Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Soon after our first night together, he opened up his fat purse and bought me a dacha at Strelna on the gulf, at No. 2, Berezoviya Alleya, where the nobility summered, where my property ran right up to the edge of Konstantin Palace, separated from its stables by only a slender canal. My house with its wooden turret lay by a grove of birch trees; a private road led to my own beach. Ornamental iron gates with hedges on either side guarded the entrance to my park. A stone pig, a stone frog, and a stone rabbit made as if to drink from a fountain on the back lawn. My park stretched to the gulf, with trees that hit the sky at the edge of it and shook like black feathers in the night wind. Eventually, I would have an orangerie, an ice house, a greenhouse, a barn, and a pier for my own boat. Better than a diamond necklace, no?, for at Strelna I could string Romanovs about me each summer. Why, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, Niki’s cousin, later put me into one of his poems, so thoroughly did I make certain to ingratiate myself with them, bicycling up and down the roads to their various palaces, learning with what they thought was their help to do fine figure eights on my cycle, holding receptions and parties, which the grand dukes, without their wives, began to attend, for, like my father, I knew how to entertain well and could do so on Sergei’s money. Yes, K.R. memorialized one of those afternoon parties:

That bayaderka was I, at Strelna, at my dacha down the hill from his palace! So easily could I have been forgotten. But Sergei, upended by love, let the rubles from his pockets fall all over me and made me shiny.

In a show of my gratitude, I designed a gold medallion for Sergei with a portrait of me in the center and engraved in a circle about my face the inscription August 21st—Mala—September 25th , in memory of our first happy days at the dacha he’d bought me. To the medallion I added a ten-kopek coin from the year of Sergei’s birth, 1869. He was only three years older than I, but in his hands he held so much power. And in my hands I held his heart. He would wear that little charm the rest of his life.

Should I have felt guilty? Why? Love, even unrequited love, is still a gift. Who knew this better than I?

Do you remember the queen in her castle by the Terek River from the Georgian song Sergei and his brothers used to sing, the one who ravished her lovers and then pushed them out her bedroom window? If they survived the fall, the rocks beneath that swift-moving river cut their bodies as they tumbled in the current. Those rocks, for Sergei, were no doubt the purgatory of our conversations, which were so often about Niki, or Niki and Alix, conversations that were idle lovers’ talk between us at first but then became, to Sergei’s discomfort, obligatory before bedding me. But if he was the suitor, I was the river queen, for to me, as well as to her, was appended a dreadful reputation. I was now yet one more debased mistress of a Romanov, and mothers warned their daughters not to talk to me. That fall when I saw a little group of students from the ballet school toddling in their penguins in the frigid air, I had my driver stop for them, and I called to them, Girls, girls, come in here with me . But they would not ride in my carriage, not even the few hundred yards up Theater Street. They shook their heads, said, Spasibo , but would not climb up into the perfumed warmth, would not nestle with me beneath my sable lap robes. She’s wicked! I heard one of them say to another as I gave up and shut my carriage door. Wicked .

Then the illness that had weakened the great tsar at the start of 1894, that had sickened him further in the summer, in the cold of autumn, cut him down. He died in Livadia, in the Crimea, at the bottom of the country, near the Black Sea, which was not black but a brilliant blue, wild roses and honeysuckle everywhere on the slopes that led down to it. So many varieties of flowers grew in the Crimea they were sent by train all winter to Petersburg to decorate the great ballrooms of the Winter Palace, the Vladimir Palace, the Mikhailovsky Palace, the Sheremetiev Palace. But the old wooden palace in Livadia where the great tsar died, with its wood balconies and galleries like those of the palaces of the old Crimean khans, was not grand but dark and damp. I saw it only when it was abandoned. A white cross drawn on the floor of Emperor Alexander’s sitting room, where he had sat suffering in the big chair and breathed his last, remained there still, flecked and faint, but visible. An hour after his death the new tsar, Nicholas II, took the oath of allegiance on the palace lawn while the old tsar received his last salvo from the warships out in Yalta Harbor. Alexander’s doctors had wanted him to go abroad, to the dry air of Egypt, but the tsar had agreed only to go south, to the Crimea, because he knew he was dying and because a tsar should die in Russia. A tsar should die in Russia, the place where he passed marked, like the floor at Livadia. The chair in which the tsar died and the props that surrounded it were treated like relics, pieces of the divine. It was the same for all the tsars. The bedroom in the Winter Palace where Niki’s grandfather died stood as it had in his last hour—a cigarette butt propped in an ashtray, handkerchiefs resting on the tables and chairs within easy reach, the stained linen unchanged beneath the coverlet. At Gatchina, behind a sealed door, was hidden the bloody bed from the Mikhailovsky Palace in which the body of Paul I, murdered by his guards and officers, had been laid. Niki told me once that he and his sister Olga used to see Paul’s ghost flickering past the windows of the Mikhailovsky, searching for his bed. And what would he do when he found it, I wondered. Lie down in it? Would he finally be able to rest? But he never found it, and so it remained, sealed off, a relic no one wanted to venerate, an evil no one wanted even to see. The House of Special Purpose in Ekaterinburg where Niki was murdered stands empty, I hear, untouched; the bullet-pocked basement walls have not been replastered.

When I dream now of Nicholas, I see him as I imagined he looked on the day of his death, aged, great creases running the sides of his face and disappearing into his beard, blue eyes cosseted by pouches of flesh. His khaki tunic is bullet-ridden, ruined by dozens of holes, the edges of them charred and ragged, but his face, his limbs are intact. In my dream, Niki stands before me with those sad eyes and raises a hand to me. What? What do you want? I ask him. What could I possibly give him now that I hadn’t offered him when he was alive? But he doesn’t speak, just offers his hand. What else can he offer but that hand, the hand of a dead man?

Did I tell you that in London, at Buckingham Palace, when Niki’s sister Xenia arrived there at the end of her flight from revolutionary Russia, her servants fell to their knees at the sight of King George? They beheld what they thought was the resurrected figure of their tsar. He looked just like Niki, you know.

But I was speaking of his father’s death.

Because Alexander III died so far from Petersburg, his body journeyed by train one last time across the Russia he had ruled—three thousand miles north from the station at Sevastopol in the Crimea to the Nikolaevsky Station in Petersburg, up through the Ukraine to Moscow and from there northwest to Petersburg, through the countryside where the barons and squires lived in manor houses that would be, in twenty years, ravaged to their foundations, stripped by the peasantry of every good, including the door frames and windowsills so that the walls stood gaping, guarding nothing. But in 1894, the old order stood intact and the peasants lined the tracks to see their tsar’s body borne back to the capital.