The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  For my son I would endure these humiliations. For after all, what more was I now, having given up my rights as parent, but a servant of the tsar?

  The sentry at the back gate took my name and my driver took me to the side of the colonnade, to the servants’ wing, where I was received by a policeman of the imperial court and a maid in a black dress with a white ribbon in her hair. Alix, I had heard, liked her palace servants to dress much like the English ones she grew up with at Granny’s, at Windsor Castle, but her Russian girls complained mightily about the corsets and the starched aprons and caps, so they had been allowed dispensation, special Russian dispensation, to wear just the dresses and the ribbons. I was taken by stairs, as the elevator was broken, to the second floor of the east wing, to what Alix called the green room, a large corner playroom. The maid waited behind me in the doorway. I suppose Alix had instructed also that I not be left unattended. What did she think I would do, strangle her son and pin a note to my own with the word tsarevich scrawled upon the paper?

  My son lay with three other children, all in camp beds, all of them asleep. Along two walls a cluster of peacocks strutted in a painted frieze against a background of green, as green as the carpet on the floor. The moonlight and starlight from the seven windows of the outer two walls made clear the figures of the children, who looked as if they had dropped, by virtue of some enchantment, into positions of abandon on the grass of a magical park. And indeed they had been enchanted, I found out, all of them drugged by the imperial doctor, Eugene Botkin, with various potions against pain and for sleep. I stepped cautiously into the big room. The carpet had been cleared of toys, the paraphernalia pushed to the walls or heaped onto the great green and yellow sofas and chairs—railways and model towns and model ships, big dolls in carriages, smaller mechanical figures in factories and in miniature mines, tea sets, dollhouses, white-faced china dolls dressed in lace, teepees, wooden canoes with matching oars, open boxes of lead soldiers, their tunics painted green, blue, and red—the riot of it muted by the dim light. Dr. Botkin was just finishing his latest rounds, his wire-rimmed glasses glinting as he moved among the shadows, and with a nod at me he left, and another servant girl in a black dress, but this one with the white apron and cap so loved by dear Alix, brought me a chair. I pointed to a spot by my son’s camp bed and she brought it there.

  I sat and scrutinized my son’s face; his skin had not yet erupted in the spots that measles inevitably brings. I laid my hand on his forehead. His skin was hot, very hot, and he was so drugged that he did not respond to my touch but slept on in this strange, deep sleep. On the row of beds beside him lay the imperial children whom I had seen only from the stages of the Maryinsky or the Hermitage. The girls would all be bald in a few weeks when their hair began to fall out from the fever and Alexandra would have their heads shaved, but for now they lay with their hair damp along their flushed faces—the broad cheekbones of Olga, the eldest; Tatiana with her delicate upturned nose and her wide-set eyes shaped like almonds, like a cat’s, like her father’s. And Alexei, a long, thin shape beneath his quilt, his face, like my son’s, losing the round childishness of babyhood and drawing itself down into a long triangle. In August he would be thirteen; in June, my son would be fifteen. Niki was right to want to make the switch now, before the boys’ faces became any more distinct from each other as they grew older.

  Here, they and their lives were the same. They slept beside each other in Alexander Palace, they were tended to by the imperial physician, watched over by Alexei’s two dyadi, his bodyguards. They took lessons from the imperial tutors, English from Charles Gibbes, French from Pierre Gilliard, history from Vladimir Voyekov, seven tutors in all, one for each subject. And Alexei at his birth had been enrolled as a member of the Imperial Guard Corps, made an honorary member of the 89th White Sea Infantry regiment and ataman of all Cossacks. His godparents were the dowager empress, King Christian IX of Denmark, King Edward VII of England, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. All these honors my son would one day assume.

