Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Do the parents of all mistresses suffer as mine did? Did the father of the ballerina Anna Kuznetsova cry when Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich built for her what was to become my house?

My parents would never visit No. 18, English Prospekt, out of principle. I had two floors, and behind the house two walled gardens, one a pleasure garden flush with flowers, the other a working one, with a row of vegetables, a stable, a barn, and just beyond that second stone wall lay the palace of one of the tsar’s many uncles. Look how close I slept now to the Romanovs! Niki’s great-uncle Konstantin had hoped to marry his mistress, but the tsar refused him permission to divorce his wife. Of course, Konstantin could have done so anyway, but he would have been stripped of his title, his income, his property, his country, and then what would he have? A new wife living with him in exile. Small compensation. So instead, he suffered in comfort his mistress’s uncertain position and those of his five children. Eventually, though, before his death, he managed to have her and her children ennobled by the tsar’s ukase . In Russia one’s place can at any moment change. A tsar’s decree was one way. For women it was done through marriage. For men by climbing the ladder of Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks. One entered state service at the fourteenth rank, and with each year one accumulated more chin , or rank, until one reached the fifth rank and earned the right to be called Your Honor . After that, the top four ranks were filled with men appointed there by the tsar, and those men were given hereditary titles. Such a man was not a member of the imperial suite, he was not a prince or a baron, but he was a nobleman and had earned the right to be addressed as Your High Excellency or Your Excellency , and his name would be added to the list from which invitations to the twelve balls at the Winter Palace were drawn. Anna and her children had been given those rights. Why could they not eventually be mine?

Yes, No. 18, English Prospekt was an address with a rich history, a history particularly resonant for me, though from its hard lessons, I, of course, learned nothing. Because the old grand duke, a navy commander with a pretty face, expected, always, to be assassinated like his brother Tsar Alexander II—mutilated on the street by bomb-throwing revolutionaries, the People’s Will terrorists—for the ground floor he’d had specially crafted steel shutters, as thick as the steel hulls of the ships he ruled. The rooms on the ground floor were otherwise outfitted fashionably in the European style, with heavy mirrors, French consoles, and delicate sofas. The bedroom I took for my own was the only room I bothered to change. Like a girl who fusses over one of her dolls and neglects all the rest, I changed not one iota of any other room in the house. For me, the bedroom was the only room of any importance—my fate would be determined there. Would I be worth the rubles Nicholas was prepared to spend on me?

For he paid my rent and paid also the salaries of my three servants—three, while the Winter Palace has six thousand when the imperial family is in residence—and this was the gossip of the capital. I remember one evening coming home from the Maryinsky, I passed my brother Josef on his bicycle, wearing his gray felt over-shoes and a fur-trimmed greatcoat, and he called to me that I should hurry, that someone on the street had told him the tsarevich was already headed to my house! The whole city knew my business. In the theater that year on Nicholas’s name day the audience laughed when the baritone in Iolanta sang, Who can compare with my Matilda? If the court only knew that at Niki’s visits to my house of ill repute he sat not by me on the small sofa, but by himself in the Louis XIV armchair opposite, as if we were formal acquaintances and he had laid his card on the salver in the entry. The setting of our new house inhibited rather than advanced our flirtation. I realized too late: here is a man who likes to dream of love, who likes the idea of a woman, but not the woman herself, who prefers a white-skinned ballerina who dances on the other side of the footlights, a mistress who is a virgin and lives in her father’s house.

I had made, perhaps, a mistake. I had miscalculated. But there I sat in the house he paid for. And there he sat, in his evening clothes, his frock coat with the gold braiding, his broad white shirtfront with the starched collar that cut a sharp vee. His body drawn away from me, he smoked his thin cigarettes in his holder with his left hand and with his right he stroked his moustache as he told me he would be tormented his whole life if he took my virginity, that if I hadn’t been a virgin he would not have hesitated to make love to me. Even in my naïveté, I knew this to be an excuse, though for what I was not sure. What purpose had I and this house if not consummation? Why had he rented it for me—out of courtesy because I had asked him to?

I began to wish I had never moved away from my parents’ house. I missed the bedroom I shared with my sister and our late-night family dinners when we had all returned from the theater, where, talking over one another, we would vie to tell my mother whose wig had slipped and who had forgotten what step and where a stagehand had begun to crank up the whirlwind and send branches and leaves flying before his cue. My father would employ his considerable talent as a mimic to demonstrate exactly how Pavel Gerdt, a little old now at almost fifty to play the Prince in Swan Lake , had come down flat-footed and huffing from a single, effortful leap. Why, he was so old that when Petipa had choreographed the pas de deux for him and his Swan Queen, the adagio had to be made a pas de trois, with the prince’s friend Benno to do most of the dancing of it while Gerdt did the lifting as the ballerina’s porteur . We would laugh, just the family, intimate and happy with one another, and my father would eventually bring out a bottle of cognac, but now I was alone, sitting awkwardly with this cipher in a frock coat, and they were still together, ignorant of my foundering. But I could not go back and face the humiliation my retreat would bring, my retreat as public as my advance, the gossip that even with privacy and opportunity I had been unable to lure the tsarevich to my bed. And, worse, I took it as proof that his feelings for me did not match mine for him, and I thought by force of will I could make his grow. And so I began to badger him, always an attractive behavior in a woman. When , I asked him, when, will you sleep with me? He told me, Soon, soon . And I would say, How can you say you love me?

Ah, and here’s the thing. I fear he did not. He was already in love with someone else and had been for years.

His beloved? Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. Niki had met her when he was sixteen and she twelve. Twelve! Alix was all I was not—a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, a princess who was the daughter of a princess, though the house of Hesse-Darmstadt into which she had been born was not grand. She had first come to Petersburg in 1884, while I was still a student at the Theater Schools, to attend the wedding of her sister Ella to another of Niki’s many uncles—in fact, there were so many Romanov brothers and uncles and sons that Niki’s father was forced to reconfigure and reduce the appanages and titles, making some sons grand dukes and others merely princes so that the treasury would not run out of money. At her sister’s wedding, Alix in a white muslin dress stood beside her sister the bride in a magnificent brocaded court gown. Alix’s blonde, blonde hair was almost as pale as her skin, and Niki’s soul bound itself to her pristine purity. And, I think, as well, to her sorrow, the black that saturated her at age six, when her mother and her little sister died of diphtheria in the same week, and she was left alone in a nursery with a set of new dolls staring at her with their black-pupiled eyes. Her old dolls had been thrown out for fear of contagion, their bodies and dresses and shoes burned to ash, her mother and sister abruptly buried, the house a tornado that left her untouched in the corner. Her nickname, Sunny, never suited her again, and this reserve tugged at Nicholas, answered a reserve in him, born of his grandfather’s violent death and the domineering personality of his father.