Encore (62 page)

“It's fun up here!” Tamara cried. She threw her fur cap down in triumph, and a twig caught it, balancing it precariously. Galina shivered inside her coat and drew it more closely around her. “Come back down!” she shouted.

Then, all at once, she heard a piercing shriek: “GALINA!” and saw Tamara flailing her arms wildly, her body toppling backward, the branch cracking in the bleak light. “Grab the next one!” Galina cried, but Tamara could not hear her, she was falling, her voice one long wail of terror. Her foot caught on a limb, her hand seized a dead two-inch outgrowth, and it snapped off, falling to the ground at Galina's feet. The red coat appeared among the green pine branches and the white snow, and Tamara was tossed down like a bird catapulted from its nest, crimson like a cardinal.

Galina began to scream, slipped on the ice and remained there, unable to move. Tamara's horrible cries had stopped now, and someone was holding Galina, trying to raise her from the frozen patch of grass and mud. Somebody else had run to the back of the tree, was kneeling down.

“Pierre! Pierre!” Galina cried, and only then did tears start to form in the corners of her eyes, wide with shock.

E
ven before she
opened the telegram, Natalia knew that it would mean a loss, still another loss, another calamity. She stood in the large rehearsal room of the Salle Gamier in the Monte Carlo Opera House, in leg warmers and a long-sleeved leotard, and set down her I baton to tear open the envelope. Around her the dancers scattered to the walls, feeling the tension, the scent of disaster.

At the last moment before reading it, she turned to Serge Diaghilev who stood behind her, and, her back gracefully erect, she handed the paper to him. As if from a far distance, she saw him approach the
chef d'orchestre,
who was standing by the piano, and speak to him
sotto voce.
He caught her looking at him and averted his eyes in sudden discomfort.

Naked dread filled her then. Outside it was lightly snowing, but the Riviera scents assailed her nevertheless: jasmine, sea kelp, lavender. Diaghilev was gently but firmly pushing her into his car.

Natalia said nothing. When Diaghilev was ready, he would speak to her, she knew. As the driver wound down toward Beaulieu, the impresario removed his monocle, polished it, reinserted it, and said: “She's alive, Natalia. That's the important thing. She fell from a tree, your little Tamara—but she's still alive. They have her in the hospital at Lariboisière now.”

“My God!” she cried. Somehow she had not thought it might be Tamara. Not Tamara, who was so healthy, so sturdy, so resilient. So much like—“How bad is she?” she whispered.

“Not good, Natalia. Broken arm and leg, concussion. Three damaged vertebrae.”

Natalia swallowed. Examining the windowpane through a blur, she said almost inaudibly: “The spine. Will she be paralyzed? And a concussion? Tell me, Serge Pavlovitch!”

Placing a firm hand on her shoulder, the impresario simply shook his head. “We'll have to see when we get there,” he told her.

They left the taxicab in the Rue Amboise Paré and walked through a carriage entrance. The first courtyard was large and square, with a center stage surrounded by flowers in a trim enclosure. All around it the building rose to three stories, the first an open gallery supported by narrow pillars and giving the impression of a cloister. The windows were large, painted white.

Natalia absorbed these images without thinking, but, once at the office of registry, her face went dead white and her lips took on a blue, pinched look. Diaghilev tightened his arm about her and said in a low voice: “It's all right. This isn't like Arkady. You have to face this, Natalia. You have to face it now.” But it was the same! she thought. Couldn't he see that?

“Why did you accompany me all the way to Paris? All the way here?” she asked him hoarsely.

“I wanted the personal satisfaction of knowing that you were going to pull through. Old friends are important to me, Natashenka.”

She blinked at him, unbelieving. “Old friends?”

He smiled then. “We'll discuss it later,” he said smoothly.

They walked to the second floor, through an enormous white room filled with narrow metal cots and sick people, at whom Natalia could not look. Her legs carried her out of fear, out of panic that if she did not hurry, she would be ill in the common room. Diaghilev kept pace with her. To the right were two small private rooms, and a nurse, looming out of nowhere like a ghost, ushered them into the farthest one. Diaghilev remained discreetly outside. He, too, abhorred the sight of blood and found it difficult to deal with.

The room was small, painted ivory more than halfway up the walls, then white, with a thin red stripe separating the two colors. Natalia took note of these details, as well as the neat white lacquered side table, the wooden chair, and the wicker armchair. Then her eyes moved up to the cot, and they widened, her lips parting dryly. Tamara was not lying on the bed, she was suspended just above it by a series of pulleys, and her black eyes were bruised, and in her skull were two screws.

