Yes, those close enough to the tsar to hold out their hands found them filled with gold and it had been that way for four hundred years, though by the end of the year all the expenses of his court depleted the treasury and the tsar was out of money. But these customs of the old Russia in which the tsar stood absolute and all wealth flowed through him were customs Niki loved. He loved the story of Catherine the Great’s standing order for a sentry perpetually at post in the meadow. He loved that by right he had first pick of the pelts, vodka, timber, and metals hacked from the mines of Siberia. In 1900, he even debated changing court dress to the long caftans of the fourteenth century and changing the spelling of words to that of Old Muscovy. He wanted to turn back the clock even as the world was hurtling forward. In medieval Russia, custom once kept the tsar and his empress shielded from the people, even from their own boyare. They observed court ceremonies from their terem, through secret windows, the mysterious, unseen source of power, and as Niki did not like to be stared at and Alix did not like to appear at court, perhaps a terem would have suited them both. But they came to the little theater at the Hermitage and let us all look.
That night the divertissement Petipa devised was Les Quatre Saisons, for which he had choreographed four dances—Rose of Summer, Winter’s Frost, Bacchante, and Harvest Time, and I represented this last as an Ear of Corn. The choreography I cannot remember, but no matter, it was not a masterpiece. Vegetables do not inspire great works of art. At the Maryinsky the court was held at a distance, but Niki sat before me now on a chair next to Alix, just beyond the orchestra pit and the proscenium of the stage, which projected forward in a half circle. If I leapt from it, I could almost land in his lap, but my legs trembled so much when the stagehands cranked up the curtain I wasn’t sure I could walk. I knew Sergei was out there and I sought his face for comfort. He nodded at me, gave me the little one-sided smile, the secret smile we gave each other. Like two-faced Janus, I returned it. I stood as decoration for much of the first few divertissements, a husk of corn in my hand as a prop, and good fortune, for I could not remember whatever it was I was supposed to do whenever my eyes met Niki’s luminous blue ones. It seemed to me he gazed at me with affection.
At this close range, Alix looked, at twenty-seven, at least a decade older and she would that year consult her physicians two hundred times for her heart, her nerves, her sciatica; when these men failed to satisfy her, she would begin her long and ultimately disastrous journey of consorting with healers and holy men. All this was before her and yet one could see something of it in her face: in the exhausted expression, the grim eyes, the long nose beginning now to droop, the frizzled hair that rose like a turban from her too high forehead, the hair brushed and then pinned around the plump cloth pads that gave her coiffure its elaborate shape. Around me danced women equally unattractive—the young Anna Pavlova with her beaked nose, my plain-faced rival Olga Preobrajenska, and Petipa’s daughter, the stout Marie, who looked like a Viking warrior and who owed having a position at all to her father. No, there was no competition on the stage or off for Niki’s attention and I began to note how often and how discreetly his eyes—just his eyes—flickered to where I stood to take in my form before returning to the general action on the stage. He wanted to look at me in my shimmering gold tunic and bloomers, cut much shorter than my usual skirts, at me in my gracefully curled wig. Well, who would not take pleasure in such a sight? And suddenly I began to relish this evening. The nervous sweat that had enveloped me and soaked my hair beneath my wig began to dry and I became impatient for my turn to take center stage and dance, for the moments when Nicholas would not have to drag his eyes from me.
I remember it was Nikolai Legat, my dear Kolinka, who partnered me in my adagio and oh, he was lovely to look at then, with dark, curly hair, eyes as large as two slices of orange, and a lower lip a woman would enjoy biting. It was Kolinka Legat who uncovered for me the secret of Legnani’s endless series of fouettés by scrutinizing her during rehearsals for Act III of Swan Lake, and it was he who coached me until I too could snap my head round while focusing on a spot center front, the trick by which one could whip the series of thirty-two turns without pitching over. (I presented him with a monogrammed gold cigarette case for his trouble.) I was an Ear of Corn, but I decided to behave that night not like a cheerful vegetable in a raspy husk, but like a flesh-and-blood woman bewitched by her lover. Our formulated and regimented choreography—put one’s head together here with one’s partner’s, then turn and place this hand there and that one here—so often produced a mechanical effect in adagio, a cursory approximation of love. But tonight, and not for the last time, I decided to channel my feelings for Niki, using the unwitting Kolinka as medium. I didn’t think he, being already a friend, would mind. Perhaps I overplayed my part a bit, looking too amorously into his eyes and then turning to the eyes of the tsar so close to me. At one point, I held out my hand to the tsar before furling my arm back and touching my palm to Kolinka’s. This went on for some time, until finally Kolinka whispered from behind while supporting me in arabesque, Mala, what are you up to? I almost laughed.
And did my efforts have the desired effect? I believe so. The tsar had no eyes for Winter’s Frost, Rose of Summer, Bacchante, for the empress herself, sitting there looking at him with an increasingly dour face. I forgot to look for Sergei’s. The empress might not be pleased by what she saw on the stage, but the Ear of Corn certainly pleased the tsar.
Sergei told me later that in the Hermitage gallery Niki had leaned toward him beneath a Rembrandt after the main courses and salad but before dessert while lighting up his little yellow cigarette to say, Mala looked very beautiful tonight. Which Niki expected Sergei, pleased by the tsar’s approbation, to dutifully repeat to me. And Sergei was pleased, but he was also wary.
What would happen next?
A meeting of sorts.
It was only a few months later that the chief of police called to tell me the emperor would be passing by my dacha on the road from Peterhof to Strelna at one o’clock and that I must be sure to be standing in the garden where the tsar could see me.
It was the first of such calls, which time would teach me to receive with greater dignity than I did that day. When I put down the receiver I screamed. Then I ran about, for I had little time, sprinting around the garden from this bench to that flower bed, trying to decide which perch would offer the best sight lines from the road. I believe I even considered sitting on the top of my fountain, but I ended up choosing the obvious stone bench, upon which first I sat and then I stood, on tiptoe, so eager was I to be certain Nicholas could see me over the clipped hedge that divided my garden from the road. In the heat the air seemed to me to be swirling and liquid, thick with the sea lapping at the bottom of my garden, which was suddenly and ferociously in bloom, as happens in Russia—after the long winter, the sudden spring, so sudden it shocks one. I felt a bit like one of the dwarves or Africans kept by the old Russian counts for amusement—or worse, like one of the unfortunate serfs forced to paint herself white and pose in the garden like a statue as her master rode past.