The Nutcracker Mice

by Kristin Kladstrup

  “It’s peppermint oil,” Irina explained. “Mama says it’s used for making candy.”

  Her father nodded. “That’s right. But peppermint oil is also used as a mouse repellent.”

  A thrill ran through Irina. Of course, she had known this morning when she had found the bottle that it must have something to do with mice. Or rather, she had known that it must have something to do with one mouse in particular. She said, “What is a mouse repellent?”

  Papa said, “It’s something you use to keep mice away. You and I like the smell of peppermint oil, but mice don’t.”

  To keep mice away! Why, Irina wondered, would the dancing mouse want her to find a bottle of something that did that? Because she was certain that the dancing mouse must have left the bottle for her to find. Why else would it have been wrapped up in the handkerchief with the embroidered letter E and left under the mouse cupboard?

  “You know,” Papa said, “I thought about using peppermint oil to get rid of the mice at the theater.”

  “Why didn’t you?” asked Irina. “Is it very awful for mice?”

  He shook his head. “No, no. In fact, it’s quite humane. But Gurkin talked me out of it.”

  Gurkin again! Everyone at the theater had been talking about him today. At supper, Mama had told Papa the news: how hundreds of mice had run across the stage in the middle of a rehearsal, and how Monsieur Tchaikovsky had suffered another fit of hysterics, and how Monsieur Vsevolozhsky had fired Gurkin.

  Now Irina asked, “Why did he talk you out of using it?”

  “He said he didn’t think it would work,” said Papa. “I suppose because he knew it wouldn’t kill the mice. It only keeps them away.”

  Away! Irina was certain the dancing mouse did not want to keep away from the Mariinsky. Perhaps the dancing mouse wanted her to get rid of the peppermint oil.

  She took the bottle from Papa and sniffed the contents again. Peppermint was such a nice smell! Then again, mice had very tiny noses: the smell might be too strong for them. She said, “Would this really keep mice away from the theater?”

  Papa laughed. “Well, it might keep them away from places we don’t want them to go inside the theater. My mother used peppermint oil when I was a boy to keep the mice out of the kitchen.”

  “Did it work?”

  “It depends on your perspective,” said Papa. “My father used to tease my mother, telling her she had simply chased the mice up into the attic. And my mother would say, ‘As long as they stay out of sight, I don’t mind.’ She was just like you, Irina. She couldn’t bear the thought of hurting little creatures.”

  Papa returned to his paper. But Irina pushed the stopper into the bottle of peppermint oil and slipped the bottle into her pocket. She was sure she knew exactly what the mouse wanted her to do.

  Papa was helping at the grocer’s all that week, so Irina accompanied Mama to the theater again the next morning. The bottle of peppermint oil was in the pocket of her pinafore. So was the embroidered handkerchief. “For good luck,” Irina told herself.

  Halfway through the morning, she asked if she might go for a walk. “Just inside the theater,” said Irina.

  Mama was busy stitching gold braid on a soldier costume. “I suppose it’s all right,” she said, adding her customary warning, “but you mustn’t bother anyone.”

  Irina hoped that what she was about to do wouldn’t count as bothering. Clutching the good-luck handkerchief in her hand, she made her way to Monsieur Vsevolozhsky’s office. She mustered her courage and knocked on the door.

  “Enter.” The director had a deep and imposing voice.

  Irina stepped into his office. There were photographs all over the wall — dancers in various poses. There was Monsieur Petipa’s daughter, Marie, wearing the Lilac Fairy costume that Irina had helped to sew.

  As for the director, he was sitting at a big desk near the window. He didn’t look up, and Irina saw that he was dipping a paintbrush in a glass of dirty water. A wooden box of watercolor paints lay open on his desk.

  “Hello?” Irina’s voice squeaked like a mouse.

  Monsieur Vsevolozhsky looked up. He had a thin official-looking mustache — not a friendly beard like Papa’s. And he wore a black monocle that made one eye look bigger than the other — an owl’s eye. “Hello!” said the director, sounding as surprised to see Irina as she was to see such an important person using watercolors.

