The pearl was the empress’s favorite gem. She had the first pick of any pearls obtained from the icy waters of Siberia by Fabergé, Bolin, and Hahn, Russia’s greatest jewelers. And so, it was specifically to flatter Alix that Petipa designed this ballet to be performed at a gala at the Bolshoi Theater, one of many entertainments planned for the new tsar and tsaritsa. That was Petipa’s job as imperial choreographer—to stage occasional pieces for coronations, state visits, royal weddings, and if he could at the same time flatter the court, why, so much the better. His detractors used to say the old man always had one eye on the stage and the other on the imperial box. But who did not? Most men had both eyes on the tsar, so at least Petipa saved one of his for me. Already Petipa had devised divertissements for pink, white, and black pearls, and suddenly he was forced to create new steps for a new rare pearl, a yellow pearl, and new music had to be composed for me immédiatement by M. Drigo. A yellow tutu had to be hastily confected for me by Mme. Ofitserova. These preparations for me, no more than the preparations made for the others, but done so long after their own, drew special attention. Drew ire, one might say. Such a fuss over Kschessinska, the tsar’s ex-concubine. Why is it so important to the tsar that she be included?—for, of course, everyone knew the theater would not go to this trouble were it not a direct order from the tsar. And so the rumors began then that despite the attentions paid to me by Sergei Mikhailovich, Nicholas came still to my bed, rumors I did nothing to dampen. There were even rumors that I had given the tsar a son and that this son was hidden, disguised in our midst, no, secreted away in Paris, but there was a son, maybe two, and this was the mystery of the tsar’s loyalty to me. How else to explain Kschessinska still sitting in the pocket of the tsar? If only that were so, but as it was, the only explanation I could find was that the tsar still loved me. I was rich with happiness during those weeks when everyone hated me. Was not a pearl formed when a grain of sand irritated an oyster?
And so I prepared to dance La Perle at the coronation gala of Nicholas II at the Bolshoi Theater, which had been renovated at great expense for the occasion—fifty thousand rubles to hang new red velvet drapes at the boxes and to reupholster the chairs, sixty thousand rubles to regild all that shone like gold and to freshen the ceiling’s mural, fifty thousand rubles to refit the crystal chandeliers and to replace the sumptuous red carpeting. More rubles than Niki had settled on me! More by half. Of course, he had access to many more rubles now. I didn’t know this yet, but the ballet would find itself crushed between the first and last acts of A Life for the Tsar, a minor divertissement, and as such, it would not command the undivided attention of the audience or of Niki. While his Yellow Pearl danced for him, he would greet dignitaries in his box, Alix beside him in a silver brocade dress. As it turned out, they were not vexed or irritated. Why, they never looked down at the stage at all, no matter how furiously I spun. Not once while I danced the steps Petipa made for me to the music Drigo had made for me in the costume Ofitserova had made for me did either of them take note of Little K. Tiny K. Grain of sand.
Nicholas wrote in his journal that night that The Pearl was a beautiful new ballet. Reading that line even seventy-five years later—for I read his journals over and over—still infuriates me. For, really, how would he know?
The coronation of a tsar always takes place in Moscow, no matter where circumstances dictate his initial oath of allegiance is pledged. Moscow is the site of our Slavic origins as tribute payers to the Mongols before we wrested our destiny from them—and before Peter the Great wrested the court from the heart of the country and spun it around to face the west, and Moscow is where the new tsars must formally pledge themselves to the Russian people. So Niki went to Moscow to be crowned on May 9, 1896, after the official twelve months of mourning for his father were well over. The planning for the coronation had begun in March of the previous year. Scale models were built so the three-hundred-year-old Cathedral of the Assumption and the processional routes to it could be studied by Niki’s uncles Vladimir, Pavel, Sergei, and Alexei, who served on the Coronation Commission, so that every step taken by every person involved in the three weeks’ events could be measured. Every hotel, palace, and lodge was rented—the imperial artists were housed at the Dresden Hotel—and any doorway, window, and roof top with a view of the processional route was rented for the day for a fortune! Almost a million rubles were spent to refurbish the city streets the processional would traverse. The only element not under the jurisdiction of the Coronation Commission was the weather, and so, of course, it did not behave. The week before the ceremony, it rained each day, the storm cold, windy, grim; only on the day of Niki’s entrance into Moscow did the sun make its entrance. Good omen.
So, on May 9, the tsar and the court rode the four miles from Petrovsky Palace to the Kremlin. Members of the Imperial Horse Guards, the Dragoon Guards, the Hussar and Lancer Guards, the Grenadier Guards, and the Life Guards Ulan Regiments stood in lines two men thick, the mounted Cossacks behind them and the Moscow police behind them, at the sides of the road all the way from the Tver Gate to the Nikolsky, all of them charged with protecting the life of the tsar—during his father’s coronation the police uncovered various assassination plots, one that even had bombs concealed in the caps of the terrorists, and so the tradition of throwing one’s cap in the air as the sovereign passed by was banned. But Niki’s father’s coronation had followed his own father’s murder and those times of unrest were long behind us now. Alexander III had died in an armchair, not in the street. The avenues had been hung with bunting to welcome Niki, and ribbons of blue, white, and red, the colors of our flag, dried slowly in the sun on their poles in the square. The buildings all along his route had been whitewashed just for him and clippings from pine trees had been strung, for good luck, over the doorways that faced the road, their scent stingingly, acridly fresh in the nostrils of those of us who waited, one million of us, flags in our hands, to see the new tsar and to be transported by the vision.
