The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  It was Sergei who told me how angry Niki was at my letter and I cringed to imagine him reading it. In my imagination—in a scenario not terribly well thought through—Alix alone would look at the pages, swoon in disgust, and then, revived, would begin to pen a letter of her own to Niki, expressing her revulsion. Your life, she would write, is regrettably debauched. I am enclosing the diamonds, emeralds, and pearls to be given to another girl more deserving. Surely you must know of one. Something like that. But that was not what happened. Instead, she showed him the letter, the other possible outcome, of course, and Niki, who could not find it in his soul to lie, was forced to tell Alix about his ballerina mistress from the demimonde, to open up the pages of his journal a little earlier than his wedding night to show her all the entries about Little K as he had once shown me all the entries about Alix. Whereupon she wrote in the margins by his entries, I love you more since you told me that little story.

  That was what I was reduced to. A little story.

  But I did not taste this humiliation yet. So certain was I that this trick would work that foolishly, ridiculously, the little story began to strut about the theater and to boast, We shall see who will win, Alix or me, and the other dancers snickered even as they slinked away from such seditious talk. Yes, I made indiscreet proclamations. We shall see who will win, I cried, and the dancers looked away, embarrassed for me. My father finally sent my brother to English Prospekt to scold me, to remind me I was a Kschessinsky, not the daughter of a laundress or a scullery maid. Where was my dignity? I had no dignity. If I could not behave myself, he told my brother to tell me, they would forcibly bring me home. But they were theater people, dancers, they had not moved in the circles I had, so how could they understand what I had lost? Yes, I had become the poor girl in every ballet, the hysterical peasant girl thrown over for a princess, the hysterical temple bayadère thrown over for a princess, the hysterical Gypsy girl thrown over for a princess. Worse, I had become a matter of state. Finally, Polovstov, a member of the State Council, was told by the director of the Imperial Theaters, Vzevolozhsky, who abandoned his usual exquisite eighteenth-century manners to report on me, about my disturbing outbursts at rehearsals and in the hallways. And Polovstov went in turn to Grand Duke Vladimir, minister of the Imperial Theaters and therefore minister of me, who ordered me to the Dvortsovaya Embankment, to his painstaking imitation of a Florentine palazzo with its 365 rooms, one for each day of the year. Its long façade faced the Neva and the sunlit water made the gold-brown bricks of it glow like God’s face. A gondola floated at the pier. A gilded carriage waited at the street. No one lived closer to the Winter Palace than the grand duke. I stood at the entrance portico for a few moments enjoying its small protection and it’s a good thing I did, for the sober façade did not prepare me for the shock of the interior. The entrance hall rose several stories high around me, with walls of scarlet and gold, each arch, each cornice, each recess so heavily gilded and ornamented I felt I had stepped into a church. My mouth opened. Two giant bears, stuffed and mounted, flanked the grand curved staircase, dwarfing me further, one bear offering a tray of salt, the other a tray of bread—an old Russian custom of welcome, but I did not feel welcome. I was in trouble. The grand duke’s servants wore scarlet coats and the square caps of the Renaissance courts and carried both swords and maces, which made me feel I was being delivered to Vladimir by armed guard. It was a palace that evoked both East and West but it spoke with one voice of the Vladimirichi’s power and ambition. I had the ambition but not the power. I meekly followed a liveried servant to the library, the two-storied room a cherrywood box, domed like an aviary, with books everywhere above and below instead of cages of spring larks and winter finches, and at the great table in the center of the room, presiding over all this wood and paper, was the grand duke, Emperor Vladimir, with his muttonchop whiskers, his booming voice.

  His palace is now the House of the Scientists of Leningrad. His bones lie in Russia, his wife’s and children’s scattered about France.

