The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  I am certain this is why he then gestured for my son to move to the front of the box to take the seat left vacant by the empress, and the audience made another noise then, one that sounded like a caress, that wrapped itself around the pretty boy who looked so happy, whose father smiled at him so fondly. From the modest distance of the stage, I could see Niki’s pleasure at the murmur of approval emitted by the audience. And when, at the end of Act IV, after the coda that marks the opera’s finale, the great bass Sobinov who had played the role of the hero, Ivan Susanin, walked to the proscenium in his long robe and his horsehair beard, dropped to his knees, raised his arms to Niki and Vova, and began to sing an impromptu “God Save the Tsar.” He had once sung a lullaby to my son in his cradle—did Sobinov recognize him now? His voice filled the theater, at first a capella until the orchestra, stumbling a bit in its surprise, followed his lead and picked up their instruments. One by one we artists of the Imperial Theaters knelt alongside Sobinov and the audience, in a great wave, stood. At this Niki stood, as well, and at his signal my son rose beside him. Niki looked down at us all, silent, head bowed. My son, in imitation, did the same, and there was no doubt it had been this, the sight of the emperor with his young heir, that had prompted Sobinov’s homage.

  God save the tsar,

  Mighty and powerful,

  May he reign for our glory,

  Reign that our foes may quake.

  The son of a tsar belongs to his country, not to his mother. And Russia, or at least the Russia inside this theater, still loved its tsar, this tsar, and it also loved and needed his son, perhaps this son, should it come to that. And if and when the time came, Alix would agree to it, had, even tonight, reluctantly, unhappily agreed to it. For the alternative to my son as imposter was for the line to pass crookedly to Niki’s brother, whom Alix hated, or to Kyril, whom she hated even more, or, if the imperial council negated those successions, to the tall, tsar-sized commander of the army, Nikolasha, whom she had hated since 1905, ever since he had told Niki if he did not install the Duma he would shoot himself on the spot rather than be charged with imposing martial law. Yes, she hated and feared them all, all the men of the imperial family—and, yes, she would take my son because he was Niki’s and because a tsar without an heir is a weakened tsar. But what kind of mother was I, to send my child away, a sack of clothes in his hands, a note pinned to his shirt, Take my son. What kind of mother? The mother of a tsar. This opera was my object lesson, after all, with Mikhail Romanov’s mother reluctantly submitting her son to his fate. Whenever I met Niki he wanted to take something from me, though when I was younger I thought I was taking something from him. But one never takes from the tsar, one always gives, and that my father saw—I was giving the tsar my life. After all, the opera is A Life for the Tsar, not The Tsar’s Life for His Subject.

  And if that time came the next week, next month, next season, I would have to say to everyone I knew, My son has gone off to school in Paris, and I would have to remain on the stage just to see him, as I had remained on the stage to see Niki. Perhaps I would have my father’s sixty years in the theater, and each of those years, the imperial family would come to watch me from their box, and I would dance for them first as a princess and then as the Queen Mother, and finally at last, as a hag, an old woman noticed only when she had the capacity to frighten or harm or amuse. The family would arrive, as always, by means of the long private drive, where they would be greeted by the director of the Imperial Theaters and escorted through the private passageway to their chairs at the gilded proscenium of the box, which in both design and ornamentation echoes the proscenium of the stage, and eventually, Tsar Nicholas II would stand there with his hair all white, beside him Alix in a tiara with white hair also, and his daughters in the brimming beauty of their adulthood, and with them the tsarevich, the tsar’s son, my son, also an adult, in his own red-and-gold dress uniform of the Preobrazhensky Guards, the oldest regiment in Petersburg, created by Peter the Great himself, and at their appearance an excitement would course through the audience and around the dancers on the stage as we waited for the curtain. The imperial family, the imperial family is here. And then at a signal from the director, the orchestra would begin the overture and the curtain with a heavy lurch would sweep sideways and upward toward the catwalk and I would run forward on the sloping boards of the stage toward the audience, toward the imperial family I had aged alongside, and one day, when I looked to the imperial box for permission to perform an encore, my son would be the one to grant it.

