In Petersburg I told everyone only that I had left my son at Stavka with Sergei.
On January 1, Niki returned to the capital and, as he promised me, he began to rid the capital of his enemies to make it and the throne safe for our sons. He had consulted the ghost of his father and the ghost had given his blessing. Prince Dimitri Pavlovich was exiled to Persia. Grand Duke Nikolasha, who was already in Tiflis, having been sent there after his demotion from commander in chief of the army to commander of the regiments in the Caucasus, was ordered to remain there indefinitely. Prince Felix Yusupov, in his gray soldier’s coat and under guard, was sent to his estate in the Kurskaya province in central Russia. Sergei’s brother Nicholas was dispatched to Grushevka, his country estate in the Ukraine. The Vladimirichi were ordered to depart Peter, and Miechen, Andrei—with the swiftest of goodbyes to me—and eventually Boris went to the Caucasus, to Kislovodsk, with the face-saving excuse that they were taking the cure at a spa, and the Vladimir Palace and the von Dervis mansion stood abruptly empty. Andrei came to say goodbye to me on Kronversky Prospekt, and I blessed him with my father’s icon of Our Lady of Czestokowa while he knelt, though he was not going off to war but to a place untouched by it where his safety could be assured and, frankly, I was happy to see him go. He was no longer an amusement and his treachery endangered my son—my ambitions for my son. Kyril, as a Navy commander, was ordered to Port Romanov on the Arctic Circle far, far from the capital and perhaps there, with any luck, he would freeze to death. After the war, Niki planned to turn his attention to his ministers of the State Council and to the members of the lower house of the Duma—to rid both of the incompetence that was crippling the country, but to reorganize the government now, he felt, in the middle of a war, could be disastrous. First, Russia must prevail over Germany.
The Christmas and New Year’s holidays had fattened the country’s spirits, and the weather had taken care of the rest, turning so cold, at fifteen degrees below zero, that the streets had emptied of troublemakers. It was so cold, in fact, that no supplies could make it either into the capital or out of it, for blizzards kept the trains frozen on their tracks and there was no one to sweep the snow as so many men had been conscripted. The bakeries were forced to stop making bread because the flour and sugar could not be moved from their warehouses and silos, and the big, fine pastries disappeared from the shops, followed by biscuits, buns, cakes, and finally humble loaves of bread. Women began queuing up in long lines for anything available. And there was trouble transporting coal, as well, and what there was of Peter’s wooden fences began to vanish as people tore them down to burn them in their stoves. But on the tsar’s orders, four trucks managed to unload coal at my Petersburg mansion, and the sight proved so novel that a crowd gathered, despite the temperature, just to stare at it. As I’ve said, my neighborhood stood far from the factories that harbored the strikers, and my house stood far from the tenements in which they lived, and so this crowd was a titled one, but no less hostile for that, the men slapping their gloved hands together, fur hats pulled down low on their heads, making remarks. I opened the door to Vova’s balcony just a crack; it overlooked Kronversky Prospekt, and I heard the French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue—a busybody who kept a diary of events large and ridiculously small (the tsar’s ministerial appointments noted alongside the chinchilla coat and gray taffeta dress worn by Niki’s brother’s beautiful new wife, Paléologue noted even her superb pearls!)—yes, Paléologue was declaiming loudly, It seems we haven’t the same claim as Madame Kschessinska to the attentions of the imperial authorities. To which I thought, Of course you haven’t, you fumisterie. You are not the mother of the tsare vich! But I said nothing and shut the door, for the phone was ringing with my weekly call from Vova.
The calls always began the same way, with a palace servant announcing, You are receiving a telephone call from the imperial apartments of His Majesty the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, and then my son would be on the line to chatter about the events of the past week—he was learning English with Alexei’s tutor Mr. Gibbes, he had sledded down a big ice hill and beat the girls, both the Big Pair and the Little Pair, for supper they had had suckling pig with horse-radish, and when would I be coming to visit, as the emperor had said it would be soon, and I agreed that, yes, it would be soon, at the beginning of March. After those calls, I would dress and go to the theater.
Even at forty-four I was still dancing, though not as often, and I remember exactly my last performance, though, of course, I did not know it was to be my last. With Mikhail Fokine, I performed an excerpt from Carnaval. Poor Fokine. The war had tied him to the Imperial Theaters, where Diaghilev had no sway, and so Fokine had had to shuffle his way reluctantly back to partner me if he wanted to appear on the Maryinsky stage. When this ballet had its premiere in 1910 at the Pavlov Hall, Nicholas and Alexandra both were there to witness it, but now we performed it as part of a benefit for a war charity. The sets for this ballet were arranged in such a way and with such perspective as to make it seem the dancers were miniature beings and the audience were peering into a velvet maquette to watch us cavort. Usually, in this little hatbox of a ballroom, the characters slipped magically in and out of the folds in the blue curtains, but that night, it being a benefit for one of Alix’s charities for wounded soldiers, Fokine and I performed only the duets and solos from the ballet, Fokine in his harlequinade costume and mask, I, his love, Columbine, in my many-layered ruffled dress with the puffed sleeves. We danced that bit of commedia dell’arte set to Schumann, and in it we exemplified the silliness and light of the form, the light in here against the dark of the war outside and the dark frozen mood of the people. Fokine moved to the flute and clarinet, and I to the strings, and yet beneath the frolic the music etched a dark line. I found myself unexpectedly weeping by the end of the ballet, when Harlequin brings his pirouettes to a finish by abruptly sitting on his bottom. Fokine’s face, behind his mask, looked up at me quizzically. He was younger than I and he belonged to a different age. When the war was over, he would go abroad. But there was only one stage for me, one world for me—this one. And it was just twenty days before the revolution that would destroy it.
For a short time, though, it had seemed this world would last. The British ambassador, George Buchanan, took his usual vacation to Finland. Princess Radziwill hosted a great soiree at her palace on the Fontanka Canal, the light from her windows flickering across the water in all directions and illuminating Boris Vladimirich’s car among the cars and carriages lined up outside. At M. Paléologue’s dinner party at the French embassy, the guests discussed whether the palm for excellence should go to Pavlova, Karsavina, or me. And Niki decided to return for three weeks to Stavka, and Alix and his ministers could not dissuade him. The night he left, I received an unscheduled call from the imperial apartments of the tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich. On the phone, Vova told me he was feeling ill, that Olga and then Alexei had come down with a headache and a high fever and the doctor had diagnosed measles and had put even Vova now to bed. Mama, I want you, Vova cried, his voice as thin as a five-year-old’s, and when I hung up the phone, I pictured him hot with fever in some closet, abandoned while Alix rushed to and fro tending to her own children with the same fervor she had shown when nursing Niki through typhus. If only Niki had not gone back to Stavka so soon! When he was at Tsarskoye I knew he would look after Vova, but how could I trust that Alix would even take notice of him? And so I began to pack a small valise and telegraphed Sergei at Stavka that I would take the train the nine versts to Tsarskoye Selo to nurse Vova myself. When Sergei reported to Niki my intentions, Niki said no, that I must trust the imperial doctors and their ministrations, for who practiced better medicine than these men? Vova was in good hands. But when I insisted, reminding Niki that my promised visit had been postponed by his departure to Stavka, he relented, so long as my visit was made by night and of a few hours’ duration. He would tell Alix to expect me. And I must use the servants’ entrance, soberly dressed, so that my visit would not be an official one, and would not be noted by the adjutant in the leather-bound appointment book, though, of course, I would still be observed by the secret police.