The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  From what I hear, you had many lonely summers, Miechen said.

  As did he. I paused. Her face reddened further. Perhaps she would have a stroke, in which case I would not need to go on. With the ridding of her, the ridding of my troubles. But no such luck. Though I waited a moment, she remained upright and sentient, so I was forced to continue.

  Have you never wondered why my son’s name is Vladimir? I lowered my voice. My son wears a green stone cross around his neck on a platinum chain. Have you never noticed? It was your husband’s christening gift to him, along with his name.

  It’s a common name.

  Have you not seen the photographs of my son as a baby? He is the image of Vladimir at the same age.

  I’ve not had the pleasure.

  Vladimir himself often commented that he and my son had the same shape of the head.

  You are saying my husband fathered your son. But if that were true, he would have told me.

  No. I smiled, giving her the smile of pity that she had refused earlier to give me. He wouldn’t have. He loved you and he knew it would have pained you deeply, as did his earlier infidelities. I gave her this, though it pained me to do it. But, after all, this wasn’t a contest of wills. It would do me no good to crush her completely. I needed her. The grand duke is Vova’s father. I’ve told this to no one. I would have taken our secret to the grave, for his sake, if this unfortunate situation hadn’t arisen.

  I took a deep breath. The final act. Vladimir would never have wanted his son to be left behind here. His blood runs through Vova’s veins. What will you tell him on that day you meet again in heaven? That you knew of his last son and abandoned him anyway?

  Outside, a drunken chorus could be heard in the distance. A baby cried. In here, the samovar steamed, but I would not be offered a glass of tea. Miechen pushed the dogs from her lap and, ignoring their yelps of protest, stood to face me, her fruit knife a small dagger. You are a whore, she said.

  A whore. She called me a whore. But not a liar.

  Was I proud of my performance? When the world is ending, pride is the first thing to go.

  The Guardsmen Sang God Save the Tsar

  We raised anchor on March 3, at night, prepared to weave our way through the harbor waters laced with mines and crowded with every kind of vessel, their stark lights blanching our faces. I heard when the dowager empress departed Russia on the Marlborough, a Russian ship glided past her own in the Yalta Harbor, and the guardsmen on the ship opposite, spotting the distinctive black-swathed figure of their empress, began a booming rendition of the national anthem, “God Save the Tsar.” There was no such serenade for us, though we, like Minnie, also stood on deck for a last look at the Russian coast. Three weeks later, the civil war would be over, and on that same dock, thousands of White Russians would cram themselves onto whatever could float. A British squadron would board several thousand White Army troops. Of those who were left behind, the Cossacks shot their horses rather than give them to the Bolsheviks, the White Army officers shot themselves in the heads with their military revolvers rather than allow the Bolsheviks that pleasure, their men shed their greatcoats and dove into the water in an attempt to swim to Turkey, drowning preferable to living. But tonight we looked out only at the encampment of the desperate rather than the hysterical. Andrei stood erect at attention at the brass rail by his mother, clothed in his uniform of the commander of the horse artillery of the guard, a uniform he would not don again until he lay in his coffin. Vova and I stood a short distance away, Miechen delivering to us the occasional sideways glance, reassessing my son. And then, along the dock, I saw a man in a greatcoat running running down the dock and out onto the jetty toward our ship, waving his arms and calling out a name that distance made into a thin thread, but I thought I pinched the end of it between two fingers—M—and I gripped the ship’s railing and peered into the darkness. If Andrei had somehow managed to secure a tin or two of cocoa and biscuits from the British canteen for our teatimes, surely Sergei, so much more clever, could manage in all this upheaval to find a way to outwit his Bolshevik guards, to steal clothes from a peasant, to hop a train across the white steppe and then down a line south from Moscow, to make his way by cart and by foot to this dock just in time to run down its pier and leap over this rail to us. And just as I opened my mouth to make a spectacle of myself by calling out to him, Vova leaned toward me and said, It’s not him.

  No. It was not Sergei. He did not join us in Novorossiysk. Nor in Touapse, Pati, Batum, Constantinople, Piraeus, Venice, Milan, Cannes, or Cap d’Ail.