  Was this not his sud’ba, his fate? And so was his illness a warning to me or a test of my resolve? I pinched at my arms and in mid-pinch the door to the playroom suddenly opened and Alix appeared, a tall, white ghost dressed in the wimple and tunic she wore when nursing the war wounded, and she moved along the beds without looking my way or speaking to me, her hands adjusting a pillow, smoothing the lock of one’s hair, the sheet beneath another, and when she reached my son, she laid her palm to his forehead as I had and then turned back his coverlet and gently moved his arms until they lay, palms up and free of the bedsheets to cool his temperature, and none of these actions had I thought to do. Vova stirred. His hand reached for and clasped hers, and comforted, he slept again. I knew then she would protect him as fiercely as she protected Alexei and I felt myself turn to vapor, as useless and as invisible. Alix loved my son—who would not?—and it appeared he loved her, too. And if he had here a mother’s and a father’s love in addition to all else, then did he not have everything he deserved? I was not needed here. I stood and started for the door when the maid caught my sleeve. I turned back. Alix beckoned to me.

  I followed her unsteadily from the playroom and along the dark corridor to a wooden staircase that took us down past the mezzanine to the first floor. She smelled of lavender, which I breathed in each time I stepped onto the stair she had just left behind. There in the vestibule with its marble floors, its walls covered in cloth that gave off a low sheen, yet another footman in white gaiters waited with the empress’s sable cloak. Through the archway and an open door I could see into a drawing room full of boxes and crates, some filled with sawdust and paper. The walls of that room had been stripped of some of their treasures, for exposed wires and nails made studs and loops along the cream-colored plaster. The court was packing to go, I thought wildly. To go where? Why, to the Crimea. To Livadia Palace. Of course. That was the plan. Niki had told me that. Vova had said in his call before last he was looking forward to Easter holiday there and to the parade on the Day of White Flowers, where the girls had told him he would carry a staff decorated with white marguerites and go into the shops with them to beg donations for the sanatoriums. Livadia was three thousand miles south, far from the war, from the troubles of the capital, and from me. I saw now that that, too, was part of the plan.

  We stepped out then into the snow-filled courtyard. The only light came from the vestibule behind us and the tall lampposts ahead—the steps had snow shoveled to the sides of them and snow rested on the pointed tips and ornamental filigrees of the wrought-iron gates and fences that enclosed the palace, and as we walked snow once again began to fall from the sky. I followed Alix in her dark cloak as she led me across the courtyard and I could not feel my feet, whether from the cold or from fear I do not know, and the air buzzed and rustled about my ears, alive with the colliding snowflakes. She walked me all the way to the gate where my driver waited, and when she saw me settled into the car, she leaned forward and whispered to me the words executioners traditionally ask of their victims before they raise the ax: Will you forgive me? So. She understood, even if Niki did not, that she was taking from me my life. And I said, Yes, I forgive you, and she shut the door to my car then and straightened up. I watched her figure standing in the courtyard as my car turned the drive, her shape half-white and half-black, one part sable, one part linen: nurse, empress, mother.

  I dreamed of my mother that night, for the first time. She died of a stroke in 1912, after having suffered an earlier one. She was eighty-two years old. For some weeks after the first stroke, she was confined to the bedroom she had once shared with my father in our old apartment on Liteiny Prospekt, and I would visit her there. In my dream I found the room unchanged, the same dark furniture, the same oil paintings of Polish landscapes in heavy gilded frames hanging on the wall from long loops of wire, the same patterned wall fabric, the same photographs of all of us, but my mother was not lying in the big bed. I found her in the big, dark ballroom where my father us
ed to give his dancing lessons, her long yellow hair unbound, her eyes closed. When I approached her, she opened her eyes and her fingers reached for my wrist. Mala, she whispered, how you’ve neglected me.

