by Colum McCann
Then came the extraordinary look on her face when I flung the watch from the balcony down into the garden.
If you wish to wear your hat indoors, who is to tell you no? (She forgets that a bucket of shit is an easy thing to pour, especially from a spiral staircase.)
You cannot end up mad (Nijinsky) or complacent (Tikhomirov).
A fan was waiting outside the Palais in the rain. Hungarian. Said he escaped in ’59. He stood in the spill from the gutter and said that until he saw me perform he did not know who he really was. Such an idiot. He held a newspaper above his head and the ink had run down his face. Also he reeked of cognac. Still, I signed his autograph book.
Maria took my arm. At dinner we talked about the great ones, Karsavina, Pavlova, Fonteyn, etc. Of course I put Maria top of the list. She blushed.
Later she suggested wisely that one must experience an older dancer as one would eat a lobster claw. She demonstrated quite nimbly, ripping the claw and noisily sucking it clean.
The fools put sequins along my sleeve so that when I lift her they scrape the inside of her thigh.
In the pas de deux there were tears in her eyes, and the streak of blood became apparent. It was dress rehearsal and the crowd was impatient. In the wings she was screaming in pain, God damn, god damn, god damn, I am ruined. She spat at the French costumier. Then she changed her outfit and the doctor patched her skin. All in the space of two minutes.
When she reappeared she had the same angelic smile as always.
The Le Monde critic said she had begun to feel immune to beauty but, after the Bayadère pas de deux, she wobbled out of the theater with tears of joy in her eyes.
Do not allow the critics to make you so good you cannot become any better. Correspondingly, do not allow them to rip the cartilage from your carcass. (Sasha: Your duty is to disprove those who don’t believe.)
Truth: When criticized you go berserk, but in your defense remember that it is those who calmly listen who never change.
Madame arranged for the boy to come over. She said he was from a good family and is studying Russian at the Sorbonne. She answered the door to him. Her lips pursed tight when she brought him into the library. He walked brazenly across the room, tossed his leather jacket on the Louis XV furniture. Madame froze and winced at the sound of the zipper as it touched the arm of the chair.
She put on Stravinsky, then excused herself delicately. We sat looking at each other. He put out his hand and said: Gilbert.
Sometimes the least word breaks the spell.
Gilbert said they had put the silverware on the table in my honor. He watched me eat the melon. I ran my tongue along the fork for him to see and could feel his shivers all the way across the room! For dessert I left the spoon in my mouth an extra few seconds. His young wife looked out from under her thin eyebrows and then excused herself to bed.
On the drive out to Rambouillet, Gilbert licked the steering wheel of his roadster and began laughing. We watched the champagne cork bounce in the rearview mirror. I thought that hundreds must be out on the roads, happy, in the darkness everywhere.
At Dominique’s his friends made a fuss. Rudi! Rudi! Rudi! Gilbert shouted a Cossack toast after stacking glasses in a pyramid. The émigré waiter sniggered at my accent. I threw my coffee in his face, splattering his fine white shirt. The manager came over and groveled, assuring me the waiter would be fired.
Gilbert laughed and kicked me under the table.
Afterwards in the club on rue d’Assis the boys in red halter tops broke into a cancan. The English actor with the black sideburns looked in my direction. Outside, the sun stung my eyes. We walked straight to rehearsal. Gilbert slept on the bench in the dressing room.
The man in the corner seemed familiar but I couldn’t place him. His mustache and eyebrows were thick and gray. He was fidgeting and smoking. I racked my brains, nervous that he might be following me. He did seem Russian, yes, but it wasn’t until he turned to pay his bill that I noticed just how cunning and disenchanted his look was. Then it became clear—he was the émigré waiter from Dominique’s.
He ignored me, left the café, yet made a good deal of noise as he pushed back the tables. He stopped by a fire-eater performing at the corner and then made a show of flourishing a twenty-franc bill, dropped it in the fire-eater’s bucket.
