Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

I didn’t have long to wait.

For as soon as the Neva began its spring thaw and the ground was broken for the foundations of my grand new house on Petersburg Island, Alix began once again promoting the canonization of the monk Serafim of Sarov. Just the year prior, she had wanted the canonization done before the birth of what she thought would be her son, but the procurator of the Holy Synod, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, had resisted. If the monk was now made a saint, she believed, he would intercede with God on her behalf and God would this time give her a son instead of a phantom. Serafim of Sarov, the monk from the Sarov Monastery who died in 1833 and who had lived as a hermit in a hut outside its walls, was said to have performed miracle after miracle in Siberia, and he had made prophecies, as well. He had predicted Niki’s reign, named him and Alix as tsar and tsaritsa fifty years before they were born, had even predicted the tsar and all his family would one day come to Sarov. Alix believed if Seraf had known of her when she existed only in the mind of God, then he might also know her son, the child she was meant to have, whose spirit still waited to be called. In anticipation of this, Seraf would be made the patron saint of Nicholas and Alexandra.

By now she had lost all patience with the church. She did not care if Seraf did not meet the standards for sainthood. She did not care if his body was decomposed, when the corpse of a saint should be sweet and uncorrupted. When Bishop Anthony of Tambov, himself of the province where Seraf had lived, protested the glorification, Alix insisted the bishop be posted deeper into Siberia, like a silenced revolutionary. She told the procurator, Everything is within the emperor’s power—even the making of saints . Finally, Niki had to step in: the canonization must be done if only to calm the tsaritsa. I knew Niki was only trying to pacify her, to make his eventual break from her easier if she believed they had tried everything and she had failed him utterly. So the church declared that hair, teeth, and bones were enough evidence of sainthood, in which case, of course, every corpse lying in a tomb would qualify; and despite the hundreds of letters of protest, the Holy Synod presided over a canonization it did not want. Let Alix canonize every wandering monk in all of Russia, I thought. Not one of them could guarantee her a son.

In July, while the beams and supports of my palace were being raised, the entire imperial family rode the train to the Arzamas station in the middle of absolutely nowhere and from there they climbed into open carriages to journey to Seraf’s old monastery. Peasants, thousands of them, lined the unpaved roads, and Niki stopped the convoy to let the people greet him, kiss his hands, touch the sleeves of his tunic, call to him, Batiushka, Father-Tsar . Before his return to St. Petersburg, over a hundred thousand peasants would gather to see Niki in all his divinity, and he had been carried through the crowd on the shoulders of his aides so the people could see him without trampling each other. Little brothers , Niki called to them as he tried to make his way through the crowd before his adjutants finally lifted him to their shoulders. Each day there were miracles and cures in the cathedral, at Seraf’s cabin in the wild, by the stream where seventy years before Seraf had scrubbed the dirt from under his fingernails. Children were cured of epilepsy, men with withered legs could walk, etc., etc., and Niki and Alix visited that miraculous stream themselves on their third night in Sarov. Naked, they submerged themselves in the dark, chilled water, guarded at a distance by a few discreet officers of the cavalry. Meanwhile, my house and I had become the subject of intense gossip in the capital. Drawings of its projected design appeared in the journal Architect . I had sent them to the editor myself!

Was I worried by all the miracles and prayers and bathings in streams? Not in the least. Not even in October when I learned Alix was pregnant again.

My house was built in the art nouveau style all the rage then—the pale brick shone like yellow gold in the sun, ironwork wreaths and boughs draped themselves above the many windows, the glass walls of the winter garden reached two stories, these windows closed by bronze latches I ordered extravagantly from Paris. My White Hall could host a concert. Yellow silk kissed the walls of my small drawing room, fumed oak the large. I had a dining room, a billiard room—for the tsar loved his billiards—a study, a dozen bedrooms upstairs, a kitchen and wine cellar below, a wing for the servants, a carriage house, stables, and a barn with a cow so my little tsarevich could drink fresh milk. The balcony of his room overlooked Kronoversky Prospekt. I hired a dvornik —a housekeeper—two footmen, a pantry man, a chef, two cooks, a scullery maid, a boiler man, a chauffeur, two maids for me, and a valet for Vova. My house was completed in the summer of 1904. I sold No. 18, English Prospekt to Prince Alexander Romanovsky, Duke of Leuchtenberg and one of Niki’s many relations, and only when I crossed the Troitsky Bridge to Petersburg Island did my family then believe what I had been telling them. I even became the subject of a new ditty that circulated throughout the capital:

Yes, let Niki stand by Alix’s side for her confinement, for I had danced my way to a palace.

And I would be in it, perhaps in a posture of repose on one of the chaises in my White Hall, when Niki came there, rather than to my dacha on one of his surreptitious visits, to tell me Alix had given him another girl, named Ekaterina or Elizabeth or Elena, or that yet again there was no baby at all! I would try not to whoop in triumph, I, Mathilde-Maria, have won!

Yet I had no sooner unpacked my clothes in my wardrobe room—each outfit numbered by a little plaque above it—when the great guns of Peter and Paul began to fire the traditional salvos that signaled a child had been born to the tsar. It was July 30. I ran to my son’s balcony and turned my ear toward Hare and Admiralty islands. No one in Peter listened more fervidly for their number than I. Ninety-nine. One hundred. One hundred and one. One hundred and two. And the guns did not stop. I thought at first I had miscounted, or perhaps I had been tricked by echoes peculiar to the location of my new house, but the salvos continued, so many of them and for so long that I knew I had not been a fool at arithmetic but a much bigger sort. By the 150th, I was weeping. By 210 I had composed myself. By 300 the telephone began ringing—have I mentioned I had the prestigiously low telephone number of 441?—but I did not take any of the calls from the artists at the theater or from my ridiculous family who wanted to say, Do you think it is true? , and who had no idea the disaster this event meant for me. By afternoon confirmation that the tsar had fathered a son appeared in every newspaper: By the manifesto of 28 June 1899 We named as Our successor Our beloved brother the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, until such time as a son was born to Us. From now on, in accordance with the fundamental laws of the Empire, the imperial title of Heir Tsarevich, and all rights pertaining to it, belong to Our Son Alexei .

Alexei. They had named him after Alexei Mikhailovich, Alexei I, Alexei the Peaceful, Peter the Great’s father, the gentle tsar Niki had long admired. It was an unusual name for a Romanov, for a family so full of Konstantins and Nikolais and Vladimirs and Mikhails and Sergeis and Alexanders, but Niki worshipped the last Muscovite tsar, the last one before his European-loving son Peter stamped out the old Russian customs, had all the men shave their beards and the women put on corsets, and set the two down to dine and dance together as they did in la France . Why, at his own coronation Niki had sat on Alexei’s throne encrusted with 750 diamonds! But there was a reason the family had only sporadically given that name to its sons. The name belonged not only to the father of Peter the Great, but also to Peter’s son, the son Peter had clandestinely murdered when he began to suspect his son might be plotting against him. This murdered Alexei was the one the people remembered when they began to whisper about the bad-luck name for the poor boy born to that woman who had come to them from behind a coffin.