Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

At Christmas, a tall tree towered at the entrance to my winter garden, the pine boughs heavy with gold tinsel and crystal pears, and tied to the lowest branches swung the toys I had bought from the peasants’ stalls set up on the Champ de Mars and on the quays. For Vova’s fourth birthday I brought in an elephant to distribute the presents with his long curved trunk, and the children climbed his leathery gray skin to sit upon his back and be led about by the clown Dourov, who’d fetched the beast to my house. At my dacha the next summer I transformed my veranda into a stage by hanging a length of velvet cloth at the edge of it and converting my big bedroom into a backstage wing. I cajoled Baron Golsch into my Russian costume, and the dancer Misha Alexandrov—the illegitimate nephew of Alexander II’s widow, Ekaterina Dolgorukaya—into a long tutu, and, all moustaches and hairy legs, they played caricatures of myself and Pavlova. On another occasion I sent out invitations summoning my guests to dinner at Félicien, a famous Petersburg restaurant that stood in summer on a raft out on the Neva, only to escort my guests through my lantern-lit alley to the gulf, where I had dinner served out on the jetty in the open air. The lights of Petersburg, of Kronstadt, of Vachta across the green water were mere peeps of light compared to the brilliance of the Milky Way, with its silver stream of flooded light. At dessert the fireworks I ordered spanked their brilliant colors onto that white sky, and after this I hired a special train to ferry my guests back to Peter. And in all this, Sergei indulged me.

Almost every man in the imperial family save for the tsar found his way to my palace, though I suppose I hoped one day one of his uncles or cousins might bring him along—one of Sergei’s brothers Nicholas or George or Mikhail, or perhaps their father or Grand Duke Paul or his son Dimitri, the poet Konstantin and his sons Oleg and Igor, who acted in my theatricals, even perhaps Alexander Mossolov, the head of the Court Chancellery, or Grand Duke Vladimir, who brought with him his sons Kyril, Boris, and Andrei, though his daughter stayed at home—yes, they all came, but not the tsar, who never saw how well I entertained the Romanovs. They mixed at my parties with the greatest artists on the imperial stages: Bakst, Benois, and Fokine, Petipa, when he visited from the Crimea, the younger dancers Pavlova, Karsavina, and Nijinsky, who made my Kolinka jealous because he was Polish, too, you see, and with him I could speak the Polish I learned as a child but never used except en famille . Kolinka used to say, One Pole can spot another Pole from far, far away —and then he would put his hands over my eyes so that I would not make Nijinsky my partner, which I did anyway. Who else came? The composers Glazunov and Shenk, the balalaika player Victor Abaza, Fabergé, to whom someone would always show her jewels for appraisal or praise, the great basses Chaliapin and Sobinov, the latter of whom one night sang Vova to sleep in his bed with a lullaby, actors from the English Theater who tended to shout, and dancers from the Imperial Ballet you’ve never heard of. Even visiting artists like Isadora Duncan, her Greek tunic clipped closed with a brooch, and Sarah Bernhardt stopped by. (For the great Bernhardt I went to enormous effort to acquire the borzoi dog she wanted so, an act of kindness she did not bother to thank me for!) And with such a mix of talent, theatricals were the order of the day, either that or baccarat and poker. And yes, at my palace many mistresses were taken and many marriages made, like that of Nina Nesterovska to Grand Duke Konstantin’s son, Prince Gabriel, and one could find there the odd son or daughter, the flower of a liaison between a theater artist and a prince, like Misha Alexandrov, who now served either as a dancer or as a member of the Guards, for there was a social fluidity at my house that existed almost nowhere else in Peter and all could swim there.

