“Your work reflects your origins, Pierre Grigorievitch. But your name is too tame, too civilized. You should be called by some noble Georgian appellation, such as…maybe ‘Khadjatur?’”
“If you do not think much of my sketches and paintings, then I shall go,” Riazhin said tightly.
Boris burst out laughing. “Right now you are my guest. It would hardly do to shoot your host. Do not take such small jokes to heart. I find your art quite extraordinary—powerful, real, yet also touched with the fantastic. In short—you could become another Bakst. Or—I could be entirely wrong—a Cézanne. Now, who were those friends of mine whom you claim to admire?”
“You mentioned one of them: Léon Bakst. Then, naturally, there was my old teacher, Valentin Serov. Also Somov, Benois—although I am not given to landscapes of his tenderness, my own work being somewhat more—”
“Fierce. Yes. Serov taught you at the Academy?”
“Briefly. He resigned because of his outrage over Bloody Sunday, and since then I have not seen him. That was why I came to you, and not him. I would not have known where to find him, or whether he remembered me. Naturally, I had also wished to thank you—”
Boris smiled. “You would have come last spring, had that been all you wished. No, you are an ambitious sort, Pierre Grigorievitch. You came to be introduced to my groups of friends, the ones who used to put together the World of Art review. You knew that I had been a part of those people. You also remembered that I had money. Everyone remembers that in reference to me: Count Boris Vassilievitch Kussov, whose good taste we may flatter so that he may untie his purse strings. Oh, I am hardly blind to such machinations, but surely a man of your directness would be ashamed of employing flattery as a tactic? I am disillusioned.”
“Sir—”
“You may address me as Boris Vassilievitch. You are not my servant. If I am to sponsor you—ah, here comes Ivan with tea! I hope your appetite matches your talent. I am famished, myself.”
Pierre Riazhin opened his mouth and started to rise, but felt Boris Kussov’s gently restraining hand on his arm. He sat down uncomfortably and regarded his host, and this time the black eyes seemed almost to plead for an explanation. Boris’s own blue eyes softened, but he said nothing as Ivan laid a magnificent tea upon the table. The young painter’s expressive face had made him recall the girl in the hallway of the Mariinsky. How different those two faces were, and yet how liquid the eyes! He sighed, and felt the weight of his thirty years. Riazhin was in his earliest twenties, and the dancer? Sixteen, at most? Two very young people who did not need money in order to expand into creativity, two people with urges that he had never felt, would never feel. And yet he was surprised that the girl had not already slipped from his memory….
“Tell me, Pierre Grigorievitch,” Boris asked, “do you ever attend performances of the ballet?”
“Once or twice from the gallery,” the young man replied. “I can’t afford it more often.”
“Then you shall have to come as my guest. I have a stall. But please, do justice to Ivan’s teacakes—the ones with sesame and honey are succulent, and nobody can resist them.”
The Imperial Ballet School closed around Natalia Oblonova like a cocoon of pure but compact silk. Alone in the large, sloped rehearsal room, she pulled up her thick, ungainly leg warmers and went to the barre. Dawn was just beginning to break, its pearlescent pink peeking between the gray skies of St. Petersburg. She was completely alone. Should one of Varvara Ivanovna’s governesses awaken and find her there, privileges, scarce as they were, would be taken away. For she was not yet a senior student. Rules were rigid, similar to those of a convent—or so the fifteen-year-old girl thought, knowing nothing at all of convents. But she knew the school, and she felt protected within it. Hurt lay beyond its graceful eighteenth century walls of white and yellow stone. Degradation did not penetrate Theatre Street, whose entire left bank was comprised of the various Imperial Theatre Schools. Bounded by the elegant and well-traveled Nevsky Prospect, and by the pleasant Fontanka River, this little street lay ensconced in the heart of the city but secluded from its general activity. The students, each and every one sponsored by the imperial purse, were completely hidden from life except when they performed at the Mariinsky.
