It’s not easy to drive a troika, you know. Of the three horses only the middle one wears the reins, and it takes all the driver’s strength and skill to steer well. We Russians love speed, and Nicholas was flaunting his skill in the obstacle course of the village, on the dark mass of the parade ground. He wanted to impress me. He smiled at me without taking his flashing eyes from his horses, from the dusty yellow highway, sluiced down all through the day by barrels of water hauled from the Ligovka River on one-horse carts, wetted now by the evening dew. I was the one now too shy to look at him, though I peeked at him, sideways. The beauty in the family belonged to Niki—no pug nose and bulging eyes like his sister Xenia, no sunken cow face like his sister Olga. No photograph does justice to the balance and nobility of his face. And those eyes—no one who saw those pale blue eyes could forget them. But his eyes were more than tools of seduction. He used them to probe the soul. If I had the eyes of a fairy, he had the eyes of a god.
The country believed, you know, that its tsars were divine.
I ended up at the villa of my sister’s beau, Ali, after all, in the early hours of the morning. He shared the villa with his friend Schlitter, a fellow officer, and what an entrance I made there, on the arm of the tsarevich—not as the baby sister blubbering at having missed the train, but as Venus triumphant! The five of us had supper and laughed for hours, Schlitter pulling a long face and saying, No candle for God and no poker for the devil, as he was the only man without a woman, a sally that pleased me enormously as it meant the tsarevich made up a pair with me.
For a moment, anyway.
I heard in the early months of his winter marriage to Alix, Niki took her, too, on nighttime rides, on a sleigh skimming the streets of Petersburg and the ice of the Neva.
And what kind of wife would I have made him? Could I have stood his future—imprisonment and a martyr’s death?
I can assure you this: if I had been his wife, that would not have been his future.
Our Family’s Talents Were Our Diamonds, Our Rubies, Our Pearls
My mother was twice a wife, and before that, for a few years, a dancer. She was a member of the corps de ballet, one of the girls who make up the row deep upstage, a Near the Water girl, or so we called them, those girls of the lowest rank who stood always in the back, their shoulder blades brushing against some piece of scenery inevitably painted with a large lake. My mother, Julia, left the theater to marry and have a family, and when her first husband, Ledé, died, she married my father, Felix. She was beautiful enough to marry as many times as she wished, with her round face and soft eyes. In the picture of her I keep by my bed she has her hair styled in ringlets, the front swept back, a braid like a crown anchoring it. She loved both of her husbands and with them had thirteen children, four of them by my father. I was their youngest.
My father was most famous for his mazurka. Poles dance the mazurka two ways, you know, one like the gentry, with elegant movements, the other like the peasantry, with feet stomping the floor, not softly sliding, and with much throwing of hats. Yes, Niki’s great-grandfather Nicholas I saw my father dance the mazurka and had to have him for his own. On the Russian stage, my father performed not only the mazurka for him but also all the major character roles in our ballets for the next sixty years, his career three times the length of most dancers’. In the Imperial Ballet we cultivated two types of dancers—classical and character. Now, of course, no company can afford to do this. The troupes all have a small number of classical dancers, well under a hundred, and when they mount the big ballets, the stage seems sparsely covered. But then, with the tsar’s purse, ah, well, we had a great many dancers, both classical dancers and character dancers, both types celebrated by the public and by the emperor. At times well over two hundred of us crowded the stage, and if we needed more bodies still, the tsar loaned us one of his regiments. My father was not only a great dancer but a great actor and a great comic. With his friend the dancer Timofei Stukolkin, when playing the robbers in The Two Thieves, the two of them not only ran about the stage but also clambered even into the orchestra pit, while the audience cried with laughter.