  But, of course, it shouldn’t surprise her that he was painting. Monsieur Vsevolozhsky had designed many of the costumes for The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. Irina had seen his pictures in the costume department.

  “May I help you?” Monsieur Vsevolozhsky dropped the paintbrush into the water.

  She curtsied. “My name is Irina. My mother works in the costume department.”

  “Are you lost?”

  “No, sir.” She fingered the lucky handkerchief. “I — I wanted to talk to you about mice.”

  The director’s eyebrows went up, and he adjusted his monocle. “Sit down!” he said, gesturing toward a chair.

  As Irina sat down, she couldn’t help but look at the half-finished painting — a picture of a ballerina dressed in colorful rags.

  Monsieur Vsevolozhsky’s gaze followed hers. “A costume design,” he explained. “We will be presenting Cinderella next year.” Then he added, somewhat pointedly, “A ballet with — er — mice.”

  He looked at her questioningly. Irina gathered her courage and began. “I — I know there are some mice in the theater.”

  The director frowned. “A great many mice!”

  Irina took the bottle of peppermint oil from her pocket and set it on Monsieur Vsevolozhsky’s desk.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s peppermint oil.”

  The director picked up the bottle, removed the stopper, and sniffed. He wrinkled his nose. Apparently, he did not like the smell.

  “Papa says it’s a mouse repellent,” said Irina. “You spread the peppermint oil in all the places you don’t want mice to go, and it keeps them away.”

  “It seems like a rather — er — simple solution to a big problem,” said Monsieur Vsevolozhsky.

  “Papa says my grandmother used peppermint oil when he was growing up, to keep the mice out of the kitchen. Papa says he never saw any mice in the kitchen.” Irina thought of what else Papa had said — about the mice moving up to the attic. Where, she wondered, would the mice at the theater go?

  Monsieur Vsevolozhsky cleared his throat. “The Mariinsky Theater is hardly a kitchen.” His voice was stern, almost indignant.

  Tears prickled in Irina’s eyes. Hastily, she wiped them away with the lucky handkerchief. Her voice quivered as she said, “But — but — Papa was going to use peppermint oil when he worked here, and —”

  Monsieur Vsevolozhsky tilted his head. “Your papa worked here?”

  She nodded. “Yes, Monsieur. His name is Mikhail Danilovich Chernov.”

  Once again, the director’s eyebrows went up. Once again, he adjusted his monocle.

  Irina hurried on. “I know you think Papa was to blame for the mouse in the costume department, but that wasn’t his fault! And the mouse didn’t mean to scare anyone. And — and — well, Papa would have used the peppermint oil long ago, only Konstantin Grigorovich Gurkin talked him out of it.”

  At the mention of Gurkin’s name, Monsieur Vsevolozhsky removed his monocle and slipped it into his pocket. He rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache. “Those mice . . .” he began.

  “Please, Monsieur,” said Irina. “Papa is a very good custodian. And peppermint oil is much better than mousetraps. It’s more humane, and — and I know it will work!”

  She hoped it would work. She hoped the mice would keep out of sight and that, somewhere inside the theater, her own mouse could go on dancing. Irina glanced down at the handkerchief, at the pink letter E.

  Monsieur Vsevolozhsky picked up the bottle of peppermint oil again, turning it over and over in his hand. At la
st he said, “I’ll tell you what, Irina. Please ask your papa to come see me. I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Yes, sir.” Did this mean the director was going to give her plan a try?

  Monsieur Vsevolozhsky set the bottle of peppermint oil down on his desk. “I’ll hold on to this, if that’s all right with you.”

  So he could use it for the mice, thought Irina. “Yes, sir!” She jumped to her feet. “Thank you, sir!” She bobbed in a curtsy.

  “Thank you, Irina,” said the director. His voice was still deep, but not quite as imposing as before, because now he was smiling.

  AS THE OPENING OF Clara and the Mouse King drew near, Esmeralda spent her days rehearsing. She felt as if she spent her nights dancing as well, for she would often dream that she was on stage. Many of her dreams were happy: the audience would cheer as she whirled across the stage. But not infrequently, her dreams were bad: her tail would come unwound, and the audience and her fellow dancers would stare at her in horror.

