My brother drove us to the station himself, fur hat pulled low on his forehead, his nose a mountain slope of rebuke, and we did not speak then of the tsarevich or anything we had seen. Instead, Josef amused Vova along the way with the numbers of beasts and birds the tsar’s hunting party had bagged each day, and I was grateful to him, for on the long train ride back to Peter, Vova drew pictures of animals and forests, of guns and bows and arrows, and then he drew up lists of imaginary hunting records with numbers carefully chosen for rabbit, pheasant, partridge, elk, stag, and bison. In a few weeks, when Alexei was well enough, he also would travel to Petersburg, first by carriage on the sandy road I had walked that night, a road raked smooth by the servants there, and then by railroad car that crept along at fifteen miles an hour to spare him any further injury. By then the dark forest and the dark house would be bleached white with snow, but that wouldn’t matter, for Alix had snatched her son back from the underworld. The imperial family would never return to Spala, never return to any of their Polish estates again.
For my part, for years I wondered what my son remembered of that night, of that small, plain room with the whitewashed walls, the single picture hanging of men at hunt, the iron bed, the window that held the vista of a cold night in Poland. But I never asked him, for once it was over, I never wanted to speak of it again. I understood now why Niki had withdrawn from me so totally—his son’s illness was a tornado and it sucked everything around the boy into its powerful and lonely vortex.
A Life for the Tsar
By the winter of 1913 the tsarevich could walk but only short distances and then only with a limp, but the Great Tercentenary, the celebration of three hundred years of Romanov rule, could not wait for his fuller recovery. For ceremonial events he would have to either remain at home or be carried by one of the Cossacks from the family’s personal retinue, the tsarevich’s eyes too large, his features wooden with fatigue, and Niki knew the country would stink with even further rumors: the tsarevich was an imbecile, the tsarevich had an incurable disease. And so, for the de rigueur gala performance of A Life for the Tsar at the Maryinsky, when the theater would be filled only with court officials and diplomats, an Old World audience of the wellborn who once ruled Russia very well, thank you, without any help from peasants, clerks, workers, Jews, and revolutionaries, Niki did not want to push through the curtain of the imperial box with his crippled son cradled in the arms of a Cossack from the Konvoi regiment. It was not my brother this time, but Sergei who brought me Niki’s latest proposition.
Niki wanted Vova to wear Alexei’s red dress tunic of the Preobrazhensky Guards that night and join them in the imperial box. I could see in Sergei’s face that this excited him—a great prank like the ones the Potato Club used to play, but he had not been to Spala to see how this prank was prelude to an abduction. Sergei thought we had gone to Poland so Vova could hunt with Josef, not so my son could be hunted. And so Sergei endeavored to persuade me. I would already be at the theater, Sergei said, and so it would be easy enough to bring Vova with me. Sergei would come visit in my dressing room as he often did and he would bring me Alexei’s uniform. The imperial carriage would roll to a stop at my dressing room window to fetch Vova. Let him be tsarevich for a night, Sergei said, and I think he was bewitched by the picture of the young, illegitimate boy he adored being adored by the court that had so far shunned him. But Sergei could see my reluctance, and so he endeavored to trump it by reproaching me. Mala, Niki needs our help.
And so I asked Vova, How would you like to play a part at the theater tonight?, knowing, of course, that he would be mad to do it—he had not yet given up his dream of becoming a future Honored Artist of the Imperial Theaters. He had announced recently that he would rather be an actor than a dancer, after all, and he had taken to dressing up to perform skits in what he could find of Sergei’s things—gloves, a cap, and once his boots, or in costumes we bought him, such as a Cossack’s tunic and cuirassier or his fireman’s uniform with its Teutonic helmet, which he wore otherwise while manning his miniature water truck, driving it about the grounds of the dacha. When I said, Would you like this?, Vova began to jump up and down at the prospect of performing.
What will I play? he asked me. A peasant boy, a fairy page, a puppet? He had seen my ballets. He knew all the children’s roles.
No, I said. A very special part. The tsarevich. The tsar’s son is sick again and can’t be with his father and mother in their box tonight. You will go there with them. Can you pretend to be very noble, the heir to the throne?
And my son said, Yes, yes, too quickly, and he raised his chin and looked about the room in a very good approximation of a nobleman surveying his estate.
Very good, I said. Very good, my little tsarevich.
That night I arrived at the theater my usual two hours before curtain and had my dresser sew me into my costume a bit earlier so she would be gone long before Sergei’s arrival with my son’s costume. Only when Vova asked, Why are you so nervous, Mama? did I realize I was compulsively tracing the patterns of the white flowers against the blue of my dressing room’s cretonne-covered walls.
When Sergei arrived, I hissed, This is ridiculous. Everyone will know he’s not the tsarevich.
And Vova interrupted me, Mama, I want my costume.
Sergei said, Mala, stop worrying, and to Vova, I’ve never known your mother to have such stage fright! and with a big wolf’s grin he opened up his greatcoat to reveal the little uniform hidden inside, the heir’s uniform of the Life Guards, a miniature of Niki’s uniform, the red breeches and the red tunic with its golden epaulettes, each button embossed with the imperial eagle, and the collar embroidered with the monogram H II, a monogram only the heir to the throne was permitted to wear. At the sight of all this, Vova let out a whoop and began to dance, he was ten and still childish from all my cosseting of him, and Sergei and I, playing his dressers, had to practically stuff him into the trousers, Sergei lifting him up off the ground and I holding open the breeches for him to be lowered into. Hold still, I told him, as I buttoned him into his shirt and tunic, Sergei laughing at Vova’s glee, my movements awkward from nerves. My son was small for his age and Alexei tall for eight and this meant that the uniform fit almost perfectly, and with his two hands Sergei smoothed Vova’s hair. Look, he said to me. Is this not the picture of the little tsarevich? More than a picture, I thought, and then we heard a carriage approaching, the bells on the horses’ bridles jingling, and the carriage paused on the private driveway right outside the low windows of my dressing room, and that was the only sound, the police at the tsar’s behest having stopped the theater-going court traffic at both ends. Sergei looked out the glass and said, It’s Niki, and to Vova, Are you ready?, and when my son nodded vigorously, Da, da, Sergei opened the window, gave Vova a quick boost, and my son was a shadow slipped over the freezing windowsill and into the envelope of that carriage to ride the rest of the way up the drive to the private imperial entrance. There he would disembark with Nicholas and Alexandra and walk through the marble foyer and up the steps, along the carpeted corridor lined with gilded chairs and into the imperial anteroom, the walls of it a light blue, and from there through a velvet curtain, as if they themselves were entering a stage, and into the imperial box itself.