Encore (48 page)

Boris. How long ago that had been! She wondered briefly what he would have thought of the new ballet,
Parade,
that had premiered hours before at the Châtelet in Paris. From her box she had watched those strange, modernistic, cubelike figures drawn by her husband: the Stage Managers. He had worked on the designs in conjunction with Pablo Picasso, the Spanish artist, and she remembered how difficult it had been for them to paint the huge curtain, which had dwarfed them. Tonight she had seen it rise majestically before the public, its painted guitar player a living example of the triumph of art over the limitations of time and space. She had been proud of Pierre Riazhin, proud to be his wife.

It was May already, springtime. Yet how few young men had sat in the audience! They had all gone to war, all wasted their lives. Natalia felt herself harden and thought: Somehow, there is never enough protection against pain. She looked at the assembled legal papers and said to herself: Boris wanted to be a hero, and all I have left of him are these. And Pierre? What had he been trying to prove, with Vendanova? Had he hoped that his conquest would make him more of a man in her eyes?

The door opened noiselessly, and a sliver of golden light streamed over her shoulder, falling on the paper in front of her. Pierre stood framed in the doorway in his bathrobe of crimson silk, a man of rich tastes and rich colors, with boundless, gluttonous needs. He looked well there, framed by the luxury in this house. It was her house, her riches, her husband—yet not hers, never fully. Did he know that Boris had bought and furnished this Paris house for him, as a gift of love?

“You are not coming to bed?” he asked.

She hesitated. He occupied the master bedroom in style, his paintings on the wall, his bottles of scent on the dressing table, his cravats scattered over chairs and small stands. He had taken possession of it with riotous joy, another expression of his hedonism. Now she avoided going there at night, seeking to oppose his magnetism in any way she could—the only way she knew how. There was pain there and she could not give to him, could not let him love her. I shall not fight for him that way, Natalia thought with sudden, defiant anger. He must come to me of his own accord.

“I still have work to do,” she answered quietly, avoiding his bottomless black eyes. It was better if she did not look at him. She could pretend to be calm if she did not look. His face, his eyes were the keys that unlocked an unbearable vulnerability in her. His own weaknesses were less discernible these days. Pierre seemed more a man and less an impetuous child—and therefore more complex, less understandable.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said. He came into the room and sat down on the low, ornamented sofa. “Do you have time?” he asked.

She nodded, and pushed aside the stationery. “Of course.”

“It's the Ballet. You know Diaghilev's in financial trouble, don't you? This damned war has taken every last sou, every last kopek, from the reserve of funds.”

She uttered a short, harsh burst of laughter. “What reserve? Serge Pavlovitch has never had any reserve of funds, my dear Pierre. Has he been wheedling you about it now?”

His body tensed. She could see the undulating muscles tighten under the silk of the bathrobe. “Give me more credit than that, Natalia. The company's in trouble and I'm aware of it, all right? Why couldn't you help? It's my future—my present.”

“And my past.”

Their eyes met now, cold and level, and she raised her chin. He stood up and began to pace the room. “You're hurting me, do you know that? Hurting me, as a by-product of some silly game with Serge Pavlovitch, left over from the days of Kussov versus Diaghilev. That's childish, Natalia. To hurt your own husband and to stamp out his future because of false pride. How can you expect things to work out between us?”

“I don't expect them to,” she replied, surprised by the cool clarity of her response. He turned around then, his eyes widening with amazement, and she continued hotly: “Pride! What do you know of pride, Pierre? It's one thing you've never had, not now, not ever! ‘Take care of me, Natalia,' you always say. And who will take care of Natalia? Jacqueline Vendane? Serge Pavlovitch?”

He closed his eyes on her anger, and she saw shame and contrition on his face, but also outrage. Her own fury burst out of her then with a ferocity she could not restrain. “You want to be the golden boy in Diaghilev's stable. With my money! You still despise Boris Kussov, yet you expect that his funds will save your work, will make magic for you! And that you won't have to pay, because you're a genius! Well, I'm sick of it, sick to death of it! What pretensions you have, because you're an artist! The world owes you nothing—not one thing. I owe you nothing. Because you see, Pierre, you give me nothing in return! In life one has to pay. Learn that, once and for all.”

