A Tsar Should Die in Russia
Then the illness that had weakened the great tsar at the start of 1894, that had sickened him further in the summer, in the cold of autumn, cut him down. He died in Livadia, in the Crimea, at the bottom of the country, near the Black Sea, which was not black but a brilliant blue, wild roses and honeysuckle everywhere on the slopes that led down to it. So many varieties of flowers grew in the Crimea they were sent by train all winter to Petersburg to decorate the great ballrooms of the Winter Palace, the Vladimir Palace, the Mikhailovsky Palace, the Sheremetiev Palace. But the old wooden palace in Livadia where the great tsar died, with its wood balconies and galleries like those of the palaces of the old Crimean khans, was not grand but dark and damp. I saw it only when it was abandoned. A white cross drawn on the floor of Emperor Alexander’s sitting room, where he had sat suffering in the big chair and breathed his last, remained there still, flecked and faint, but visible. An hour after his death the new tsar, Nicholas II, took the oath of allegiance on the palace lawn while the old tsar received his last salvo from the warships out in Yalta Harbor. Alexander’s doctors had wanted him to go abroad, to the dry air of Egypt, but the tsar had agreed only to go south, to the Crimea, because he knew he was dying and because a tsar should die in Russia. A tsar should die in Russia, the place where he passed marked, like the floor at Livadia. The chair in which the tsar died and the props that surrounded it were treated like relics, pieces of the divine. It was the same for all the tsars. The bedroom in the Winter Palace where Niki’s grandfather died stood as it had in his last hour—a cigarette butt propped in an ashtray, handkerchiefs resting on the tables and chairs within easy reach, the stained linen unchanged beneath the coverlet. At Gatchina, behind a sealed door, was hidden the bloody bed from the Mikhailovsky Palace in which the body of Paul I, murdered by his guards and officers, had been laid. Niki told me once that he and his sister Olga used to see Paul’s ghost flickering past the windows of the Mikhailovsky, searching for his bed. And what would he do when he found it, I wondered. Lie down in it? Would he finally be able to rest? But he never found it, and so it remained, sealed off, a relic no one wanted to venerate, an evil no one wanted even to see. The House of Special Purpose in Ekaterinburg where Niki was murdered stands empty, I hear, untouched; the bullet-pocked basement walls have not been replastered.
When I dream now of Nicholas, I see him as I imagined he looked on the day of his death, aged, great creases running the sides of his face and disappearing into his beard, blue eyes cosseted by pouches of flesh. His khaki tunic is bullet-ridden, ruined by dozens of holes, the edges of them charred and ragged, but his face, his limbs are intact. In my dream, Niki stands before me with those sad eyes and raises a hand to me. What? What do you want? I ask him. What could I possibly give him now that I hadn’t offered him when he was alive? But he doesn’t speak, just offers his hand. What else can he offer but that hand, the hand of a dead man?
Did I tell you that in London, at Buckingham Palace, when Niki’s sister Xenia arrived there at the end of her flight from revolutionary Russia, her servants fell to their knees at the sight of King George? They beheld what they thought was the resurrected figure of their tsar. He looked just like Niki, you know.
But I was speaking of his father’s death.
Because Alexander III died so far from Petersburg, his body journeyed by train one last time across the Russia he had ruled—three thousand miles north from the station at Sevastopol in the Crimea to the Nikolaevsky Station in Petersburg, up through the Ukraine to Moscow and from there northwest to Petersburg, through the countryside where the barons and squires lived in manor houses that would be, in twenty years, ravaged to their foundations, stripped by the peasantry of every good, including the door frames and windowsills so that the walls stood gaping, guarding nothing. But in 1894, the old order stood intact and the peasants lined the tracks to see their tsar’s body borne back to the capital.
In Moscow the body lay in the Kremlin overnight as if to rest before making the long journey to Peter. Black carpet covered the station platform where a catafalque housed the coffin, its columns bound up in black cloth, the horses that bore it also draped in black. Even the court carriages had been covered in black—no red and gold for this occasion. It took four hours for them to ferry the family, living and dead, across Petersburg, along Nevsky Prospekt lined with a hundred thousand guards, the guards and the mourners on the street silent, the only sounds those of the carriage wheels, of the church bells ringing in counterpoint in that special way of Russian bells, the guns of the Fortress firing each time the clock clicked past a minute, the horses’ shoes ringing against the slushy streets, the wheels making a deep rumble as they traversed the cobblestone Palace Square.
