There were no teas or dinners for me. Wherever I lived I was an embarrassment, and whomever I lived with I endangered. A pornographic movie was made about me that depicted me servicing one grand duke after another or two at a time in some revolutionary filmmaker’s fantasy of a mistress’s boudoir: The Secret Story of the Ballerina Kschessinska. I became the subject of many news articles—about the jewels and silver fleeced from my house: “16 Poods of Silver from the Palace of Kschessinska” about the war bribes: “Espionage and the Ballerina” about my long-ago affair with Nicholas: “Secrets of M. F. Kschessinska.” But the most frightening of all was the novel, The Tsarevich’s Romance, by Maria Evgenieva, which told the story that my early liaison with Nicholas had resulted in the birth of two sons, now grown, both of them spirited off to Paris after Glorious February. If only that were true, but my one son was not in Paris, he was here, just outside the city, right under their noses, sending off his letters to Sergei, a Romanov grand duke of the old regime—and therefore at peril. I am well. We are planting a kitchen garden. Alexei and I showed movies in his room. I kiss your hands, Vladimir.
My connections to the court, which once made me quite a prize to know, now made me a peril. At Vladimirov’s I hid my reticule of jewels at the bottom of a potted plant. The tsar’s signed photograph I had slipped between the pages of a magazine at Yuriev’s, afraid to tell Yuriev what I had done for fear of compromising him, and later I discovered he had, all unknowing, thrown away the magazine! I hid the bundle of the tsar’s letters with another friend for safekeeping, but she was arrested, her home searched and searched again, until finally, in terror, she burned all his letters to ash. Forgive me, divine creature, for having disturbed your rest, along with all the other lovely lines Niki stole from the greats or created for me of his own inspiration were gone. Even the lowest housemaid to Niki’s daughters, Elizaveta Nikolaevna Evsberg, felt compelled to burn the little notes the girls had left for her and that she had saved as keepsakes—Elizaveta, can you sew this button on for me, thank you, Tatiana—because it was too dangerous to have been even the exploited servant in the Winter Palace, too dangerous to know anyone who knew any Romanov at all. And I, of course, knew many Romanovs, and I had flaunted those connections.
M. Fabergé finally asked me to come and remove my valuables from his vaults, as with all the upheaval he could no longer guarantee their safety.
The Fabergé Building boasted red-brown granite pillars at its entrance. Into one of them was chiseled his name, the F, the A, the B of the Fabergé so straight and so tall, their edges so precisely beveled, they seemed the only bit of order left in the capital. But inside the building all was chaos. The showroom’s glass cases had been emptied, and through a door to the back I could see open crates and men bent over them stuffing valuables into sawdust to be shipped off—shipped off to where? Fabergé himself led me to my vault, the wisps of his white hair standing almost on end, as if alarmed, and his beard, when he turned to address me, shimmered as white and fine as spun sugar. Look, look at this, he told me, his voice cracking, and he halted at a wooden crate about to be hammered shut, thrust open the lid, and excavated from its shavings a luminous blue stone egg floating on a bank of clouds, the imperial Easter egg Niki had intended to give Alexandra that coming Easter of 1917.
Why he showed this to me I do not know, nor do I know what stone gave those clouds their milky opalescence, nor do I know what gleaming blue gem made up the egg itself, but Fabergé told me he had been working on this gift for a year and that it had been designed to honor the birthday of the tsarevich. Fabergé’s face flushed pink and he looked down through his delicate nostrils at me and at the egg as he extolled its virtues. The lines etched into the surface of the luminous blue, he said, sketched out the lines of the earth’s longitude and latitude, and the tiny diamonds embedded along those spokes winked like the constellations that shone in the northern hemisphere on the early August day the tsarevich was born. This egg marked the fortune of his birth, Fabergé said, and those stars spoke his fate—to rule one-sixth of the world. Fabergé suggested with his fingers the golden disk that like a ring of Saturn would have girdled this small planet, its thin surface also paved with diamonds. It would have been his most magnificent, his most poignant, his most meaningful egg yet presented to the tsar, and Fabergé’s eyes brimmed with tears at how the revolution had foiled the presentation of his masterpiece. Now his egg would be buried in this crate filled with sawdust, the lid hammered closed, the box shipped into oblivion, into the chaos of this godforsaken country, to end up on a train commandeered in the upheaval of some province, in the wet basement of some requisitioned municipal building, in the rough hut of some peasant, where it would wait to be rediscovered.