“I have paid,” he said quietly. “For years and years I paid, in waiting. I'm not going to wait anymore, Natalia. Everything you give me you consider a favor. I am not a protégé, begging. I came to ask you as a man, as a husband. Well, I don't want your favors anymore.”

The words resounded with odd strength in the small room. Natalia's lips parted. She rose, a terrible cry tearing through her chest but never quite making it to her mouth. I shall not lose my pride to him, or whatever's left of it, she thought. He will not strip me of my dignity, he will not. “Pierre,” she asked, and he barely heard her, “what do you mean?”

“I'm through, Natalia. Through with not being loved enough.”

“Not loved enough?” Again she was outraged. “Not loved enough. You can speak to me this way, after everything? After Tamara? I had her for you, for God's sake. You were the first man I loved, and the one I came back to. But when I did come back, I truly
came back.
There is no one else for me, Pierre. No one backstage, no one to prop me up, to stroke my hand. I don't care about the marriage vows, but I do care about the commitment. Without commitment love has no meaning. Why, Pierre? Why Vendanova? Why the need for a Vendanova, whoever she may be?”

The answer came to her in his eyes. She said, “Are you that much in need of constant reassurance? Of—of applause?”

“I have to get it somewhere,” he retorted, his hand on the doorknob.

“Please go away,” she whispered. “Go now, Pierre.”

When he had left, she sank back into the pillow. We all need reassurance, she thought miserably. We all need applause.

Too much had been said, and yet not enough. When June came, Pierre went to Spain with Diaghilev and the Ballet, and Natalia remained alone in Paris. More than ever, she missed her profession, and in the house on Avenue Bugeaud, she practiced until her aching muscles glistened with sweat, until she had exercised her yearning for Pierre out of her very consciousness. Summer passed, and then fall.

World events began to intrude on the life that Natalia was carefully erecting for herself and her small daughter. In November Lenin's Bolsheviks took over Russia, driving out the more moderate Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky. Suddenly the March Revolution paled by comparison, and Natalia sat home and trembled, wondering what could have happened to her family and friends. There seemed no adequate way to find out, and in her isolation she imagined the worst. More than ever during these days of estrangement from Pierre, Natalia thought of Nina Stassova and her daughter, Galina. Nina had been Boris's beloved sister, she and her daughter had become Natalia's only family. Now she felt as if part of herself were somewhere in Leningrad—her St. Petersburg—hiding from the Bolsheviks. What else would a wealthy aristocratic family be doing during these troubled times filled' with rumors of bloodshed?

But, much as her thoughts converged on her native country, another revolution became a more pressing concern. In the winter Diaghilev and his small band of followers found themselves in Lisbon, a city under civil strife. As she read the news, Natalia saw Pierre's image vividly in her mind. She sat in the English-style parlor of her elegant stone house on Avenue Bugeaud and pictured her husband cowering behind barricades, or walking across a street, calm and majestic in his dark solidity, being hit by a volley of exploding shells. Crumpling, crumpling. The male beauty of him destroyed, bloodied. Her fingers trembled so that she could no longer hold the newspaper, which was illegible through the curtain of her tears.

She did not know how to wire him for news, as there was no Russian embassy in Lisbon. She waited, adding this fear to the others. Yet all the while she persisted in thinking stubbornly: If he's all right, I shall not communicate with him.

The defiance in her heart strengthened when Diaghilev finally wrote to her from Madrid. Somehow he had succeeded in evacuating them from Portugal, but his plans for a season in Barcelona had been canceled. “We are desperate, my Natashenka,” he explained in his letter. “We have absolutely no funds, not enough to eat. We can't get out, and I can't pay anyone, and so we shall be disbanding in an attempt to survive, each in his own fashion.” Clearly, she thought, Pierre is too proud to communicate at all. Well, if that's the case, I'll be damned if I'll help him.

