Encore

by Monique Raphel High

  We had planned then to return to Petersburg, which by then had become Petrograd, but we couldn’t seem to find a driver to take us back to Tiflis. Mama wrote Papa—but because of the intense confusion generated by the war, he never received our message, or else he would have come for us, wouldn’t he? We didn’t want to risk our lives again this time. It had been one thing to come here on the double, thinking we might find Uncle Boris. But knowing now that it wasn’t he, we were going to use caution in returning. Only we never did—the March Revolution came, and Mama was afraid, and no one at home was sending for us. She thought perhaps they’d all been killed, and so we stayed put in the village. Everyone was most kind to us, since we were harmless enough, and we helped care for the officer.

  Mama had changed a lot by then. She’d grown very frightened, and nervous. The disappointment of not having found her brother alive had hurt her very much. She couldn’t sleep, didn’t really want to go back to Petrograd. She seemed happy enough in the village, where we were left alone and she could think and brood. But I missed Papa, and my lessons, and the aunts. It was as though Mama wished to remain lost. Maybe you too felt like that after you heard of Uncle Boris’s death, right on top of Arkady’s. I was still too little to have known how to mourn or even whom to mourn for—Uncle Boris had been like a golden image, not truly real to me.

  Then, early in ‘18, after the November Revolution, Mama caught the cholera. There was a dreadful epidemic and no way of curing it in our primitive village—no doctors, no medicines. She simply died. It seems so cold, so abrupt, to write it that way—but I’ve had to learn to deal with that fact over the years, and that’s really what happened. She grew sick and died. We’d always been together, more like sisters than mother and daughter—and then she died and I was all alone among strangers, in a remote part of the country, and no one at home knew that I was there, or how to reach me. You can’t possibly imagine how broken down communication systems were at that dismal time in our Russia!

  I was able to survive. The Tcherkess family took me in, though there was almost no money left, for Mama hadn’t been able to bring much of her own along. Then, in ‘19, I found a way to reach Tiflis—Tbilis by then—and started sending messages to Papa and Grandfather. That’s when word reached me through various sources about the deaths and the burning of the house. All of them killed! (You had learned of that, hadn’t you, Aunt Natalia? That our whole family was murdered by some rioters, in November of’17?) But I took that news better than Mama’s death. Somehow I’d expected it. I’d been alone so long, I’d known that I’d have to remain that way. I’d long since stopped hoping that Papa would be around to save me.

  Then I found some other refugees in Tbilis—a charming town, full of good people—and we tried to put aside some funds to escape from the Bolsheviks. One of the girls was a tzigane from Moldavia, with a wonderful rich voice, and she taught me to sing the way they do, wrenching your heart and guts out as you do it. We used to go to local traktirs, simple provincial eateries, and sing for the clients, and the owners would pay us a few kopeks, which we then put away. I wasn’t very good, but life was manageable. And it wasn’t difficult to learn how to repel the advances of drunken men. One learns quickly about such matters—even a little princess from the Boulevard of the Big Stables, who’s only fourteen!

  Yes, my dear Aunt Natalia, I’ve changed! I’m almost sixteen now, but I feel as if I’ve grown up very fast, much faster than I would have in the capital. Do you realize—I wouldn’t even have come out at my debut yet? Oh, I know—Papa had such dreams for me: presentation at court, then a brilliant marriage. But do you know, I’m not half sorry that these things won’t ever take place? I’ve seen a part of the world, and I don’t know what’s meant by “brilliant marriage” anymore. You made one, that’s for sure; Uncle Boris was very special, very—well, glowing. But it was you who brought the “specialness” out in him. He needed you, because you were an artist, one of those unique individuals who defies class distinctions and brings some of God’s magic to the poor earth. Maybe I can do something special myself, someday. I don’t know—I’m not certain I possess any gifts. I sing, but not that well, as I’ve told you. And my education stopped when we came to the Caucasus. So about dance, or painting, or formal musical training—what can I say?

