Spala, once the hunting seat of the kings of Poland, was now the hunting seat of the tsar of Russia, who entertained the remaining subjugated Polish nobility there during his autumn visits. It was already dark by the time a car took us to the gates of the estate. Here in the forested countryside we were accompanied by a great, deep hush. A carriage brought us along a sandy road through the spruce and pine and fir trees to the lodge park. Josef, holding a torch, met me and Vova at the edge of the circular drive before the lodge, but Josef would not look at me directly; it was only after the carriage let us out and disappeared that Niki himself stepped from the shadows, holding his own torch like a weapon. The breath he blew toward me in the cold mingled with my own and his aging face confronted mine. His hairline had greatly receded, and beneath his beautiful eyes another color washed there, a purplish blue. The skin of his face was the texture of paper that had been folded again and again at every possible angle and then smoothed out. His moustache seemed to thrust from his sober mouth, or perhaps it was just the light or the grimace he made that had his moustache bristling so, and his eyes glittered far too brilliantly. Behind him on the grass lay a row of dead stags in two lines on their sides, back and front legs bound, branches thick with fall leaves pressed to their bellies like a garnish to hide where they had been gutted, their beautiful antlers lifted to the sky. At the sight of all those beasts, Vova cried out in delight, Look, Uncle Iouzia, and pulled at my brother’s hand, but Josef shushed him and Vova fell silent. Niki’s great sheepskin coat fell in folds to the grass and his tall black papakha made him a dark crown. He looked like the king of the underworld in full costume amid this carnage. Niki raised his free hand and gestured that Vova should approach, and beside me in his own little coat Vova began to shake. He was small for ten, with a delicate face, and people when they saw him on the street often called out to him, Look here, pretty boy! With a backward glance at me, my son took small steps toward Niki in the cold, stiff grass. Do you know who I am? Niki asked. Josef answered for Vova, This is the tsar, and Vova bowed and said, Highly pleased, Your Majesty. At this, Niki put his hand on Vova’s shoulder and peered into his face. Did he see himself? No, he saw my son’s brother. He looks so much like Alexei, Niki said to me, and then he held out his hand for my own. Forgive me, Mala. You’ve had a long journey. His palm was warm and rough, and it had been a long time since I had felt his skin against my own. Come. He walked not beside me, but slightly in front as we headed toward the lodge, leading me like a horse, Vova, the hound, trotting slightly behind, and my brother, whom I had forgotten, trailing us at the discreet distance of a servant.
The lodge at Spala did not look like much of a palace, being long and aging and ugly, the bottom story measured off by evergreens clipped into pyramids, the top by tall windows, side by side by side. The forest appeared to be penned back from it by a scalloped hem of clipped brush. As we drew closer, Niki, with a wave of his hand, sent Vova back to walk with Josef. When they were out of earshot, Niki gestured upward to a curtained balcony at one end of the lodge above a veranda. Alexei is dying up there. I believe I began to bite at my nails while he went on, those eyes scintillant, that face such a fine mesh of lines. It was the second week of Alexei’s suffering, he said. Blood had begun to fill the cavity between his groin and his left leg to the point where the child had no choice but to draw his knee to his chest, but still the bleeding did not cease. The doctors alternately raised and lowered the springed frame of his bed to help him sit up or lie down, but in neither position, in no position, Niki said, could the tsarevich find comfort, and the blood began to press on the nerves, causing Alexei spasms of pain so great that he had begun, between shrieks, to beg to be allowed to die, crying, Bury me in the woods and make me a monument of stones. But the worst was the hemorrhage in the stomach, which the doctors could not stop either and from which he would soon expire. He was feverish and delusional, his heart was feeble, and he was so white-faced it seemed there was no blood left to circulate about the rest of him, but as he was a child and they did not want to give him morphine, his only relief was to faint. All this was the result of an unfortunate poke by the oarlocks when Alexei had jumped into a boat at Bielovezh, causing a small swelling that they thought had healed until he took a carriage ride here at Spala on one of the bumpy, sandy roads like the one we had walked together.
