La Bayadère
In 1896 the court came out of its year’s mourning for Alexander III and the imperial family returned to the theater and so did I. During that truncated season of 1894–1895 at the Maryinsky, my family had endeavored to distract me. My brother had taken me with him to Monte Carlo to dance an engagement there for those members of the imperial family who vacationed on the Riviera to escape the rigors of mourning demanded of the court back home. After that, my father brought me to Warsaw, to the Grand Theater, where we danced together the czardas and the mazurka, my father’s specialty, even at his age of seventy-four! I was gone so much from Petersburg that rumors began that I had died of a broken heart, the very broken heart my family tried so hard to stitch back together. They hoped that with Niki now married and the routine of the theatrical seasons restored, I would recoup the exuberant high spirits of the Maletchka they once knew. But the routine of the theater was not exactly the same. Niki no longer visited the school or applauded the annual graduation performances of the students. Grand Duke Vladimir took over that responsibility. Alix, apparently, did not want Niki in such close proximity to the harem or me ever again. And though Niki still attended the theater, soon enough he never attended on nights when I performed. This seemed to be the new order, as permanent as a tsar’s decree, as permanent as the sentinel ordered by Catherine the Great to stand in the Summer Garden after she spotted a lone flower, ahead of its fellows, rising up through the snow. A soldier was stationed in the garden that day to brush away any flake that fell on the petals of that flower, and because Catherine never revoked her order, every day, for years after, a guard was remanded to that spot. Rain, snow, heat, there he stood. So did I imagine Alix’s order stood equally absolute.
Yes, so, 1896. I went back to the theater after Russian Christmas, which never falls on the same day as Western Christmas but two weeks later, nor does our Easter match the day the West celebrates the Resurrection of Our Lord. We went by the Julian calendar, you know, until the revolution, at which time in 1918 January 31 suddenly the next day became February 14, in line with the Gregorian calendar used in Western Europe. But the church never made the switch. So who is right? In 1896, after Russian Christmas, I danced a new role, that of Nikiya, a bayadère, a temple dancer, in the ballet La Bayadère, another of Petipa’s fairy tales, this one fitted with bangles and saris, banana trees and the Himalayas with their mourning veils of silver snow. A Hindu temple dancer falls in love with a warrior prince, a kshatriya, who, alas, is already promised to the daughter of a rajah. Both the rajah and his daughter conspire to rid themselves of the bayadère and she is delivered a basket of flowers, an asp hidden deep within the stems and petals, an asp which springs out and plunges its fangs into her breast. After her death, her Shade haunts first the prince’s opium dream and later his wedding, unnerving the bride and groom. Before the ceremony can be completed, thunder, lightning, and earthquake destroy the great hall of the rajah’s palace and bury within its ruins all the participants. A perfect vengeance. Odd, don’t you think, for me to be cast in the role of the dancing strumpet who spoils the young couple’s wedding bliss? Perhaps Vzevolozhsky, having failed to get rid of me by tattling to Polovstov and to Grand Duke Vladimir, thought he’d try again, by sticking me in a role designed to remind Niki and Alix of my past with Niki and of my present as the girl whose ghost haunts their bedroom as Alix’s ghost once haunted mine.