Because of my many and myriad relationships with the imperial men, the grand dukes began to call me not Ma -thilde, but Notre -tilde— Our -tilde—so intimate did I become with them all, though their wives had another name for me, of course, that awful woman , which I’m sure they would call me still today, had I not outlived them. Grand Duke Vladimir sent me each Easter an arrangement of lilies of the valley and my own jeweled Fabergé egg, and he sent me also a pair of porcelain vases that once belonged to Prince Vorontzov, a sapphire bracelet he bought for me in Paris at Cartier, even sheet music. The last piece, La Valse triste by Sibelius, was sent just a few weeks before Vladimir’s death in 1909 and had been written for the play Death , penned by a relative of the composer. The music describes a dance between a dying woman and death itself. On the first page of it Vladimir scribbled a note by the title, This is your ballet . So he knew, Vladimir, of my private dance with the destroyer, the tsar. For Vladimir had ample opportunity to observe me. He not only came to my palace for my parties but also took me to dinners at Cubat’s, and in the summers, he spent afternoons at my dacha, sometimes alone with me and sometimes he brought along his sons, for long sunlit hours of card games. Our favorite was tëtke , or aunt. One day it seemed Vladimir was dealt the queen of every suite and at the last abruptly folded his cards to ask me, Does anyone like me for myself or is this respect and affection awarded to me solely because of my rank? And I told him, swiftly, Here you are loved for yourself , though of course, there is no way to sever one’s position from oneself, nor would he have wanted to try, I am sure. I loved him for his rank and his person but also for his friendship to me and for the friendship to me he prodded from his sons. I knew the elder two, already, Kyril and Boris. They came to the ballet on their father’s abonnement , Kyril, with the long, handsome face and English-looking features, and Boris with a face bloated by his love of baccarat and liquor and women and a good joke—at my theatricals, he was always the first to stamp his feet and call Curtain! Curtain! as the French do.

Vladimir’s youngest son, Andrei, though, had been studying at the Mikhailovsky Artillery School all these years, one of those elite military schools so strict they did not allow their pupils any holidays with their families—to snap, I suppose, the boys’ ties to home and to have them forge instead new ones with their fellow officer candidates and their country, and so him I had not met before 1905, when Vladimir brought him one afternoon to luncheon. If I was his father’s dushka , Andrei became mine, stirring a finger into my heart. His face was the face of the young sovereign I saw up close for the first time at my school graduation dinner; and like Niki then, Andrei was terribly shy, a baby, still, at twenty-seven, though I was no longer a girl but a woman of thirty-two. Each time I spoke to him, he ducked his head with a charming terror. At luncheon, when I placed my left hand on his wrist to ask him which dessert he preferred, I startled him, and he knocked over his wineglass, spraying my white dress with purple darts. His brothers laughed.

That day for luncheon he came with his father and his brothers, but soon enough we made a date for him to come again alone, late one evening, on his mother’s name day, July 22, when the rest of the family would be occupied. He rode over from Ropsha, the Vladimir country estate, leaving behind his mother’s annual party in her own honor, chairs filled with Romanovs, leaving behind the Gypsy musicians fiddling in the garden, the food spoiling on tables set among the flower beds. Petersburg was hot that month, the walls of the buildings glowing red with the sun, the Neva thick and still. But Strelna was part of a constellation of islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, and here the heat mellowed into a dreamy warmth as the Neva surged toward the Baltic Sea. I waited outside on my terrace for Andrei, pacing just as I had once paced at Krasnoye Selo while waiting for the young tsarevich to take me for a ride in his troika, reluctant to sit down, for I didn’t want to crease my starched summer dress. When Andrei finally arrived in the late evening’s dusk, he brought on his boots the yellow sand of the roads and on his clothes the scent of the flowering jasmine and the lilies of the valley that grew at the sides of them. We lingered on the terrace listening to the nightingales, which are silenced only by the light, and it seemed when eventually he went to my bed we took the birds and the lilies of the valley there with us where Andrei, almost a virgin, made love to me as the tsar had once made love to me, with soft surprise. And it was as if the tsar, a fairer, blonder version of him, had been returned to me, and I could continue, through this proxy, to live the life I should have had with him.