The True Memoirs of Little K Page 22

  Almost every man in the imperial family save for the tsar found his way to my palace, though I suppose I hoped one day one of his uncles or cousins might bring him along—one of Sergei’s brothers Nicholas or George or Mikhail, or perhaps their father or Grand Duke Paul or his son Dimitri, the poet Konstantin and his sons Oleg and Igor, who acted in my theatricals, even perhaps Alexander Mossolov, the head of the Court Chancellery, or Grand Duke Vladimir, who brought with him his sons Kyril, Boris, and Andrei, though his daughter stayed at home—yes, they all came, but not the tsar, who never saw how well I entertained the Romanovs. They mixed at my parties with the greatest artists on the imperial stages: Bakst, Benois, and Fokine, Petipa, when he visited from the Crimea, the younger dancers Pavlova, Karsavina, and Nijinsky, who made my Kolinka jealous because he was Polish, too, you see, and with him I could speak the Polish I learned as a child but never used except en famille. Kolinka used to say, One Pole can spot another Pole from far, far away—and then he would put his hands over my eyes so that I would not make Nijinsky my partner, which I did anyway. Who else came? The composers Glazunov and Shenk, the balalaika player Victor Abaza, Fabergé, to whom someone would always show her jewels for appraisal or praise, the great basses Chaliapin and Sobinov, the latter of whom one night sang Vova to sleep in his bed with a lullaby, actors from the English Theater who tended to shout, and dancers from the Imperial Ballet you’ve never heard of. Even visiting artists like Isadora Duncan, her Greek tunic clipped closed with a brooch, and Sarah Bernhardt stopped by. (For the great Bernhardt I went to enormous effort to acquire the borzoi dog she wanted so, an act of kindness she did not bother to thank me for!) And with such a mix of talent, theatricals were the order of the day, either that or baccarat and poker. And yes, at my palace many mistresses were taken and many marriages made, like that of Nina Nesterovska to Grand Duke Konstantin’s son, Prince Gabriel, and one could find there the odd son or daughter, the flower of a liaison between a theater artist and a prince, like Misha Alexandrov, who now served either as a dancer or as a member of the Guards, for there was a social fluidity at my house that existed almost nowhere else in Peter and all could swim there.

  Because of my many and myriad relationships with the imperial men, the grand dukes began to call me not Ma-thilde, but Notre-tilde—Our-tilde—so intimate did I become with them all, though their wives had another name for me, of course, that awful woman, which I’m sure they would call me still today, had I not outlived them. Grand Duke Vladimir sent me each Easter an arrangement of lilies of the valley and my own jeweled Fabergé egg, and he sent me also a pair of porcelain vases that once belonged to Prince Vorontzov, a sapphire bracelet he bought for me in Paris at Cartier, even sheet music. The last piece, La Valse triste by Sibelius, was sent just a few weeks before Vladimir’s death in 1909 and had been written for the play Death, penned by a relative of the composer. The music describes a dance between a dying woman and death itself. On the first page of it Vladimir scribbled a note by the title, This is your ballet. So he knew, Vladimir, of my private dance with the destroyer, the tsar. For Vladimir had ample opportunity to observe me. He not only came to my palace for my parties but also took me to dinners at Cubat’s, and in the summers, he spent afternoons at my dacha, sometimes alone with me and sometimes he brought along his sons, for long sunlit hours of card games. Our favorite was tëtke, or aunt. One day it seemed Vladimir was dealt the queen of every suite and at the last abruptly folded his cards to ask me, Does anyone like me for myself or is this respect and affection awarded to me solely because of my rank? And I told him, swiftly, Here you are loved for yourself, though of course, there is no way to sever one’s position from oneself, nor would he have wanted to try, I am sure. I loved him for his rank and his person but also for his friendship to me and for the friendship to me he prodded from his sons. I knew the elder two, already, Kyril and Boris. They came to the ballet on their father’s abonnement, Kyril, with the long, handsome face and English-looking features, and Boris with a face bloated by his love of baccarat and liquor and women and a good joke—at my theatricals, he was always the first to stamp his feet and call Curtain! Curtain! as the French do.

