Encore

by Monique Raphel High

  Overpowered by nausea, she stood against a gas lamp and vomited, aware that night had fallen and that she was alone in the street. The wind blew ominously around her, lifting her skirt, and she felt the sharp drizzle of hail. She began to panic. She could not remember why she was out in the storm, why she was trembling, why every limb of her body ached with throbbing pain. She would soon awaken, and her mother would be there, and Pierre. With supreme effort she forced herself onward, into the street, blinded by darkness and a stinging cascade of hail.

  She was beginning to stumble, and thought: It’s all right. I can’t walk anymore, I’m going to lie down. I’m going to lie down and go to sleep, and then Pierre will find me. Pierre loves me. She closed her eyes and felt her body slide to the rough ground, not sensing the moment of impact. Pierre! Galina felt for her wedding ring, touched it, and remembered in one flashing moment that it was over, everything was over, Pierre would never love her again because she had trapped him, hadn’t slept with him before their marriage—and what else? She had forgotten, but this afternoon he had told her: She was like Boris Kussov, a user, a depraved individual, and what else? Why was it so essential to remember this now? But it was, it was!

  Galina heard the screeching of the tires and huddled on the ground like a baby. Her dress was soaked through with hail and perspiration, and her hair lay matted on the cobbles. She heard the tires and put her hands over her face and felt the colliding shock of the rubber against the soft part of her stomach, where the baby was. She opened her mouth to scream: Pierre!!! but before the sound came, she saw the red spots over the blackness, felt the searing pain. There was no time to think, I am Galina Stassova Riazhina, the princess, beloved wife of the painter Pierre Riazhin, soon to be the mother of his child—

  “It’s a very young woman,” a man was saying in the night. “But with the storm I couldn’t see her at all, officer. I’m afraid she’s dead.”

  Natalia refused to admit Pierre into the house but threw herself vehemently against Stuart Markham, pounding on his chest with her fists until, in pain, he let her go. Then she fell into a chair and doubled over, her teeth clamped together and her lips pulled up. He could see her swaying back and forth but was afraid to touch her again, knowing that she would lash out and strike him. Instead he sat down in front of her and waited, watching this display of violence with discomfort and awe. It occurred to him that women, in their grief, came closer to pure agony than men ever could.

  After a while she began to breathe again, in deep dry sobs. “He murdered Galina, he murdered her! I don’t know what he said to drive her out into the night during the worst storm of the year—but he murdered her as surely as I live!”

  Then her voice broke as she was stunned with the realization. “My little girl,” she whispered. “He killed my little girl, my sister, my child.” She fell forward onto the carpet, her fingers in her hair, gasping for air as tears clogged her throat and the dam was at last released.

  Stuart went into the entrance gallery and saw old Chaillou, tears in his eyes, and the figure of Pierre Riazhin, his face haggard, the muscles slack in his cheeks and jaw. Pierre took one giant stride toward him and asked: “Will she see me?”

  Stuart licked his lips and examined the man before him. Something inside him was infinitely moved, and he wanted to break the shock, help alleviate the anguish. But then he remembered the woman on the floor in the parlor, gagging with grief. He straightened his shoulders and said evenly: ‘‘You’d better try to forget about Natalia. I don’t know if she’ll ever receive you again.”

  Feeling a presence, he turned around and saw her, disheveled and wild-eyed, in the doorway of the living room. He remembered how the young blond princess had regarded Pierre the night he, Stuart, had found her in the Chateau Caucasien with the American boys. The memory was painful: Galina so vivid, so alive, so golden and azure, and Pierre, unable to contain an unreasonable fury. Had he already been in love with her?

  Abruptly, Stuart wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve, and stepped toward Natalia. But she did not see him, was not conscious of him or the aged butler. Looking at Pierre through narrowed eyes, she spoke to him alone, her voice suddenly high and shrill:

  “Murderer!”

  Chapter 32

  On the glistening hardwood floor the girl stood in fifth position, her head held proudly on the long neck, her hands low in front of her, palms up, fingers relaxed. She was tall for her ten years, and her black curls were held in a cluster by a ribbon at the back of her head. She was a striking child, with a chiseled, upturned nose, a small, well-molded chin, high cheekbones, and enormous black eyes ringed by curling lashes. Her skin glowed a healthy peach tone, only barely moistened from exertion.