  “Stage jitters — all part of being a performer,” Conrad reassured her when she told him of her nightmares. “You’re doing splendidly. Everybody thinks so, and Madame Giselle is beside herself — I’ve never seen her this happy.”

  Meanwhile, other preparations for Clara and the Mouse King continued apace. Gringoire devised a complicated mechanism for handling the watercolor-painting backdrops. Strings were looped through tiny holes along the top edge of each painting. The strings went up and over nails in the walls high above the stage. By pulling on the ends of the strings, a team of twelve mice could raise and lower each backdrop. Gringoire also suggested that the mice increase the number of candle footlights from three to six. “We’ll dazzle the audience,” he promised.

  And then there were the theater posters.

  These were Maksim’s idea. “I can tell you that the Saint Petersburg mice like to look at the posters the humans use for their productions,” he said. “You’ll generate a lot of excitement if you use posters to advertise Clara and the Mouse King.”

  Using cigarette papers, Gringoire produced dozens of posters. On some he drew Esmeralda dancing in her Clara costume. On others, he drew Conrad in his mouse king costume. And on some, he drew Esmeralda and Conrad dancing together. Maksim made sure the posters were displayed throughout Saint Petersburg. “All the places mice like to go,” he told Esmeralda.

  One of the posters was displayed just outside the secret entrance to the Balalaika Café. Esmeralda saw it there one evening. Maksim had insisted she come out dancing with him. “No practicing tonight; no hunting for food,” he had told her. “Just fun! You need it.”

  Now, as they stood hand in hand in front of the poster, he said, “What do you think, seeing yourself up there like that?”

  Esmeralda stared, her head tilted to one side. “I know it’s me, but I still can’t quite believe it. It doesn’t feel real!”

  He took her arm. “That’s because it isn’t you! It’s Clara! Haven’t you said that’s who you want to be when you’re performing that role?”

  Saying just the right thing was one of Maksim’s many gifts. Esmeralda smiled, and together they walked into the café, where Nadya, Igor, and Dmitri embraced her warmly.

  The music started up, and Esmeralda joined her friends on the dance floor. But it wasn’t long before the floor cleared and she was dancing alone with Maksim. She could hear the mice around them clap and count out loud as she performed fouetté after fouetté: thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three . . . She was so dizzy she thought she might spin right off the floor, but she kept on turning until the ecstatic crowd shouted forty!

  She finished with a flourish of her tail.

  “You see? You are already a star!” said Maksim, sweeping her up in his arms and whirling her around one final time.

  Would the Saint Petersburg mice like her controlled ballet performance as much as they liked her wild dancing at the café? At that moment, Esmeralda felt as if they might. And, as she and Maksim left for home, she stole one more look at the theater poster. Maksim was right, she decided. It really was Clara up there on the poster.

  On the morning after her visit to the Balalaika Café, Esmeralda caught sight of Irina and her father at the theater. The mice had heard only yesterday that Mikhail Danilovich was to be reinstated as chief custodian. Now, here he was with his daughter, the two of them hard at work removing mousetraps. Better still, Esmeralda could see from the small bottle Irina held in her hand that the peppermint-oil plan had worked.

  “Smear it on thick — right where that trap was, Irina,” said Mikhail Danilovich. “We don’t want any more mice.”

  “Maybe they’re only hiding, Papa,” said Irina.

  “They had better stay in hiding if I’m to keep my job.”

  “They will,” said Irina.

  “We will,” whispered Esmeralda.

  It was a promise she was determined to keep . . .

  By giving the best performance she possibly could.

  DRESS REHEARSALS AT THE Mariinsky were important events. The tsar himself attended many of them, and rumor had it that he would be watching the dress rehearsal for The Nutcracker. Madame Giselle, on the other hand, had always made a practice of banning outside observers from dress rehearsals on the mouse stage. “Too many things can go wrong,” she was always saying, and in the case of Clara and the Mouse King, her words proved to be true.

