Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

I’ve told you Tchaikovsky died of cholera from the drinking water? Well, even the tsar’s daughter Tatiana would grow sick one year from the water. I had to pinch my nose when I stepped out of my house at No. 18 and I no longer wanted to stroll by what were now the putrid canals and river. Unfortunately, in the early 1900s disease lurked everywhere in beautiful Peter, and it surprised even the tsar, while his ministers refused to build the suburban housing that could help alleviate the crowding and the disease, saying, But we’re an agrarian society , when clearly what we were was something else entirely. Russia’s land, not much of which was fertile, was so over worked the peasants couldn’t farm it. In 1892, the peasants in Simbirsk starved in a famine so terrible that when a charity sent children’s clothes to the province, the clothes were returned. There were no children left to wear them. You can see why over the next decade peasants flooded the cities.

And from this devastating famine the sentiments of the Decembrists of 1825, long suppressed, were reawakened. Those nobleman officers who had fought Napoleon alongside the peasant infantry saw that the foot soldiers they commanded were men, who deserved to be treated by the regime as men, not as serf beasts. And now, this new generation at the end of the century, a generation of intellectuals and students and revolutionaries, saw the same and said so. They demonstrated against the regime and joined the Union of Liberation, the Marxist Social Democrats, the Social Revolutionaries, and so just as his father had, Niki was forced to repress what threatened the crown. He hunted down and conscripted, exiled, or imprisoned the groups’ leaders. Did I think of these things then? Ponder the unjust treatment of the peasantry or the need for a constitution? I wish I could say yes, but I had more pressing concerns.

For I heard that while in the Crimea nursing Niki, Alix discovered she was pregnant again, and she told the family she was certain that she was carrying, this time, a son. This news from Sergei—that Niki was gravely ill and that Alix was carrying a son and heir—had me halfway between frustration and despair. Her pregnancy and his illness were her great victories, her chance to revive his flagging affection for her with his gratitude. What an opportunity! She could have designed no better one and she must have known this for she kept a steady vigil by Niki in the darkened bedroom. If only the tsar had been this sick with me—I would have nursed him so well I would have won him over completely! Sergei told me Alix reported Niki was so weak he could not crawl from his bed to his dresser. The light hurt the tsar’s feverish eyes and one small ray sent spasmodic pain through his neck, back, and legs. He was so weak he could not hold a spoon or a pen or scratch out the few words of a ukase . If only when he opened his aching eyes he could have seen me before him with the spoonful of broth and the cool rag for his forehead. But he saw Alix. The old palace at Livadia, always humid and moldering, seemed to be decaying about them. The whole of the Great Palace was dark, covered up by shrubbery and arcades and loggias all run over by honeysuckle and wild roses and ivy, which shut out the sunlight—and the mahogany paneling of the interiors quickly absorbed whatever light pierced that fortress. Against even that, Alix shut the drapes and so shut out the world. Alix’s panic had stolen from her the pains of her weak heart and her sciatica, the pain that usually kept her in bed or confined to a wicker wheelchair, and now she had energy, the frantic energy terror provides. While her children and Xenia’s ran back and forth along the “imperial trail,” the brambled path between Livadia and Xenia’s palace of Ai Todor, a progress Alix normally assiduously monitored, she sat instead in her sweat-soaked muslin feeding the tsar spoonfuls of soup, relieved only by Mrs. Orchard, the one servant she fully trusted, this her own nanny whom she had brought from England when Olga was born to help her carve order from the free-flowing splendor of our long Asiatic Russian summer days and the long darkness of our winter ones. Mrs. Orchard had been there when the black cyclone of diphtheria had sucked up Alix’s mother and sister and then let them fall back down lifeless, and surely with Mrs. Orchard by her God would not dare take her husband from her as well. Without him, she had no center to her world, only these children, these tinies , little leaves, the oldest of them five, and this baby inside her, a life of so few weeks it did not yet have a discernible shape and without Niki would have no discernible future. She knew what would happen: if Niki died she would be consigned to one of the palaces to quietly raise the children of the former tsar, while someone else moved into Tsarskoye Selo, Peterhof, Livadia, the Grand Kremlin Palace, her appanage and those of her children reduced and their places at court pushed upstage, against the water. Instead of being grand duchesses, her daughters would be merely princesses, and her son, instead of tsar, a prince. Here in Petersburg, Sergei told me, Count Witte and Baron Freedericks and the grand duke uncles and great-uncles were already conferring about the line of succession and the dowager empress was maneuvering to have Niki’s brother Mikhail made heir to keep Vladimir or Nikolasha from crawling onto the throne. Niki’s brother George, who had been the heir apparent, had died the year before, in the Caucasus, at Abas Tuman, where he had been living quietly, isolated from the family, hoping the climate would cure him of his tuberculosis. But no such luck. He had had a hemorrhage while riding his bicycle and he was found by the side of a road by the attendants charged with his care, dead in the shadow of the great Kazbek mountain. And now the tsar’s handsome but foolish youngest brother Mikhail must quickly be declared heir, for how likely was it that Alix would produce a boy? Not likely. No, Mikhail was heir and he would remain so until Alix produced a boy. The family rose up against her in a dress rehearsal of their complete retreat from her a decade and a half later, when they would plot to force Niki’s abdication and her own confinement in a convent. This time the family merely stirred and rustled and strutted, but from this, Alix understood that Niki’s family were her enemies. But if the tsar recovered and she had a boy, they would have to walk on their knees to her.

And so Alix put her lips to the whorl of her patient’s ear and whispered: Make me regent for your son. Declare your brother only temporary heir, not tsarevich. Ignore your mother. I am sure I am carrying a boy . I had to give her credit: she was not without plots and schemes and capers. And in his superheated dreams Niki, too, could see what she saw, the landscape of disempowerment, trees without leaves, stalks without flowers, smoke and ash. Even I, in St. Petersburg, could see it—for that future was also my own and it rolled toward me with the news of Niki’s illness. I might never have a chance to complete my destiny with Niki and I had so many plots and schemes and capers myself. I had seen Alix as my nemesis for so long I forgot to worry about assassination or illness. Many people died of typhus. I might never see Niki alive again. I tried to bring up the picture of him as he rode past my dacha, but I kept seeing my own self in my white dress with my pretty long hair instead. I should have worn a ribbon. I lay on my bed at Strelna one whole day in my nightgown—an eternity!—waiting for news of the tsar’s death, but that news never came, and, after all, how long can one stay in bed? I had to get up. And so, eventually, did the tsar.

By December, he was sitting up in his chair.