  When the piano started to play, she slid her right foot forward on pointe, shifted to the pointe itself, and made a half-turn to the right, bringing her left foot quickly on pointe in front of the right, and finished the turn in the same place that she had begun it. Without missing a beat, she repeated the déboulé a second time, retaining her momentum. She spun around, her dark head the topmost peak of the axis, her arms constant, a flush spreading to her cheeks. Then, gently, she lowered her feet to the floor, made an automatic plié in first position, and slumped forward like a ragdoll. “Uh!” she groaned.

  Natalia said evenly: “That was excellent, Tamara. You’ve really mastered it this time. I’m very pleased.”

  “Are you?” The dark head shot up quickly, the eyes bright and hopeful. Tamara rubbed her forehead roughly with her knuckles and then scampered on demi-pointe to her mother, making amusing faces. “Am I going to be good enough for the Opéra audition?”

  “We’ll see. Remember that they sometimes have five hundred young people trying out and only some thirty or forty openings.”

  “But you’re Oblonova,” Tamara countered. “Everybody knows you!”

  Natalia nodded and smiled. “Maybe so, but nobody knows Tamara Petrovna Riazhina. I’ll put on my blond wig to take you there!”

  They laughed, but Natalia sensed her daughter’s bristling. She chose to ignore it. Companionably, they sauntered out of the practice room and went into the parlor, where Chaillou had put down the tea tray. Natalia poured their cups full and then sat back, wryly amused. Another audition! How long it had been since 1900, when she had gone with Masha into the Imperial School, for her first examination. It was now 1927, and she was thirty-seven years old. Twenty-seven years.

  “What are you thinking about, Mother?” Tamara asked.

  “Oh, odds and ends. How strange it feels that my recalcitrant young daughter has opted for a career in dancing. But I’m so glad, darling. In all my life ballet has been my single constant friend, the one thing that’s kept me going. I hope that it will bring you joy, but I don’t want it to be your whole life. There are other things, too.”

  “There is nothing else for you,” Tamara countered.

  “There’s you.”

  Tamara bit on the end of her index finger and thought about that. Then she nodded, and her bright black eyes flicked to her mother’s face. “That’s true. I didn’t always think I was that important to you.”

  “I didn’t, either,” Natalia said softly.

  “But I remember thinking when I had the accident that it was always your face that was there—you know what I mean?—when I would wake up. And then when I was so ill—I can’t think back too clearly on that—you’d take my hand, and it felt so good, your cool, firm hand. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to feel anything in my legs at all. Then when Galina died—” Her eyes filled with sudden tears, and she looked away, embarrassed. “That’s when I really had only you, wasn’t it? Papa just fell to pieces and stopped caring.”

  “Sometimes,” Natalia said, her eyes focusing on a point above the door frame, “even the strongest man feels that his container is too full for another drop. We all have our breaking point. Your father reached his when Galina died. It was such a horrid way for her to have died—such a waste
! And for him two beloved people died in one—Galina and the baby.”

  Tamara blushed and looked at the floor. “I wasn’t very nice to her about her baby. I told her that it might not live, like Arkady. That was the day I fell, remember? But I didn’t want her baby in our family. I didn’t want Papa to prefer it to me.”

  “It’s all right, darling. I didn’t particularly like her baby, either—for different reasons that were just as selfish. Let’s not think about it anymore. It doesn’t do us any good. Drink your tea, and I’ll give you another cupful.”

  “I miss her,” Tamara murmured. “Don’t you?”

  Natalia bit down hard on her lower lip and concentrated on pouring the hot beverage. She nodded silently. Yes, she thought, of course I miss her. But did any of us ever really know her? Didn’t she finally die of loneliness, that night in the storm? It isn’t only Pierre—we were all guilty, all responsible. I won’t remember, I can’t, not now. Now I have what I have, a tenuous thread, a hope, a ... something. I can’t lose it now!

  Tamara gulped down her tea and cake and stood up, suddenly just a child again, a young foal on uncertain legs. “I have to go diagram three irregular verbs,” she said, kissing her mother with buttery lips. “See you later? At dinner?”

