Adrienne Sharp: The True Memoirs of Little K

A whore. She called me a whore. But not a liar.

Was I proud of my performance? When the world is ending, pride is the first thing to go.

We raised anchor on March 3, at night, prepared to weave our way through the harbor waters laced with mines and crowded with every kind of vessel, their stark lights blanching our faces. I heard when the dowager empress departed Russia on the Marlborough , a Russian ship glided past her own in the Yalta Harbor, and the guardsmen on the ship opposite, spotting the distinctive black-swathed figure of their empress, began a booming rendition of the national anthem, “God Save the Tsar.” There was no such serenade for us, though we, like Minnie, also stood on deck for a last look at the Russian coast. Three weeks later, the civil war would be over, and on that same dock, thousands of White Russians would cram themselves onto whatever could float. A British squadron would board several thousand White Army troops. Of those who were left behind, the Cossacks shot their horses rather than give them to the Bolsheviks, the White Army officers shot themselves in the heads with their military revolvers rather than allow the Bolsheviks that pleasure, their men shed their greatcoats and dove into the water in an attempt to swim to Turkey, drowning preferable to living. But tonight we looked out only at the encampment of the desperate rather than the hysterical. Andrei stood erect at attention at the brass rail by his mother, clothed in his uniform of the commander of the horse artillery of the guard, a uniform he would not don again until he lay in his coffin. Vova and I stood a short distance away, Miechen delivering to us the occasional sideways glance, reassessing my son. And then, along the dock, I saw a man in a greatcoat running running down the dock and out onto the jetty toward our ship, waving his arms and calling out a name that distance made into a thin thread, but I thought I pinched the end of it between two fingers— M —and I gripped the ship’s railing and peered into the darkness. If Andrei had somehow managed to secure a tin or two of cocoa and biscuits from the British canteen for our teatimes, surely Sergei, so much more clever, could manage in all this upheaval to find a way to outwit his Bolshevik guards, to steal clothes from a peasant, to hop a train across the white steppe and then down a line south from Moscow, to make his way by cart and by foot to this dock just in time to run down its pier and leap over this rail to us. And just as I opened my mouth to make a spectacle of myself by calling out to him, Vova leaned toward me and said, It’s not him .

No. It was not Sergei. He did not join us in Novorossiysk. Nor in Touapse, Pati, Batum, Constantinople, Piraeus, Venice, Milan, Cannes, or Cap d’Ail.

Slowly, slowly, in Paris and on the Riviera that spring and summer appeared the faces of those who survived—various theater artists, among them Chaliapin, Karsavina, Fokine, Preobrajenska. Pavlova and Diaghilev were already in the West, and so Russian ballet was reborn in Paris, London, and New York, our dancers—or students touched by our dancers—founding some of the world’s great ballet troupes. And there appeared, as well, many variations of grand dukes, princes, and counts. We found one another at our villas, at the Hôtel de Paris, at the Château de Madrid, at the Pavillon d’Armenonville, at the Théâtre de Sarah Bernhardt—but other faces did not appear, though they seemed to stand at our sides or just behind us, their forms washed in with a thin gray paint. We looked for the lost, asking ourselves, Where are they? What has happened to them? And then the terrible answers to these questions arrived in Paris, in the person of Nicholas Sokolov, a legal investigator who had been assigned to the mystery of the disappeared Romanovs. After the White Army took Ekaterinburg briefly back from the Bolsheviks, a few officers had hurried to the Ipatiev house where the tsar and his family had been held until just eight days earlier and found it scrubbed and emptied. Perhaps history would have been changed entirely if they had found Niki and his family there, for by 1920 Russia was in the depths of a famine so great the people of the eastern provinces had begun to eat their snow-frozen dead just to survive. Yes, the starving Russian people would have thrown flowers along the roads to Peter if the tsar were still alive and promised them bread. But the White officers did not find Niki or Alix or Alexei or the girls or any of the imperial suite; they found only Alexei’s spaniel, Joy, wandering the house, hungry. They found hairpins, toothbrushes, books, a wheelchair, the board the frail Alexei had used as a desk while in bed. A frightening nothing. Sokolov knew how to conduct a proper search. He knew how to interrogate, how to enlist the help of interested parties, how to survey the pockmarked walls of the basement, the tire and rut marks and the imprint of horses’ hooves leading from the house to the forest around the Four Brothers Mine, twelve miles outside Ekaterinburg. He knew how to sift the earth, to spot evidence. He was good at cataloging—charred bone fragments, belt buckles, a pearl earring, a few centimeters of a woman’s finger, three icons, shoe buckles, shreds of a military cap, and the contents of the tsarevich’s pockets—tinfoil, nails, copper coins, a lock. And from these he surmised that the imperial family had been shot, their bodies carried by truck and then by cart through the forest, where they were stripped, cut into bits, and burned, their ashes thrown into the mine. This would have been my son’s fate, too, had he journeyed with them to Siberia that August night in 1917.

Sokolov had put what was left of the imperial family’s belongings into a suitcase nobody wanted until finally the Orthodox Church in Brussels accepted it. All this Sokolov managed to collect before the Red Army retook Siberia in 1919, and in the same wave that sent us fleeing the country altogether, he, too, fled—with his suitcase and his notes and his theories and his photographs—to the French Riviera, where he visited Niki’s uncle Nikolasha; to London, where he visited Niki’s sister Xenia; to Denmark, where he attempted to visit Niki’s mother the dowager empress, who refused to see him, who refused ever to believe that her son and his family had been murdered or to allow prayers for their souls; and finally to Paris, where Andrei and I met with him and saw his reports and photographs. We sat in the Hôtel Lotti, in an alcove of the dining room, our plates untouched, the steel gray sky pressed up against the window at my back. I peered at Sokolov’s reports and documents, the photograph of the gouged wallpaper of the Ipatiev cellar, the gruesome list of hundreds of objects recovered, and then I could not read anymore, my arms shaking to the elbow, but looked into Sokolov’s face—at his deep-set eyes, his long, waxed moustache as he spoke very properly of the family ground to ash. The Bolsheviks had sent a dozen men to the doorway to shoot and hack at Niki and at Alix and the children lined up with him in that cellar, on the excuse that they were to be photographed. From the Bolsheviks’ own accounts of it later, every assassin had wanted to kill the tsar and tell the story of it. After they read him their orders, In view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you , Niki had cried out, What? What? He was the first to die in that little basement room in distant Ekaterinburg. Alix, sitting in her chair, second. Olga, third. But the other girls had begun to run, their corsets so sewn up with jewels the bullets could not pierce them. They ran in circles in that small space, tripping over the bodies of their parents blown from their chairs, crouching against the walls. Where do you find men to shoot at screaming girls, to club and bayonet them, to murder a fifteen-year-old boy crawling toward his father? The Bolsheviks found such men—and many more like them.