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.