But Galina could not stop. Leaning against the wall, she wept soundlessly now, her face covered with red splotches. Natalia began to tremble. “She’s a difficult child,” she said. “She’s not what you once were as a child. You were charming and pliable and well mannered and considerate. Tamara is selfish, indulged by her father since she was born; and she’s also confused. I told Diaghilev I wasn’t coming back, that I needed to stay here with my daughter, to spend time mending with her, reestablishing a sense of trust, of fairness. You’re going to have a baby in several months. Take care of yourself and avoid this sort of strain. It isn’t good for you, and it isn’t good for Tamara.”
“You’re telling me not to come to see her?”
Natalia regarded the tall, lovely form of Galina Riazhina, her fine golden hair, her wide azure eyes—the eyes of Boris Kussov, but guileless. Galina felt the appraisal and flinched. I am not part of them, she thought. I am the outsider, the one whose stupidity caused all this—and so much more besides. “Pierre looks at me like that, more and more often,” she said in wonder, her voice quivering.
Natalia raised her eyebrows. “Oh?” She sighed and stroked Galina’s cheek. “He doesn’t mean to. Neither do I. My darling girl, in many ways it was easier to lose Arkady, because there was nothing I could have done. This is limbo. We don’t know what’s going to happen. And somehow, we all feel responsible. Don’t let us both hurt you by interpreting our nervousness as rejections. But we’re all human. Under stress we each react with a minimum of thoughtfulness. That thoughtfulness should be reserved for Tamara.”
Galina ran out of the secluded hallway, down the corridor, and out of the hospital. Natalia pressed her forehead against the coolness of the wall, thinking: She can’t afford the luxury of guilt. It costs too much.
Several days later when Pierre came to the hospital, Natalia was blocking the way to Tamara’s room, her face white and thin, deep circles under her eyes. “They aren’t letting us in,” she declared in a dead tone. “The doctor’s told me she has a fever.”
Pierre’s eyes widened, and two lines stood out around his lips. “A fever?”
“Come,” she said wearily, “let’s take a walk. Outside, in the courtyard—anywhere but here.” She pulled the veil down over her face, adjusted the egret feather on her hat, and took a few steps ahead of him. For a minute he simply stood in place, mesmerized, watching her small, graceful form from the back: the gray coat trimmed with fur, the shapely legs, the kid boots. She was so infinitely pathetic, so tired and hopeless and dragging. Yes, dragging, even old-looking. An indefinite feeling passed over him like a wave, and he caught up with her and took her arm. She did not resist. It was as if, finally, she had given up the fight.
In the cloistered courtyard they began to march dully around the statue. “Bakst is dead,” she finally sighed. “Serge Pavlovitch sent me a message from London. Fine New Year’s gift, don’t you think? Dear old Léon Nicolaievitch. I liked him well. It seems as though the world is preparing for a giant mourning. Everything around us is falling apart.”
“That’s what I told Galina. She thought I meant—” He stopped suddenly, embarrassed. “I’m sorry about Bakst. He was one of my first mentors. I preferred him to the more refined snobs in the group. He and Serge Pavlovitch hadn’t been on friendly terms for a while, had they?”
“No. The Ballet has changed. Diaghilev’s cohorts are growing younger and younger. Even I felt outdated.” She smiled, but he could see that her eyes were not smiling. “But it’s going to be all right for him. He’s just hired a brilliant young choreographer from Russia, Yuri Balanchivadze. He’s twenty-one!”
“So what are you going to do?” Unspoken lay the question: If ...
She stopped, and he stopped with her. Overhead the clouds were gathering for a storm, and a kind of dusk had fallen. “Maybe I’ll go to America and make a talking movie in Hollywood. Who knows? That would be exciting. Something new.”
His mouth worked, and he laid his hands on her arms. “You can’t do that,” he said simply.
“Why not? It’s exactly what I’m searching for: a way to express myself artistically, without growing moldy and repetitive. Stuart’s been offered a chance to write the screenplay for Toys That Don’t Work. He asked me to go with him.”
