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 lessons 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?
La Bayadère