“It’s an abominable group, all of them!” Marguerite cried. “Do you know Count Boris?”
“Count Boris Kussov. Yes, I am acquainted with the man. I must tell you that I am aware of your own connection with him.”
“Well, then, tell me what you think of him!” Marguerite demanded. Pinpoints of hysteria pierced her voice.
Pierre laid down his brush. “We were friends once, and he did me much good. Now, however, I could not answer your question: The reply would not be fit for a lady’s ears. Enough said, Baroness?”
“No!” she answered. “Never! I am married to such a nice man, Pierre Grigorievitch. Such a good, kind man. But I did not want him. I did not wish for a life with a Prussian diplomat. I wanted Boris, and he tried to have me put away as a madwoman. Now I think it is he who is mad. Tell me—do you know the ballerina whom he married, after me?”
“Baroness, I must ask you to sit quietly, or I shall not be able to capture your natural expression,” Pierre cautioned.
“You can do it later. Tell me—”
Pierre left the canvas and strode over to Marguerite. He stood over her, almost ominous in his massive strength, his black hair and black eyes gleaming under the overhead light. “I have come all the way from Petersburg to make you immortal,” he said. “Now, perhaps you will find me a boor to mention it, but if immortality does not appeal to you, I shall go home at once. I am not good at conversations, Baroness von Baylen. I am only good with oils. So if it’s talk you want, I have wasted a trip and you are wasting a commission.”
Marguerite uttered a small laugh and threw her hands up to cover her face. “I’m sorry!” she cried, and laid her hands down. “It’s just that no one wants to be made a fool of, don’t you see?”
“Yes,” he said, “I see. Now look serene, a little more to the left—ah, perfect!”
Poor woman, he thought, settlng himself behind his painting again. Then he felt a surge of old pain sweep through him. No, truly, he was not a politic man, or he would not have allowed his life to slip so far. The old days: the committee, Bakst, Benois, Diaghilev—Boris; Egypt and France and The Hague; palace hotels and golden cufflinks; intelligent conversation, good food, a lesson in manners and savoir faire. And the silver hope of Natalia. Now there were faded society ladies, little children, and half-mad wives of Prussian diplomats. But it was a step up from where he’d been before the Stassov work.
That small blond Galina Stassova—it was difficult to reconcile her sweet nature with the fact that she was Boris’s niece. She looked exactly like him, but soft and gentle. He had wanted to kiss her, to pet her, and instead, he had glared at her like an ogre, remembering her parentage. Princess Nina was another good, kind soul, but devoted to her brother. Damn them all! Boris had ended up with everything, everything! How could he not hate the man? Boris had given him everything and then withdrawn it all. Better to have stayed on the periphery and never been helped at all.
I should have listened to my instincts, Pierre thought fiercely. Never take, so that you will never owe. The mystique of the golden Boris. Still, Natalia was right: Pierre had his talent, his genius. He would rebuild his life, trusting in his own abilities. Why should he always seek out pillars on which to rest? He had let Petersburg corrupt his soul; in the Caucasus he had never relied on others.
Or had I? he wondered. There had been his mother, indomitable, a silent tower of will and support, as he had wanted Natalia to be. Natalia was right! Pierre thought with angry self-condemnation. I would never have been happy with her. She is too separate, too complete, and I could never have allowed her to stay that way. I would have consumed her, used her to fuel my own creative energies. She did what was right for herself.
But I shall never accept it, never.
He suddenly asked: “Do you miss Count Boris, Baroness?”
Marguerite blinked. “Miss him? No. That is not it at all,” she replied with some asperity. How did one explain the anger after a theft? One did not necessarily miss the robbed goods. “How can one miss a person like Boris?” she added. “He is conceited, selfish, acerbic, cruel—What is there to miss?”
“Those very things, I suppose,” Pierre replied. “He is, as you claim, a wicked man, often an odious one. But he also has the most diverse interests. He is never boring.”
“I did not know him well enough to judge,” she replied with a shrug.
Pierre uttered a short laugh. “This sitting would amuse him. His ex-wife, and his ex-protégé! This is the ultimate irony.”