Exercising at the barre, making the blood flow to the tips of her fingers and toes, the small, slender girl with the heart-shaped face could feel herself come alive. For a moment, a picture passed in her mind’s eye of a field of red poppies, windswept with the scent of fresh hay. She increased the width of her rond de jambe to chase the thought away. It belonged to a previous life, when for brief instants she had felt the same fire of excitement in the core of her being that she now felt whenever she danced. Her face, not beautiful but delicate in its molding, was set into lines that belied her youth and took all gentleness from her features: Now she looked like an antique Russian icon, proud and ruthless. She stopped her movement slowly, winding down, then sank to the floor and began to execute limbering motions, forming a line with her extended legs, then bending her head first toward one knee, then toward its opposite. The muscles in her back loosened, and she breathed deeply. Thinking was bad for her.
Yet her thoughts kept intruding ungraciously. She had once been a Dew-Drop, and later a Bon-Bon, in The Nutcracker productions at the Mariinsky. Then, the previous year, she had been chosen to dance Clara, the little girl who, with her magic Nutcracker Prince, undertakes the magnificent journey to the land of Snow and the Kingdom of Sweets. This year it had been announced, in a matter-of-fact manner, that she was to take the part of the Sugar Plum Fairy, an honor most often reserved for a member of the Imperial Ballet. To dance the Fairy, dressed exquisitely in pink finery, lifted by her male partner in sweeping gestures, moving to Tchaikovsky’s music in the blue and silver theatre crowded with members of the aristocracy—she lived for this and this alone. Others had surely helped, but she had essentially created herself, and she intended to become the famous Oblonova, just as the daughter of a Jewish laundress had made herself the incomparable Pavlova.
Natalia could not remember the taste and color of love, and she thought it a somewhat pretentious affectation. She cared for Katya Balina, her classmate, and even for Katya’s family, who had taken her in during the first year, before she became a boarder at the school. She was fond of them, especially of Katya’s mother, who always struggled to keep neat and forever failed, a laughing, witty woman who kissed her children and husband in front of the fire, when all the family would take turns reading from a Chekhov play.
The Balins were an alien lot to Natalia, and she knew that they had held her in some awe—this child who had never been a child, whose laughter had never tumbled out of her in spasms of delight, who had never allowed anyone to see her weep. Natalia had never once received a Christmas package, and she was sent only chance letters scattered throughout the year. But the Balins had listened to Katya, who told them that Natalia’s dancing was like no other, that in her movements there was life itself.
Katya was soft, round, and pretty, and talked all the time about her feelings; when an older girl snubbed her, Katya was hurt. Natalia could not comprehend how Katya could care so much for the outside world, for meaningless arrows from the slingshots of meaningless people.
Natalia did not carefully ponder these ideas now as she exercised. Sometimes months went by without a thought like this, but now her bends and stretches could not block out her memories. She recalled the Crimean countryside, so fertile and magnificent in its vibrant hues, aromatic scents, and gentle climate. She remembered the farm on which she had first lived. She did not concentrate on her parents, but they were there: Dmitri Oblonov, the embittered second son of a second son of a very minor squire in Simferopol, a man whose holdings were so scant that he had married Elena, thin and brittle, only because her father had been a fairly comfortable leather worker and she his only heir. They had lived on the farm, always bemoaning poverty, always beholden to the local landowner, Baron Gudrins
ky. Elena had complained. She had wanted to live, no matter how meagerly, in Simferopol, and she still daydreamed about tea with the wives of the local gentry. Dmitri had hated his wife and “made do” with the little maid who helped in the house. He had been—and probably still was—a magnificent man, his auburn hair tinged with red, a tall, massive man with good color and brilliant blue eyes that were obscured by envy and lust. His wife might have been pretty once but had long since aged into mean, petty frailty and ill health. He had loved no one; she had loved Vera, her older daughter, who had inherited Dmitri’s handsome looks and features. Elena had seized on Vera’s beauty as a vicarious means to small gentility, for Vera, placid and not too intelligent, would marry properly through her fair attractions. Natalia—mousy little Natasha, who was neither feminine nor pleasing of character—would never become anything worthwhile. Natalia was willful and thin, like a small, furtive animal: No man worth more than a few kopeks would settle for such a creature. Elena had resolved to ignore her younger child—and she had succeeded.
