Come, I said to Niki finally, and I took his hand and led him to the nursery, where Vova, now two, slept, his cheeks two red apples, his forehead a charm. Is he breathing? Niki asked. It’s too hot in here, Mala. I laughed. He’s breathing, I told him, and I lifted our boy from his little bed and put him in Niki’s arms. Niki rocked him standing there in the warm room. We cannot see each other for a while, Mala, Niki said over my son’s small back. I cannot undermine Alexei’s legitimacy. He may live for some time. There is no way to know for certain. Meanwhile, I would have my palace. The minister of the court would continue to transfer a monthly stipend to my accounts. He and Alix would have no more children. We have enough daughters, Niki said ruefully, and the risk is too great for another son.
Yes, the risk was too great. The House of Spain had two hemophiliac sons. The little princes wore padded suits to play in the palace park where the trees had also been padded but still the boys suffered. Both of Alix’s sister Irene’s sons were hemophiliacs; before his death, she had kept the younger son Henry hidden in the palace in Prussia to conceal the evidence of his illness, lest the country know both the heir and his brother were bleeders and the House of Prussia was riddled with disease. So Alix had decided she would do the same with Alexei. The next year, the family would move to Tsarskoye Selo and hide themselves in Alexander Palace, hide Alexei and his illness so completely that almost no one knew of it. It would be 1912 before even the children’s tutor, Pierre Gilliard, understood what illness the boy suffered from, why he was so pale, his face so pinched, and why he spent weeks at a time in bed. Alexei’s doctor, Eugene Botkin, never spoke a word of Alexei’s condition even to his own family. Niki’s family themselves for more than a decade would not know what was wrong with the boy. Photographs of Alexei were fed to the press, but he would rarely appear at state occasions, with various excuses given for his absence. And so the rumor-mongering commenced yet again: the child was retarded, an epileptic, the victim of a revolutionary’s bomb.
As for my son, Niki issued a secret ukase granting him the status of a hereditary nobleman. And that was all Vova would be until the inevitable, the unspeakable, occurred, for which I waited, wickedly, impatiently, even lamenting the wait! I remember thinking, Oh, if the theatricals at the Maryinsky had taken this long to create, the tsar would have sat in his box for decades with nothing to see.
The Match to the Tinder
For the glimpse of Niki I longed for, now I was obliged to attend public events, and so in January 1905 I went to the Dvortskaya Embankment to watch the ceremony of the Epiphany. This blessing of the waters began the cycle of Carnival, an explosion of gaiety that climaxed with Butter Week, just before Lent. Soon booths would be set up on that very spot and in the streets and on the Champs de Mars, and the next few months would be boisterous ones. The peasants kept themselves alive between harvests with their sales at those wooden stalls, slapped up in a hurry and hung with bunting and flags, and jugglers and Gypsies danced between the booths for the kopeks we would throw. I planned to take Vova to watch the puppet shows where harlequins were clobbered on the head by villainous blackguards with sabers and clubs, to hear the Gypsies sing their folk songs, to stuff ourselves with blinis, themselves stuffed with caviar and slippery with butter, to feed Vova gingerbread or hazelnuts or Ukrainian nuts or Greek nuts roasted right out in the open on charcoal braziers just like the vendors do here in Paris, using their brass shovels to scoop the nuts into paper bags. You’ve seen the ballet Petrouchka? Then you’ve seen a Shrovetide Fair and the puppets upon which this ballet is based, the little harlequin Petrouchka, the Blackamoor with his sword, the Columbinecum-Ballerina with her stiff pink skirt. At one of the stalls, I would buy Vova a caged bird and a wooden toy. Today, on the way to the embankment, I promised him that as soon as Carnival began I would find him a wooden cart with wheels that really turned, the sides painted with the vivid red, yellow, and blue of eastern Russia.