Marguerite announced: “I shall make you a household name in Berlin, Pierre Grigorievitch. My husband, the baron, loves artists. You shall have to come for a visit—and paint my friends.”
Pierre felt a momentary spasm of disgust. He had never wanted to be a society portraitist, and the notion of visiting the dull von Baylens filled him with horror. He remembered the gallant dinners at Boris’s, the elegant Petersburg aristocrats who were not afraid to mingle with real artists. He knew that if he went to Berlin, it would be as a hired hand. How things changed!
“Thank you, Your Excellency,” he replied, lifting his brush to the canvas.
In early May Natalia resigned from the Mariinsky, much to the disgust of General Teliakovsky. Taking her hand, he said softly: “I was going to promote you to prima ballerina. We need you here, my dear. Karsavina still dances with us and manages to fit in Diaghilev. Or is it your husband? Does Boris Vassilievitch wish to hold you back from your Petersburg admirers?”
She hesitated: Why, indeed, was a choice so necessary? But the die was cast, and she packed her bags to go to Paris for the spring-to-summer season. Vaslav Nijinsky wanted her for his first ballet, Afternoon of a Faun, in which she was to dance one of seven woodland nymphs. The entire production would last only twelve and one-half minutes, but Diaghilev had told her that the innovations his protégé was instigating would be revolutionary for the world of ballet.
Now, days later, Boris and Natalia were seated on the terrace of their home on the Avenue Bugeaud in Paris when the maid came out with the tea tray. She deposited it on the table in front of her mistress, bobbed a curtsy, and retreated. Boris looked attentively at Natalia from half-closed eyes. She had lost some weight, and her glossy brown hair did not hold its form as well as usual. Her eyes seemed to have taken complete possession of her small, pale face.
He said nothing, but when she seized the teapot, he noticed that her fingers were trembling. She steadied the pot with her other hand and poured. She handed him his cup, then lay back in her chair, closing her eyes. “Are you ill, Natalia?” he asked.
Her whole body jerked to attention. In a low, tremulous voice, she said: “If you really want to know, Boris, it’s that damned Nijinsky! I can’t take it another day, I swear I can’t! Nobody else can, either. Karsavina, Nelidova—we’re all sick of him, sick to death of his impossible requests. When your body’s been trained for over twelve years to make only certain kinds of movements, it’s inhuman to expect it to flatten itself into a single dimension, like the figures in those drawings of ancient times! You know—the ones on your Greek amphoras and on those Egyptian parchments you brought back. But we’re real women—ballet dancers!”
“New concepts are always hard to work out,” he said softly. “And Vaslav can’t express himself like other people. Serge has always been his mouthpiece. He isn’t a verbal person, and in his frustration he may say things he doesn’t mean. You must rise above that, Natalia. You, of all people.”
“But why? If Michel Fokine leaves, I do not want to stay with the Ballets Russes! I’d rather return to the Mariinsky and accept Teliakovsky’s offer. As a prima ballerina, I could have much greater freedom of choice than I had as a soloist of the first degree. I might not see as much of other countries—but we could travel during the summer and accept engagements at that time.”
Boris was silent. She sat back and poured a cup of tea for herself. Her face had grown pink with animation, and now she seemed spent. He regarded he
r keenly, then said: “Natalia, if there were no solution, I would not subject you to this. But I’m going to ask you to do something for me. Learn to work with Vaslav Nijinsky. It will pay off in the end. You will be far happier than with that ass Teliakovsky.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, suddenly alert.
He shook his head. “Nothing as yet. Simply what I’ve told you. I know, it’s a small ballet, and you’re not the lead. But it’s important.”
Her lips parted on a question, but she stifled it. She had learned long ago not to ask him what was brewing in his mind. Instead, she sighed. “All right,” she replied, with weary resignation.
