The True Memoirs of Little K Read online

  Yet within not even a week of my arrival at Strelna, where I had not even planned to be, the chief of police called to inform me he was closing the bridge from Peterhof to Strelna and that the emperor was on his way to see me. The police tracked the whereabouts of all persons of importance at all times. Why, they could tell you exactly whom the various ambassadors and grand dukes called upon each afternoon and exactly when. And so, of course, they knew I had left Peter for Strelna, and therefore so did Niki. And I thought, Niki’s come already to take the key to my palace from me, to pay me another hundred thousand rubles. He has already drawn up more official papers for me to sign. But he had no papers with him when he arrived. Before I could even greet him, before he had even come up the steps of the veranda where I had gone to stand when I heard his horse, he said, Mala, the baby is sick. And when I looked at him uncomprehendingly, he said, Alexei is a bleeder, and he sat down abruptly on the bottom step and I came and sat by him. He put his head in my lap and the bright sunlight streamed down from the sky and slowly, slowly my former despair was bleached to pity. I stroked at the tsar’s hair the way I had just stroked the hair of my child to put him to sleep for an afternoon nap.

  This bleeding disease had made its appearance in Alix’s family before. Queen Victoria and her daughters and granddaughters carried this disease in their bodies, for women were the carriers and men the sufferers and because these women married cousins who were princes and kings, the disease had infiltrated the royal houses of England, Spain, Germany, and now, apparently, Russia. When Alix was just a year old, her brother Fritzie had died from a fall he suffered in the morning that killed him by day’s end. When she was twelve, her uncle Leopold fell and died of a brain hemorrhage. Just six months before Alix’s son was born, her sister Irene had lost her son. It had taken Alix’s nephew Henry, four years old, several weeks to die after a bump on the head, weeks of his screams and weeks of the most terrible helplessness suffered by his parents. Alix had gone, pregnant, to the funeral. Bad omen. So Alix knew if a child was a bleeder each fall, each stumble, each bang, each bump could mean weeks of painful bleeding, swollen knots of corrosive blood beneath the skin that could immobilize a joint, damage organs, even kill. Niki said to me that he should have married the French princess Hélène or the Prussian princess Margaret as his parents had wished. No mention, of course, of me! He believed now that this was why Alix had wept so uncontrollably on the day of their engagement. Fate held this black card at the back of her hand, out of sight, but Alix had somehow seen it. He himself was born under the sign of Job. He was that card. He was destined for a terrible trial. He would not receive his reward on this earth, nor would Alix. When her contractions began, Niki said, she was sitting on a sofa in the drawing room in the Lower Palace at Peterhof, and the mirrored panels hanging behind her spontaneously shattered and covered her with glass, just as the quicksilver of the stage mirror had done in my last ballet. One did not have to be Russian to see the omen in that. And all the while he spoke, I stroked at his hair and made unintelligible murmuring sounds, there, there, and I was glad he could not see my face, which I am sure shone with a slowly waking bliss. His son was sick. He would not live long. It was not my life God wanted to take but Alexei’s. Despite all Alix’s efforts to thwart me, fate had intervened. Heaven did not want Alix’s son to be the next tsar. Heaven did not want Alix as empress. Niki had left her at Peterhof and had come here to me. The key to my new house would remain in my pocket.

  Come, I said to Niki finally, and I took his hand and led him to the nursery, where Vova, now two, slept, his cheeks two red apples, his forehead a charm. Is he breathing? Niki asked. It’s too hot in here, Mala. I laughed. He’s breathing, I told him, and I lifted our boy from his little bed and put him in Niki’s arms. Niki rocked him standing there in the warm room. We cannot see each other for a while, Mala, Niki said over my son’s small back. I cannot undermine Alexei’s legitimacy. He may live for some time. There is no way to know for certain. Meanwhile, I would have my palace. The minister of the court would continue to transfer a monthly stipend to my accounts. He and Alix would have no more children. We have enough daughters, Niki said ruefully, and the risk is too great for another son.

