Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

He was too old for me, but Niki was not, and just when it appeared my impassioned twice-weekly flirting with Niki the Hussar before the chartered train hauled me the thirty versts back to Peter had utterly failed to have the desired effect, and when only one week remained of maneuvers, Niki suddenly asked me to wait for him in the alley behind the theater after a performance that August night. He wanted to double back from his villa after supper to take me for a ride in his troika. Need I spell out my answer? What had inspired this sudden and uncharacteristic boldness on his part? I had seen him watching me with special interest from the imperial box, which at this theater was designed to look like a Russian peasant’s hut. It must have been my costume that evening of tulle, the bodice embroidered with two great flowers that lay, one each, over my breasts. Or perhaps my little dance—for while the other girls had performed that night as a flock of birds or a school of fish, I had been given the adagio, the love duet, my hands laid tenderly on the forearms and shoulders of my cavalier. I remember Niki’s invitation gave me trouble tying the sash of my white summer frock as I readied myself in my dressing room that night, and my hair sprang away from my face like the wild wig of Dr. Coppelius. The covered walkway to the theater was deserted by the time I came out, most of the dancers having already boarded the train back home to the capital, and the theater itself had gone dark. A tiny pulse flicked at the base of my throat. What if he didn’t come for me? I would have to trudge to the villa where my older sister, Julia, also a dancer, visited with her beau and cry to her like a baby that I had missed the train. I went with some trepidation to the alley, where I stood alone, trying to smooth out everything about me, including my emotions, which were in a jumble. I waited. Before me the sandy yellow drive unwrapped itself, became dark and grainy, emptied into nothing. In the park and garden beyond the theater the summer insects made waves of sound, which crested and fell. Many are the stars in a Russian night, and here, fifteen miles from the capital, the sky made a plain well-furrowed with stars above the infertile, difficult earth below. Eventually I heard the bells of a troika and at the sound I was smart enough to feel a small moment of premonitory dread—on what journey was I now embarking and with what consequences? But I could not go back, would not go back. The troika appeared, the lanterns swinging from it shaking the stars from the sky and sticking them all around the tsarevich, who glowed like a saint on an iconostasis. He put out a hand with a grin and pulled me up onto the seat beside him for our wild ride, driving that troika across the parade grounds and through the small village, where all the streets and thoroughfares were empty, as if by decree. These streets, this village, these cities, Russia itself, one-sixth of the landmass of earth, belonged to him—or soon would—and when I was with him, it belonged to me, too. What was he showing off to me that night when he drove me across the plain, abducted me, as I later read in his journal—the countryside or himself?

It’s not easy to drive a troika, you know. Of the three horses only the middle one wears the reins, and it takes all the driver’s strength and skill to steer well. We Russians love speed, and Nicholas was flaunting his skill in the obstacle course of the village, on the dark mass of the parade ground. He wanted to impress me . He smiled at me without taking his flashing eyes from his horses, from the dusty yellow highway, sluiced down all through the day by barrels of water hauled from the Ligovka River on one-horse carts, wetted now by the evening dew. I was the one now too shy to look at him , though I peeked at him, sideways. The beauty in the family belonged to Niki—no pug nose and bulging eyes like his sister Xenia, no sunken cow face like his sister Olga. No photograph does justice to the balance and nobility of his face. And those eyes—no one who saw those pale blue eyes could forget them. But his eyes were more than tools of seduction. He used them to probe the soul. If I had the eyes of a fairy, he had the eyes of a god.

The country believed, you know, that its tsars were divine.

I ended up at the villa of my sister’s beau, Ali, after all, in the early hours of the morning. He shared the villa with his friend Schlitter, a fellow officer, and what an entrance I made there, on the arm of the tsarevich—not as the baby sister blubbering at having missed the train, but as Venus triumphant! The five of us had supper and laughed for hours, Schlitter pulling a long face and saying, No candle for God and no poker for the devil , as he was the only man without a woman, a sally that pleased me enormously as it meant the tsarevich made up a pair with me.

For a moment, anyway.

I heard in the early months of his winter marriage to Alix, Niki took her, too, on nighttime rides, on a sleigh skimming the streets of Petersburg and the ice of the Neva.

And what kind of wife would I have made him? Could I have stood his future—imprisonment and a martyr’s death?

I can assure you this: if I had been his wife, that would not have been his future.

