The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  I saw Rasputin in St. Petersburg later that fall—for after his great success at Spala he had been allowed out of exile to return to the capital—on an evening after the theater while I was driving over the Troitsky Bridge. At first he was just a shape, a long black coat, a hood, hands gesticulating, two animals battling, and then as we drew closer, the lanterns on the outside of my carriage swung into his face. The man beneath the hood was suddenly illuminated, as if the figure had stepped up to the footlights of a stage. He had been turned toward the Neva, staring into the water, possibly importuning his own fate, but he turned his head toward me as I passed in my perfumed and heated carriage, and I saw the face of the creature that Petersburgers had begun to call The Nameless One or The Unmentionable—a nose broad at the nostrils, like the gnarled root of a tree, a heavy brow like a ledge over two blue eyes, pale as electrified water. I knew immediately and unmistakably it was he, so much had his description circulated. When his eyes connected momentarily with mine I felt the shock of it as if I turned inside out and my mind was wiped clean. And then we passed and I looked back at him, but he had not turned to look back at me. He didn’t know who I was or how my son could have seized from him his power.

  So, where was I? Yes, how we saw Alexei for the first time, Vova and I. Although it was brilliant daylight outside, the electric lights were burning in the narrow, dark hallways. While my brother supervised the loading of our trunk into the carriage, our utility here over, the tsar escorted us down the hall. The door to Alexei’s room had been flung open, and standing by the bed against a table of medicines and towels, useless palliatives, were Alexei’s sisters, all four dressed alike as if they were a small corps de ballet—in high-necked, white lace blouses and pale, pleated linen skirts. Even their hair was similarly styled—half of it pulled back at the crown with a bow, the rest loose behind the ears and falling over their shoulders. Only the littlest one’s, Anastasia’s, hair was straight. The hair of the other three hung in soft waves. They were kissing at their brother’s fingers and telling him about the bit of theater they had performed last night at dinner for the guests, the members of the imperial suite and the Polish noblemen who had been invited to join them—two scenes from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme that must have called for two of them to be the lady and the pirate I had seen in the corridor last night—and their laughter stopped as they saw at the threshold Vova and me, a little boy and a little woman. They themselves were big, pink swans surrounding the small, white-faced form, who smiled at Vova from his bed. For a moment, with that smile, one could see the lively boy Sergei once described to me who at dinner even with company there licked his plate, squirmed through the meal, teased his sisters, stole the slipper from a lady-in-waiting and returned it to her with a strawberry stuffed into the toe of it, wrote little notes to Niki telling him of his day—When I see you I am going to bathe in your bath—I kiss your hand. The children had few friends, as Alix kept them away from what she considered the salacious influence of the court, which was everyone they knew. So the girls entertained each other, and Alexei was allowed the company of the son of his sailor nanny or when the family was in the Crimea the son of a peasant or on occasion a boy from the Corps des Pages, a well-behaved cadet who was summoned to the palace when they were in Petersburg. And now here was my son, his half brother, the latest to be summoned, standing in his bedroom doorway.

  Perhaps Alexei thought Vova was one of those boys come to play with him during his convalescence, for he raised his hand and beckoned Vova to come, telling him not to bow. When Vova approached, toy in hand he had clutched for courage, Alexei said, Is that for me? and without protest Vova handed over to him the stuffed elephant I had given him at Christmas as a remembrance of the real elephant the clown Dourov had brought to the house. The cotton animal wore a red-and-gold cloth saddle and matching hat with a bell that jangled. The children fell upon it instantly—Oh, how darling, look at its little trunk—as Alix and I looked at each other. All night we had each contemplated losing a son, and this morning we shared the same relief. My son bent over the bed to show the heir the intricacies by which the elephant’s legs could be made to move and their two heads touched. Alexei’s hair had more chestnut to it, but Niki was right, the two boys looked remarkably alike, of similar age and build and similar features; it took my breath away to see how similar they were, but one had color and health and the other yellow skin stretched tight across his face. But Alexei was alive. He would not be buried in the cold woods by the Pilitsa River. Soon enough Alexei asked one of his sisters—I don’t know which one—to fetch his box of lead soldiers so they could play elephant hunt, and when she reappeared with the chest of beautifully painted toy men, each molded into a different posture, Niki followed behind her and stood in the doorway to watch the boys stand the soldiers one by one until they filled the hills and dales of the bedsheets around Alexei’s legs—one leg up, the other leg down. It would be a year before the tsarevich could walk normally or fully straighten his left leg, for the stagnant blood that had filled his joint was like acid and it ate away at bone and cartilage and this deformation locked the leg into a bent position. For a year he would wear iron braces designed to slowly once again straighten out the limb, and during this year he would be photographed officially only when seated—on chairs, on sleighs, on steps. The boys aimed their soldiers at the elephant and made shooting sounds, and after a few rounds of this, the tsar said we would have a real hunt another time, when Alexei was all better, and Alix told Alexei to make a gift of those soldiers to Vova and the tsar helped the boys gather all the men and lay them back into the wood box.