I did not say to him, My son was born in June. If the world rights itself, you will have designed the wrong constellations for the tsarevich.
Then in July, a crowd of fifty thousand Bolshevik sympathizers—Kronstadt sailors, Putilov workers in their blue factory tunics, and soldiers—surrounded the Tauride Palace where the Soviet met and tried to force it to seize power from the weak Provisional Government, crying, Seize power, you bastards! All Power to the Soviet! Then in frustration, when Trotsky and Chernov refused to do so, saying the time for a Soviet revolution had not yet come and certainly would not be decided by bayonets in the street, the mob ran through the city attacking the burzhui until a sudden rainstorm cleared the streets. The mob caused such a disturbance that Kerensky feared the monarchist right, indignant at this mayhem and the Provisional Government’s inability to control it, might bring in the armies from the front, after all, and move to reinstate the tsar and the civil order of that regime. And so Kerensky laid down a series of decrees—no public gatherings, death penalty to deserters and insubordinates at the front, no more soldiers’ committees. But it was his release of leaflets accusing the Bolsheviks of being traitors, their movement financed by German money with the purpose of overturning the revolution and all the new freedoms and forcing Russia into a humiliating peace treaty that finally turned the workers and the troops against them. Arrest warrants for the Bolshevik leaders were issued, and those who didn’t flee were jailed in the Peter and Paul Fortress alongside the corrupt loyalist officials from the old regime already there. This sudden wave of sentiment against the Bolsheviks, which meant perhaps the imperial family would also be released, worked unexpectedly in my favor. In this new atmosphere, the public began to agitate against the traitors who with their dirty boots and tobacco juice tromped their way through the house of a prima ballerina, even if that ballerina was the imperialist trollop Kschessinska. And so the Provisional Government sent eight armored cars and several batteries of artillery over the bridges to my house and turned the remaining Bolsheviks out.
Sergei’s brother now judged it safe enough for Sergei to return to Peter, and Sergei came at once to see me at my brother’s apartment, driving there in the lone car the Provisional Government had permitted him to keep—he who had once had half a dozen motorcars! The arthritis that sometimes troubled him had now flared like a pulsing star, scorching his every joint, and that was why Sergei limped into the foyer, where I stopped him to kiss his beard, untamed as a peasant’s and tangled with silver just as the tinsel we threw each year on our Christmas trees tangled with the pine needles. When I kissed at his fingers, I saw the knuckles of them had become so misshapen that his insignia ring sat on a little finger as curled and reddened as a boiled shrimp. I took his hat from him and suddenly I found myself on the floor with it in my two hands like a giant saucer. Sergei stooped awkwardly and tried to pat my shoulder. He missed. His hand batted the air, the tip of my ear. I peered up at him—had he lost his sight, along with everything else? No. He was simply, suddenly, at forty-eight, an old man. And I knew—I would not be permitted to sit down on the floor, cry into this saucer of a hat, and hand him my tears.
While Sergei had moved back into his apartments at the New Mikhailovsky Palace, where he and his brothe
r Nicholas dined together every night, the Napoleonic memorabilia Nicholas collected scattered about, I had not yet been able to return to my home, which the Bolsheviks made famous and which would be forever referred to in the history books as the Kschessinska Palace. But when the Provisional Government finally put the keys back in my hand, I, along with Josef and Sergei and two of Sergei’s loyal dragoons—for not every soldier, you must remember, was sympathetic to the revolution—drove to Petersburg Island in Sergei’s one car to take stock of the ruin.
