The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  And Niki marched uncontested down the line of them toward my son, the revolutionary soldiers stepping back involuntarily in deference, cowed, their insolence abruptly evaporating, as well it should in the presence of the tsar. Still, a few followed after him, calling ineffectually, Gospodin Polkovnik—Mister Colonel—Colonel Romanov! until Niki whipped around abruptly and thrust his face to these soldiers’ faces, one breath apart, and, uncertain, off-balance, the men backed away. I have only one son, Niki said, his voice a scythe. And I know who he is. And with a flat gesture of his hand, without taking his eyes off the men, Niki signaled the Cossack to release Vova, which he did at once. Vova stepped away quickly, rubbing his neck as the Cossack looked back and forth from the commander to the tsar, his big hand still open as if surprised by itself. The tsar at that moment could have done anything, could have called the Cossacks to charge, could have ordered the Cossacks to hang these soldiers from the trees, could have sent them to the Winter Palace to drag Kerensky and his ministers off to the Peter and Paul Fortress. But he did none of that, as he had done nothing on the train in March of last year in Pskov. Perhaps he was now afraid of further endangering us all, as he had been afraid of endangering his country and his subjects.

  And so, he made Vova the only subject of his orders, telling him, Go to your mother, and then Niki strode back to his family, and the group of soldiers behind him rallied, shrugged, and waved their rifles to corral everyone back to their various places, Niki having snatched from them, temporarily, their precious authority, a humiliation for which the soldiers would later make the family pay. Vova and I stumbled back as the cavalcade of horses and trucks passed in a cyclone of wind and sand; as the first black car flew by I saw Niki staring straight ahead, Alix, beside him, head down. But in the middle seat, there was a face turned toward Vova, the small white sad face of the tsarevich Alexei, who raised one hand to his friend in farewell.

  In Siberia, they killed everyone with the imperial family, you know—Dr. Botkin, the valet Trupp, the cook Kharitonov, the maid Demidova.

  We’re not going back to the Alexandrovsky Station, Sergei said when we reached him, and so after he embraced Vova and kissed his cheeks, he hurried us onto the cart and we drove it and the horse all the way back to Petersburg. At first, Vova wanted to marvel at how the tsar had stood up to the soldiers, Did you see his face when he looked at that Cossack? And then he told us how the tsar had once used his walking stick to whip at the ankles of a soldier who had followed him too closely around the palace park and who had stepped on the heel of the tsar’s boot. But other times the tsar had done nothing when the soldiers behaved with insolence, signaling the empress to do nothing also, and Vova’s face grew dark to recall this. In a voice that rattled, careening between the high thin treble of childhood and the lower register of young manhood, he told us how they had stayed awake that last night at Tsarskoye, sitting on their suitcases for hours in the semicircular hall, then going up to the playroom to nap until the guards called out again, The cars are coming, and then, when it appeared the train cars had still not been coupled because the surly railway men had refused to couple cars for the tsar and the motorcars were not coming either, the children wandered back up to the green room. The last few months the soldiers had followed them everywhere, Vova said, and they listened at doors, refused to let them speak any language but Russian, which was the only language the ill-educated soldiers could understand, and this made it difficult as the empress always spoke to her daughters and her husband in English; Alexei was terrified of them, Vova said. They once took a toy gun away from him and some afternoons came to the doorway of his room just to look at him and to whisper about him and about his many-paneled, elaborate iconostasis, an oddity in a child’s room, which usually hosted only a single candle and icon. And you? Sergei asked. Did the men want to look at you? Not so much, Vova said, though he wished they had and ignored the sensitive Alexei. But everybody knew Vova was not the heir but the ward of Sergei Mikhailovich and that as the grand duke was at Stavka, the tsar had temporarily made Vova his ward. So that was the story Niki had cut and pressed for the family, and I exchanged glances with Sergei. All spring, Vova said, when they were better from the measles, they had amused themselves by watching one of the movies given Alexei by the Pathé film company at Christmastime—Atlantis, Luke’s Double, Fantômas—which the boys would set up on the projector in Alexei’s room. He and Alexei lined up chairs and then invited the family in, guiding them as if they were theater attendants to their seats and then introducing the films, which Alexei would rate Excellent, Very Good, or Satisfactory. Or they played outside with Vanka, an old donkey who had once performed at Cinizelli’s Circus, who pulled them on a sled when there was snow and would chew the rubber balls they fed him, one big eye closed with pleasure. The girls showed him how to embroider a row of swastikas, the empress’s favorite symbol of good luck, across a handkerchief, and at embroidery Tatiana was the best. And we had lessons, he said. The tsar taught us history and geography and from the newspapers he read to us about the war, about the street violence, about Kerensky and the Provisional Government. The tsar did not like the way the soldiers who guarded them didn’t polish their boots. The tsar knew all his family had left Petersburg except for his brother. Vova would read Sergei’s letters to him before putting them in his valise, and at night Vova would take one out, read the line that said, Your mother is well and sends you her love, and put it under his pillow. In Siberia, the tsar had said, they would hunt and fish, and I thought, In the Siberian exile of the past the tsars used to order, perhaps, but not in this one, and then Vova wanted to know when he could rejoin the family, because he and Alexei had planned to erect a tent in their bedroom and to build a trap for wolves. So Vova had relished his captivity, where he had been a part of a family I could not give him, with a mother and father, with sisters and a brother, and the family had all been together every hour—held there by force, yes, but still.

