In his spare time, he made a model of the St. Petersburg Bolshoi Theater, that building now demolished, though my father’s model still survives, I hear, in the Bakhrushin Theatrical Museum in Moscow. It stands in a display case by the one that holds the little shoes I wore in my first performance in the undersea bacchanal of Le Petit Cheval bossu, though I have not seen either for eighty years. The little model my father built had real oil footlights and a velvet curtain and miniature canvas scenery that went up and down when you turned the handle, which my sister, Julia, never let me do, slapping my hands away if I reached for the crank. She thought she was the mistress of everything in the house. My father built, too, a big glass aquarium that stood by the windows in the parlor. Stone ornaments, like garden ornaments in miniature, decorated the vast bottom of the tank and fish swam like women moving in colorful dresses through the pillars of the watery estate. It was my father who designed the rooms of our large apartment at No. 38, Liteiny Prospekt in Petersburg and of our dacha on our country estate, Krasnitzky. There he tore down the walls of the dining room to enlarge it and built a bathhouse on the river. We had a farm there, an orchard, a vegetable garden, and beyond that, a forest thick with mushrooms. And I remember how each time we arrived at the country from the city, my father and my mother knelt down and kissed the land of our estate. We were not rich, but the money my father earned as principal character dancer and from his private ballroom lessons in the waltz and the mazurka, lessons given to the children of the nobility, even the children of the imperial family, gave us a comfortable life.
Christmas and Easter he turned into pageants and feasts. Christmas Eve day we fasted until the first star appeared in the evening sky, after which we gorged ourselves on the thirteen fish dishes my father himself had prepared—we, of course, had a cook, but this was a special day and my father a real culinary artist, with a secret recipe for fish soup made with cream, a Polish dish. He labored in the kitchen while we children played games—rucheyok, like London Bridge, and chekharla, leapfrog. Candles and glass pears shone in our tree, which was showered all over with silver tinsel that tangled with the gold paper stars and angels. On New Year’s we drank hot Swedish punch and ate apple pies. For Easter my father baked a dozen kulichi, one for each apostle. Tall as a man’s top hat, each cake was iced in a different manner and adorned with fruits or candies, and I would walk the length of the banquet table to admire their distinct beauty: a fleur-de-lis of sliced strawberries on this one, the crest of an ocean wave made of white icing on that, tiny toothpick flags a fence at the border of another. In France, the old Russian immigrants bake their kulichi in coffee cans to make them rise tall.
All the world was a theater to my father, and for my birthday in August no production was more grand. We were inevitably at our dacha in that month and the feast he prepared was followed by fireworks of his own invention. At the dessert table I sat in the place of honor; one year, my father hung a wreath of flowers on a string run though a hook in the ceiling and when my dessert was served, he lowered the petaled crown by pulley until it settled gently onto my head, while my big brother and sister and half-brothers clapped. Russian girls love to weave themselves crowns of flowers, and so my father wove one for me. Even the peasants in the nearby villages who did our haymaking and took care of our cows brought birthday gifts, baskets of eggs nestled in napkins, each linen embroidered with a small red cross, and they bowed low from the waist as they presented their treats. Some of the peasants had been serfs just ten years earlier, before they had been emancipated by Niki’s grandfather Alexander II, and they kept still their serf manners, bowing low like that to their masters.
During those long days of haymaking and rye threshing and mushroom and berry picking, the lives of peasant and master were stitched tightly together in a single seam. Peasant children became the playmates of the noble ones, if only for the summer, and who does not remember playing gorodki with wooden blocks or bat and ball, babki, with any scrap of metal to be found, or bory, the game of tag, our bare feet brown with dirt. I remember the littlest ones bathed naked in what remained of our old bathhouse. The peasants joined us for lunch or for tea on Sunday, but when we returned to Petersburg, of course, they remained by the river Orlinka at their harvests to work the fields while I learned my art. I put on so much weight one summer from all the big meals that when I returned to school my teacher scolded I had become regrettably fat. But what is there to do in the country but play and eat? But wait, I’ve lost myself. That happens often to me now. It was the peasant women who as wet nurses and nannies raised the noble children, taught them folklore and fairy stories, played with them cards and lotto, put them to bed at night, accompanied them from country to city back to country again, wept when they went off to the lycée or joined the Guards, and then were cared for by the families as aging relations. Why, Sergei Diaghilev brought his nanny with him when he moved to Petersburg as a grown man!
We, of course, were of more modest means and had no nannies. My mother and father raised us, were devoted to us. Would it be wrong to say that of the four children he had with my mother, I was my father’s favorite? After all, my parents are gone, their faces blackened in their graves; my brother Josef died in 1942, my brother Stanislaus died over a century ago, in 1864, at age four, eight years before my birth. This fascinated me, a brother I never knew, and I would gaze for long periods at the photograph my mother kept in a silver frame on her dressing table as if by that I could come to know him; he looked just like her, the rest of us like my father, with the long face, the straight nose, the close-set eyes. My sister, Julia, lived to be one hundred two, you know. She died the evening after Russian Christmas Eve two years ago, January 7, between seven and eight o’clock, right here in this room. After our husbands died, we lived together again, as we had as girls. My father lived to the age of eighty-three. Longevity runs in our family, though not in the Romanovs’, but longevity is not immortality; it merely ensures you suffer the loss of everyone you love so that when death finally comes you are more than ready.
I am not writing this down. I am thinking it. I had two strokes this past year. To answer my correspondence, I dictate, and then I sign my initials MRK in a hand so shaky it looks as if some very old lady had written those three consonants. My handwriting used to be minuscule, but now it is loose and large, like a small child’s. Yes, it is impossible to write, but I do not want to ask for help until I know for certain what I wish to share. Because, you see, there are so few of us left who remember how it all was. After the revolution three million of us fled to Berlin, Paris, New York, where we clung together, speaking Russian, reading Bunin, Tolstoy, Akhmatova, not the traitor writers, the ones who loved the Bolsheviks, but the ones who reminded us of what life was like before. We spent our days eating Russian breakfasts of tea, cream, ham, cheese, and hard-boiled eggs, attending midnight mass at Easter, sitting together in theaters where actors and singers and musicians from the tsar’s great theaters now performed, traveling to the Riviera in the season, trying to live as before. That was our phrase, as before. Everything we did we tried to do as we did before. We were waiting for the Russia we knew to be returned to us. But death picked us off one by one as we waited, and our children who came of age in these foreign cities do not know the Petersburg and the Moscow that, as the poet Ivanov put it, disappeared into the night. Yes, if I don’t tell, certain things will never be known, and when my memory is completely lost, even I will not know them. All will be rumor, which is nothing but the tail end of a vanishing truth.