Encore (9 page)

“Why is it so important to spread our culture to France?” Natalia questioned. There was an edge to her voice because she was nervous.

“Why does anyone want to go beyond himself? This is the

human secret. I don't know, my dear. Why did you decide to become a dancer?” He quirked one fine blond eyebrow, smiling ironically.

“I was too young to be a courtesan,” she retorted with asperity. Then, abruptly, she blushed. It had been an impulsive, defiant answer born of fear.

But Boris laughed. “Nevertheless, you wanted to be loved! Whether as Oblonova the ballerina, or, if you like, as Madame de Montespan, whore to Louis XIV”—and he looked into her eyes with calculated mirth—“you did not wish to remain an anonymous woman. A country is the same. Russia wants to be loved, by the French, by the British—because we are a vain lot.”

Pierre Riazhin had been watching them closely, and now he put down his glass and strode to them rapidly. There was a jerky quality to his movements, a half-repressed passion manifested in his limbs. Boris glanced up at the intruder with annoyance. “Ah, we have here our young genius, Pierre Grigorievitch Riazhin. Have you come to meet this charming lady?”

“I do not need an introduction,” Pierre said, looking directly at Natalia. She was so small, close up—small yet strong, compact, athletic. And grave. He liked her seriousness, which contrasted so vividly with Boris's careless ease. Suddenly Pierre wanted to be very rude to Boris, to lash out at him. Instead, he said to Natalia: “I wondered if you would be so beautiful in person. I see that you are.”

Her brown eyes took him in, with his absurd Frans Hals hat, his earnest black eyes that seemed bottomless, his quick face, massive carriage, and slim waist. She shook her head, bewildered. “What do you mean?” she asked. She saw the dark, crisp hair, the large hands with their well-shaped, blunt fingers, the wide nostrils. She could almost breathe him. He smelled of maleness, a strange, unfamiliar scent that threw her off. She shivered, thinking of a Crimean wheat field swept by southern winds.

“He is paying you a compliment, Natalia Dmitrievna,” Boris laughed pleasantly. “But ignore the boor. He has all the delicacy of a young panther on the prowl.”

“No,” Natalia said, looking at Pierre, “it was the way you said

it—as though you had seen me before. but 1 do not know you. Yet something was eluding her, something in the not-too-distant past—the women after the performance of
Chopiniana!
“Riazhin,” she intoned with wonder. “Yes, you are a painter. But we have never met.”

“You have never met me, but I did meet you, two years ago. I saw you dance the Sugar Plum Fairy. I have never forgotten that night.”

“I was only an insignificant ballet student,” she stammered. The feeling in the black eyes that bore into her was disconcerting. She had never spoken to anyone like this young man, whose probing intensity dismayed her. She had not yet learned to parry compliments and was uncomfortable. “Please,” she said, and her voice trembled. “I am honored that you remembered me, but—”

“Pierre loves all beautiful things,” Boris commented. His fingers closed over Natalia's delicate arm, but his eyes were leveled at Pierre Riazhin, and the girl stepped back, watching black eyes hold blue in an incomprehensible deadlock. She should have stayed at home. Here were Louis XIV and a seventeenth-century Dutch baron sparring. Around them floated the room, with its Renaissance medallions juxtaposed with artifacts of the Chinese Sung dynasty and laughing voices. Matilda Kchessinskaya, Feodor Chaliapin, and the minister of education. She felt ill, and unconsciously found herself leaning on Boris's arm for support.

“There now, Natalia Dmitrievna,” he said to her, “are you faint?”

“I'm quite all right, thank you, Boris Vassilievitch,” she replied.

“But you, Borya, are being neglectful of your other guests,” Pierre said. “Why don't you leave Natalia Dmitrievna to me? I can entertain her.” Natalia thought: How rude he is, and yet what a relief it would be for Count Boris to leave me ...

“Yes, please, Boris Vassilievitch,” she interposed. “I should not like to think that I were keeping you from more illustrious and amusing company.”

Boris Kussov gazed at her through narrowed eyes, then at the young man. Natalia felt cold. Without a word, their host turned away and merged into the crowd of odd faces and hats. Natalia started to laugh nervously. “You were unkind,” she commented. “Are you not afraid to displease Boris Vassilievitch? I have heard that it is dangerous to upset him, and he did look somewhat . . .upset.”