All tsars are given a week of masses before burial. When Niki’s grandfather died, the embalmers could not fully put back together the bits and pieces he had become by the force of the grenade thrown at his feet—both legs had been destroyed, his abdomen split open, his wedding ring broken into splinters of gold and drilled into the flesh of his right hand. So they camouflaged what they could. In his death photograph—those of the tsars were published in the papers or reproduced as lithographs, hand-tinted and sold as mementi mori—he wears his uniform with epaulets, but his face looks sunken, the mouth open, the bushy whiskers dry as straw, his mangled hand covered by the intact left. At his funeral, his body was covered up to the chest with an ermine and gold cloak, his face covered with a veil until the time when the coffin lid, covered with flowers and the tsar’s sword and helmet, was placed on top. As for Nicholas’s father, when the time came, he was mutilated not by death but by his embalmers, who somehow miscalculated their chemicals and imposed upon the emperor the disgrace of rotting before his subjects’ eyes. It was almost a month from the day he died that Alexander was finally interred. By the time his body reached the fortress, his face had blackened, his head had shrunk, and no flower could mask the smell. The family by custom kissed that face on entering and leaving the church each of those seven days mass was said, Come ye all that love me and kiss me with the final kiss, until even his wife cried, Enough, enough. Imagine such a thing to happen to so great a man—and to the father Niki worshipped and feared.
At the thought of it I gripped my father’s hand as we walked with my mother, my sister, and my brother through those quiet, slushy streets to St. Catherine’s, our own parish, on Nevsky Prospekt, where we Catholics worshipped and where the last king of Poland was buried in 1798, here in the country that took his country from him and made it its duchy. Attendance at the funeral service at the Peter and Paul Fortress on Hare Island was for the imperial family, the court, and its diplomats, and yet the crowd that had traveled over the bridge to stand respectfully in the streets about the mustard-colored cathedral was so great I heard the Prince Dolgoruky could barely clear a path for their majesties to enter. The city, which was normally so lively, now seemed to be populated by the dead, shuffling and inert, following the boxed corpse of their king.
He was the only tsar I had known. My parents kept his portrait in the house, and portraits of him hung in the ballet school and in the theater. In my first year at the school I used to cross myself when I passed by the big picture in a frame so heavy it could kill a child if the portrait fell from the wall. In my mind, I mixed up the tsar with God, and his eyes looking down at me from the canvas seemed to know me all the way through. I remember St. Catherine’s that day as crowded with many black coats and black dresses, black hats and black veils. My mother wept that afternoon, as did I, but as you might suspect, I did not boo-hoo for Alexander III but for myself, for Niki now so burdened with all the duties of the empire would have very little thought of me. When Sergei brought back the funeral program for me to see—the silver imperial eagle stamped on the front of the dignified plain black portfolio—I blinked twice at reading Niki referred to as the emperor. The emperor. At twenty-six! So quickly my Niki of last year was no longer my Niki. And, of
course, Alix would soon be empress. Not me! For she was there, too, even if, as fiancée of the new emperor, she had no official place, no official funeral duties to perform, as did Niki. For after the eight major generals of Alexander’s suite lift the funeral cloth, the program informed us, His Majesty the Emperor will approach the coffin to fold the imperial cloak on the mortal remains. His Majesty the Emperor. Niki’s portrait would soon replace the one of his father in the school, in the theater, on the ruble, and that paper face would be all I would see of him. All I was hearing of him from Sergei I could put to no use, and because of the protocols of mourning, Niki would not even return to the theater this winter! And so I wept wildly, alongside the rest of my fellow Poles, my father casting sidelong glances of surprise at me and the vehemence of my grief, while across the Neva, at the Fortress of Peter and Paul, the court prepared to inter the body of Alexander III in the small cathedral where all the Romanov tsars since Peter the Great were entombed.
Alexander III would be the last tsar buried there.
