But I found Krasnitzky changed, too. When I took a stroll on the roads I knew so well from childhood or along the familiar sandy path by the swift-running river Orlinka, if I should happen to pass a peasant from the estate he gave me only a curt nod, and I felt even that was offered reluctantly. And after all the kindness my father had shown to them! Our neighbor found a wall of his barn smashed one morning; another one had his farming tools stolen. Other neighbors complained the peasants were measuring the land and pretending to divide it up between them, and they did not stop their chatter even when their squire walked by. And so, reluctantly, I curtailed my walks and stayed closer to our dacha. My boy was old enough now to toddle alongside me to the fringe of birch trees, to yank up the mushrooms I pointed out and drop them, some of them squashed and others in bits, into my own bark basket carved long ago with my initials, MMK. In the evening’s soft light I rocked him on my lap or my mother took him onto hers, while we gazed at the trees that rose twice as high as our roof. My father gave Vova a pet pig, which Vova would take on a walk as if it were a dog, a rope leash to pull it and a stick to prod it, and he would call to me to watch him strike the animal until I had to take the stick away from my miniature Ivan the Terrible. Because Vova was so particular at table, my mother spoiled him by cutting his food into shapes—an acorn, a butterfly, a rabbit, and coaxed him to eat as only she could, with honeyed words and a few twirls of the spoon, and after dinner, she and I taught him durachki, which means little idiots, the card game learned first by all Russian children. At night Vova slept in my bed, covers thrown back, face flushed; underneath that red fever the sun had tinted his white skin brown. I lay awake beside him sometimes for hours, while the wind shifted the limbs of the trees, the top page of a sheaf of paper, the hem of a tablecloth, the tea in a glass. I felt as if I were a girl again and Vova were my much younger brother, but this was not the life I had envisioned for him, slow summers with Petersburg’s Catholic circles. Just ten versts away, at Tsarskoye Selo and at the palaces lining the avenues leading to it, the imperial family and the court had also retreated from the unrest in the capital, but those ten versts might have been ten thousand versts, so far had my life drifted from theirs. At Tsarskoye Selo, I’m sure the trees also grew lush and green and stirred with the wind as they bent over the canals Empress Elizabeth had once intended, before the project had been abandoned, to lead all the way to Peter, so the tsars could be rowed the nine versts to the capital like pharaohs on a barge. In the Alexander Palace there, I imagined Niki spent his days as we did, playing cards with his children, perhaps bezique and aunt, reading aloud from the novels of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev, pasting photographs into his picture albums. But I did not hear from him and had not for almost a year now, though money was regularly transferred into my account each month by Baron Freedericks. By midsummer I had grown restless and dispirited, and then my spirits were destroyed further by calamity.
During a dress rehearsal for Sleeping Beauty this past season, a trap door on the stage had abruptly snapped open and my father, who had had the bad luck to be standing on it, dropped through. He arrested the plunge with his elbows at the very last moment, but the shock of the fall, like a curse in a fairy tale, had cracked his robust health; the unrest in the capital and in the theater only ruptured it further. The doctors had put him to bed, as if whatever was wrong might mend itself there, but for eighty-three years my father’s life had been predicated on motion, and he refused to lie flat with the covers drawn up. Yet, once out of bed, he told me, he felt the parts of him seemed to be assembled in some manner that was not quite right, that he moved like a mechanical man, metal bones covered over by paper. Though none of us could see this, assuring him the summer at Krasnitzky would cure him, who knows his own body better than a dancer? My father died suddenly in July, a month after our arrival. He had lain down with a headache and when my mother sent me to check on him, I couldn’t rouse him. I said to myself, He is just sleeping, and I crawled next to him on the bed and curled my arm around him, laid my face by his face from which I had inherited so many features, and then I looked out the window at the blazing blue sky. I thought, If he does not get up, I will not get up.
It was 1905, twelve years after the cuckoo in his study had called out twelve times as I struggled to tell him of my plans to become the mistress of the tsarevich.
My father had come to Petersburg in 1853, and he had danced for four emperors—Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II. My father was in Peter even before the Maryinsky! He had watched the circus burn down in 1859 and the Maryinsky Theater rise in its place. He had given me his adopted city and his theater and this life, and I could not imagine any of it without him. At Ivanov’s funeral a few years earlier, in 1901, my father had sighed, Very few of us oldsters remain, and now they were one fewer. Perhaps I could close my eyes and when I opened them my father would open his. I closed mine to try my magic but then I was afraid to open them. My mother eventually came looking for us both and had to slap my hands and call to the maid to help pull me from the bed.