  But all this would not happen yet. By the next summer, 1914, my son was still with me and Russia was at war with Austria and Germany.

  Toy Soldiers

  In cities across Russia, from the east to the west, from Odessa to Irkutsk, the red flags of the revolution were suddenly and all at once replaced with portraits of the tsar and holy icons, the country spontaneously united against a new enemy, the Austrians who threatened the Slavic people and the Germans who were Austria’s allies. The German embassy in Petersburg was vandalized by a mob, the equestrian statues on its roof toppled to the street, where enormous chunks of horses’ heads, horses’ legs, and thick horses’ bodies lay as if dynamited in the roadway. In Moscow, Bechstein and Bluthner pianos were thrown from the top stories of the leading piano store, something satisfying, I suppose, in dropping large objects from a great height. The name of the capital was changed from the Germanic Petersburg to the Slavic Petrograd. But I will always call it Petersburg—not Petrograd, Leningrad, Stalingrad—and I know one day it will again be St. Petersburg. Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven were no longer played in concert. Christmas trees were banned by the Holy Synod for the 1914 holiday: the candlelit Christmas tree was a German custom. Anyone in the streets who spoke English, French, Italian—the common Russian was too ignorant to know French from German, Bonjour from Guten Tag—was hissed at: Nemtsy! Germans!

  Sergei rolled out a great map of Europe and Russia onto the desk in Vova’s room and Vova excitedly went through his toy soldiers to bring them to the table and place them where Sergei pointed as he explained the battles. Here in Sarajevo was where the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, had been killed by a Serbian assassin, and there Vova lay one of his men on his side. Here in Vienna was where the emperor Franz Joseph had drafted an ultimatum demanding that Austrian officers be permitted to enter Serbia to suppress all anti-Austrian sentiment and arrest all anti-Austrian officers. Vova stood a man at Vienna and made him a tiny paper crown. And here in Belgrade was where the Serbian crown prince telegraphed to the tsar in St. Petersburg for help, as by tradition the tsar was protector of all Slavic peoples. Our city Vova knew and he spent some time searching for the proper figure to represent the tsar, finally settling on the tallest soldier in the box, though Niki, of course, was not tall. But despite the tsar’s mediations, the Austro-Hungarians attacked Belgrade—Vova placed cannons here and there, and Sergei pointed to where the Russians mobilized along the Austrian border. Then the kaiser declared Germany would enter the war to help its ally, Austria-Hungary, and he began to send his troops through Belgium to northern France to prevent the tsar’s armies from being transported by railroad through France to Germany. So France entered the war. The tsar’s armies began to fight both north and south, north against the Germans where they met many casualties and south against the Austrians where they had greater success. The Russian army in the south moved all the way to Gorlice, Cracow, Lodz, and the Carpathian Mountains. Through all the battles of 1914, Vova moved his lead soldiers steadily southwest and at the north he laid them down on their backs, dead. Sergei told Vova that the tsar had a map just like this one in his study at Alexander Palace which no one was allowed to enter and that he kept the key to that room in his pocket. The tsar wanted to use this war to enlarge the country, Sergei said, to make it an even greater Russia, to stretch it over East Prussia to the mouths of the Vistula and over Bukovina to the Carpathians. Armenia would be annexed, the Muslim Turks pushed out
of Europe and back into Asia Minor. The Straits and Holy Constantinople would belong to Orthodox Russia, as they should. The Germanic empire, which Sergei told me Alix found so changed from the Germany of her childhood, the people transformed by the perfidy and ambition of the kaiser—who had once loved her own sister!—that she urged Niki to crush it. Sergei told Vova that Germany, once crushed, would be divided among France, England, and Denmark, and the kaiser’s House of Hohenzollern would soon be no more and wasn’t that a great thing, and Vova nodded. And I nodded too. A greater Russia meant a greater tsar, a greater future tsar, and Alix and I were united in our desire for that.

