Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

I am certain this is why he then gestured for my son to move to the front of the box to take the seat left vacant by the empress, and the audience made another noise then, one that sounded like a caress, that wrapped itself around the pretty boy who looked so happy, whose father smiled at him so fondly. From the modest distance of the stage, I could see Niki’s pleasure at the murmur of approval emitted by the audience. And when, at the end of Act IV, after the coda that marks the opera’s finale, the great bass Sobinov who had played the role of the hero, Ivan Susanin, walked to the proscenium in his long robe and his horsehair beard, dropped to his knees, raised his arms to Niki and Vova, and began to sing an impromptu “God Save the Tsar.” He had once sung a lullaby to my son in his cradle—did Sobinov recognize him now? His voice filled the theater, at first a capella until the orchestra, stumbling a bit in its surprise, followed his lead and picked up their instruments. One by one we artists of the Imperial Theaters knelt alongside Sobinov and the audience, in a great wave, stood. At this Niki stood, as well, and at his signal my son rose beside him. Niki looked down at us all, silent, head bowed. My son, in imitation, did the same, and there was no doubt it had been this , the sight of the emperor with his young heir, that had prompted Sobinov’s homage.

The son of a tsar belongs to his country, not to his mother. And Russia, or at least the Russia inside this theater, still loved its tsar, this tsar, and it also loved and needed his son, perhaps this son, should it come to that. And if and when the time came, Alix would agree to it, had, even tonight, reluctantly, unhappily agreed to it. For the alternative to my son as imposter was for the line to pass crookedly to Niki’s brother, whom Alix hated, or to Kyril, whom she hated even more, or, if the imperial council negated those successions, to the tall, tsar-sized commander of the army, Nikolasha, whom she had hated since 1905, ever since he had told Niki if he did not install the Duma he would shoot himself on the spot rather than be charged with imposing martial law. Yes, she hated and feared them all, all the men of the imperial family—and, yes, she would take my son because he was Niki’s and because a tsar without an heir is a weakened tsar. But what kind of mother was I, to send my child away, a sack of clothes in his hands, a note pinned to his shirt, Take my son . What kind of mother? The mother of a tsar. This opera was my object lesson, after all, with Mikhail Romanov’s mother reluctantly submitting her son to his fate. Whenever I met Niki he wanted to take something from me, though when I was younger I thought I was taking something from him. But one never takes from the tsar, one always gives, and that my father saw—I was giving the tsar my life. After all, the opera is A Life for the Tsar , not The Tsar’s Life for His Subject .

And if that time came the next week, next month, next season, I would have to say to everyone I knew, My son has gone off to school in Paris , and I would have to remain on the stage just to see him, as I had remained on the stage to see Niki. Perhaps I would have my father’s sixty years in the theater, and each of those years, the imperial family would come to watch me from their box, and I would dance for them first as a princess and then as the Queen Mother, and finally at last, as a hag, an old woman noticed only when she had the capacity to frighten or harm or amuse. The family would arrive, as always, by means of the long private drive, where they would be greeted by the director of the Imperial Theaters and escorted through the private passageway to their chairs at the gilded proscenium of the box, which in both design and ornamentation echoes the proscenium of the stage, and eventually, Tsar Nicholas II would stand there with his hair all white, beside him Alix in a tiara with white hair also, and his daughters in the brimming beauty of their adulthood, and with them the tsarevich, the tsar’s son, my son, also an adult, in his own red-and-gold dress uniform of the Preobrazhensky Guards, the oldest regiment in Petersburg, created by Peter the Great himself, and at their appearance an excitement would course through the audience and around the dancers on the stage as we waited for the curtain. The imperial family, the imperial family is here . And then at a signal from the director, the orchestra would begin the overture and the curtain with a heavy lurch would sweep sideways and upward toward the catwalk and I would run forward on the sloping boards of the stage toward the audience, toward the imperial family I had aged alongside, and one day, when I looked to the imperial box for permission to perform an encore, my son would be the one to grant it.

