Encore (42 page)

His horse suddenly stiffened, and Boris turned back in his saddle, curious. A black mass was moving toward them, and all at once his muscles tensed and his entire body became poised for action. He cried: “Lev, look—over your shoulder, there—Do you think they're Turks?”

Grodin stopped, and the enlisted men did likewise on the other side of Boris. The tall sergeant began to shout orders. The intruders raised their rifles; shots rang out. Boris felt an exhilaration that drove all the anguish of Arkady's death from his body and mind, an exhilaration that was more elating than anything he'd experienced in his forty years. Youth flowed into him, and intense virility. Next to him, firing on the approaching mass, Grodin had thrown back his head and was laughing, his face flushed. “Turks?” Boris called to him.

“No. We'd have seen them, Major. These must be Cossacks—guerilla fighters. But if we don't kill them, they'll slaughter us. There must be a villageful, and we're only sixteen men!”

Briefly Boris felt disappointment, but Baranov had warned him of these Cossacks. Now
they
were the enemy. Boris turned for a split second to address Grodin, when he saw the sergeant open his mouth and fall forward in his saddle, clutching his stomach from which red liquid was spurting. Boris's throat went dry. He swerved to the right and saw that the men had witnessed Grodin's fall and that panic was spreading through the line. “Forward!” he cried, not certain of the validity of his order, but knowing that only by propelling them onward at this very moment could he possibly prevent chaos from taking over. The young corporal, Bogdanian, looked at him in surprise, then raised his arm and spurred his mount toward the Cossacks. Boris followed suit.

In the mêlée that ensued, Boris saw the angry men throw themselves into the fray, shooting the guerillas with fierce resolution. Only one young soldier fell from his horse. Boris held the reins of his stallion in one hand and was preparing to reload his rifle, when something grazed his temple and he wheeled about, bewildered. His eyes were seeing double images of horses and Cossacks and his own men, firing. The sky was tinged with gold from the setting sun. A blinding pain made his eyes water, and he touched the side of his face. When he looked at his fingers, there was blood on them.

“Major, are you hit?” Bogdanian called, his voice sounding far off, as if from a dreamland. Boris supposed he was wounded. His body was collapsing because he could feel himself falling from his horse, and the fall took forever, like a ballerina's movement in slow motion. He must have hit the ground because his blurred vision was jarred. He could see hooves and boots and the red-brown earth. But where was Natalia?

Now there was cotton in his head, wads of it in his mouth and ears. “Natalia?” he said. “Natalia?” A face with dark eyes bent over him, and he said: “Pierre?” Then he couldn't see at all, and he supposed they'd gone into the baby's room, to fetch Arkady. He smiled: Arkady, his son. And then the sky disappeared behind his horse.

It was chilly when Natalia entered the lobby of the Metropole. She had spent a wearing day at the hospital, and her calves ached from standing. Her muscular frame could support physical hardship, but, as a dancer, she had been accustomed to regulated periods of rest. Now there was dull, endless toil without respite. No rest and no glory and no joy, only wrecked human bodies and her own exhaustion. She wanted to throw herself on her bed and forget dinner. Who could eat after seeing what she had seen?

The desk clerk stopped her on her way to the elevator. “Letter.” He held an envelope out to her, and she went to pick it up. She was too tired to see whether it came from Boris. She wondered if her marriage would ever be the same after the war, if the resentment would ever fade. She did not allow herself to consider Arkady, and the fact that she would have to face her husband's grief, making her own resurface. Accepting, she knew, would be the hardest adjustment of all.

She unlocked her bedroom door. The soft lights had been turned on by the floor chambermaid, and the bed lay invitingly open, welcoming her. She unhooked her cape, removed her skirt and blouse, and tossed off her hat. Her bathrobe lay on the bed, and she slipped it over her tired limbs. I need to practice longer on my basics, she thought with irritation: Her muscle tone was disappointing these days. She was twenty-five and no longer in perfect form: She hated to see her hard-won muscular control slip away.