  The sun was high by the time we reached the capital and Vova said, Why aren’t we going home? when Sergei turned the cart up Spasskaya Ulitsa toward Josef ’s apartment, our home for now. When I told him our own home had been taken from us and that I had just now gotten it back and that it was empty of furniture. Vova could not quite grasp this. All I had gone through these past months was a novelty to him.

  What about our dacha? he asked.

  The soldiers are using it as a club, but we will have it back, too, I told him.

  And Vova said, And the tsar will have his house back from the soldiers as well?

  And Sergei spoke, Yes, of course. Yes.

  When? Vova asked. How long will it be before the tsar comes back?

  A few months. When things are settled here.

  I think it will be longer than that, Vova said, after a pause, because they packed so many things. Another pause. I’m not going to join them, am I?

  Kerensky later said he had picked Tobolsk because he believed there the tsar would be safe, and because the choice of Siberia as a place of exile would most likely satisfy the agitators—had their comrades not been sent there for the last hundred years? They may have been, but the revolution itself had not yet traveled those three thousand versts east to the backwater town of Tobolsk. The imperial family was given the old governor’s mansion there, a dirty, boarded-up house, only thirteen rooms, hardly a mansion. The walls were painted and papered for them, their carpets unrolled and beaten and laid, their furniture dusted and polished and arranged in the various rooms, but still the girls were four to a room and the toilets overflowed, and I thought of Alix, who, out of modesty, used to cover her toilet at Tsarskoye with a cretonne cloth to mask its form and function. The townspeople, as Kerensky had expected, were respectful of the former tsar and sent over in welcome butter, eggs, and sugar, tipped their hats when they passed the front door. And when the family walked from the mansion to church, their route from the former to the latter flanked by two lines of revolutionary guards, the townspeople gath
ered to see the processional and fell to their knees at the appearance of the emperor. The stupidity of the people for loving their tsar infuriated the guards, whose commander finally decreed that the family could no longer walk to church. Mass would be said for them privately in the house.

  That evening I put my son to sleep in Josef ’s daughter’s bed, which was the bed of a child and my son’s feet hung over the end of it—Celina would sleep with her parents—and Vova asked me then, finally, about the puppy he had given Sergei in December. So his stay at Tsarskoye Selo had not wiped his mind completely clean of our life together—how easily we could all be washed away from him, slipping from his fingertips down some dark drain, how easily Niki’s plan could have worked. The puppy is now almost a dog, I told him, and he is at Stavka, a mascot there, Sergei tells me. My son smiled and I covered him halfway with a blanket. When will we go home? he asked me, and I said, Soon. Sergei is here now and he will fix everything.