But even now, Natalia did not hate her mother. In her heart, instead, was a total absence of sensation, as if Elena had never been a part of her existence. She was not taking anything away from her mother, for Elena had placed nothing there with which to start Natalia’s life. Natalia had reared herself; her sister, too soft, girlish, and fearful, had not been close to her either. But Dmitri had been there. Sulking, violent at times, envious of others’ wealth and ease, he had run his small farm, and his younger daughter, to whom he had barely acknowledged parenthood, had followed him, dogging his footsteps in admiration of his bestial beauty. Had she loved her father? Was that love, to watch a man work a land he detested, feeling excitement when he raised his strong arms or pushed aside a cow, but in no way feeling connected to this strange, defiant creature? Yet she had felt a slight connection: She had absorbed his desire to flee, his fury at his bondage. She had sensed his animal will and felt a similar strength within her own small self.
She had imagined Dmitri as a tramp, combing the roads of Russia, befriending drunkards and whores—and had envisioned him happy, unfettered. One could not blame a man for wishing to rejoin the elements. Unwittingly, he had taught her that.
She had loved the Crimea in her own way, while realizing, even as a toddler, that the land did not bind her to it; she had loved it in the same free manner as had the children of the rich landowner, Baron Gudrinsky, who visited each summer from St. Petersburg, knowing they essentially belonged in the capital. Yet the land had expanded her soul, linking her to something greater than herself, greater than her own small-minded family.
And so she hugged the trees and rolled in the soft earth and emitted wild cries, leaping over brooks and attempting to fly, failing gloriously. Baroness Gudrinskaya had seen her one day, and during the annual festivity when she gathered together all the people employed on the vast estate, as well as those who, like the Oblonovs, provided her family with services and goods, she had asked Elena if her daughter had ever expressed the wish to become a dancer. “But Baroness, she is only a goat, that Natasha!” her mother had cried, shocked and bewildered.
“Goats scamper on mountain rocks that no one else can reach,” the baroness had stated, amused.
“A dancer? But where would she learn? That would be too costly, in any event.”
“I was thinking of the Imperial Ballet School,” the squire’s wife said. “The children spend seven or eight years there, at the Tzar’s expense. Then, upon graduation, they enter the Imperial Ballet. But of the two hundred girls who come for the entrance examination each summer, perhaps six are chosen. It is a great honor, Elena Alexandrovna.”
Elena had shaken her head. “Natasha has no talents. And besides, we lack the means with which to send her to St. Petersburg.”
Baroness Gudrinskaya was growing bored with this recalcitrant farmer’s wife. Her summers were long, and she was at loose ends. She enjoyed the ballet, and the notion of sending this wild child to the capital to audition at one of the country’s most prestigious institutions had at first appealed to her. She liked performing good works. But now her amusement was waning. The mother did not think her child had talent—so be it. The child was ugly, anyway.
And then, strangely, the challenge had returned in the form of Dmitri. His ears had perked up at the thought of ridding his household of one mouth to feed, and he went to the baroness. “About Natasha and the Ballet School,’ he began awkwardly. “How certain would we be that they would accept her?”
“Not certain at all. But I think you and I can make a bargain, my dear man. The auditions are in August. That is when my servants return to the capital to reopen the house. Your daughter could travel with them; and in return you would lower your price on next season’s produce.”
“And if she is rejected, Baroness?”
“Then she would work one year in my household, as assistant to my seamstress. She would quickly learn how to sew. And you would not have to feed her for that time, of course.”
