The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  And so I wrote him, daily, but that first letter was the only one I had from him until, months later, a last, in June, a telegram, wishing Vova Pazdravlyayu s dnem rozhdeniya—a happy birthday. And then a great silence. I brooded over this, locked in my hot bedroom, for the temperature was warmer here than in Peter in July, sending my thoughts to Sergei—Get out of that schoolhouse. Climb over the desks and through a window and come to me. Vova harangued me, See, they are all there together. But I could not tell him, It is not a good thing that they are all together in Siberia. He wanted me to travel there. One of the princes’ wives had followed this group of Romanovs to Alapayevsk of her own volition, the way wives and families of the revolutionaries exiled to Siberia for the last one hundred years had traditionally done, but this was a different Siberia, not the loosely monitored Siberia of the tsars, and within a few months, she was arrested and put in a Perm prison.

  The capital we had already abandoned had now, with the exit of Lenin and the remains of the aristocracy, become a ghost town, with men and women ghosts floating slowly through the deserted streets looking for food or fuel. We heard the two hundred thousand beautiful horses of the city could no longer be fed and they died, often in the streets, where dogs ate at them if the people did not get there with their knives first. Trees disappeared. Then the houses, three thousand wooden houses—floorboards, wall panels, doors, window frames—anything that could be burned. We heard people burned their own furniture, their books, and they made light—there was electric current only a few hours each evening—with a bottle of fat and a wick, whose stinking smoke blackened the walls. We heard people piled their garbage on street corners and the rats ran to it. We heard the formers who weren’t killed and who had anything at all to sell sold it on the streets or took the trains out to the countryside, where they bartered their shoes and clothes for bags of food—those formers had a new name, bagmen. And I thought, Why could I not have been born in 1772 instead of 1872? For then I could have lived out my life peacefully in the Peter of the tsars.

  Through all this, Miechen bided her time in the Caucasus. And the dowager empress waited in the Crimea—the two women who had once lived in rival palaces and had run rival courts now squared off across the Black Sea. For here in the south, in the fall of 1917, around the time I arrived, an incipient resistance was taking root. Two former commanders of the Russian army, generals Alexeev and Kornilov, had made their headquarters in Novocherkassk, just north of us, in the territory of the Don Cossacks, only some of whom were tsarist loyalists but all of whom hated the Bolsheviks. These men were slowly joined by landowners’ sons and students who had been made junior officers in the army and who hated this new regime and hated the common people who had expropriated their homes and burned their oriental carpets and the leatherbound books in their libraries and who with their axes had chopped up their chairs and consoles. These young officers wanted to rout the peasants out and send them back into their huts where they belonged. Why, they hated even the sight of the peasants’ grotesque rough faces and greasy hair as they sat side by side with them in the fourth-class compartment on the train to Novocherkassk. And more of the old regime followed, including the old Duma politicians who hated Lenin. Even the poet Tsvetaeva and her husband went south, and he joined the Volunteers, as this new group was first called, and she wrote verse about them all, White Guards: black nails / in the ribs of the Antichrist. In Novocherkassk, the men donned their old tsarist uniforms or formal frock coats to distinguish themselves from the revolutionary rabble, and as this army of men grew in size and ambition, so did the hopes of Miechen and the dowager empress. After the Volunteers had a major victory at Rostov, just north of us, Andrei announced he would travel to Novocherkassk to join the ranks of what had now been renamed, rather grandly, the White Army, but Miechen forbade him to do so—and so Andrei deferred his plans, and Vova laughed at the news, saying, Your suitor is a forty-year-old devushka!—a girl!