  “Mm. Yes. Of course.” Natalia watched her leave and thought: Lately she’s known I’d be there every night. She pressed her fingers over her eyes and sighed. No, it was better not to think about the options. There were none at this point, anyway. She had burned her bridges, made a decision, and at heart she knew that it had been for the best. When Tamara had been released from the hospital, it had seemed so unlikely that she would ever use her legs again, but it had been such a miracle that she had survived at all that Natalia had refused all offers of engagements in France or abroad and had concentrated, instead, on caring for her daughter. It was she who had implemented the difficult physical therapy outlined by the physicians at the hospital, she who had urged, cajoled, and browbeaten Tamara into using first crutches, and then, painfully, tentatively, her own legs. Now, two and a half years later, she was walking perfectly, dancing, pirouetting, as if this brush with a crippled life had made her earnest desire a bright banner for which to fight, a goal as essential as the Holy Grail. And that’s been good, Natalia thought. Thank heaven for dance! It has made us both survive all the bad times.

  She rose and went to the small English secretary in the left corner and rolled down the top. There, neatly folded together, lay the letters. Natalia could feel the constriction in her chest, the moisture suddenly bursting onto her palms and forehead. She took the small pile to the sofa and sat down again. On the coffee table, beside the silver tea tray, her reading glasses were waiting. She had first needed them the year before, now used them daily. She slipped them on, unfolded the first letter, and began to reread it.

  But she had already committed it to memory, and now only snatches of phrases jumped out at her, twisting her inside. “My lovely Natalia: Hollywood rises out of tropical hills, a fake paradise of back-lot castles juxtaposed with .” And then; “The silent-screen stars aren’t doing so well in the talkies. They aren’t used to having to watch their inflections, their accents…. One wonders sometimes if the real world exists outside of sand and sun and drunken screenplay writers from the East, and cigar-brandishing, agate-eyed moguls from small towns in Poland and Serbia.” The part that was becoming blurry said: “Where are you now in Tamara’s development? You know I think of you, but once before you made a decision, and it was not in my favor. I understood it then, I understand it better now, knowing you better and caring for that little tomboy of yours in my own way.” Natalia put the letter down in her lap, and said aloud: “I don’t want to be your friend, Natalia, my love. It isn’t enough. I understand, but I can’t risk allowing you to use me as a shoulder to cry on. You don’t need that anymore, and I don’t particularly relish that role. I’d rather remain in a small corner of your mind as a remembered joy.”

  She folded up the letter and set it down on the coffee table. The next one was less troublesome but made her shift restlessly in her seat. Something vague in this letter from Michel Fokine tugged her out of her self-absorption. At that time he had been mounting a production in a New York film theatre. “The Americans relish our exoticism,” he had written. “It is virgin ground broken by few, and we’ve enjoyed it, Vera and I. New York bristles with energy. The jazz is mesmerizing, the landscape quite unreal, like Pierre’s American Stage Manager in Parade. There is no true aristocracy here, only money and the power that it creates.” Old words, old thoughts. Old friends.

  I don’t have a life anymore, Natalia thought, startling herself. I am thirty-seven and live the life of a recluse, remembering dead dreams, dead husbands, dead children, and finding hope only in my one living child. It isn’t good—it isn’t good for her, and certainly not for me. Fokine appears to have adjusted to traveling from country to country, a homeless artist; Kchessinskaya thinks she’ll be happy teaching a ballet school here in Paris, but I am nervous, like a reined-in horse. What can I do?

  There was a photograph on the secretary, of Boris and Arkady in Germany, an old photograph that she had forgotten about, which the Zwingenberg innkeeper, Hermann Walter, had snapped several weeks after her son’s birth. Some months ago a newspaper columnist had interviewed Natalia, and an article had followed that had been reprinted in various foreign tabloids, about Oblonova, who had chosen seclusion in order to teach her daughter how to use her legs again, and how to dance. Then she had received a letter, postmarked Munich: “Dear little Gräfin, As you see, we have moved, sold the inn after the war. But we shall never forget that we had the privilege of helping you to deliver your precious son.” They hadn’t even known. They hadn’t suspected how much that resurrected photograph would hurt, would rub her raw. They hadn’t known, the two old people, that Arkady and his father had both passed away, so shortly after she had left the inn.