  Yes, the risk was too great. The House of Spain had two hemophiliac sons. The little princes wore padded suits to play in the palace park where the trees had also been padded but still the boys suffered. Both of Alix’s sister Irene’s sons were hemophiliacs; before his death, she had kept the younger son Henry hidden in the palace in Prussia to conceal the evidence of his illness, lest the country know both the heir and his brother were bleeders and the House of Prussia was riddled with disease. So Alix had decided she would do the same with Alexei. The next year, the family would move to Tsarskoye Selo and hide themselves in Alexander Palace, hide Alexei and his illness so completely that almost no one knew of it. It would be 1912 before even the children’s tutor, Pierre Gilliard, understood what illness the boy suffered from, why he was so pale, his face so pinched, and why he spent weeks at a time in bed. Alexei’s doctor, Eugene Botkin, never spoke a word of Alexei’s condition even to his own family. Niki’s family themselves for more than a decade would not know what was wrong with the boy. Photographs of Alexei were fed to the press, but he would rarely appear at state occasions, with various excuses given for his absence. And so the rumor-mongering commenced yet again: the child was retarded, an epileptic, the victim of a revolutionary’s bomb.

  As for my son, Niki issued a secret ukase granting him the status of a hereditary nobleman. And that was all Vova would be until the inevitable, the unspeakable, occurred, for which I waited, wickedly, impatiently, even lamenting the wait! I remember thinking, Oh, if the theatricals at the Maryinsky had taken this long to create, the tsar would have sat in his box for decades with nothing to see.

  The Match to the Tinder

  For the glimpse of Niki I longed for, now I was obliged to attend public events, and so in January 1905 I went to the Dvortskaya Embankment to watch the ceremony of the Epiphany. This blessing of the waters began the cycle of Carnival, an explosion of gaiety that climaxed with Butter Week, just before Lent. Soon booths would be set up on that very spot and in the streets and on the Champs de Mars, and the next few months would be boisterous ones. The peasants kept themselves alive between harvests with their sales at those wooden stalls, slapped up in a hurry and hung with bunting and flags, and jugglers and Gypsies danced between the booths for the kopeks we would throw. I planned to take Vova to watch the puppet shows where harlequins were clobbered on the head by villainous blackguards with sabers and clubs, to hear the Gypsies sing their folk songs, to stuff ourselves with blinis, themselves stuffed with caviar and slippery with butter, to feed Vova gingerbread or hazelnuts or Ukrainian nuts or Greek nuts roasted right out in the open on charcoal braziers just like the vendors do here in Paris, using their brass shovels to scoop the nuts into paper bags. You’ve seen the ballet Petrouchka? Then you’ve seen a Shrovetide Fair and the puppets upon which this ballet is based, the little harlequin Petrouchka, the Blackamoor with his sword, the Columbinecum-Ballerina with her stiff pink skirt. At one of the stalls, I would buy Vova a caged bird and a wooden toy. Today, on the way to the embankment, I promised him that as soon as Carnival began I would find him a wooden cart with wheels that really turned, the sides painted with the vivid red, yellow, and blue of eastern Russia.

  The blessing itself was an annual ritual in which the tsar and his family walked out onto the frozen Neva on a long red carpet that ran from the Winter Palace, down the steps of the quay and over the ice to a makeshift chapel, assembled of gleaming crucifixes, plaster pillars, a wooden altar and silver chalices, and the banners and icons of St. John the Baptist. Guards regiments lined the strip of carpet and made a circle around the chapel. A hole in the shape of a crucifix was cut into the ice there and the cold water swam sluggishly beneath it, while snow dust blew across us above. On this day, we pretended the Neva was the Jordan, and for onc
e, the imperial guests waited inside the palace while the plain Russian people stood witness to a ceremony. It was our day, a rare one, to be with the emperor. Some women carried pitchers to fill with the Neva water once it had been blessed: a child or a husband was sick or crippled at home. Some women carried an ailing baby to be dipped quickly into the freezing water and then swaddled in a fur lap robe. I had brought Vova, though his only ailment was his illegitimacy, and a dunk in the water would not cure that, nor would a glimpse of the emperor cure what ailed me. Still, Vova and I waited anyway. No guard stirred a finger or uttered a word but stood like lead soldiers, their heads bare and their helmets at their feet as the wind whipped across the ice and rattled the props of the chapel.