“But you don’t love him!”
“I care for him, I’m attracted to him, I like him. Why shouldn’t that be enough?”
“Because it never is!” he cried, tightening his hold on her arms. He dropped them and sighed. “Nothing ever is. We wake up too late.”
She looked up sharply, then continued to walk. “We are both fools,” she said. “Talking to fill the space of our fear. This fever—America! I might have told you I was going to the moon, to allay my own fear of the fever. They wouldn’t let me see her. There’s an oxygen tent over her, they said.”
“The only good that ever came of our being together,” he said, his voice catching in his throat. “But she is good, isn’t she? Isn’t she the most beautiful little girl you’ve ever seen? And she has your chin.”
Natalia shook her head and laughed, without much joy. “She is good, I’ll grant you that. But Galina was as pretty. Maybe you’ll have another daughter, Pierre. Would you like that? Or do men always want sons?”
Without looking at her, Pierre said: “I honestly don’t care. Since Tamara’s accident I haven’t really thought one way or another about the new baby. It’s left me indifferent. Perhaps we all feel a special something for our first. I remember you in Germany, with Arkady. I thought then that you loved him because of Boris, and that if you cared less about Tamara, it was because you never could love me as much as Boris. But now I realize it’s not that. You do love Tamara—only she’s less of a miracle to you because you’ve gone through the process before.”
She regarded him from her clear brown eyes and reached up to touch his cheek. She smiled. “Thank you, Pierre,” she murmured. “It means a lot to hear you say this.”
He caught her fingers in his and pressed them to his lips. “I should have thought to say it long ago. I should have done a lot of things I didn’t do, long ago.”
She took back her hand and stuffed it in her pocket, and they walked silently back into the hospital. They had not seen Galina, who had entered through the heavy carriage door. Trembling in the cold, she watched them disappear inside the building and continued to stare toward the statue, her blue eyes slowly filling with tears. Then she shook herself and briskly crossed the courtyard toward where Pierre and Natalia had preceded her.
From the atelier one could glimpse the rooftops of Paris, their tiled gables, slate gray, and their iron balconies hung with flowerpots. Inside were eaves and attics and student rooms hardly bigger than closets. From them one could see the Seine, wide and green-gray, with the bookstands lined on its quays, and its elegant bridges.
Pierre had bought the top floor of an apartment building on the Left Bank, and had knocked out the walls separating each of the students’ and maids’ rooms from its neighbors. This had provided him with a large work area overlooking Paris, the windows tilting down in a charming way. He came there each day, and sometimes when Galina went there to visit him, she would find his friends there too: Picasso, Braque, Man Ray, who had photographed her with her hair down over her shoulders. Now there was no one, and Pierre threw the brush down angrily at his feet, where it splattered green paint in an absurd pattern.
“I can’t seem to work,” he said moodily, looking beyond her out the window. “I can’t think of anything except that she may never lead a normal life, that she may be a cripple forever! I feel like a failure, suddenly. It’s as if everything else were paper trinkets piled up in a child’s room: all the triumphs, all the commissions, all the good reviews.” He sighed, licking his lips, and murmured: “I can understand Boris now, what impelled him to go to the front line. It must have been my letter! It must have been! There’s nothing quite like losing a child. Nothing can ever fill that void ag
ain, no other child. Part of oneself dies, a part of oneself that was better than you, more than just you. You and someone else, the best of both of you.”
Galina watched him carefully, fingering the wide gold band on the ring finger of her left hand. She was silent, her eyes enormous. “Natalia and I wrought a lot of damage,” he said in a husky voice, balling his hands into fists. “Tamara is the single thing that we truly built rather than destroyed. I can’t bear it, Galina—to imagine her crippled. Because she’s the only one that will ever be—the only child to come from her and me, with whatever we have of good and the towering amount we certainly have of defects and vices.”
Galina breathed deeply and, with the barest tremble in her voice, asked: “Why did you leave her, then? Natalia?”
He wheeled around, his dark eyes flashing. “What are you saying? I left her because of you, because I wanted you! Have I ever given you reason to be jealous of Natalia?”
