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!”
He had already melted into the shadows, but she saw him stop and turn, his face relaxing from its taut white lines. He waited for her. For a moment she remained uncertain. Small pricks of sharp emotion pierced her consciousness. He waited, and then she ran, light and airy on the tips of her toes. She ran to him and then, face to face with him in the cold November night, she felt embarrassed. She was there. Now what? Why had she come? Had she not won and sent him away, this odd man who had painted her vulnerability upon a cloth canvas, who had shown her to unknown eyes in a city halfway across Europe, who pursued her with an intensity for which she was unprepared? She did not like him, but he did not appear to like her any better for all his admiration of her work.
Lydia had told her about the golden youth of Moscow and St. Petersburg, wild young men who wasted fortunes on gypsies at the Aquarium, who possessed women with single-minded intent. When they met a woman of virtue, they attempted to buy her services, their blood lust unabated by the difficulty of the challenge. Was Pierre Riazhin like them? He failed to fit the picture. Surely he did not lack mistresses of far greater charms than Natalia herself. She was small with plain coloring, hardly vivid or sensual. Her breasts were small, her calves well developed like all dancers. And Pierre? He was not a gentleman—a painter, not a wealthy scion of society. Nothing made sense.
“Are you afraid of me?” he asked, his dark eyes probing hers.
“I do not understand you,” she replied. But the sound of his voice had reassured her, had reestablished normality between them. “We do not know anything about each other, and yet you have staked a claim. But what sort of claim? Do you want me to pose for you? I don’t know how. Painters are a mystery to me.”
“I occasionally work on commission,” he said. “But rarely. I do not like to paint people as they see themselves. I have my own ideas, you see. I do not ask my subjects to sit. I prefer to think about them, and then paint. That is how I did the Sugar Plum portrait. They liked it, in Paris.”
“It is cold,” she said. “Do you have a carriage?”
“We’ll have to hail a coach. I came with Boris Vassilievitch, but I—did not want to return with him.” He suddenl
y smiled. “I had a bouquet of asters for you, from a Swiss florist on Morskaya—but I forgot them in the stall. The first time that I was organized, too! But I did not want to miss you as you left the building, and so the flowers are still waiting beneath my seat.”
She laughed. A landau for hire passed in front of them, and Pierre stopped it. He opened the door, and she climbed inside. He gave the coachman his own address, then joined her. As the horses started, he said: “I am taking you to my flat. I could not think where else we could go. Your party will be at Cubat. Besides, Paris has brought me certain customers, but my means are still limited. Do you mind terribly?”
“You have already totally ruined my reputation,” Natalia answered. “There will be an empty place at the long table, and when somebody asks, the girls will say I was detained by a strange man. They will wait awhile and then assume that I have gone to his rooms somewhere!” She shook her head, her brown eyes luminous: “I do not really care what people think. There is nobody whose good opinion I treasure, you see. I am not what you would call a lady.”
“No. You remind me of the wild horses in the Caucasus—beautiful, graceful, and totally unfettered. But also somewhat scared. I wanted to tame the fright out of them.”
“Is that why you waited for me in the dark? I do not like it. You take me by surprise and throw everything off kilter. Yet you still have not explained yourself at all.” But somehow as she leaned against the soft upholstered cushions of the carriage, she felt a new elation. This was an adventure and anything was better than another painful dinner with the company. At least, this way …She looked at his profile, strong and clearly defined, and suddenly realized that this was the first time she had ever been alone with a man. Her panic returned. She wished she could stop the horses and get off, in the middle of the road—anywhere! She had been mad, reckless, and childish—not for accepting the ride but for having called him back into her life.
But the landau had come to a halt, and Pierre took her hand to let her down. She trembled slightly at his touch and once again pictured his fingers: large, strong, not gentle. He opened a massive oak door, then led her up a flight of musty stairs. He removed a key from his pocket and opened a second door. They stood inside an unlit room, moonlight filtering through the curtains onto the carpet. Pierre walked into the room and turned on a yellow light. Natalie blinked and started, motionless. They were inside a small enclosure bound by extremely high walls leading to a beamed ceiling. On the walls, hung one over the other, were what appeared to be canvases of differing sizes, depicting subjects that were as varied as their colors. “All yours?” she whispered.
“Yes. I have seen your work and understood you. Now you can see mine and know me. Would you like some tea?”
She shook her head, mesmerized. “I could not eat or drink,” she murmured. ‘‘Usually a performance makes me hungry, but tonight I could not consume a thing. I would have made a valiant effort at Cubat—but no, thank you.”
She did not look at him or consider that she was being most unconventional, coming to his flat without company. Hesitating, she asked: “You do not have a servant, Pierre Grigorievitch?”
“No,” he replied. “I can hardly afford one, although Boris Vassilievitch sometimes sends me Ivan. Ivan is—what do they say?—a pearl. But he does not approve of me.”
So there was no one. She walked to one of the walls and examined a green and gold pasture interspersed with crimson and indigo. She touched the canvas. It felt hard. She ran her finger over it and felt ridges of color. She wet her lips, blinked. Then she went to the next painting. Her senses seemed strangely short-circuited, the hues cramming into her brain, fighting for space. She stepped back to see the wall as a whole, and her cheeks glowed. Her scalp beneath the soft chignon tingled. She felt physically assaulted by a surfeit of brilliance.
