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—
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 said 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?