Natalia uttered a small cry and then, to Diaghilev's horror, she slid noiselessly to the floor.

She sat on the chair, her hands folded quietly, watching the unconscious girl in her odd contraptions. Of course, she'll make it, she thought. Shell make it because she's my daughter, because we're stronger than that, both of us. Then Natalia glanced at the legs, and winced.
Petit rat!
If she did not move for many weeks, if she remained perfectly still, Tamara might be lucky enough to learn once more how to use her lower limbs. If... But she'd wanted to dance!

The dance. How it saved me, how it destroyed me too! Natalia thought. It made me want to live, to rise, to become a person in my own right, an artist. But it also made me overlook you, my little one. It's true, what Pierre has said through the years: I didn't want you. But then I never wanted Arkady either, and yet how much I loved him while I had him. He had seemed like such a miracle to us, to Boris and to me, whereas you, my sweet, were just a mistake, an impulsive, childish mistake. “But I always loved you,” she said aloud. “I always did. It's been difficult between us, and we've both felt rebuffed, alienated. But lately it has been quite good, especially those last few months, the two of us dancing, and Stu ...”

“Hello, Natalia,” Pierre said. She had been speaking very quietly, and now she blushed, and jumped up, embarrassed. Had he been listening? But then, why not? She was his daughter, too. Their daughter.

“Hello, Pierre.” She tried to smile but couldn't make the corners go up. He sprawled into the wicker armchair, crossed his legs, laced his fingers together. His face was thinner, more drawn, and there were bags under his eyes. A wave of feeling swept over her, and she placed a hand quickly over his, then withdrew it. “You look awful,” she murmured.

“And you. But she'll be all right. You'll see—” His voice rose, trembled, dropped.

She picked up the cue, almost without thinking. “Yes, dear. She'll be all right. How is Galina?” she asked, steadying her voice.

“Fine, fine.” His eyes were focusing improperly, and he rubbed his temples. “Not so fine, really. None of us is ‘fine,' of course, Natalia. God is punishing us.”

She started and sat forward, suddenly lively. “What? Are you mad, Pierre?”

But his voice droned on, weary, self-flagellating. “Punishing us all. I've done many reprehensible things, you know that. Nobody knows it better than you because you're the one I wronged the most. Not just because of Galina—also before. I shouldn't have forced you into having Tamara. And then, Jackie Vendane. I behaved despicably, putting you through that for so long. The night of Tamara's birth—I'm paying for it now, and you're paying for your denial of motherhood, and Galina's paying for her own involvement, for—whatever. It's God's way, Natalia. What the hell!”

“You always were somewhat of a mystic, Pierre, but never to this extent. Take hold of yourself! You're starting to sound like Vaslav before his mind completely deteriorated.” Oh, God, she thought, closing her eyes, isn't it enough that I have Tamara to pull through? Why is it always my job to help Pierre, even now? But she was too tired, too depressed to turn on him, and so instead she sat in silence, staring at the small, bound figure on the bed. My daughter, my heart. My piece of immortality. Which we all want, don't we?

Pierre was holding his head in his hands and softly weeping. She looked at him and did not move, sat back and watched, her hands folded. Oh God. She rose and kneeled by the armchair, pried the fingers away from his eyes, and stared into them, an intense light burning in her own. Her strong hands held his on his thighs. “Damn it, Pierre,” she said in an undertone, “don't you understand? I've lost a son in one bloody hospital, and I'm not about to relinquish my daughter—our daughter—to another. I've had my fill of disinfectants, and if I never wear the color white again, you'll know why. I don't know what was wrong with Arkady's makeup, but I'm through blaming myself. And this—it was an accident, for God's sake, an accident! There's nothing mystical about that, it isn't retribution, it's simply a terrible fact that they are going to try to correct, right here in this place that I detest, that makes me think of a living tomb.”

Her voice began to break, and she added: “Do you realize that this is Christmas again? If your God existed, He wouldn't have done this to me, would He now? But do you know what, Pierre? I'm glad we have a daughter and not a son. Women are stronger than men, women are survivors!” She turned her face away, deep sobs breaking from her in the silence of the room.

She felt his fingers tighten over hers. “Maybe you're right,” he said. “Maybe you're right.”