  Then exactly after the morning service in the palace chapel, the bands began to play the national anthem and the soldiers we could not see shouted out the salute and then Nicholas, looking quite regal, led the imperial family and their Cossack retinue down the stone steps of the quay to the river; from the women’s jeweled kokoshniks floated long white veils, and it looked as if their souls floated behind their bodies, so pure as to be colorless, part of the gray-white sky. Niki’s head, by tradition, was as bare as his guards’, for today he played Christ ready to be baptized by St. John, and he played the part well, for didn’t he, like Christ, suffer the dark knowledge of what was to come? The local metropolitan and his bishops and archimandrites and priests wore gold vestments so grand one would think they, and not the emperor, stood at the head of the church, but the truth was Nicholas held the appointments of these churchmen in his palm. From where I stood holding Vova, who wore a tiny beaver hat, the exact words of the liturgy were not distinct; only the sounds of the priests’ voices skimmed over the ice on the scent of cloves and roses. The wind puffed up its lips and blew its cold, wet, voluptuous breath across the ice, as well, and Vova buried his face into the sable collar of my shuba. He buried his face because he was cold. He was too young to know shame, but soon enough he would begin to ask, Where is my father? And what would I answer? Your father is far away—for after all, is it not very high up to the tsar?—although at that moment he was less than a verst from us.

  At the climax of the ceremony, the metropolitan dipped three times a large silver cross hanging from its long chain into the hole cut in the ice and with it he blessed us all. The bells from Peter and Paul chimed and the guns and cannons made their thunder, and the women next to me began to scream—at the sound, I thought at first—until I realized some invisible weapon had begun to pock the ice all about us. Small pieces of ice flew up and bit at our faces and hands, and Vova began to whimper. The women near me began to run, children tucked under their arms, slipping a little despite their felt boots, dragging with them their empty pitchers. We found out later that a terrorist had managed to substitute live ammunition for the usual blank rounds, and as the guns continued, some of it flew all the way over to where we were standing. The imperial party was sprayed with shrapnel, too, and they scattered in shock. On the quay I saw a policeman fall, his blood a red thread unraveling from the crimson carpet, and we could hear the windows shattering in Nicholas Hall, where the guests waited in court dress for the return of the emperor. I patted Vova’s shoulder to soothe him and strained over him to see. I could not flee until I knew Niki was safe. I saw Niki was now surrounded by his guards; other guards encircled the rest of the imperial family, and when the cannons quieted, Nicholas moved through his party, calming its members, having his group, a bit like a woman with her dress mussed, gather and smooth itself and make a dignified recessional. I had never seen him called upon to lead in any public situation that had not been tightly choreographed—and it appeared his ten years as tsar had prepared him for this departure from the expected better than he knew. This, too, was part of being emperor. The office involved, after all, not only receptions and processionals and ceremonies but actual governance and the protestations against it. Niki at his coronation had spoken against the senseless dreams of those who, like the generations before them all the way back to the war with Napoleon, hoped to bring reform to the monarchical government of Russia. Perhaps Niki would find his way with as much aplomb through the jumble of that. When the imperial family vanished into the Winter Palace, the ice quickly cleared, but I lingered on it, stooped to pocket a piece of the shrapnel that lay there, unnoticed, the edges of the metal warm and jagged to the touch even through the leather of my gloves.

