Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

At that moment, a real soldier came to the study door to tell Niki it was time for dinner. Sergei’s face next appeared in the doorway and I could tell from it the tsar had already discussed with him his plans and that Sergei was distressed by them; it had distressed him even to overhear Niki repeating them to me, though Sergei did not know none of this was a surprise, that I had been preparing myself for this and dreading this since Spala. But I understood this was why Sergei had been talking of death, of leaving his estate to Vova: he wanted to lay some claim to Vova before Niki gobbled him all up. But what could Sergei do? Vova was not his son, no matter how much he doted on him, though Vova did not know this. Nor did Vova belong fully to me. This fate or something like it had been Vova’s since his conception. And he did not know that either.

I touched Sergei’s hand as I passed him and then Niki gestured to Vova to walk on ahead with Sergei and the soldier while we held back. Niki turned to me in the dim winter light of that bedroom. I promise I will leave him the greatest empire Russia ever commanded . Nicholas II’s Christmas manifesto to his army would speak of his vision, as yet unfulfilled, of this Great Russia, and the peace that would follow from it that, its reach blanketing all the Slavic peoples and resolving all long-simmering conflicts, a peace such that generations to come will bless your sacred memory . Did I believe him? Like his most loyal subjects, I still believed him capable of anything. Then he kissed me, the triple kiss to the cheeks the divine tsar bestows upon his subjects at Easter, and then one last kiss, the one a man gives to a woman, his chapped lips to mine. I opened my mouth to his rough tongue, which I had not tasted in fourteen years and which he let me have now. Had he loved me all these years? If only, if only, he had ennobled me and made me his wife in 1894 instead of Alix. Our kiss was long, and though the twilight made around us a cloak of black fur, we were not invisible beneath it. When we broke apart, finally, I saw that Sergei had forged on ahead, the puppy at his heels, but my son had turned back to wait for us, and he stood there in the passageway, his face utterly astonished.

That night I dreamed I was following the tsar through the south gates at Tsarskoye, those grand gates, their Gothic façades like the doorways to a great church. The tsar was wearing his thick greatcoat and his fur papakha , and I saw only the broad back of him as his big dogs, his fifteen Scottish sheepdogs, the large breed favored by Queen Victoria who first brought them to Balmoral, came to stick their long noses into the folds of his coat, and then they ran ahead of him in the grass toward the grove of birch trees and oak and then back, weaving his steps like shuttles through a loom. His favorite sheepdog, Iman, had been the only palace dog, but Iman had disappeared, had perhaps taken a nail in the paw or swum too far in one of the lakes, and now Niki did not want that attachment to a single dog again, so he enjoyed them as a pack, loving no particular one over the other. Spaced thirty feet apart at the tall iron fence stood the Cossack guards, and along the horizon one of them rode by on a huge horse, beast and man fused into a force of speed and strength, headed to the barracks of his regiment, built in the Muscovite style Niki so loved, an imitation medieval village christened the Feodorovsky Gorodk, or Townstead. Niki walked alone, ahead of me, unaware of me, but I followed him as he walked along the grass, along the glades of trees, along small bodies of water turned green and black by the reflection of these trees and their shadows and the grasses, the yellow walls and white columns of Alexander Palace rising like an ancient Greek temple at the other end of the long drive and the wide lawn. His children ran there, built snow towers, and sledded on the hills in the winter, canoed in the lakes and swam in the canals in the summer, served tea on Children’s Island in the little playhouse, buried their pets in the small cemetery by the bridge, and marked their graves with headstones in the shapes of miniature pyramids. I followed him across the bridge to Children’s Island where he climbed the few steps to the porch of the playhouse, the playhouse like the ones built for all privileged Russian children since Peter the Great, and where with his gloved hand he brushed the leaves from the seats of the two wicker chairs, and the wind came over the still water and rattled the little canoe at its small stone pier and the pine needles shifted in the tall trees that reached twice as high as the roof. Some of the needles, unhinged from their branches, fell like the lightest rain, and he brushed clean the table on which sat some crockery playthings—teapot, cups, and plates—and then he turned and faced me and raised one arm and held it out with the palm up and then I saw it was not Niki at all, but Vova, grown to manhood, and I woke just as I was racing across the grass to kiss his hand.

