Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

And so I asked Vova, How would you like to play a part at the theater tonight? , knowing, of course, that he would be mad to do it—he had not yet given up his dream of becoming a future Honored Artist of the Imperial Theaters. He had announced recently that he would rather be an actor than a dancer, after all, and he had taken to dressing up to perform skits in what he could find of Sergei’s things—gloves, a cap, and once his boots, or in costumes we bought him, such as a Cossack’s tunic and cuirassier or his fireman’s uniform with its Teutonic helmet, which he wore otherwise while manning his miniature water truck, driving it about the grounds of the dacha. When I said, Would you like this? , Vova began to jump up and down at the prospect of performing.

What will I play? he asked me. A peasant boy, a fairy page, a puppet? He had seen my ballets. He knew all the children’s roles.

No , I said. A very special part. The tsarevich. The tsar’s son is sick again and can’t be with his father and mother in their box tonight. You will go there with them. Can you pretend to be very noble, the heir to the throne?

And my son said, Yes, yes , too quickly, and he raised his chin and looked about the room in a very good approximation of a nobleman surveying his estate.

Very good , I said. Very good, my little tsarevich .

That night I arrived at the theater my usual two hours before curtain and had my dresser sew me into my costume a bit earlier so she would be gone long before Sergei’s arrival with my son’s costume. Only when Vova asked, Why are you so nervous, Mama? did I realize I was compulsively tracing the patterns of the white flowers against the blue of my dressing room’s cretonne-covered walls.

When Sergei arrived, I hissed, This is ridiculous. Everyone will know he’s not the tsarevich.

And Vova interrupted me, Mama, I want my costume .

Sergei said, Mala, stop worrying , and to Vova, I’ve never known your mother to have such stage fright! and with a big wolf’s grin he opened up his greatcoat to reveal the little uniform hidden inside, the heir’s uniform of the Life Guards, a miniature of Niki’s uniform, the red breeches and the red tunic with its golden epaulettes, each button embossed with the imperial eagle, and the collar embroidered with the monogram H II, a monogram only the heir to the throne was permitted to wear. At the sight of all this, Vova let out a whoop and began to dance, he was ten and still childish from all my cosseting of him, and Sergei and I, playing his dressers, had to practically stuff him into the trousers, Sergei lifting him up off the ground and I holding open the breeches for him to be lowered into. Hold still , I told him, as I buttoned him into his shirt and tunic, Sergei laughing at Vova’s glee, my movements awkward from nerves. My son was small for his age and Alexei tall for eight and this meant that the uniform fit almost perfectly, and with his two hands Sergei smoothed Vova’s hair. Look , he said to me. Is this not the picture of the little tsarevich? More than a picture, I thought, and then we heard a carriage approaching, the bells on the horses’ bridles jingling, and the carriage paused on the private driveway right outside the low windows of my dressing room, and that was the only sound, the police at the tsar’s behest having stopped the theater-going court traffic at both ends. Sergei looked out the glass and said, It’s Niki , and to Vova, Are you ready? , and when my son nodded vigorously, Da, da , Sergei opened the window, gave Vova a quick boost, and my son was a shadow slipped over the freezing windowsill and into the envelope of that carriage to ride the rest of the way up the drive to the private imperial entrance. There he would disembark with Nicholas and Alexandra and walk through the marble foyer and up the steps, along the carpeted corridor lined with gilded chairs and into the imperial anteroom, the walls of it a light blue, and from there through a velvet curtain, as if they themselves were entering a stage, and into the imperial box itself.

The entire audience stood at the family’s entrance and the national anthem was played, and by that time, of course, I had run out onto the stage to look through the peephole in the curtain. I believe I had to elbow someone out of the way. The three tiers of the boxes and all of the stalls seemed reddened by the color of all the scarlet tunics of all the uniforms worn by all the officers in attendance, that red punctuated in two spots by the greens, blues, and golds of the national costumes of the emir of Bokhara and the khan of Khiva and their retinues. My son stood proudly between Niki and Alix in his scarlet-and-gold uniform, looking down at the crowd from the imperial box with the exact aplomb he had shown when practicing his role at home. I had always thought Vova showed little talent for the theater, but it looked as if I had been his Teliakovsky, thwarting him, holding him back, for clearly Vova was enjoying this moment, even, at one point, raising one hand to execute a very good semblance of a noble wave. So, he was a Kschessinsky as much as he was a Romanov.

