Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

I remember it was Nikolai Legat, my dear Kolinka, who partnered me in my adagio and oh, he was lovely to look at then, with dark, curly hair, eyes as large as two slices of orange, and a lower lip a woman would enjoy biting. It was Kolinka Legat who uncovered for me the secret of Legnani’s endless series of fouettés by scrutinizing her during rehearsals for Act III of Swan Lake , and it was he who coached me until I too could snap my head round while focusing on a spot center front, the trick by which one could whip the series of thirty-two turns without pitching over. (I presented him with a monogrammed gold cigarette case for his trouble.) I was an Ear of Corn, but I decided to behave that night not like a cheerful vegetable in a raspy husk, but like a flesh-and-blood woman bewitched by her lover. Our formulated and regimented choreography—put one’s head together here with one’s partner’s, then turn and place this hand there and that one here—so often produced a mechanical effect in adagio, a cursory approximation of love. But tonight, and not for the last time, I decided to channel my feelings for Niki, using the unwitting Kolinka as medium. I didn’t think he, being already a friend, would mind. Perhaps I overplayed my part a bit, looking too amorously into his eyes and then turning to the eyes of the tsar so close to me. At one point, I held out my hand to the tsar before furling my arm back and touching my palm to Kolinka’s. This went on for some time, until finally Kolinka whispered from behind while supporting me in arabesque, Mala, what are you up to? I almost laughed.

And did my efforts have the desired effect? I believe so. The tsar had no eyes for Winter’s Frost, Rose of Summer, Bacchante, for the empress herself, sitting there looking at him with an increasingly dour face. I forgot to look for Sergei’s. The empress might not be pleased by what she saw on the stage, but the Ear of Corn certainly pleased the tsar.

Sergei told me later that in the Hermitage gallery Niki had leaned toward him beneath a Rembrandt after the main courses and salad but before dessert while lighting up his little yellow cigarette to say, Mala looked very beautiful tonight . Which Niki expected Sergei, pleased by the tsar’s approbation, to dutifully repeat to me. And Sergei was pleased, but he was also wary.

What would happen next?

A meeting of sorts.

It was only a few months later that the chief of police called to tell me the emperor would be passing by my dacha on the road from Peterhof to Strelna at one o’clock and that I must be sure to be standing in the garden where the tsar could see me.

It was the first of such calls, which time would teach me to receive with greater dignity than I did that day. When I put down the receiver I screamed. Then I ran about, for I had little time, sprinting around the garden from this bench to that flower bed, trying to decide which perch would offer the best sight lines from the road. I believe I even considered sitting on the top of my fountain, but I ended up choosing the obvious stone bench, upon which first I sat and then I stood, on tiptoe, so eager was I to be certain Nicholas could see me over the clipped hedge that divided my garden from the road. In the heat the air seemed to me to be swirling and liquid, thick with the sea lapping at the bottom of my garden, which was suddenly and ferociously in bloom, as happens in Russia—after the long winter, the sudden spring, so sudden it shocks one. I felt a bit like one of the dwarves or Africans kept by the old Russian counts for amusement—or worse, like one of the unfortunate serfs forced to paint herself white and pose in the garden like a statue as her master rode past.

At the sound of Niki’s approach I stood on tiptoe and arranged my hair, which I had pinned only half up, leaving the bulk of it down my back like a young girl who has not yet been presented—it was my garden, I reasoned, where one could expect to be left alone, and so if my hair was in charming dishabille, it seemed circumstances might allow it. Girls dance without wigs now on the stages of Paris, London, and New York—but for me that is hard to imagine, one’s hair is as private as the hair on one’s body beneath a tutu; to expose one’s head to an audience is like undressing before it. No. I always wore a wig. But not for this impromptu program.

The sovereign’s carriage at last appeared over the edge of the hill and its appearance surprised me—I had been expecting Nicholas to approach on his horse. And then I saw: the empress sat in the carriage beside him. The empress? Why? Did she feel Niki needed a chaperone on his ride by my dacha? As they neared, I curtseyed and they bowed, but I saw her eyes were on him as he inclined his head toward me, one hand raised against the sun. A bit of a smile, forced, flat. Nothing from her but that bent head. They passed. And I understood it all. She had bristled at his ogling of me at the Hermitage, and they had fought and he had denied it and she had insisted on this ride by my dacha for the purpose of watching his face, to see if her suspicions were correct, that Niki was tiring of her, of her illnesses and of her predilection for producing girls, and that his thoughts were curling back to me. And Sergei—Sergei must have known this and yet he must have been concealing it from me in order to keep me for himself. Selfish. I said a quick selfish prayer myself to the back of Niki’s carriage, the wheels raising yellow dust mixed with pollen, praying that the one minute in which Niki’s carriage rode past my garden would be long enough to remind him of the color and texture of my hair and the alabaster sheen of my skin, which I once pressed beneath his brown body, browned from his naked summertime dips in the Black Sea, and, more important, that his face would reveal his memories of this and that he would fail his test, fail it miserably.

I’m sure he meant to come to me, soon, and alone, but that spring of 1900 while he lingered in the Crimea, where he should have been safe from the cholera and typhus of Petersburg, Niki was stricken with the latter. Niki called Peter the bog , and he left it behind each spring for the fragrance and the blossoms of the Crimean tropics, the lilies, the lilacs, the violets, the orchids, the wisteria and roses and magnolia, left behind Peter’s flooded streets and gardens and stairways. For in the late spring the Neva rose as the ice melted and water flooded the city. Rats swam through the rivers made of the streets, long tails a whiplash in the eddies, their basement houses drowning pools. Disease had become a problem now that the city had become clogged with factories and the factories clotted with the peasants who left their villages at the end of the summer harvest to look for work and ended up staying here year-round, shackled to all the new industries: the metalworks, the engineering works, the electrical plants. You’d see whole families, women in their homemade blouses and kerchiefs, men with their bowl haircuts and filthy beards, and this was a new phenomenon in Peter, not the peasants, for we always had peasants there, working as our maids and chauffeurs and stable hands and bath attendants and laundresses and prostitutes, but these peasant families working at the factories now crowding up to English Prospekt and spotting the Vyborg side of the city, filling the adjacent Little Neva with their waste. The workers slept together in flophouses or cellars or stairways or shared apartments, sixteen to a room, or they slept on plank beds in the factory barracks or on makeshift mattresses of dirty clothes piled by the side of their machines, and they filled the backyards of the tenements with excrement, and that was why we had so much typhus and cholera all of a sudden in our city.