“Yes, well, so much for him. Let us talk about you. When will you have another solo role? I would like to see you,'

“I'll dance in the
Pavilion d'Armide pas de trots
on the twenty-fifth,” she replied.

An awkward silence ensued. He said irritably: “Do you like society?”

“If you could imagine how much I would like to die right now!” she cried, then bit her lower lip. “But that is most ungrateful, isn't it? Somebody told me about you, Pierre Grigorievitch. You took part in the Russian exhibit in Paris last year, didn't you?”

“Yes. I wanted—I'd hoped—” Suddenly he looked away from her in confusion. “Come with me,” he ordered. He offered her his arm, then walked rapidly from the drawing room into a small corridor. Away from the noise of the other guests, he faced her. “I must show it to you,” he murmured. Then he led her mystified, past a door into a square study upholstered in Cordova leather. A fire in the hearth burned orange and gold. Only a single lamp shone in the room.

“There,” Pierre announced, indicating the wall farthest from the door. Natalia looked up and started. A large oil painting hung in an ornate gilded frame, and she saw herself, small, wistful, mischievous, in her pink tulle outfit from
The Nutcracker.
It was unmistakably her, and not merely a resemblance. “Had anyone told you?” he asked, scanning her face for a reaction.

“Yes,” she whispered. She turned to look at him and stiffened. This was all so bizarre, so unforeseen. “Who are you?” she demanded. “Why did you paint me?”

“I am an artist, like you. Why? Why does there have to be an answer?”

“Because!” She moved away from him, suddenly fearful. “You have taken me and put me in a frame, and I don't know anything about you!”

He took a deep breath, and his nostrils flared. She knew she had made him angry. “You know more about me than anyone,” he stated. “Or you could, if you wanted to look. Look, then! I have put myself inside this frame as much as I have put you there, but you are too blind, too self-centered to notice! And yet the Sugar Plum Fairy was not self-centered. She was real!”

“You are the strangest man I have ever met!” she cried back.

They stood opposite each other, pent-up nervousness exploding, anger being released, unacknowledged emotions rising to the surface. His hands clenched into fists. They stared at each other in shock and surprise, as if suddenly naked and exposed. Then she stepped back, her lips parting in fear, and he moved forward, unthinking, elemental. He grabbed her shoulders and shook them once and then he bent toward her, roughly, his face flushed, hers white and drawn.

All at once the door swung open, and the sarcastic voice of Boris Kussov said: “Supper awaits, my dears.”

On November 25 the première of
Le Pavilion d'Armide,
an expansion of Michel Fokine's
Les Gobelins Animés,
took place at the Mariinsky. Natalia danced in the
pas de trois
as she had in the former ballet. The choreographic innovations were well received by the aristocracy of St. Petersburg—so well received, in fact, that the composer, Tcherepnine, the designer, Benois, and young Fokine were all called forward for an ovation.

This presentation had been the culmination of much hard work. Fokine was a high-strung perfectionist, and his methods were so different from those of the classical choreographers, Petipa and Ivanov, that many of the ballerinas could not follow him well. Wills clashed more than once, and tempers were strained. But Natalia was the most junior of the ballerinas and knew how to hold her tongue. This was a marvelous chance for her, not one to be wasted. She avoided the troublemakers and practiced relentlessly.

Natalia now had access to the established and more prestigious of the Mariinsky's
ballerinas. The management recognized that she would rapidly be promoted to
coryphée
and then to soloist of the second degree. Had she not graduated a year early, she could not have skipped the entire process of joining the
corps.
She danced in small groups during most performances and sometimes had a minor part of her own. She now got dressed with those who had achieved a certain measure of distinction and was learning from experience what to expect of whom: Pavlova was the least tractable of the ballerinas, prone to jealousy that took the form of hurtful comments; Tamara Karsavina was intelligent and agreeable, and one could ask her questions; Olga Preobrajenskaya was a true professional, and kind. And Matilda Kchessinskaya, if one did not challenge her supremacy, could be witty and charming. But her ego was even more fragile than Anna Pavlova's, and Prince Volkonsky, the previous director, had been forced to quit his position as a result of a disagreement with her. Her Imperial lovers made her a matchless enemy for anyone.