  I studied the sleeping son I had not seen for six months. The small pink lamp on Celina’s dresser revealed the light black hairs scattered above his upper lip and between his thickening brows; his nose stood large in his face. He wore a thin, sleeveless undershirt, unfamiliar to me, and around his neck a thin velvet cord; a small bump at the neckline of his shirt hid something. I teased out the lump and found a homemade paper pendant: an oval shape with a photograph of Rasputin on the front and a hand-printed prayer on the back. I stared down at the face of the staretz Rasputin in the palm of my hand. This picture had been touching my child’s skin. The electric eyes, pale gray in the black-and-white photograph, stared out from that face framed by the wild hair. I turned the photograph over and read, Dear Martyr, give me thy blessing and remember us from on high in your holy prayers. The family’s executioners would find an amulet like this on each one of the children’s bodies when they stripped them in the forest twelve miles from Ekaterinburg in order to burn their clothes and conceal their identities. I understood that this amulet was meant to protect Vova, and that Alix, Rasputin’s most fervent disciple, had probably given it to him. It meant that she feared for Vova as she feared for her own children and that she loved him as she loved them. When did she hang this around my son’s neck? When he was sick with measles? The day Niki abdicated? Or was it on the very night Niki returned to his family from Stavka as Colonel Romanov, when a band of revolutionary soldiers broke into the little chapel Alix had had built at Tsarskoye as Rasputin’s tomb, dug up Rasputin’s corpse, stuffed it in a piano case, and drove it to the Pargolovo Forest, where they soaked the body and the case in kerosene and set it on fire? Vova told me that in the night the wind had howled and he and Alexei had thought it sounded like a man’s voice wailing, but they didn’t find out until the next day from his big sister Olga what had happened.

  No, a photograph of Rasputin was not enough to save the Romanovs. The humble name Kschessinsky was much better protection. With a pair of my brother’s small manicure scissors I cut the necklace from my son’s neck.

  When I went out into the sitting room where Sergei waited for me, I said to him, We need to leave Peter.

  But it was early September before Vova and I could get permission from Kerensky to leave the capital, and while Sergei agreed I should go to Kislovodsk, sixteen hundred versts south of the capital, where we would have at least the Vladimirichi to help us, he would not go with us and I could not persuade him otherwise. Some adults must remain in the capital, he said, while the children try to rule Russia. Should there be a reversal of fortune, a few Romanovs should be there to receive it. And if that happened, Vova and I could return. And if that did not happen, Sergei would join us in the south and we could go to his estate in the Crimea or over the Caucasus in Georgia, to Borjomi.

  We said goodbye to Sergei on the last day of September 1917 at the Nikolaevsky Station, the station named for Nicholas I, the Iron Tsar, who had faced down his mutinous guards in the Senate Square, who had created the secret police, who had ruled Russia with an iron fist for thirty years. Would he not laugh in disbelief to see us now in flight from a legion of peasants and workers? At the station the attendants stood at the train doors and porters in big fur caps and tall boots collected bags and workmen in sheepskin jackets and felt boots moved about the tracks, loading the luggage or coupling the cars. It was raining and it was dark, and Sergei sat with us on a sofa in the first-class waiting room, wearing his thick military greatcoat without his epaulettes. I supposed Kerensky now used the imperial waiting room, with its suite—sitting room, dining room, and bedroom—where the imperial family could rest or eat or sleep, and where Emperor Kerensky could now do the same. When he had returned to Peter from a trip to the front, I heard he had insisted on being met at the station by an honor guard, as were the tsars. A train whistled from somewhere down the line and soon we could feel the trembling beneath our feet that meant the train would soon arrive. The stationmaster stood on the platform along with a few peasants in their peaked caps and their long greasy beards. A boy sold kvass, a woman pushed a samovar on a cart. All as it had been two years earlier, three years earlier, before the war, when we still had a tsar. A bell rang and Sergei escorted us from the waiting room and helped us up the high step onto the train and down the narrow passage to our compartment, where I took a seat against the glass and Vova the one next to me. Sergei compulsively smoked one cigarette after another, taking a new cigarette from his case before he had fully exhaled the smoke from the last. It was warm in the compartment, a steamy heat, and then when the blast of heat dissipated, the compartment grew slowly cold until the next blast once again warmed the car. When the second bell rang, Sergei put out his last cigarette and bent to embrace Vova, who pressed his lips to Sergei’s, and then Sergei and I kissed cheek to cheek. I am embarrassed to recall I was trembling. We still had to travel six days through Tver, Moscow, Bobriki, built on the manor of Count Bobrinsky, and through territory Kerensky had deemed too dangerous for the tsar to travel. We would, in fact, be stopped just past Moscow by a mob of deserters who declared we were all free! and we would barricade ourselves in our compartment against the exercise of their freedom. Then through Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don, and finally to Kislovodsk, in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.