Still, regret seeped through her bitterness. Boris would have done anything to keep his company together. If I don't owe it to anyone else, she thought, I do owe
him
the effort to sustain Serge Pavlovitch. Leaning her head face down on the blotter of her secretary, she wept with frustration and wrote out a large check to the order of the impresario. She mailed it to Madrid.

When a letter arrived in Pierre's handwriting, she felt the bottom fall out of her stomach, and her hands begin to shake. He had sent her only a few lines, but when she read them, tears blinded her.

We're still alive, and Serge Pavlovitch is terribly grateful. But I've missed you, missed Tamara, and wondered how a man can survive if he is not forgiven. We can't continue apart, Natalia. Is there no way to mend fences with Diaghilev, to have you work alongside me in the Ballet? I think he would be ready to take you back on your own terms.

But the accompanying missive from the director himself was not as encouraging. Diaghilev thanked her for her financial help but explained that the crisis was far from resolved. Only the promise of a solid engagement would save the Ballet from total collapse, and at the moment no European impresario was willing to take a chance on the Diaghilev dancers. He had been trying in vain to strike a bargain with Sir Oswald Stoll in London—and could report little progress in the negotiations. He was at his wits' end.

Boris would have known what to do, Natalia thought, suddenly grim. She called Tamara's nurse and said to her: “I shall have to go to England tomorrow. But only for a few days, so you and the baby should remain here.” As she packed, she knew that she was making the only possible decision. Her marriage and her career both depended on it. On the train to Calais, on the ferry to Dover, and later on her way to London, she thought through what she would say, how she would look, how she would sound.

Once in the British capital, she went directly to Claridge's and telephoned Sir Oswald Stoll, inviting him to tea the following day. She received him in her suite, in an afternoon dress of ivory wool with wide sleeves and a low waist. “I hear that you are negotiating with Serge Pavlovitch Diaghilev,” she said, pouring tea for him in the hotel's fine china. “He is a desperate man.”

“And have you rejoined him, Madame Riazhina?” the impresario asked with a distinguished and subtle smile.

“That's what I wished to discuss,” she replied, looking at him with quick coolness. “You are planning to book the Ballet into the Coliseum, between vaudeville acts? Would you have me perform Armida between the talking dogs and Lockhart's elephants?” She smiled at him then, the most charming, unprepossessing smile that he had ever seen, and she knew at once that he had noticed, close up, the unmistakable aura of her beauty.

“I am a businessman first, a balletomane second,” he demurred.

“Of course. And we are infinitely grateful. London is special to us. I shall never forget the year of the Coronation Gala, Sir Oswald. The British have been most gracious to us. And so I have a proposal for you. Offer Diaghilev a contract, the contract he wants, and I shall pay you the sum of the advance. Between you and me.”

Sir Oswald coughed, his eyes betraying deep surprise. “Oh, don't worry,” Natalia continued sweetly. “I have the Kussov fortune at my disposal. I cannot finance the entire Ballets Russes from my own purse, but I can help from time to time.” She regarded him directly. “But you see, I too have become something of a businesswoman. Diaghilev must not know of this, or it would lower my value as a performer in his estimation. A man must pay for quality, or he comes to disregard its inherent price. My late ex-husband, Count Boris Kussov, was a patron of the arts by profession. I'm not and must be considered no differently from any other aspiring choreographer. Because that is my goal, you see.”

The impresario began to smile and raised his teacup in appreciation. “My dear Madame,” he declared, “I hope that we shall have the pleasure of a long and fruitful association.”

W
hen Natalia returned from London
, she found Pierre in the Paris house, feeding his baby daughter. He appeared more gaunt than before, and there were lines of fatigue etched around his dark eyes. For a moment stubborn pride fought for control, then it dissolved, and he came to her, burying his lips in her hair. She rested limply in his arms, exhausted from the worry and the trip, wanting to be made whole again, wanting to obliterate her pain in his sensuality. But
he
was seeking help from
her,
forgetting that he had left her, that, like Boris, he had disappeared from her life and not she from his. “It doesn't matter,” she whispered. “It doesn't matter as long as we love each other, does it, Pierre?”

