by Nancy Kress
“Napoleon’s man,” she mocked. “Then you are bound for Austria.”
“Tomorrow, Mademoiselle.”
“Then you must not be late. Those who conquer must be on time.” She fingered the rose at her breast and glanced impatiently up the street.
“Yes, Mademoiselle,” he said meekly. “Wait, don’t . . . don’t go inside!”
“Why not? I am cold.” But the girl moved closer to him, clear to the front edge of the step, and made no move to close her cape.
“You . . . you are injured. The blood . . .”
“And where do you come from, mon petit, that you have never seen a dancer bleed through her slippers? The great Marie Sallé could bloody four pairs of shoes during a single performance!”
“Who is the great Marie Sallé?”
“Ah, you know nothing. But you leave for the war tomorrow, yes? Do you think I’m beautiful?”
The soldier couldn’t answer. He nodded.
“I can see that you do. And you have never seen a ballet girl. Ah, mon pauvre, watch.”
She pulled off her cape and flung it at him. It settled over Gaspard’s head. He fought free of it, as blinded by her mocking laughter as by the light wool. On the smooth stone the girl curtsied low, smiling, and rose. She whirled, and danced a few steps, and smiled over her shoulder. She rose on the ends of her toes and balanced there—how could she do that? how was it possible?—and began to dance on the tips of her feet, spinning and swaying and forming such graceful arches with her arms that the soldier turned as hot as if he already heard the Austrian guns.
She danced for several minutes to unheard music, and ended with one leg high in the air, impossibly high, balanced on the ends of her toes. Nothing moved. The air stilled, and the light from the still-open doorway did not flicker, and the dancer stood on one leg while the world stopped.
A carriage rounded the corner.
“Oh, vite, give me my cape! Go away now, he doesn’t like to see me with young men . . . go away, I tell you!”
The soldier shrank back into the shadows. The carriage stopped and the girl climbed in, crying, “There you are! I have just this minute come out!” Her voice sounded stretched and sweet. The carriage door closed, and the horses clopped down the cobblestones.
Someone within closed the oak door, but not before Gaspard had studied both the carving above, ‘L’École d’Opéra Ballet,’ and the fresh blood smeared across the smooth stone of the stoop.
He bent to rub his finger across the stain, and put the finger to his lips.
On the contrary, Mademoiselle, you are mistaken. I know a great deal about your dancing. I have followed your long and astonishing career quite closely.
Tant pis pour toi.
The next day, Gaspard did not leave to join his regiment. By midafternoon he had stationed himself in an alley, from which he could see the oak door. Carters passed by, and peddlers. A laundress, a butcher’s boy, a street cleaner. An orange girl, who smiled at him with a provocative dimple. He didn’t really see her, nor the dancers as they hurried in at dusk, except to note that none of them was the girl who had danced for him.
At evening he made his way, asking many stumbling directions, through the city’s theaters: “Please, Monsieur, is this where the dancers from L’École d’Opéra Ballet rise up on their toes?” At the Opéra, he bought a ticket. In the foyer hundreds of candles glittered in chandeliers. Gentlemen in high-starched collars laughed with women in gowns so flimsy and low that Gaspard blushed. No one in his village wore such gowns. Almost his nerve failed him, but he remembered that he was now a soldier and looked straight ahead, unsmiling, until a contemptuous old woman showed him to his seat and thrust out her hand for a coin. He gave her one and, when her hand stayed out, another, although he was a little frightened that all the old women might then want coins. But they did not.
She was not on the stage. There were other dancers there, skimming along on the ends of their toes, floating like the ghosts old drunken Massine, his father’s stableman, used to tell about at home. But not her. This must be the wrong theater. Gaspard was just about to leave, numb with disappointment, when a long line of girls danced out onto the stage and there, at the end, was she.
He sank back into his seat, his legs watery.