Niki said he could not bear to enter his son’s bedroom, where Alix sat in an armchair day and night, without weeping. Though each day there was a hunt and each evening there were many guests to dinner, where on a makeshift stage his daughters performed for their entertainment, behind the painted canvas of that show hung a very different scene. Just the day before, Baron Freedericks, the minister of the imperial court, who oversaw all court protocol and carried out all Niki’s instructions, had persuaded the family the tsarevich was so sick it was time to publish a bulletin announcing this to prepare the country for his death, and this bulletin had appeared in all the newspapers this morning. That was what I had seen in the gazeta at the train station. Another bulletin had also been prepared to announce his death. As Niki talked, we approached the house, and Niki paused to point out the green canvas tent in the garden, the fabric rippling in the dark wind. Up until today the weather had been warm, the tsar said. But now, as if in preparation for the tsarevich’s death, the season had turned. The simple tent had been made into a chapel and now with the official announcement of Alexei’s illness, all churches and chapels in Russia would hold prayer services twice a day. As Josef led Vova into the tent to see the altar, Niki said to me simply, Come with me.
Niki took me a half verst into the deep forest of tall, thin trees, birch trees with their white peeling trunks so tall and close together one could disappear within them, Niki holding up his torch to light the way. Everywhere I stepped, a root or a vine twisted under my shoe. On Niki walked, now and then offering me his hand or his elbow, and just as I was about to ask how much farther, he abruptly stopped counting off his paces and looked down. Before us lay a small grave, freshly dug, and by it a loose pile of stones. Niki knelt, picked up a pebble from the ground, and put it in my hand. The stone was cool and moist, and my fingers closed around it. The forest around us listened, waiting, and I heard myself exhale, slowly. Niki said not one word; his torch crackled and snapped. We stood there a minute, an hour, a year until I understood: this grave was for Alexei and it was meant to disappear, to be swallowed by the forest. We turned away from it, finally, and Niki led me back to the green tent, where Vova and Josef lingered. I tried to catch Josef ’s eye. What did he know? Everything, probably, and he considered it a curse I’d brought on myself. Niki took us to the white-paned doors of the lodge, where Niki and Josef thrust their torches into the ground at either side. We went into a hallway that smelled of damp and offered little light. We passed a small room that held two chairs with backs like the antlers of giant stags, a dining room with leather chairs pulled up to a long table, a dark covered porch spotted with wicker furniture. Everywhere we walked, we left a trail of gritty sand. Josef followed as Niki, Vova, and I went up a narrow wooden staircase. At the top of it Niki touched my elbow. We walked along a hall, and when we came down the corridor two young girls in costumes ran by us—one in full pirate regalia, the other in a white dress and white cap—and opened a door and then we could hear it, a long, low moaning sound. The tsarevich. The door closed. Niki’s face pleated itself into a thousand furrows, and by the time we reached the curtained outdoor balcony at one end of the long hall by that door, he was a thousand years old.
A woman sat in a wicker chair on that balcony in the almost dark amid a miasma of stripes—striped fabric on the low walls, striped curtains floor to ceiling, striped cushions of the chairs. Alix. She rose. She wore a sable coat against the cold, its thick cuffs bracelets at her wrists. Her hair, which I had remembered only as red-blonde, had many gray strands now mixed with the gold at the temples, her hair parted in the center and crimped and arranged into large poufs at the si
des of her head. We were the same age, but I was a girl and this was a grandmother, a German grandmother, whose skin had loosened and thickened at the jowl, whose nose had begun to hook, and whose eyelids now formed hoods. I gripped at the stone I still held in my hand. Why, Alix looked more like a man than a woman, as some women do when they age. At the theater, men always played the hags, the Baba Yaga, the Carabosse. This was Alix, the princess from Hesse-Darmstadt? She did not contrive to make her anguished face say anything but what she felt. She looked down at my son, the little boy with the big eyes I held in front of me, my arms across his chest, and smiled sadly at him.
And Niki said to me, See how we suffer.
When Josef himself brought our luggage up the back passage to the bedroom adjoining Alexei’s, where we were to sleep, I understood we were unofficially here.
When are we going to hunt? Vova asked.
And my brother answered, Later. The tsar’s son is very sick.
When will he be well?