If true, Vzevolozhsky’s plot almost succeeded. All innocence, I performed the ballet on a Sunday, January 28. I remember the date because it was the last Sunday I was to dance almost that entire year. It was not hard to see the imperial family that night, situated as their box was to the right of the stage and not very far above it. One had to ask their permission to perform an encore, which the highest-ranking member of the family granted with a nod of the head, so we had to be able to see them. Their faces were as clear to me as the faces of the dancers who played my beloved prince Solor, the rajah, and his daughter, Gamzatti. I could see Niki in his red dress tunic, and his sash, braids, and medals, all gold; his mother, hair piled high and loaded with the jewels convention dictated should have been given to Alix, the reigning empress, but which Sergei told me Marie Fedorovna could not bear to give up, having given up so much else the past year; and Alix herself. It was the first time I ever saw her, and I felt—I felt cold, as if I had drunk a pitcher of ice water in the wings and it had filled up my limbs instead of my belly. She looked, with her red-gold hair, exactly like the German and English princesses in the fairy-tale book my sister used to read to me when I was four. My sister read while I studied the colored engravings of the princess in the tower, the princess asleep in the woods, the princess trying on a slipper, the princess disgorging pearls and flowers from her open mouth. Alix wore a gown of silver cloth that rendered her skin a luminous white, and the pearl-and-diamond tiara planted in her curled hair she must have wrestled from her mother-in-law in a palace catfight. And I stood before them in a ridiculous pair of pantaloons, copied exactly from an engraving in the Illustrated London News that documented the Prince of Wales’s journey to India in 1876, my arms stacked with bracelets, my skin tinted brown like an old cup of tea, and around my neck, in deliberate provocation, the tsar’s necklace. I admit it: I was not all innocence. I might not have recognized the echo of our lives in the ballet, but I certainly recognized an opportunity to vex Alix and the new tsar. And I did vex them. Niki’s face I had not seen since that gala for his sister’s wedding, and yet he did not look happy to see me. He regarded me from his box with an expression both stern and wary. Sergei had told me Niki was displeased with me—I just hadn’t understood how much. It had been a mistake, perhaps bigger than I realized, to stage crying fits at rehearsals, to have written those letters to Alix, to have worn the necklace tonight. And with that realization, the ice water sloshing around in my limbs turned solid, and I had to drag and hoist my arms and legs through all the movements of the first act. I supposed I would be given no signal from the emperor to dance an encore.
Thank God much of Act I is mime—my horror at the Great Brahmin’s declaration of love for me, my filling of a vase with water to offer it to the other temple dancers and the fakirs, the men who jump through fire and wave daggers and knives in their religious ecstasy, my conversation with Solor in which we declare our love—for I don’t think I could have danced. But somehow I moved my arms. Our theatrical miming was so elaborate the court balletomanes took lessons in it to understand what we gesticulated about up on that stage. Yes, it was during one of those extended mime interludes that I peered over the shoulders of my beloved Solor and witnessed a small commotion in the imperial box. Big splotches now reddened Alix’s face and she breathed as heavily as if she had been the one dancing here on the stage, not I. She leaned toward Niki, made a gesture of distress, at which signal he stood immediately and pulled her chair back into the shadows of the box—into her own Kingdom of the Shades. Let her remain there. What did I care, if only Niki reappeared. But he did not. Vzevolozhsky’s ploy had succeeded, though not the way he had intended. He had rid the theater of the emperor and empress, not of me! After that the sovereigns and I shared the Maryinsky. It was arranged always to have me dance midweek, on unfashionable Wednesdays, the nights the imperial family did not come to the Maryinsky, while Pierina Le gnani, that Italian pigeon, short, stout, plain-faced, performed her bag of tricks each Sunday for the tsar. I had been made prima ballerina assoluta of the Imperial Theaters, but I would never dance before the sovereigns. I might as well be dead.
When I danced Act II of La Bayadère now, on my Wednesdays, after the great procession of Badrinata I put down my little guitar and picked up a basket of waxed flowers; within the wicker recesses lay not the prop master’s rubber snake, but a live one, drugged, and that is what I thrust to my breast to simulate its bite. I have always been fearless on the stage—no one comes to the theater to see a performer restrain herself—and on the stage I never restrained myself: nor off
the stage much either, if truth be told. The other dancers reared back when, snake licking its way up my arms, I circled the stage to show them my injury and my inevitable fate. Some nights, under the hot lights that bedazzled me and the colorful dervish of pantaloons and saris and veiled headdresses, I wished that snake would wake and in its confusion bite into me—and then, like the famous Gypsy singer Varya Panina, who one night, spying her former lover in the audience, sang to him a song of ruined love and drank a glass of poison, I, too, might die right there on the stage. Better to become a legend than to be known as a scorned lover dancing to a vacant imperial box on Wednesday nights.
