Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Sergei’s brother now judged it safe enough for Sergei to return to Peter, and Sergei came at once to see me at my brother’s apartment, driving there in the lone car the Provisional Government had permitted him to keep—he who had once had half a dozen motorcars! The arthritis that sometimes troubled him had now flared like a pulsing star, scorching his every joint, and that was why Sergei limped into the foyer, where I stopped him to kiss his beard, untamed as a peasant’s and tangled with silver just as the tinsel we threw each year on our Christmas trees tangled with the pine needles. When I kissed at his fingers, I saw the knuckles of them had become so misshapen that his insignia ring sat on a little finger as curled and reddened as a boiled shrimp. I took his hat from him and suddenly I found myself on the floor with it in my two hands like a giant saucer. Sergei stooped awkwardly and tried to pat my shoulder. He missed. His hand batted the air, the tip of my ear. I peered up at him—had he lost his sight, along with everything else? No. He was simply, suddenly, at forty-eight, an old man. And I knew—I would not be permitted to sit down on the floor, cry into this saucer of a hat, and hand him my tears.

While Sergei had moved back into his apartments at the New Mikhailovsky Palace, where he and his brother Nicholas dined together every night, the Napoleonic memorabilia Nicholas collected scattered about, I had not yet been able to return to my home, which the Bolsheviks made famous and which would be forever referred to in the history books as the Kschessinska Palace . But when the Provisional Government finally put the keys back in my hand, I, along with Josef and Sergei and two of Sergei’s loyal dragoons—for not every soldier, you must remember, was sympathetic to the revolution—drove to Petersburg Island in Sergei’s one car to take stock of the ruin.

Shall I tell you a bit of the ruin, for I remember it exactly? My intimate Louis XVI drawing room had been looted of all its period furniture and its silk walls shone a dull gray now rather than soft yellow from smoke and filth. Apparently, the Bolsheviks did not employ housekeepers. My piano had been, inexplicably, pitched by a crazy man almost into my winter garden, where, caught between two white pillars like an officer pinched between two of his infantry, it could go no farther. My winter garden itself had become a thicket of dead plants, the marble basin in its center a toilet circled by brown palms. My dining room floor had clearly functioned as a spittoon for the husks of those ubiquitous sunflower seeds. The bottles in my wine cellar, all carefully selected by the dilettante Andrei at his long-ago ease, had vanished, drunk to the bottom, I am sure, the moment they were discovered. But there were some provisions in the pantry cupboards; the Bolsheviks had been booted out too quickly to pack everything, though they had tried. The staircase to my bedrooms was covered with the books and leaflets someone had tried to carry out before the men gave up hope of removing their literature and decided to burn it instead; in almost every fireplace and stove in the house I found a big pile of ash. Ink stained my bedroom carpet, and I found cigarette butts and wads of tobacco spittle lying like cockroaches in the bottom of the sunken bath I had with such imperial delusions built for the tsar. The cedar wardrobes in which I had stored my furs had their doors ripped off. Need I say there were no furs remaining within? The numbered plaques above my dressing room cubbies had been pried off, as well. The Bolsheviks did not like numbers? They liked well enough the clothing that had been assigned those numbers, I saw, because not a stitch of it remained, either. The next weeks, it seemed to me I saw bits and pieces of my wardrobe on the backs of young women everywhere on the streets—my black velvet skirt on one, my ermine coat on another, my lace shawl around the shoulders of a bucktoothed girl. I went then into Vova’s suite, threw open the doors to his balcony, and sat at his desk, a student desk but large enough for me, the drawers still stuffed with notebooks and papers from Vova’s lessons with his tutors, a map with the major cities of Europe, even those hated German ones, marked in red ink, a line of script on the frontispiece of his French notebook, Je m’appelle Vladimir Sergeivich Kschessinsky, quatorze ans . I fingered the spine of one of Vova’s notebooks and then held it to my nose to breathe in the scent of my boy. How long had it been since he had fidgeted here at this desk? Half a year. But instead of breathing in my son, I inhaled something else, a foreign smell. I lowered the notebook to the desk and opened the cover.

The country is passing from the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class consciousness and organization of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasantry…

All power to the brutish peasantry, the social equivalent of the theater’s Near the Water girls? They were to run the country? Those rank-and-file workers who threw a man off a roof while their brethren on the street below beat at his body with sticks?

The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government… no support of the Provisional Government.

So the Provisional Government was not revolutionary enough for this writer?

Abolition of the police, the army, and the bureaucracy… nationalization of all land… the union of all banks in the country into a single national bank.

And what was this? No police? No landowners? One bank?

There were cross-outs as the writer revised and blotches and pools of ink where he had paused to think, nib of the pen against the paper. I flipped the page to see a list of names I did not recognize and had never heard of, perhaps the names of his own comrades, and next to each name an epithet— pig, cunt, whore, bastard .

I shut the notebook. It was certainly one of my son’s school composition books. I opened the cover again. On the inside cover the writer had signed his name, one word, Lenin . The handwriting was large, graceful, almost the handwriting of an older woman lying at her case on her chaise, but these words, this Theses , as the document was titled, had not been written by some bourgeois but by some maniacal anarchist who sat hunched here at my son’s desk composing these stark sentences. Actually, I was correct in my assessment of the two sides of the man, though I couldn’t know it then. Lenin was Vladimir Ilyich Ul’ianov, a hereditary nobleman whose father had slowly earned enough chin as inspector of schools to be addressed as Your Excellency and whose mother had inherited her father’s country estate at Kokushkino, where Lenin strutted about like any good squire, sniffing the fragrance of its lime trees, strawberries, raspberries, and hay, and where, in 1891, during the great famine, he had the gall to sue a starving peasant neighbor for damaging a fence. That was one side of Lenin, but the other side had seen his older brother, Alexander, hanged for plotting to kill Alexander III. And when Lenin later arrived to study law at Kazan University as had his brother, he joined the same neo–People’s Will groups that his brother had joined, and Lenin was expelled for taking part in a student demonstration—if only they had hanged him like his brother! But, no, Lenin survived a prison sentence, a three-year Siberian exile imposed by the tsar, and then a further exile of his own in Europe, before the war had done to this country what all his treatises could not. Lenin had been a revolutionary for twenty years now, and a man like that was not going to give up just because Kerensky had put out a paper warrant for his arrest. Not that I knew this then—but this ugly writing foretold that if it were up to this Lenin, the Provisional Government would have it no easier governing than had the tsar. And would meet, perhaps, the same fate.