When I was a little girl, my father took me to watch him dance at the old Bolshoi Theater in Petersburg. Already I loved the theater and begged to be allowed to go. If my father would not take me, I cried. If he did take me, he complained that afterward I could not sleep all night. I pestered my mother to have a ballet costume sewn up for me so I could dance and pose before the mirrors of our ballroom, where my father gave his lessons in the mazurka. And so, on occasion, he relented and brought me to the theater. I remember the first time, a matinée. Like today, matinées then were full of children with their governesses and old ladies with their lorgnettes. I had the privilege of sitting in one of the artists’ balcony boxes backstage, a special perch from which I could see not only the action of the performance but also that of the interval, when the curtain went down and behind it the stagehands lowered the new scenery and raised the old and the floor was swept and watered and the dressers stitched the torn strap of a costume while the wearer of that costume fidgeted impatiently. The performance that afternoon, I remember, was Le Petit Cheval bossu, in which my father played the Khan in his carpeted tent. All our ballets were based on French and German fairy tales until my father and his friends, who met Saturday afternoons at Stukolkin’s, suggested to the old ballet master St. Léon that a ballet be based on a Russian fairy tale. St. Léon shrugged and confessed he knew none. At this, Stukolkin ran and pulled a storybook from the shelves of his children’s nursery and right then pushed the samovar and the glasses of tea aside and read aloud the tale of The Little Humpbacked Horse by Ershov, while someone else translated each line into French so St. Léon could understand it. And so the tale of the Tsar Maiden and Ivanushka the Fool became a ballet—and St. Léon, inspired, took lessons in Russian and learned to speak it fluently—more than one can say for his successor as maître de ballet, the obsequious Frenchman Marius Petipa. And that is how I came to be that afternoon at the theater, watching my father play the old Khan of the Kirghiz Kaisaks who yearns for the young Tsar Maiden, only to find once he abducts her that she will not be possessed. At the end he is tricked by his passion for her into jumping into a barrel of boiling water, and she marries Ivanushka the Fool. In a few more years I would play my first child’s role in that ballet as part of the undersea bacchanal. At the end of Act II the little horse and a peasant boy dive to the sea floor to find the missing ring of the Tsar Maiden, and that is where I, too, was found, in a tableau with all the inhabitants of the sea. But at this time I am telling you about I was only three and I was so silent in my rapture as I watched night become day on that stage and wind give way to thunder as the stagehands worked the machinery that my father forgot I sat waiting for him in the artists’ box and went without me to his dressing room to wipe off his makeup and then traveled all the way home to Liteiny Prospekt. Only when my mother asked, Where is Mala? did my father cry, Oh, my God, I’ve left her there! and run back to the theater. He found me where I had hidden myself under my seat to wait for the evening’s performance. Every artist has the story of his first enchantment with his art and that is mine.
After my father died, I found the leather journal where he wrote in his distinct hand the complete list of his partners. The last name at the bottom of the page was my own, underlined. At the sight of that black-inked mark I wept, for it told me he was still proud of me despite the disgrace of my personal circumstances. Yes, I was aware that while I considered my life a great triumph, to my parents it was a disgrace. My parents’ friends were all, like them, Polish Catholics, and none of the daughters of their acquaintances became the mistress of anyone—before the revolution. After the revolution, of course, girls from the best families walked the Petersburg streets, selling themselves for pieces of soap. But we are not there yet. That is later. No, my private life was not what my father wanted for me. We were a proud family of artists—my grandfather was a tenor at the
Warsaw Opera, his voice so beautiful the king of Poland called him my nightingale, and my father had hoped we would be a theatrical dynasty like the Petipas or the Gerdts, all of whom, fathers and children, worked at the Maryinsky and married fellow dancers. My brother Josef had already married a coryphée, Sima Astafieva, and he and my sister, Julia, and I had all graduated from the Imperial Theater Schools. We had all performed the children’s roles in the company’s ballets, as marionettes, cupids, nymphs, and pages. When we were cupids we wore headwear embroidered with gold thread, when we were nymphs we wore garlands of roses, when we were sylphs we were made to fly, a ring at the back of our costumes hooked onto a line by the machinist, smiles on our faces to conceal our terror as we were cranked into the air and tried to pitch our arms into the required poses. We watched the afternoon rehearsals at the great Maryinsky Theater from a box until it was our turn to rehearse on the stage, a little timid in the face of the theater so empty and so hushed, the great chandeliers and the velvet seats covered with brown canvas against the dust. Before the performance we were dressed, and then the lady chaperones used cotton wool to make circles of rouge on our cheeks. And then we were pushed onto the stage, where we tried hard not to stare out at the house, at the gold and white and blue of the four tiers, the parterres, the loges, the high-up gallery, tried not to breathe in the smell of chocolates and leather and tobacco, but attempted instead to focus on our little world on the stage. When we graduated, we all danced with the Imperial Ballet, my brother as a character dancer, my sister as a classical one. Julia was six years ahead of me; we were called Kschessinska I and Kschessinska II, until, of course, I surpassed her and was then simply M. Kschessinska. Our family’s talents were our diamonds, our rubies, our pearls, and my father’s talent was so abundant, the heap of it toppled off the stage and into our home.