At the end of the year, I learned with delight I had been given a Sunday to dance—only to hear that Vzevolozhsky had persuaded the tsar to see a French play that night at the Mikhailovsky instead. When I heard this, my delight turned to a bitterness so fierce, I raged through my house, absolutely raged through it like the propellers of the imperial yacht, the Standart. I would not be so thwarted. I would not be entombed at the theater like a piece of old scenery or a decrepit prop. I sat down at my little writing desk and wrote a letter to Niki in hysterical script big as a placard, and at the end of it I signed my name with its grand flowery M. I wrote in Russian and when Sergei arrived that evening, as was his habit every night duty did not require him to be elsewhere, I planned to beg him to translate the letter into French, which I would then copy over neatly in my beautiful, tiny penmanship. I had no real education, you know—the academics at the Imperial Theater Schools were laughable—even Vaslav Nijinsky, a true imbecile in the schoolroom though a genius on the stage, managed to graduate. But it was important to me to write the final copy in French, the language of the court, as this was a formal letter from a wronged subject to her tsar, not a love note from some petite danseuse. I had written that if I had lost the privilege of dancing for the emperor I no longer wished to dance and if I did not dance then I had nothing, not him and not my art; that I accepted the punishment of not seeing him privately, but I could not be doubly punished by not seeing him even at the theater. Was I or was I not his prima ballerina assoluta? And as such, were my talents not the ones he should be applauding, rather than those of some imported il secondo?
Sergei that night read over my letter—I had rushed to him at the front hall and stuffed it into his hands like a child with a broken toy for her father to fix—and when he finished, he said, So, Mala, you are delivering an ultimatum to your tsar? Are you sure you want to do this? I nodded, though truth be told I had not thought much beyond Niki reading my Gypsy song of lamentation. What if his irritation with me now was so great he said, Fine, leave the theaters? But my desire to have him understand the injustice done to me was greater than my interest in the outcome. And so, reluctantly, Sergei translated my letter for me after which I covered him with kisses, and the next morning he put it in his pocket to take to the tsar, for he served that day as Niki’s aide-de-camp, a privilege the grand dukes rotated among themselves. Who else could have delivered to Niki such a letter and from whom else would Niki have accepted it? Once it was in his hands, I knew he would read it, not only because I had written it, but also because even this early in his reign he had shown he took pleasure in dealing with little matters—the budget of a provincial school, the petitions of peasants who wished to officially change their names from the crude monikers the village had assigned them, such as Ugly or Stinky—even the notorious Rasputin’s name came from a nickname, Rasputinyi, meaning dissolute—petitions that required the tsar’s attention. Well, this was my petition.
On that Sunday I prepared as I usually did the day of a performance—I stayed in bed all day, ate a few spoonfuls of caviar at noon, refused to drink a drop of liquid, even water, arrived at the theater two hours early to warm up. This habit of arriving early to the theater had been with me since I was a little girl. Because of my father’s position, when the theater needed a tiny child to pull the Tsar Maiden’s magic ring from the fish’s mouth in the last bit of Le Petit Cheval bossu, I was chosen—and though I did not set foot on the stage until almost the end of the ballet, I insisted my father take me with him to the theater one hour before curtain. On the stage this night behind the lowered curtain, the other dancers grumbled as usual about having to dance with me when my presence guaranteed the emperor’s absence. If the tsar and his suite were not in the theater, even the audience was affected, for the court came to the theater as much to see the tsar as to see us. And we artists longed to be seen by him, as well. I cannot explain this—his power conferred on us heightened senses, as does love.
I had not received a reply to my letter and Sergei had not watched Niki read it, and so I myself could only pray that what mattered so much to me still had the power to move him a little. I walked, as if casually, through the forest of trees, the bananas, amras, madhavis, their branches intertwined, and along the side of the pagoda, for I was dancing, once again, as luck would have it, La Bayadère. It had an elaborate set, for the court loved to see a lavishly outfitted stage and loved, too, the machinery of it—flying figures, apparitions, whirlwinds, trap doors, fountains and floods, creeping webs and thickets, the crumpling of great castles, floating barques transformed into sparkling palaces—Vzevolozhsky earmarked most of the year’s budget for the opera but made sure there would be spectacle enough for the ballet. I made my way through the stage to the peephole in the blue velvet curtain.
The imperial box was deserted. Vzevolozhsky I could not see at all. It was his job to greet the emperor at the private drive, and with his peculiar gait—his back was bent, curved perhaps from so many years of bowing to the sovereigns?—to escort him through the private hallway and salon to his box. Perhaps Niki had gone after all to the Mikhailovsky to see the French play. Vzevolozhsky would be there to meet him. I put my finger to the peephole as if by crooking it I could draw Niki toward me. Come here. Come here.