That night we performed A Life for the Tsar , which tells the story of the boy Mikhail Romanov, the first tsar of the dynasty, protected from assassination by the peasant hero Ivan Susanin. Mikhail was sixteen years old and the grand nephew of Ivan the Terrible’s wife, close enough, when the council of boyare decided in 1612 to offer him the throne. Ivan had died in 1584, the first to call himself tsar , from the Latin word caesar , and the last ruler of the Rurik dynasty that had controlled Russia for six hundred years. After his death, Russia stumbled this way and that until the council reached out for someone related, however tenuously, to Ivan. In the winter of 1612, the Poles had invaded Russia, intent on taking advantage of her during its time of troubles—ah, we have a long, tangled history, the Poles and the Rus—and intent on murdering Mikhail on the eve of his coronation, which managed to take place, thanks to the peasant Susanin, in the Ipatiev monastery where Mikhail had been hidden. No wonder his mother trembled as her son was crowned, listening for the men coming to murder him, her boy who had just last month lived quietly with her in a Volga River village. Susanin only pretended to lead the Polish regiment to the boy, and instead took them into a snowy mountainous impasse. For his trouble, Susanin paid with his life and Poland with partition, but Russia was given a new, stable dynasty, the Romanov dynasty of three hundred years.

I trembled in the wings, like Mikhail’s mother, at this turn in my child’s life, but luckily I did not have to enter the stage until Act II, at the ball at the palace of a Polish nobleman where the ensemble performs several Polish dances—a polonaise, the krakowiak, a waltz, a mazurka—and while dancing this last, the gentry’s mazurka my father had taught me, it seemed over the shoulder of one capped dancer and then another I saw my father’s face. Mathilde-Maria, what are you doing? Over the shoulders of another, I noted how often the court looked up at the imperial box. Vova was now seated slightly behind Niki and Alix, the dowager empress, and Niki’s sisters and their husbands, but Niki’s brother Mikhail was notably absent. He had eloped with a divorcée and been exiled just like Andrei’s brother Kyril. In the grand ducal loges, Sergei sat beaming with his brothers and Andrei, bland-faced, completely ignorant of what was at hand, sat in his box with his brother Boris and with Miechen, now widowed, but no less rapacious, perhaps more so! The formidable Miechen had taken over her husband’s position as minister of the arts, most unusual for a woman, but other ambitions, more traditional ones, had been thwarted—she had not managed entirely to unhook Andrei from me, she had not married her daughter off to a king but to Prince Nicholas of Greece, her suit to have Boris betrothed to Niki’s daughter Olga had been rebuffed, Alix sniffing that she would not think to match a fresh young girl with Boris, so much older and in and out of so many beds, and Boris settled instead for a mistress. And though Miechen had quickly and expediently converted to Orthodoxy after the tsarevich’s near-fatal illness and Mikhail’s exile, her own son Kyril’s unfortunate marriage might prevent him as well from ever being tsar. And Miechen did not even know the other obstacle that stood in his way to the throne—the one sitting in a velvet-cushioned chair behind Niki in the imperial box. Just let her try to tip my son from that chair! But it wasn’t until I finished the mazurka and took my bow first to the imperial box, then to the grand ducal boxes, and finally to the house at large, that I even noted the grim face of the empress, another of the ambitious mothers here and one miserable despite her finery—the white velvet gown, the blue diagonal ribbon of the Order of St. Andrei, the diamond tiara, the white fan made of eagle feathers. She stood up at my bow, face covered in blotches, and removed herself to the back of the imperial box, where no one could see her and where she remained for the rest of the performance of the opera. One could hear the audience practically hiss its disapproval as the empress withdrew—and these mouths and tongues belonged not to the peasants, not to the students, not to the revolutionaries, not to the members of the Duma, but to the court. Niki kept his face impassive, but he heard the sound.