Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

By January, he was back in Petersburg, to the relief of his mother and brother, and to the concealed disappointment of his grand duke uncles and older cousins.

By June, he was at Peterhof, where on the fifth of that month, to the curses of the entire imperial family, Alix gave birth to her fourth daughter, Anastasia.

And by the end of June, Niki rode the Volkhonsky High Road to my dacha at Strelna. His two Cossack bodyguards remained at the stables while we walked together back to the house, the wind trying to take from us our clothes, which we would take off soon enough, small leaves and twigs making targets of our faces and bodies, the whole afternoon suddenly aroar.

Ah, it is almost too painful to recall that triumphant afternoon as I lie here on this bed.

I will say that it seemed, after all, Niki had yielded to the ravenous nature of his grandfather who, not fully sated by his wife and mistress, commissioned from the artist Mikhail Alexandrovich Zichi pornographic engravings for further pleasure. This erotica—in one, Zichi had women impaled by winged phalluses as if the woman on her back receiving the phallus of the devil was not enough for him, that disembodied members must also be fornicating simultaneously beside him—was discovered locked in Alexander II’s desk at the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks when they ransacked the place in 1917. They later published the painting in books for all the world to see. What would the world ever come to know of this woman on her back, receiving the phallus of the tsar?

When we finished to his satisfied bellow, Niki sat up to locate his cigarettes, which were tucked, as always, in the pocket of his tunic or the pocket of his greatcoat, with him wherever he went; he put one in his holder, which was like any item he used or owned, no matter how small—a pen, an inkwell, a brush, a bottle—exquisite, made of silver or gold or inlaid with mother-of-pearl or encrusted with gems. He kept a collection of Fabergé cigarette cases in the dressing room of his bath. Did he possess any plain objects? I never saw one. The Bolsheviks couldn’t find any either when they stuffed their pockets with palace trinkets—even the embossed cakes of imperial soap made them pretty prizes. I sucked at one curled end of my hair, a childhood habit, and stared at the tsar, who sucked at his embellished cigarette holder, leaning forward every now and then to offer me a smoke, which, thanks to Sergei, I knew how to do. I would like to say I thought of the feelings of Sergei Mikhailovich at this time, not just the tricks he taught me, but I did not. I was thinking about the discouraging fact of the gold band glistening on the ring finger of Niki’s right hand and about the marvelous fact that he nonetheless lay naked in my bed. And he was now no longer a faun but a man; he wore a greater weight than he had six years earlier and grooves now scratched at the corners of his eyes, and those six years as emperor of the country and emperor of the bedroom had erased his hesitation, his reticence as a lover. I rested my chin on Niki’s thighs and made an idle fig leaf for him of my hair, while he sat against the pillows, smoking and looking out my window at the tall yellow and purple heads of the tulips in my garden, the boldest of those tulips so proud, so big, they couldn’t possibly know how the wind would peel them from their stalks before summer. Was he thinking of Sergei, whom he had just displaced? Of Alix, whom he had just betrayed? My mind was empty—pleasure and triumph had wiped it clean, but I could feel in a cupboard there a few words scrambling into formation, which then broke ranks when Niki said abruptly, Let’s walk .

He wanted us to wear little—my chemise and petticoat, his shirt loose over his breeches. He wanted to enjoy in the fragrant afternoon the nothingness of private people who can walk half-clothed in the gardens of their empty houses. I think he wanted in that moment not to be tsar or even to be himself. But my house was not empty, though to him it must have seemed to be. I had only my houseman and my cook and my yardman, but any one of them could look out a window and see Nicholas II in his billowing shirt walking beside me past the violets, the orange tips, the dahlias. And with what surprise would my servants regard him! And what would they think when they did? That the fortunes of this house were soon to rise? The tsar’s boot soles bent the grass. My bare feet skimmed the grass. At his coronation four years earlier Niki had been eclipsed by Alexandra’s height, made greater by her heels and her crown, and eclipsed also by her breadth, made wider by the stiff skirts of her court dress. By her side he , rather than she, seemed the consort, meager of stature, his chin receding into the neck of his mantle. She made him look slight, but at my side he stood majestic, his stride the stride of an emperor. It’s all in the proportions, as any scenic designer knows. A small castle on the backdrop is made to loom large in the distance. The second floor of a storefront is constructed at half the size of the first to give the illusion of greater height. A large spinning wheel dwarfs the girl. A dwarf by her side makes her a giant.

We walked all the way along my private road to the gulf, and his silence was so deep I thought wildly that when we got there perhaps he would expect us two fornicators to drown ourselves. The wind lifted his shirt and my chemise, but when we reached the water, he stopped walking and he made no motion to rope me to a big rock and roll me into the surf. No. He had in mind to talk. Whatever he wanted to say, he wanted to say here, outside, as if he did not want to be held accountable for these words, but to let the wind over the water take them from him as he spoke. Alix has been seeing a spiritual advisor, a Monsieur Philippe, and he has assured her she will bear me a son . He turned his face to me. He said this last child would be a boy . At the sight of yet another baby daughter in Alix’s arms, Niki told me, he had had to excuse himself from Alix’s bedside and walk the Peterhof palace park to master his disappointment. His sister Xenia’s reaction? My God, another girl! It had been six in the morning, but the dew had already dried from the speckled planes of the flowers, and Niki’s hope and faith had dried up along with it.

I had heard of M. Philippe Nazier-Vachot, the butcher’s assistant from France. All of Petersburg had heard of him. He lectured, in his ungrammatical French, about the heavenly orbs and the earth, which was once, according to him, a globe of fire, and offered up prophecies, all the while asserting, I am nothing in myself, I am the receptacle of God, I act in the name of the divine . His women disciples called him Master and they revered his psychic powers, believed that if he proclaimed them invisible they were so. Why, they would not even greet one another in the streets, for each believed herself as invisible as M. Philippe had promised, and therefore could not be seen by the others. If M. Philippe promised Alix she would bear a son, she would flatten herself beneath the tsar every night to make it so. But Niki had lost his taste for making love to Alix, he said, these six years of illness, paranoia, and desperation stripping from him his patience and his desire. Even her increasing mysticism he met with dismay. My mother barely speaks to her, my father, if he were alive, would have her put away . Niki had begun to use his study as a refuge, his ceaseless paperwork as barrier, darkness as tool of last resort. When it was her time of the month to conceive, he told me, grimacing, he managed his part by conjuring up his memories of my body, which was, here and now, exactly as he recalled it, exactly as it had been when I was twenty. And here he kissed my arms. Well, of course, I had not had four children and I was a dancer—an occupation that preserves the body better than a dip in formaldehyde. But I did not say any of that. Let him think what he wished about the marvelous condition of my beauty and the decrepitude of hers. Let him kiss the length of my arms. No, I reveled in his words. All this was what I had waited to hear, the thoughts too private for the tsar to reveal to Sergei, impossible to reveal given Sergei’s relations with me, relations Niki could halt with a word. If the tsar wished to reassume his place in my bed, Sergei, of course, would be nudged from it. Did I think, Where is the lighthearted young officer I fell in love with ten years ago and who is this beleaguered man in his place? No, I did not. I thought only about how I couldn’t wait to run back to my family, and to my father in particular, to tell him, The tsar still loves me! You were wrong. My idyll, after all, is not so short!