In the pit the musicians tuned their instruments, and broken bits of various melodies from the score floated up from below—now the turti and the vina, the bagpipes and the small guitar of the bayadère’s dance, now that of the violin used in Act II in the Kingdom of the Shades. With the imperial box still dark, the curtain drawn at the back of it, I felt myself shrink and my bracelets slipped past my wrists. As I bent to retrieve them, I heard all around me, competing with the orchestra, a great cacophony of voices as the news spread from the house to the wings to the stage: The tsar is here. The emperor is here. It was like the French farce the emperor would not, after all, see tonight—the theater administrators colliding with one another in their rush to phone the Mikhailovsky Theater and have Vzevolozhsky, in his formal blue coat with the star of Vladimir pinned to the left lapel, rerouted to the Maryinsky to greet Niki, in their efforts to reach the private drive to greet their sovereign themselves in case the director could not hasten back quickly enough. What had Niki told Alix to explain this change of plans? Did she know what I had written him? My smile as I turned from the peephole was triumphant. I knew he would come, I told the court of the rajah Dugmanta now assembled in their places for Act I. I was looking out the curtain for him. And I put away my poor, drowsy reptile and took in its stead the rubber one from the prop master’s cabinet. I was dancing on Sundays again.
It was a great night, for I knew I still held some power, however small, over his majesty the emperor. What would I do with it?
Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias
So when the dowager empress struck my name from the special list of imperial artists scheduled to perform at the coronation gala later that spring of 1896, saying, It would be an insult for her to dance before the young empress, and when Niki stood there silently while she did so, I acted. Surely Niki would want me in Moscow to witness the moment when he placed the majestic nine-pound state crown of Catherine the Great on his own head. Why had he not said so when his mother uncapped her pen and drew a line through my name? Because to contradict anyone was considered by the tsar to be impolite. His minist
ers never understood this about him, were perpetually astonished when the seemingly agreeable tsar did not do what he had been advised to do, when the tsar smiled at them one hour and asked for their resignations the next. Why, this happened to Prince Volkonsky, who succeeded Vzevolozhsky as director of the theaters, and who, after a contretemps with me, offered Niki his resignation. Niki asked him to reconsider, but when Volkonsky arrived home he found sitting on his desk a letter from the tsar accepting his resignation! But I will tell you more of this later. Niki always knew his own mind, though his ministers did not know it. I did.
This time I did not go to Sergei for help, but to Grand Duke Vladimir, who as head of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts was the ultimate arbiter of all things theatrical and who as blustering uncle of Niki held his young nephew in his palm. It was Vladimir and his brothers who decreed that Niki could not marry Alix quietly in the Crimea as he had wished but must wait and have a formal state ceremony at the Winter Palace in the capital. It was Vladimir who choreographed the funeral of Alexander III. And it was he who planned this coronation. And so I knew already that Vladimir loved to exercise his power and with his older brother the tsar dead and his young nephew the new tsar so raw, this was Vladimir’s best opportunity to play the tsar himself for a while. Why, Niki had already had to reprimand him for using the imperial box at the Maryinsky without Niki’s express permission. I could have gone to Sergei about this matter, but this was not the matter of a Sunday-night performance but a matter of state, and I was afraid the dowager empress would not listen to her great-nephew. No, Emperor Vladimir was the better choice, and anyway it is always better to have two allies than one, and I was certain Vladimir would help me countermand the dowager empress’s order because he hated her and because Alix had insulted his wife. When Alix first arrived in Petersburg, Miechen tried to take her under her wing. After all, they were both brides brought to Russia from small German principalities, both women quiet and bookish and unprepared for the spectacle of the Russian court. When Miechen looked at Alix, she saw her long-ago self, modest of dowry and social graces, though Alix was a fairy-tale beauty with her red-gold hair and Miechen looked like a bulldog. But like Miechen before her, Alix had no one to guide her through the intricacies of the elaborate Russian court. The dowager empress was busy helping her son choose ministers and hold on to the crown. So the wily Miechen saw an opportunity to slip her hand into the pocket of the new empress. But Alix slapped it out. The puritanical Alix found Miechen far too sophisticated, far too comfortable with the luxury-loving, sexually amoral Russian aristocracy, and so Alix made the first of many enemies in Peter. No, I was the first. And I was also Vladimir’s obedient dushka who had shut her mouth like she was told and who was still being punished. And so on my behalf Vladimir spoke to Niki, who agreed that, yes, my name should be put back. He did want me there! I knew it! Unfortunately, Petipa had already created a ballet called La Perle in honor of the occasion.
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 10