The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  Niki watched Vova pensively, shifting, his uniform wrinkling across the front. His boots bore dried mud. Every afternoon, Niki said, he would drive to the woods or walk by the Dnieper River, sometimes alone, sometimes with Sergei. He had begun, while here alone at Mogilev, to contemplate the colorlessness of life without Alexei. Rasputin had promised that Alexei would at thirteen outgrow his illness, but the doctors he spoke to last month had contradicted this, and the disease had certainly showed no sign yet of abating. Each month brought Alexei some new pain to his joints or brought him a headache or a fever. Each movement brought with it the potential for hemorrhage. And now with Rasputin’s death, Niki said, what was to prevent the next hemorrhage from being a fatal one? Alix had wept for days after Rasputin’s murder, now that catastrophe was certain for her son. She had read the congratulatory letters and telegrams between all their imperial relations, notes confiscated by the secret police, and she knew they stood alone. He and Alix had come to accept that Alexei would not live long now and certainly would not be able to serve as tsar. And, Niki said, it was not only Alexei’s life that was in danger; Alix’s was also, for different reasons. She had written him, Don’t let them send me to a convent. Don’t separate Baby from me. Had I heard the rumors? I nodded. Did he not know I had heard them all practically firsthand on the sable-covered bed at the von Dervis palace?

  He had, Niki told me, decided to return to Peter at the end of December, to take charge of the roiling matters in the capital, and then to send Alix and the children to Livadia Palace in the Crimea, after Russian Christmas, where they would stay for a few years, until the war was safely over, until order had been brought both to the State Council and to the State Duma or else that two-chambered parliamentary body would be permanently dissolved. Eventually, according to his plan, Alix would return to Petersburg, but Alexei, if he still lived, would remain behind, tucked away, just as his English cousin George V and his wife, Mary, had concealed their sickly epileptic son John, just as Alix’s sister, Irene, had hidden her hemophiliac son Henry. And there, just as John and Henry had, Alexei would eventually die.

  We heard the cannonballs exploding, marbles clinking against one another as Vova played, and Niki turned his head toward him but spoke still to me. He wanted to take Vova home with him to Tsarskoye for Christmas, alone. He could help decorate the three trees at the Alexander Palace, the one in the Big Living Room, another in the passage for the servants, and the last in the playroom, the fir tree there, strung with crystal baubles and tinsel, so tall it almost reached the ceiling, and I thought, Does the decree against Christmas trees not apply to the sovereigns, or is Niki recalling the hazy comfort of some Christmas past? Though I knew Niki delivered these details to soothe me, he was the one who smiled as he recalled them. The candles on the playroom tree would be lit first, he said, and beneath it Vova and the other children would unwrap their gifts. After the New Year Vova could travel with them to the Crimea for Easter. And so on and so on, each holiday leading to another, one month to the next. Vova could call me once a week. I could see him in March before the family left for the Crimea. We would have to explain to him, slowly, the manner of his birth, the function of his new place, and eventually, his assumption of his new name, and this transfer must be cultivated as unhurriedly and as carefully as Petersburgers cultivated their vines and flowers in their greenhouses all winter, forcing their bulbs to flower, their vines to bear fruit, forcing nature to do the impossible, to make summer from ice. And when Alix returned to Peter with the girls, Vova would come with her. Did I understand?

  I was not an idiot—how did he think I had memorized all those divertissements and adagios, one step leading to hundreds of others? I understood—without a clear line of succession, the various Romanov men from all branches of the family would furiously contend for the crown. And with this weakness and divisiveness from above and the ruinous fog of war all around us, the red flags of the revolution would once again be draped from the roofs and windows of Peter and the old revolutionaries would slink back into the capital to take full advantage of the instability of the three-hundred-year-old throne. No—there could be no rupture in the route to the throne. Yes, I understood. Niki’s son—one of them—must be the tsarevich. We were quiet enough now to notice Vova had also grown silent. Niki might consider him a child, but I knew better. Vova had been listening intently. If he did not want to do this, if he did not want to go with the tsar, I knew he would let me know. He sat on the cot, motionless. Of course he wanted to go. This was the big adventure he yearned for, the path that led, finally, away from me. And then he let a marble roll slowly along the windowsill to topple the last soldier standing upright, which fell, with a clatter, to the floor.