In his spare time, he made a model of the St. Petersburg Bolshoi Theater, that building now demolished, though my father’s model still survives, I hear, in the Bakhrushin Theatrical Museum in Moscow. It stands in a display case by the one that holds the little shoes I wore in my first performance in the undersea bacchanal of Le Petit Cheval bossu, though I have not seen either for eighty years. The little model my father built had real oil footlights and a velvet curtain and miniature canvas scenery that went up and down when you turned the handle, which my sister, Julia, never let me do, slapping my hands away if I reached for the crank. She thought she was the mistress of everything in the house. My father built, too, a big glass aquarium that stood by the windows in the parlor. Stone ornaments, like garden ornaments in miniature, decorated the vast bottom of the tank and fish swam like women moving in colorful dresses through the pillars of the watery estate. It was my father who designed the rooms of our large apartment at No. 38, Liteiny Prospekt in Petersburg and of our dacha on our country estate, Krasnitzky. There he tore down the walls of the dining room to enlarge it and built a bathhouse on the river. We had a farm there, an orchard, a vegetable garden, and beyond that, a forest thick with mushrooms. And I remember how each time we arrived at the country from the city, my father and my mother knelt down and kissed the land of our estate. We were not rich, but the money my father earned as principal character dancer and from his private ballroom lessons in the waltz and the mazurka, lessons given to the children of the nobility, even the children of the imperial family, gave us a comfortable life.
Christmas and Easter he turned into pageants and feasts. Christmas Eve day we fasted until the first star appeared in the evening sky, after which we gorged ourselves on the thirteen fish dishes my father himself had prepared—we, of course, had a cook, but this was a special day and my father a real culinary artist, with a secret recipe for fish soup made with cream, a Polish dish. He labored in the kitchen while we children played games—rucheyok, like London Bridge, and chekharla, leapfrog. Candles and glass pears shone in our tree, which was showered all over with silver tinsel that tangled with the gold paper stars and angels. On New Year’s we drank hot Swedish punch and ate apple pies. For Easter my father baked a dozen kulichi, one for each apostle. Tall as a man’s top hat, each cake was iced in a different manner and adorned with fruits or candies, and I would walk the length of the banquet table to admire their distinct beauty: a fleur-de-lis of sliced strawberries on this one, the crest of an ocean wave made of white icing on that, tiny toothpick flags a fence at the border of another. In France, the old Russian immigrants bake their kulichi in coffee cans to make them rise tall.
All the world was a theater to my father, and for my birthday in August no production was more grand. We were inevitably at our dacha in that month and the feast he prepared was followed by fireworks of his own invention. At the dessert table I sat in the place of honor; one year, my father hung a wreath of flowers on a string run though a hook in the ceiling and when my dessert was served, he lowered the petaled crown by pulley until it settled gently onto my head, while my big brother and sister and half-brothers clapped. Russian girls love to weave themselves crowns of flowers, and so my father wove one for me. Even the peasants in the nearby villages who did our haymaking and took care of our cows brought birthday gifts, baskets of eggs nestled in napkins, each linen embroidered with a small red cross, and they bowed low from the waist as they presented their treats. Some of the peasants had been serfs just ten years earlier, before they had been emancipated by Niki’s grandfather Alexander II, and they kept still their serf manners, bowing low like that to their masters.
During those long days of haymaking and rye threshing and mushroom and berry picking, the lives of peasant and master were stitched tightly together in a single seam. Peasant children became the playmates of the noble ones, if only for the summer, and who does not remember playing gorodki with wooden blocks or bat and ball, babki, with any scrap of metal to be found, or bory, the game of tag, our bare feet brown with dirt. I remember the littlest ones bathed naked in what remained of our old bathhouse. The peasants joined us for lunch or for tea on Sunday, but when we returned to Petersburg, of course, they remained by the river Orlinka at their harvests to work the fields while I learned my art. I put on so much weight one summer from all the big meals that when I returned to school my teacher scolded I had become regrettably fat. But what is there to do in the country but play and eat? But wait, I’ve lost myself. That happens often to me now. It was the peasant women who as wet nurses and nannies raised the noble children, taught them folklore and fairy stories, played with them cards and lotto, put them to bed at night, accompanied them from country to city back to country again, wept when they went off to the lycée or joined the Guards, and then were cared for by the families as aging relations. Why, Sergei Diaghilev brought his nanny with him when he moved to Petersburg as a grown man!
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 t
hen 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 True Memoirs of Little K Page 3