  My brother drove us to the station himself, fur hat pulled low on his forehead, his nose a mountain slope of rebuke, and we did not speak then of the tsarevich or anything we had seen. Instead, Josef amused Vova along the way with the numbers of beasts and birds the tsar’s hunting party had bagged each day, and I was grateful to him, for on the long train ride back to Peter, Vova drew pictures of animals and forests, of guns and bows and arrows, and then he drew up lists of imaginary hunting records with numbers carefully chosen for rabbit, pheasant, partridge, elk, stag, and bison. In a few weeks, when Alexei was well enough, he also would travel to Petersburg, first by carriage on the sandy road I had walked that night, a road raked smooth by the servants there, and then by railroad car that crept along at fifteen miles an hour to spare him any further injury. By then the dark forest and the dark house would be bleached white with snow, but that wouldn’t matter, for Alix had snatched her son back from the underworld. The imperial family would never return to Spala, never return to any of their Polish estates again.

  For my part, for years I wondered what my son remembered of that night, of that small, plain room with the whitewashed walls, the single picture hanging of men at hunt, the iron bed, the window that held the vista of a cold night in Poland. But I never asked him, for once it was over, I never wanted to speak of it again. I understood now why Niki had withdrawn from me so totally—his son’s illness was a tornado and it sucked everything around the boy into its powerful and lonely vortex.

  A Life for the Tsar

  By the winter of 1913 the tsarevich could walk but only short distances and then only with a limp, but the Great Tercentenary, the celebration of three hundred years of Romanov rule, could not wait for his fuller recovery. For ceremonial events he would have to either remain at home or be carried by one of the Cossacks from the family’s personal retinue, the tsarevich’s eyes too large, his features wooden with fatigue, and Niki knew the country would stink with even further rumors: the tsarevich was an imbecile, the tsarevich had an incurable disease. And so, for the de rigueur gala performance of A Life for the Tsar at the Maryinsky, when the theater would be filled only with court officials and diplomats, an Old World audience of the wellborn who once ruled Russia very well, thank you, without any help from peasants, clerks, workers, Jews, and revolutionaries, Niki did not want to push through the curtain of the imperial box with his
crippled son cradled in the arms of a Cossack from the Konvoi regiment. It was not my brother this time, but Sergei who brought me Niki’s latest proposition.

  Niki wanted Vova to wear Alexei’s red dress tunic of the Preobrazhensky Guards that night and join them in the imperial box. I could see in Sergei’s face that this excited him—a great prank like the ones the Potato Club used to play, but he had not been to Spala to see how this prank was prelude to an abduction. Sergei thought we had gone to Poland so Vova could hunt with Josef, not so my son could be hunted. And so Sergei endeavored to persuade me. I would already be at the theater, Sergei said, and so it would be easy enough to bring Vova with me. Sergei would come visit in my dressing room as he often did and he would bring me Alexei’s uniform. The imperial carriage would roll to a stop at my dressing room window to fetch Vova. Let him be tsarevich for a night, Sergei said, and I think he was bewitched by the picture of the young, illegitimate boy he adored being adored by the court that had so far shunned him. But Sergei could see my reluctance, and so he endeavored to trump it by reproaching me. Mala, Niki needs our help.