I left the café and kissed the fire-eater’s cheeks (he did not flinch). The asshole waiter watched me from a distance and then finally scuttled away, probably to the rue Daru where he and the others could mourn their paltry existence.
Truth: I conceal my fear in loudness, including performances.
The ovations become more exhausting than the dance. Perhaps one day there will be a ballet of ovations. On mentioning this to Claire she said that any such effort would be very Artaud. I was lost—no idea. Sometimes it is impossible to conceal this blankness. She said it was all right, he’s a French experimentalist, she will get me his books, he might be interesting, something about the theater of cruelty.
She also promised the Richter recording. With a portable hi-fi I could listen to him on the road.
I thought at first it was a joke. I almost cursed her in four languages. I realized it was indeed Margot and almost choked. She said the whole thing was arranged.
Outside Covent Garden. Taking off my beret elicits a roar.
Rehearsal is pure and unpolluted. Margot’s fierce intelligence. She dances from the inside out. For the pas de deux she took tiny faltering steps, dropped them perfectly on stage like tears. She makes us see not only the dance but also what the dancer sees.
Afterwards she brought me to her home at the Panamanian embassy and made a lamb stew, laughed when I pulled my shirt over my head and inhaled the smell. (Over dinner she made a joke that she is the mutton and I am the lamb, but the two decades between us mean nothing to me.)
For the Savoy reception she dressed up fashionably, someone said it was very Saint Moritz, whatever that means. When we walked in all the heads swiveled.
The English claim to civilization is pure shit! They allow their reporters and photographers everywhere. The problem with them is that they see dance as an aperitif, not the actual bread of their lives.
The French critics say you are a god when you dance.
I doubt that.
You doubt the critics?
I doubt the French.
(laughter all round)
I also doubt the gods.
Pardon me?
I’d say the gods are far too busy to give a shit about me or anybody else for that matter.
Walked in the rain, past the National Gallery, the Tate. The bodyguard didn’t understand my terror, near Kensington Palace Gardens, on seeing the Soviet embassy.
Then it clicked and he bundled me away, his arm around my shoulder.
At Margot’s, she heated the leftover stew and made a bitter English tea. Tito was away at some Panamanian function. She wore a low-cut silk blouse. Her neck could have been painted by da Vinci at the very least. She asked about home, said she could imagine Mother in her mind’s eye, she must have been a beautiful woman. Unsure how to answer, I got up from the table and went into the back garden. She came out to say that she hoped she had not offended me.
Margot has a projector set up, dozens of cans of film, arranged by dates, beginning in 1938(!). Sat up all night unraveling the cans of film until I found some of Bruhn. His glorious formality. I went to my bedroom, couldn’t sleep, paced.
The vultures ask about Cuba. I will not let them rope me in. A particularly stupid headline in the Daily Express: Che será será.
Elephant and Castle: one expects a magical fairyland but simply finds another part of Kiev.
Manager, agent, accountant—Gillian claimed they are the holy trinity of any great performer’s life. At the end of the meeting Saul suggested he might be able to squeeze five thousand dollars from the German TV company. A twenty-minute performance, which means two hundred and fifty dollars per minute! I pretended to balk
and could see him sweating at the other end of the table. (Margot says: Do not lose sight of the dance.)
Erik arrived in the lobby of the Savoy. Tall and lithe. He wore all white, even the stitching and zipper teeth of his jacket were white. We circled for a while, out-complimenting each other. He had just spent an awful lot of money on a Miró and the conversation swung between Miró and Picasso—we were surely talking about ourselves (Erik as Miró of course, me as Picasso.)
After champagne we asked the bellboy to find tea and cigarettes for Erik. He sat chain-smoking. At two Erik left for his room with an apology and a tortured smile. He avoided the elevator. The thought occurred to me that the greatest (second greatest?) dancer in the world was taking the steps four at a time.
Together we did an hour of barre, then went to class. The light streamed through the Covent Garden windows.
In the Tate, beside the Turner painting The Chain Pier 1828, he touched my shoulder. Later, on Saville Row, he wondered how we would look in the suits and bowler hats. The clerk pretended to be busy. I grabbed the measuring tape from around his neck and whispered to Erik that he should check the length of my inside leg. We wore the new bowler hats through the city, laughing.