  Each day Vova pestered Sergei for news of the war and Vova had me wash his first-year cadet uniform daily, for that was all he would wear. But I gladly had it washed, glad he was at home with me and not at the military school where we had planned to send him this fall had the war not interrupted our plans. I was sorry about the war, but not sorry to have Vova home. Perhaps, like my father, who wanted to keep his children close, I, too, wanted my child at my side, where I could pet and cosset him and where I could perpetuate his undiluted love for me, having so little of it, even diluted, from the tsar. But there were other reasons to keep Vova near. Because of the loss of so many officers at the northern front, graduates of the military schools were being commissioned early and sent to replace them. Though our officers allowed their men in the infantry to crawl along the ground as they moved forward under machine gun fire, their Russian pride would not allow them to do the same, and so in their colorful uniforms the officers strode into battle and were easily gunned down, still gripping the lances and sabers and bayonets they never lived to use. So new officers, teenagers fresh from school, replaced them, and the infantry of the Second and Third armies replaced the soldiers of the First, and these men were barely trained—some did not even know how to hold their rifles—and the worst of them were garrisoned in our cities to protect us from the Germans. And when the war dragged on and revolutionary sentiment was reawakened, these barracked soldiers turned on us—as the men in the field turned on their young, inexperienced officers. But not yet—this was still to come.

  What was it like to live in Peter during the war? At first it was not so different. The cannons at the Peter and Paul Fortress still marked the noon hour; the swans still skimmed the waters of the canals along the Champ de Mars. Tea parties marked name days and at christenings babies were baptized, the leaves turned first yellow and then gold, and after they fell, children fought with snowballs before the backdrop of a pink winter sky. Long carriages still ferried the little theater students to the Maryinsky in the evenings, and the tsar’s theaters still presented their seasons, for theater to us was like opium, though we at the Maryinsky returned now to the comfort of the old classics, pulling from the storage vaults our costumes, reminding ourselves of the choreography created by Didelot, Johansson, and early Petipa and Ivanov, divertissements we had almost forgotten how to dance, steps that dated back to tsars Alexander II and III, when the world we knew was comfortably secure, where one could find, in the words of an elderly court official, order, punctiliousness, symmetry. The opera company sang Boris Godunov and Don Quixote, and the Imperial Ballet danced Sylvia and La Fille du Pharaon, ballets about long-ago and faraway civilizations—ancient Greece and Rome and Egypt, once great civilizations now vanished. It’s ridiculous to point out the irony, yes? So I won’t.