Only then did she look at the envelope. It had come from the Caucasus, and on the back, in a strange hand, was the name of the sender: General Anton Alexandrovitch Baranov. Boris had written to her about this man, one of the leaders of the Division Sauvage. All at once she knew what his message contained.

Natalia felt very cold. She rang for room service, then lay down on her bed, facing its foot. Two medium-sized, “modern” cubes adorned either side, like two pedestals guarding the bed. Natalia had always hated that footboard with the ungainly flat cubes. They were a stupid decorating notion that Boris would have laughed it. Boris. She felt her throat begin to beat, and waited. Presently the maid knocked, and entered. Natalia said: “Bring me a bottle of Napoleon cognac and a snifter.”

The maid curtsied, then hovered near the threshold of the room. “That's all,” Natalia said calmly. The young Swiss girl quickly exited, somewhat startled. What an odd request from the Russian lady!

Only when a busboy came in with a tray did Natalia look up. “Put it there,” she said, indicating one of the cube tops to the right of her. It would make a perfect little table. The boy did as he was told and went out, closing the door behind him noiselessly. Now Natalia was alone.

With steady fingers, she poured herself a snifterful of brandy and unsealed the envelope. Baranov's decisive handwriting stared at her, and she perused it thoroughly. He was attempting to make the news more bearable by telling her about her husband's courage, about his heroic leadership that had lived up to the “traditions of the Division Sauvage.” So. Fine traditions. And I am to be healed by reminding myself that my dead husband was true to these fine traditions?

She sipped the golden liquid and felt it coursing down her throat into her stomach. He'd always suffered from burning in his stomach but had never kept to a diet. She waited, but nothing came—no tears, no wild eruption of her body, no uncontrolled shaking. She reread the letter and poured another glass of Napoleon. Napoleon—another bloody fool for whom other fools had died. Fools such as Boris.

All at once cold anger began to tremble within her. He had lived up to the traditions of the Division Sauvage! What a joke! He hadn't lived at all. You may be fooled, General Baranov, but I'm not, she thought. Boris is, as Pierre says, a manipulator, and he's manipulated me once again and changed my life by his actions. That's right—he's dead and I'm still alive, and our son is dead too. He's won even in this. And I'm supposed to accept this victory, and not fight back? Oh, God, how
can
I fight back, what can I do? I have to win this one away from you, I can't just let you die and laugh at me from your grave. But maybe you don't even have a grave. Those rebel Cossacks who killed you surely didn't bury you. They didn't know about you, about your mystique and your charm and your ironic mind. They thought you were only a man, an undistinguished major accompanying his squad. The idiots! They failed to recognize the great Boris Kussov, before whom all men trembled—and all women. Isn't that the greatest irony of all, my darling? Carry that wherever you are, my own true love. You can't win with everyone.

She was beginning to feel tipsy, but she treated herself to a fourth glass of brandy and raised it to the empty room. “To your health, my dear husband.” It was ludicrous, ludicrous. I have never hated anyone so much as I hate him, for doing this to me, she thought. And now if there's a place where dead men go, he's found Arkady,
my
son,
my
child, part of
my
body. I'm glad you're dead, Boris Kussov, because it saves my having to leave you upon your return. Though I always knew you'd never come back. I knew it that night in Zwingenberg, when you told me of your absurd decision. You made a fool of me even then! You've always made a fool of me. Even when you said you wanted a child, you were making a fool of me. You who knew everything, didn't you have any idea he'd die, too?

Goddamned Boris Kussov, she thought, pulling the bedspread over her. And goddamned Natalia Kussova. God has damned us all. And then, starting to sob, she thought: But I'd forgotten, there is no God! We have damned ourselves.

P
ierre held
Diaghilev's letter to the light and took a deep breath. In Viareggio the Russian impresario had learned of Boris's death and wondered whether Pierre had seen Natalia. The war had separated the various members of the Ballets Russes from one another; it had caught Serge Pavlovitch and his new
¦ premier danseur
and favorite, Leonid Miassin, in Italy. Pierre wondered exactly how much Diaghilev knew—or had inferred—of his relationship to both the Kussovs.

