The ballets I danced that season teased me with possibilities.
That winter I danced Paquita, a new role for me in the ballet of the same name, wearing a fetching costume with one big white flower on my breast and another in my hair. The ballet was set during Napoleon’s occupation of Spain. Paquita saves the life of a French officer, Lucien, but the two, though in love, cannot marry: she’s a Gypsy, of no birth at all. Only when she shows Lucien a medallion she’s owned since infancy does she learn she is really of noble family after all, abducted as a baby by the Gypsies she thought were her kin. And so the lovers can now wed, for in this ballet, as in all of Petipa’s ballets, the series of scenes and acts culminated in a celebration, usually a wedding, at which a variety of classical and character dances could be performed. All talents must be accommodated, you remember. Paquita’s story is a bit like my own, you know. Imperial blood runs in my veins from my Polish ancestors on my father’s side. My great-grandfather was the son of Count Krassinsky. He was orphaned at age twelve and entrusted into the care of his French tutor. Apparently the count did not trust his brother to be guardian and with good reason—in 1748, this brother sent assassins for the boy, and the tutor had to flee with him to Neuilly. This uncle usurped his birthright and his property and all that was left to my father was a ring with the arms of Count Krassinsky: a silver horseshoe, a gold cross, a crow with a gold ring clasped in its beak, the crown of a count, all set against a background of azure. I had a ring, Paquita had a medallion. Perhaps this would make me imperial enough for Niki. I determined to ask my father for that ring, to show it to Niki, and to tell him the story behind it. Once he knew that I, too, was from a ruling house, or almost a ruling house, he might speak of it to his father, and who could predict the effect of that on the tsar? But there was no hurry then, and so I wastefully dreamed my way through that winter and spring, summer and fall, until early 1894, when Niki’s father suddenly took ill.
My Life, at Twenty-One Years, Is Over
That winter of 1894 Niki came to see me less and less, as his father’s intractable illness drew him back to his mother and father, to his brothers and sisters. A cough the doctors could not cure, weakness, and pain in the kidneys, which rendered the tsar unable to stand, brought with it concerns about the succession and made urgent what had been put aside—the matter of an appropriate bride for Niki. How many times have I thought—has every Russian thought—that if only the tsar had not sickened and died at age forty-nine, how different the future might have been. If we had even one more year together, I thought then, like a simpleton, perhaps Niki would have gone to the tsar with my name instead of Alix’s. The doctors had diagnosed Alexander III with nephritis, brought on by the injuries sustained in that train wreck six years before that had almost enthroned his brother Vladimir and made Vladimir’s wife croon, So close, so close. Alexander III had, like Atlas, held up the world, or in this case, the heavy ceiling of the dining car to keep it from crushing his children, and was now paying the price of a mortal trying to do the job of a Titan.
It seemed even the days shortened themselves in mourning. I remember how, at a certain hour, the shadows seemed to race across the streets and canals toward my house and then engulf it. All the soft white spokes of the blossoms and the green leaves had long fallen from the beech trees, and they lay sodden and rotting beneath the snow. The heavy white branches of the trees crept so close to my bedroom window the ends of them scratched against the glass as if a woman were perched out there, clawing to get in. One night, waiting for the tsarevich, I sat at the table in the long narrow dining room and stared at the oak paneling that ran from floor to ceiling. The nicks and swirls and grain of it seemed to assemble themselves into the features of my father’s face, and once I had seen it as such I could not unsee it, could not dismantle his likeness from the striations of the wood. I stood and still I saw him. I moved left and right and his eyes followed me, and then, as I stood in the dining-room doorway, it seemed the full figure of my father emerged from the paneled wall, and grained just like the wood, but diaphanous, stood there, gazing at me sadly. But when I jumped up to touch him, running my hands over the paneling, I couldn’t find his shape—all was smooth.
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.