  Have I mentioned at all that Russia had been at war that year with Japan? It’s no wonder if I haven’t. It’s a war best forgotten. While Niki was building my house on Petersburg Island, he was also busy completing the Trans-Siberian Railway, shortening its planned route by laying track right across Manchuria, Chinese land that had obstructed the track’s direct route from Irkutsk to Vladivostok, Russia’s furthermost eastern outpost. The Chinese had been bribed with rubles and with the promises of an alliance with Russia against China’s enemies and respect for her sovereignty. But while his men were laying the track, Niki decided in violation of that agreement to annex Manchuria, to make it another of his Asiatic conquests, which the Chinese, despite their protestations, were too weak to prevent. Had Niki stopped there, all would have been well. But he did not stop there. He wanted to claim the forests of the Korean peninsula, as well, to become master of even more Russian lands. After all, was he not tsar? Unfortunately, the Japanese also wanted those Korean forests, and so, when Niki refused to sign an agreement with the yellow monkeys to contain his interests to Manchuria and to leave the Korean forests to them, the Japanese attacked. The yellow monkeys that we had laughed at—in the newspaper cartoons our Cossacks scooped the Japanese up by the dozens in their fur hats—not only bottled up the Russian fleet and sank our ships in the Straits of Tsushima, a disaster Vladimir’s son Kyril, a commander in the navy, barely survived, but also mowed down our men making their old-fashioned bayonet charges in Manchuria. It took seven months for the Baltic Fleet to sail around the world to reach Port Arthur to assist our men, endless days for supplies to travel the six-thousand-mile route by rail from the big cities of western Russia to the Manchurian-Korean border. Niki at one point sent his men a shipment of icons to aid them in battle—beautiful oval portraits of the Savior in gold chains—and at that, unpacking those boxes, a general had laughed, The Japanese are beating us with machine guns but never mind: we will beat them with icons. I suppose the war was the match to the tinder, and the shrapnel I held in my hand an artifact of an attempted assassination. The coming year would bring a wave of assassinations: Niki’s minister of the interior, Plevhe; his Russian governor-general of Finland, Bobrikov; his governor-general of Moscow, his very own uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich; and later, his prime minister, Stolypin. Yes, these men would all be killed, though not yet the tsar.

  Now for the tinder.

  Just three days later, on January 9, it exploded when Father Gapon, a priest who had been working with the poor peasants laboring in the factories, felt compelled to lead these suffering people to the Winter Palace to tell the tsar of their sorrows. Gapon wanted the tsar to hear of the poisonous fumes that filled the unventilated factories, of the typhus and cholera spawned from the industrial waste, of the peasant children working sixteen hours through the long Russian night, of the machinery that tore out an eye or severed a limb, after which the worker was paid a few rubles and fired, of the searches the workers endured at the factory gates, of the floggings they endured for violations, the pay docked for using the toilet, the piles of clothes used as bedding in the factory barracks or the cellars and stairways where the workers slept like serf beasts at the mercy of their factory boss squires. The irony of Gapon’s desire was that he was paid by the tsar’s police to sponsor unions expressly designed to keep the workers enduring these conditions, to keep them from joining the radical Socialist Democrats and their unions, which urged the workers to revolt rather than endure. At Gapon’s meetings, decorum reigned: the workers drank tea, recited the Lord’s Pray
er, sang the national anthem. But I suppose Gapon’s pity for them ultimately overwhelmed his mission to subdue them, and so he dreamed up the idea to stage a great theatrical allée, to provoke a solution to their great enslavement. Their tsar would help them. It had been only because the tsar’s windows looked out onto the beauty of the river that he had missed their misery. Or perhaps the enfilades were too many rooms deep and word of the workers’ misery did not penetrate. Or perhaps the tsar had been too busy with the papers on his desk and the mighty worries of the war with Japan, his mind on matters far away, and so he did not see the suffering right there within a half verst of his study walls. But once he knew of the intolerable conditions under which the peasants toiled at his factories, their Tsar-Batiushka would surely hold out his hands and smooth everything over with the right strokes of his pen. For, after all, the tsar always says yes; it is his little dog that barks no. So with this hope pounding in his breast, Gapon and the workers gathered by the hundred thousand at six points in the city and proceeded on foot along the streets designed like the spokes of a wheel by the European architects of the beloved eighteenth century—Lambert, Trezzini, LeBlond—spokes that led to the Admiralty and to the Winter Palace, the hub of it all.