I have a son, Niki smiled. I have a son. And he looked about him as if to tell someone the news, but I was the only one there and so he told it to me.
Yes, I said. You have a son. Niki stood with him and my son kicked spasmodically and stretched and contracted his small arms, his little fists the fists of a tsarevich, and Niki spoke.
Maletchka, why did you tell poor Sergei Mikhailovich you were having his child?
Did you want two sons by two mothers? I asked. Are you that greedy?
And the tsar laughed.
I said, What does Sergei know?
He thinks it’s the son of the prince of Siam—or of the Hussar Nikolai Skalon.
Two men I’d had flirtations with in 1899 and 1900.
But since he doesn’t look Siamese, Niki said, and as Skalon is long dead, the boy must be mine. What is his name?
When I told him, Niki said immediately, We shall call him Vova, using the diminutive. We. So Vova would not be adopted by my sister and her husband. Niki put the baby in his cradle and then he knelt, abruptly, before me and kissed my hands, and at this, the heavens released their heavy rain, which rushed to meet the treetops, the grass, the roof, the windows, the doors, the cobblestones, the garden, the High Road, its cousin the gulf, and the rain also fell upon the crowns of the triple-headed golden eagle on the cupola of the Grand Palace at Peterhof.
By the first snowfall, Niki had bought for me three plots of land on Petersburg Island, across the Great Neva, across from the Winter Palace, at the corner of Kronversky Prospekt and Great Dvorianskaya Street. The purchase of the land was kept secret. It was not registered in my name so as not to draw attention to the 88,000 rubles paid for it, which everyone would know that I—abandoned by Sergei Mikhailovich—could not afford. This side of the city owned no metal works or electricity plants or printing presses, only a smattering of new mansions amid the old wooden houses that Peter the Great had once decreed were to be the only type of house to be constructed in this part of the city, as the granite from Finland, the marble and travertine from Italy and the Urals, the porphyry from Sweden, and the sandstone from Germany were to be used only for Admiralty Island, for the imperial section of Petersburg, demarcated by its canals, the Fontanka and the Moika, and by its avenues, and by the two palaces of the tsar, the Winter and the Summer, and by its stone. And so until 1830, little else was built on Petersburg Island but wooden shacks for the workers, a wooden fort, a wooden house where Peter himself had lived while his city was assembled. Even after that, the land remained barely developed. But when the Troitsky Bridge was finished the next year in 1903, it would connect the island to Peter proper and the building of mansions would begin in earnest, and mine would be one of the best of them, built by the court architect, Alexander von Gogan, and taking a silver medal from the city for its art nouveau design. From my new property, Vova and I would look across the Neva to the Fortress of Peter and Paul, the Summer Garden, the Champs de Mars, the Vladimirichi Palace, the New Mikhailovsky Palace, to the Winter Palace itself.
So that Niki could visit us discreetly, whenever he wished, he planned to have a tunnel dug beneath the Neva, stretching from the basement of the Winter Palace to the basement of my new palace. I hear that visitors to my mansion, now the State Museum of Political History, to this day ask to see the entrance to the secret tunnel that once linked the palace of the dancer Kschessinska to the palace of the tsar. Political history does not interest them. I interest them. The secret passage, the underground tunnel, was not without precedent, given our Russian winters. In Moscow, tunnels connected the Yusupov Palace and the palace of Niki’s uncle, Sergei Alexandrovich, with the Kremlin. In 1795, a five-hundred-foot tunnel was dug between the basement of the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo and its kitchen, located on the other side of the garden. In 1814, the engineer Marc Brunel proposed to Alexander I that a tunnel be built under the Neva, and when the emperor decided to build a bridge instead, Brunel built a tunnel under the Thames. So the Neva would now have its tunnel, and Kschessinska would soon have her palace. Until then, I would have to satisfy myself with Niki’s infrequent visits to my dacha, where I lingered, out of sight, as out of sight was the only place Niki could see me, and where, once or twice, I managed to persuade him to spend a genial hour in my bed. Yes, yes, I agreed. I must be patient. But patience, I will admit, was not my strong suit.
Almost all the great emperors had two wives, you know—Mikhail Romanov, Alexei Mikhailovich, Feodor Alexeyvich, Peter the Great. Not that Niki said anything directly about this to me, but I understood it to be a possibility, as he must also. Of course, the first wife must be disposed of. Peter the Great’s first wife did not have the grace to die, and so after almost a decade of marriage he forced her to move into a convent and take the veil. Later, Peter married a peasant girl who worked in the regimental laundry. It was her son who became the next tsar. Did you know that at the end of his short life, Niki’s grandfather was maneuvering to make Ekaterina the empress, to place in the line of succession their son, Georgy, instead of the son of his first wife, Alexander, Niki’s father? Alexander II had never liked the cool reception the children of his first wife gave to his second one—or to his children with her. What would the country and his family bear? Could he pass over the thickset Alexander in favor of his delightful Georgy, son of the love of his life? Niki would have to maneuver equally delicately. Yes, first he would make me a palace. Then he would give me a title—Princess Krassinsky-Romanovsky. Then he would pack Alix and her herd of girls off to Paris—or return her, daughters hidden under her big skirts, to Hesse-Darmstadt, where they could all become Lutherans if they wished. Yes, if Alix did not want a second wife for Niki she would have to give him a son. Tant pis.
To prepare for my fabulous future, I decided to retire from the stage (as if anyone could forget I had once danced upon it) at the end of the season. In 1700, perhaps, the empress could be a laundress, but in 1900, she could not be a dancer.
My sister had already retired with my parents’ blessing, although she had done this after twenty years at the theater and with the receipt of her pension. But when I went to Liteiny Prospekt to tell my father that I would retire, he was not happy with this latest enterprise of mine. I trapped him in the ballroom where he gave his dancing lessons—the little children were just filing out, ribbons crooked in their hair, to meet the governesses who stood in the anteroom holding their charges’ fur-lined coats and fur-trimmed felt boots. The large ballroom stood luminous and humid and within it my father a tall willow in a frock coat. Those at the theater who gave ballroom lessons wore white ties and tails to do so, sometimes wearing them even to rehearsals if they had scheduled themselves too tightly, and these men were known as the frock coat set. My father looked thin, a little too thin, in his frock coat. He was getting old, I saw. Just four years before, he had celebrated sixty years on the tsar’s stage. He had received so much tribute that it took four stagehands to hoist each chest of gold plates and silver cups from the orchestra pit to the table set out on the stage, where, at the interval, the curtain remained raised so the audience could appreciate the great esteem in which my father was held.