  A Frightening Nothing

  Slowly, slowly, in Paris and on the Riviera that spring and summer appeared the faces of those who survived—various theater artists, among them Chaliapin, Karsavina, Fokine, Preobrajenska. Pavlova and Diaghilev were already in the West, and so Russian ballet was reborn in Paris, London, and New York, our dancers—or students touched by our dancers—founding some of the world’s great ballet troupes. And there appeared, as well, many variations of grand dukes, princes, and counts. We found one another at our villas, at the Hôtel de Paris, at the Château de Madrid, at the Pavillon d’Armenonville, at the Théâtre de Sarah Bernhardt—but other faces did not appear, though they seemed to stand at our sides or just behind us, their forms washed in with a thin gray paint. We looked for the lost, asking ourselves, Where are they? What has happened to them? And then the terrible answers to these questions arrived in Paris, in the person of Nicholas Sokolov, a legal investigator who had been assigned to the mystery of the disappeared Romanovs. After the White Army took Ekaterinburg briefly back from the Bolsheviks, a few officers had hurried to the Ipatiev house where the tsar and his family had been held until just eight days earlier and found it scrubbed and emptied. Perhaps history would have been changed entirely if they had found Niki and his family there, for by 1920 Russia was in the depths of a famine so great the people of the eastern provinces had begun to eat their snow-frozen dead just to survive. Yes, the starving Russian people would have thrown flowers along the roads to Peter if the tsar were still alive and promised them bread. But the White officers did not find Niki or Alix or Alexei or the girls or any of the imperial suite; they found only Alexei’s spaniel, Joy, wandering the house, hungry. They found hairpins, toothbrushes, books, a wheelchair, the board the frail Alexei had used as a desk while in bed. A frightening nothing. Sokolov knew how to conduct a proper search. He knew how to interrogate, how to enlist the help of interested parties, how to survey the pockmarked walls of the basement, the tire and rut marks and the imprint of horses’ hooves leading from the house to the forest around the Four Brothers Mine, twelve miles outside Ekaterinburg. He knew how to sift the earth, to spot evidence. He was good at cataloging—charred bone fragments, belt buckles, a pearl earring, a few centimeters of a woman’s finger, three icons, shoe buckles, shreds of a military cap, and the contents of the tsarevich’s pockets—tinfoil, nails, copper coins, a lock. And from these he surmised that the imperial family had been shot, their bodies carried by truck and then by cart through the forest, where they were stripped, cut into bits, and burned, their ashes thrown into the mine. This would have been my son’s fate, too, had he journeyed with them to Siberia that August night in 1917.

  Sokolov had put what was left of the imperial family’s belongings into a suitcase nobody wanted until finally the Orthodox Church in Brussels accepted it. All this Sokolov managed to collect before the Red Army retook Siberia in 1919, and in the same wave that sent us fleeing the country altogether, he, too, fled—with his suitcase and his notes and his theories and his photographs—to the French Riviera, where he visited Niki’s uncle Nikolasha; to London, where he visited Niki’s sister Xenia; to Denmark, where he attempted to visit Niki’s mother the dowager empress, who refused to see him, who refused ever to believe that her son and his family had been murdered or to allow prayers for their souls; and finally to Paris, where Andrei and I met with him and saw his reports and photographs. We sat in the Hôtel L
otti, in an alcove of the dining room, our plates untouched, the steel gray sky pressed up against the window at my back. I peered at Sokolov’s reports and documents, the photograph of the gouged wallpaper of the Ipatiev cellar, the gruesome list of hundreds of objects recovered, and then I could not read anymore, my arms shaking to the elbow, but looked into Sokolov’s face—at his deep-set eyes, his long, waxed moustache as he spoke very properly of the family ground to ash. The Bolsheviks had sent a dozen men to the doorway to shoot and hack at Niki and at Alix and the children lined up with him in that cellar, on the excuse that they were to be photographed. From the Bolsheviks’ own accounts of it later, every assassin had wanted to kill the tsar and tell the story of it. After they read him their orders, In view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you, Niki had cried out, What? What? He was the first to die in that little basement room in distant Ekaterinburg. Alix, sitting in her chair, second. Olga, third. But the other girls had begun to run, their corsets so sewn up with jewels the bullets could not pierce them. They ran in circles in that small space, tripping over the bodies of their parents blown from their chairs, crouching against the walls. Where do you find men to shoot at screaming girls, to club and bayonet them, to murder a fifteen-year-old boy crawling toward his father? The Bolsheviks found such men—and many more like them.