  Vladimir’s youngest son, Andrei, though, had been studying at the Mikhailovsky Artillery School all these years, one of those elite military schools so strict they did not allow their pupils any holidays with their families—to snap, I suppose, the boys’ ties to home and to have them forge instead new ones with their fellow officer candidates and their country, and so him I had not met before 1905, when Vladimir brought him one afternoon to luncheon. If I was his father’s dushka, Andrei became mine, stirring a finger into my heart. His face was the face of the young sovereign I saw up close for the first time at my school graduation dinner; and like Niki then, Andrei was terribly shy, a baby, still, at twenty-seven, though I was no longer a girl but a woman of thirty-two. Each time I spoke to him, he ducked his head with a charming terror. At luncheon, when I placed my left hand on his wrist to ask him which dessert he preferred, I startled him, and he knocked over his wineglass, spraying my white dress with purple darts. His brothers laughed.

  That day for luncheon he came with his father and his brothers, but soon enough we made a date for him to come again alone, late one evening, on his mother’s name day, July 22, when the rest of the family would be occupied. He rode over from Ropsha, the Vladimir country estate, leaving behind his mother’s annual party in her own honor, chairs filled with Romanovs, leaving behind the Gypsy musicians fiddling in the garden, the food spoiling on tables set among the flower beds. Petersburg was hot that month, the walls of the buildings glowing red with the sun, the Neva thick and still. But Strelna was part of a constellation of islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, and here the heat mellowed into a dreamy warmth as the Neva surged toward the Baltic Sea. I waited outside on my terrace for Andrei, pacing just as I had once paced at Krasnoye Selo while waiting for the young tsarevich to take me for a ride in his troika, reluctant to sit down, for I didn’t want to crease my starched summer dress. When Andrei finally arrived in the late evening’s dusk, he brought on his boots the yellow sand of the roads and on his clothes the scent of the flowering jasmine and the lilies of the valley that grew at the sides of them. We lingered on the terrace listening to the nightingales, which are silenced only by the light, and it seemed when eventually he went to my bed we took the birds and the lilies of the valley there with us where Andrei, almost a virgin, made love to me as the tsar had once made love to me, with soft surprise. And it was as if the tsar, a fairer, blonder version of him, had been returned to me, and I could continue, through this proxy, to live the life I should have had with him.

  Soon after that, Andrei bought his own palace on the English Embankment, No. 28, so that we would have a place to meet privately, out of the sight of Sergei and out of the sight of Andrei’s mother—who had been horrified enough by my friendship with her husband and was enraged now by his forbearance at my friendship with their youngest son. Andrei’s palace had belonged to Baron von Dervis, who had made his fortune in railroads, and his widow, in the few years left to her, had remade all the rooms in high style alternately rococo and Gothic, reminiscent of the Winter Palace. Andrei changed nothing about the mansion, did not even remove the von Dervis monograms and coats of arms, did not, in fact, even live there, but used the place as a stage set for our parties and our trysts. Yet Sergei, of course, knew about this purchase and knew also that I visited Andrei secretly there, and he endured this as penance. He had abandoned me when my son was one hour old, still coated with yellow wax, and he had heard me cry after him as he galloped through my garden and jumped my hedge. It had taken three years and my father’s death for Sergei to offer me a word. Did I think of the deceit I offered him the day I told him I carried his son and all those days after when still I kept silent? Conveniently, I did not.

  Andrei and I were nevertheless discreet. We conducted our affair in a different neighborhood or we went abroad,
to the French Riviera, where Andrei, in a gesture to rival Sergei’s, bought me a villa in Cap D’Ail. In Russia, too, we stayed out of sight, as the von Dervis mansion stood where the English Embankment faced the Neva as it curved south, away from the Winter Palace and the New Mikhailovsky Palace, and from it one had a different view, that of Vasilievsky Island. The Rumyantsev Mansion stood at No. 44. The Vorontzov-Dashkovs at No. 10. Countess Laval at No. 4, where Pushkin himself read aloud his Boris Godunov in 1828. Diaghilev lived at No. 22. All of these mansions serve some other purpose now. The great noble families are long gone—some of their houses are museums. The Laval mansion is a historical archive. Andrei’s home became first a Ministry of Agriculture under the Provisional Government. I hear in 1961 it became the USSR’s first Palace of Weddings. I like to think of the young couples arriving there, perhaps the girl with orange blossoms tucked behind one ear, a little unsteady on her heels. Perhaps out of some prescience of what this palace would one day become, Andrei was driven one late afternoon to announce he wished to marry me, and he threw off our sable coverlet to dress and, leaving me there in the bed, rode immediately home to announce his intentions to his parents. And I thought, How delightful, how perfect. Let me make trouble in the palace of every Romanov!

