Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

One of the commanders had given us use of his quarters, a two-room hut, and from there Sergei led us to the governor’s house, to the two rooms Niki had taken for himself. As we passed through the big dining room, I saw the long table was already being set for dinner, the round carved legs poking out from beneath a short white tablecloth, the rough planked floor and clapboard walls illuminated to the last splinter by the wall of windows at the far end of the room. Niki sat waiting for us in his study at an enormous mahogany desk, every inch of it etched and carved and ornamented. This room, after the brilliance of the dining hall, seemed blindingly dark—the stripes of the damask paper on the walls made a dull mirror; a lone dark chair crouched like a dwarf against the back wall. Niki rose to greet us, his face at first sepia, but then as he neared me, rosy, as if he were a photograph being painted over with color while I watched. Or perhaps I was that painter, and I felt myself color, too. He kissed my peach hand, shook Vova’s, now almost the size of his own, and asked him about his studies, Was he learning French and geography? And did he like his subjects? He put a hand on my boy’s shoulder as he listened, and now and then Niki looked over at me and smiled, and I thought, Do I look as old to him as he does to me? Because I was now forty-four, the age when a woman is well into her long, reluctant goodbye to the beauty she has worn as a right since she was sixteen.

Sergei stayed behind in the study when Niki showed us the other room in the house he had taken for himself, as if this next room, the carpeted bedroom, were too personal, too private for Sergei to enter, though we could, and he took from Vova the puppy. A camp bed had been placed by the great porcelain stove at the side of Niki’s own bed, and through the window opposite, half-open, we could see the windows of the city hall and hear the noise in the street below, voices, the occasional car or cart. This was a town, after all, not a battleground. The cot was made up with a striped cover, the pillows plumped at the head as if expecting a visitor, and beneath the cot lay a leather box which Niki gestured Vova should open. Within the box Vova found some colored marbles and lead soldiers—toys that must have belonged to Alexei and which he had left behind. Vova looked at the tsar and Niki nodded that he should play with them, and Vova glanced at me, uncomfortable. He was fourteen now, and except for planting soldiers on his battle map, he did not play with toys anymore. It was clear, though, from his nod, that Niki saw Vova as the twelve-year-old Alexei, still child enough to be engaged by the lead men. Vova looked down and then with a small smile, he took the box to the chair by the window and began to line the soldiers along the window ledge. Vova understood. If the tsar wanted him to be twelve, he would be twelve. Niki smiled as Vova made the marbles into cannonballs to fell the soldiers. Ah, if only our regiments could fight the Germans with that ease. Why, we had hoped to be in Berlin by Christmas 1914! All over by Christmas , everyone had said. Two years had passed since then.

Niki watched Vova pensively, shifting, his uniform wrinkling across the front. His boots bore dried mud. Every afternoon, Niki said, he would drive to the woods or walk by the Dnieper River, sometimes alone, sometimes with Sergei. He had begun, while here alone at Mogilev, to contemplate the colorlessness of life without Alexei. Rasputin had promised that Alexei would at thirteen outgrow his illness, but the doctors he spoke to last month had contradicted this, and the disease had certainly showed no sign yet of abating. Each month brought Alexei some new pain to his joints or brought him a headache or a fever. Each movement brought with it the potential for hemorrhage. And now with Rasputin’s death, Niki said, what was to prevent the next hemorrhage from being a fatal one? Alix had wept for days after Rasputin’s murder, now that catastrophe was certain for her son. She had read the congratulatory letters and telegrams between all their imperial relations, notes confiscated by the secret police, and she knew they stood alone. He and Alix had come to accept that Alexei would not live long now and certainly would not be able to serve as tsar. And, Niki said, it was not only Alexei’s life that was in danger; Alix’s was also, for different reasons. She had written him, Don’t let them send me to a convent. Don’t separate Baby from me . Had I heard the rumors? I nodded. Did he not know I had heard them all practically firsthand on the sable-covered bed at the von Dervis palace?

He had, Niki told me, decided to return to Peter at the end of December, to take charge of the roiling matters in the capital, and then to send Alix and the children to Livadia Palace in the Crimea, after Russian Christmas, where they would stay for a few years, until the war was safely over, until order had been brought both to the State Council and to the State Duma or else that two-chambered parliamentary body would be permanently dissolved. Eventually, according to his plan, Alix would return to Petersburg, but Alexei, if he still lived, would remain behind, tucked away, just as his English cousin George V and his wife, Mary, had concealed their sickly epileptic son John, just as Alix’s sister, Irene, had hidden her hemophiliac son Henry. And there, just as John and Henry had, Alexei would eventually die.

We heard the cannonballs exploding, marbles clinking against one another as Vova played, and Niki turned his head toward him but spoke still to me. He wanted to take Vova home with him to Tsarskoye for Christmas, alone. He could help decorate the three trees at the Alexander Palace, the one in the Big Living Room, another in the passage for the servants, and the last in the playroom, the fir tree there, strung with crystal baubles and tinsel, so tall it almost reached the ceiling, and I thought, Does the decree against Christmas trees not apply to the sovereigns, or is Niki recalling the hazy comfort of some Christmas past? Though I knew Niki delivered these details to soothe me, he was the one who smiled as he recalled them. The candles on the playroom tree would be lit first, he said, and beneath it Vova and the other children would unwrap their gifts. After the New Year Vova could travel with them to the Crimea for Easter. And so on and so on, each holiday leading to another, one month to the next. Vova could call me once a week. I could see him in March before the family left for the Crimea. We would have to explain to him, slowly, the manner of his birth, the function of his new place, and eventually, his assumption of his new name, and this transfer must be cultivated as unhurriedly and as carefully as Petersburgers cultivated their vines and flowers in their greenhouses all winter, forcing their bulbs to flower, their vines to bear fruit, forcing nature to do the impossible, to make summer from ice. And when Alix returned to Peter with the girls, Vova would come with her. Did I understand?

I was not an idiot—how did he think I had memorized all those divertissements and adagios, one step leading to hundreds of others? I understood—without a clear line of succession, the various Romanov men from all branches of the family would furiously contend for the crown. And with this weakness and divisiveness from above and the ruinous fog of war all around us, the red flags of the revolution would once again be draped from the roofs and windows of Peter and the old revolutionaries would slink back into the capital to take full advantage of the instability of the three-hundred-year-old throne. No—there could be no rupture in the route to the throne. Yes, I understood. Niki’s son—one of them—must be the tsarevich. We were quiet enough now to notice Vova had also grown silent. Niki might consider him a child, but I knew better. Vova had been listening intently. If he did not want to do this, if he did not want to go with the tsar, I knew he would let me know. He sat on the cot, motionless. Of course he wanted to go. This was the big adventure he yearned for, the path that led, finally, away from me. And then he let a marble roll slowly along the windowsill to topple the last soldier standing upright, which fell, with a clatter, to the floor.