  Some of the mishaps that occurred during the dress rehearsal were relatively minor. Several children in training ribbons tumbled off the stage during the party scene in the first act. Though nobody was injured, somehow, in the resulting confusion, the dancer playing Drosselmouse completely missed his entrance. Then, during the battle scene, Conrad dropped his toothpick sword. One of the soldiers accidentally kicked it across the stage, and the mouse king had to duel empty-handed when he faced off with the evil nutcracker sorcerer.

  But the real disaster occurred after the battle scene.

  The raising and lowering of the backdrops required a great deal of coordination, not to mention strength. The stagehands were moving the backdrop for the Silvermouse family’s drawing room out of the way when something went horribly wrong. The watercolor painting fell forward onto the stage. The dancers managed to skip out of the way, but the backdrop knocked over one of the candle footlights, and the edge of the painting caught fire. Fortunately, the quick-acting fire-mice prevented it from going up in flames. But the orchestra was halfway through the second act before the mess was cleaned up.

  Gringoire was mortified by the failure of the mechanism he had devised for changing the sets. “I suppose it’s better that it should happen now rather than on opening night,” he said glumly when the rehearsal was over. “I’ll fix the problem so it can’t happen again, and we’ll have to hope the audience won’t notice those scorch marks.”

  As for Esmeralda, she was relieved that she had made it through the dress rehearsal without making any mistakes.

  “A flawless performance, my dear!” said Madame Giselle. “Technically perfect! When we open tomorrow night, you will light up the stage!”

  “Thank you, Madame,” said Esmeralda, even as she wondered if the ballet mistress was simply trying to be encouraging. The truth was that Esmeralda felt as if something vital had been missing from her performance. Surely Madame Giselle must have noticed.

  Esmeralda relayed her concerns to her cousin. To her surprise, he agreed. “Of course Madame Giselle is being encouraging. But don’t worry! She knows that what you need is an audience. It will make all the difference in the world.”

  Was that the answer? If Esmeralda was to believe Maksim, there would be quite a large audience on opening night. “I predict a record crowd,” he had told her. “I’ll be there, as will Dmitri, Igor, and Auntie Nadya, and all of your fans from the Balalaika Café. But the posters have done their work, too. I can’t remember the last time everyone was so excited about a new ballet!”

  “Does it make you nervous to dance in fro
nt of an audience?” Esmeralda asked Conrad.

  “I find it invigorating!” he said. “There’s something about dancing in front of others that makes you want to do your very best.”

  Esmeralda thought of dancing at the Balalaika Café. It occurred to her that she always felt shy when she first stepped out on the floor. But her cousin was right: her shyness always vanished when she began to dance for the other mice. Just as he said, her performance was stronger for knowing that others were watching.

  She thought of the night she had danced for Irina. She would dance for her audience on opening night just as she had then.

  Tomorrow night, she would let the music take hold of her, and she would become Clara.

  RATS HAD NEVER COME to see a Russian Mouse Ballet Company production before, so it caused quite a commotion among the Mariinsky mice when two of them showed up for the opening-night performance of Clara and the Mouse King.

  The mouse dancers gathered backstage were all abuzz, wondering if the rats had come to cause trouble.

  “No!” Esmeralda told them. “Modest and Pyotr are friends of mine.”

  Conrad further calmed their fears. “The Saint Petersburg mice in the audience don’t mind Esmeralda’s friends, so why should we? Besides, you should see what they paid for admission — bread and cheese that will last a week for one of our families!”

  Conrad told Esmeralda, “Maksim was right. We’re going to have a packed house tonight!”

  “Is he here?” asked Esmeralda. “Have you seen Maksim?” She felt a moment of panic. Suppose something should prevent him from coming!

  Her cousin grinned. “He’s sitting in the front row with three of your fans.”

  “Dmitri and Igor and Nadya.” It was a comfort to know that they were here with Maksim.

  Conrad said, “Listen! I think Gringoire’s about to begin!”

  Esmeralda’s brother liked to serve as master of ceremonies for the ballet company’s productions, using a device that he called a speaking trumpet. This was nothing more than a rolled-up paper cone, but when Gringoire shouted into the small end, his voice could be heard by everyone in the audience.