You must see how I could not let conscience overwhelm expediency—not that I ever had—and on Sergei’s return I said only that I had rested those summer weeks while he was gone at Krasnoye Selo, putting the troops through their exercises, absorbed by that world of men, weapons, and uniforms to which all Romanov males periodically retreated. If Alix had not given birth that summer, Niki would have been there with him, with all of them, instead of rolling around in bed with me, his Cossack bodyguards playing cards in my stable the only witnesses to what were supposed to be the tsar’s long rides through the countryside. Yes, I took Sergei back into my bed with a haste and a false ardor that made him smile. Yes, I licked at him with my black tongue and I rubbed my ash, coal dust, and sooty pebbles all over him, and he only smiled and said, How you’ve missed me, Mala, before my body spit him into a sleep where he lay spent, so terrifically unaware of the malignancy of me.
By late October, my body had begun to change in ways only I could notice but soon enough Sergei would, as well. The theater season began, too, and though I could hide my pregnancy for now beneath my high-waisted tutu if I took care with the profile I presented on the stage—thanks be to God we did not perform in the leotards of today—eventually, I would have to withdraw from the season with some excuse of illness and with a more intricate fabrication for Sergei. I chose a gray afternoon as we rode in his carriage on Nevsky Prospekt during the usual promenade—in a few years more the carriages would be joined by motorcars, but for now we shared the wide boulevards with bicycles and drozhkis and horse-drawn taxis called izvozchiki and troikas and electric streetcars. I wore, like all women who rode in these contraptions, a veil that shielded my hair and face from wind and grit. Better to be veiled when one is two-faced. The rains of September had gone; the November snow had not yet arrived. It was neither here nor there, a good day for a lie. Strolling about us were officers in their winter uniforms with gray mantles, men in greatcoats and dark caps with cockades to signify their rank, students in their black cloaks, peasant men in belted tunics and sheepskin jackets, muzhiki in red shirts. Peasant women in kerchiefs carried their children, and governesses—foreign ones and Slavic girls—led their charges by the hand or in a small parade and the ones with infants pushed elaborate buggies. I touched at my hair, at my wrists, at the spot beneath my collarbone. As I opened my mouth, the tall slender windows of the city watched me from the four-story buildings that lined the streets. Sergei, I’m carrying your child, I said, and the hot words scorched the material of my veil. I held my breath. Would he believe me? He turned to me, his bearded face suffused with joy. Ah, yes. He believed me. Terrible. We had to hurry to my house on English Prospekt to drink to the child’s health, Sergei pouring the vodka into the little jeweled glasses Niki had bought me as a housewarming present ten years before.
But don’t pity Sergei too much. He could have offered to marry me yet he did not. A morganatic marriage to me would have jeopardized his income and his titles. But he would put his name down as father on the child’s birth certificate, give my child his patronymic, which no Russian child can be without. It was like an identity paper, and with Sergei’s patronymic, Sergeivich, my child’s future would be assured.
Unfortunately, of course, I gave birth a month too soon, in June, at Strelna, during the white nights, in the heat and privacy of my dacha. In an act of deliberate impudence, I had covered the walls of my bedroom in a silk with the same floral pattern Alix had selected for her bedroom at Tsarskoye—green wreaths dotted with pink flowers, each one tied up with a pink ribbon, or so Roman Meltzer, designer to the crown, had described it to me—and the flower-and-leaf-covered walls seemed to breathe with me as I paced. Sergei, alarmed by what he thought was this emergency of a premature delivery, had called in his brother Nicholas’s private doctor (for Nicholas, in addition to being a homosexual, was an inveterate hypochondriac), a doctor who demanded I lie flat on my back in bed, a command I promptly disobeyed. I could not obey him. Instead, like a peasant woman, I walked the room, my fingers sliding against the silk walls, the green leaves as prickly as if they were real leaves beneath my wet fingertips, the bright print of the flowers and bows deepening and seeming to bleed. This kind of pain was unknown to me, this pain tightening across my abdomen, this pulling at my tailbone. Peasant women in labor, I’d heard, tied themselves under their arms with rope and hung themselves from the rafters of a barn to enlist gravity as midwife. I understood the impulse. Some gave birth in the fields, stepping away from their plows to squat. But I had a doctor who treated the imperial family and who implored me to lie in a dignified manner flat on my back.
As I lay beneath the sheet that protected my modesty and blinded him, with his unwashed hands he periodically checked the progress of my labor. I would be sick with childbed fever for a month following the birth from his ministrations, my body weak and rubbery and my brain dark. My sister was the only one I could stand to have in my humid bedroom, the only one in my family not mortified by the disgrace of my confinement. While Sergei paced on the veranda, she distracted me, retelling from memory the old stories she used to read me when I was a child, the Russian fairy tales, about Grandfather Frost whose breath makes thin icicles and who shakes the snow to the earth by rustling the long hair of his beard, about the Snow Maiden who rises from that snow and melts each spring, about Baba Yaga, the witch who inhabits a house that stands not on stone or dirt but on chicken feet, and so the house could be turned to face north, south, east, or west, depending on Baba Yaga’s fancy. But any way I turned, north, south, east, or west, I found only pain.
Somewhere during this long day children played in the gardens of the villas around me and lovers took little green boats across the lakes between the islands and the boatmen sang for pay, and on a barge a concertina band played as it did on summer evenings, and on a veranda I could not see a gramophone was cranked and bits and pieces of its music turned to splinters and pierced the air. At night there was no sun but also no darkness, the sky streaked magenta, blue, and pearl; the yellow of the Russian virgin’s bower with its spidery bell-shaped blossoms did not disappear and the birds did not hide themselves. I did. In my room the wet heat came off me and no number of cool towels could stanch it. Although there was only Julia in my room, I saw others—the shadows and outlines of bodies, the flicker of a face—just as I sometimes see today, now that the dead are arriving to sit with me. By the early hours of the night I understood I might die; my labor was going on too long. I was being punished for my duplicity, which I longed now to confess, and I began to pray, Gospodi pomilou, Lord have mercy on me. But my body was strong—I had my father’s robust health and I would have his longevity, though I did not yet know this—and finally, between one and two in the morning, the earth opened between my legs and my son was born.