  And so I asked Vova, How would you like to play a part at the theater tonight?, knowing, of course, that he would be mad to do it—he had not yet given up his dream of becoming a future Honored Artist of the Imperial Theaters. He had announced recently that he would rather be an actor than a dancer, after all, and he had taken to dressing up to perform skits in what he could find of Sergei’s things—gloves, a cap, and once his boots, or in costumes we bought him, such as a Cossack’s tunic and cuirassier or his fireman’s uniform with its Teutonic helmet, which he wore otherwise while manning his miniature water truck, driving it about the grounds of the dacha. When I said, Would you like this?, Vova began to jump up and down at the prospect of performing.

  What will I play? he asked me. A peasant boy, a fairy page, a puppet? He had seen my ballets. He knew all the children’s roles.

  No, I said. A very special part. The tsarevich. The tsar’s son is sick again and can’t be with his father and mother in their box tonight. You will go there with them. Can you pretend to be very noble, the heir to the throne?

  And my son said, Yes, yes, too quickly, and he raised his chin and looked about the room in a very good approximation of a nobleman surveying his estate.

  Very good, I said. Very good, my little tsarevich.

  That night I arrived at the theater my usual two hours before curtain and had my dresser sew me into my costume a bit earlier so she would be gone long before Sergei’s arrival with my son’s costume. Only when Vova asked, Why are you so nervous, Mama? did I realize I was compulsively tracing the patterns of the white flowers against the blue of my dressing room’s cretonne-covered walls.

  When Sergei arrived, I hissed, This is ridiculous. Everyone will know he’s not the tsarevich.

  And Vova interrupted me, Mama, I want my costume.

  Sergei said, Mala, stop worrying, and to Vova, I’ve never known your mother to have such stage fright! and with a big wolf’s grin he opened up his greatcoat to reveal the little uniform hidden inside, the heir’s uniform of the Life Guards, a miniature of Niki’s uniform, the red breeches and the red tunic with its golden epaulettes, each button embossed with the imperial eagle, and the collar embroidered with the monogram H II, a monogram only the heir to the throne was permitted to wear. At the sight of all this, Vova let out a whoop and began to dance, he was ten and still childish from all my cosseting of him, and Sergei and I, playing his dressers, had to practically stuff him into the trousers, Sergei lifting him up off the ground and I holding open the breeches for him to be lowered into. Hold still, I told him, as I buttoned him into his shirt and tunic, Sergei laughing at Vova’s glee, my movements awkward from nerves. My son was small for his age and Alexei tall for eight and this meant that the uniform fit almost perfectly, and with his two hands Sergei smoothed Vova’s hair. Look, he said to me. Is this not the picture of the little tsarevich? More than a picture, I thought, and then we heard a carriage approaching, the bells on the horses’ bridles jingling, and the carriage paused on the private driveway right outside the low windows of my dressing room, and that was the only sound, the police at the tsar’s behest having stopped the theater-going court traffic at both ends. Sergei looked out the glass and said, It’s Niki, and to Vova, Are you ready?, and when my son nodded vigorously, Da, da, Sergei opened the window, gave Vova a quick boost, and my son was a shadow slipped over the freezing windowsill and into the envelope of that carriage to ride the rest of the way up the drive to the private imperial entrance. There he would disembark with Nicholas and Alexandra and walk through the marble foyer and up the steps, along the carpeted corridor lined with gilded chairs and into the imperial anteroom, the walls of it a light blue, and from there through a velvet curtain, as if they themselves were entering a stage, and into the imperial box itself.

  The entire audience stood at the family’s entrance and the national anthem was played, and by that time, of course, I had run out onto the stage to look through the peephole in the curtain. I believe I had to elbow someone out of the way. The three tiers of the boxes and all of the stalls seemed reddened by the color of all the scarlet tunics of all the uniforms worn by all the officers in attendance, that red punctuated in two spots by the greens, blues, and golds of the national costumes of the emir of Bokhara and the khan of Khiva and their retinues. My son stood proudly between Niki and Alix in his scarlet-and-gold uniform, looking down at the crowd from the imperial box with the exact aplomb he had shown when practicing his role at home. I had always thought Vova showed little talent for the theater, but it looked as if I had been his Teliakovsky, thwarting him, holding him back, for clearly Vova was enjoying this moment, even, at one point, raising one hand to execute a very good semblance of a noble wave. So, he was a Kschessinsky as much as he was a Romanov.