Pierre had renewed his acquaintance with Stravinsky, who lived in Morges, near Lausanne. Through the composer he had learned that Diaghilev had signed a contract with the Metropolitan Opera in New York to appear there next year, in April 1916. “Karsavina's in Russia; he'll have to get Natalia and find some way of enticing Nijinsky for the North American season,” Stravinsky had told Pierre. “The New World wants to see the main attractions of the old Ballets Russes.” But Pierre had known that Natalia was tied to her sick baby and that Nijinsky and his wife and small daughter had been caught in Hungary when war was declared and were now interned in house arrest at the home of her mother, Emilia Markus.

Later, when Arkady had died, Pierre had written to Stravinsky, asking the composer and his family to call on Natalia. But she had refused to see him. I'm not going to her, Pierre had thought fiercely. If she needs me, let her send for me.

He had met a young woman from Locarno, Fabiana d'Arpezzo, and had moved her into his rented house overlooking the Lago Maggiore. Fabiana was dark, laughing, and compliant, a good model and a fine cook. I don't need Natalia, or her problems, he had said to himself. Life is sweet this way. I'm not expected to love, and I'm not looked upon as a commodity. I can devote my energies to painting, and Fabriana does not wreak havoc on my nerves or make demands of my very soul. I am free of her at last, free of Natalia.

Then Medveyev had shattered his peace by announcing in a letter that Boris had been killed in the Caucasus. An inexplicable tightness had gripped Pierre's throat and brought the taste of salt to his mouth. Somewhere at the back of his life there had always been Boris. Now there was emptiness and the certainty of never encountering him again, of having no one left to hate, no force against which to battle. Boris Kussov has been my albatross, Pierre thought, and he has been my Satan. But while he was my mentor, I escaped mediocrity, and since then my potential has never been fulfilled.

She will have to make the first move, he had also thought. She's lost her husband and her son, but why should that matter to me? She loved him. It's time I faced reality: Natalia's love for me was the quick infatuation of a schoolgirl. The woman Natalia wanted another man because I had become commonplace. I don't want to win her by default because he is dead and she is distraught. I shall stay away.

Now Diaghilev was asking him questions. Evidently, Pierre concluded, he had written to her and not received an answer. Stravinsky had made another attempt to see her and had reported to Pierre that for a while she had remained closeted in her hotel, receiving no visitors. Then she had resumed her work as a nurse and had sent him a brief note: “Igor Feodorovitch, I am touched that you wished to see me. But right now I cannot face old friends. Please do not begrudge me my seclusion.” Pierre chewed on his lower lip. It was so difficult to understand things from a distance. But he was afraid to come closer, afraid to confront what she had become and too proud to overcome his fear.

There is nothing to cling to, Natalia thought. There is no core to Natalia Oblonova. The Countess Kussova was a dream, a fairy tale, and getting married was the greatest mistake of my life. Anger once again paralyzed her emotions. She had been angry since reading Baranov's letter, angry that the little Crimean waif had allowed herself to become vulnerable. Boris had seized on each person's vulnerability, had twisted and turned others' lives into cruel parodies of existence, and she, fool that she was, had allowed him to do this to her own life.

Damn you, damn you, I won't mourn you! she thought for the hundredth time as she arrived at the train station for duty. Station duty provided a means of escape; she always returned to the hotel too exhausted to think. Now she squeezed her eyelids tightly shut, holding back the agony that had to be anesthetized each day anew. Why couldn't you have stayed out of my life, Boris Kussov? Why did you have to help me make a baby? Why did you ever love me?

