That was the night Niki told me that he was going to Coburg in his father’s place for the wedding of Alix’s brother Ernest, the grand duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, and there he was going to propose once again to Alix. His right hand pulled at his collar; his left closed over his cap and gloves. His position obliged him to take a consort from a ruling house and Romanovs had been raiding the German principalities for their wives for a century: Leuchtenberg, Wurtemburg, Saxe-Attenberg, Oldenburg, Mecklenburg, Hesse-Darmstadt. He would, he said, take care of me, but I must understand that we ourselves could never marry. Alix was a princess, she was the sister of his uncle’s wife, she knew Russia a little through her sister, and here I interjected, She doesn’t even know the Russian word for yes! His parents had agreed to the match. So Niki’s father had gone soft with suffering, soft enough to consent to Niki’s desire to marry this stiff-necked, minor German princess who clung to her Protestant religion as if it were a lover. I had lost my ally and it seemed I might now lose Niki, who seemed determined this time that Alix accept his proposal. She’ll refuse you, I told him, and he shook his head and smiled. I put my hands on my hips, but I could not summon the energy for an exhibition of Her Imperial Indignation. I could see that what Niki wanted at sixteen, at twenty-one, at twenty-six, he still wanted, and that something was not me. I was not solemn and reserved, I was not educated, I spoke only Russian, a child’s version of Polish, and a smattering of French ballet terms, and none of those was the language of the court. I had read few books, my religion mattered little to me, I was trivial, I adored cards and parties, and worst of all, I appeared half-naked on the stage. Everything I was was wrong, everything I lacked he desired. What had been for me a passion had been for him a diversion, or worse, a dress rehearsal. My body had only further primed his desire for Alix’s, with the red-gold hair, the pale skin, the long, manicured fingers, Alix’s body with its own distinctive scent waiting to be discovered, with its own distinctive cry waiting to be provoked. I did not want to be reasonable, I did not wish to behave, as he put it, like two adults.
No one likes her here, I told Niki, and You will be her only friend. And when those announcements did not seem to move him, I began to rummage about for the ring of Count Krassinsky I had begged from my father and stuffed away like a fool. Perhaps it was not too late to tell Niki the story behind it. Niki watched me for a while, perplexed and concerned, as I pulled open drawer after drawer and thrust my arms into them, begging him, Wait, wait. And he did wait, until I had given up looking and stood, a little lost, a doll flung down in mid-play by her distracted mistress. Then he finally lowered his omnipresent cigarette and told me, You will always be among the happiest memories of my youth, and I told him, Go then. Go to your despicable Alix. And those were the last words I said to him before his engagement.
It was March and snowing in Russia when Niki left for Coburg. My life, at twenty-one years, was over. I lay like a frozen corpse in my bed that week, watching the white blur the wind made outside my dark bedroom window, the ring of Count Krassinsky, which I had found, too late, a tiny bit of ice in my fist. In Germany that year, though, March brought with it an early spring, lilac blossoms, pendulous and heavy, making soft purple bows as Niki strolled through the palace park with his consort, Alix, on his arm.
Later that March, Niki dispatched his cousin Sergei, one of those Mikhailovichi cousins, to my house to tell me that Alix had at last accepted his proposal. Niki had written all the family from Germany of his jubilation that his prayers had been answered, of how Alix had wept for three days, saying, I cannot, I cannot, before finally agreeing, Yes, I will marry you. If I had been there, I would have slapped her. What could possibly be her hesitation?—not that I was sorry she hesitated. But, apparently, according to Sergei, it was only when Alix apprehended that her brother’s new bride would replace her as the first lady of Hesse-Darmstadt and that Alix would now become the spinster sister-in-law that she changed her mind. How better to upstage the bride, Victoria Melita—and oh, I must tell you this, she was not long the bride, for she later divorced Alix’s brother to marry one of Vladimir and Miechen’s sons (is that not unbelievable?)—what better way to upstage the bride than to become the future empress of All the Russias? Niki and Alix’s engagement, Sergei told me, immediately became the talk of Coburg. Even Niki’s mother wrote to dear Alix to ask if she preferred diamonds, sapphires, or emeralds. Why, Alix liked diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls, apparently: to honor their engagement, Nicholas gave Alix a matching ring and necklace of pink pearl, an emerald the size of an egg dangling from a bracelet, a sapphire-and-diamond brooch, and a sautoire created by Fabergé of so many ropes of pearls Alix could drape them from her bodice to her hem. Niki could not have paid for this—any of this. That last piece alone cost 250,000 rubles. The money had to have come from his father. The first of many imperial rubles spent on Alix of Hesse.