  But by the late fall of 1914, only a few of the young Guards who had walked our prospekts and danced at our balls still sat in the stalls of our theaters. There were no more rows of military tunics in the parterres and boxes, no medals gleaming in the footlights, and there were fewer shimmering jewels and evening dresses as their wearers also occupied themselves otherwise, running hospitals and forming charities. At the intervals when the houselights came on the audience demanded national anthems—at first just our own, but then also the French and the British as each country became a Russian ally, and our intervals soon became interminable, even by Russian standards. When the little students of Theater Street now looked out their windows onto the Maryinsky Theater Square, they saw recruits with bayonets at practice stabbing at dummies—uniforms stuffed with hay. The infantry marched in columns down Nevsky Prospekt to depart from Warsaw Station, and the men leaving were not only young men, but also men of thirty years or more, their wives trailing them until fatigue or grief made them give up and stop and simply stare after their husbands. The imperial family went to serve, as well, not because they were particularly gifted leaders, but because that was what their positions in the family demanded of them. The tsar’s brother Mikhail was called back to Russia only to be sent to the southwestern front to fight in Galicia, in a battle productive but horrible, a hundred versts piled high with the Russian dead and not enough living to clear the ground of their bodies. Niki’s older cousin Nikolasha continued to serve as commander in chief of the army. Vladimir’s three sons also served. Andrei went to the northwest front to headquarters, or Stavka, an old Russian name for the camp of a military chief, at Baranovichi, but I didn’t have long to miss him for the stress of the war made him ill with bronchitis and he soon came home. One would think living with Miechen would have prepared him better for battle, but since he was never able to stand up to her, this was just one more instance of overwhelming force inspiring Andrei to retreat. His brother Boris served as commander of the Ataman Cossacks. Kyril commanded the naval Garde Equipage. Sergei’s brother George went to Kiev to supervise evacuation of the wounded. Sergei, suffering from arthritis, remained in Petersburg to run the Artillery Department as inspector general, and the tsar himself moved between Tsarskoye Selo and Stavka, sometimes taking Alexei with him to see the spots Vova only looked at on his map—Galicia, Reval, Odessa—until a nosebleed in December 1915 nearly killed the tsarevich. I will tell you more about that later. And then, of course, inevitably, the dead and the wounded began to be returned to Peter, the dead put into rough, wooden coffins and the wounded into makeshift hospitals. Alix transformed the golden Armorial Hall at the Winter Palace into a huge ward, removing the glass cases of silver trophies and placing in their stead hundreds of hospital cots. And she turned a hall in Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo into yet another hospital, as well as two palaces in Moscow, and even a portion of the Feodorovsky Gorodsk at Tsarskoye Selo was made over into a lazaret. But for every man who called for the empress to hold his hand, there were a dozen others embarrassed to have her see them so vulnerable and ruined and a dozen more than that who were openly rude as the war went on. Not only she, but every woman of means opened a hospital, served as a nurse, or packed boxes to send to the front. Why, even I funded a hospital, though I did not nurse there, being no good with blood and amputations, but I visited the convalescing, helped them write letters home and performed for them my Russian dance, my ruskaya, and the men called me radouchka, bringer of joy, which I was! What could my enemies criticize about that?

  By the beginning of 1915 the army began to run short not only of munitions, of bullets and rifles, but also of overcoats and uniforms and boots, and men could not shoot until the men in front of them were shot and they could snatch up their rifles. Eventually whole regiments of gunners could not even return fire, and they were stuck in the Carpathians without the means to fight their way down the other side into Hungary. By the summer, the Germans had quietly assembled in southern Poland and in May they began to bombard our men, who fought back with no cartridges or shells, but with their bare hands and bayonets, the Germans pushing us east, from Galicia and back out of Poland, our men running away in their fur caps and greatcoats and empty hands in a bloodbath that massacred 180,000 men, and Sergei feared the Germans might make it all the way to Moscow. At this Vova put his soldiers back in his box—there weren’t many left standing, anyway—rolled up his map and stashed it away, and the country exploded, looking to place the blame, not yet at the tsar—though the proverb says, A fish begins to stink from the head—but at everyone around h
im. Petersburg blamed for these disasters the inspector general of the Artillery, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich; the war minister, Vladimir Sukhomlinov; and even, in its desperation, the imperial concubine, Mathilde Kschessinska. Yes, there were rumors that I took bribes of money and jewels to convince Sergei to throw business to friends, the Petersburg arms contractors and munitions factory owners and providers of matériel who came to my parties and who could not possibly fill all the orders they took, while the munitions factories in the provinces sat idle and eventually went bankrupt from lack of business. Articles appeared in the press saying I used artillery documents and privileged information from Sergei to better negotiate a price for my bribes—how else did I pay for my house?—and the president of the infernal Duma spoke out against me, against the thieving gang operating under cover of the grand duke’s name. Sergei’s brother Nicholas demanded Sergei break off all relations with me, accusing me of exploiting him for profit. I was greatly affronted! And all these rumors tingled the ears of the empress, who scribbled a note to Niki about them—There are very unclear, unclean stories about her and bribes which all speak about—a note I’m sure she purred while writing. Lewd poems about me and unflattering caricatures made the rounds of the capital—I, planted naked in bed with a bevy of grand dukes; I, surrounded by mounds of diamonds and rubies, fat munitions manufacturers laughing behind my sable-coated back while an army private shook his empty rifle in despair. As if I could be happy about this, about Warsaw, where my father and grandparents were buried, rotten with Germans! The uproar around me grew so great I had to leave for Strelna in May and could not return to the capital until late fall.