Into the cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue. Darkness.
Erik’s tall silhouette by the window in the Savoy, rain outside.
The English shoemaker was so different from what I had expected. Bald head, dirty suit jacket, face like a Cossack. Above his desk he has a framed picture of Margot. I could hardly breathe in the factory, stink of cow hides and buckets of glue. But his work is glorious. He spent hours preparing the shoes, meticulously going over every detail. Simply slipping the shoes onto my feet seemed to give a new energy.
(The maker on Kaznacheiskaya could learn a thing or two.)
Afterwards in the dressing room, a light burned out in the row of bulbs above Margot’s mirror. She came to my door, knocked a couple of times and grew frantic when I didn’t answer. Rudi, dear, make a wish! (She is very superstitious. Sometimes she catches an eyelash that has fallen on her cheek or a petal from a vase, and she is convinced this will affect everything.)
In Edinburgh the snow came down, brought me back to Leningrad.
Clarinda and Oscar (under a pseudonym) are writing the account of my defection for a publishing house, which is altogether ridiculous but the only thing that interests people. They say it will sell books, that readers want to know what happened, how I defected, blah blah blah. (I can’t even remember the date, July 17 perhaps, who cares?) But I will cooperate and rattle on about freedom.
Their Kensington home is spacious and warm and they invited me to stay a month or two. She promised to wash my clothes, cook meals, look after me, why not? It costs nothing and she’s more cultured than a slave.
In the afternoons they like to listen to dramas on the radio, so very English. They make tea and scones, light a fire. I lie on the bearskin rug. At night they put more wood on the fire and make hot chocolate. Clarinda loves to listen to me play the piano. She says I am brilliant (which is quite a lie, even for her). Perhaps I am getting better, but how I wish I could stretch my fingers farther. To be my own orchestra.
Clarinda found the magazines and stacked them strategically under the three Ionesco plays. I felt like a naughty son, yet I kept my jaw solid, said nothing.
The hotel room was full of assistants, lights, wires, hairdressers, waiters with trays. The makeup artist whispered that Avedon was likely to make a flamboyant entrance. I watched the door, waited. It was a trick, a good one. In reality he was there all along, among his assistants, watching, getting to know me, preparing the angles in his mind. He told them all to leave and the champagne was opened. When I took my clothes off he said: Me oh my.
In the morning I awoke crazed with fear. Gillian called his studio and threatened to sue if he ever published the pictures. Avedon sent me a telegram: Your (big) secret is safe with me.
Erik lay back and fell asleep. (I recalled Anna making Sergei’s imprint on her pillow.) His breath was uneven and stank of cigarettes. Song of a Wayfarer. I kissed him and packed.
Instead of coming through a tunnel the limousine driver wanted to cross the upper deck of a bridge. He said I should see the city lit up. My escorts thought it would be uninteresting, they said the bridge was old and decrepit, but I shouted: Let’s go across the fucking bridge! The driver grinned.
The city was a crazed jewel. I stuck my head out of the window. One of the escorts kept repeating that fewer apartments were lit up as it was a Jewish holiday. (Another neurotic kike.)
I couldn’t stand their chatter anymore so I switched seats and sat with the driver up front. On instructions he closed the glass screen behind us. He was listening to Charlie Parker on the radio. He says they called him Bird because he never had his feet on the ground.
(Nijinsky declined to come down at all. Perhaps every madman prefers it in the air.)
Walked up and down by the newsstand, watched people pick up their copies of The New York Times, thinking, I am en l’air in a million arms. The photograph caught me in perfect line.
Sasha! Tamara! Mother! Father! Ufa! Leningrad! Do you hear me? I am hailing you from the Avenue of the Americas!
Snow and not too much traffic. The fur coat drew laughter and a few smiles. Outside the Apollo a woman recognized me and a crowd gathered. Someone said: Do a Sammy Davis! I stood on a fire hydrant, pirouetted and they roared.
