Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

During a dress rehearsal for Sleeping Beauty this past season, a trap door on the stage had abruptly snapped open and my father, who had had the bad luck to be standing on it, dropped through. He arrested the plunge with his elbows at the very last moment, but the shock of the fall, like a curse in a fairy tale, had cracked his robust health; the unrest in the capital and in the theater only ruptured it further. The doctors had put him to bed, as if whatever was wrong might mend itself there, but for eighty-three years my father’s life had been predicated on motion, and he refused to lie flat with the covers drawn up. Yet, once out of bed, he told me, he felt the parts of him seemed to be assembled in some manner that was not quite right, that he moved like a mechanical man, metal bones covered over by paper. Though none of us could see this, assuring him the summer at Krasnitzky would cure him, who knows his own body better than a dancer? My father died suddenly in July, a month after our arrival. He had lain down with a headache and when my mother sent me to check on him, I couldn’t rouse him. I said to myself, He is just sleeping , and I crawled next to him on the bed and curled my arm around him, laid my face by his face from which I had inherited so many features, and then I looked out the window at the blazing blue sky. I thought, If he does not get up, I will not get up .

It was 1905, twelve years after the cuckoo in his study had called out twelve times as I struggled to tell him of my plans to become the mistress of the tsarevich.

My father had come to Petersburg in 1853, and he had danced for four emperors—Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II. My father was in Peter even before the Maryinsky! He had watched the circus burn down in 1859 and the Maryinsky Theater rise in its place. He had given me his adopted city and his theater and this life, and I could not imagine any of it without him. At Ivanov’s funeral a few years earlier, in 1901, my father had sighed, Very few of us oldsters remain , and now they were one fewer. Perhaps I could close my eyes and when I opened them my father would open his. I closed mine to try my magic but then I was afraid to open them. My mother eventually came looking for us both and had to slap my hands and call to the maid to help pull me from the bed.

Within a day, my brother and his wife, Sima, and my sister and her husband, Ali, converged at Krasnitzky, and at the supper table that night, after we had drunk too many glasses of vodka and cognac, and had laughed over my father’s habits, the face he made while seated in his dressing room gluing on his horsehair beard, drawing his lips wide in a ghoul’s grimace, or the time my brother came stomping through the kitchen and sank two of my father’s kulichi , which he then had to build up with a tower of icing so sweet no one could eat the cake at all, or the way my father had sat all three of us down—me, Julia, and Josef—to lecture us as if we were third-year students about the sedition at the theater, reminding us that we were Kschessinskys, servants of the tsar, and we served at his pleasure, and how we had sat in our chairs, cowed, not even Josef daring to look up. And as we were laughing at ourselves, my brother pushed aside his plate and said perhaps my father should have called in all the workers on the estate that day, as well, sat all of them down in chairs beside us, for from what he heard today, the peasants could have used this lecture. And then Josef sang for us a tune he’d heard that afternoon while walking along the river:

I listened to it, wondering, Who was the rich man they sang of—my father? Was it his head they wished upside down? And then, after a moment, I pushed Josef’s plate back at him, all the pleasantness between us dimming, and cried, See what you have wrought? You killed him, trying to turn his theater upside down . And he said, I? Because I refuse to take orders from Teliakovsky like a slave? I cannot lie beneath the emperor and his cousin as you have, Mathilde-Maria, and from that position give my orders . And I said, Ha! Some Bolshevik! I see you picked a princess to marry —because his wife was Serafima Astafieva, the daughter of a prince who served as a general in the Imperial Army, so Josef did not always turn up his nose at the court but kissed the fingers of some members of it—and then my mother’s tears and my sister’s shushing sent my brother from the table so we could scream at each other no further.

But because of the troubles Josef so supported we could not travel to Warsaw to bury my father by his own father as he’d wished. I had always thought of my father as a real Petersburger, but perhaps my father, a Pole from one of the empire’s duchies, had never felt truly comfortable in Russia’s hard embrace, which had left Poland, as my brother put it, poor, broken, and depressed . Why, Poles hated the Russians so much that if one used Russian to order a meal in Warsaw, the waiters refused to hear it. But we could not take my father home. The Russian countryside was on fire. The trains were not moving. And so we could not move his mother’s body, either, which had lain in a Petersburg cemetery all these years and which my father wanted buried with him and his father in Warsaw. We had no choice but to take my father’s body back to Petersburg and place his coffin in the crypt of St. Stanislaus until the maelstrom of that summer subsided. Ivan Felix Kschessinsky would have to continue to lie alone in the family vault in the Powalsky Cemetery, waiting for his wife and his son.

The court sent a wreath and the emperor sent a note of condolence to the family.

It was not until early autumn, after Niki finished his hunt and noted in his ledger the number of deer and pheasants bagged, that he seriously turned his attention to the great unrest. Have you ever seen those beautiful watercolored records of the imperial hunt? A sheet of card stock, forty-eight centimeters long, bore the illustration of a fall/winter scene—a muddy river flowing through a snow-covered field, a wood of fir trees and orange-leaved birch to one side, a sleigh, men in winter dress, dogs, and in brown ink the tally of pheasant, partridge, hare, and deer, the record signed by the head of the Imperial Hunt. The Old World. Niki kept these records in his Gothic Revival library at the Winter Palace. He liked order, hated disorder. The year 1905 was nothing if not disorderly, but you would never know it from the record of the hunt for that year. Yes, it was not until October, after the hunt, that Niki could bear to lift his head and look at the disturbances, at which time he reluctantly sued for peace with Japan in order to bring his army home to turn it on his people. Hadn’t he given them enough time to settle down on their own? But because Russia was a country of many millions of souls and each soul had a voice, there was no end to the clatter. The army brought order to the cities, which the police and local regiments could not seem to establish, and then it restrained the peasants in the countryside. Niki called the army out three thousand times to help the Cossacks—who forced the peasants to remove their caps and scarves and bow down to them, after which they executed the men and raped the women—finally put down the peasant uprisings. What the army could not finish, Niki’s new minister of the interior, Petr Arkadevich Stolypin, did. Stolypin, with his balding pate and ridiculous waxed moustache, might be one of Niki’s aristocratic ministers, but he refused to be one of Niki’s sycophantic courtiers—he wouldn’t accompany the tsar on his annual hunt, for example, as did the rest of his suite, so Niki never really liked Stolypin, but Stolypin was effective. He had so many thousands of men hanged—fifteen thousand—to restore order that the people began to call a noose Stolypin’s necktie and the train cars that hauled the forty-five thousand revolutionaries to Siberia Stolypin carriages . And though I more than anyone wanted to see order restored, I was uncertain about the means. Surely this brutality could only make Niki’s people further hate him. On the other hand, look at his grandfather, who offered reforms and had been killed in the street for his trouble. That is what attention and forbearance brought. Regicide. So Niki cracked the whip and his people bowed their heads and this was the end of the first revolution, though most people know only of the second, in 1917. But really, I see now, there was just one.