She danced for only a few minutes, before the line of girls joined hands and floated off the stage. It seemed to Gaspard during those few minutes that, after all, her leg did not lift as high as the other dancers’, nor hold as steady. She wobbled. It didn’t matter. He had no heart for anyone on the stage but her, and afterward he waited in the theater alley. But this time a rich man’s carriage waited even before she came out the oak door. All he saw was a glimpse of her dark cape, parted for a minute over the flattened silver rose on her breast. One glimpse, and the fresh blood smeared on the stone from her slippers.
The next morning, he left for the war.
Your history, Mademoiselle, your personal history, that is . . . it is most . . . complicated.
You mean I began as a dancer of no particular talent but great beauty, who in the demimonde of that day made her way as a whore, do you not?
You are very frank.
As your magazine is not. A pretty little essay you were planning, n’est-ce pas, about the glory of womanhood under the first Emperor? A marzipan of an essay?
Our feminine readers are refined.
No. They are merely squeamish.
The soldier fought at Ulm. He fought near Vienna. He fought at Austerlitz. In each battle the Emperor was victorious, and Gaspard himself distinguished for courage and loyalty. The shells exploded around him, and men died screaming, and the soldier fought beside his dead comrades with a fury he had not known he possessed. He became someone else, charging across the Austrian battlefield, thrusting his bayonet into the bodies of the enemy. He did not know himself. Afterward, he sat alone beside his campfire and shook his head to clear it, and felt his blood still surging in his veins, exhilarating as drink. His blood, and theirs. The greater the victory, the greater the surging power, as if he had taken into himself the life of those he had slain.
He was only a little surprised to discover how much he loved war.
In April he returned to Paris with the Legion d’Honneur on his uniform. The first night, he looked for the dancer.
She wasn’t dancing at the Opéra. He studied the ballet girls as they floated across the stage in tiny delicate steps—bourées, he had learned those were called—and as they left by the side door for the carriages of rich merchants or government officials. More than one dancer threw Gaspard an admiring glance, tall and strong in his blue uniform. He ignored them all, until the last.
“Pardon, Mademoiselle, but I am looking for someone . . . a dancer of this height, with black hair and blue eyes, very beautiful . . . she was here last summer, dancing in the chorus, but she did not dance tonight.”
The girl wrinkled her pretty nose. “Ah, Amalie Dumont. You had best forget her, mon ami. She is above your reach, under the protection of Monsieur Endart, the diamond merchant.” She eyed Gaspard’s wide shoulders. “But if you should like some other company . . .”
“Where does this diamond merchant live?”
The girl shrugged. “Discover that for yourself.”
He did. He could discover anything, do anything. Walking toward the house rented for her by Monsieur Endart, it seemed he could smell her in the spring air: rose perfume, and clean sweat, and the chalk rubbed on the stage floor that rose during the performance to halo the dancers in ghostly clouds. He went straight to the front door, and the decoration on his uniform got him admitted by the flustered footman.
She came down the stairs to the trim foyer, with its small polished table and fashionable rug. Monsieur Endart was generous. Her glossy hair was piled high on her head; jewels sparkled at her throat. The thin fabric of her dress was cut low over her breasts, and bulged below. She was heavily pregnant. “Yes, Monsieur?”
He blurted, “We met
last year. You danced for me. In the street, outside the Opéra . . .”
She didn’t remember. “In the street? I did? How vulgar of me.”
“I have never seen anything so beautiful in my entire life.”
“I thank you.” She dropped him a little joke curtsy. “But if you would state your business . . .”
“Only to see you again.”
She frowned, and glanced up the stairway. “I see no reason for that. We have never even properly met.”
“You are Amalie Dumont. And I am Gaspard—”
“I don’t care who you are.” A door opening, above. Her eyes darkened. “I am afraid you must leave, M’sieu. You should not have been admitted. But I was told . . .”
She didn’t say what she had been told. Gaspard said desperately, “But you danced for me. You stood on the toes of one foot, the other leg raised so high . . . I have fought in so many battles with that picture of you in front of me. I have fought only for you.” Even as he said this, he knew it was not true. And yet it was.
She smiled. “How loyal. The constant soldier. But you might better have fought as a means to your own preferment.”