Back down St. Nicholas Avenue in the car. (Nobody believes me when I say there are no beggars in Russia.)
On The Ed Sullivan Show he simply couldn’t pronounce my name.
He had no interest in ballet and he said as much. But he was a pure gentleman with perfect manners. Each hair combed into place. He said that dance was Jacqueline’s joy, so for years he had been trying to develop an honest interest. He claimed that watching Margot and me on television had changed his perspective completely (a brazen lie of course and quite stupid).
He ushered us into the Oval Office. His suit was cut beautifully and his tie was slightly loose. He swung in his chair the whole five minutes. Towards the end of the pleasantries he looked at my feet, said I was a symbol of pure political courage.
Outside, on the lawn, the secret service agents were hovering. Later Jacqueline came in carrying tea and he had to excuse himself.
Walking Margot and me to the helicopter, Jacqueline hooked her arm in mine, said she hoped we would return, that she and her husband hold us both in the highest artistic esteem. In the helicopter we sat in an awed silence while the figures on the lawn grew smaller. (I was momentarily climbing a staircase in Leningrad and the police were chasing me.)
Newsweek: You seem to plow your soul under in order to seed your very own Albrecht.
(a sudden panic imagining Father at the garden plot.)
Pardon me?
For Albrecht you successfully create a new persona.
I am an actor.
But surely you are more than—
Oh no more stupid questions please.
In the room next door I could hear her, already awake. I went to greet her. She smiled and began stretching—neckrolls and leg stretches in a carefully timed sequence. Without thinking, Margot was able to put both her feet behind her head and carry on a conversation. The irony is she claims to be afraid of growing old.
(Lesson: continue to work always for mobility.)
The cover of Time and Newsweek—in the very same week. Gillian was ecstatic.
November 22, 1963. The weeping started outside the windows in the late afternoon, but nobody told us until six o’clock. Margot turned to the pianist, asked her to play Bach, but she was too overcome by grief, her fingers shaking above the keys. We sat in silence, then sent a telegram to Jacqueline. Our performance was canceled. In the streets people carried candles.
In the Russian Tea Room the maître d’ asked for a minute of silence, disturbed only by some fool who knocked his fork from the table.
A
letter came through from Yulia to say she is divorced. She has nowhere to live. Our shithole country.
Another twelve hours in preparation for Raymonda. It is strange that the corps is so surprised when they come to watch me rehearse or when I give class. They sit in the corridor, smoking foul cigarettes, which makes me want to kick them in the ass down to the Ministry of Labor, if there is such a thing. They are lazy shits, their weak legs, unworked turnout, careless feet, they need to be transformed, one and all. The trombones sound like sick cattle, the pianist even worse. Not to mention the stagehands, who threatened yet another strike because the parrots are real and their shit falls from the cages in the wings. The poor bastards complain because they have to mop up.
Margot could hardly talk, her voice quivered uncontrollably. She said the bullet entered Tito’s chest and came out the other side.
In Stoke Mandeville Hospital, after the visit with Tito (lying in bed, saying nothing), we were guided around the wards. The fourteen-year-old girl paralyzed from the neck down said she often imagines being Margot and then her legs can move.
A beautiful eight-year-old had drawn a crayon picture, using her teeth. It was a picture of me dancing in a field, and the little girl had drawn herself watching from the perch of a flowering tree. There was a loveheart on the flip side, both our names in the middle, Oona and Rudolf.
I told her I would hang it in my dressing room. The child could barely move her head and there was spit on her lips, but her eyes were bright blue and she almost was able to turn her mouth into a smile. She said she didn’t wish for much but if she ever got to heaven the first thing she would want to do is dance.
(Some asshole photographer caught me weeping in the corridor.)
Tito will never walk again so Margot must go on performing to pay the hospital bills. Of course she is so very English, she doesn’t see the irony of this. (I am loathe to tell her that Tito deserves what he got.) Outside, she switched her handbag from side to side, dabbed a handkerchief at her eyes, then rushed back in to see him once more.
