Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Finally, thanks to Niki, was I able to move my father and his mother to the family vault by train from Petersburg to Warsaw, on the railway line Emperor Alexander III had once built so he could travel from Petersburg to his white-walled palace at Gatchina, south of the capital, and then the track was extended and extended until it reached the old capital of Poland, once a great nation with its own king, now its capital just an outpost of the Russian empire. My father arrived for the last time at the old railway station there with its circular archways, its latticework along the portico, its slanted slate roof off which the rain could sluice. And it was raining when we arrived, as it often does in early autumn, the pinks and greens, the peaches and yellows, of the buildings around us drenched by the weeping sky to the zenith of their coloration. We stood, my brother, his wife, Sima, my sister with her husband, Ali, my mother, and I, holding Vova’s hand, in the vaulted main hall of the station. My father’s body and that of his mother were loaded onto the cortege that would be drawn to the Powalsky Cemetery. There is no other way to approach a cemetery than by horse and carriage. The stately approach echoes the heartbeat and allows one to prepare. Why do you think the cars we use today for funeral processions slow to a crawl as they follow one another on the long trek from church to graveyard? The cars move at a horse’s pace. I have been now to many funerals and I have had time to think about these things. All along the streets, from the station to the cemetery, my father’s fans—he had never neglected them, making an annual pilgrimage to Warsaw to perform—stood weeping, hats removed, for as my brother later wrote to his son: tears of gladness or of sorrow show the feeling and heart of a man, only in Poland are people accustomed to love those close to them, to become attached to them and esteem them . They did not blame my father for devoting his life to the entertainment of the Russian tsars. And now that that was done, they welcomed him home.

The Powalsky Cemetery is one of the most beautiful cemeteries in Europe, you know. It rivals the Père Lachaise here in Paris. In Père Lachaise, death feels orderly, but in Powalsky death is wild, rustic, the cemetery paths leaf-strewn, its trees massed closely together, as are the graves and monuments, many of them slabs marked by a simple cross. Stone angels fly with wings outstretched; stone women draped in togas point to the sky; stone men stand in hooded robes or stretch out a hand to the passersby. Join me . At some crypts a statue weeps, at others the door bears a knocker—so you can knock for whom, the soul? Or perhaps the soul itself opens the door, knocker clapping, to make its way to heaven. The peasants buried their dead with a candle and a bread ladder, but we buried my father with a crucifix in his hands. My brother closed the bronze door to the chapel I had built over the crypt with my Romanov money, and he embraced his wife and my sister embraced her husband, and I took my mother’s hand. However many imperial bodies I have lain beneath, I have observed the great moments, the ceremonial moments of my private life, alone. And when my Romanovs observed the great moments of their private lives, I was not with them either; I was, always, the shoe under the bed.

Before we left, I picked up pebbles from around the crypt and pulled thick green leaves from the trees there, and these I put in my reticule.

When we returned to Petersburg from Warsaw, my sister went with her husband to their house at No. 40, English Prospekt, just down the street from where I had once been kept by the tsarevich a thousand years ago, and my brother went with his wife to their twelve-room apartment at No. 18, Spasskaya Ulitsa, and I, who had no husband, who had never had a husband, went home alone with my grief and with my son to my dacha at Berezoviya Alleya in Strelna. I went out to the veranda, and I remember there I could smell the gulf and real autumn swiftly coming and behind her, the long, long winter. I rolled the pebbles I’d taken from my father’s grave around and around in my hands. The peasants left breadcrumbs, not pebbles, on the graves of their relatives at Easter, and when the sparrows flew down to eat, the peasants knew the souls of their loved ones were well. A fairly certain way to comfort oneself about the dead, no? The peasants believed heaven existed in some faraway cleft of the Russian steppe, where long green grass swayed and rivers of milk bubbled and foamed unseen by the living. And what kind of heaven did dancers believe in? An abandoned theater where their souls amused themselves all day in face paint and magnificent costume, perpetually playing the parts they had played here on earth to a decaying house?

When I heard the sound of a horse’s hooves on my front drive, I opened my hands in surprise—I was expecting no one—and my pebbles rolled across the wooden porch floor. I crouched, as desperate to find them as if they were my father’s bones, when a man’s boot appeared, first one, then the other on the whitewashed planks. The boot belonged to Sergei Mikhailovich, and when I looked up into his bearded face, he said kindly, What are you looking for, Mala? , as if he had never been gone or had been gone for just an afternoon, instead of three years, and had come upon me kneeling on the porch. I wanted, suddenly, to kiss him as answer, for how could I explain to him why I was trying to gather up these little stones? But I didn’t have to explain. Because I wanted them, he knelt beside me and began to collect them, and all at once I found the tears that had eluded me in Warsaw. He let me cry as he squatted there on the porch. He had heard of the death of my father, he said, and he had come here to Strelna on the day I was to return from the funeral to offer his condolences. He knew what my father had meant to me.

And he came also, he said, to express his regret at having abandoned me the very hour I gave birth. He had ridden home to the New Mikhailovsky Palace that night without knowing how he got there and when Sergei did, his brothers poured vodka down his throat in an effort to calm him, the trollop’s lapdog. But when the plans for my palace were published, the golden double-headed eagles tiny gray scratches on the page one needed a magnifying glass to discern, and when my new home appeared in all its magnificence on Petersburg Island, where one needed no optical device to read its message, he and all of Petersburg knew: Kschessinska has given birth to a Romanov—though perhaps only Sergei knew my son’s father must be Niki himself.

But Niki was still an unfaithful lover, was he not? I nodded. And in that case, perhaps I still needed a protector, for Niki could not leave Alix’s side, as she lived in a state of perpetual hysteria over the health of Alexei. As Niki struggled to control the country, Sergei told me, so he struggled also with Alix. She was desperate for a cure for some mysterious ailment from which the baby suffered, and because of this ailment, they had kept Alexei hidden since his christening even from the family. And Alix, frustrated by the court doctors, had begun to enlist the aid of healers and mystics, believing if St. Seraf had given her a son, perhaps a man of God could save him. Another man like Philippe Vachot had appeared in the capital, brought there as M. Philippe had been, by the Montenegrins, the Black Sisters, another of their mystics to parade about the Petersburg palaces like a monkey on a leash. This man had sent a telegram to the tsar as so many peasants did— Father Tsar, I wish to bring you a tamed sable . Father Tsar, I wish to bring you a potato as big as a dog . Little Father Tsar! I would like to bring you an icon of the blessed St. Simon Verkhotursky the miracle worker . And the tsar, on occasion, let the peasants come. The tamed sable was brought to the palace to play with the children. And Alix, who had seen the telegram about the icon, and who could not resist it or anything like it—had it brought to the palace by this man, Gregorii Rasputin. So once again, through Sergei, I was privy to the most secret life of the tsar. By then Sergei had gathered all the pebbles and put them in my hands, then held my hands in his own.