  At that moment, a real soldier came to the study door to tell Niki it was time for dinner. Sergei’s face next appeared in the doorway and I could tell from it the tsar had already discussed with him his plans and that Sergei was distressed by them; it had distressed him even to overhear Niki repeating them to me, though Sergei did not know none of this was a surprise, that I had been preparing myself for this and dreading this since Spala. But I understood this was why Sergei had been talking of death, of leaving his estate to Vova: he wanted to lay some claim to Vova before Niki gobbled him all up. But what could Sergei do? Vova was not his son, no matter how much he doted on him, though Vova did not know this. Nor did Vova belong fully to me. This fate or something like it had been Vova’s since his conception. And he did not know that either.

  I touched Sergei’s hand as I passed him and then Niki gestured to Vova to walk on ahead with Sergei and the soldier while we held back. Niki turned to me in the dim winter light of that bedroom. I promise I will leave him the greatest empire Russia ever commanded. Nicholas II’s Christmas manifesto to his army would speak of his vision, as yet unfulfilled, of this Great Russia, and the peace that would follow from it that, its reach blanketing all the Slavic peoples and resolving all long-simmering conflicts, a peace such that generations to come will bless your sacred memory. Did I believe him? Like his most loyal subjects, I still believed him capable of anything. Then he kissed me, the triple kiss to the cheeks the divine tsar bestows upon his subjects at Easter, and then one last kiss, the one a man gives to a woman, his chapped lips to mine. I opened my mouth to his rough tongue, which I had not tasted in fourteen years and which he let me have now. Had he loved me all these years? If only, if only, he had ennobled me and made me his wife in 1894 instead of Alix. Our kiss was long, and though the twilight made around us a cloak of black fur, we were not invisible beneath it. When we broke apart, finally, I saw that Sergei had forged on ahead, the puppy at his heels, but my son had turned back to wait for us, and he stood there in the passageway, his face utterly astonished.

  That night I dreamed I was following the tsar through the south gates at Tsarskoye, those grand gates, their Gothic façades like the doorways to a great church. The tsar was wearing his thick greatcoat and his fur papakha, and I saw only the broad back of him as his big dogs, his fifteen Scottish sheepdogs, the large breed favored by Queen Victoria who first brought them to Balmoral, came to stick their long noses into the folds of his coat, and then they ran ahead of him in the grass toward the grove of birch trees and oak and then back, weaving his steps like shuttles through a loom. His favorite sheepdog, Iman, had been the only palace dog, but Iman had disappeared, had perhaps taken a nail in the paw or swum too far in one of the lakes, and now Niki did not want that attachment to a single dog again, so he enjoyed them as a pack, loving no particular one over the other. Spaced thirty feet apart at the tall iron fence stood the Cossack guards, and along the horizon one of them rode by on a huge horse, beast and man fused into a force of speed and strength, headed to the barracks of his regiment, built in the Muscovite style Niki so loved, an imitation medieval village christened the Feodorovsky Gorodk, or Townstead. Niki walked alone, ahead of me, unaware of me, but I followed him as he walked along the grass, along the glades of trees, along
small bodies of water turned green and black by the reflection of these trees and their shadows and the grasses, the yellow walls and white columns of Alexander Palace rising like an ancient Greek temple at the other end of the long drive and the wide lawn. His children ran there, built snow towers, and sledded on the hills in the winter, canoed in the lakes and swam in the canals in the summer, served tea on Children’s Island in the little playhouse, buried their pets in the small cemetery by the bridge, and marked their graves with headstones in the shapes of miniature pyramids. I followed him across the bridge to Children’s Island where he climbed the few steps to the porch of the playhouse, the playhouse like the ones built for all privileged Russian children since Peter the Great, and where with his gloved hand he brushed the leaves from the seats of the two wicker chairs, and the wind came over the still water and rattled the little canoe at its small stone pier and the pine needles shifted in the tall trees that reached twice as high as the roof. Some of the needles, unhinged from their branches, fell like the lightest rain, and he brushed clean the table on which sat some crockery playthings—teapot, cups, and plates—and then he turned and faced me and raised one arm and held it out with the palm up and then I saw it was not Niki at all, but Vova, grown to manhood, and I woke just as I was racing across the grass to kiss his hand.