  But on that day he was master of the house, master of me, and he had me sit down at the big table in a leather chair opposite him in which my feet barely skimmed the floor. If I’d put my thumb in my mouth I could not have looked younger. Vladimir looked at me sternly, the white whiskers of his sideburns plumped up with alarm. By this time Vladimir’s beard was also white, though his moustache still had color, and his face had thinned the way the faces of old men do as life begins to seep from them. As a young man the grand duke had had a fleshy body, a face full and voluptuous, but as he aged his face became quite elegant—hollow cheeks, the dark muttonchops gray, then white—it became an intelligent face, no longer the face of a drunken lecher. He looked like an ascetic, but he was not one: he still loved food and theater and power and women, and thank God I was a pretty young woman. Pretty enough.

  My actions were upsetting to the tsarevich, he told me, threatening the security of his new fiancée, did I understand that? Nicholas and Alexandra were one day to be the father and mother of a nation, Russia’s Batiushka and Matiushka. I could not go about shrieking this way and slandering Niki in letters to Alix. I put my hands over my face. Yes, he said, he knew about the letters. Furthermore, I must know that Niki had to marry. Had matters not been settled properly with me? I nodded. So why was I still making such a fuss? The state secretary wanted me sent from the capital, with a monthly allowance to be stopped if I ever returned, he told me. Was that what I wanted for myself? I shook my head. And then I felt it—the great patriarchal fist squeezing the breath out of me like the boned corsets I danced in. I could be another Maria Labunskaya, dismissed from the Imperial Ballet and sent all the way to Paris, the city where the tsars had, for decades, sent the wayward members of their families. I did not want to be so far from home. I did not want to dance as Maria had at the Parisian Gaîté-Lyrique Theater. I was one of the tsar’s imperial dancers, not a common entertainer.

  So I put on my smile. I used two shaking fingers to wipe at my tears. I agreed to stop making a fuss. And the grand duke called me his dushka—thank God I had once been his dushka—and he kissed the top of my head. Good girl.

  And there was something else. The grand duke promised if I behaved I would be named prima ballerina assoluta of the Imperial Ballet. So my hysterics had some benefit, after all. And to the envy of all about me, the laughingstock was promoted. Just like that.

  Soul and Spirit, Body and Heart

  Yes, patronage had its advantages and the lack of it disadvantages. My hundred thousand rubles from Niki and the Potato Club would not allow me to live like a Romanov. The money was intended only, I understood, to tide me over until fortune brought me a new protector. At the theater, without one, I would eventually be subject to the whims of the administration or perhaps eclipsed by my rival Olga Preobrajenska, who despite her modesty and lack of cunning was being promoted right behind me, kicking at me with her muscular legs and shoving her plain face right next to mine. And both of us would soon enough be trampled by the younger girls, the ones graduating from the school every year and marching out onto the Maryinsky stage. No, I needed a protector with ties to the court to help me keep my footing at the center of that crowded stage. But Vladimir was, as a brother to the tsar, perhaps a bit too old for me—not that I didn’t think about it! But I was not yet in straitened-enough circumstances to take an old white-bearded grandfather to my bed. Sergei Mikhailovich, however, already making regular visits to my house on Niki’s instructions, might do. When a master tired of his serf mistress, he gave her a dowry and married her off to one of his hunting serfs, one of the elite serfs on the estate. And that is, in essence, what Niki did to me, giving me, well, not quite a dowry, but a purse, and sending it along with his proxy, the serf Sergei Mikhailovich, who was, as general of the artillery, a hunter of men! Clearly, Niki wanted Sergei, whom he trusted above all others, to look after me, and perhaps, too, Niki had intuited as I had that Sergei’s feelings for me ran quietly alongside his own. So S
ergei was not a poor choice. His father was the brother of one tsar and the uncle of another, and as such Mikhail Nikolaevich received one of the treasury’s largest appanages; he owned land and estates all over Russia to which his sons were heirs. In time Sergei would be one of the wealthiest men in the empire, and he was certainly wealthy enough now. And because Sergei was so very close to the tsarevich, on his visits to me he could report on Niki’s summer idyll with Alix in England, on her lessons with Father Yanishev, on Niki and Alix’s service as godparents to the first son of his English cousin George of the chestnuts and pinecones and his wife, May, and of how the baby was not dunked in the baptismal as was the custom here but merely sprinkled with a few drops of holy water. How European Niki was becoming! Yes, Sergei knew all about Niki and Alix’s vacation in Osbourne on the Isle of Wight, where Niki rolled up his trouser legs and trekked down the palace lawn to the sandy beach to count the white sails of the boats he spotted out on the sea. In Sergei’s company, you see, I was never very far from Niki. And I liked Sergei. He taught me how to smoke one of those little yellow cigarettes smoked by the court between dinner courses and how to ride a bicycle, and he promised when I had to travel to Krasnoye Selo in July he would let me use his personal train car. What better way to convince Niki I thought no more of him than he did of me than to quickly take Sergei to my bed? And there was always the chance Niki might become jealous.

