Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

During this time, also, my sister told me Sergei had begun an affair with a woman he had known a long while, Countess Barbara Vorontzov-Dashkov, who had married into an old and important family of Moscow boyare , long associated with the court, and at this news my heart shrank like a desiccated old nut in its shell and it rattled there in its place behind my rib cage. Niki’s father had years ago bought the old Vorontzov estate in the Crimea, with its waterfall, its pine tree forests, its view of the Yalta harbor, and its French château, done Third Empire–style, and Sergei and Niki had played there and at the Winter Palace and Gatchina with Barbara’s future husband, Vanya. They, along with the other Vorontzov-Dashkov children, the Sheremetiev children, the Dariatinsky children, had run on the palace lawns, ridden the miniature railways, taken tea at the Huntsman’s Lodge. Niki and Vanya had each married, but Sergei had not. And now Vanya was dead and his wife was a widow and in her Sergei found another vulnerable woman to love. I did not know whether the countess visited Sergei at his palace or he called on her at her mansion on the English Embankment. I did not know if their lovemaking involved a bed or a garden bench, the sound of a clock chiming or the smell of crushed rose petals, but in 1905, the countess went to Switzerland, where she quietly gave birth to Sergei’s son, whom she named Alexander. At his birth, he was adopted by the countess’s friend Sophie von Dehn. Why did the countess not keep her son? Why did her liaison with Sergei not end in a marriage? Wait, and I will tell you.

Now August 1902.

I sat on my veranda, my tiny son, my faithful little man, in my arms, and I prayed one thing over and over, that Alix would have a daughter.

But prayers are rarely answered as you request. For Alix, alas and alack, had that summer no baby at all.

In early August, Alix began to bleed and though she bled and bled, there was no baby. It was, the doctors said, simply her Mrs. Beasley , as she called her monthly, after nine months of what she had thought was a pregnancy. When her waist had thickened and her breasts had swelled, she had refused all those medical doctors access to her body. She had admitted only M. Philippe, who had pressed his hand to her womb and said, You are with child . And she had not wanted the doctors to contradict this, to in any way impede the progress of the necessary, the essential fantasy, and so only M. Philippe, who had been decreed here in Russia by one of Niki’s ukazy a doctor of medicine and who had been made a state councilor, observed the progression of this phantom pregnancy. I suppose even a tsar’s decree cannot make a doctor of a charlatan. Perhaps Alix had guessed where Niki spent those long summer afternoons while she nursed Anastasia, and so she had hastened too soon to try for another child. Her pregnancy had long ago been announced and all the country was awaiting the birth of the tsar’s fifth child. When a bulletin was published, finally, on August 20, explaining away the hysterical pregnancy of the past year as a miscarriage, the wildest rumors began to circulate in the capital: the empress had given birth to a monster with horns, to yet another girl who was spirited out of the country, to a stillborn buried on the grounds of Peterhof under cover of night. I ask you, was the truth of it any less fantastic?

No, there was no child buried or sent away. That fate belonged to M. Philippe, with the black hair and the black moustache. At last Niki had had enough of the znakhar . Philippe’s last words to them: Another will come to take my place.

His prediction was not as outlandish as you might imagine. The sorcerer, the holy fool, the idiot muzhik , the peasant through whom God speaks, the madman who is not mad but prescient—these are men for whom Russia has long had tolerance. Wearing rags and chains, they wander from village to village on pilgrimages, fed by handouts, sleeping in the open or by a borrowed fire, begging a few kopeks from some peasant or prince who hopes to buy a bit of grace. On occasion, these fools and spiritualists were brought to a palace to pray or to rebuke or to heal. In the Petersburg of my time, the two princesses from Montenegro who married cousins of the tsar—they were known as the black sisters —brought with them to Russia along with their dowries their interest in the occult. It was they who brought Mitka the Fool, Philippe Vachot, and, finally, Rasputin to the palace. In Montenegro, they claimed, witches and sorcerers lived in the forests and they could speak with the dead and see the futures of the living. They and their friends at court held séances in closed rooms or hung on the ravings of spiritualists in trances. Alix, the German-English Alix, found all of this to be nonsense, until her desperation for an heir reached a high-enough pitch, until she turned one wall of her bedroom into an iconostasis before which she prayed, as if in church, for God to give her a son, and then the gates to Tsarskoye Selo swung open to these peasants, these startzy , to whom she surrendered utterly.

You could say, I suppose, that M. Philippe had wrought a miracle—for me! I sat down and wrote a note to Niki, which I gave to my sister without a word and which my sister gave to her husband, Ali, to deliver to the tsar. Ali was quite close to Niki, you know. On the eve of Niki’s coronation Ali was one of five Guards officers invited to join the tsar at his uncle’s estate at Ilinskoe. My sister’s marriage could not have worked out better for me. I needed a new courier now that Sergei had vanished. And Ali personally handed to the tsar my note, which said simply: C ome see your son .

So, when the birds began their annual migration from Petersburg to the more temperate climates of the Crimea and Persia and Turkey, for the weather, which had been warm, had suddenly turned cold and soon it would begin to rain, as it does for weeks and weeks until one longs for snow, which at least brings light to the city but does not, for some reason, feel as wet, and when Niki returned from the provinces of Rishkovo and Kursk, where he had toured monasteries and hospitals and governors’ houses, the chief of police called me to say Niki would be coming to Strelna and the police would close this afternoon the highway between Peterhof and my dacha, so that Niki, before he went home, could make one last official visit, this one to me, at my dacha, where I had remained, later in the season than usual, out of sight.

I had been waiting for him since noon, uncertain exactly when he would arrive, and by now the light had already begun to fade. When I finally heard the cry of my stableboy’s greeting and the slog of the tsar’s approach to my house from the stables, I opened the door to greet him—and there was the shock of the sight of him—tall in his papakha , his face ruddy from the cold, his eyes a sparkling blue—and I thought, Will my desire for this man ever leave me? He kissed me on both cheeks, the scent of his bath oils still present on his chilled skin, present even at the end of the day, and when I put my hands to my cheeks against the cold he left there, he laughed. My Little K, did I chill you? And I wanted to kiss the tips of his fingers but instead I took from him myself his papakha and his greatcoat, which I handed over to my houseman to clean and brush, and off the man went trembling with the honor. Niki looked at me, one part of his mouth still smiling, and he said, So, Mala, I’ve heard a rumor that you have given me a son . I laughed with surprise—our meeting was going to be lighthearted, not at all like the weather or the weather I imagined inside the palace at Peterhof. And the tsar said, Does he look like you or like me? , teasing a bit, but I detected a stress note beneath that tone—remember, I have been listening for the notes beneath a melody all of my life—and so I said, teasing also, The sovereign will himself decide , and I brought him my son, almost four months, sleeping, swaddled in his blankets, and just the sight of him sent milk to my breasts, which were bound up with strips of cloth to prevent exactly this. My maid followed me, carrying the cradle, and when she set it by the tsar, I placed my son in his arms.