On Wednesday, May 29, 1912, the beau monde of Paris went to see Nijinsky’s first effort at choreography. Based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem, “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” this short work was a collaboration between the young Russian dancer and Debussy, whose score was graceful airiness, breeze, and flow. Nijinsky had taken the theme of woodland eroticism and made a tableau of flat, frieze like nymphs moving in furtive steps around a Faun, not quite man but more perceptive than beast. Seven Nymphs danced one by one, watched by the Faun, stimulating his nascent desires. The last one was Nelidova, tall and angular, the only one not dancing in bare feet. They wore headdresses of gold braid and ,long white skirts heightened with splotches of red or blue, and the Faun wore an off-white body stocking marked with brown spots. At the end all that he was left with was the scarf of the tall Nelidova, and, taking it to his promontory, he made love to it in strange masturbatory movements.
The French public was shaken to its foundations by this short ballet. Cries erupted at its conclusion, and people stood in their seats, shouting. “This isn’t dancing!” some cried. “Give us back our money!” And: “Such an obscenity, on the French stage!” But other yells were veritable ovations. During the days that followed, newspapers devoted entire columns to heated rebuttals, and France took sides for or against Nijinsky.
Serge Pavlovitch was jubilant. “Think of the publicity!” he exclaimed and rubbed his hands together.
Boris said to Natalia: “Vaslav’s a genius. It comes from a subconscious well inside him that defies intellectual comprehension. But sometimes the world can be too much for people like him. They aren’t practical enough and certainly possess no analytical perceptions.”
She looked at him quizzically, but he simply shook his head and stared into space.
Sometimes the dancers were exhilarated by the nomadic quality of their touring company, but at other times they felt like cattle being shipped in boxcars for inspection at county fairs. At Christmas the Ballets Russes were once again in Budapest, and, following that visit, young Romola de Pulzky was indeed accepted into the corps. Boris befriended her, to Natalia’s slight irritation. She could not fathom why this society girl had attached herself to a company of professional Russian dancers. The Hungarian had joined them in London.
Now, in March, another trip, another language, another country: lilac-and-jasmine-scented Monaco, on the Riviera. The dancers decorated the lovely town, from its harbor to its craggy tops. Wearing wide-brimmed hats, the Russian ballerinas discovered little alleys covered with vines and sipped tea chez Pasquier. Natalia liked the evenings best of all: In the indigo sunset she felt a completeness, a comfort, an inner joy.
Overlooking the blue-green bay of Monaco, Boris and Natalia stood on a high rock, the falling dust spreading about their shoulders like a magic cloak. A light breeze caressed her hair. “I think I like it best here,” she murmured softly. “It has the poetry of Italy and the grace of France. It is a hybrid town, in the hills. When we are old, Borya, you will have to build me a house here, with fruit trees in the garden and a terrace that faces the sea.”
“It seems almost like a miracle to hear you say that: “When we are old. Do you really think we shall grow old together?”
She turned her face to him, like a flower opening its velvet petals. “How else would it be?” she asked and placed her hands on his shoulders.
“I don’t know, Natalia. A gust of wind could suddenly blow you down into the sea, or Sinbad the Sailor could send the Roc to collect you in its beak. You’re very fragile, you know. Anything could happen!”
She laughed. “I’m as sturdy as an old farm horse. Look at me!” And she twirled around on the tips of her toes, her skirt billowing out around her. He thought, she is twenty-three, and I, thirty-eight: almost eight years of two lives that have meshed in and out like two recalcitrant threads, at length intertwining. Eight years, five of them under the same roof, two of them together as man and woman.
He fought the overpowering sentimentality that had suddenly seized him and attempted to laugh. But something in his throat blocked the sound. She was still dancing, round and round, her wide hat a halo surrounding the brown hair. But when he reached her, she stood still, and then, light as an evening breeze, she pretended to collapse in slow motion into his arms. She smelled of apricot and rosewater, fresh, unadulterated by confectioned perfumes.
Leaning his head into the crook of her shoulder, Boris said: “Natalia, we could make 1913 last forever, couldn’t we?”
She blinked slowly. “But how?”
“We could make each other the gift of a child.”
She stiffened, and her eyes grew very wide. “I didn’t know you wanted one,” she said, and her tone was distant suddenly, and a little hurt.