My mother was twice a wife, and before that, for a few years, a dancer. She was a member of the corps de ballet , one of the girls who make up the row deep upstage, a Near the Water girl, or so we called them, those girls of the lowest rank who stood always in the back, their shoulder blades brushing against some piece of scenery inevitably painted with a large lake. My mother, Julia, left the theater to marry and have a family, and when her first husband, Ledé, died, she married my father, Felix. She was beautiful enough to marry as many times as she wished, with her round face and soft eyes. In the picture of her I keep by my bed she has her hair styled in ringlets, the front swept back, a braid like a crown anchoring it. She loved both of her husbands and with them had thirteen children, four of them by my father. I was their youngest.

My father was most famous for his mazurka. Poles dance the mazurka two ways, you know, one like the gentry, with elegant movements, the other like the peasantry, with feet stomping the floor, not softly sliding, and with much throwing of hats. Yes, Niki’s great-grandfather Nicholas I saw my father dance the mazurka and had to have him for his own. On the Russian stage, my father performed not only the mazurka for him but also all the major character roles in our ballets for the next sixty years, his career three times the length of most dancers’. In the Imperial Ballet we cultivated two types of dancers—classical and character. Now, of course, no company can afford to do this. The troupes all have a small number of classical dancers, well under a hundred, and when they mount the big ballets, the stage seems sparsely covered. But then, with the tsar’s purse, ah, well, we had a great many dancers, both classical dancers and character dancers, both types celebrated by the public and by the emperor. At times well over two hundred of us crowded the stage, and if we needed more bodies still, the tsar loaned us one of his regiments. My father was not only a great dancer but a great actor and a great comic. With his friend the dancer Timofei Stukolkin, when playing the robbers in The Two Thieves , the two of them not only ran about the stage but also clambered even into the orchestra pit, while the audience cried with laughter.

When I was a little girl, my father took me to watch him dance at the old Bolshoi Theater in Petersburg. Already I loved the theater and begged to be allowed to go. If my father would not take me, I cried. If he did take me, he complained that afterward I could not sleep all night. I pestered my mother to have a ballet costume sewn up for me so I could dance and pose before the mirrors of our ballroom, where my father gave his lessons in the mazurka. And so, on occasion, he relented and brought me to the theater. I remember the first time, a matinée. Like today, matinées then were full of children with their governesses and old ladies with their lorgnettes. I had the privilege of sitting in one of the artists’ balcony boxes backstage, a special perch from which I could see not only the action of the performance but also that of the interval, when the curtain went down and behind it the stagehands lowered the new scenery and raised the old and the floor was swept and watered and the dressers stitched the torn strap of a costume while the wearer of that costume fidgeted impatiently. The performance that afternoon, I remember, was Le Petit Cheval bossu , in which my father played the Khan in his carpeted tent. All our ballets were based on French and German fairy tales until my father and his friends, who met Saturday afternoons at Stukolkin’s, suggested to the old ballet master St. Léon that a ballet be based on a Russian fairy tale. St. Léon shrugged and confessed he knew none. At this, Stukolkin ran and pulled a storybook from the shelves of his children’s nursery and right then pushed the samovar and the glasses of tea aside and read aloud the tale of The Little Humpbacked Horse by Ershov, while someone else translated each line into French so St. Léon could understand it. And so the tale of the Tsar Maiden and Ivanushka the Fool became a ballet—and St. Léon, inspired, took lessons in Russian and learned to speak it fluently—more than one can say for his successor as maître de ballet , the obsequious Frenchman Marius Petipa. And that is how I came to be that afternoon at the theater, watching my father play the old Khan of the Kirghiz Kaisaks who yearns for the young Tsar Maiden, only to find once he abducts her that she will not be possessed. At the end he is tricked by his passion for her into jumping into a barrel of boiling water, and she marries Ivanushka the Fool. In a few more years I would play my first child’s role in that ballet as part of the undersea bacchanal. At the end of Act II the little horse and a peasant boy dive to the sea floor to find the missing ring of the Tsar Maiden, and that is where I, too, was found, in a tableau with all the inhabitants of the sea. But at this time I am telling you about I was only three and I was so silent in my rapture as I watched night become day on that stage and wind give way to thunder as the stagehands worked the machinery that my father forgot I sat waiting for him in the artists’ box and went without me to his dressing room to wipe off his makeup and then traveled all the way home to Liteiny Prospekt. Only when my mother asked, Where is Mala? did my father cry, Oh, my God, I’ve left her there! and run back to the theater. He found me where I had hidden myself under my seat to wait for the evening’s performance. Every artist has the story of his first enchantment with his art and that is mine.