I walked the floors of my Petersburg house, the house I hated now, and as I walked I could hear the pistol-shot sounds of the ice of the Neva cracking and breaking up, and soon enough the cold water would begin to move again, blocks of ice hurtling along with the current from Lagoda and the current bringing with it Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. Sergei followed me awkwardly in his overpolished boots, his voice a trail of vapors, the syllables breaking apart as soon as he uttered a word. Poof. Poor Sergei, following a madwoman through her rented home, trying to reason with her. I did not want to be reasoned with. I believe I actually pulled at my hair. I ran through the austere reception rooms, their octagonal tables crimped with gilt, their feather-stuffed settees, their dark-wood rococo-revival chairs with backs like laced antlers, all the artifacts of that old grand duke’s ambition and the artifacts of mine, and then circled back into the private rooms, the Russian rooms, with their mustard and lime walls, their bloodred oriental rugs, and the framed photographs of my parents, who had warned me not to leave them. Sergei followed me all the while, his high, broad forehead all twisted up and his gentle eyes full of pity—no jokes to tell me now! No, instead he tried to tell me how Niki planned to settle on me 100,000 rubles and the house on English Prospekt. I knew the tsarevich did not have unlimited funds. The 100,000 rubles represented his entire appanage of a year, the only money whose use he did not have to account for. The house itself, at 400,000 rubles, would have to be bought for me, as I found out later, by the Potato Club—for Niki’s cousins each earned a grand ducal appanage of 200,000 rubles a year, as well as income from their own and their father’s enormous estates. Yes, Niki was quite the stepchild, in comparison, as tsarevich. So in an act of brotherhood to help the tsarevich wash himself clean of me, the Potato Club made a great fountain of its money. Apparently, the tsar Alexander III, who had seated me with Niki on my graduation day and who now hung ropes of pearls on Alix, would not put up a single kopek to pay off Niki’s little Polish whore.
As I sat stonily on a chaise, Sergei drew a sheaf of papers from a leather satchel and made as if to explain them to me. All I needed to do, Sergei said, was to sign a few documents transferring the title and agreeing to the settlement, how lucky was that? How lucky? This lucky. I spat on the papers like a peasant woman from Borjomi and he folded them up at once and apologized. This could wait a few days, he said. A few days? How quickly they wished to settle accounts! Did they really expect me to capitulate so immediately? Perhaps they hoped to knock me over with their generosity. After all, it was no small sum, even though that day I spat on it. I have to confess, even as I spat, I felt a small thrill of pride at the amount. My salary at the theater was a thousand rubles a year. So Niki thought me worth a hundred years, five hundred years if one counted the house. But if I signed the settlement, I knew I would never see Nicholas alone ever again, and that I could not bear. And so I did not sign. But it wasn’t until Sergei had bowed once again and left that I found the great big tears of self-pity I could not locate earlier.
It was through Sergei that I extorted a last meeting with Nicholas. As Niki was now engage
d, it would not be proper for us to meet at the house where we had conducted our affair, and yet Niki wanted the meeting to be secret. I can see now, of course, that he did not want to meet me at all, but courtesy was a cardinal virtue for him, so he agreed to my request and Sergei arranged a rendezvous for us near an old barn out on the Volkhonsky High Road, halfway between Petersburg and Peterhof, that grand country retreat Catherine the Great had built in imitation of Versailles. By then it was May, the time the Neva had been declared open for navigation and the imperial family traditionally left the city for the country. The High Road allowed glimpses of the sea between the trees and occasionally those trees thinned out to reveal fields where cows wandered grazing. The High Road terminated at the Grand Palace, its gilded cupola topped by a crowned triple-headed eagle so that from every angle the bird had two heads. But I would not travel so far.
