Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

The calls always began the same way, with a palace servant announcing, You are receiving a telephone call from the imperial apartments of His Majesty the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich , and then my son would be on the line to chatter about the events of the past week—he was learning English with Alexei’s tutor Mr. Gibbes, he had sledded down a big ice hill and beat the girls, both the Big Pair and the Little Pair, for supper they had had suckling pig with horse-radish, and when would I be coming to visit, as the emperor had said it would be soon, and I agreed that, yes, it would be soon, at the beginning of March. After those calls, I would dress and go to the theater.

Even at forty-four I was still dancing, though not as often, and I remember exactly my last performance, though, of course, I did not know it was to be my last. With Mikhail Fokine, I performed an excerpt from Carnaval . Poor Fokine. The war had tied him to the Imperial Theaters, where Diaghilev had no sway, and so Fokine had had to shuffle his way reluctantly back to partner me if he wanted to appear on the Maryinsky stage. When this ballet had its premiere in 1910 at the Pavlov Hall, Nicholas and Alexandra both were there to witness it, but now we performed it as part of a benefit for a war charity. The sets for this ballet were arranged in such a way and with such perspective as to make it seem the dancers were miniature beings and the audience were peering into a velvet maquette to watch us cavort. Usually, in this little hatbox of a ballroom, the characters slipped magically in and out of the folds in the blue curtains, but that night, it being a benefit for one of Alix’s charities for wounded soldiers, Fokine and I performed only the duets and solos from the ballet, Fokine in his harlequinade costume and mask, I, his love, Columbine, in my many-layered ruffled dress with the puffed sleeves. We danced that bit of commedia dell’arte set to Schumann, and in it we exemplified the silliness and light of the form, the light in here against the dark of the war outside and the dark frozen mood of the people. Fokine moved to the flute and clarinet, and I to the strings, and yet beneath the frolic the music etched a dark line. I found myself unexpectedly weeping by the end of the ballet, when Harlequin brings his pirouettes to a finish by abruptly sitting on his bottom. Fokine’s face, behind his mask, looked up at me quizzically. He was younger than I and he belonged to a different age. When the war was over, he would go abroad. But there was only one stage for me, one world for me—this one. And it was just twenty days before the revolution that would destroy it.

For a short time, though, it had seemed this world would last. The British ambassador, George Buchanan, took his usual vacation to Finland. Princess Radziwill hosted a great soiree at her palace on the Fontanka Canal, the light from her windows flickering across the water in all directions and illuminating Boris Vladimirich’s car among the cars and carriages lined up outside. At M. Paléologue’s dinner party at the French embassy, the guests discussed whether the palm for excellence should go to Pavlova, Karsavina, or me. And Niki decided to return for three weeks to Stavka, and Alix and his ministers could not dissuade him. The night he left, I received an unscheduled call from the imperial apartments of the tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich. On the phone, Vova told me he was feeling ill, that Olga and then Alexei had come down with a headache and a high fever and the doctor had diagnosed measles and had put even Vova now to bed. Mama, I want you , Vova cried, his voice as thin as a five-year-old’s, and when I hung up the phone, I pictured him hot with fever in some closet, abandoned while Alix rushed to and fro tending to her own children with the same fervor she had shown when nursing Niki through typhus. If only Niki had not gone back to Stavka so soon! When he was at Tsarskoye I knew he would look after Vova, but how could I trust that Alix would even take notice of him? And so I began to pack a small valise and telegraphed Sergei at Stavka that I would take the train the nine versts to Tsarskoye Selo to nurse Vova myself. When Sergei reported to Niki my intentions, Niki said no, that I must trust the imperial doctors and their ministrations, for who practiced better medicine than these men? Vova was in good hands. But when I insisted, reminding Niki that my promised visit had been postponed by his departure to Stavka, he relented, so long as my visit was made by night and of a few hours’ duration. He would tell Alix to expect me. And I must use the servants’ entrance, soberly dressed, so that my visit would not be an official one, and would not be noted by the adjutant in the leather-bound appointment book, though, of course, I would still be observed by the secret police.

For my son I would endure these humiliations. For after all, what more was I now, having given up my rights as parent, but a servant of the tsar?

The sentry at the back gate took my name and my driver took me to the side of the colonnade, to the servants’ wing, where I was received by a policeman of the imperial court and a maid in a black dress with a white ribbon in her hair. Alix, I had heard, liked her palace servants to dress much like the English ones she grew up with at Granny’s, at Windsor Castle, but her Russian girls complained mightily about the corsets and the starched aprons and caps, so they had been allowed dispensation, special Russian dispensation, to wear just the dresses and the ribbons. I was taken by stairs, as the elevator was broken, to the second floor of the east wing, to what Alix called the green room , a large corner playroom. The maid waited behind me in the doorway. I suppose Alix had instructed also that I not be left unattended. What did she think I would do, strangle her son and pin a note to my own with the word tsarevich scrawled upon the paper?

My son lay with three other children, all in camp beds, all of them asleep. Along two walls a cluster of peacocks strutted in a painted frieze against a background of green, as green as the carpet on the floor. The moonlight and starlight from the seven windows of the outer two walls made clear the figures of the children, who looked as if they had dropped, by virtue of some enchantment, into positions of abandon on the grass of a magical park. And indeed they had been enchanted, I found out, all of them drugged by the imperial doctor, Eugene Botkin, with various potions against pain and for sleep. I stepped cautiously into the big room. The carpet had been cleared of toys, the paraphernalia pushed to the walls or heaped onto the great green and yellow sofas and chairs—railways and model towns and model ships, big dolls in carriages, smaller mechanical figures in factories and in miniature mines, tea sets, dollhouses, white-faced china dolls dressed in lace, teepees, wooden canoes with matching oars, open boxes of lead soldiers, their tunics painted green, blue, and red—the riot of it muted by the dim light. Dr. Botkin was just finishing his latest rounds, his wire-rimmed glasses glinting as he moved among the shadows, and with a nod at me he left, and another servant girl in a black dress, but this one with the white apron and cap so loved by dear Alix , brought me a chair. I pointed to a spot by my son’s camp bed and she brought it there.

I sat and scrutinized my son’s face; his skin had not yet erupted in the spots that measles inevitably brings. I laid my hand on his forehead. His skin was hot, very hot, and he was so drugged that he did not respond to my touch but slept on in this strange, deep sleep. On the row of beds beside him lay the imperial children whom I had seen only from the stages of the Maryinsky or the Hermitage. The girls would all be bald in a few weeks when their hair began to fall out from the fever and Alexandra would have their heads shaved, but for now they lay with their hair damp along their flushed faces—the broad cheekbones of Olga, the eldest; Tatiana with her delicate upturned nose and her wide-set eyes shaped like almonds, like a cat’s, like her father’s. And Alexei, a long, thin shape beneath his quilt, his face, like my son’s, losing the round childishness of babyhood and drawing itself down into a long triangle. In August he would be thirteen; in June, my son would be fifteen. Niki was right to want to make the switch now, before the boys’ faces became any more distinct from each other as they grew older.