  Miechen, of course, railed at him that he had been bewitched into destroying his future. She was already maneuvering for her daughter, Elena, to marry a king and for her son Boris to marry Niki’s eldest daughter, and she did not want Andrei to throw away his chances of a great match, as had his brother Kyril, who just that past year eloped with the divorcée Victoria Melita and as a consequence had been stripped of his titles, income, and country. Perhaps Kyril’s recklessness had inspired Andrei? Grand Duke Vladimir admonished him that I was a pleasant enough diversion but nothing more. He should know. No, he could not marry me, Andrei said, returning to me, sheepishly. I laughed and snapped my fingers at him. How very like the young tsarevich! I knew I was unmarriageable. It was not only Andrei who could not marry me. No man of any real rank could, nor would one of lesser rank want to, I had been so well used. No, the tsar could not marry me, Sergei could not marry me, even Andrei could not marry me. When Princess Radziwill congratulated me later that year on having two grand dukes at my feet, I forced myself to laugh and reply, And why not? I have two feet.

  What I did not have was the tsar, who had turned his face from me and my son no matter what trouble I stirred up in the beds of his capital.

  When Vova saw me going off those afternoons to Andrei’s, he was jealous and, as he assumed I was going off to rehearse at the theater, he said he was old enough now to come with me. He wanted to see the stage, he cried, he wanted to see me dance, he wanted to take lessons at the theater school, and as I had once done to my father—until, exasperated, he took me to Lev Ivanov, who watched me pose and dance and said, All right. Let her come to the school straightaway!—I was seven!—so Vova also launched an elaborate campaign. He would live at the school, he said, and I could be his teacher. They will not take you until you are ten, I told him. Until then you will study with your tutors. By the time he was ten, I figured, he would forget all this, and so I hoped, for at ten or twelve, boys could enroll not only at the Theater School, where I had no intention of enrolling him—where my brother Josef ’s children Slava and later Celina attended—but also at the prestigious Corps des Pages, where, just before Vova’s birth, Sergei had, at my urging, placed his name on a list. For after all, the young tsarevich still lived—Alix’s uncle, Leopold, had lived to thirty-one before a hemorrhage from a minor car accident claimed him—and Vova must have a life. The Corps des Pages admitted only the sons of grand dukes, lieutenant-generals, vice admirals, and privy councilors, and my son, as far as they knew, was the son of Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich. The old Vorontzov palace, designed in the 1790s by the same Rastrelli who had created the Catherine Palace and Peterhof for Empress Elizabeth, had housed the school for over a hundred years, and on its grounds were both an Orthodox and a Catholic church. Within the palace were rooms for dormitories and classrooms and a ballroom with a great gallery where the school hosted its seasonal balls.

  The young cadets who decorated those rooms were given day uniforms, full-dress uniforms for court appearances, evening clothes of black broadcloth with gold lapels, and standard ball uniforms, with weaponry to be removed while dancing, though the disasters that occurred when spurs and swords met taffeta and satin were legion. In their final years, the top students in the class were appointed pages to the court. The emperor was assigned a page, as were the grand dukes and duchesses. The dowager empress and Alix had four apiece. If Vova—when Vova—was appointed a court page and assigned to one of the imperial family, he would be given a court uniform of white doeskin breeches, a red-and-gold tunic, and black Wellington boots and driven in a court carriage to the Winter Palace, the pages all covered with sheets to keep their uniforms spotless en route. And when Vova completed his service he would be awarded a gold watch engraved with the monogram of the imperial personage he had served and commissioned as an officer, assigned as an adjutant to one of the men of the imperial family to begin what would be, I was certain, a brilliant career at court. I could see already his initial appearance there, where he would be formally presented to the imperial family, including Alix, whose hand he would kiss and with whom he would exchange pleasantries in French to the extent of her ability to deliver them. My son had a French tutor already, so by eighteen, he would speak the language fluently. What would she think of him? Would she note some imperial resemblance? See in him Niki’s eyes, perhaps, Niki’s likeness in the face, his gait, his bearing? Or would Vova be to her merely another of the many, many beautiful young men in uniform? Family, wealth, beauty, loyalty—those were the requirements for the Guards.