“You are my means to preferment,” he said, and saw in her eyes how foolish it sounded. “There was blood on the step . . .”
“There will be blood here if you do not leave,” she said quickly, as the clumping of a man’s boots started down the staircase. Instantly Amalie vanished. But this time the soldier would not shrink into the shadows. He stood his ground.
Monsieur Endart was old. Bent, stooped, white-haired, perhaps blind, or nearly so. He walked slowly past the soldier and never glanced at him at all.
Gaspard smiled at the door through which Amalie had disappeared. Soon the child would be born, in cries and pain and blood. He could wait. Waiting was a necessary tactic of war.
You began dancing during the First Empire, n’est-ce pas? Your first role was in the corps de ballet of Dauberval’s La Fille Mal Gardée. But none of the notices mention you.
No.
No one knew, then, what you would become.
None of us, young man, can know what we will become.
He was sent to Spain, under Marshal Murat. In Madrid he fought against rioting citizens outraged at the seizure of their homeland, armed with sticks and stones and the tools of their trade. He shot a blacksmith waving a hammer in one hand and a poker in the other, and a stonemason firing a rifle so old it must have belonged to his grandfather, and a baker with flour on his apron. The riot was quelled in less than a day. Later, when Spain was invaded by the English, he went back, serving under the Emperor himself.
He was gazetted a corporal.
At Seville he was wounded: four ribs and a collarbone broken. It healed leaving only a puckered scar and a slight bumpiness where the bones had knit. He caught a disease of the bowels, and then a fever, and survived both.
He was made a lieutenant.
Every night, just before sleep, he pushed aside the face of the stonemason, mouth surprised into a long slit in his rough beard just before the bullet tore into his throat. He pushed aside the baker and the blacksmith and pictured Amalie Dumont, dancing on the stone stoop, one leg raised so high in an arabesque that it seemed to disappear into the shadows of the street.
When he returned to Paris, it seethed with soldiers. Danish, Swiss, Dutch, French. Once more he could not find her. Gaspard was older now; he knew people; he had developed an air of command. People answered his questions. He found her not at the Opéra but in a second-rate company just in from the provinces. She danced again at the end of a line of ballet girls: thin, hollow-cheeked, too pale. Her attitude croisée wobbled.
In the dressing room she sprawled on a ramshackle chair, bent over the ribbons of her slippers. The other girls, jammed all together in the small room, twittered and stripped.
“Mademoiselle Dumont.”
“You!”
“Yes, me. I’ve come to take you to supper.”
She glanced nervously at the door. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I am otherwise engaged, Lieutenant . . . uh . . .”
“Gaspard Lafort. Break the engagement.”
The girls twittered more loudly, exchanging amused glances. She said, “No, no. Please leave.”
“Where is your diamond merchant? And the baby?”
“He died,” she said, and he didn’t know which she meant. It didn’t matter. “Please go!”
Gaspard folded his arms across his chest and waited. The man came in, eventually. Not a dancer, nor a soldier. An innkeeper, perhaps, or a small farmer. The innkeeper scowled.
“Mademoiselle Dumont comes with me,” Gaspard said. “Good day, Citizen.”
“Amalie!”
“I will see you later, Michel.” With eyes demure and downcast, her beauty returning with male rivalry.
After the tavern supper, in his room at the inn, Gaspard said, “Dance for me.”
She did, briefly, sly pas de chats and airy bourrées, nothing too difficult. During an entrechat she almost lost her balance. She ended with one leg raised high. He saw the bruises on her bare thigh. He pulled her to him—carefully, as if she were glass filigree—and kissed the bruise.
In the morning she was gone, and with her his purse, his kit, his boots, and his sword.
What have been your favorite roles, Mademoiselle?
I have no favorite roles.
He was sent to Russia, the vast, the unknown.