  And then Sokolov told us this was not all. He had also learned that Sergei’s brothers George and Nicholas had been shot in the courtyard of the Shpaterraia Prison and their corpses thrown into a mass grave. Niki’s brother Mikhail had been shot in the woods outside Perm while smoking a cigarette. Sokolov had gone also to Alapayevsk, and there in his account he paused and cleared his throat. In Alapayevsk he had discovered that Sergei, Alix’s sister, and the three Konstantin princes had been taken from their schoolhouse prison on July 17, 1918, Sergei’s name day—not long after Sergei had sent his birthday wishes to Vova—put into peasant carts, and driven to an abandoned mine shaft, and I knew then that his story would not end well. Sergei, Ella, and the three princes had been thrown into the shaft, Sergei with a bullet in his head. Sokolov had surmised that Sergei alone must have resisted his captors (and I thought, Of course you would resist them, my fierce Georgian), and therefore he had been shot before the long fall down, while the others had landed at the bottom still alive, to die a slow death of broken bones and starvation, and after them their murderers threw down pieces of timber to conceal their crime. And at this I put a napkin to my mouth. Sokolov had pictures of the bodies, which had been winched back up, laid out on sheets, and photographed, and Andrei, pulling out his reading glasses, inspected these, as I could not look at them. While Andrei did so, Sokolov passed to me across the table other evidence: a small envelope that contained two items, Sergei’s gold potato charm and the kopek medallion I had given him thirty years before. Both pieces, he said, Grand Duchess Xenia had asked him to give to me. Eventually I would give them to Vova, for had Sergei not planned to leave all that was his to my son? In 1914 that was an annual appanage of 280,000 rubles along with the income from the vast family estates in northern, central, and southern Russia, and houses in every city and resort where the court traveled. By 1920, this was all that was left.

  That night I dreamed I was returned to Petersburg, to the Imperial Ballet School, and as I headed down the long corridor to the little student theater where I had once danced at my graduation, someone behind me I could not see cried out, The imperial family, the imperial family is coming! And I asked, But how can they come? They are all dead, and the voice answered, Their souls are coming, and all around me voices began to sing,

  Christ is risen from the dead

  Trampling down death by death

  And upon those in the tombs bestowing life—

  and I ran down the passage to fling open the door to the little theater, but there was no room beyond the door, no room with its small stage and its wooden chairs lined up in rows. The door opened instead into nothing at all, into a dark abyss where it was raining great sheets of rain and where a great wind moaned and sent the rain in all directions, and I stood there on the threshold, my skirts blowing, calling out into the wild dark, Christ is risen from the dead, and though I stood there a long time until I was quite wet, no one answered me at all.

  What do the dead occupy themselves with, do you think, when they aren’t haunting us? Do they find in the grave a pocket of the past? I know some souls rest in peace, but I don’t think the souls of émigrés do, nor do the souls of the murdered. The souls of the Romanovs probably march west across the churning soil of Russia, through Omik, Ekaterinburg, Life, Kazan, Tambov, Tula, Moscow, all the way back to what is now called Leningrad, looking for what they have lost.

  The Princess Romanovsky-Krassinsky

  With Sokolov’s report disseminated, Kyril declared himself emperor in exile and thus forever alienated the dowager empress and the Nikolaevichi. What did he care? The dowager empress was in Denmark, he was here in the heart of Russian Paris, where one’s worth among the émigrés was still measured by one’s old rank and where to be received by a grand duke was still considered a social triumph. On Easter, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, the émigrés crowded the grand ducal houses to sign the guest books, to sip a bit of vodka, to be in the company of the men who once ruled Russia. And I? I did better than that. Why, I married Andrei as soon as Miechen was snapped shut in her vault in the chapel she built for herself at Contrexéville. Are you surprised? Then you have not been paying attention. I didn’t have long to wait—she was dead within six months of her arrival in France, having decided to spare herself the diminution of stature served up like a stale pastry to any refugee. Before Andrei and I took our vows in the Church of St. George in Cannes, Andrei, ever obedient, wrote to warn the dowager empress of what was to come and petitioned his brother Kyril, as head of the family, for permission; and this deference to the old protocol had its rewards. Grand Duchess Olga sent us her mother’s best wishes and Kyril issued a ukase whereby I, Mathilde-Maria Felixovna Kschessinska, became Her Serene Highness the Princess Romanovsky-Krassinsky. My son was ennobled, too, after my marriage, when I pressured Andrei to adopt him, and he became Miechen’s grandson rather than her husband’s son, if this makes any difference to her. After our wedding, Andrei took me to be formally presented to Emperor Kyril and his wife, to Queen Alexandrine of Denmark, to Queen Marie of Romania, to Queen Olga of Greece. And in time I came to be received by King Gustav V of Sweden, King Alexander of Yugoslavia, the Shah of Persia, the old king Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the new king Boris, his son, not only by all the Russian grand dukes, but also by Grand Duchess Xenia, by Prince Dimitri Pavlovich and his sister Princess Marie Pavlovna, by the princesses Radziwill and Golitzin, by Prince Volkonsky, my old enemy, if you remember, as director of the Imperial Theaters, by the dukes of Coburg, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and Leuchtenberg. Yes, by all these people my son and I were now received.

