The entire audience stood at the family’s entrance and the national anthem was played, and by that time, of course, I had run out onto the stage to look through the peephole in the curtain. I believe I had to elbow someone out of the way. The three tiers of the boxes and all of the stalls seemed reddened by the color of all the scarlet tunics of all the uniforms worn by all the officers in attendance, that red punctuated in two spots by the greens, blues, and golds of the national costumes of the emir of Bokhara and the khan of Khiva and their retinues. My son stood proudly between Niki and Alix in his scarlet-and-gold uniform, looking down at the crowd from the imperial box with the exact aplomb he had shown when practicing his role at home. I had always thought Vova showed little talent for the theater, but it looked as if I had been his Teliakovsky, thwarting him, holding him back, for clearly Vova was enjoying this moment, even, at one point, raising one hand to execute a very good semblance of a noble wave. So, he was a Kschessinsky as much as he was a Romanov.
That night we performed A Life for the Tsar, which tells the story of the boy Mikhail Romanov, the first tsar of the dynasty, protected from assassination by the peasant hero Ivan Susanin. Mikhail was sixteen years old and the grand nephew of Ivan the Terrible’s wife, close enough, when the council of boyare decided in 1612 to offer him the throne. Ivan had died in 1584, the first to call himself tsar, from the Latin word caesar, and the last ruler of the Rurik dynasty that had controlled Russia for six hundred years. After his death, Russia stumbled this way and that until the council reached out for someone related, however tenuously, to Ivan. In the winter of 1612, the Poles had invaded Russia, intent on taking advantage of her during its time of troubles—ah, we have a long, tangled history, the Poles and the Rus—and intent on murdering Mikhail on the eve of his coronation, which managed to take place, thanks to the peasant Susanin, in the Ipatiev monastery where Mikhail had been hidden. No wonder his mother trembled as her son was crowned, listening for the men coming to murder him, her boy who had just last month lived quietly with her in a Volga River village. Susanin only pretended to lead the Polish regiment to the boy, and instead took them into a snowy mountainous impasse. For his trouble, Susanin paid with his life and Poland with partition, but Russia was given a new, stable dynasty, the Romanov dynasty of three hundred years.
I trembled in the wings, like Mikhail’s mother, at this turn in my child’s life, but luckily I did not have to enter the stage until Act II, at the ball at the palace of a Polish nobleman where the ensemble performs several Polish dances—a polonaise, the krakowiak, a waltz, a mazurka—and while dancing this last, the gentry’s mazurka my father had taught me, it seemed over the shoulder of one capped dancer and then another I saw my father’s face. Mathilde-Maria, what are you doing? Over the shoulders of another, I noted how often the court looked up at the imperial box. Vova was now seated slightly behind Niki and Alix, the dowager empress, and Niki’s sisters and their husbands, but Niki’s brother Mikhail was notably absent. He had eloped with a divorcée and been exiled just like Andrei’s brother Kyril. In the grand ducal loges, Sergei sat beaming with his brothers and Andrei, bland-faced, completely ignorant of what was at hand, sat in his box with his brother Boris and with Miechen, now widowed, but no less rapacious, perhaps more so! The formidable Miechen had taken over her husband’s position as minister of the arts, most unusual for a woman, but other ambitions, more traditional ones, had been thwarted—she had not managed entirely to unhook Andrei from me, she had not married her daughter off to a king but to Prince Nicholas of Greece, her suit to have Boris betrothed to Niki’s daughter Olga had been rebuffed, Alix sniffing that she would not think to match a fresh young girl with Boris, so much older and in and out of so many beds, and Boris settled instead for a mistress. And though Miechen had quickly and expediently converted to Orthodoxy after the tsarevich’s near-fatal illness and Mikhail’s exile, her own son Kyril’s unfortunate marriage might prevent him as well from ever being tsar. And Miechen did not even know the other obstacle that stood in his way to the throne—the one sitting in a velvet-cushioned chair behind Niki in the imperial box. Just let her try to tip my son from that chair! But it wasn’t until I finished the mazurka and took my bow first to the imperial box, then to the grand ducal boxes, and finally to the house at large, that I even noted the grim face of the empress, another of the ambitious mothers here and one miserable despite her finery—the white velvet gown, the blue diagonal ribbon of the Order of St. Andrei, the diamond tiara, the white fan made of eagle feathers. She stood up at my bow, face covered in blotches, and removed herself to the back of the imperial box, where no one could see her and where she remained for the rest of the performance of the opera. One could hear the audience practically hiss its disapproval as the empress withdrew—and these mouths and tongues belonged not to the peasants, not to the students, not to the revolutionaries, not to the members of the Duma, but to the court. Niki kept his face impassive, but he heard the sound.
I am certain this is why he then gestured for my son to move to the front of the box to take the seat left vacant by the empress, and the audience made another noise then, one that sounded like a caress, that wrapped itself around the pretty boy who looked so happy, whose father smiled at him so fondly. From the modest distance of the stage, I could see Niki’s pleasure at the murmur of approval emitted by the audience. And when, at the end of Act IV, after the coda that marks the opera’s finale, the great bass Sobinov who had played the role of the hero, Ivan Susanin, walked to the proscenium in his long robe and his horsehair beard, dropped to his knees, raised his arms to Niki and Vova, and began to sing an impromptu “God Save the Tsar.” He had once sung a lullaby to my son in his cradle—did Sobinov recognize him now? His voice filled the theater, at first a capella until the orchestra, stumbling a bit in its surprise, followed his lead and picked up their instruments. One by one we artists of the Imperial Theaters knelt alongside Sobinov and the audience, in a great wave, stood. At this Niki stood, as well, and at his signal my son rose beside him. Niki looked down at us all, silent, head bowed. My son, in imitation, did the same, and there was no doubt it had been this, the sight of the emperor with his young heir, that had prompted Sobinov’s homage.
The son of a tsar belongs to his country, not to his mother. And Russia, or at least the Russia inside this theater, still loved its tsar, this tsar, and it also loved and needed his son, perhaps this son, should it come to that. And if and when the time came, Alix would agree to it, had, even tonight, reluctantly, unhappily agreed to it. For the alternative to my son as imposter was for the line to pass crookedly to Niki’s brother, whom Alix hated, or to Kyril, whom she hated even more, or, if the imperial council negated those successions, to the tall, tsar-sized commander of the army, Nikolasha, whom she had hated since 1905, ever since he had told Niki if he did not install the Duma he would shoot himself on the spot rather than be charged with imposing martial law. Yes, she hated and feared them all, all the men of the imperial family—and, yes, she would take my son because he was Niki’s and because a tsar without an heir is a weakened tsar. But what kind of mother was I, to send my child away, a sack of clothes in his hands, a note pinned to his shirt, Take my son. What kind of mother? The mother of a tsar. This opera was my object lesson, after all, with Mikhail Romanov’s mother reluctantly submitting her son to his fate. Whenever I met Niki he wanted to take something from me, though when I was younger I thought I was taking something from him. But one never takes from the tsar, one always gives, and that my father saw—I was giving the tsar my life. After all, the opera is A Life for the Tsar, not The Tsar’s Life for His Subject.