I don’t know, Josef told him, and he looked at me and shook his head, as if to say, Look where your idyll has brought you now, and then he looked at that adjoining door, and I understood that our immediate proximity to the tsarevich was purposeful, that at the exact moment of Alexei’s death, he would be carried into this dark room and from there to the forest while Vova was pulled from this bed and ferreted into the sickroom, with Niki and Alix beside him, and he would be proclaimed miraculously healed. I supposed Niki believed he could appropriate my child as he appropriated the best furs, timber, vodka, and caviar for the profit of the crown. After all, I had long ago and foolishly offered my son to him. But my ambitions for Vova then had always involved me, as well—my marriage to Niki, my son and I together brought to the palace. Now I could see that Niki and Alix had been stitched together so tightly by the tragedy of their son’s illness that there would be no sending of Alix to a convent and no divorce, no matter what happened to their boy. So all that remained of my long-ago fantasy was this tale by Dumas, in which my boy was required to assume the identity of another.
It was not that a quiet reassignment such as this did not have precedent. It had long been suspected by the wider court that Emperor Alexander I had one night walked by his sentries in his cap and greatcoat—the sentries swore it was he, they knew the sight of him well—disappeared into the streets of the capital, and a short time later his family announced his death in the south, in Taganrog. He had defeated Napoleon, and then despite, as he said, the French air of liberty that had delighted me in my youth, he had continued to oppress his own people, upholding the principles of aristocracy, until, exhausted, he told his brothers, I can no longer bear the weight of being ruler. His coffin was sent from Taganrog back to St. Petersburg. The casket, always open by custom during a state funeral, had for the funeral of Alexander I remained sealed. One of the grand dukes commented that the blackened face of the corpse, its features indiscernible, could be the face of anyone, as Alexander’s family, determined to secure a serene transition and to hold on to its wealth, very well knew. And after his brother, Nicholas I, ascended the throne, defying the guards who wanted to establish a republic, there appeared in the wilderness of Siberia a holy man, a hermit, who gave his name as Fedor Kozmich and who bore a striking resemblance to the old emperor. An emperor in rags in Siberia is a hermit. The brother of the living emperor, dressed in ermine and standing in the Winter Palace, is the tsar. But Nicholas I was thirty years old when he assumed the throne and he had been raised at court. My son was ten years old and he had been raised by me. Unprepared, he would be forced into the tsarevich’s bedclothes, while I would be driven from Spala, alone, escorted to the station by my brother, the two Kschessinskys in service to the court. Three Kschessinskys.
All that night on the other side of the door that connected us to Alexei’s room we heard the many comings and goings of Doctors Raukhfus and Derevenko and Botkin and Federov and Ostrogorsky—all sent for from Petersburg—and through the door I could hear their voices and then Niki’s voice and Alix’s. Beneath the door on occasion the shadow of a shoe would appear and then be withdrawn. There would be light and then shadow. And, of course, we could hear the suffering of the child and his mother’s croon as she attempted, helplessly, to soothe him. Although I put Vova into his dressing gown, I never undressed but sat in a chair drawn up to his bed, much as Niki had said Alix sat fully clothed by her son this night and every night for two weeks past, rarely sleeping. Vova lay in bed with his eyes open. We could see very clearly from our window the moon and stars made crisp by the frost; the earth seemed very large and heaven very far away. I stroked my son’s brow and his silky brown hair and his slender beautiful fingers and I tried to answer his questions.
Why is the boy crying?
Something hurts him.
When will he stop crying?
I don’t know.
But with the continuing moans and shrieks from next door, Vova’s questions stumbled to a halt. He was listening, his eyes wide, to the boy’s cries from the next room. Lord, have mercy or Mama, help me or, the worst, Let me die, and soon Vova began to whimper himself in sympathy. Mama, is that boy dying? But he put his hands over his ears for my answer. And then I heard the unmistakable sounds of prayer, one voice, not conversing, but intoning. Through this holy anointing and His most loving mercy, may the Lord help you by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and then several voices, Amen. This was the first part of the rite of extreme unction, the anointing of the sick, followed by the last confession, and finally, the administration of the viaticum, the Eucharist, food for the journey. The journey where? The journey to heaven. Alexei was dying, right now, in the next room, and at any moment Niki would open that adjoining door and take possession of his other son, without telling me, without asking me. And right there I decided I would tell Niki it was both too late and too soon. He could have Vova later, as a man, as a page, as an officer in the Guards, as a diplomat or a minister. He could make him a prince. But he could not take my baby from me now even if God took Alexei from him. And in the silence coming from the next room, I stroked my son’s sleeping head, and I rehearsed my lines, Batiushka, hear my plea.