  This White Army might be made up of volunteers, but these volunteers, well-schooled and well-trained generals and Cossack atamans and officers, not only won their first battle at Rostov but a next at nearby Ekaterinodov and they were joined in Siberia in the spring of 1918 by the Czechs and the Allies. Emboldened, the Whites moved north from the Caucasus into the Ukraine, where they reclaimed Odessa and Kiev and Orel, and then they then began their march farther north to Tula, with its great arsenal, and from there it was not far to Moscow, where the Bolsheviks were in a panic, preparing to evacuate once again, this time to their stronghold in the Urals. I wish I could have seen Lenin scamper about as the workers and peasants tore up their party cards and tried to curry quick favor with the Moscow borzhui before the White deluge. We heard that the Whites were simultaneously preparing a charge on Peter and that they had encircled Ekaterinburg in the east, and after that we heard on the radio that the imperial family had been rescued by the White Army and I told Vova that Sergei would soon be saved as well. Then we heard rumors that the tsar’s brother Mikhail had been shot, that Sergei had been freed by loyalist Cossacks, that he had been transported to another location, that two of his brothers had been executed in the courtyard of Shpaterraia prison, that the tsarevich Alexei had died, that the imperial family had been massacred, that the tsar had been hidden by the Pope in the Vatican, that the tsar had been seen on the streets of London, his hair snow white, that the imperial family were on a ship sailing ceaselessly on the White Sea, never touching the shore.

  If Niki was alive, if Alexei or even Grand Duke Mikhail was alive, then the dowager empress had won. If not, then it would be Miechen’s victory, for the crown would pass to Kyril—if his own marriage to a divorcée and his mother’s overlate conversion to Orthodoxy did not disqualify him. In these special times, perhaps something as trifling as Miechen’s Lutheran womb would no longer matter. And so these two willful women refused to leave Russia until what was unknown became known. Minnie’s and Miechen’s sons and daughters, however, had had enough of this waiting. The dowager empress’s daughter Olga traveled by train, cart, and foot to the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. Sergei’s brother Sandro took his eldest son and left for England. Boris, for after all, he was never going to be tsar, left Russia for Paris. Kyril left Finland for his wife’s home in Coburg, of all places! But Andrei, unable to leave his mother, out of either duty or attachment—and I suspected the latter—stayed, and I stayed, as well, because Kislovodsk was where Sergei knew to find me.

  Then, in April 1919, at King George’s urgent concern about the growing civil war, the dowager empress and the rest of the Nikolaevichi put down their dishes of rose-leaf jam, clotted cream, and hot honey cakes and left the Crimea on two British battleships, the Marlborough and the Lord Nelson—and then Miechen and Andrei and Vova and I were alone in the bottom of Russia in our two rented villas, Andrei running up and down the streets between them with news. If one flank of the White Army took Peter in the north and another pushed up from the Caucasus through the Ukraine and still a third came west from Siberia, Andrei said, then the Reds would be surrounded and crushed, and Peter would open itself to the Vladimirichi like the Fabergé coronation egg and Miechen would snatch up the egg’s golden stagecoach and put Kyril within it. But that was not what happened. Instead, the Red Army deserters returned to their regiments when the Whites moved through the countryside, for the peasants suspected, correctly, that a White victory would mean the loss of their land and the return of it to their old squires. And in Tula, Lenin hastily conscripted the factory workers to dig trenches and erect barricades and arm themselves to protect the arsenal against the Whites, who would grab the munitions and guns and cannons and run with them to Moscow. And when Peter was threatened, the Red Army swelled yet again to defend it, for Peter was the seat of their revolution and a symbol of it. And through all this Miechen paced, her pet spaniels and bulldog dumped from her lap as she pondered her empire. But there was no empire. The Whites were eventually outnumbered and outfought in all three theaters, and by the
end of 1919, the White Army and the Cossacks had begun their long, ugly retreat, fleeing from Moscow, through the Ukraine, and down to the Black Sea ports, drinking and pillaging and killing along the way anyone they blamed for the destruction of the empire in an orgy of furious defeat. And the people closed their shops and cafés and patients crawled from their hospital beds and they all followed the army, knowing that anyone who had been a White sympathizer would be executed by the Bolsheviks when they retook their cities.