Alix had knelt by the tsar’s coffin, had kissed the tsar’s face with a final kiss, had been witness even to the tsar’s final hours—this last we learned from Sandro, already with Xenia and the family in the Crimea that fall for the deathwatch, and it was he who delivered to Sergei and me all the details of the agony of the sickroom, of Niki’s panic at the thought of the throne, of his pleas to his father to be allowed to abdicate, just as Alexander I’s brothers, the grand dukes Konstantin and Nicholas, each tried to abdicate before Nicholas I finally accepted the crown and became the Iron Tsar. Niki’s father refused to even consider Niki’s abdication—his son might be an imbecile but the tsarevich’s brother Mikhail was an even greater fool and Niki would have his mother to guide him. And so Niki bowed his head, but Alix, he insisted, he must have Alix. And so he was allowed to send for her at Darmstadt. He went to the railway station at Simferopol himself to retrieve her, and by the end of their four-hour ride from the station to Livadia Palace, their carriage overflowed with the lemons and oranges, the roses and lilac and oleander offered as tribute by the Tartar peasants along their route—the seat of their carriage was like a marriage bed, strewn with symbols of fertility. While she may have brought courage for Niki with her from Germany, she also brought death with her: after her arrival the emperor lived only ten days more. Alexander’s funeral cortege would be the first time that Petersburg saw Alix. In the procession she rode alone in her own carriage behind the rest of the family, her place still uncertain, and the women in the street crossed themselves as her carriage passed as if to ward off bad luck. She has come to us from behind a coffin.
If Alexander had not died so young, Niki would never have married Alix so quickly—and who knew what change of heart those months of delay might have brought? It wasn’t fair! But Nicholas, in his first decree as tsar, named his fiancée Alix The Truly Believing Grand Duchess Alexandra Fedorovna. And in his second he declared that his marriage to The Truly Believing Grand Duchess would take place one week after the burial of his father. As the peasants say, It is very high up to the tsar, and Niki now flew so far away from me I suppose only his grand duchess could reach that great height.
The details of the wedding I could not help but pull from Sergei, who as one of Niki’s four best men had, so to speak, a view from the imperial box, the best seats in the house. But he did not want to tell the tale to me and thereby contribute to my agony. I had to kiss him for each word.
What did she wear?
A silver gown and a gold cape.
And on her head?
A diamond kokoshnik.
Her jewels?
Pearls. The 475-carat diamond Imperial Rivière.
Her bouquet?
White roses and myrtle.
The train of her cape?
Lined with ermine. Carried by four pages.
She rode to the palace in?
A gold coach.
Nicholas stood?
In the palace chapel, wearing his Hussar uniform and boots.
They carried?
Each a candle.
And the vows?
Niki stumbled over them, needed prompting.
And then?
The priests blessed the couple, who kissed the golden cross.
And it was done?
Just before one.
And when they left the palace in their coach?
The crowd on Nevsky Prospekt cheered.
What theater, no?
I did take pleasure in this: At the reception, Alix found herself in one of the rooms of the long enfilade quite alone, abandoned in the confusion by her young pages from the military school, the Corps des Pages, who had been charged with the duty of carrying the new tsaritsa’s train, and then misplaced both the train and the empress. There in her heavy court dress, with its underskirts and overskirt, its thick sleeves and long train, with the weighty kokoshnik and the 475-carat diamond necklace and the diamond earrings so laden with gems they had to be strung up with wires so as not to tear the flesh of her earlobes, Alix realized she could not move at all. And so she remained there, rooted to the spot, in that empty, high-ceilinged hall. I wonder what she thought, stranded there in the palace of a country so foreign to her she would never come to understand it. If I were there I would have hissed in her ear, Go home!, and given her a push west. But eventually, her brother, Ernest, realized she was missing and went to look for her. Her brother, mind you, not Niki.
That night I cried as only a young girl fed daily on theatricals could cry. And Sergei, whose family had begun to call him my lap dog, could find no trick to distract me. Though he tried.
I myself would not be a bride until I was forty-nine years old. There was no kokoshnik for me, no silver gown, no golden cape, no cheers on Nevsky Prospekt. Petersburg was a ghost town by the time I married, in 1921. No gold carriages rode the streets. No imperial crests rode the façades of the Winter Palace. They’d been hacked off and laid in the palace square like stone angels dropped from the heavens. Three-quarters of the houses stood empty. Dead horses lay in the streets. Trash floated in the canals. By the time I married, I stood at the beginning of my old age. My lips had begun to line. The skin of my arms had turned crepey and soft. My hair had to be tinted black. As a bride, I was Petersburg.