The advancing army, 500,000 strong, met only small skirmishes. The enemy retreated. At night wolves howled, the first Gaspard had ever heard. By October, the cold froze skin and nose hairs. The Emperor wore a peasant woman’s shawl over his uniform, for warmth. They took Moscow, but as soon as they had taken it, the Russians themselves burned it to the ground. There was no food, no fuel, no shelter. Only cold. Gaspard fought looters in the burning capital, army soldiers beside frozen rivers, mounted cossacks on steppes so swept with wind that it was hard to stand upright long enough to fire.
Crossing an icy river, the ragged army was attacked. A shell landed beside Gaspard and exploded. His leg was ripped off at the knee.
In the cold, the blood drained more slowly, but not so slowly that he couldn’t feel it leave his body, watch it stain the snow red. He lay on his back, frigid wind howling over his face, and stared at the gray sky. In every snowflake he saw Amalie, dancing. In the tavern bedroom, her feet had not bled. They bled now, in memory, and each red drop was the blood of the baker, the blacksmith, the stonemason, the Austrian soldiers, the Moscow looters, the mounted cavalry that Gaspard had shot.
He had not at first chosen to be a soldier. Later, he had loved it. He had given his strength to war, and his will, and his blood, now seeping into ground too frozen to absorb it. Enemy ground. But the enemy must not have his blood power, even though he could not keep it himself. They should not have it. It must go elsewhere.
“Amalie,” he whispered. “Amalie.”
And fainted.
You have been dancing for over forty years, Mademoiselle. You have seen ballet change, become more refined and exquisite—the phantoms of Robert le Diable, the disembodied spirits of La Sylphide, and of course the ghostly dead brides in Giselle. You yourself have refused to dance any of these ballets, refused to dance at all unless the Opéra revived the . . . the earthier works of an earlier time. Why is that?
No reason.
Come, there must be a reason. Is it loyalty to the . . . Mademoiselle? What have I said to amuse you?
In Paris the chestnut trees were in full flower, and June roses scented the night air. The soldier waited outside the Opéra. He gazed steadily at the door, standing on his left leg, balancing on his crutch. His right leg was a stump, dipped and sealed in hot tar.
She came out alone, as if she knew this was the night he would be there. Flowers ringed her dark hair, and her ballet skirt was pink tulle and blue satin. Gaspard glanced down at her feet. The soft blue slippe
rs were bloody.
“Bon soir, Amalie.”
“Gaspard. You are—”
“Home. I am home.”
She stared at his one leg and he saw the swift recalculations behind her eyes, the shift in reaction. Many people looked at him this way now. She smiled. “I honor your sacrifice for France.”
“It was not a sacrifice for France.”
She tried to look shocked, failed. “But surely—”
“It was for you. All of it. And when lose it I must, I lost it to you.”
Her beautiful face turned wary. “You make no sense, Lieutenant.”
“There is no sense to it. Only truth.”
“Please excuse me; I am late.”
She swept past him, but he grabbed her arm. “Dance for me once more.”
“Let go of me!”
“Once more. So I can see what my loyalty has given you.”
“Buy a ticket, Monsieur!” She broke free of his grasp and ran lightly down the street. Even in the darkness, even from behind, he could see how much more lightly she moved than she had before.
He bought a ticket the next night, many nights. She was no longer the last ballet girl in the corps de ballet. She led the corps. She danced in a small pas de trois in Les Amans Surpris. She danced a brief solo in Medea et Jason. Gaspard always stood where she could see him, in a front box or the side aisle or once, when he bribed a stagehand, in the wings. He stood on his one leg and gazed, unmoving, at Amalie.
Did you always plan to be a ballet dancer? Since you were a small child?
I never planned to be a ballet dancer.
But, surely, the discipline, the practice—
I never planned to remain a dancer!
The war had gone wrong. In Paris, they could hear the guns. The tulips stood straight and tall in the gardens of the Tuileries, and the air smelled of hyacinths, decaying meat, drains. People pushed through the streets the Emperor had redesigned, the marketplaces, the quays and wide squares. They carried babies, dragged overladen carts, tugged on frightened donkeys. The enemy was only hours away—the Russians ate roast children for supper—the Prussians used babies for bayonet practice. Get out, leave Paris. Vite! Vite!