  Masquerade

  So sleep brought no comfort, but the theater would. The next night I went to the Alexandrovsky, to see my old friend the actor Yuri Yuriev in his twenty-fifth-anniversary performance in Lermontov’s Masquerade. Ah, how we clung to our old rituals in the very face of their dissolution—the anniversary tributes with the requisite gifts from the tsar and the court. Inside the theater’s mustard yellow building, aristocrats were chockablock in the seats, having come to honor an imperial artist, to applaud a play set during the reign of Nicholas I, the Iron Tsar, a tsar Niki was now emulating with his own resolute behavior. Had he not cleared the capital of imperial malcontents? Was he not about to wash down the barnyard of the Duma? Would the Romanovs not reign another hundred years? On the stage the huge mirrors and gilded doors suggested the great ballroom of a great palace. It was the most elaborate set ever assembled on the tsar’s stages, yet it was assembled even as the real sets of that real world were dismantled forever on the streets outside.

  For the next day the newspapers printed that bread would be rationed starting March 1, setting off a panic and protests. Two hundred thousand people coursed down the Neva over the ice after the police raised the bridges to block their way to Admiralty Island and the palace square, where it was traditional to march, to claim the streets from and the attention of the imperial authorities. By night the streets still weren’t completely safe. Many restaurants stayed dark, the rail lines were empty of trams and the streets of cabs, streetlights did not burn, and the beacon from the Admiralty lay like a white sword over the city. The next day, when the temperature, which had been as cold as in Lapland, suddenly rose to five degrees Celsius, it seemed the entire populace emerged from its dark hiding places into the sun to voice its misery, and by the afternoon, the crowd that had been shouting, Bread, bread, began shouting, Down with the tsar! And each day that week the police and brigades of Cossacks—reserve Cossacks new to Peter, not Niki’s Cossacks—their horses skittish on cobblestone and their hands empty of the whips with which the regiment was normally equipped, half heartedly tried to control the crowds. And then Niki, from faraway Stavka, ordered the Pavlovsky, Volynsky, and Semenovsky regiments, which had put down the uprisings of 1905, into the streets, where they shot dead fifty people in Znamenskaya Square, and it seemed after that the remorse of the regiments spawned a mutiny. These junior officers of humble backgrounds, unlike all the aristocratic senior officers who had been killed at the front, joined the crowds as they took over the Arsenal, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the telephone exchange, and the railway stations, and together with the crowds and the Cossacks, the mutineers fought the tsar’s police.

  At midday, the mob breached the island and made its way across the Troitsky Bridge, and the chief of the 4th Petrograd Police District telephoned to tell me a large crowd was heading down the Bolshoi Dvorianskaya toward me. As I spoke to him, I saw a truck filled with elated soldiers, red flags flying, cross Kronversky Prospekt. By the time I hung up the phone, another truck. It seemed that all the city’s soldiers, the whole 170,000 peasant infantry billeted in the Petersburg garrison for training before being shipped to the front, had absconded with their guns and their trucks. But they were not at the front, they were here, and their enemies were not the Germans but their own officers, along with the regiments, the police, and the Cossacks who remained loyal to the tsar, the court, and the burzhui.

  And the imperial family? Were they safe in Tsarskoye Selo? When I called my brother—who was back in Petersburg, having been by this time reinstated at the Imperial Ballet at my request—he relayed to me what he had heard all day from the isvozchiki, the cab men, as they drove back and forth on the riotous city streets. All day, he had heard, drunken soldiers had been looting the Pavlosk shops of wine, bread, and boots, and a mob had headed to Tsarskoye Selo. A department store in Tsarskoye Selo was attacked, in the mistaken belief that it was the palace, by peasants so ignorant they couldn’t tell one grand edifice from another. There were soldiers in the courtyard of Alexander Palace, regiments loyal to the tsar from the Garde Equipage who were used to protect the family at sea and on their yachts, standing in battle formation. So the rumors of the mob, if not the mob itself, had reached the palace.

