Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

I folded the newspaper back over the tsar’s ukase . I went up the small staircase of seventeen steps that led to my bedroom suite in this house that was so newly mine and might so soon be mine no longer. I went into the very grand blue-and-silver mosaic-tiled bathroom that housed the great sunken tub I had built for the tsar and in which no one had yet bathed, plugged the drain, and turned on the faucet. I climbed in fully clothed, my plan unfolding before me as I enacted it. The water slowly covered my body, saturated first the fabric of my dress, then even the elaborate layers of my underskirts, and finally the silk of my chemise, my corset cover, and the canvas of my corset, all of which acted as weights. As the water rose, my hair and then my arms began to float toward the surface and when my head was fully submerged, I looked out at the rippling bathroom, its silver-and-blue mosaics shot with little rivulets of light. They would find me here, preserved like an oddity from Peter the Great’s Scientific Museum, and my plaque would read Former Mistress of Tsar Nicholas II . I should have worn a better dress, but too late for that now. I should have been holding a crucifix in my hands, but too late for that, too. I opened my mouth to breathe in the water but at the influx of bathwater rather than air, my body exploded in outrage and I shot up, coughing. It appeared I did not have what it took to die, to disappear, which would clearly be better for everybody, except, perhaps, my son, now eating bits of chopped apple in the kitchen with my cook. With me gone and the tsar occupied with his legitimate son, Vova would in short order be adopted by my sister and shunted off into the ballet school like everyone else in my family, where he would vanish into that warren of a theater and emerge sixty years later an old man with a gold watch. Was there no other career for a Kschessinsky? No. Apparently not. Only if I were alive could I ensure this would not happen. Only if I were alive could I make certain Vova had the life he deserved. So I stood up, my skirts weighing a hundred kilos, and wringing what water out of them I could, I hoisted my leg over the edge of the tub. Dragging my dress behind me, I sloshed my way in my sodden shoes to my bedroom to pack for Strelna, as if it were time for my usual summer holiday. There I would figure out what to do next.

Yet within not even a week of my arrival at Strelna, where I had not even planned to be, the chief of police called to inform me he was closing the bridge from Peterhof to Strelna and that the emperor was on his way to see me. The police tracked the whereabouts of all persons of importance at all times. Why, they could tell you exactly whom the various ambassadors and grand dukes called upon each afternoon and exactly when. And so, of course, they knew I had left Peter for Strelna, and therefore so did Niki. And I thought, Niki’s come already to take the key to my palace from me, to pay me another hundred thousand rubles. He has already drawn up more official papers for me to sign. But he had no papers with him when he arrived. Before I could even greet him, before he had even come up the steps of the veranda where I had gone to stand when I heard his horse, he said, Mala, the baby is sick . And when I looked at him uncomprehendingly, he said, Alexei is a bleeder , and he sat down abruptly on the bottom step and I came and sat by him. He put his head in my lap and the bright sunlight streamed down from the sky and slowly, slowly my former despair was bleached to pity. I stroked at the tsar’s hair the way I had just stroked the hair of my child to put him to sleep for an afternoon nap.

This bleeding disease had made its appearance in Alix’s family before. Queen Victoria and her daughters and granddaughters carried this disease in their bodies, for women were the carriers and men the sufferers and because these women married cousins who were princes and kings, the disease had infiltrated the royal houses of England, Spain, Germany, and now, apparently, Russia. When Alix was just a year old, her brother Fritzie had died from a fall he suffered in the morning that killed him by day’s end. When she was twelve, her uncle Leopold fell and died of a brain hemorrhage. Just six months before Alix’s son was born, her sister Irene had lost her son. It had taken Alix’s nephew Henry, four years old, several weeks to die after a bump on the head, weeks of his screams and weeks of the most terrible helplessness suffered by his parents. Alix had gone, pregnant, to the funeral. Bad omen. So Alix knew if a child was a bleeder each fall, each stumble, each bang, each bump could mean weeks of painful bleeding, swollen knots of corrosive blood beneath the skin that could immobilize a joint, damage organs, even kill. Niki said to me that he should have married the French princess Hélène or the Prussian princess Margaret as his parents had wished. No mention, of course, of me! He believed now that this was why Alix had wept so uncontrollably on the day of their engagement. Fate held this black card at the back of her hand, out of sight, but Alix had somehow seen it. He himself was born under the sign of Job. He was that card. He was destined for a terrible trial. He would not receive his reward on this earth, nor would Alix. When her contractions began, Niki said, she was sitting on a sofa in the drawing room in the Lower Palace at Peterhof, and the mirrored panels hanging behind her spontaneously shattered and covered her with glass, just as the quicksilver of the stage mirror had done in my last ballet. One did not have to be Russian to see the omen in that. And all the while he spoke, I stroked at his hair and made unintelligible murmuring sounds, there, there , and I was glad he could not see my face, which I am sure shone with a slowly waking bliss. His son was sick. He would not live long. It was not my life God wanted to take but Alexei’s. Despite all Alix’s efforts to thwart me, fate had intervened. Heaven did not want Alix’s son to be the next tsar. Heaven did not want Alix as empress. Niki had left her at Peterhof and had come here to me. The key to my new house would remain in my pocket.

Come , I said to Niki finally, and I took his hand and led him to the nursery, where Vova, now two, slept, his cheeks two red apples, his forehead a charm. Is he breathing? Niki asked. It’s too hot in here, Mala . I laughed. He’s breathing , I told him, and I lifted our boy from his little bed and put him in Niki’s arms. Niki rocked him standing there in the warm room. We cannot see each other for a while, Mala , Niki said over my son’s small back. I cannot undermine Alexei’s legitimacy. He may live for some time. There is no way to know for certain . Meanwhile, I would have my palace. The minister of the court would continue to transfer a monthly stipend to my accounts. He and Alix would have no more children. We have enough daughters , Niki said ruefully, and the risk is too great for another son .

Yes, the risk was too great. The House of Spain had two hemophiliac sons. The little princes wore padded suits to play in the palace park where the trees had also been padded but still the boys suffered. Both of Alix’s sister Irene’s sons were hemophiliacs; before his death, she had kept the younger son Henry hidden in the palace in Prussia to conceal the evidence of his illness, lest the country know both the heir and his brother were bleeders and the House of Prussia was riddled with disease. So Alix had decided she would do the same with Alexei. The next year, the family would move to Tsarskoye Selo and hide themselves in Alexander Palace, hide Alexei and his illness so completely that almost no one knew of it. It would be 1912 before even the children’s tutor, Pierre Gilliard, understood what illness the boy suffered from, why he was so pale, his face so pinched, and why he spent weeks at a time in bed. Alexei’s doctor, Eugene Botkin, never spoke a word of Alexei’s condition even to his own family. Niki’s family themselves for more than a decade would not know what was wrong with the boy. Photographs of Alexei were fed to the press, but he would rarely appear at state occasions, with various excuses given for his absence. And so the rumor-mongering commenced yet again: the child was retarded, an epileptic, the victim of a revolutionary’s bomb.