But for once I did not behave impetuously. I did not shriek at the emperor for relishing a diversion with me while still at the labor of sleeping with his wife. I did not pitch at him the hard sponge which I held in my hand. No, I closed my mouth around my secret. I, who had never kept a secret in my entire life, who ran to my father, to my sister, to this grand duke or that to prattle on about every perceived injury or splendiferous triumph—why, the hour after the tsar bedded me in 1893 I gave the telephone exchange my sister’s number so I could crow to her—yes, the details of that night flew from my mouth, but this summer and its secrets lay under my tongue and had no feathers. I thought, Better to wait, let Alix have another daughter, and then I will tell the tsar I had had his son.
So, Niki dressed and left me that day for the Great Review at Krasnoye Selo knowing nothing, and I have no memory of what else he said to me or what I said to him, whether he took the bath I drew for him or not, whether I watched him dress or not, or whether we kissed goodbye. I knew only that he would return to Alix and remain by her side during her confinement, and I would not see him for a long time. As soon as he disappeared over the bridge, I began to worry. What if I did not have a son? Another daughter would be of little interest to Niki and that lack of interest would not be enough to counter the scandal I was certain to endure. Not that I was that much afraid of scandal. Still, this would be scandal on a far grander scale than Will Mathilde wear a hooped petticoat? In this scandal the tsar had returned to his mistress and given her a child.
Society women who carried illegitimate children as the result of an affair retreated from public life, went abroad for the birth if they could, and adopted out their children. A woman who was a mistress gave birth at home and raised her child at the fringes of society, employing her protector’s connections to ennoble her child or find for him a place at court, in the Guards, or in the diplomatic corps. Even the child of a servant and an aristocrat could find some position—why, the governess of the tsar’s own children was such a one as that. And girls who had no protection, such as the poor girls in the ballet who had been made pregnant by the young officers who abandoned them, well, those girls were dismissed and went home to their families, and each in her own way struggled with the disgrace. I did not fit exactly into any of those categories. I was a mistress, but my child did not belong to my protector. I was a dancer who had been made pregnant, but my impregnator was not a young officer but the tsar. If Alix and I both had sons, she would campaign to send me and my son into exile, probably to Paris to live side by side with Ekaterina Dolgorukaya and her son who had some claim to the throne. But what if I were not carrying the tsar’s child? What if I carried the child of, say, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich? If I had a daughter, Sergei would find her a husband from one of the great Russian families, for I would not subject her to the limited life of the theater, and if I had a boy, well, the possibilities were endless for a boy. My child could study at the Alexander Lyceum or at the Corps des Pages. He could join the Guards. He could have a career at court. And if Alix should have another daughter, well, that would be another story still. My son could be tsarevich. But for now it was better for my son to be the son of Sergei Mikhailovich.
You must see how I could not let conscience overwhelm expediency—not that I ever had—and on Sergei’s return I said only that I had rested those summer weeks while he was gone at Krasnoye Selo, putting the troops through their exercises, absorbed by that world of men, weapons, and uniforms to which all Romanov males periodically retreated. If Alix had not given birth that summer, Niki would have been there with him, with all of them, instead of rolling around in bed with me, his Cossack bodyguards playing cards in my stable the only witnesses to what were supposed to be the tsar’s long rides through the countryside. Yes, I took Sergei back into my bed with a haste and a false ardor that made him smile. Yes, I licked at him with my black tongue and I rubbed my ash, coal dust, and sooty pebbles all over him, and he only smiled and said, How you’ve missed me, Mala , before my body spit him into a sleep where he lay spent, so terrifically unaware of the malignancy of me.
By late October, my body had begun to change in ways only I could notice but soon enough Sergei would, as well. The theater season began, too, and though I could hide my pregnancy for now beneath my high-waisted tutu if I took care with the profile I presented on the stage—thanks be to God we did not perform in the leotards of today—eventually, I would have to withdraw from the season with some excuse of illness and with a more intricate fabrication for Sergei. I chose a gray afternoon as we rode in his carriage on Nevsky Prospekt during the usual promenade—in a few years more the carriages would be joined by motorcars, but for now we shared the wide boulevards with bicycles and drozhkis and horse-drawn taxis called izvozchiki and troikas and electric streetcars. I wore, like all women who rode in these contraptions, a veil that shielded my hair and face from wind and grit. Better to be veiled when one is two-faced. The rains of September had gone; the November snow had not yet arrived. It was neither here nor there, a good day for a lie. Strolling about us were officers in their winter uniforms with gray mantles, men in greatcoats and dark caps with cockades to signify their rank, students in their black cloaks, peasant men in belted tunics and sheepskin jackets, muzhiki in red shirts. Peasant women in kerchiefs carried their children, and governesses—foreign ones and Slavic girls—led their charges by the hand or in a small parade and the ones with infants pushed elaborate buggies. I touched at my hair, at my wrists, at the spot beneath my collarbone. As I opened my mouth, the tall slender windows of the city watched me from the four-story buildings that lined the streets. Sergei, I’m carrying your child , I said, and the hot words scorched the material of my veil. I held my breath. Would he believe me? He turned to me, his bearded face suffused with joy. Ah, yes. He believed me. Terrible. We had to hurry to my house on English Prospekt to drink to the child’s health, Sergei pouring the vodka into the little jeweled glasses Niki had bought me as a housewarming present ten years before.
But don’t pity Sergei too much. He could have offered to marry me yet he did not. A morganatic marriage to me would have jeopardized his income and his titles. But he would put his name down as father on the child’s birth certificate, give my child his patronymic, which no Russian child can be without. It was like an identity paper, and with Sergei’s patronymic, Sergeivich, my child’s future would be assured.
Unfortunately, of course, I gave birth a month too soon, in June, at Strelna, during the white nights, in the heat and privacy of my dacha. In an act of deliberate impudence, I had covered the walls of my bedroom in a silk with the same floral pattern Alix had selected for her bedroom at Tsarskoye—green wreaths dotted with pink flowers, each one tied up with a pink ribbon, or so Roman Meltzer, designer to the crown, had described it to me—and the flower-and-leaf-covered walls seemed to breathe with me as I paced. Sergei, alarmed by what he thought was this emergency of a premature delivery, had called in his brother Nicholas’s private doctor (for Nicholas, in addition to being a homosexual, was an inveterate hypochondriac), a doctor who demanded I lie flat on my back in bed, a command I promptly disobeyed. I could not obey him. Instead, like a peasant woman, I walked the room, my fingers sliding against the silk walls, the green leaves as prickly as if they were real leaves beneath my wet fingertips, the bright print of the flowers and bows deepening and seeming to bleed. This kind of pain was unknown to me, this pain tightening across my abdomen, this pulling at my tailbone. Peasant women in labor, I’d heard, tied themselves under their arms with rope and hung themselves from the rafters of a barn to enlist gravity as midwife. I understood the impulse. Some gave birth in the fields, stepping away from their plows to squat. But I had a doctor who treated the imperial family and who implored me to lie in a dignified manner flat on my back.
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