“The trains are late tonight,” Louise Dondel said, her teeth chattering. It was March and the nights were still frosty. The young Swiss girl looked at Natalia and was startled. Natalia's face beneath the hood of her thick cape appeared white and stark and totally devoid of emotion. Louise bit her lip, shocked. She liked the Russian woman but found her increasingly strange, since her husband's death. She should have expressed her tragedy, wept, and broken down, but instead she came faithfully, night after night, but with that cold, expressionless face, that alabaster remoteness that discouraged all sympathy. How could she help a woman like Natalia? Or perhaps she had never cared for her husband and now had no reason to grieve.

The first evening, after Louise had learned of the count's demise, she had said to Natalia: “I am so sorry. I have never been married—” She would have continued to explain why words were failing her, but the other had turned to her with an intense light in her brown eyes and whispered:

“Neither have I. We are born alone and we die alone, and in between we do what we can to prevent pain. Let's never discuss this, Louise.”

She had looked, Louise Dondel thought, as if she had actually hated her husband and believed that he had deserved to die in combat.

This March night the trains eventually arrived. The women waited in chilled silence on the platform, then tended the wounded and administered care, coffee, and medicines. Louise lost track of her Russian companion. When the whistles resounded as wails in the black, frosty air, Louise hastened toward the warmth of her waiting car. Natalia, she thought, had probably accepted a ride from another volunteer. Louise went home.

At the first whistle Natalia had found herself still mopping the brow of a very young Prussian lad whose left leg had been amputated. She'd nearly had to force the coffee down his throat to revive him. But she did not allow his pain, his wracked, limbless body to register on her emotions. Competently she wiped the perspiration from his brow. When he relaxed, she set his head down on the bunk and made her way out of the train. She stepped from the ladder seconds before the last whistle emitted its shrill elegy. The other nurses were already leaving the platform.

Natalia was lost in thought and hardly noticed the piercing cold that surrounded her. The young soldier had finally ceased to writhe, had calmed down. His other leg had stopped twitching. They said that missing limbs often felt more acutely painful than wounds on the living flesh. She had accomplished something, getting him to lay his head down peacefully. Now she would be able to sleep, too. No one had done that for Boris.

She froze and could not walk: No one had done that for Boris! The horror penetrated like a searing blade slashing through her, and she bent over, sickened. Now she knew why she continued to come here, night after endless night: to prevent another man from dying alone. Natalia shook the thought from her but could not remove the bitter intensity of her pain. I am atoning for letting him leave, for letting him die alone, she thought. She could picture herself spending the rest of her life plodding to the Geneva train station to mop fevered brows, to whisper words of encouragement to total strangers in the middle of the night. Hers would be an endless expiation.

Natalia's eyes filled with tears, and she missed a step. She felt herself slipping into a puddle, felt the clammy cold of the sloshy water on the platform. But she could not rise. Utter exhaustion had come over her, enveloping her reflexes in a narcotic stupor. She thought: This too is death. Borya died alone and now I am paying for it. Her head lolled back and hit the pavement as she fainted.

Pierre sat in the wing chair by the bed and watched the little heart-shaped face delineated against a mound of white pillows. She is the love of my heart, he thought, and felt a rush of anger at his own weakness. She breathed with difficulty. The feather-soft brown hair formed a halo around her pale features, suggesting to him her sudden vulnerability.

She stirred, and her eyes fluttered open like tentative butterflies poised over honeysuckle. “Natalia,” he said. He moved his chair closer to the bed and took the small hand that lay on the coverlet, its palm perspiring. “You slept a long time.”

She turned her face to him, her eyes wide and surprised. “You?” she whispered. She was too weak to speak up and too limp to sit. “Who let you in?”

He smiled. “The nurse. She needed some time off. I took over, if you will. Do you mind?”

She shook her head. “I don't care, Pierre. But don't feel sorry for me. It doesn't matter anymore.” She swept the room with her eyes, then looked at Pierre again, insistently. “Who told you?” she asked.

He shrugged lightly and smiled. “Stravinsky. You probably don't even remember that he came to see you while you were in the hospital. You were at your worst then, after they found you frozen to the pavement of the train station in a pool of ice. You were lucky to have escaped with pneumonia.”