Natalia thought that
Le Pavilion d'Armide,
an uncontrived ballet with asymmetric pieces, was more difficult to dance than the traditional Petipa fairy stories. But what most appealed to her was that the pace of her movements changed during her special dance as one of Armida's confidantes. The other female dancer, Karsavina, possessed a gay, light role that did not parallel hers. The male dancer of the
pas de trois
was a young man who had graduated the same year as Natalia. His name was Vaslav Fomitch Nijinsky, and he was small and airy, with Oriental features reminiscent of a woodland animal's. When he leaped, he remained suspended above the stage far longer and more gracefully than Natalia had ever seen anyone else soar. The critics called this talent “ballon.”

Natalia's eyes had wandered to the stall where she had noticed Boris two years before, magnificent in his black and gray evening suit. This time she picked him out at once. Next to him was Pierre Riazhin—a rather defiant Pierre, if she could judge by the way he held himself apart from Boris, his feral head proud and aloof. Then she began to dance, paying them very little attention. Still, what attention she did pay them was too much. Her concentration was broken ever so slightly, and she was angry, angrier than she had been over the claque. She knew that Pierre had come for her, placing her under greater obligation than ever before to be excellent for
his
eyes.

Undressing afterward, her fingers trembled. It had been several weeks since she had met Riazhin, but in her imagination she had frequently relived that moment in Boris's study when Pierre's hands had seized her by the shoulders. His fingers had been round, hard; his eyes black, ringed with thick black lashes. His black curls had fallen over a wide brow, and his body had conveyed a sense of boundless strength, of danger. He had smelled of danger. Better to keep away from him in the future, she suddenly decided.

But would she be able to? She bit her lip and smoothed back her fine brown hair. There was to be a dinner at Cubat for the dancers. Would he attend? If so, what then? Inexplicably, her eyes filled with tears, and she wanted to run outside in the cold and find her way home. She was behaving like a child, and so she breathed deeply and continued to dress.

She was always somewhat dazed by these celebrations. Nobody knew her yet, and if someone spoke to her, it was generally as one does to a naïve beginner. The
basso profundo
_,
Feodor Chaliapin, had tapped her hand, and Kchessinskaya had called her a “sweet little dove.” What did they know of her? She was somewhat disgusted. Yet Lydia had told her that a dancer was not merely the instrument of her body—that she would have to learn about public and private life. Therefore, she went to learn—about good food, wit and intellect, and deportment, all that she had never come to know as a child. There was wonder in the outside world, and strange light, new odors. The problem lay in sorting through the sensations afterward and in not feeling alienated at the time.

When she stepped outside, a figure darted from the darkness and confronted her as she was turning toward the carriage. She looked up, her throat constricting with fear, and saw Pierre Riazhin. He was wearing a tuxedo, yet his barely contained frenzy belied the formality of his attire. His head was bare, the curls spilling over, and his face was pale. “Natalia Dmitrievna,” he said.

“Are you coming, Natashenka?” a gay voice called out from the carriage.

“That is my car,” she said.

“Let it go without you. Please! Let us go somewhere together.

I would like to talk to you.” He placed a hand—one those hands which she had dreamed about—on her sleeve. “I beg of you.”

“No,” she replied forcefully. “There is no reason for us to talk. And—and—it wouldn't be right.”

“Do you care what people think?” he asked with incredulity.

“Right now I do. Let me go, please.” But, to her dismay and growing despair, the carriage door was closing, and the coachman was raising his whip. She gazed wide-eyed at the hand on her arm and jerked free. “You are a nuisance, Pierre Grigorievitch,” she cried. “Now I shall miss the supper! What do you want? Why can't you leave me alone?”

He stiffened. All at once he stood upright, unflinching, tall and broad in the night, the lights of the Mariinsky casting gold reflections on his hair. “As you wish,” he said tightly. He turned with almost military dignity and started to walk away with long, angry strides.

Feeling the wind lift a strand of her hair, Natalia stood alone. The audience had long since departed, and now even the dancers had left. Her cloak billowed around her, and she shivered. A tremendous feeling of gloom pervaded her, which she could not shake free. She looked at Riazhin's retreating figure, and thought, I did it! I've sent him away. But instead of triumph or relief, hard-edged misery flowed through her. She took one small step, then another. In the night she called out: “Wait! Please!”