Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

All those long summer afternoons of 1901, when Alix and her four daughters lay down all unknowing at Peterhof for their naps, Nicholas would set aside the papers his ministers had brought him from Petersburg in the special leather pouch stamped with the imperial insignia, and he would mount his horse and ride the twelve versts to my dacha. He had asked me to empty my house that summer for his visits—Sergei was with his regiment at Krasnoye Selo, I hosted no parties, invited no one to stay, gave my servants each afternoon off—and so there was no one to see us when we walked into the woods in search of the mushrooms Sergei had had planted for me or when Niki himself filled my birch-bark basket with the black and brown caps, which I would stew with butter and cream. I did not have my father’s culinary talents, but I could do this much for the tsar. We would sit on the veranda and eat with our fingers, like two children left to their own devices while the adults went out visiting. Before we went to bed, we licked each other’s fingers clean. The fingers he once licked of butter are puckered now and dry, but not then, and not his either. That summer I did not wear my cup of beeswax nor did the emperor wear a sheath, and though he said nothing I knew what he wanted, a son, against the drip, drip, drip of all those girls. The sun rises before five in that month and makes a leisurely arc across the sky, and because the sun took so long a roll west, our afternoons together were endless; our lovemaking was slow and long and breathless in the heat. When it neared the dinner hour, only then did he rise from the bed, and I drew him a bath in the dacha’s biggest tub, which still was not deep enough or long enough for him. In the bathrooms in each of his apartments in each of his palaces had been installed a sunken tub in which he could completely immerse himself. In my mansion on Kronversky Prospekt I would build him such a tub, but we are two years from there yet. We take our bathing seriously in my country—every estate had its own bathhouse and the blocks of every city were dotted with them—bathhouses complete with Persian carpets, wood paneling, potted palms, and male attendants bearing trays of brandy and cigars. The men, smoking and drinking, would dip in the pool. Then they sat in the sauna while the pages beat them with birch twigs or else they retired to a private room where a page would allow himself, for a fee, to be corrupted. For Niki, I served as such a page, and in my dacha he folded his limbs into my tub, where I poured in the oil he loved of bergamot, bitter orange, and rosemary, and sponged him first with that water and then with fresh as he lay there, cigarette between his teeth, head back against the porcelain rim. The window above the tub let in air pungent with grasses, pine, and birch, the scent seized and intensified by the steam rising from the water. In this sweet haze his fingers would play against my fingers and sometimes he would turn his face to me, and I would begin then to dread his leaving, the emptiness of the dacha once he had, and the specter of Sergei, which seemed to walk the rooms at the tsar’s exit. I would sometimes run after it to say, I’m sorry. You know he was my first love . Sometimes my fingers would drum the rim of the tub in anticipatory dread, and the tsar would calm my fingers with his own. Finally, though, Niki would have to stand, water sluicing off his body as the waters in the fountain at Peterhof sluiced down the gilded body of Samson, the estate and the evening there a relentless slice of boredom to which the tsar must now return, to face dinner, embroidery, reading aloud, perhaps the showing of a film from which, at the empress’s insistence, the indecorous moments had been removed. To all this the tsar was subject, as he was subject to the continuing predictions of M. Philippe, who assured him that for Anastasia to have been born when all signs of the sun and moon and stars pointed to the birth of a son must mean that she was marked for an extraordinary life. The next child would most certainly be a son, for Anastasia had paved the way. And through all this nonsense, the tsar kept his silence.

Poor Anastasia. I met her briefly in Paris, in 1928, with my husband, in the compartment of a train at the Gare du Nord, eight years after she had been fished out of that Berlin canal and given her name as Frau Tchaikovsky. Yes, Anastasia had had an extraordinary life, though I doubt M. Philippe could have foreseen its exact dimensions. None of the Romanovs but Niki’s sister Olga would see her, and then denounced her as a fraud. Olga had known Anastasia best, having been the one member of the family still visiting Niki and the girls even as late as 1913, when the family summered, as usual, at Livadia, where she gave Anastasia painting lessons. But it was hard, you see, to know for certain if Frau Tchaikovsky was in fact Anastasia, as girls change so much in appearance between the ages of twelve and twenty-seven, even girls who had not seen their families murdered and who had then crawled across Russia to Berlin. And as Niki and Alix broke completely from the rest of the family after the tercentenary of 1913 over the issue of Rasputin, no one saw the girls after that. By 1916, Niki was no longer even exchanging Christmas presents with his brothers and sisters and cousins and their families. But I saw Anastasia, in 1917, just before Niki abdicated. She was then almost sixteen. And so, I knew it was she in the train compartment. Or, rather, I knew an opportunist when I saw one. And why should she not have her opportunity? What harm was there in it? I stepped from the compartment and said, I have seen the tsar’s daughter . In 1967 I said it again to the French director Gilbert Prouteau for his documentary Dossier Anastasia . He came to film right here in my bedroom. He addressed me as Princess . I was considered an expert, an insider, an authority on the Romanov family. More of an authority than he knew. Yes, I told M. Prouteau, she had the tsar’s eyes. I could not mistake them. I knew those eyes very well . Ah, that made M. Prouteau very happy.

So. So. Where am I?

At the end of that summer of 1901, just before the emperor was due to join Sergei and the court for maneuvers at Krasnoye Selo, I knew I was pregnant. If I was pregnant with a son, this would change the tsar, me, and the country. So to prepare the way for this announcement, I brought the tsar sturgeon, black bread, and caviar to his bed. I found his cigarettes. I drew his bath. I would tell him while he lay in the tub, when his mind was relaxed and his heart open to me. In my mind’s eye I could already see his smile, his slow disbelief turning to comprehension, and the birth again of hope and faith: he would have a son. When I came to the bedroom to tell him his bath was ready, he was still lying on his back, smoking, his slow exhalations sending long shots of smoke up to the high ceiling, which then disappeared halfway there. At my entrance, the tsar sat up and stubbed out his cigarette on the small porcelain dish with the remains of the bread and cleared his throat. Mala , he said, I have something to tell you . And so, of course, I let the tsar speak first.

How many times have I replayed in my mind the different unfolding of events had I spoken first! For what he told me was that Alix was pregnant again and that M. Philippe, la surprise grande , had declared with dead certainty that this time she would have a son. I would have laughed had I not been choked by a spasm in my larynx that kept me from either breathing or speaking. Probably a good thing, for if I had spoken, I’m sure I would have said something to regret, as always. I felt the way I did a thousand times over when trumped, unexpectedly, at vint. Why, our afternoons together had been just another wild troika ride across a great plain, and that ride had brought us to this same place. I had been deceiving myself all summer. I had not had Niki to myself as I had thought. I had counted on his fidelity for at least the eight weeks that followed the birth of Anastasia in June, at least until Alix stopped the bleeding that follows childbirth. But no, the French butcher’s son and the German baby-making machine had not waited even that long before their quest for an heir began in earnest once again. There were three of them in the bedroom at each coitus, Alix and Niki in the bed, M. Philippe in the corner, intoning some prayer. I am nothing in myself. I act in the name of the divine.