  We ourselves had to flee Kislovodsk for Novorossiysk in January by train, Miechen’s personal car linked to the back of it, and Andrei rode with her there while Vova and I sat on our bags in a third-class car. I left a note with the postmaster for Sergei, telling him we were headed for the Black Sea port. The journey of three hundred miles, because of the stops and delays and searches, took an arduous two weeks, and at each small stop along the way, people’s faces and hands would appear at the windows and the doors, the hands and faces wrapped in rags and clinging to any pipe or railing or to the sides of the carriages, even after the train had begun once again to move. And my son, seeing this, shrank against me, his sullen bravado of the past year gone after the first ten versts. When we arrived, finally, at the port, we found many people had already set up camp on the embankments or on the piers or in the warehouses, had pinched themselves between the great cranes and winches that bent themselves in metal angles to the sky. Former tsarist generals, former counts, former princes, former grand dukes had moved with the retreating Cossacks and Whites toward this port, where they piled now into consulates or hotel rooms. On the shaky dock a hundred thousand officers, army men, Cossacks, ministers of the government, members of the former court, and ordinary people converged. Niki’s sister Olga, as irony would have it, also waited here with us for evacuation by whatever ship came into this popular harbor. But when Andrei called on her, she had no more news of Niki and Sergei than did I.

  Everywhere I saw tents with bunches of garlic strung at the front flap, an old Rus amulet against epidemics, and this epidemic was typhus, the same illness that had nearly killed Niki so long ago right here in the Crimea. When the pharmacy ran out of medicine, it began to sell Orthodox medals to the most desperate, usually parents of young children. The rest of us hung garlic and held our breath when the ambulance trains brought the sick and the dead to the station, where we, for lack of anywhere else to go, remained in our railroad cars on the tracks. The general inspector, at Andrei’s prodding, found me a saloon car, with two beds and a lavatory, to live in. Of the living, I asked for word of Sergei Mikhailovich. Of the dead, I could ask nothing, but I looked into their faces to see if he was among them. From my compartment window each day I saw the corpses of the typhus victims lifted from the arriving trains, put unceremoniously on carts, and dragged to the cemetery. I chased after them like a ghoul, arm over my nose, for a peek. We tied the cuffs of our sleeves tight against crawling lice, we put kerchiefs over our mouths, and we waited for a ship to take us across the Black Sea. But every boat had a problem. One was too small to take more passengers. Another was going only across the Black Sea to Turkey, which the Bolsheviks had already declared as the Turkestan Soviet Republic and which was embroiled in various tribal uprisings. On another ship the voyagers already had typhus, and yet another asked for more than we could pay. We were trapped in the rail yard, which slowly, with the rain, turned into an enormous mud hole. It seemed the wind was wet with ice and, like the figure painted on a Maryinsky backdrop, filled its cheeks with the cold air and blew it down through the tracks, and we resorted to sawing up telegraph poles to burn for fuel. Each cold evening Andrei came from his mother’s first-class compartment to my tiny carriage to visit and sip tea or the occasional hot chocolate with me and Vova, who sat there silently, glowering, until, I swear, he seemed to wear the face of a muzhik grimacing at a borzhui. And we did look like peasants, for by now I had only two dresses left and my son one outfit and a coat. In the mornings, in the bleak light, I stepped out on the ice, my heels cracking the thin sheets that lay over the mud, and at the dark corners of the station the stray dogs emerged for the scraps from our dinner the night before. How they ran to me when I called them, thin, ribs visible beneath their fur, spots of mange covering their legs, their backs, even their faces. Yes, we were as ragged as those dogs, and I pitied them as I could not afford to pity us.