  I plotted all this while Niki was on the Polar Star in the Baltic Sea, sailing back home to Russia now for his sister Xenia’s wedding to Sergei’s brother Sandro, a union that did not make the royal family very happy, Sandro being one of those Caucasian Romanovs. Yes, I plotted while Niki was on the water, away from Alix but dreaming of her, I’m sure, probably reading over her notes in his journal about me—When we are young, we can’t always hold our own against temptation—as if I were the serpent himself and Niki the innocent! And I worried that Niki, upon his return, might rebuke me in some way for my letter, perhaps by a letter of his own: Dear Mala, it would read, Vengeful demon, dark where Alix is light, turbulent where she is smooth, soiled where she is pure. Soiled by him! And so, being soiled, there was no reason I should not accept the attentions and the protection from Niki offered by Sergei. But what if Niki was so angered by my letter that he yanked Sergei away from me? Where would that leave me then?

  And so on July 25 Xenia married Sergei’s brother and Sergei said goodbye to his dreams of her and on July 28 I performed at the gala in honor of the bride and groom at the old Peterhof Palace theater, which had been renovated for the occasion, the galleries lined with tropical plants and both the theater and the long drive to it from the Great Palace fitted with electric lights. The tsarevich sat with his family in the imperial box made to look like an enormous red velvet tent, supported by columns and beams of gold and topped with a crown, and he did not approach to congratulate me after Le Réveil de flore, as was the custom. I knew then not only Sergei’s dreams were in the past, but mine as well. And so, while Xenia’s maids packed away her wedding gown and while Niki was inspired to write Alix, You have got me entirely and forever, soul and spirit, body and heart, everything is yours, yours, Sergei stood behind me in my Petersburg house and took the pins and ribbons from my hair as if I were a little girl being put to bed, and then he began to comb out my hair with his fingers and to roll the long, curled strands of it between his palms. He said nothing, and neither did I. It was late in the evening, eleven o’clock, and the sun had just set so that the air in the house was soft and furred and we felt our way to one of the bedrooms, not the one I had shared with Niki. It took some time to remove all our garments—we wore clothing then, we were dressed, not like today with two or three articles. I myself wore an underskirt to match my overskirt, a frilled blouse, a hooped petticoat and a soft cotton one, a plump cloth pad that had just recently replaced the bustle and that when untied revealed an S-bend corset and its corset cover, a chemise embroidered with tiny roses, frilled drawers that tied at the front with two satin sashes and reached to my knees, and beneath that, high stockings. Yes, I wore all this in July. It was enough to give one pause, a chance to reconsider, but we did not reconsider. Sergei put his hand down my drawers and did something gentle with his finger until I was so full of cries out and whats and wherefores that finally Sergei had to stop to laugh at me and ask, What has Niki been doing with you all this time? (I have to say here that Sergei and his brother Sandro were known as the two great rakes of Petersburg, and now I understood why.) And when I said to him, Nothing like this, I think for him at that moment the ghost of Niki flew out the window, where it was saturated with the scent of grass and drowned by dew, for it was clear Sergei had trumped Niki in matters of the bedroom, if not yet in matters of my heart. Tant pis. So much the worse for Sergei, who began to love me though I did not love him, who would, all his life, seek that love, a woman’s love. Though I did not know this yet, by his bed in Mikhailovsky Palace he kept a framed photo of himself as a toddler standing in his mother’s lap, her winter dress thick with heavy trim, her head bent to his so her chin just touched his hair. Though she holds him close for those minutes before the camera, she did not pet him much—she was too busy for her children. She was quite strict and had a sharp tongue to boot, and Sergei had therefore resigned himself to the perpetual deprivation of affection. Now, with me, he thought he had found happiness and it made him expansive.