She shook her head slowly. “No. But I thought you had left her first and foremost because you no longer loved her, that it was only because your feelings for her had died that you were able to come to me, a free man. I did not want to take you from your wife. I thought it was over between you.”
He turned away from her, picked up his brush, and dipped it angrily into a pot of paint. “The palette’s dry,” he said with disgust. “Nothing works anymore.”
“We do, don’t we?” she asked softly. “Don’t we?”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Galina? I’m talking about the paint, for God’s sake!”
“Don’t be annoyed, answer me. Sometimes I think you’re not really with me, that you’re still ... a little in love with Natalia. Tell me!”
The blue eyes held him. Suddenly he was filled with nameless anger, and he cried: “Leave me alone, Galina! Natalia is—my past. She’s a reflex action! Can’t you be sensitive enough to understand that and not read any more into it? Natalia has been part of my thoughts, of my whole life, since I was twenty-two. That was the year you were born, Galina. So all the years of your life Natalia has been with me, in some way or another. Nineteen years! She’s also the mother of my child—my child, who can’t even turn over in bed by herself, my child, whom I think of day and night! Of course, I can’t get rid of Natalia! Of course, I will wake up and say her name first—out of bloody habit! There—are you satisfied?”
She stood quietly, unflinching, her blue eyes like mirrors of the sky. “Pierre,” she murmured, “if I had been anyone else but Boris Kussov’s niece, would you have cared for me?”
“Look, Galina, I’ve had enough. I’m trying to work. Why do you harass me?” He set the brush down again, sighed, left his stool and walked up to her. “Galina. If, if, if. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life. If you’d had hairy moles all over your face, and if you’d weighed two hundred pounds, would you have been my girl? And if I’d been an uneducated, evil-smelling, eighty-year-old peasant from the Upper Volga, would you have slept with me? You are who you are. And among the things you are, you are Boris’s niece. All right?”
“Tell me about you and Boris—my Uncle Boris. I’d like to know.”
For a moment there was an odd light in Pierre’s eyes, a flicker of red. His nostrils flared. She stepped back, instinctively, all at once afraid. “You’ve been seeing Natalia,” he said in a low, tense voice. “What has she told you? Why can’t you let well enough alone?”
“I haven’t discussed any of this with Natalia. But I’m your wife, Petya. You must talk to me. Why is it so terrible for me to ask about Boris? Is it true, then? That you and he were lovers?”
“No!” he shouted, a purple flush mounting to his cheeks and forehead. “But only Natalia could have told you that—she’s always believed it! God knows who else she’s convinced over the years! And yet she should have known, after all our years together, that there was no way, no way I could have slept with a man, not ever! And now you doubt me too.”
Galina’s eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head rapidly. “No, no, of course I don’t doubt you. And I don’t care! It’s all in the past, I wouldn’t have cared however it had been! I asked you only because I love you and want to understand you in every way. I want to be a better wife, to learn why Boris upset your existence, to see that no one ever upsets it again. Don’t you see that, darling?”
But his black eyes were unseeing, and his face grew more congested. He took her by the shoulders, and she could feel his fingers pressing down, bruising her. “All I can see,” he said, a note of hysteria in his voice, “is the face of Boris Kussov taunting me, taking from me all I had, playing with my life as if he were God—laughing, laughing! I believe in the demon because I have seen him, and I still see him now, in your own face, his face! Oh, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he was your father, that he committed incest along with everything else! The damned Kussovs, with their aristocratic inbred genes and their immaculate beauty, with all their riches and their degenerate life-style. You asked me if I would have loved you if you’d been someone other than a Kussov relation? For a while I was fooled into loving your outside, your beauty, your gentleness. But now that I have lived with you, I can see chinks in your armor. I can see weakness, I can see evil! You are not who you seem! You’re like all the rest, a jealous woman, jealous of Natalia and of Tamara! And like Boris you want to destroy me, you want to degrade me—”
She cried out then, pushing him away and collapsing against the wall. All at once he went completely still, the color draining from his cheeks, his arms hanging limply at his sides. He covered his face with his hands. “Oh, God,” he moaned, “what have I said? Galina, my darling—I didn’t mean it, not any of it! Please—”
She lay huddled on the floor, staring at him like a bewildered child. He crouched down, took her in his arms, started to caress the thick blond hair. “My darling, my little love,” he said softly, tears falling from his eyes. “You’re the only pure and lovely tree in my garden, the only encouragement I have to become a better man. It wasn’t I speaking to you. It was a man who hasn’t been sleeping nights, who’s been worried sick about a child. You must forgive me, Galya, you must.”