  Recently we have come to Constantinople, my friend and I. We crossed the mountains with some hardy people, mostly other tziganes whom Irina knew. The tziganes are accustomed to moving around the face of the earth, knapsack in tow. We found our way—I shall skip the trials and tribulations—to this strange Turkish city, overrun by foreigners of all types and races—Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and now hordes of emigrated Russians. Irina and I are renting a room and singing again, by night.

  And so, Aunt Natalia, I need you. You are my only living relative, so I am not going to pretend to false pride with you. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life all alone in Turkey—I want to come to Paris, to you! If you will have me??? I shall need a visa and the money for a train ticket. Someday I shall find a way to reimburse you. I promise not to be a burden in your life—only let me come and have a family again!

  Your loving niece,

  GALINA ANDREIEVNA STASSOVA

  “Is Madame all right?” Mademoiselle Pichenet demanded, placing a hand on Natalia’s shoulder. But when the young woman turned her face up, the governess blinked, taken aback. Tears were streaming down Natalia’s cheeks, silent tears that dripped down her chin in haphazard rivulets, falling on the sheets of paper in her hand.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Natalia answered softly. “Just fine, mademoiselle.”

  Finally, at thirty-one, Natalia had been given her chance to plan a work of dance. Leonid Massine, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, had succumbed to the charms of a woman and had been dismissed from the Ballet. Diaghilev had been about to launch into a remake of the Mariinsky’s classical extravaganza The Sleeping Beauty—a remake he was calling The Sleeping Princess. For this adaptation he had turned to the only person present who could fill the shoes of a choreographer: Natalia. Pierre was working on costumes and set designs, and once again they were in London, living in a suite at the Claridge Hotel.

  She had never known how difficult it would be to move from individual interpretation of a character to the planning of a whole ballet. There was no well-developed system of notation, nothing like the bars and notes a composer used or the mock-ups that Pierre and Bakst could produce on a moment’s notice. She had worked with the stylized choreographers of the Imperial Theatres, where she had watched Petipa follow the music with a sheet of notes on what he thought the dancers should be doing. Fokine had danced in front of his people, working from a half-formed idea, derived from the music he was using. Massine had been very precise, expecting each interpreter to follow his directions to the letter—there was to be little individual acting, for he as creator knew every gesture that had to be made. Nijinsky had proceeded from a vague idea of a frieze, of the primitive. But all of these choreographers had not compounded their work until the dancers were at hand.

  Natalia, however, had devised a different working method. At first she sketched her ideas and sometimes played with candlesticks on a large expanse of desk representing the stage. She moved them about, interrupting herself to dance out a phrase. Then she would try to remember how Petipa had arranged his Sleeping Beauty. She would ask the accompanist to play a few bars for her, and she would write down what she could still visualize from the Imperial Theatres. Then she would think of ways to change this, to soften the acrobatic nature of some of the steps, to weld Diaghilev’s ideas and her own into a whole. Only after this could she walk into a rehearsal room and see if the dancers could follow her train of thought. Sometimes, with their bodies in front of her, knowing their individual limitations and strengths, she would change a routine, redo a passage, smooth out an enchaînement. It was an endless task.

  There were also some unresolved problems between her and Pierre conc
erning the costumes. He had designed splendid extravaganzas, baroque full-length finery that flowed thick and richly textured, but which made it difficult for the dancers to move. “How can any ballerina worth her mettle execute a jeté when she’s carrying twice her own weight?” she had cried to Diaghilev. Pierre had stormed from the rehearsal room, angered that she had complained about his work to the director. But Diaghilev had not supported her practical objections. He had been most enthralled by Pierre’s and Bakst’s designs.

  They were together in their hotel suite when the telegram was delivered. He took it eagerly from the bellhop, tearing at it with his customary impatience. “Ah!” he cried. “She has come at last, our little princess!”

  Natalia grabbed the paper from his hand, restraining a momentary flare of resentment. He was appropriating something not rightfully his—something from her past, not his, not theirs together. Galina had never been a member of his family. She scanned the words. “Natalia darling: I’m here! Visa took own sweet time, then I became sick. But I’m in Paris, Tamara’s beautiful. Where are you? Love, Galina.”

