Adrienne Sharp: The True Memoirs of Little K

We, of course, were of more modest means and had no nannies. My mother and father raised us, were devoted to us. Would it be wrong to say that of the four children he had with my mother, I was my father’s favorite? After all, my parents are gone, their faces blackened in their graves; my brother Josef died in 1942, my brother Stanislaus died over a century ago, in 1864, at age four, eight years before my birth. This fascinated me, a brother I never knew, and I would gaze for long periods at the photograph my mother kept in a silver frame on her dressing table as if by that I could come to know him; he looked just like her, the rest of us like my father, with the long face, the straight nose, the close-set eyes. My sister, Julia, lived to be one hundred two, you know. She died the evening after Russian Christmas Eve two years ago, January 7, between seven and eight o’clock, right here in this room. After our husbands died, we lived together again, as we had as girls. My father lived to the age of eighty-three. Longevity runs in our family, though not in the Romanovs’, but longevity is not immortality; it merely ensures you suffer the loss of everyone you love so that when death finally comes you are more than ready.

I am not writing this down. I am thinking it. I had two strokes this past year. To answer my correspondence, I dictate, and then I sign my initials MRK in a hand so shaky it looks as if some very old lady had written those three consonants. My handwriting used to be minuscule, but now it is loose and large, like a small child’s. Yes, it is impossible to write, but I do not want to ask for help until I know for certain what I wish to share. Because, you see, there are so few of us left who remember how it all was. After the revolution three million of us fled to Berlin, Paris, New York, where we clung together, speaking Russian, reading Bunin, Tolstoy, Akhmatova, not the traitor writers, the ones who loved the Bolsheviks, but the ones who reminded us of what life was like before. We spent our days eating Russian breakfasts of tea, cream, ham, cheese, and hard-boiled eggs, attending midnight mass at Easter, sitting together in theaters where actors and singers and musicians from the tsar’s great theaters now performed, traveling to the Riviera in the season, trying to live as before . That was our phrase, as before . Everything we did we tried to do as we did before. We were waiting for the Russia we knew to be returned to us. But death picked us off one by one as we waited, and our children who came of age in these foreign cities do not know the Petersburg and the Moscow that, as the poet Ivanov put it, disappeared into the night . Yes, if I don’t tell, certain things will never be known, and when my memory is completely lost, even I will not know them. All will be rumor, which is nothing but the tail end of a vanishing truth.

The tsarevich and me and our fortunes together after that troika ride, yes, those details I can remember, but not so the names of the little girls I taught at my ballet school just seven years ago.

When we returned from Krasnoye Selo, the tsarevich called on me for the very first time, at my parents’ house. My sister and I had a little sitting room adjacent to our bedroom, with a second door that opened directly into the central hall, which gave us some privacy for entertaining. As we were now eighteen and twenty-four, we could receive our own visitors, though we could not feed them, it still being our parents’ house and the cook subject only to their orders! We both, like our father, enjoyed a party, and as my sister was six years older than I, my parents allowed her to serve as both hostess and chaperone while they retired out of earshot for the night. Some of the young officers of the Guards who saw us at the theater became our admirers and would visit us the evenings we were not performing. We were grownups now and did not have to shout our names from a carriage as we left the dormitories. The men could now ogle us at the theater and call on us at home. And so, you see, my sister had set the precedent for me with Ali—Baron Alexander Zeddeler, an officer in the Preobrazhensky Regiment whose family had been in service to the crown for a hundred years—who courted her and later became her official protector. She had not chosen a fellow dancer to love, and I, who copied her in all matters, would copy her in this. I would do better than copy her. In this, as in all things, I determined to trump her: I was prettier, my promotions came quicker, and so if she had a baron to court her, I would have a tsarevich. There is no greater pleasure than winning a competition with one’s sister and no greater sorrow than to see her suffer because of it. In my journal that year I wrote of Nicholas, He will be mine! Yes, I used an exclamation point.

One evening in March the maid opened the sitting-room door to announce the officer Eugene Volkoff, but it was Nicholas Romanov who stepped through the threshold in his long gray overcoat, and the maid knew no difference. She had never seen the face of the tsarevich. But even those who had could mistake others for him. Niki’s friends Volkoff and Volodia Svetschin looked so much like him, they were often taken for the tsarevich. Svetschin wore his hair and even his beard like Niki’s and loved the moments of mistaken identity when Petersburgers stood straight and gave the eyes right as he passed—one was not supposed to look directly into the sovereign’s eyes, you know—thinking Svetschin the heir. Yes, sometimes Niki was able to travel about unrecognized. If the tsar were to appear before you without introduction, would you know he was the tsar? At the head of a Bolshoi Vykhod from the Winter Palace, surrounded by carriages and Cossacks and uniformed grand dukes, yes. But without such a production, perhaps not. Niki’s own guards did not, on occasion, recognize him. On his march in the Crimea years later to test out the army private’s new uniform, he was stopped by a sentry at the gate of his own estate. You can’t go through here , he was told. And so the tsar of All the Russias turned without complaint and retreated.

Hard perhaps, now, to believe that the face of the tsar or the heir might be unknown to his subjects. The camera was not used to the extent that it is today. I have few pictures of myself before the age of thirty, and though the imperial family all had camera boxes and pasted pictures of each other in their scrapbooks at night, those photographs were private. The tsar almost never appeared in public. The official portraits issued in lieu of his presence were often painted photographs or colored lithographs, but those were idealized images. So my maid did not know this was the tsarevich, who did not want himself known as his intentions were not—and would never be—honorable. But at that time I did not care about this, and this “M. Volkoff” and I spent the evening in the type of light chatter I had learned so well by age fourteen. My first flirtation had been with an English boy, McPherson, I can no longer recall his full name, who had visited our dacha one summer and whose engagement my determined pursuit of him compromised. I must have entertained the tsarevich very well. For the next day, on ivory palace stationery with its gold crown floating above his blue-green monogram, Niki wrote me, Since our meeting I have been in the clouds . I had snared him as I had snared McPherson. Niki was always more expressive in letters than in person, though one could not know this from his journals, as terse and dull as a detective’s report.

Once he had actually come to my house—which he told me he had feared would make him uncomfortable, as I lived with my parents—he came back again and again. My parents did not interrupt us in our sitting room. Could one tell the tsarevich that the hour grew late? That the frivolity grew too loud? For though Niki came sometimes alone, he came also at times with his fellow officers, Count André Chouvalov or the real Eugene Volkoff or Baron Zeddeler, or sometimes with his young cousins, the children of his grandfather’s brother Mikhail Nikolaevich, the handsome Mikhailovichi—for that is how we refer to each branch of the Romanov family, as a group through the patronymic—the grand dukes George, Sandro, and Sergei. These last three and Niki constituted the Potato Club, their private joke. Out riding one day, some of them turned their horses into a potato field and the others, losing sight of them, called out to a peasant farmer, Where did they go? —to which the man replied, They turned into potatoes! And so to commemorate their brotherhood each man wore around his neck a golden charm in the shape of a potato.