Yes, I was there, leaning out the window of my hotel, above the herds of peasant women who wore their kerchiefs knotted under their chins, the fabrics yellow or brightly printed or striped, above the smarter of the women who opened parasols against the sun, above the city girls, more fashionable, who wore hats with ribbons made to stand in fat bows or sprigs of flowers—I saw one woman in a pointed hat that made her look like a Pierrot—all of them as excited as if they were at a circus, and who doesn’t like a circus?
We could hear the parade long before it reached us—the twenty-one-gun salute that rang out at the commencement of the processional, the obligatory sounding of the church bells, hundreds of bells ringing Russian style, the ropes pulling the clappers to the bells, not swinging the bells against the clappers, and then the hurrahs of the crowd ahead of us, the thudding of boots and horses, the trumpets and drums of the court orchestra who strode with the costumed men. The Imperial Guard came by us first, in their golden helmets, then the Cossacks with their sabers, the Moscow nobility, the orchestra behind them, the Imperial Hunt, the master of the horse and the master of the hounds, various platoons of Asiatics in the costumes of their subjugated provinces, because after all, we are a vast people, we reach far east and far west, far north and far south—the court footmen in their white powdered wigs, the black Abyssinian Guards in their tasseled caps and embroidered tunics, the Petersburg court in full military regalia traveling in carriages or phaetons, then Niki on his gray charger, Norman, onto whose hooves had been nailed silver shoes that, like my little shoes, now stand in a museum as historical objects. Behind Niki rolled the grand dukes in their gilded carriages, Sergei among them, and then the red and gold carriage of Catherine the Great, a replica of her crown mounted to the top of it, pulled by eight horses, that ferried the dowager empress, weeping because only thirteen years ago it had been her husband’s coronation and her own. Behind her carriage, another one: the gold carriage of the Truly Believing Alexandra Fedorovna, her face stony and unsmiling, because th
e crowds grew silent and suspicious as she passed. Put up your hand and wave, you fool, I thought. Smile. Did she think she was the only one ever to perform before a hostile audience?—why, with all the intrigues at the theater and all the claques of the balletomanes who cheered their favorite dancers and booed the rest, I had learned long ago to smile into the faces of my enemies, to woo them into my camp. If only that had been me in that carriage. I would have stuck my arms out the windows and waggled my fingers. But Alix had not learned my lessons, and by the end of the procession at Cathedral Square, when she and Niki bowed to their people three times on the Red Staircase, Sergei told me she was openly weeping, the idiot. Behind her came the carriages of the other grand duchesses, who knew how to behave better, and then all the various foreign princes on horseback. A gang of princes, as Niki described them in his journal, princes from Germany, England, France, Greece, Italy, Denmark, Romania, Bulgaria, Japan, all there to witness what would be the coronation of the last tsar of Russia.
The processions were filmed, you know, for the first time in Russian history, by the two brothers Lumière of the Lumière Cinéma tographe, who cranked by hand their movie cameras. But the black-and-white film and photographs of the time cannot capture this event. Any grand moment is diminished by a photograph—all is small and brown and silent. But it was anything but silent or brown as the horses and carriages and regiments trooped past us in a shimmering undulation of red, purple, green, silver, and gold, so much gold that this must have been what it was like to gawk at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. I wonder sometimes what happened to all of those steps, all of those programs, all of those costumes, all of those scripts spoken by the priests and the sovereigns. Are they packed away somewhere, diagrammed, preserved? No matter. They have not been needed again. That day the women below me raised their arms and cheered as Niki passed and men all along the route fell to their knees and called out, We would die for our tsar! They thought he belonged to them and their desire to die for him proved that. But I watched silently as he rode past my hotel window, a stranger to me, my face a pale cousin to his. He had no idea I floated above him. He gripped the reins in his left hand, right hand raised in a permanent salute to all and no one in particular. To symbolize his humility, as he entered the Kremlin and the formal beginning of his reign he wore his plain army tunic. He could play at being humble only because no one else and nothing else around him did, lest anyone mistake the new tsar’s humility for weakness. But he rode in the middle of a spectacle so vast, so gaudy, so proud, that I’m afraid a glint of it must have reached up to heaven and pierced the eye of God.