Shall I tell you a bit of the ruin, for I remember it exactly? My intimate Louis XVI drawing room had been looted of all its period furniture and its silk walls shone a dull gray now rather than soft yellow from smoke and filth. Apparently, the Bolsheviks did not employ housekeepers. My piano had been, inexplicably, pitched by a crazy man almost into my winter garden, where, caught between two white pillars like an officer pinched between two of his infantry, it could go no farther. My winter garden itself had become a thicket of dead plants, the marble basin in its center a toilet circled by brown palms. My dining room floor had clearly functioned as a spittoon for the husks of those ubiquitous sunflower seeds. The bottles in my wine cellar, all carefully selected by the dilettante Andrei at his long-ago ease, had vanished, drunk to the bottom, I am sure, the moment they were discovered. But there were some provisions in the pantry cupboards; the Bolsheviks had been booted out too quickly to pack everything, though they had tried. The staircase to my bedrooms was covered with the books and leaflets someone had tried to carry out before the men gave up hope of removing their literature and decided to burn it instead; in almost every fireplace and stove in the house I found a big pile of ash. Ink stained my bedroom carpet, and I found cigarette butts and wads of tobacco spittle lying like cockroaches in the bottom of the sunken bath I had with such imperial delusions built for the tsar. The cedar wardrobes in which I had stored my furs had their doors ripped off. Need I say there were no furs remaining within? The numbered plaques above my dressing room cubbies had been pried off, as well. The Bolsheviks did not like numbers? They liked well enough the clothing that had been assigned those numbers, I saw, because not a stitch of it remained, either. The next weeks, it seemed to me I saw bits and pieces of my wardrobe on the backs of young women everywhere on the streets—my black velvet skirt on one, my ermine coat on another, my lace shawl around the shoulders of a bucktoothed girl. I went then into Vova’s suite, threw open the doors to his balcony, and sat at his desk, a student desk but large enough for me, the drawers still stuffed with notebooks and papers from Vova’s lessons with his tutors, a map with the major cities of Europe, even those hated German ones, marked in red ink, a line of script on the frontispiece of his French notebook, Je m’appelle Vladimir Sergeivich Kschessinsky, quatorze ans. I fingered the spine of one of Vova’s notebooks and then held it to my nose to breathe in the scent of my boy. How long had it been since he had fidgeted here at this desk? Half a year. But instead of breathing in my son, I inhaled something else, a foreign smell. I lowered the notebook to the desk and opened the cover.
The country is passing from the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class consciousness and organization of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasantry…
All power to the brutish peasantry, the social equivalent of the theater’s Near the Water girls? They were to run the country? Those rank-and-file workers who threw a man off a roof while their brethren on the street below beat at his body with sticks?
The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government…no support of the Provisional Government.
So the Provisional Government was not revolutionary enough for this writer?
Abolition of the police, the army, and the bureaucracy…nationalization of all land…the union of all banks in the country into a single national bank.
And what was this? No police? No landowners? One bank?
There were cross-outs as the writer revised and blotches and pools of ink where he had paused to think, nib of the pen against the paper. I flipped the page to see a list of names I did not recognize and had never heard of, perhaps the names of his own comrades, and next to each name an epithet—pig, cunt, whore, bastard.
I shut the notebook. It was certainly one of my son’s school composition books. I opened the cover again. On the inside cover the writer had signed his name, one word, Lenin. The handwriting was large, graceful, almost the handwriting of an older woman lying at her case on her chaise, but these words, this Theses, as the document was titled, had not been written by some bourgeois but by some maniacal anarchist who sat hunched here at my son’s desk composing these stark sentences. Actually, I was correct in my assessment of the two sides of the man, though I couldn’t know it then. Lenin was Vladimir Ilyich Ul’ianov, a hereditary nobleman whose father had slowly earned enough chin as inspector of schools to be addressed as Your Excellency and whose mother had inherited her father’s country estate at Kokushkino, where Lenin strutted about like any good squire, sniffing the fragrance of its lime trees, strawberries, raspberries, and hay, and where, in 1891, during the great famine, he had the gall to sue a starving peasant neighbor for damaging a fence. That was one side of Lenin, but the other side had seen his older brother, Alexander, hanged for plotting to kill Alexander III. And when Lenin later arrived to study law at Kazan University as had his brother, he joined the same neo–People’s Will groups that his brother had joined, and Lenin was expelled for taking part in a student demonstration—if only they had hanged him like his brother! But, no, Lenin survived a prison sentence, a three-year Siberian exile imposed by the tsar, and then a further exile of his own in Europe, before the war had done to this country what all his treatises could not. Lenin had been a revolutionary for twenty years now, and a man like that was not going to give up just because Kerensky had put out a paper warrant for his arrest. Not that I knew this then—but this ugly writing foretold that if it were up to this Lenin, the Provisional Government would have it no easier governing than had the tsar. And would meet, perhaps, the same fate.