But Niki did not appear to us in this little room until the morning, and then he said only, Alexei is better. Come and see him.
So what or who had effected this sudden miracle? The staretz Rasputin. Alix had telephoned him in the night sometime between my arrival and the delivery of last rites. In her grief and despair she had reached out wildly for his help, just as Niki had reached out for mine. And just as I rushed to obey, so did Rasputin, far away in Pokrovskoe, Siberia. He did not have to travel, though; he simply prayed, interceded with God and then sent to the tsaritsa a telegram: God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The Little One will not die.
Perhaps a word here about Rasputin. He had begun to perform healings for Alexei and because of this he had become indispensable to Alix, which would not have been a problem had Rasputin been a quiet man, but, alas and alack, he was a man of the theater from start to finish, so perhaps I understood him better than most. Let’s begin with the costume—the shabby black coat, the peasant’s blouse, and the peasant’s boots (all of which Alix soon replaced with silk shirts embroidered with cornflowers, with velveteen pants, with boots soft as butter, with a beaver cap and a beaver coat), the long, uncombed hair that fell past his shoulders like the hair worn by no man, peasant or prince, only by holy fools, the long, unkempt beard, the beard of all Old Believers, and then the eyes, a light blue like the pale gemstone tourmaline, just as sharp and piercing and as shot through with light as a crystal. I heard he could barely read a tract of Scripture, had trouble remembering any of its passages, and that his handwriting was a scrawl of big black letters, misshapen, of uneven size, the words misspelled, toppling onto each other. But when he spoke, it was an incantation, an almost incoherent ramble—the world is like the day, look it’s already evening; love the clouds, for that is where we live.
Most theatrical of all were his healings, where he took the hand of the patient, and then, using the greatest powers of concentration, made his face lose all color, turn yellow. Sweat dripped down his cheeks, and with his eyes closed he began to tremble—it was as if life left him and entered the body of the sick. Yet a storm of criticism always surrounded Rasputin because of his behavior at the margins of the stage—at the height of his popularity a stream of women came to his apartment in Petersburg to listen to his lectures, to give him money, even to be defiled by him, after which, in the night, he went to bathhouses, consorted with prostitutes, drank himself to public drunkenness beyond even that of an ordinary Russian, and once at the Moscow restaurant Yar, Rasputin, leering, exposed himself to a group of women and created a fracas that ended only when the management called high enough up the ladder of command until someone, the assistant minister of the interior, was well enough positioned to give permission for the arrest of the palace favorite. Alix believed the police reports were false, the ministers who spoke against her association with him his enemies—and hers. But when her letters to Rasputin began circulating in Petersburg in 1911, letters written in an effusive style so at odds with her chilly public demeanor, letters in which everyone was her darling and in which she longed to kiss them all, copies Rasputin himself released at first to the capital and then to cities all over Russia to silence his tormentors (I only wish one thing, to fall asleep forever on your shoulders and in your arms. Where are you? Where have you gone? Will you soon be again close to me?), it seemed all of Russia was in an uproar. What was the empress doing in the arms of this unwashed staretz?
The cartoons that resulted from these letters—caricatures of Rasputin, Alix, and the girls that appeared in the papers and could not be suppressed, now that the 1905 reforms had lifted censorship of the press and guaranteed freedom of speech—showed the women of the imperial family frolicking naked, the empress and Rasputin embracing. In another, a demonic, black-haired, oversized Rasputin held two small stupid-faced puppets in his hands: Niki and Alix. Behind Rasputin, the empress knelt naked, a yellow crown in her long flowing brown hair; Niki potbellied and castrated, sat in a palanquin, wearing only boots and a fur hat; clustered about the three of them chattered a legion of grand dukes and ministers, all now exiled or murdered. At this, the family, Niki’s ministers, even the prime minister of the Duma, Petr Stolypin, insisted Rasputin had to be sent away. And so, bowing to pressure, which he never liked to do, Niki sent Grigory Rasputin back home to Siberia for a while, to his village of Pokrovskoe, which was why, in 1912, from Spala, Alix had to telegraph him there.
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 23