  Something warm dissolved inside her, and she smiled at the excited confusion of the telegram, at this proof that Galina had reentered her life. “We must go home and greet her,” Pierre was saying.

  Natalia wheeled about. “No, I must go by myself. Darling, Galina hardly remembers me, let alone you! It wouldn’t be right. Besides, she doesn’t even know that I’ve remarried.”

  “It wouldn’t be right not to come with you to welcome her. You’re forgetting, Natalia, that she’ll be a guest in what’s also my house.”

  She could feel his eyes boring into her, daring her to challenge this statement, and now she felt like lashing out that Galina would be no one’s guest, that as Boris Kussov’s only descendent, she actually belonged there more than they, the Riazhins. But she said nothing. Her heart was knocking in her chest. “I’m tired,” she whispered. “Dear God, I’m so tired. Please pour me a glass of brandy, Pierre, and let’s sit down. So much is happening to us all at once.”

  She was thinking of Galina, remembering her as a child, wondering if she had changed. How like Boris she had looked! Natalia pressed her fingers to her eyes and felt the old deep pain of loss, the disorientation of déjá-vu. A breathlessness had come upon her, and she thought: But Galina is hardly more than a child—and I’m not very good with children! What have I opened up—what have I done to my life, accepting this responsibility? Then a rush of passion flowed out of her, the need to care for this little remnant of her lost husband, of the father of her son. Arkady would have been—had been—Galina’s cousin.

  But Galina had resembled Boris far more than Arkady had. In a sense she had been his daughter—the first child to have touched both their lives. Had she then not also been a kind of daughter to Natalia herself? The feeling of dislocation between past and present, between real and imagined, persisted, and she took the brandy snifter from Pierre with trembling fingers.

  “I still think we should both go to Paris,” he said. “We should all be there together for this first reunion—Tamara, too, will need to adjust. You must think of her also, Natalia.”

  “Tamara! You see her alone all the time!” She was referring to the trips he often took across the Channel, “to see my child,” he claimed. In reality Natalia felt that he was escaping Diaghilev’s pressures and their own more and more frequent disagreements. She said: “Let me make the trip once on my own—my daughter thinks I’m a stranger, and it’s not fair. Serge Pavlovitch can spare you far more easily than he can spare me in our day-to-day operations, but Tamara has no way of understanding that!”

  “You don’t go because the ballet is more important to you than she is,” he countered roughly, suddenly turning away. “Now you will go for Galina’s sake, without even considering Serge Pavlovitch!”

  Natalia bit into her knuckle, welcoming the pain. “I’m going because this is an emergency,” she said in a low, tense voice. She took a swallow of brandy, then another, some of it spilling onto her fingers. “Think a little, Pierre! Galina has suffered a tremendous shock—the loss of her whole family, of her country, of her money. She watched her mother die. How can you be so callous as to compare her needs at this time with those of our daughter, who is healthy and happy in her own home?”

  “A home composed of servants,” he said sullenly.

  “It’s a better solution than to spend one’s childhood surrounded by four hotel walls!” she cried. She bit her lower lip and then thought: What the hell, he deserves it, and added: “Besides, I don’t want my daughter to grow up to be an English miss, as cool and calm about sleeping with another woman’s husband as she might be about eating someone else’s cold porridge! Oh, God, Pierre, she couldn’t even dance. Why did you pick her? Why did you do it?”

  Now she wanted to catch the damaging words and stuff them back inside herself. Vendanova had long since left the Ballet. Why had she dredged up this old incident? It was not simply because of Pierre—it was because of Serge Pavlovitch; it was because of the construction crews, the danseurs. She had grown unforgiving, tired perhaps from the extra work, tired also of the years when one thing or another had held her back, had made a mockery of her, had hurt her.

  Once their bitter quarrels had led to a kind of physical confrontation, when she would tremble with fear as he bore down on her, his fists clenched. But instead, the compressed energy would be released in another sort of physical climax, a ferocious lovemaking, the passion surging through them like cleansing fire, scorching and blistering but also healing. Then she would think, aghast afterward at the violence inside them: He wanted to hurt me, and I too could have hurt him! She would tremble slightly, horrified but also fascinated by this side of them that defied civilization. Their love was like a pagan ritual from which one emerged bruised and spent but also renewed. Then would follow a period of intense sweetness, of gentleness, of consideration.