  Yes, my son would get to his father in the Winter Palace one way or another, but for now my boy would remain at home with me, doted on by my family and cosseted by Sergei, who placated him for not attending the theater school by having a playhouse built for him at our dacha. And later when Vova complained, indignantly, that he had to stand in the garden to relieve himself into the rosebushes, Sergei added a working bathroom to the playhouse. He bought him a miniature motorcar that really drove, a fireman’s hose that shot real water, a stuffed llama that towered above his bed. At night, beneath the llama, Sergei and Vova knelt to whisper their prayers together. When Vova was sick, Sergei brushed his thin hair up into a ribbon to cool his fever and telephoned his brother the hypochondriac to send his personal doctor to come and treat Vova; Sergei even had a camp bed set up in Vova’s room so he could sleep by him until he was well. Though Sergei never rebuked me for my dalliance with Andrei, it seemed because of it Vova had supplanted me in Sergei’s affections and the two of us were turned by it from each other to Vova, who became quite spoiled from all the attention. And so, this is how it all was until 1912.

  See How We Suffer

  In late September of that year, the tsar and his suite traveled, as usual, to Poland for the hunt, to his estates at Skernevetski, Bielovezh, and Spala, and my brother Josef, now chairman of the Northerner, a hunting society, and who had been, through my influence, you remember, put in charge of the tsar’s hunting lodges after his dismissal from the ballet, traveled with him. It wasn’t long before rumors about matters in Poland began to make their way to Peter. People were saying the tsarevich had taken ill with typhus or cholera. The London Times had written the heir had been wounded by a terrorist’s bomb. Of the truth, Sergei knew nothing. If the rumors were true, Niki was not speaking of them yet. And then, on the ninth of October, Josef sent me a terse telegram instructing me to come to Spala at once at the tsar’s request and to bring Vova with me. I carried the telegram around in my hand so long that afternoon the paper began to disintegrate. What did the tsar want of me and my son after so long? What he wanted back in 1904? But when I answered my brother’s message, Josef would give me no details other than Don’t use Sergei’s railroad car.
I was to call him at the lodge when I arrived at the station in Warsaw. Josef the revolutionary as the tsar’s servant? See how poverty and need can change a man!

  I told Vova only that we would go to Poland to visit my brother who was serving the tsar at his hunting lodge. Yet at the train station I saw the gazeta with the black-bordered bulletin that announced the tsarevich was gravely ill, and though the bulletin did not specify the affliction, I knew the family would not allow such an announcement unless the tsarevich was near death. All the way south and west from Petersburg Vova chattered, could he go hunting and would we hunt elk and stag and would there be European bison there, too? Would he have his own gun or would Josef have to hold his for him? Could he take the antlers home and mount them on the wall of his bedroom, or, better yet, over the mantel in my White Hall so our guests could see them and demand to be told the tale? He wanted to practice with me the few Polish words I had taught him, but I was distracted and kept pulling out Josef ’s telegrams to read and reread as if some new information might appear there to explain away my dread. Eventually, in disgust with me, Vova wandered the aisle of the compartment. At each station he asked me to buy him strawberry-flavored kvass or tea or roasted nuts. He kept the vendors busy all along the route. At the Warsaw Station while we waited for the car Josef sent for me, I fussed over Vova, smoothing his hair, straightening and buttoning his coat, at one point drawing him close, but he was old enough now to be embarrassed by all this and so he squirmed away from me to kick at the leaves that blew about the station, and I pulled up the collar of my chinchilla coat.