  Soon after our first night together, he opened up his fat purse and bought me a dacha at Strelna on the gulf, at No. 2, Berezoviya Alleya, where the nobility summered, where my property ran right up to the edge of Konstantin Palace, separated from its stables by only a slender canal. My house with its wooden turret lay by a grove of birch trees; a private road led to my own beach. Ornamental iron gates with hedges on either side guarded the entrance to my park. A stone pig, a stone frog, and a stone rabbit made as if to drink from a fountain on the back lawn. My park stretched to the gulf, with trees that hit the sky at the edge of it and shook like black feathers in the night wind. Eventually, I would have an orangerie, an ice house, a greenhouse, a barn, and a pier for my own boat. Better than a diamond necklace, no?, for at Strelna I could string Romanovs about me each summer. Why, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, Niki’s cousin, later put me into one of his poems, so thoroughly did I make certain to ingratiate myself with them, bicycling up and down the roads to their various palaces, learning with what they thought was their help to do fine figure eights on my cycle, holding receptions and parties, which the grand dukes, without their wives, began to attend, for, like my father, I knew how to entertain well and could do so on Sergei’s money. Yes, K.R. memorialized one of those afternoon parties:

  A stream trickles down from the hill,

  Swaying a tulip’s petals with its water,

  And there Bayaderka in the flowers

  Dances passionately to the sound of timbrels.

  That bayaderka was I, at Strelna, at my dacha down the hill from his palace! So easily could I have been forgotten. But Sergei, upended by love, let the rubles from his pockets fall all over me and made me shiny.

  In a show of my gratitude, I designed a gold medallion for Sergei with a portrait of me in the center and engraved in a circle about my face the inscription August 21st—Mala—September 25th, in memory of our first happy days at the dacha he’d bought me. To the medallion I added a ten-kopek coin from the year of Sergei’s birth, 1869. He was only three years older than I, but in his hands he held so much power. And in my hands I held his heart. He would wear that little charm the rest of his life.

  Should I have felt guilty? Why? Love, even unrequited love, is still a gift. Who knew this better than I?

  Do you remember the queen in her castle by the Terek River from the Georgian song Sergei and his brothers used to sing, the one who ravished her lovers and then pushed them out her bedroom window? If they survived the fall, the rocks beneath that swift-moving river cut their bodies as they tumbled in the current. Those rocks, for S
ergei, were no doubt the purgatory of our conversations, which were so often about Niki, or Niki and Alix, conversations that were idle lovers’ talk between us at first but then became, to Sergei’s discomfort, obligatory before bedding me. But if he was the suitor, I was the river queen, for to me, as well as to her, was appended a dreadful reputation. I was now yet one more debased mistress of a Romanov, and mothers warned their daughters not to talk to me. That fall when I saw a little group of students from the ballet school toddling in their penguins in the frigid air, I had my driver stop for them, and I called to them, Girls, girls, come in here with me. But they would not ride in my carriage, not even the few hundred yards up Theater Street. They shook their heads, said, Spasibo, but would not climb up into the perfumed warmth, would not nestle with me beneath my sable lap robes. She’s wicked! I heard one of them say to another as I gave up and shut my carriage door. Wicked.