  In February, through old friends from better days at the British consulate, Miechen found herself and Andrei a place out of this tumult on an Italian luxury liner, the Semiramisa, bound for Venice; Andrei trudged down to my car through the mud to tell me they would leave tonight, that he could not allow his mother to travel alone but that she had been unable to secure passage for me or Vova and what could he do about that? This was her lie, of course, but I’m certain Andrei believed it to be true. He handed us a small package of biscuits from the British canteen and then sat, awkwardly, on the springed seat opposite, one leg crossed over the other, showing us his empty hands. I pursed my lips at him. Of course, she did not want to secure passage for us—what better way to rid Andrei of me than to allow the nightmare that was Russia to swallow me whole. And my son. Vova opened the paper package and began to eat without offering Andrei a bite and I did not correct his manners. Once Miechen and Andrei left the Caucasus, Vova and I would sink into this crowd of refugees, our privileges lost. We had no connection to the British consulate and who among the sick and desperate aristocracy remembered or cared that I was once prima ballerina assoluta of the imperial stages? No, my power, what remained of it, extended only to the Romanovs I had bedded, two of them either imprisoned or dead and the third about to sail out of sight. And though I fantasized about Sergei’s escape from Alapayevsk, what if he never arrived at this dock and Vova and I were here waiting for him still when the Bolshevik cavalry rode up over the hills, ringed this small city, and began to imprison, execute, or starve any formers they could scoop up in their red caps? They might put me in a cage on a cart and drag me from village to village to dance like a monkey on a chain, the tsar’s former dancer, and my son they would take out into the woods and shoot straightaway. No, though I would like to say I waited faithfully for Sergei until certain death, until the Bolsheviks on horseback raced their way up those hills, I did not. No, I was more like the Messieurs Sabin and Grabbe and Leuchtenberg, members of the imperial entourage of Nicholas II who’d slunk away when the tsar’s train from Pskov drew into the Tsarskoye station in 1917 after his abdication, much more like Dr. Ostrogorsky, who, after years of treating the imperial children, who had even gone all the way to Spala for the tsarevich’s great hemorrhage!, told the empress that the roads to the palace were much too snowy and slushy for him to travel now that the family was under house arrest. No, I would not wait for Sergei in Novorossiysk. Vova and I must have passage out.

  And so, while Andrei remained behind with my biscuit-eating son, I slogged up the muddy, icy path to Miechen’s battered train car, mounted the steps, and rapped on the door. One of her staff admitted me to her sitting room, which was hung with blue drapes looking a bit soiled now, as were the narrow frosted glass windows that alternated with larger, smeared ones, the carpet, the embossed leather lining of the compartment walls, the blue upholstery of the chairs. How difficult it was even for Miechen to keep up appearances—difficult for her, impossible for me! But still she held court here, her brass samovar steaming amid the grime, her tulip-shaped reading lamps aglow. She sat in the largest chair in the small room, three dogs in her wide lap, wearing a heavy black shuba and a long gray scarf which she had wound several times around her neck. Her face was a mushroom, heavy and bloated, her jaw now thick as a man’s, the nose broad, and clipped incongruously to her ears, as if to remind one of her original sex, were a pair of pearl drop earrings. At my entrance she lowered the fruit knife she had been using as she read to cut the pages of her book. She did not smile to greet me, not that I expected her to. She hated all her sons’ women and we knew it; she called us, An
drei told me, the harem—me, Boris’s mistress, Zinaida, even Kyril’s wife, Victoria—all odalisques. Miechen blinked those eyes, hooded like a lizard’s, at me. She showed no surprise at my appearance, although it was the first time we’d ever been alone together. Perhaps she knew I would come, knew that I would not accept my omission from the Semiramisa manifest without a fight—when had I ever allowed my name to be scratched off a list?—yet she gave not the slightest sign of pity or regret that my son and I would be left behind in this crumbling country to a fate that looked bleaker each day.

  She said to me only, I have no time to visit.

  If Miechen had spoken kindly, I might have lost my nerve, but the tiny tip of a smile she used to punctuate her remark acted like her fruit knife to cut the page from my imaginary script. And so I began, I began with my son, my son of suddenly, felicitously indefinite parentage.

  Your husband was always a dear friend to me, I said, and her lips became paper thin. A very dear friend.

  I stepped closer, taking care to use the small stage of this car. He visited me often, as you know. We shared lunches, dinners. Breakfasts. He interceded on my behalf many times. Why, he even arranged my performance at the coronation gala, over the protests of the dowager empress herself. But of course you know that, too.

  Her face was flushing then and I moved to admire a portrait of the grand duke that sat, in its frame, on a console. There was no need to rush. Let the audience catch her breath. I straightened the portrait and let my fingers cling possessively to the frame for a moment before I turned back. Yes, I don’t believe her eyes had left me for one second.

  I said, This is difficult for me, but it wasn’t, not at all!, not now that I had begun. There was one summer, a particularly lonely summer for me. And for Vladimir.