  Now when the moments of rage began, one of them would leave the room, walking or running outside to drive away the tension, while the one left vented his anger on pillows, newspapers, and haphazard cups and saucers. Natalia waited now, watching Pierre. Who would leave this time? Nameless anguish rose in her throat. This hatred, these accusations were not right—just as the war that had slaughtered millions because of the pompous pride of a strutting Kaiser had not been right. My God, my God! Is this, then, what we’ve come to? she inwardly cried. Mutual destruction? And for what, for what?

  She grabbed her coat and ran out of the suite.

  Together they went to the front door, feeling the February wind on their shoulders through their fur wraps, each involved in his own emotions. Natalia was seized with a wordless anticipation: to see Galina again, after all these years! Pierre was curious. He remembered Galina, of course, from that long-ago time when he had painted her. Painting Galina Stassova had initiated the rebirth of his career: Baroness von Baylen had seen the painting—or had it been her friend, the Countess Brianskaya?—and had commissioned one of herself. Then had come those years at the Künstler Kolonie, in Darmstadt—years best forgotten, years of dry bitterness, of loneliness, of rejection. But Galina had been a lovely, lively child. She’d also been Boris’s niece, his look-alike. Pierre had painted her with fierce resentment, frightening her. Actually, he’d wanted to become her friend and hadn’t known how.

  The front door opened and Chaillou bowed graciously, smiling imperceptibly. Everything about the man is imperceptible, Pierre thought with wry amusement. But Natalia was pushing past him, her face coloring with expectation.

  “Where are they?” she asked.

  “Mademoiselle Tamara is having her tea, with Mademoiselle Pichenet,” the old butler replied. “The princess ...” His white brows shot up with the merest hint of quizzicality. “The princess is in the parlor, waiting.”

  In the hallway sudden shyness took hold of Natalia. In the parlor so carefully put together by Boris sat his only living descendent, the child who
had helped to cement their relationship, who had unconsciously prepared Natalia for having a child of her own. As she hesitated, Pierre strode forward, until he had crossed the threshold and stood framed in the doorway, eyeing Galina Andreievna Stassova.

  His strong footsteps had startled her. Expecting Natalia, ill prepared for this tall, wide-shouldered, dark man, her face registered bewilderment and even fear as she looked at him as at an apparition. She had been sitting on the sofa, her long legs crossed, her slim fingers resting in her lap, her torso upright with apprehension. The exclamation of welcome died on his lips. She was so poignantly beautiful, so startling in her eerie resemblance to her uncle, that he could not speak, could not breathe normally for a full few seconds. He could only gaze at her in amazement.

  He could not discern how tall she would be when she stood up, but the legs which she displayed were lanky and well molded, partially hidden by a hideous cerise skirt that had definitely seen better days on another, shorter person. The color was wrong, but the girl was right. She was long-waisted and her breasts were full and high, pushing slightly against the soft wool of the cream blouse. Cascades of hair, blond and glowing, spread over her shoulders, unrestrained by pins, totally unseemly and out of fashion in this day of crimped bobs, yet completely bewitching. The face was a gentle oval, the nose perfect and straight, the mouth large, chiseled and somewhat chapped, and the eyes—he had never seen the likes of them, not in thirty-eight years of existence, most of them spent in quest of subjects to commit to paint and canvas.

  What met her own sight was a man, pure and simple. Galina had seen few of them like Pierre, elegant in a robust, sensuous fashion. The dark azure of her magnificent eyes went to his face like scared rabbits, and she took in the unruly black curls heavily interspersed with premature gray, and beneath them the wide brow, the high cheekbones, the full lips. Her eyes encountered his, and she read the admiration in them. He was appraising her as if she belonged to this room, as if she were a work of art, an antique, a treasure. She blushed and looked uncomfortably away. All at once nameless misery had invaded her spirit, and she was thinking: It was a mistake, I shouldn’t have come!