The blessing itself was an annual ritual in which the tsar and his family walked out onto the frozen Neva on a long red carpet that ran from the Winter Palace, down the steps of the quay and over the ice to a makeshift chapel, assembled of gleaming crucifixes, plaster pillars, a wooden altar and silver chalices, and the banners and icons of St. John the Baptist. Guards regiments lined the strip of carpet and made a circle around the chapel. A hole in the shape of a crucifix was cut into the ice there and the cold water swam sluggishly beneath it, while snow dust blew across us above. On this day, we pretended the Neva was the Jordan, and for once, the imperial guests waited inside the palace while the plain Russian people stood witness to a ceremony. It was our day, a rare one, to be with the emperor. Some women carried pitchers to fill with the Neva water once it had been blessed: a child or a husband was sick or crippled at home. Some women carried an ailing baby to be dipped quickly into the freezing water and then swaddled in a fur lap robe. I had brought Vova, though his only ailment was his illegitimacy, and a dunk in the water would not cure that, nor would a glimpse of the emperor cure what ailed me. Still, Vova and I waited anyway. No guard stirred a finger or uttered a word but stood like lead soldiers, their heads bare and their helmets at their feet as the wind whipped across the ice and rattled the props of the chapel.
Then exactly after the morning service in the palace chapel, the bands began to play the national anthem and the soldiers we could not see shouted out the salute and then Nicholas, looking quite regal, led the imperial family and their Cossack retinue down the stone steps of the quay to the river; from the women’s jeweled kokoshniks floated long white veils, and it looked as if their souls floated behind their bodies, so pure as to be colorless, part of the gray-white sky. Niki’s head, by tradition, was as bare as his guards’, for today he played Christ ready to be baptized by St. John, and he played the part well, for didn’t he, like Christ, suffer the dark knowledge of what was to come? The local metropolitan and his bishops and archimandrites and priests wore gold vestments so grand one would think they, and not the emperor, stood at the head of the church, but the truth was Nicholas held the appointments of these churchmen in his palm. From where I stood holding Vova, who wore a tiny beaver hat, the exact words of the liturgy were not distinct; only the sounds of the priests’ voices skimmed over the ice on the scent of cloves and roses. The wind puffed up its lips and blew its cold, wet, voluptuous breath across the ice, as well, and Vova buried his face into the sable collar of my shuba. He buried his face because he was cold. He was too young to know shame, but soon enough he would begin to ask, Where is my father? And what would I answer? Your father is far away—for after all, is it not very high up to the tsar?—although at that moment he was less than a verst from us.
At the climax of the ceremony, the metropolitan dipped three times a large silver cross hanging from its long chain into the hole cut in the ice and with it he blessed us all. The bells from Peter and Paul chimed and the guns and cannons made their thunder, and the women next to me began to scream—at the sound, I thought at first—until I realized some invisible weapon had begun to pock the ice all about us. Small pieces of ice flew up and bit at our faces and hands, and Vova began to whimper. The women near me began to run, children tucked under their arms, slipping a little despite their felt boots, dragging with them their empty pitchers. We found out later that a terrorist had managed to substitute live ammunition for the usual blank rounds, and as the guns continued, some of it flew all the way over to where we were standing. The imperial party was sprayed with shrapnel, too, and they scattered in shock. On the quay I saw a policeman fall, his blood a red thread unraveling from the crimson carpet, and we could hear the windows shattering in Nicholas Hall, where the guests waited in court dress for the return of the emperor. I patted Vova’s shoulder to soothe him and strained over him to see. I could not flee until I knew Niki was safe. I saw Niki was now surrounded by his guards; other guards encircled the rest of the imperial family, and when the cannons quieted, Nicholas moved through his party, calming its members, having his group, a bit like a woman with her dress mussed, gather and smooth itself and make a dignified recessional. I had never seen him called upon to lead in any public situation that had not been tightly choreographed—and it appeared his ten years as tsar had prepared him for this departure from the expected better than he knew. This, too, was part of being emperor. The office involved, after all, not only receptions and processionals and ceremonies but actual governance and the protestations against it. Niki at his coronation had spoken against the senseless dreams of those who, like the generations before them all the way back to the war with Napoleon, hoped to bring reform to the monarchical government of Russia. Perhaps Niki would find his way with as much aplomb through the jumble of that. When the imperial family vanished into the Winter Palace, the ice quickly cleared, but I lingered on it, stooped to pocket a piece of the shrapnel that lay there, unnoticed, the edges of the metal warm and jagged to the touch even through the leather of my gloves.