But there was so much for each of them to forgive. There were all the years when she had belonged to someone else, and then there had been Vendanova.

The reunion with Diaghilev proceeded with infinite smoothness. He simply accepted her back as
prima ballerina,
and she mentioned nothing about choreography. At this point, all she wanted was to dance again on a stage, and she received this opportunity at Sir Oswald Stoll's arrangement. The Ballets Russes were booked into the Coliseum for six months in 1918, and the Riazhins took Tamara and her nurse to London with them. On November eleventh of that year, Pierre hoisted his small daughter to his shoulders in Trafalgar Square, and they danced in the streets with the British to celebrate the Armistice. But afterward Pierre said harshly: “How nice for the British! I wonder, however, if an armistice can occur in a civil war. Until such an event, we will all be exiles from our own mother country, won't we?”

His wife clasped her hands together, thinking of a man who had been senselessly murdered by his countrymen even before the outbreak of the Russian Revolution.

Several months later Natalia received a letter from Romola Nijinskaya, in Switzerland. Vaslav had been committed to the Sanatorium Bellevue Kreuzlingen for treatment of a condition labeled “schizophrenia.” Too many people had played with this man's life, tampering with the delicate balance of his sanity. Natalia felt sad, anguished at the remembrance of times spent onstage with him and of the parallels in their lives. His daughter, Kyra, would have been Arkady's age—and hadn't Boris turned to a woman in the same way that Vaslav had? But Boris had virtually abandoned the Nijinskys after helping to arrange their coming together on the S.S. Avon, and Natalia felt a stab of bitter shame. As for Diaghilev, he had never overcome his need to avenge his lover's “betrayal.” Had it been like that between Boris and Pierre, with her at the center of their conflict?

That spring, a new and even lengthier London season began, this time at the Alhambra. Natalia could never come to the British capital without being reminded of the summer of 1911, when Boris had finally made love to her at Ashley. But now Tamara Karsavina, who had been caught in Russia during the dreadful last months of 1917, unable to escape until now, rejoined the Ballets Russes in London. She told Natalia and Pierre about the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian capital, about the bloodshed and terror that had paralyzed the city. All the Kussov property had been destroyed.

“And the family?” Natalia asked. “My father-in-law? Nina and her daughter?” She felt her throat tightening and looked at her friend, her eyes insistent.

Karsavina glanced at the carpet, at her fine kid boots. “No one has learned anything about Princess Stassova and the girl. They weren't in Petersburg—Leningrad—when the riots broke out on November 8. But the others—the old count, and his two other daughters, and their husbands and children—they were all killed in the old man's home. There had been a christening, I think—Liza was visiting from Moscow—”

Pierre saw Natalia collapse in her chair, all color drained from her face. After he had put her to bed, he sat beside her, unable to read, unable to think. Their Russia had become a nightmare of bloodlust, its people brutal and depraved. And yet, in his profound shock, he could not help feeling a twinge of animal excitement at the notion that Boris's fine people, with their august lineage, had been crushed without regard for their special status, just as Boris himself had been. In death the great fell with their inferiors, and breeding counted for nothing.

In the months that followed, he sometimes wondered if the little princess, Galina Stassova, had been able to survive the ordeal. He had never quite forgotten the golden perfection of her features, which he had painted with the love that artists always bear the objects of true beauty.

In June of 1919, Tamara watched her mother perform in
La Boutique Fantasque.
The girl of two stood up in her seat to see the mechanical can-can dancer who wore a short, flouncy skirt, and could not understand how this live doll onstage could be her actual Mama, as her nurse was telling her. But she clapped and clapped with her chubby hands, giggling aloud, and afterward she was taken backstage. There, approaching her, came the mechanical doll herself! Tamara was filled with wonder. Bending toward her, the doll said: “Did you enjoy it, sweetheart?” and then the little girl knew, really knew, that this was Mama! She went home bewildered and excited, and before going to sleep, she hugged to her breast one of Natalia's old ballet slippers.