  The Kussovs were all a dream, she thought, clenching her hands together. They touched my life like spiritual beings, and I was the solid earth, unmoving. One by one they brought their starshine and I closed my eyes, believing them, pretending that I was the sun. One by one they were extinguished in a burst of grandiose sparks—Boris, Arkady, and then Galina. In the end I have survived them all, I the peasant, the earthling. I and my solid daughter, my girl-child. We were not meant to peter out like comets, but to endure like the earth itself.

  Still, what shall I do? Diaghilev predicted this, too, that I would withdraw until it was too late. I didn’t want to be a mother, but I gave up my career three times, each time for a child. I never had a chance to be Arkady’s mother, and I lost my chance the first time around with Tamara. The accident provided the last possible opportunity, and it’s worked out—at least I think it has.

  Natalia stood up, shivering suddenly, and whispered: “Nevertheless, a child’s a child, and I’m grown up. We were not meant to be each other’s keepers, she and I. She’s on the brink of something wonderful. And I? Who would want a ballerina long past her prime, another relic from the Mariinsky?” The empty room filtering the afternoon sunlight did not answer her. Yet that’s hardly true, her mind rebelled: I have as much inside me that is strong and unique as Diaghilev’s young prize, Balanchivadze—“Balanchine” now.

  She sighed and took off her spectacles and brought the folded old letters back to the secretary. Someday, she thought with quick amusement, I shall have to compile my memoirs, someday when I am very, very old, and my feet are crippled with arthritis. Oblonova Remembers. But that will be when my eardrums have caved in, and I can’t hear the beat of the piano, except as it reverberates through my mind.

  The body, she thought wryly, touching her stomach, isn’t so bad after all. But when she smiled, her lips felt like plastic, stiff and false.

  Natalia sat at the vanity in her boudoir, brushing her soft, glowing brown hair. It was December again, and the cold and gray outside seemed to seep into the marrow of
her bones. Three years since Tamara’s accident, since Galina’s death—why did her catastrophes tend to cluster around the holidays, and always come in twos? Arkady and Boris, Tamara and Galina. But her daughter had recovered and broken the spell. And actually Christmastime had not always been the harbinger of death and disaster: It had also been the beginning, that glorious Christmas of 1905, when she had danced the Sugar Plum Fairy and triumphed at the Mariinsky for the first time. She laughed in self-mockery.

  Outside her door she could hear the sounds of the servants busying themselves, and then a sudden joyful voice, Tamara’s. Natalia looked up, suddenly alert, and waited for the door to be flung open. Tamara was so much like her father! “Oh, Mama!” the girl cried, tossing her dancing shoes with buoyant carelessness on Natalia’s bed. “Guess what happened today after class? They selected dancers for the Christmas matinées of The Nutcracker! Your own wonderful daughter, Tamara Petrovna, is going to be one of the Claras! Alternating with two other girls, of course, to ‘rest’ us.”

  “Darling, that’s grand news!” Natalia exclaimed, and her face lightened into that of a very young girl, color rising to her cheeks. “That’s marvelous! But I’m amused: In my day only the greatest stars were ‘rested’—Nijinsky, for instance, because he exerted himself so much executing his jetés. Is the director of the Opéra a more lenient man than Teliakovsky? It would appear so, anyway.”

  Tamara giggled. “Teliakovsky was a mean old bear, wasn’t he?”

  Natalia smiled. “Not such a mean one, really. But very strict. The Tzar could not have been stricter. But lovey, I’m delighted! Tell me more about the ballet, about you—”

  Tamara threw herself down on the floor, and, playing with a tassel on Natalia’s hemline, began to recount in a singsong voice, tinged with unsuppressed excitement, what had happened and how she had been chosen. Her mother listened, but part of her watched her child’s eyes, examining Tamara with great care. There is my determination there, she thought, and Pierre’s immense hunger for life. There is the spark of creativity, but also my own follow-through. She won’t let down until she has what she’s set her mind to capture. Right now she only wants one thing, to shine as a ballerina. Natalia felt her eyes fill with sudden tears.