I was still sitting there with that notebook when I heard Josef call out my name, Mala, Mala, and I went to the top of the staircase. Josef and Sergei stood at the bottom and Josef said tightly, Sergei’s just heard from his brother, and I thought, why is he speaking for Sergei? When I looked to Sergei he said, Niki and the family are being moved at midnight tonight, and then I understood. Josef had meant to prepare me for bad news.
They were being moved? Moved where? My fingers curled themselves around the notebook and I started down the stairs. Did Kerensky fear the loyalists would put Nicholas back on the throne? Or did he worry the Bolsheviks would try to stage another putsch and that this time there would be none of the meteorological luck which in July had brought the heavy rain to put out the chaos? Nothing this time to keep back the crowd that had shattered the windows and splintered the doors of the Tauride Palace and had almost lynched the Social Revolutionary leader Chernov in his black frock coat right in the street before his comrade, the Menshevik Trotsky, intervened, giving one of his impromptu speeches to the crowd from the bonnet of a car? Pride and Glory of the Revolution, you’ve come to declare your will and show the Soviet that the working class no longer wants to see the bourgeoisie in power. But why hurt your own cause by petty acts of violence against casual individuals? And thus having hypnotized the crowd, Trotsky announced, Citizen Chernov, you are free! Was Kerensky afraid that this month or next month at the Tauride or Tsarskoye or the Winter Palace, the crowd would drag out the tsar, the ministers of the Provisional Government, possibly even Kerensky himself and beat them all to death or string them up in the trees? I looked into Sergei’s face, trying to guess what he thought of this news. I could already tell what Josef thought, what Josef always though
t: anything to do with the Romanovs was a bad idea.
Where are they moving them? I asked Sergei. Sergei shook his head. They were told only to pack warm clothes.
Warm clothes? Niki’s mother, sisters, cousins were now all in the south, in the Caucasus and the Crimea. Niki would not need warm clothes there.
But they were going south, to Livadia Palace, I said.
There’s too much unrest along that route, Sergei told me. The steppe is empty. They are probably taking them east. And at the look on my face, he said, Kerensky promises the family can come back by the fall, once the Constituent Assembly has met, and Niki will be free to go where he wishes.
I looked at Josef, who was shaking his head, and then at Sergei. I took the notebook I was carrying and put it into his hand. Look, look at this. And I opened it to the page that said,
We fully regard civil wars, wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave owners, serfs against landowners, and wage workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive, and necessary.
Sergei read the lines and then tore the page out of the notebook, crumpled the paper in his fist, and threw it down. I pointed to the paper ball. They want a civil war.
Sergei smiled. Where is this writer now? Chased out of your house so quickly he didn’t even have time to take his big speech with him.
But the writer had gotten into my house. In 1905 he had not gotten this far. By 1918 he might be writing on manuscript paper instead of schoolbooks, issuing his own ukazy from the tsar’s desk in the Winter Palace where Kerensky now sat. I thought, Only you Romanovs cannot imagine a Russia without you. While the Romanovs left in Peter were dreaming, in Siberia, with the droves of mosquitoes in summer and the cold so extreme in winter only reindeer skins could help a man withstand it, Niki and his family would be shrunk into such tiny figures on the horizon eventually they would be not even seen, this former tsar, with his former sons. In the outlier of Siberia their guards, drunk on vodka and far from the moderating reason of Kerensky, could turn surly from the boredom of their inglorious posts, and no one from the capital or the old court, no Vladimirichi, no Mikhailovichi, no Alexandrovichi, would hear the imperial family cry out if they were suffering. And how would I hear my son’s cry as it flew over the Urals, across thousands of miles of empty steppe, from whatever small town Kerensky saw fit to stash the family? I could see already the Tura and Tobol rivers, the endless versts, a meadowland in this season but an ice sheet soon enough. And so I said to Sergei, Take me to Tsarskoye. Vova cannot go with them to Siberia.
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 31