“Incredibly lucky,” she said ironically. Shiny dots of fever marked her prominent cheekbones, and on the coverlet her hand trembled, its blue veins marbling the white skin. Suddenly, her face contorted with anguish, and tears streamed from her eyes. “I wish you would let me die,” she whispered.

He turned away, overcome by what he had seen. Regaining control with effort, he said, “I didn't come to let you sink into abject self-pity, Natalia. I know what that's like: It's death-in-life, and I've succumbed to it more than once myself. I didn't make the journey to come to a funeral, either.”

“Well, why did you come?” Her pupils had enlarged, and in her glowing, excited face they shone strangely. Suddenly she said, in small gasps: “Show me what it is to live, Pierre! You used to love me!” She was trying to sit up, her lips parted, her breath rasping. The cover fell from her armpits to her waist, revealing her nightgown open to her cleavage, which had never been deep but which, to Pierre, was riveting now. The beginning of her two firm apple breasts stared at him, glistening with moistness. She did nothing to hide them.

He stood up and began to pace the room. At length he stopped in front of her, and placed his hands on her shoulders as if leaning on her for support. She raised her hands to his, looking at him through her shining eyes. “It wouldn't work, Natalia,” he said finally. “I'm not a substitute. A man has to be loved for himself alone—at least, this one does.”

They stared silently at each other. Then Pierre said: “Diaghilev is planning to come to Lausanne with Miassin, to set up a new committee. For the North American season next year. He needs you, Natalia.”

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “Thank you,” she said and pressed his hands with her own.

In the fall of 1915 Natalia received Serge Diaghilev in her suite at the Hotel Metropole. After the chambermaid wheeled in a tray of teacakes, Natalia herself, Russian fashion, poured him the scented brown infusion into a cup of the most delicate Meissen porcelain. He smiled beneath his thin mustache. “Tea in a cup—it seems barbaric, does it not, my dear?” he remarked.

“I have lost touch with Russia, Serge Pavlovitch. Somehow I do not care anymore. Lydia, Katya—they are friends of the past. My life no longer touches theirs, and I have no desire to reintegrate the country of my birth.”

“And I? Am I another ‘friend of the past'?”

“In two years a lifetime can go by,” she said, and then, hearing her own words, she turned aside and bit her lower lip.

“Indeed. Natalia—you must realize how much I miss him, too. We weren't always on the same side, but we were always friends—ever since I first arrived in Petersburg, at eighteen, and he, at sixteen, was still at the May gymnasium. Not even Serov's death affected me so deeply.”

“It does no good to talk about it,” Natalia said sharply. She breathed quickly in and out and looked at Diaghilev. “I didn't mean to be rude to you, Serge Pavlovitch. But I don't want to hurt anymore. I have nothing left of him except material things—possessions—and so I'm going to pick up from 1908, when I was alone with my talent and my ambition. This may sound hard to you, but I've always been a hard woman. I don't wish to relive my experience of him.”

Her clear brown eyes were fastened on him with an intensity that belied the coldness of her words. He could not meet her gaze and examined his finely manicured nails instead. “Natalia—I am reassembling the Ballets Russes,” he said. “The war nearly broke us totally. The company won't have many of the same people, as you can fathom. I have Miassin; he could become as great a choreographer as Fokine when properly launched. He doesn't dance like our previous male star, but in his own way he parallels Nijinsky. I have excellent artists, a young Russian couple, Gontcharova and Larionov. They've worked for me before, but now they've given us a new perspective. I also hope to rekindle the interest of Pierre Riazhin. Will you join us?”

Color rose to her checks, which were still wan from her illness. “I want nothing else,” she answered simply. She smiled. “And Pierre—I'm certain he'll be enthusiastic. He hasn't done anything these past years to equal the work he did for the Ballets Russes, and before that, for the Paris Exhibition.”

Raising his brows, Diaghilev said: “Very true. He had an inspiration then—the Sugar Plum Fairy. But I had nothing against the young man—I believe it was Boris who dropped him from the committee.”