  When we see each other again, Mala, Sergei said, into my ear, we will marry. And that’s how I knew this new world, whatever happened to it, had irrevocably changed the old one. Six months of revolution had granted me what my twenty-five years of wrangling could not. A whistle sounded. I gripped the sleeve of Sergei’s wool coat. The train on the track alongside ours began to pull away, its iron wheels and pistons and joints going round, and our train would depart next. With the third bell, Sergei was gone, a blast of cold air stamping his departure, and then Vova pointed his finger at the figure of Sergei standing on the platform once again to watch us go. His face looked so unhappy, I thought to myself, we should get off this train and wait with him in Peter until the reign is restored or until we are certain there is nothing left of the Romanovs’ three-hundred-year stranglehold on the land and wealth of All the Russias. But we did not get off. I stayed in my springed seat, my son’s hand on my shoulder as he looked past me out the window. Our train began to pull away with many knocks and lurches and squeaks. I crossed myself, then touched my gloved fingers to the glass to encircle Sergei’s sad face until the face grew too small to hold, and it was only then as his face vanished from my grasp that I understood I loved him.

  Sour Waters

  Into southern Russia along with us poured Romanovs, boyars, banking families, oil magnates, theater artists—all of Peter it seemed had emptied itself into Kiev in the Ukraine or into the Crimea or here into the Caucasus. Kislovodsk, or Sour Waters, was a spa town, one of three famous spa towns, Kislovodsk, Yessentuki, and Pyatigorsk, strung along the Olkhovka and Beresvka rivers, all known for their healing mineral springs and fashionable baths. Kislovodsk sat in a valley north of the great Caucasus Mountains, and Georgia, where Sergei had lived as a boy
, lay on the other side of those mountains to the south, closer to Turkey and Persia, in the Asiatic region of Russia, and it was here I came to breathe in the cherry blossoms, almond blossoms, and oleander that perfumed Sergei’s childhood, to see the gold-domed churches elbowed by minarets and the mosaics of Arabia. Though the Mikhailovichi might not have been Armenian or Persian or Chechen or Abkhaz, and though they might not have worn chokha, those long, skirted coats of the Georgians with the pouches for bullets, for twenty years they had inhaled the woolly fragrance of that place and so they were, as the Romanovs had always sniffed, not quite Petersburgers. So much the better for them.

  Andrei met our train in Kislovodsk, wearing a papakha, which, when removed, exposed the dome of his half-bald head; we kissed cheek to cheek. He was clean-shaven, so when I stepped back I had a good view of the weak chin I had not seen for half a year, longer. I had not missed it, or him. At the open-air restaurant he took us for dinner, I remember we sat at a table beneath a grape arbor, the big, flat grape leaves making a patchwork over us, Andrei talking, my son and I silent. I watched Vova slowly, uncertainly, unfold his linen napkin in his lap—did he not remember how to perform this nicety? Andrei placed his jeweled cigarette lighter on the table and ordered us a few local dishes, khachapuri—cheese pies—and shashlik—lamb kebobs. While we ate, Andrei smoking between courses, a small band played, and then, unexpectedly, a boy a few years younger than Vova rose from his table and began to dance and I recognized his dance—the lezginka, a Caucasian dance my brother Josef had taught me years ago for a performance at Krasnoye Selo. Who would have thought I would see an example of it here, performed on its native ground, by a boy who was not one of the tsar’s dancers? The boy imitated an eagle, making big flapping motions with his arms while taking small, quick, light steps, birdlike steps, and then he dropped to his knees and lifted himself quickly up again, like a bird taking flight. At the end of his performance, we and all the other diners toasted him with our vodka and cognac, To your health. But I toasted also the spirit of this place, where people were not too broken to dance.