  In Petersburg I told everyone only that I had left my son at Stavka with Sergei.

  On January 1, Niki returned to the capital and, as he promised me, he began to rid the capital of his enemies to make it and the throne safe for our sons. He had consulted the ghost of his father and the ghost had given his blessing. Prince Dimitri Pavlovich was exiled to Persia. Grand Duke Nikolasha, who was already in Tiflis, having been sent there after his demotion from commander in chief of the army to commander of the regiments in the Caucasus, was ordered to remain there indefinitely. Prince Felix Yusupov, in his gray soldier’s coat and under guard, was sent to his estate in the Kurskaya province in central Russia. Sergei’s brother Nicholas was dispatched to Grushevka, his country estate in the Ukraine. The Vladimirichi were ordered to depart Peter, and Miechen, Andrei—with the swiftest of goodbyes to me—and eventually Boris went to the Caucasus, to Kislovodsk, with the face-saving excuse that they were taking the cure at a spa, and the Vladimir Palace and the von Dervis mansion stood abruptly empty. Andrei came to say goodbye to me on Kronversky Prospekt, and I blessed him with my father’s icon of Our Lady of Czestokowa while he knelt, though he was not going off to war but to a place untouched by it where his safety could be assured and, frankly, I was happy to see him go. He was no longer an amusement and his treachery endangered my son—my ambitions for my son. Kyril, as a Navy commander, was ordered to Port Romanov on the Arctic Circle far, far from the capital and perhaps there, with any luck, he would freeze to death. After the war, Niki planned to turn his attention to his ministers of the State Council and to the members of the lower house of the Duma—to rid both of the incompetence that was crippling the country, but to reorganize the government now, he felt, in the middle of a war, could be disastrous. First, Russia must prevail over Germany.

  The Christmas and New Year’s holidays had fattened the country’s spirits, and the weather had taken care of the rest, turning so cold, at fifteen degrees below zero, that the streets had emptied of troublemakers. It was so cold, in fact, that no supplies could make it either into the capital or out of it, for blizzards kept the trains frozen on their tracks and there was no one to sweep the snow as so many men had been conscripted. The bakeries were forced to stop making bread because the flour and sugar could not be moved from their warehouses and silos, and the big, fine pastries disappeared from the shops, followed by biscuits, buns, cakes, and finally humble loaves of bread. Women began queuing up in long lines for anything available. And there was trouble transporting coal, as well, and what there was of Peter’s wooden fences began to vanish as people tore them down to burn them in their stoves. But on the tsar’s orders, four trucks managed to unload coal at my Petersburg mansion, and the sight proved so novel that a crowd gathered, despite the temperature, just to stare at it. As I’ve said, my neighborhood stood far from the factories that harbored the strikers, and my house stood far from the tenements in which they lived, and so this crowd was a titled one, but no less hostile for that, the men slapping their gloved hands together, fur hats pulled down low on their heads, making remarks. I opened the door to Vova’s balcony just a crack; it overlooked Kronversky Prospekt, and I heard the French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue—a busybody who kept a diary of events large and ridiculously small (the tsar’s ministerial appointments noted alongside the chinchilla coat and gray taffeta dress worn by Niki’s brother’s beautiful new wife, Paléologue noted even her superb pearls!)—yes, Paléologue was declaiming loudly, It seems we haven’t the same claim as Madame Kschessinska to the attentions of the imperial authorities. To which I thought, Of course you haven’t, you fumisterie. You are not the mother of the tsare vich! But I said nothing and shut the door, for the phone was ringing with my weekly call from Vova.