I’ve told you I live now in Paris, dressed this month for Christmas, with the lights like fork tines riding up the sides of the trees on the Champs-Élysées, the big pine tree knotted with lightbulbs and bells at Notre Dame, the wood stalls of the Christmas market hung with boughs and lights that recall for me so well the Shrovetide markets on the Champ de Mars where the peasants sold their Christmas crafts and toys. I have lived here in France for fifty years, but that time lies like a thin veneer over my real carpentry. By day I speak French when I must, but not en famille, and at night I dream in Russian. I settled in Paris rather than Berlin, where so many writers and artists and musicians fled after the revolution, drawn by the cheap mark and the large apartments like the ones we once had in Petersburg (in Peter now stuffed with worker and peasant families, one family to each room), all those southwestern suburban Berlin apartments left vacant by the suddenly destitute middle class whose finances had been completely destroyed by the Great War. But the Romanovs, what was left of them, moved in large part to France, to their villas on the Riviera, and therefore so did I, and from there, as all our finances declined further, to Paris, where the light and the squares and the boulevards of the old city are so like Petersburg’s. Paris in the winter smells of chestnuts roasting over charcoal; Petersburg’s streets in winter were spotted with bonfires, not to cook on but simply to warm the air. In Paris, White Army officers worked as taxi drivers and chauffeurs, businessmen as factory workers, counts and barons as waiters. And dancers of the Imperial Ballet opened ballet schools. I taught ballet on the avenue Vion-Whitcomb for thirty-five years at my own studio, the Studio of Princess Krassinsky. I closed the school in 1964. I was ninety-two years old. I gave a few les
sons to the great Margot Fonteyn, you know, and to Pamela May—both from the Vic-Wells. I taught Mia Slavenska and Tatiana Riabouchinska—the latter from a great Russian banking family—who both became stars of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, that company made up of what was left of Les Ballets Russes after Diaghilev’s early death. I taught Swan Lake to Alicia Markova—the English girl Alice Marks, who dressed herself up with a nice Russian name because, thanks to the tsars, Russia was synonymous with ballet, and what dancer worth her salt was not Russian? And I, once the greatest imperial ballerina of them all, now live on the charity of old friends and my former students. Yes, I, Kschessinska, am a charity case.
In my drawer there with the pity francs I have a receipt for eleven boxes of silver and gold, deposited in 1917 in the vaults of the Petersburg Bank of Azor and Don. Eleven now-empty boxes. In 1920, Lenin liquidated the banks, took everything in them that didn’t belong to him to prop up his tottering regime. Do you know what else I have tucked in my drawer? Old money, paper money, rubles, printed with the imperial eagle or the tsar’s face, Niki’s face. People hoarded those bills during the revolution, spent their Provisional Government rubles instead, or later, their Bolshevik rubles with their hammers, sickles, or the face of Lenin, as if by hiding the tsar’s money they could protect the tsar, the regime, and themselves.
The Orthodox priests here in Paris won’t give their blessing to my desire to contact my dead through a medium, and I have so many dead. The church never liked the séances that were all the rage in Petersburg during Niki’s reign, with the trembling tables and the spirits knocking on the walls and making the clocks chime out of time. The dowager empress used to open her bible at random, the words that lay on that page read as prophecy. How is that so different from a séance? No, the nobility were not that different from the peasants, with their domovoy, the impish household spirits who took the blame for any kitchen mishap. The peasants left pancakes for them on their windowsills at Carnival. We sat in dark drawing rooms in our silks and furs and called out the names of our dead. The priests are jealous of their travel ways to heaven and beyond, so even now they tell me that such an effort would disturb their souls, which I doubt, anyway, are at all peaceful. What do the priests imagine, that the soul stretches like a white cirrus cloud above the body in the stone crypt? Or that it sits on an armchair in heaven, dressed in phantom flesh and phantom clothes, motionless, and that the tendril of my yearning could be perceived as an itch or a pinprick?
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 9