“I didn’t know I wanted one either,” he replied. “But it’s all right, I understand how you feel.”
She bit her lower lip, and said nothing. Then she murmured: “No, you don’t know how I feel. It isn’t that. It’s ... I don’t know how to put it. I feel silly and female, and ...”
He began to laugh and tilted her face up to him. “I suppose you’re right,” he remarked. “I never did say the actual words, did I? I love you, Natalia. But you knew I felt it, didn’t you?”
“I know you feel it now,” she answered, her voice trembling. “Before—I could not be sure. I thought—yes—but ...” She shook her head lamely and held out her hands in a gesture of helplessness.
Then, in the gathering darkness, she wound her willowy arms around his neck and fit the stem of her young body to the birch like firmness of his. Tomorrow he would laugh at the schoolboy romance, but there it was, the peace which had eluded him for a lifetime. It did not matter that he had spent years protecting himself against the pain, years storing up the memory of every slight aimed at him. There had been pain, and humiliation. For her too, years and years of them, of loneliness, distrust, and fear.
“I love you, Natalia,” he whispered into the softness of her hair. And then again, “I love you,” Yet, even as he said the words, the image of Pierre’s strong limbs etched itself over his memory like a faded blueprint. His hands over his wife’s hips tightened, his fingers trembled slightly, and he thought fiercely: Yes, we must have a child.
Chapter 13
In May 1913 Nijinsky once again surprised the Parisian public. He had formed his own choreographic style, all linear planes, stark and savage. In Games he depicted a highly stylized confrontation between a boy and two girls, one of whom was Natalia. The boy had come upon the young women as he was searching for his tennis ball, which Bakst had designed as big as a grapefruit. The second ballet was The Rite of Spring, an elemental bacchanalia that hailed more from the days of the Druids than from those of civilized Attica. Natalia danced the frenzied, dervish like sacrificial virgin who at last expired from breathless exertion. At the end of this performance the gracious French public turned into a mob, screaming, standing in their seats, outraged, offended, and uplifted in turn.
As with Afternoon of a Faun, the newspapers once again took sides for or against the young choreographer. Natalia lay in bed the following day, white with exhaustion. Certainly this was a momentous landmark in her life as a dancer, but she did not yet know how to interpret it. What had Boris said after Afternoon of a Faun? He had seemed to ask: “Can such a genius last
in this world?” Surely Nijinsky was a genius, although intellectually he could hardly express himself. He was subliminal, surprising, and almost impossible to connect with as a person. Childlike, aloof, he did not encourage friendship. Yet beneath it all one felt a heart that did not know how to assert its needs.
Nijinsky was a phenomenon. He was Diaghilev’s creature, yet ingenious enough to produce unique ballets. Still, without his patron lover, the sloe-eyed young man would have alienated the entire company. He did not know how to handle people, how to make them work for him toward a common goal. I would know, she found herself thinking, suddenly fierce. I would know, but nobody’s asked me to plan a ballet.
All at once she knew that this was the direction she wanted her career to take. Entering the master bedroom, she confronted Boris, who had been reading at the table. Color had risen to her cheekbones, points of crimson fire. Her hand trembled on the doorknob, “I could compose a ballet,” she stated, her voice low and tense. “I could bring new ideas to the Ballets Russes!”
She could not tell whether he appeared surprised. He put the book aside with care, taking time to set the ribbon to mark his place, and then he looked up, his eyebrows quizzically arched. “An intriguing thought,” he commented dryly.
“Why not? Because I’m a woman? Isn’t that unfair, Boris? For centuries women have been the backbone of ballet dancing. Yet never a choreographer among us!” Her brown eyes were flecked with golden dots of anger.
He shrugged lightly. “I’m not disagreeing. But Serge has been trying to bring out the male danseur—you know that. This is hardly the proper time to bring up the matter of fairness to women!”
“Then you won’t talk to him?”
He looked away. “No, Natalia, I won’t. But not because I don’t believe in you. Because I have other plans.”
Encore Page 25