Yes, I was in Moscow for the coronation of the last Tsar, the last Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, of Poland, Siberia, of Tauric Chersonese, of Georgia, Lord of Pskov, Grand Duke of Smolensk, of Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Livonia, Courland and Semigalia, Samogotia, Bialystok, Karelia, Tver, Yougouria, Perm, Viatka, Bulgaria, Lord and Grand Duke of Lower Novgorod, of Tchernigov, Riazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Yaroslav, Belozero, Oudoria, Obdoria, Condia, Vitebsk, Mstislav, and all the region of the North, Lord and Sovereign of the countries of Iveria, Cartalinia, Kabardinia, and the provinces of Armenia, Sovereign of the Circassian Princes and the Mountain Princes, Lord of Turkestan, Heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, of Storman, of the Ditmars and of Oldenbourg.
It would have been easier to list what he was not emperor of.
Of course, I was not among the two thousand guests invited to the Cathedral of the Assumption for the actual coronation itself, nor was I on the guest list for any of the breakfasts or luncheons or dinners or military reviews or balls. No, I watched the processions with the common crowd and with them pressed toward the Grand Kremlin Palace to see the spectacle of lights that evening. Great projectors sent beams of flashing white into the sky and across the balcony that overlooked the left bank of the Moskva River where Niki and Alix stepped out, so illuminated, to greet the crowd. The mayor of the city presented a bouquet of flowers on a silver salver to the new empress and when she took the tray from him a hidden switch sent its message to the Moscow power station which in turn sent its current back again to light up all at once the little bulbs of red, green, blue, and purple that had been strung along the steeple of St. John the Great and all the cupolas and roofs and ledges of the churches and all the trees in the courtyards and all the tall buildings within the Kremlin. I whooped with the rest of them, but really, it was an old trick. At Easter, the priests at St. Isaac’s laid a long oiled string across the tops of the dormant votive candles that lined the cornices and encircled the dome of the cathedral, all far above the congregation. At midnight, the string was lit at one end and a flame coursed about the church, lighting the wick of every candle in turn, the lighting of them an echo of the miracle of the Resurrection. Why was it arranged for Alix to perform a similar miracle? Why, to make her seem divine to a people who wished to believe she was so, to make it seem that it was her will that made the city sparkle, that from her palm alone blew the magic dust that turned Moscow into a fairyland. And what did she think, this German princess, when she looked out on the lit-up ancient capital from which the first Rus princes ruled this part of the world? Did she believe herself then truly Russian? Because she never would be.
I could imagine how she felt, though, in that moment, being made such a fuss over. After all, such theater was my milieu and I had been the object of such fuss and the purveyor of such stagecraft myself. It is easy to forget when you stand there glittering that you are not the wizard who conjured up these spells, though you are made to look that way to your audience, which gasps, thunderstruck by you. Yes, like Alix, I, too, had enjoyed such moments. Just two months after the coronation I stood at Peterhof in a little grotto on Olga Island, named so for Nicholas I’s favorite daughter. A stage had been built out on the lake and the guests were rowed in small boats to their seats in stands constructed on the island. When the ballet began, I stepped from my little grotto onto a mirror, which floated on the lake, supported by pontoons, and the stagehands worked the pulleys that drew me to the stage proper. It was like the reika, a small platform on a long track constructed first for The Nutcracker, on which the Sugar Plum Fairy stands in arabesque, her hand in her prince’s, while the stagehands winch the wire to draw the reika across the stage, the fairy gliding upon it as if by magic. To the assembled, it looked as if I walked on the water and their oohs and aahs skipped toward me. I walked on water. Alix lit a city with her fingers. But her action impressed far many more than did mine.
The coronation weeks, though filled with miracles, were not without their casualties. Eighteen people died in the mayhem that ensued when heralds in their gold tunics and black-and-red-feathered hats distributed souvenir parchments announcing the date of the coronation—the carriage in which they rode was robbed by a sea of bodies and stripped of its imperial emblems, which became also, I suppose, souvenirs. That, though, was nothing compared to the two thousand peasants crushed to death on Khodynka Field outside of Moscow, where four days after the coronation, according to tradition, the peasantry were to be fed and barrels of beer were to be sprung, filling red, blue, and white enameled cups stamped with the tsar’s initials, the Cyrillic H II, with the image of the crown above it and the date 1896 below. Unbelievably, the tents and tables had been pitched on a field pocked with ditches and trenches where the Moscow garrison trained. How imbecilic was that? Tents and tables rocking on pitted ground. Even at Alexander III’s coronation a handful of peasants were trampled to death there, but this year five hundred thousand peasants were on that meadow, and when something—a rumor, a cry, a woman fainting—ignited a panic, the crowd began to push. Some were suffocated standing up, others fell into the ditches where they were trampled, mud pressed onto their cheeks and into their open eyes and mouths. The crushed bodies, arms like the arms of paper dolls flapping across their flattened trunks, lay like a tarp over the fiel
d, as if protecting the ditches and potholes that had killed them all. The chaos was filmed by the horrified Lumière brothers, there to record the banquet, but the police confiscated their film. They had time to think of that while they and the Cossacks laid the corpses on sheets and, when they had no more sheets, on the bare ground. And then they gave even that up and waited for the peasants’ carts filled with straw to arrive so they could clear the field before the ball given by the French ambassador that night at the Sheremetiev Palace in the city. The carriages of the partygoers would have to pass this field on their way to Moscow.
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 11