In front of her was an unfamiliar world: sharp, dry, abrupt mountains, with rivers that cascaded from snow-covered peaks to the turbulent sea; close-ups of water hitting the sides of a narrow, deep gully; a pasture full of peaceful cows; vineyards, wine presses, orchards of flowering peach, pear, apricot, and apple trees; fine shady beaches. “Where is this?” she asked, turning to Pierre.
“It’s the Caucasus, the most magnificent country I know. It is a world unto itself. From the Caspian to the Black Sea, everything exists there: the most arid mountain range—you should see the Kazbek, dominating the world!—and then, green fields, beaches, and Tiflis, the most charming city you can imagine. The panorama changes before one’s very eyes. I have not stopped painting it.”
She noticed the bright light in his eyes, the nervous excitement in his strong legs. “Why did you ever leave it?” she asked.
He sat down on a low stool next to where she was standing, her blue velvet cape trailing on the floor. She could not read his expression. “I wanted to expose my paintings, to speak through them to a multitude of people. I wanted to see great cities and meet other artists. I felt as though I had outgrown my country. I was wrong, though. It’s still in my heart, and I shall paint its landscapes forever.”
“But—you’re sorry, then, to be here?”
He shook his head. “Ill at ease, perhaps, but hardly sorry. I was built one way, and here I must adapt to another pattern of thought, to people who are not my own people. Sometimes I cannot stand the constriction—but if I am to stretch myself as an artist, I must also try to reach beyond my small reserve of experience. If Antokolsky had remained in the Pale of Settlement, he would have spent a lifetime hewing Jewish shtetls out of limestone and would never have sculpted his marble busts of the Tzar and Tzarina. Isn’t that true?”
“Are you an ambitious man, Pierre Grigorievitch? Does it interest you to mingle with important men?”
He shrugged somewhat impatiently. “I do not know whom you mean by important men. I have met artists of reputation, yes, and have learned—am learning—through their influence. If you mean statesmen and financiers and members of the aristocracy—well, I suppose they are important to an extent. Without patronage a man could never win acceptance these days—not a pleasant fact, Natalia Dmitrievna, but one which I have had to learn here in the capital. Struggling along, one relishes one’s pride, and that is a wonderful feeling—but an unseen painter is like a voice crying in the desert. Anything is better than that—anything! An artist, after all, is primarily an exhibitionist. We perish in closets, away from the world with which we seek to communicate.”
Bitterness twisted his features. She felt a sudden surge of sympathy, thinking of Matilda Kchessinskaya, empress of the ballet. How far would she have climbed had she not first been the Tzar’s mistress, and later that of two of his cousins? And yet …“Is this why you associate with Count Boris?” she asked.
Pierre said coldly: “He is my patron. I did not know him while I was at the Academy, but his scholarship helped to support me during my student days. When I met him, he took an interest in my career. He has been most kind.”
Almost instinctively, Natalia touched the pearls around her neck. “Is he always generous with artists?” she asked somewhat breathlessly.
He did not miss the gesture. “As generous as with you?” he demanded, and now his tone was sarcastic and unkind.
She winced. “You knew then, about his gift to me? What was wrong with it? Others have received similar presents, no doubt.”
“No doubt. But yes, I knew. Boris is a strange man. He wanted me to know. Perhaps to prepare me for his taking on a new protégée.”
“And you were jealous?”
He started to laugh, but the sound was harsh and it jolted Natalia. “Jealous, yes, but not in the way you assume. I had been hoping to meet you, you see. He simply reached you first. It was all planned, I assure you.”
Natalia carefully sat down on a hard backed chair that faced Pierre. “I wasn’t even out of school at the time,” she said in measured tones.
“But he saw you as the Sugar Plum Fairy. Svetlov was with us. You were a unique dancer,
even then. Signaling his interest at that time was a stroke of genius: No one else could lay claim to you afterward, when you fulfilled your initial promise. Boris is like that—a most exclusive man, who lives through the creativity of others by controlling their very souls. You must admit that in itself, despicable though it may be, that is supreme creativity.”
“I find it diabolical—and nauseating,” Natalia said. “Why don’t you shake him off and stand alone? After Paris—”
“After Paris I am still a shadowy figure. Boris has lifted me from obscurity by introducing me to Bakst, Benois, and Somov. He has aided my career by bringing me to the attention of Serge Diaghilev. But without his continuing support, these men would quickly stop bothering with me. He is the key to everything I want—everything! He is the final link between artists and society, between those who will critique my work and those who will buy it. Don’t you see?”
Coolly, her brown eyes appraising him, she replied: “No. I see a caricature of a painter—a man of talent and vision, who has bartered his pride for a few connections. Frankly, I have more respect for Count Boris. He has helped you willingly. You treat him badly. I saw the way you spoke to him in his house. But if you sold yourself to him, you sold him spoiled goods. A serf, defiant and ill-tempered, is a bad serf.”
Pierre half-rose, shaking with anger. “And you?” he cried. “Are you going to let him buy you for a necklace of pearls? How different are you from Kchessinskaya, or from Anna Pavlova, who seeks patrons in every man with clout? Or from Valerian Svetlov’s Trefilova? All whores, in one way or another! Whether you marry for influence, or become a man’s mistress, or simply curry for his good word in the proper circle—all that is prostitution!”
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