I rode out in my carriage with the same Russian coachman who had driven me two years earlier on my afternoon promenades along Nevsky Prospekt and Morskaya Ulitsa, driven me in circles around Petersburg in my desperation to surprise the tsare vich in his carriage. I studied the back of the elaborate costume worn for the last hundred years by all the old Russian drivers—the green blouse closed by silver buttons under the left arm, the belt embroidered with gold thread from which hung a hunting dagger, the low hat with a long flap that shielded the back of the neck from the sun. What did this man think of me, this little girl who had flung herself like a fleck of mud at the tsarevich and was now about to be scraped off by his fingernail? That I was lucky to have flown so high? Or that it was time I learned my place? Society would be so divided—some would pity me, others would grow slippery with pleasure. But no longer would anyone envy Mathilde-Maria Felixovna Kschessinska unless I could effect a great feat. I touched at the orchids I had pinned in my hair and reviewed what I would say. I had a plan, concocted over these long two months during which Alix began her study of the Russian language and prepared for her conversion to the Orthodox Church and during which I alternated between hysteria and despair. My behavior terrified my family—and then, when I hatched this idea, I became suddenly calm—which worried them still more. They begged me to return home to Liteiny Prospekt and to resume my old life with them, with my sister, but I knew if I did that, within a few months, whatever comfort home provided would pale and then I would be plagued by longing, for Niki, for the world of the Romanovs whose slice of this life was so much tastier in every way than the life of anyone else on earth. I wanted to keep eating from their golden plates. And so I intended to persuade Niki to keep me as his mistress after his marriage—after all, his grandfather had had both wife Marie Alexandrovna and mistress Ekaterina Dolgorukaya. Why should Niki not do the same? I could think of no reason why not, and once I suggested this to him, I was certain he would slap his forehead and say, Mala, I should have thought of that myself!
I arrived first at the barn just off the High Road and so I was able to watch the figure of Nicholas as he slowly approached—at first like a dot, then a smudge, a shape, a centaur, a sovereign astride a horse. He looked as heavy, as immutable, as the statue of his father on horseback that he would one day unveil in Vosstaniya Square and about which this ditty would spring up, making everyone laugh—
Zdes stoit komod
Na komode begemot
Na begemote sidit idiot
Here stands a chest of drawers,
On the chest a hippopotamus,
And on the hippopotamus sits an idiot.
But Niki was not an idiot. His face was cautious and grim, for he had come here against his better judgment to hear the trouble I was prepared to make him. He was on his guard against me, but he needn’t have worried, because once he dismounted, I could not find my voice. I could do nothing, I could not even move. He saw this and the careful, polite look left his face and one of compassion replaced it, and he offered me his arm. We walked in silence a short way around the barn, the wood warm and splintering against my palm, just out of the sight of my coachman. My shoes, not made for walking in the grass, got their heels stuck here and there, but the tsarevich in his knee-high military boots walked easily over the matted grass that hid the buds of incipient wildflowers, and he helped me along, gently. If only this grass went on forever, if only we could never stop walking. I gripped his arm, the material of his summer dress uniform so formidably starched, so crisp, I could have bitten into it. Let the grass turn to dirt, let the length of this barn never run out. But it did. And that’s when Niki said, That’s a pretty flower in your hair, Mala. He smiled at me. You look beautiful today. I looked beautiful today! I would not have to say anything to him, after all. He was thinking what I thought and all I had to do was say, Yes, I agree. He unlocked my fingers from his sleeve and kissed my palm before raising my other hand and kissing its palm also. That’s how we Russians sign our letters to our friends and family, I kiss your hands, a sentence full of love and fealty. The sun became so radiant about me I felt it would scorch my silhouette into the barn wall. I shut my eyes. Next I would feel his lips on my lips. Instead, Niki released my hands. I opened my eyes to see why. From a pocket of his white uniform, he drew out the papers Sergei had shown me in March, in April, in May. And Nicholas said, Mala, I need you to sign these. He held out next a pen, a blue-and-gold enameled fountain pen, these pens being a fairly recent invention, and he unscrewed the cap of it. While he held one paper and then another against the rough barn wall, I signed my name once, twice. Mathilde-Maria Kschessinska. I remember thinking even then how strange it was that a few ink marks on paper proposed to dissolve a human bond. One hundred thousand rubles and the house on English Prospekt were mine and Niki rode back to Peterhof.