  My name is in all the genealogy charts, you know, the ones that trace the lines of European and Russian royalty. I sit on the page below Queen Victoria of England, King Christian IX of Denmark, and Tsar Alexander II of Russia, though to be frank I am not positioned where I had hoped, next to Niki but beneath Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, who as his first wife would be listed above, or even next to Sergei, off to the side with the Mikhailovichi branch of the family. No. I am a Vladimirichi, and perhaps, after all, that is where I belong, with the wily and the cunning, the schemers, the plotters, the intriguers, the Machiavellians. But my son, Prince Romanov, is not on the genealogy charts at all, for the line to the throne runs through Kyril, you see, so it is through Kyril’s issue that the line is traced. You will see the name of his son Vladimir there, not mine. Tant pis.

  We lived in style on the Riviera for nine years off the sale of the magnificent rubies Miechen bequeathed Andrei—she left her daughter, Elena, her diamonds, Boris her emeralds, and Kyril her pearls—but th
e huge price the rubies brought, twenty million francs, is not, after all, so much money for a Romanov; and when those francs were gone, I was forced to sell, stone by stone, my own gems, which did not bring me the price they should have, as the market was by then, of course, flooded with the imperial jewels of the impoverished Russian court-in-exile. At last, in 1929, we had to sell our villa at Cap d’Ail and purchase a home in Paris, where real estate was not so dear, a modest house with a long front garden at 10 Villa Molitor in the 16th Arrondissement and, additionally, a maisonette at 6 avenue Vion-Whitcomb to serve as my ballet school, the Studio of the Princess Krassinsky, for once again, it appeared, I would have to work for a living. Andrei was reluctant to lend his name to the sale of champagne, caviar, or cigars, feeling it beneath him, and, anyway, such an endorsement paid only a pittance, otherwise I would have insisted. Instead, I put out my placard and hired the wife of a former tsarist general as my pianist and employed Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirich to keep my books and sweep my studio floors, which he did daily, in his three-piece suits.

  The Day of Glory Is Near

  For my son, however, I did not wish such a coda, such an infernal gallop. I did not want him sweeping my studio floors, and yet there is no proper occupation for a prince-in-exile, no institutions of government or military to run. Like the sons of other émigrés of his rank, Vova lived with his parents, attended royal family weddings and funerals, supported various charities, and waited in vain for the world he had been groomed to rule to be restored. In anticipation of this, Kyril established his Council for Building Imperial Russia; his grand ducal advisors included Boris and Andrei, as well as Sergei’s two surviving brothers, Sandro and Mikhail, and lest you think the five of them alone were such dreamers, let me tell you that in 1930, in a forest outside Paris, Kyril conducted a review of two thousand former officers of the tsar’s guard regiments, who cheered at the sight of him as they had once cheered for Niki, The day of glory is near. My son, along with Prince Dimitri Pavlovich and other frustrated young men, joined the Union of Young Russia, organized by Alexander Kazem-Bek, a great-nephew of Tolstoy, which envisioned a Russia that embraced both the reforms of the Bolsheviks and the throne of its tsar. Like those old officers in the Paris forest, they, too, had a uniform (a dark blue shirt), a symbol (the cross and the orb), and a motto (Tsar and the Soviets!). And they, too, held their rallies and yodeled paeans, theirs to the Red Army, of which most of them were too young to know almost anything, and when Andrei admonished him, Vova bristled—Your council is a council of doddering old men. It was not until Kazem-Bek was discovered in 1937 to be a Soviet agent that Vova finally left the movement, which itself collapsed after the Second World War.