When Tamara turned three, she was already strong and willful, a tiny replica of her father, with black curls circling a round face endowed with black eyes and long lashes. She had her mother's graceful, sloping shoulders, her delicate hands. She was a little princess, conscious of her domain, already able to manipulate the young nurse who took care of her. Natalia spoke to Pierre about her development. “She needs to be taken firmly in hand,” she said, “and we can't do it, working such long hours as we do. Tamara needs a governess, and she needs a home, not a hotel suite. I'd like to send her back to Paris and hire a French or a Swiss governess to take care of her and begin her lessons.”

“But I don't want her away from us,” Pierre countered abruptly. “No one knows how long this British season will last.”

“No, and where will we go from here? We're traveling minstrels, Pierre. A child can't traipse around the world with people like us. She needs to put down roots, to have a country. Since we can't send her back to Russia, the best we can do is to settle her in Paris, the nearest either of us comes to having a real home! And besides, London isn't far. We can visit her whenever we want!”

“You find her a burden,” he tossed at her, but he could think of no valid argument with which to counter hers. To Tamara's dismay, they took her back to Paris and hired Mademoiselle Pichenet, a middle-aged matron from Normandy with the beginnings of a mustache on her upper lip. Chaillou, the white-haired butler who presided over the house on Avenue Bugeaud, declared himself delighted to have part of the family back again. Pierre missed his daughter and blamed Natalia, but he was silent, and the child, ever sensitive to the moods of the grownups closest to her, absorbed his resentment and hoarded it in the secret part of herself. Mama had shoes of magic, but she was also a tyrant, to be opposed.

Natalia was in Paris to prepare for Christmas. It was snowing outside, and this year, 1920, marked the sixth anniversary of Arkady's death. Had it been up to her, she would never have celebrated the holidays again, for the pain of loss made her want to sleep and forget, to obliterate this part of her past that was still with her. But for Tamara she had to push on, to make plans that were abhorrent to herself.

Pierre had fallen in love with her during a Christmas season fifteen years before, a lifetime ago, she thought, touching her hair, which she now wore clipped in a bob. She was sitting in the cheerful parlor, her favorite room of the house, and now she laid down the large print sheet of winter fashions that she had been perusing and thought: But we were all in love that year, each of us hopeless and each of us in the throes of anguish! Somehow this made her smile, and she felt a little better. It could only have been resolved this way, she said to herself—with her and Pierre together. What would have happened if Boris had not died? Horrified, she laid her head in her hands and shivered. But I wanted him to live, and I did love him!

“Mama, I don't want to go for another walk in the Bois!” Tamara was crying, bursting into the room, her curls tumbling over her shoulders. In her fur coat she resembled a small, fluffy rabbit. “I won't go! Tell Ma'zelle I don't have to go!”

“You most certainly do have to,” Natalia said sternly. “Go to your room and apologize to Mademoiselle and tell her that I have something to discuss with her. Then you two will take your walk and work up an appetite for tea. Don't forget to put on your hat before you leave.”

The child glared at her and opened her mouth to protest. But her mother stood up and propelled her out of the room, pushing her gently but firmly ahead of her into the hallway. When she had gone, Natalia returned to the sofa and picked up her fashion tabloid, sighing deeply.

She heard Chaillou coughing delicately, and looked up, startled. “There is a letter for Madame,” the old butler said, carrying it to her on a silver tray. “It is addressed to the Countess Kussova.”

Natalia raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Ah? That's interesting. For some the appeal of a title is irresistible, although one would think it might have less value now, since the outpouring of exiled Russian nobility into France.”

She took the heavy, soiled envelope, and Chaillou unobtrusively turned on his heel and left the room. Natalia fingered the envelope, examining the large round handwriting with which she was not familiar, and the postmark from Constantinople. The letter had obviously traveled far and taken its time to reach her. She slit it open and withdrew a series of folded sheets. Inexplicably, foreboding seized her, and she felt her fingers begin to tremble. She started to read, her heart palpitating in her throat and echoing in her ears. She was so intent that she did not hear the governess enter, discreet in her soft-soled shoes.

“Darling Aunt Natalia,” the letter began, and she experienced a profound shock upon assimilating these words: