Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Here, they and their lives were the same. They slept beside each other in Alexander Palace, they were tended to by the imperial physician, watched over by Alexei’s two dyadi , his bodyguards. They took lessons from the imperial tutors, English from Charles Gibbes, French from Pierre Gilliard, history from Vladimir Voyekov, seven tutors in all, one for each subject. And Alexei at his birth had been enrolled as a member of the Imperial Guard Corps, made an honorary member of the 89th White Sea Infantry regiment and ataman of all Cossacks. His godparents were the dowager empress, King Christian IX of Denmark, King Edward VII of England, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. All these honors my son would one day assume.

Was this not his sud’ba , his fate? And so was his illness a warning to me or a test of my resolve? I pinched at my arms and in mid-pinch the door to the playroom suddenly opened and Alix appeared, a tall, white ghost dressed in the wimple and tunic she wore when nursing the war wounded, and she moved along the beds without looking my way or speaking to me, her hands adjusting a pillow, smoothing the lock of one’s hair, the sheet beneath another, and when she reached my son, she laid her palm to his forehead as I had and then turned back his coverlet and gently moved his arms until they lay, palms up and free of the bedsheets to cool his temperature, and none of these actions had I thought to do. Vova stirred. His hand reached for and clasped hers, and comforted, he slept again. I knew then she would protect him as fiercely as she protected Alexei and I felt myself turn to vapor, as useless and as invisible. Alix loved my son—who would not?—and it appeared he loved her, too. And if he had here a mother’s and a father’s love in addition to all else, then did he not have everything he deserved? I was not needed here. I stood and started for the door when the maid caught my sleeve. I turned back. Alix beckoned to me.

I followed her unsteadily from the playroom and along the dark corridor to a wooden staircase that took us down past the mezzanine to the first floor. She smelled of lavender, which I breathed in each time I stepped onto the stair she had just left behind. There in the vestibule with its marble floors, its walls covered in cloth that gave off a low sheen, yet another footman in white gaiters waited with the empress’s sable cloak. Through the archway and an open door I could see into a drawing room full of boxes and crates, some filled with sawdust and paper. The walls of that room had been stripped of some of their treasures, for exposed wires and nails made studs and loops along the cream-colored plaster. The court was packing to go, I thought wildly. To go where? Why, to the Crimea. To Livadia Palace. Of course. That was the plan. Niki had told me that. Vova had said in his call before last he was looking forward to Easter holiday there and to the parade on the Day of White Flowers, where the girls had told him he would carry a staff decorated with white marguerites and go into the shops with them to beg donations for the sanatoriums. Livadia was three thousand miles south, far from the war, from the troubles of the capital, and from me. I saw now that that, too, was part of the plan.

We stepped out then into the snow-filled courtyard. The only light came from the vestibule behind us and the tall lampposts ahead—the steps had snow shoveled to the sides of them and snow rested on the pointed tips and ornamental filigrees of the wrought-iron gates and fences that enclosed the palace, and as we walked snow once again began to fall from the sky. I followed Alix in her dark cloak as she led me across the courtyard and I could not feel my feet, whether from the cold or from fear I do not know, and the air buzzed and rustled about my ears, alive with the colliding snowflakes. She walked me all the way to the gate where my driver waited, and when she saw me settled into the car, she leaned forward and whispered to me the words executioners traditionally ask of their victims before they raise the ax: Will you forgive me? So. She understood, even if Niki did not, that she was taking from me my life. And I said, Yes, I forgive you , and she shut the door to my car then and straightened up. I watched her figure standing in the courtyard as my car turned the drive, her shape half-white and half-black, one part sable, one part linen: nurse, empress, mother.

I dreamed of my mother that night, for the first time. She died of a stroke in 1912, after having suffered an earlier one. She was eighty-two years old. For some weeks after the first stroke, she was confined to the bedroom she had once shared with my father in our old apartment on Liteiny Prospekt, and I would visit her there. In my dream I found the room unchanged, the same dark furniture, the same oil paintings of Polish landscapes in heavy gilded frames hanging on the wall from long loops of wire, the same patterned wall fabric, the same photographs of all of us, but my mother was not lying in the big bed. I found her in the big, dark ballroom where my father used to give his dancing lessons, her long yellow hair unbound, her eyes closed. When I approached her, she opened her eyes and her fingers reached for my wrist. Mala , she whispered, how you’ve neglected me .

So sleep brought no comfort, but the theater would. The next night I went to the Alexandrovsky, to see my old friend the actor Yuri Yuriev in his twenty-fifth-anniversary performance in Lermontov’s Masquerade . Ah, how we clung to our old rituals in the very face of their dissolution—the anniversary tributes with the requisite gifts from the tsar and the court. Inside the theater’s mustard yellow building, aristocrats were chockablock in the seats, having come to honor an imperial artist, to applaud a play set during the reign of Nicholas I, the Iron Tsar, a tsar Niki was now emulating with his own resolute behavior. Had he not cleared the capital of imperial malcontents? Was he not about to wash down the barnyard of the Duma? Would the Romanovs not reign another hundred years? On the stage the huge mirrors and gilded doors suggested the great ballroom of a great palace. It was the most elaborate set ever assembled on the tsar’s stages, yet it was assembled even as the real sets of that real world were dismantled forever on the streets outside.

For the next day the newspapers printed that bread would be rationed starting March 1, setting off a panic and protests. Two hundred thousand people coursed down the Neva over the ice after the police raised the bridges to block their way to Admiralty Island and the palace square, where it was traditional to march, to claim the streets from and the attention of the imperial authorities. By night the streets still weren’t completely safe. Many restaurants stayed dark, the rail lines were empty of trams and the streets of cabs, streetlights did not burn, and the beacon from the Admiralty lay like a white sword over the city. The next day, when the temperature, which had been as cold as in Lapland, suddenly rose to five degrees Celsius, it seemed the entire populace emerged from its dark hiding places into the sun to voice its misery, and by the afternoon, the crowd that had been shouting, Bread, bread , began shouting, Down with the tsar! And each day that week the police and brigades of Cossacks—reserve Cossacks new to Peter, not Niki’s Cossacks—their horses skittish on cobblestone and their hands empty of the whips with which the regiment was normally equipped, half heartedly tried to control the crowds. And then Niki, from faraway Stavka, ordered the Pavlovsky, Volynsky, and Semenovsky regiments, which had put down the uprisings of 1905, into the streets, where they shot dead fifty people in Znamenskaya Square, and it seemed after that the remorse of the regiments spawned a mutiny. These junior officers of humble backgrounds, unlike all the aristocratic senior officers who had been killed at the front, joined the crowds as they took over the Arsenal, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the telephone exchange, and the railway stations, and together with the crowds and the Cossacks, the mutineers fought the tsar’s police.