She was the someday. I was the here and now and perhaps beyond. But it was not until 1893, when Alix refused Niki’s first proposal of marriage, that I truly triumphed. In his journal of that year, Niki recorded the tale of his failed endeavor and included in his entry a few lines from Alix’s letter in which she proclaimed it a sin to change the belief in which I have been brought up and which I love. To marry the heir to the Russian throne she must convert to the Russian Orthodox Church and this she would not do—though I would have done so in the snap of a finger. Where do I sign? To whom do I bow? What statue do I kiss? But Alix was a Lutheran, the entire religion a reaction against the Roman Catholic Church with its spectacle, its idols, its fancy vestments, and its insistence on the necessity of a priest’s intercession to reach God. Alix could speak to God on her own in her own plain church, danke schön, in which she had just two years ago been confirmed, that sacrament as important to her as the one of marriage. How could she now, suddenly, renounce this? But she could not be Lutheran and be the future empress of Russia—the emperor stood as head of the Orthodox Church and any heir to the throne must be born of an Orthodox mother. The calendar of the Russian court year was ruled by Orthodox observances. It was impossible for the empress to be Lutheran. So Niki’s parents, who didn’t much like Alix anyway and who had been withholding their permission for the match, were pleased by Alix’s refusal to convert, although their pleasure could not approach mine, and they began suggesting instead this alliance and that, perhaps to Princess Hélène of France or to Princess Margaret of Prussia. But all this was to be considered eventually, and eventually is a long day’s ride from immediately. For now, at least, the long-haired phantom of Alix that had stood sentry over Nicholas at my bedroom window receded, whisked into the distance, and, in despair at her disappearance, Nicholas bedded the little Polish princess instead of the German one. That happened January 25, 1893. I could tell you the hour.
I cannot, of course, describe to you what it was like to make love to the tsarevich because such things are private. But his naked body impressed even the Bolsheviks who dragged it from the cold water of the mine shaft twelve miles from Ekaterinburg the day after his murder. Before they chopped him up and burned him, they marveled at how fit he was, his cheeks so red from the icy water that he looked alive. That January night with me he was alive, his body whole and warm beneath my fingers and my mouth, his limbs all stitched to their proper places, after which he recorded in his diary, Flew to my MK… am still under her spell—the pen is shaking in my hand. He was not a Pushkin, not a Lermontov, I grant you, but he was the tsarevich, and so he did not have to be.
I’m afraid for a while at the theater I became intolerable. I received my own diamond brooch from him, and to mark the delight of our consummation, a necklace of large diamonds—each diamond as big as a walnut—which I wore showily onstage with the brooch, whether I played a peasant girl or a princess. It was not unusual for a dancer to do this, to wear on the stage the jewels her protector had given her, but no one else had ever been given a necklace like that. The Romanovs knew their jewels, mined from the rich earth of the Urals in Siberia since the seventeenth century, and the tsars had first pick of the best of them. Alix, age twelve, may have returned her diamond brooch to Niki, but I kept my brooch and my necklace, which all came to know as the tsar’s necklace and which I valued most and for years refused to sell. With that around my neck, I was untouchable at the theater. When I did not get what I wanted, they at the theater called my fits of pique Her Imperial Indignation.
Our idyll. Let me tell you about our idyll. Niki often left his parents at Anichkov Palace in the evenings and made my house on English Prospekt his second home. I can still recall my excitement at returning from the theater to see his coat already in the front hall and the way my body flushed as I moved from the violet-scented warmth—for the violet was my flower—of my carriage to, for a brief moment, the frigid Petersburg air and from there into my house, my own house, where my lover waited, when all the other girls my age lived still with their parents. What a triumph! And in my house, on the marble-topped table of the front hall, lay the dark greatcoat of the heir to the Russian throne. Some nights we ate a late supper alone; other nights we had suppers together after the theater with friends from the ballet or opera companies or with his cousins, the Mikhailovichi, or with his fellow officers. I served zakuski—mushrooms in cream sauce, little sausages, eggs, and onions—sturgeon, and then kuropatka, partridge, and we toasted our health with the eight gold-painted vodka glasses encrusted with semiprecious stones the tsarevich had brought me as a housewarming present. No more plain drinking glasses for me! The meals were followed by games of charades, where Niki would hold his cigarette between his teeth and pretend to conduct an orchestra that spread above us across the ceiling, while we had to guess at the symphony, the plaster lifting away to accommodate the musicians and instruments. I can still see the set of his jaw, the way he threw down the cigarette to grab me up and kiss me, while his cousins pounded the table in approval. Or there were games of baccarat, the beginning, I suppose, of my nasty infatuation with cards and gambling. Later in life I would become a habitué of the gaming tables at Monte Carlo. They called me Madame 17, for I always bet that number. Can you guess why? After all this Nicholas and I would climb into the bed, which I had made so comfortable—not at all like his camp bed at Anichkov Palace. Yes, the emperor, so as not to cosset his children, had them sleep on camp beds and wash in the morning with cold water. Niki’s cousins all did this, as well, some odd imperial tradition of deprivation for those children who would grow up to have so much, as if a hard bed and a cold bath could bring with them humility and strength of character. Nor was my bed like a bed in the Winter Palace, sheathed with a comforter that bore the monogram of Catherine the Great, the coverlet so stiff and slippery it slid to the floor if one shifted position. No, I had a coverlet of sable, which we lay under or upon, and Niki stayed with me some nights all the way until the morning. I slept with my arms around him or his around me and sometimes in the hour before he left, we would study one another in the winter light, where naked we were a different color than we had been the night before by oil lamp, this paler version of ourselves no less pleasing. He called me Mala, Maletchka, Panni—short for Pannochka, the endearment for a young Polish girl—or my M.K. I called him my Niki and this interlude in the months before he became tsar and assumed the responsibilities that governing demanded were the last days of his youth. Why, he played like a boy up until a month before his father’s death that next autumn, when he and his cousin Georgie pitched a great chestnut-throwing battle out at Gatchina and a few days later fought another match with pinecones. Chestnuts, pinecones, theatricals, cards, a few imperial duties, and me—that was how Nicholas II, before he became Nicholas II, spent the year 1893. That year the tsarevich visited me almost every week, and some weeks twice, and between visits we wrote one another our love letters. His to me I lost in the revolution, but mine to him are preserved—they sit today in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow. He had saved my letters as I had saved his, and they, along with every other bit of his property, were confiscated after his arrest and death. My letters are now testament: the last tsar once lived and loved—loved me!