  And he came also, he said, to express his regret at having abandoned me the very hour I gave birth. He had ridden home to the New Mikhailovsky Palace that night without knowing how he got there and when Sergei did, his brothers poured vodka down his throat in an effort to calm him, the trollop’s lapdog. But when the plans for my palace were published, the golden double-headed eagles tiny gray scratches on the page one needed a magnifying glass to discern, and when my new home appeared in all its magnificence on Petersburg Island, where one needed no optical device to read its message, he and all of Petersburg knew: Kschessinska has given birth to a Romanov—though perhaps only Sergei knew my son’s father must be Niki himself.

  But Niki was still an unfaithful lover, was he not? I nodded. And in that case, perhaps I still needed a protector, for Niki could not leave Alix’s side, as she lived in a state of perpetual hysteria over the health of Alexei. As Niki struggled to control the country, Sergei told me, so he struggled also with Alix. She was desperate for a cure for some mysterious ailment from which the baby suffered, and because of this ailment, they had kept Alexei hidden since his christening even from the family. And Alix, frustrated by the court doctors, had begun to enlist the aid of healers and mystics, believing if St. Seraf had given her a son, perhaps a man of God could save him. Another man like Philippe Vachot had appeared in the capital, brought there as M. Philippe had been, by the Montenegrins, the Black Sisters, another of their mystics to parade about the Petersburg palaces like a monkey on a leash. This man had sent a telegram to the tsar as so many peasants did—Father Tsar, I wish to bring you a tamed sable. Father Tsar, I wish to bring you a potato as big as a dog. Little Father Tsar! I would like to bring you an icon of the blessed St. Simon Verkhotursky the miracle worker. And the tsar, on occasion, let the peasants come. The tamed sable was brought to the palace to play with the children. And Alix, who had seen the telegram about the icon, and who could not resist it or anything like it—had it brought to the palace by this man, Gregorii Rasputin. So once again, through Sergei, I was privy to the most secret life of the tsar. By then Sergei had gathered all the pebbles and put them in my hands, then held my hands in his own.