You would think I would have the sense then to give up. But I did not. I had lost all sense. Grief had stolen it from me.
I must tell you I was not the first of the tsarevich’s mistresses from the Imperial Ballet. There was one before me—Maria Labunskaya: long blonde hair, in certain lights too pale to be called blonde, long legs, the face of a Russian aristocrat, not of a peasant. Those broad eastern faces with the strong bones, thick lips, and almond eyes were not so prized by the court. The more delicate northern European features were preferred. The first Slavs, you know, mixed with the Normans when they came down from Scandinavia to Russia, and Ingwarr eventually became Igor and Waldemar became Vladimir, and the legendary Norse prince Hroerekr became the first Russian ruler, Rurik, in the historical chronicles of the ninth century. Traces of that northern heritage still appear on occasion on our faces. So Maria Labunskaya. When the tsar’s advisor Konstantin Pobedonostsev suggested to the sovereign that they find someone suitable for Nicholas to enjoy before the rigors of marriage, the chief of police, a good friend of the tsar’s, pointed his fat finger at Maria in the corps de ballet and told the tsar she would be perfect. I’ve told you the men came to the ballet for a mistress. They drove their carriages right up the private drive of the Maryinsky Theater reserved for the imperial family, right up to the low windows of our dressing rooms so we could lean out and chat with them before performances. Maria Labunskaya was a few years ahead of me at the school and engaged to an officer in the Guards, but her new duties as mistress so appalled her prospective mother-in-law that her marriage plans were jettisoned. In what position was Maria to say no to the sovereign? She was paid eighteen thousand rubles a year from the tsar’s purse to make herself available whenever summoned to the palace. But Nicholas with his baby face and his beginnings of a moustache preferred sketching his country scenes to an awkward assignation with a pair of legs paid for by his father. Two years later she was still on the imperial payroll and Nicholas had yet to summon her—he had, in fact, begun to flirt with me.
But I worried: Why would the tsarevich ever call on me when the beautiful Maria Labunskaya still raised her white arms on the Maryinsky stage?
I’ve told you I was not beautiful?
So at the theater I began to spread rumors in her name—Labunskaya had sai
d the tsarevich was a syphilitic, the emperor a fraud, the empress a whore for having first been engaged to the emperor’s brother—and within a few months Labunskaya was exiled from Russia, dismissed from the Imperial Ballet.
And so I thought perhaps the same incantations I had used to chase Maria from the tsarevich in 1892 would repel Alix from him now. What else can one do in a beauty contest in which one’s beauty is second but lessen the beauty of the rival?
I wasn’t close enough to Alix to whisper my slurs about Niki into the air and let them buzz and stumble on their black wings to her ear. So I wrote the spells down in my own tiny hand—I know, I was twenty-one years old—sealed the papers with wax, and sent them to her in Coburg. Niki was not the only one with documents! I had said things so terrible Alix could no longer possibly love him, and when she opened my letter, the pages would spit out their slanders and she would recoil from Nicholas as Petersburgers had once recoiled from the deformities in Peter the Great’s scientific museum: a man with two fingers, a hermaphrodite, a two-headed fetus. I wrote her that her fiancé had taken the virginity of a young girl and then discarded her, that he could not be trusted, that the whole capital was saying the tsarevich was a rake, a libertine, a fornicator, that it would be bad luck for her to marry a man with such a black soul and their marriage would be cursed from start to finish. Stay away, I finished, Stay out of Russia! But Alix was then still very practical, not yet a superstitious Russian, not yet one of us with our icons and our candles and the acrostics we make of our names, looking for omens, though she would make up for lost time and double so. There would be no empress more medieval than she, eventually. But in 1894, when she saw my girlish handwriting on paper, she showed my letter to Nicholas, who had gone back to visit her, and he immediately recognized the handwriting as my own. Hadn’t I written to him enough plaintive letters on that same paper, in that same hand? I am terribly bored if I do not see you. The time drags endlessly. Who did you look at so long in the stalls?
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 7