  The calls always began the same way, with a palace servant announcing, You are receiving a telephone call from the imperial apartments of His Majesty the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, and then my son would be on the line to chatter about the events of the past week—he was learning English with Alexei’s tutor Mr. Gibbes, he had sledded down a big ice hill and beat the girls, both the Big Pair and the Little Pair, for supper they had had suckling pig with horse-radish, and when would I be coming to visit, as the emperor had said it would be soon, and I agreed that, yes, it would be soon, at the beginning of March. After those calls, I would dress and go to the theater.

  Even at forty-four I was still dancing, though not as often, and I remember exactly my last performance, though, of course, I did not know it was to be my last. With Mikhail Fokine, I performed an excerpt from Carnaval. Poor Fokine. The war had tied him to the Imperial Theaters, where Diaghilev had no sway, and so Fokine had had to shuffle his way reluctantly back to partner me if he wanted to appear on the Maryinsky stage. When this ballet had its premiere in 1910 at the Pavlov Hall, Nicholas and Alexandra both were there to witness it, but now we performed it as part of a benefit for a war charity. The sets for this ballet were arranged in such a way and with such perspective as to make it seem the dancers were miniature beings and the audience were peering into a velvet maquette to watch us cavort. Usually, in this little hatbox of a ballroom, the characters slipped magically in and out of the folds in the blue curtains, but that night, it being a benefit for one of Alix’s charities for wounded soldiers, Fokine and I performed only the duets and solos from the ballet, Fokine in his harlequinade costume and mask, I, his love, Columbine, in my many-layered ruffled dress with the puffed sleeves. We danced that bit of commedia dell’arte set to Schumann, and in it we exemplified the silliness and light of the form, the light in here against the dark of the war outside and the dark frozen mood of the people. Fokine moved to the flute and clarinet, and I to the strings, and yet beneath the frolic the music etched a dark line. I found myself unexpectedly weeping by the end of the ballet, when Harlequin brings his pirouettes to a finish by abruptly sitting on his bottom. Fokine’s face, behind his mask, looked up at me quizzically. He was younger than I and he belonged to a different age. When the war was over, he would go abroad. But there was only one stage for me, one world for me—this one. And it was just twenty days before the revolution that would destroy it.

  For a short time, though, it had seemed this world would last. The British ambassador, George Buchanan, took his usual vacation to Finland. Princess Radziwill hosted a great soiree at her palace on the Fontanka Canal, the light from her windows flickering across the water in all directions and illuminating Boris Vladimirich’s car among the cars and carriages lined up outside. At M. Paléologue’s dinner party at the French embassy, the guests discussed whether the palm for excellence should go to Pavlova, Karsavina, or me. And Niki decided to return for three we
eks to Stavka, and Alix and his ministers could not dissuade him. The night he left, I received an unscheduled call from the imperial apartments of the tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich. On the phone, Vova told me he was feeling ill, that Olga and then Alexei had come down with a headache and a high fever and the doctor had diagnosed measles and had put even Vova now to bed. Mama, I want you, Vova cried, his voice as thin as a five-year-old’s, and when I hung up the phone, I pictured him hot with fever in some closet, abandoned while Alix rushed to and fro tending to her own children with the same fervor she had shown when nursing Niki through typhus. If only Niki had not gone back to Stavka so soon! When he was at Tsarskoye I knew he would look after Vova, but how could I trust that Alix would even take notice of him? And so I began to pack a small valise and telegraphed Sergei at Stavka that I would take the train the nine versts to Tsarskoye Selo to nurse Vova myself. When Sergei reported to Niki my intentions, Niki said no, that I must trust the imperial doctors and their ministrations, for who practiced better medicine than these men? Vova was in good hands. But when I insisted, reminding Niki that my promised visit had been postponed by his departure to Stavka, he relented, so long as my visit was made by night and of a few hours’ duration. He would tell Alix to expect me. And I must use the servants’ entrance, soberly dressed, so that my visit would not be an official one, and would not be noted by the adjutant in the leather-bound appointment book, though, of course, I would still be observed by the secret police.