  That night we performed A Life for the Tsar, which tells the story of the boy Mikhail Romanov, the first tsar of the dynasty, protected from assassination by the peasant hero Ivan Susanin. Mikhail was sixteen years old and the grand nephew of Ivan the Terrible’s wife, close enough, when the council of boyare decided in 1612 to offer him the throne. Ivan had died in 1584, the first to call himself tsar, from the Latin word caesar, and the last ruler of the Rurik dynasty that had controlled Russia for six hundred years. After his death, Russia stumbled this way and that until the council reached out for someone related, however tenuously, to Ivan. In the winter of 1612, the Poles had invaded Russia, intent on taking advantage of her during its time of troubles—ah, we have a long, tangled history, the Poles and the Rus—and intent on murdering Mikhail on the eve of his coronation, which managed to take place, thanks to the peasant Susanin, in the Ipatiev monastery where Mikhail had been hidden. No wonder his mother trembled as her son was crowned, listening for the men coming to murder him, her boy who had just last month lived quietly with her in a Volga River village. Susanin only pretended to lead the Polish regiment to the boy, and instead took them into a snowy mountainous impasse. For his trouble, Susanin paid with his life and Poland with partition, but Russia was given a new, stable dynasty, the Romanov dynasty of three hundred years.

  I trembled in the wings, like Mikhail’s mother, at this turn in my child’s life, but luckily I did not have to enter the stage until Act II, at the ball at the palace of a Polish nobleman where the ensemble performs several Polish dances—a polonaise, the krakowiak, a waltz, a mazurka—and while dancing this last, the gentry’s mazurka my father had taught me, it seemed over the shoulder of one capped dancer and then another I saw my father’s face. Mathilde-Maria, what are you doing? Over the shoulders of another, I noted how often the court looked up at the imperial box. Vova was now seated slightly behind Niki and Alix, the dowager empress, and Niki’s sisters and their husbands, but Niki’s brother Mikhail was notably absent. He had eloped with a divorcée and been exiled just like Andrei’s brother Kyril. In the grand ducal loges, Sergei sat beaming with his brothers
and Andrei, bland-faced, completely ignorant of what was at hand, sat in his box with his brother Boris and with Miechen, now widowed, but no less rapacious, perhaps more so! The formidable Miechen had taken over her husband’s position as minister of the arts, most unusual for a woman, but other ambitions, more traditional ones, had been thwarted—she had not managed entirely to unhook Andrei from me, she had not married her daughter off to a king but to Prince Nicholas of Greece, her suit to have Boris betrothed to Niki’s daughter Olga had been rebuffed, Alix sniffing that she would not think to match a fresh young girl with Boris, so much older and in and out of so many beds, and Boris settled instead for a mistress. And though Miechen had quickly and expediently converted to Orthodoxy after the tsarevich’s near-fatal illness and Mikhail’s exile, her own son Kyril’s unfortunate marriage might prevent him as well from ever being tsar. And Miechen did not even know the other obstacle that stood in his way to the throne—the one sitting in a velvet-cushioned chair behind Niki in the imperial box. Just let her try to tip my son from that chair! But it wasn’t until I finished the mazurka and took my bow first to the imperial box, then to the grand ducal boxes, and finally to the house at large, that I even noted the grim face of the empress, another of the ambitious mothers here and one miserable despite her finery—the white velvet gown, the blue diagonal ribbon of the Order of St. Andrei, the diamond tiara, the white fan made of eagle feathers. She stood up at my bow, face covered in blotches, and removed herself to the back of the imperial box, where no one could see her and where she remained for the rest of the performance of the opera. One could hear the audience practically hiss its disapproval as the empress withdrew—and these mouths and tongues belonged not to the peasants, not to the students, not to the revolutionaries, not to the members of the Duma, but to the court. Niki kept his face impassive, but he heard the sound.