In Petersburg I told everyone only that I had left my son at Stavka with Sergei.

On January 1, Niki returned to the capital and, as he promised me, he began to rid the capital of his enemies to make it and the throne safe for our sons. He had consulted the ghost of his father and the ghost had given his blessing. Prince Dimitri Pavlovich was exiled to Persia. Grand Duke Nikolasha, who was already in Tiflis, having been sent there after his demotion from commander in chief of the army to commander of the regiments in the Caucasus, was ordered to remain there indefinitely. Prince Felix Yusupov, in his gray soldier’s coat and under guard, was sent to his estate in the Kurskaya province in central Russia. Sergei’s brother Nicholas was dispatched to Grushevka, his country estate in the Ukraine. The Vladimirichi were ordered to depart Peter, and Miechen, Andrei—with the swiftest of goodbyes to me—and eventually Boris went to the Caucasus, to Kislovodsk, with the face-saving excuse that they were taking the cure at a spa, and the Vladimir Palace and the von Dervis mansion stood abruptly empty. Andrei came to say goodbye to me on Kronversky Prospekt, and I blessed him with my father’s icon of Our Lady of Czestokowa while he knelt, though he was not going off to war but to a place untouched by it where his safety could be assured and, frankly, I was happy to see him go. He was no longer an amusement and his treachery endangered my son—my ambitions for my son. Kyril, as a Navy commander, was ordered to Port Romanov on the Arctic Circle far, far from the capital and perhaps there, with any luck, he would freeze to death. After the war, Niki planned to turn his attention to his ministers of the State Council and to the members of the lower house of the Duma—to rid both of the incompetence that was crippling the country, but to reorganize the government now, he felt, in the middle of a war, could be disastrous. First, Russia must prevail over Germany.

The Christmas and New Year’s holidays had fattened the country’s spirits, and the weather had taken care of the rest, turning so cold, at fifteen degrees below zero, that the streets had emptied of troublemakers. It was so cold, in fact, that no supplies could make it either into the capital or out of it, for blizzards kept the trains frozen on their tracks and there was no one to sweep the snow as so many men had been conscripted. The bakeries were forced to stop making bread because the flour and sugar could not be moved from their warehouses and silos, and the big, fine pastries disappeared from the shops, followed by biscuits, buns, cakes, and finally humble loaves of bread. Women began queuing up in long lines for anything available. And there was trouble transporting coal, as well, and what there was of Peter’s wooden fences began to vanish as people tore them down to burn them in their stoves. But on the tsar’s orders, four trucks managed to unload coal at my Petersburg mansion, and the sight proved so novel that a crowd gathered, despite the temperature, just to stare at it. As I’ve said, my neighborhood stood far from the factories that harbored the strikers, and my house stood far from the tenements in which they lived, and so this crowd was a titled one, but no less hostile for that, the men slapping their gloved hands together, fur hats pulled down low on their heads, making remarks. I opened the door to Vova’s balcony just a crack; it overlooked Kronversky Prospekt, and I heard the French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue—a busybody who kept a diary of events large and ridiculously small (the tsar’s ministerial appointments noted alongside the chinchilla coat and gray taffeta dress worn by Niki’s brother’s beautiful new wife, Paléologue noted even her superb pearls !)—yes, Paléologue was declaiming loudly, It seems w e haven’t the same claim as Madame Kschessinska to the attentions of the imperial authorities . To which I thought, Of course you haven’t, you fumisterie. You are not the mother of the tsare vich! But I said nothing and shut the door, for the phone was ringing with my weekly call from Vova.