The baroness had secretly smiled, knowing that the man’s greed would now win him to her side. The idea of scoring a victory against the town’s most unpleasant individual appealed to the baroness’s vanity: She was only a woman, and an aristocrat, yet she had won a round with a merchant of sorts, a barterer. Her friends in Petersburg would be thrilled to hear this tale—how daring, and how brilliant, to have come down the social ladder, thus, and to have braved a man known for his intensely bad manners and violent temper! The child was no longer the object of the game, but the man had been cowed.
Elena had professed herself pleased. Now Vera could afford new lace with which to make a series of inexpensive dresses. Dmitri had been pleased, too: Had he not hoisted one of his three burdens to the shoulders of this refined and empty-headed city woman, and perhaps even of the Tzar himself, should the chit, by sheer luck, pass the examination?
Natalia would never forget the day that she had learned she was to travel to the capital. She had never been farther than Simferopol. At ten, untamed and unstyled, she could not imagine Petersburg. She had only thought: I am to dance, to spend my lifetime dancing! She had never seen a formal ballet and did not think one had to be trained to espouse the motions of the wind as it wrapped its breath around the barks of frail willows. She was glad to leave what had never felt like home.
In her simple cotton shift and bright red kerchief, Natalia had taken her place beside Masha, the baroness’s maid. There were ten carts and wagons in the Gudrinsky procession bearing goods and servants to the train station several hours away. The August heat had scorched the small girl, who had sat proudly beside the sulking maid. Masha had hardly spoken to her: She probably resented the added burden of having to care for a child during a long journey. There was no true road, only ruts of wheels in the burned grass. Then they had arrived at the little town with its crude sidewalks of thrown-together wooden planks. Natalia had seen her first train: enormous, lumbering, wide. Masha had pushed her into a third class compartment with hard wooden seats, and two bulky men had squeezed her next to the window. She had not wanted to sleep, watching the scenery change from province to province, the lushness of the Crimea giving way to more barren land, and then cities.
When they were hungry, Masha unfolded baskets of provisions, but Natalia tried to ignore her hunger pangs, for she did not want to owe the Gudrinskys for more than the barest necessities. At ten years of age, she had already learned pride, perhaps because her mother had been so blatantly devoid of it and her father’s had been false. Each time the train stopped at a large station with a restaurant, Masha would descend to refill her teapot from the steaming samovar inside. At night, the controller would send away all but four passengers and would raise the backs of the wooden seats to form two upper bunks: Russians, no matter how poor, could not conceive of sleeping without lying down. Several times Masha made Natalia climb down, bringing all the baggage with her, too: They were changing trains. But Natalia learned that Russian tra
ins paid scant attention to schedules: Sometimes, while the Gudrinsky staff was still waiting for its connecting train, night would fall, and they had to make do with benches in the waiting rooms for bunks.
Natalia was mostly silent. Slowly, the unkempt, unacknowledged child of the Crimea, Natasha “the goat” was being shed, and a clearer, more defined character was emerging: that of Natalia who wanted to win a place at the Imperial School of Ballet. She did not think this so impossible; maybe the baroness had begun this adventure as a lark, as a joke upon an unfortunate family unpopular in the town. But she, Natalia, had always felt that something would occur to free her from her sister’s destiny. She was not beautiful, but she was intelligent, though unschooled, save in the crudest manner. Even the majesty of the Orthodox religion had been denied her, for her parents, disillusioned nonbelievers, had rarely made the effort to send her to the village Sunday school; it had been otherwise for Vera, in the hopes that the parish pope might help to make her more eligible for decent matrimony.
As a farm child, Natalia had seen death many times and was not frightened by it. She knew that death was acceptable. Far worse a commonplace existence, which was a denial of the divine side of man, of his humanity. She did not know then that money might have saved her, had she possessed it; for, as with love, she had never known money. Hence she must rely on herself. If she were to emerge with dignity, if she were to accept herself, she must do so alone, with whatever gifts might lie within her. At ten, she did not reason this out—but she knew it instinctively, with a keen sense of self-preservation.
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