Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

It seemed even the days shortened themselves in mourning. I remember how, at a certain hour, the shadows seemed to race across the streets and canals toward my house and then engulf it. All the soft white spokes of the blossoms and the green leaves had long fallen from the beech trees, and they lay sodden and rotting beneath the snow. The heavy white branches of the trees crept so close to my bedroom window the ends of them scratched against the glass as if a woman were perched out there, clawing to get in. One night, waiting for the tsarevich, I sat at the table in the long narrow dining room and stared at the oak paneling that ran from floor to ceiling. The nicks and swirls and grain of it seemed to assemble themselves into the features of my father’s face, and once I had seen it as such I could not unsee it, could not dismantle his likeness from the striations of the wood. I stood and still I saw him. I moved left and right and his eyes followed me, and then, as I stood in the dining-room doorway, it seemed the full figure of my father emerged from the paneled wall, and grained just like the wood, but diaphanous, stood there, gazing at me sadly. But when I jumped up to touch him, running my hands over the paneling, I couldn’t find his shape—all was smooth.

That was the night Niki told me that he was going to Coburg in his father’s place for the wedding of Alix’s brother Ernest, the grand duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, and there he was going to propose once again to Alix. His right hand pulled at his collar; his left closed over his cap and gloves. His position obliged him to take a consort from a ruling house and Romanovs had been raiding the German principalities for their wives for a century: Leuchtenberg, Wurtemburg, Saxe-Attenberg, Oldenburg, Mecklenburg, Hesse-Darmstadt. He would, he said, take care of me, but I must understand that we ourselves could never marry. Alix was a princess, she was the sister of his uncle’s wife, she knew Russia a little through her sister, and here I interjected, She doesn’t even know the Russian word for yes! His parents had agreed to the match. So Niki’s father had gone soft with suffering, soft enough to consent to Niki’s desire to marry this stiff-necked, minor German princess who clung to her Protestant religion as if it were a lover. I had lost my ally and it seemed I might now lose Niki, who seemed determined this time that Alix accept his proposal. She’ll refuse you , I told him, and he shook his head and smiled. I put my hands on my hips, but I could not summon the energy for an exhibition of Her Imperial Indignation . I could see that what Niki wanted at sixteen, at twenty-one, at twenty-six, he still wanted, and that something was not me. I was not solemn and reserved, I was not educated, I spoke only Russian, a child’s version of Polish, and a smattering of French ballet terms, and none of those was the language of the court. I had read few books, my religion mattered little to me, I was trivial, I adored cards and parties, and worst of all, I appeared half-naked on the stage. Everything I was was wrong, everything I lacked he desired. What had been for me a passion had been for him a diversion, or worse, a dress rehearsal. My body had only further primed his desire for Alix’s, with the red-gold hair, the pale skin, the long, manicured fingers, Alix’s body with its own distinctive scent waiting to be discovered, with its own distinctive cry waiting to be provoked. I did not want to be reasonable, I did not wish to behave, as he put it, like two adults .

No one likes her here , I told Niki, and You will be her only friend . And when those announcements did not seem to move him, I began to rummage about for the ring of Count Krassinsky I had begged from my father and stuffed away like a fool. Perhaps it was not too late to tell Niki the story behind it. Niki watched me for a while, perplexed and concerned, as I pulled open drawer after drawer and thrust my arms into them, begging him, Wait, wait . And he did wait, until I had given up looking and stood, a little lost, a doll flung down in mid-play by her distracted mistress. Then he finally lowered his omnipresent cigarette and told me, You will always be among the happiest memories of my youth , and I told him, Go then. Go to your despicable Alix . And those were the last words I said to him before his engagement.

It was March and snowing in Russia when Niki left for Coburg. My life, at twenty-one years, was over. I lay like a frozen corpse in my bed that week, watching the white blur the wind made outside my dark bedroom window, the ring of Count Krassinsky, which I had found, too late, a tiny bit of ice in my fist. In Germany that year, though, March brought with it an early spring, lilac blossoms, pendulous and heavy, making soft purple bows as Niki strolled through the palace park with his consort, Alix, on his arm.

Later that March, Niki dispatched his cousin Sergei, one of those Mikhailovichi cousins, to my house to tell me that Alix had at last accepted his proposal. Niki had written all the family from Germany of his jubilation that his prayers had been answered, of how Alix had wept for three days, saying, I cannot, I cannot , before finally agreeing, Yes, I will marry you . If I had been there, I would have slapped her. What could possibly be her hesitation?—not that I was sorry she hesitated. But, apparently, according to Sergei, it was only when Alix apprehended that her brother’s new bride would replace her as the first lady of Hesse-Darmstadt and that Alix would now become the spinster sister-in-law that she changed her mind. How better to upstage the bride, Victoria Melita—and oh, I must tell you this, she was not long the bride, for she later divorced Alix’s brother to marry one of Vladimir and Miechen’s sons (is that not unbelievable?)—what better way to upstage the bride than to become the future empress of All the Russias? Niki and Alix’s engagement, Sergei told me, immediately became the talk of Coburg. Even Niki’s mother wrote to dear Alix to ask if she preferred diamonds, sapphires, or emeralds. Why, Alix liked diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls, apparently: to honor their engagement, Nicholas gave Alix a matching ring and necklace of pink pearl, an emerald the size of an egg dangling from a bracelet, a sapphire-and-diamond brooch, and a sautoire created by Fabergé of so many ropes of pearls Alix could drape them from her bodice to her hem. Niki could not have paid for this—any of this. That last piece alone cost 250,000 rubles. The money had to have come from his father. The first of many imperial rubles spent on Alix of Hesse.

I walked the floors of my Petersburg house, the house I hated now, and as I walked I could hear the pistol-shot sounds of the ice of the Neva cracking and breaking up, and soon enough the cold water would begin to move again, blocks of ice hurtling along with the current from Lagoda and the current bringing with it Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. Sergei followed me awkwardly in his overpolished boots, his voice a trail of vapors, the syllables breaking apart as soon as he uttered a word. Poof. Poor Sergei, following a madwoman through her rented home, trying to reason with her. I did not want to be reasoned with. I believe I actually pulled at my hair. I ran through the austere reception rooms, their octagonal tables crimped with gilt, their feather-stuffed settees, their dark-wood rococo-revival chairs with backs like laced antlers, all the artifacts of that old grand duke’s ambition and the artifacts of mine, and then circled back into the private rooms, the Russian rooms, with their mustard and lime walls, their bloodred oriental rugs, and the framed photographs of my parents, who had warned me not to leave them. Sergei followed me all the while, his high, broad forehead all twisted up and his gentle eyes full of pity—no jokes to tell me now! No, instead he tried to tell me how Niki planned to settle on me 100,000 rubles and the house on English Prospekt. I knew the tsarevich did not have unlimited funds. The 100,000 rubles represented his entire appanage of a year, the only money whose use he did not have to account for. The house itself, at 400,000 rubles, would have to be bought for me, as I found out later, by the Potato Club—for Niki’s cousins each earned a grand ducal appanage of 200,000 rubles a year, as well as income from their own and their father’s enormous estates. Yes, Niki was quite the stepchild, in comparison, as tsarevich. So in an act of brotherhood to help the tsarevich wash himself clean of me, the Potato Club made a great fountain of its money. Apparently, the tsar Alexander III, who had seated me with Niki on my graduation day and who now hung ropes of pearls on Alix, would not put up a single kopek to pay off Niki’s little Polish whore.