“But it’s my fault that you haven’t been sleeping,” she said in her clear, low voice. “It’s my fault that you’ve begun to hate me, not Boris Kussov’s or your own. Tamara fell because of me, and neither you nor Natalia will ever be able to look me in the eye again without feeling some kind of terrible resentment. Try to tell me, Petya, that I’m wrong—that things haven’t started to change between us already!”
Clinging to her, tangling her hair with his fingers, he cried: “No, no, my dear sweet love. Nothing has changed. I promise you.” He pulled her up, and pressed her to his chest, where she rested like a child. He sighed, a sigh that pierced his entire body. And then he straightened up and said, without looking at her: “You’d better go now, Galina. I must try to work here.”
Galina waited in the apartment, knitting by the fire, tears splashing unheeded over her fingers. All afternoon she had been profoundly chilled, but now she was too hot. There’s nothing I can do, she was thinking, desperation knotting her throat. Pierre’s violent words, his distorted features, reappeared before her mind’s eye over and over. Dusk came at last, and when the servants inquired after Monsieur, she dismissed them for the evening. Her teeth were absurdly chattering. It was no use. Natalia had been right that day at the house: She had made a sorry mess of things, and now Tamara was at her worst and this was her fault, too.
She got up abruptly and went to the large window. Why wasn’t he coming home? Had he become so bored with her that he could be happy only when she was out of his sight? Or was he simply a man who could never be happy? She felt her clothes clinging to her and shivered.
A nameless terror took possession of her, and she went to the telephone and lifted the receiver. She must call Natalia, ask her to come and talk to her, to fill the space with words, with life. I’m going to have a baby in less
than six months, she thought, but already I know that he has ceased to care. I’m not enough for him. And he blames me.
He blames me because he never really loved me. He still loves Natalia. It isn’t possible to be “civilized,” to love the same man and to share him. It will always be she against me, and I against her. And now he feels responsible to me, and to our baby—but it’s Natalia he loves, and Tamara, their daughter.
Galina went to the mirror and stared at herself with growing revulsion. She was so vivid, so oversized! He had told her once that she was too perfect to be painted accurately. Galina began to sob. She’d been a symbol: the princess, Boris’s niece! Oh, I hate you, Boris! she cried to herself. Why couldn’t everyone have forgotten you?
She felt her forehead and realized that it was hot and damp, that she was shaking. The room oppressed her to the point of strangulation. Without thinking, she threw down her knitting and went into the hallway. Take a walk, get some cool air, she thought, and heaved a sigh of relief. Yes, that would do it, would ease the pressures building up inside her. She would leave him a note in case he came home while she was out.
Her breath coming in constricted gasps, Galina opened the door and ran down the stairs into the cobbled courtyard. This was much better. Without even feeling the December wind, she allowed it to propel her forward into the street. She had forgotten to bring a wrap, but it hardly mattered. Her skin was burning, and her eyes were stinging. She realized she had not left Pierre the note, but what difference would that make? He didn’t love her. He was probably somewhere with Natalia.
Natalia …Galina had wanted to call her on the telephone, to see her. Well, she would walk there. She had never walked from the Left Bank clear to the Bois, but why not now? Exercise was good for expectant mothers.
For a moment she stopped, her mind reeling, feeling more intensely dizzy than she had ever felt in her life. “I must be very sick,” she said aloud, hugging herself in the afternoon dress. “I don’t know where I am anymore, and I can’t stop shaking and shivering.”
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