“It's going to be months, Serge Pavlovitch,” Natalia said, offering him a snifter of Napoleon. She stretched out her legs in front of her, under the coffee table in the parlor. “I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do.”

“You're not to worry, to start off with.”

“She wants to be a ballerina! God knows if she'll ever walk again. It's funny, my life. Nothing good ever lasts. But then I hardly expect it to. I suppose Tamara thinks this way, too. She had a mother she never saw, and a father she adored. Then the father left and she had a very nervous mother with whom she didn't get along. Then there was another upset, and her father reappeared. And now this. Pierre thinks the heavens are falling down on us.”

“Pierre is an adorable child, Natalia. But you are not a child.”

She sighed. “I wish I could be.” She laughed nervously. “Then someone else could take care of me for a change.”

“We shall miss you,” he said. “You're like Lopokhova, popping in and out of the Ballets Russes, like the prodigal son. Still—we'll find it very difficult to survive without you. You've been one of our best choreographers, and you've proved me wrong.”

“It's good of you to say so. However, you can't fool me, Serge Pavlovitch. These past few months I haven't been blind to the fact that Serge Lifar, our new
danseur
from Kiev, has been practicing his own ideas with you. It's a game I haven't enjoyed, to tell you the truth. People are pawns to you, Serge Pavlovitch, and when you're through with them, you discard them.”

“Not always. I rehired Fokine, remember? Now when I go to London, I intend to rehire Massine, too. Enticements abound. You judge me too harshly, my dear.”

“Survival of the fittest? Let the Nijinskys go mad?”

He looked down at the floor, kicked lightly at the Aubusson rug. “That was a tragedy over which I had little control. I won't say no control. But there were other factors, Natalia.”

“I know. And you've never forgotten that Boris played a role.”

“Yet, in Boris's place I would have acted as he did. All I can say in defense of my own behavior is that, as far as you've been concerned, I always knew with whom I was dealing. You may not have thought yourself Boris's equal, but I did. You were always an interesting woman.”

“Thank you, Serge Pavlovitch.”

“You've been a friend. I've counted on you many times, and you've been there. The Ballet won't be complete without its Oblonova.”

She smiled wryly. “Certainly it will. I was speaking to Benois, and he feels that he is no longer useful to you, that his style is
déþassé.
With me it isn't exactly the same thing. I simply see your enthusiasm lying elsewhere than in the plastic arts. For you the Ballets Russes have come to mean a compendium of all the new trends in the arts, a receptacle of all that hasn't quite yet been discovered, but which will dictate the new style in music, painting, sculpture. Novelty upon novelty. I want room. I want space, to create unencumbered by the myriads of brilliant minds who surround your own brilliance. Our objectives aren't the same anymore, but that's all right. There's room on this earth for us both, I have no fear.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “You're a lovely lady, Natalia,” he said. “Good night.”

Afterward, holding her brandy snifter to the light of the fireplace, she thought: He is the only man who has ever seen me first and foremost as Oblonova—not as the Countess Kussova, not as Madame Pierre Riazhina. If it weren't for Tamara, I would stay to witness the last splendid burst of flame from this great giant, the Ballets Russes, which cannot last much longer now that it lacks a solid base. I would stay, even though this is the time to leave, my time to say “so long,” because I'm almost thirty-five and need to be on my own.

To do what? she wondered. But she was not afraid in the still night, not afraid for herself. She was only frightened for her daughter, for what would become of those lovely legs, of all those dreams with which she, Natalia, was so familiar.

“It's your turn now, Tamara,” she whispered to the gold-red flames. “I'm not going anywhere until you're better, and then we're going to go together.”

Galina sat in the narrow chair, reading aloud. “It's all right, “ Tamara said. “I'm tired of Gulliver. Tell me one of your old stories, Galya. Remember? About what it was like in the Caucasus, and also about Petersburg when you were a child. I prefer that, anyway.”

“You should ask your father to tell you about the Caucasus. He was very happy there. I wasn't, you know.”

“It wasn't nice what I told you about the baby, the day I fell.”

Galina's eyes filled with tears. Her fault, everything her fault. “I understand,” she murmured. “You were afraid we didn't love you very much, and that it was the baby's fault.”

“What's going to happen to me?” Tamara asked, her voice suddenly very young and scared. “I want to be a dancer. Now I can't even move my neck.”

Galina pressed her hands together over her small stomach. “It's going to take some time, Tama. It will all work out.”

“How do you know? Did the doctor promise?”