  The sound of a crowd is the sound of braying, unpredictable energy, and at the theater that sound coming from the audience is a sound of ecstatic adulation, a swell that rushes to one on the stage and seems to lift the dancers off their feet as it rises. The sound I heard from the street was not a sound to lift one up. Even if the mob didn’t know that my house was the house of Kschessinska, the double-headed eagles glittered on my gates and those eagles alone would provoke attack. What delusion drove me to put the imperial eagles there? I remember I sat down. I remember thinking in no place in the city was there someone to call. Sergei and Niki were at Stavka, the tsar hiding, the people said, in the bosom of his army. Even the disgraced Andrei had found himself, by accident rather than by design, safely in Kislovodsk—in fact, the most powerful factions of the Romanov family, because of Niki’s orders, were not even here. Grand Duke Vladimir and Stolypin were dead. And my family? My sister lived on the other side of Petersburg, on English Prospekt, my brother Josef on Spasskaya Ulitsa, also over the bridge. At least my son was safe. No one would be more protected than he. But I could not remain here. Yet my car, my Rolls-Royce, was too well known, for in choice of cars, as in all things, I copied the Romanovs, and I had heard from my brother that Grand Duke Gavril Konstantinovich’s Rolls had been commandeered by the crowd at will. To make my departure now I would need a different car. But when I called up the New Mikhailovsky Palace to beg for a car while the mob and the troops rioted their way down Bolshoi Dvorianskaya toward my house, I discovered Sergei’s brother Nicholas had left written instructions to the servants to refuse any calls from me, to stop all communication with the house on the Petrograd side of the city. The great historian wanted me to run through the streets, carrying my reticule with my jewels, through the streets! where anyone with so much as a fancy hat was being murdered as a borzhui. And this was not all that was happening in the streets, but the rest I will tell you later. Sergei’s family had always referred to him as my lap dog and thought I used him mercilessly, blamed me for his current disgrace and his virtual exile at Stavka, and now, even in Grand Duke Nicholas’s absence, as he had been sent to Grushevka, his orders were being followed and the family were having their revenge. I sat there, nonplussed, the phone in my hand. And then I thought of Yuriev. The party after his tribute had been held at his apartment on Kamennostrovsky Prospekt just a few blocks away. The Romanovs might not help me, but surely my fellow theater artists would harbor me, and at this distance I could escape on foot.

  And as the only thing safe to be at this time was a worker, this is what I did: I disguised myself as one, scissoring an ermine collar off an otherwise plain cloth coat, tying my maid’s kerchief about my head like a peasant woman. I took with me my jewels that were not in storage at Fabergé, Niki’s letters, the photograph he inscribed to me all those years ago, my father’s icon and the ring of Count Krassinsky, a photograph of Vova at age five—an odd ménage, I know, but when one runs from a burning house, only the most valuable items run with you, and you learn quickly what you value most. Believing my servants to be safe, I left alone. But the next morning, when my housekeeper opened the gate to the mob and called out to them, Come in, come in, the bird has flown—have I told you I had been described in Peter as a jeweled bird?—the mob came in bellowing for me, Kschessinska! Where is Kschessinska? and not finding me, seized my porter instead and stood him up against a courtyard wall as if to execute him, whereupon his wife died from shock before the crowd spied the Cross of St. George my porter had earned for valor in the war and released him. Over the next weeks my furniture
disappeared from my home, as did my silver, my crystal, my Fabergé objets, my clothing, my furs, even my car, the car I had been so afraid to drive! My house had become a free market—all goods for the taking. No other house in the city was so looted as the mansion of the tsarist concubine Kschessinska, unless it was the mansion of the minister of the court, Baron Freedericks, dispenser of the tsar’s punishments and favors. Yes, the minister and the trollop were famous in Peter, and I’m aware it is for my scandalous private life that I am still best known. Why, just this year, 1971, when Kenneth MacMillan created the ballet Anastasia for London’s Royal Ballet, I was made a character in it, appearing in Act II to perform at a Winter Palace ball given in honor of the tsar’s daughter Anastasia in a costume that befitted my reputation, my neck belted with diamonds, the décolletage of my black tutu split practically to the waist. As that, I live on.