But all this would not happen yet. By the next summer, 1914, my son was still with me and Russia was at war with Austria and Germany.

In cities across Russia, from the east to the west, from Odessa to Irkutsk, the red flags of the revolution were suddenly and all at once replaced with portraits of the tsar and holy icons, the country spontaneously united against a new enemy, the Austrians who threatened the Slavic people and the Germans who were Austria’s allies. The German embassy in Petersburg was vandalized by a mob, the equestrian statues on its roof toppled to the street, where enormous chunks of horses’ heads, horses’ legs, and thick horses’ bodies lay as if dynamited in the roadway. In Moscow, Bechstein and Bluthner pianos were thrown from the top stories of the leading piano store, something satisfying, I suppose, in dropping large objects from a great height. The name of the capital was changed from the Germanic Petersburg to the Slavic Petrograd. But I will always call it Petersburg—not Petrograd, Leningrad, Stalingrad—and I know one day it will again be St. Petersburg. Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven were no longer played in concert. Christmas trees were banned by the Holy Synod for the 1914 holiday: the candlelit Christmas tree was a German custom. Anyone in the streets who spoke English, French, Italian—the common Russian was too ignorant to know French from German, Bonjour from Guten Tag —was hissed at: Nemtsy! Germans!

Sergei rolled out a great map of Europe and Russia onto the desk in Vova’s room and Vova excitedly went through his toy soldiers to bring them to the table and place them where Sergei pointed as he explained the battles. Here in Sarajevo was where the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, had been killed by a Serbian assassin, and there Vova lay one of his men on his side. Here in Vienna was where the emperor Franz Joseph had drafted an ultimatum demanding that Austrian officers be permitted to enter Serbia to suppress all anti-Austrian sentiment and arrest all anti-Austrian officers. Vova stood a man at Vienna and made him a tiny paper crown. And here in Belgrade was where the Serbian crown prince telegraphed to the tsar in St. Petersburg for help, as by tradition the tsar was protector of all Slavic peoples. Our city Vova knew and he spent some time searching for the proper figure to represent the tsar, finally settling on the tallest soldier in the box, though Niki, of course, was not tall. But despite the tsar’s mediations, the Austro-Hungarians attacked Belgrade—Vova placed cannons here and there, and Sergei pointed to where the Russians mobilized along the Austrian border. Then the kaiser declared Germany would enter the war to help its ally, Austria-Hungary, and he began to send his troops through Belgium to northern France to prevent the tsar’s armies from being transported by railroad through France to Germany. So France entered the war. The tsar’s armies began to fight both north and south, north against the Germans where they met many casualties and south against the Austrians where they had greater success. The Russian army in the south moved all the way to Gorlice, Cracow, Lodz, and the Carpathian Mountains. Through all the battles of 1914, Vova moved his lead soldiers steadily southwest and at the north he laid them down on their backs, dead. Sergei told Vova that the tsar had a map just like this one in his study at Alexander Palace which no one was allowed to enter and that he kept the key to that room in his pocket. The tsar wanted to use this war to enlarge the country, Sergei said, to make it an even greater Russia, to stretch it over East Prussia to the mouths of the Vistula and over Bukovina to the Carpathians. Armenia would be annexed, the Muslim Turks pushed out of Europe and back into Asia Minor. The Straits and Holy Constantinople would belong to Orthodox Russia, as they should. The Germanic empire, which Sergei told me Alix found so changed from the Germany of her childhood, the people transformed by the perfidy and ambition of the kaiser—who had once loved her own sister!—that she urged Niki to crush it. Sergei told Vova that Germany, once crushed, would be divided among France, England, and Denmark, and the kaiser’s House of Hohenzollern would soon be no more and wasn’t that a great thing, and Vova nodded. And I nodded too. A greater Russia meant a greater tsar, a greater future tsar, and Alix and I were united in our desire for that.