She will have to make the first move, he had also thought. She’s lost her husband and her son, but why should that matter to me? She loved him. It’s time I faced reality: Natalia’s love for me was the quick infatuation of a schoolgirl. The woman Natalia wanted another man because I had become commonplace. I don’t want to win her by default because he is dead and she is distraught. I shall stay away.
Now Diaghilev was asking him questions. Evidently, Pierre concluded, he had written to her and not received an answer. Stravinsky had made another attempt to see her and had reported to Pierre that for a while she had remained closeted in her hotel, receiving no visitors. Then she had resumed her work as a nurse and had sent him a brief note: “Igor Feodorovitch, I am touched that you wished to see me. But right now I cannot face old friends. Please do not begrudge me my seclusion.” Pierre chewed on his lower lip. It was so difficult to understand things from a distance. But he was afraid to come closer, afraid to confront what she had become and too proud to overcome his fear.
There is nothing to cling to, Natalia thought. There is no core to Natalia Oblonova. The Countess Kussova was a dream, a fairy tale, and getting married was the greatest mistake of my life. Anger once again paralyzed her emotions. She had been angry since reading Baranov’s letter, angry that the little Crimean waif had allowed herself to become vulnerable. Boris had seized on each person’s vulnerability, had twisted and turned others’ lives into cruel parodies of existence, and she, fool that she was, had allowed him to do this to her own life.
Damn you, damn you, I won’t mourn you! she thought for the hundredth time as she arrived at the train station for duty. Station duty provided a means of escape; she always returned to the hotel too exhausted to think. Now she squeezed her eyelids tightly shut, holding back the agony that had to be anesthetized each day anew. Why couldn’t you have stayed out of my life, Boris Kussov? Why did you have to help me make a baby? Why did you ever love me?
“The trains are late tonight,” Louise Dondel said, her teeth chattering. It was March and the nights were still frosty. The young Swiss girl looked at Natalia and was startled. Natalia’s face beneath the hood of her thick cape appeared white and stark and totally devoid of emotion. Louise bit her lip, shocked. She liked the Russian woman but found her increasingly strange, since her husband’s death. She should have expressed her tragedy, wept, and broken down, but instead she came faithfully, night after night, but with that cold, expressionless face, that alabaster remoteness that discouraged all sympathy. How could she help a woman like Natalia? Or perhaps she had never cared for her husband and now had no reason to grieve.
The first evening, after Louise had learned of the count’s demise, she had said to Natalia: “I am so sorry. I have never been married—” She would have continued to explain why words were failing her, but the other had turned to her with an intense light in her brown eyes and whispered:
“Neither have I. We are born alone and we die alone, and in between we do what we can to prevent pain. Let’s never discuss this, Louise.”
She had looked, Louise Dondel thought, as if she had actually hated her husband and believed that he had deserved to die in combat.
This March night the trains eventually arrived. The women waited in chilled silence on the platform, then tended the wounded and administered care, coffee, and medicines. Louise lost track of her Russian companion. When the whistles resounded as wails in the black, frosty air, Louise hastened toward the warmth of her waiting car. Natalia, she thought, had probably accepted a ride from another volunteer. Louise went home.
At the first whistle Natalia had found herself still mopping the brow of a very young Prussian lad whose left leg had been amputated. She’d nearly had to force the coffee down his throat to revive him. But she did not allow his pain, his wracked, limbless body to register on her emotions. Competently she wiped the perspiration from his brow. When he relaxed, she set his head down on the bunk and made her way out of the train. She stepped from the ladder seconds before the last whistle emitted its shrill elegy. The other nurses were already leaving the platform.
Natalia was lost in thought and hardly noticed the piercing cold that surrounded her. The young soldier had finally ceased to writhe, had calmed down. His other leg had stopped twitching. They said that missing limbs often felt more acutely painful than wounds on the living flesh. She had accomplished something, getting him to lay his head down peacefully. Now she would be able to sleep, too. No one had done that for Boris.
She froze and could not walk: No one had done that for Boris! The horror penetrated like a searing blade slashing through her, and she bent over, sickened. Now she knew why she continued to come here, night after endless night: to prevent another man from dying alone. Natalia shook the thought from her but could not remove the bitter intensity of her pain. I am atoning for letting him leave, for letting him die alone, she thought. She could picture herself spending the rest of her life plodding to the Geneva train station to mop fevered brows, to whisper words of encouragement to total strangers in the middle of the night. Hers would be an endless expiation.
Natalia’s eyes filled with tears, and she missed a step. She felt herself slipping into a puddle, felt the clammy cold of the sloshy water on the platform. But she could not rise. Utter exhaustion had come over her, enveloping her reflexes in a narcotic stupor. She thought: This too is death. Borya died alone and now I am paying for it. Her head lolled back and hit the pavement as she fainted.
Pierre sat in the wing chair by the bed and watched the little heart-shaped face delineated against a mound of white pillows. She is the love of my heart, he thought, and felt a rush of anger at his own weakness. She breathed with difficulty. The feather-soft brown hair formed a halo around her pale features, suggesting to him her sudden vulnerability.
She stirred, and her eyes fluttered open like tentative butterflies poised over honeysuckle. “Natalia,” he said. He moved his chair closer to the bed and took the small hand that lay on the coverlet, its palm perspiring. “You slept a long time.”
She turned her face to him, her eyes wide and surprised. “You?” she whispered. She was too weak to speak up and too limp to sit. “Who let you in?”
He smiled. “The nurse. She needed some time off. I took over, if you will. Do you mind?”
She shook her head. “I don’t care, Pierre. But don’t feel sorry for me. It doesn’t matter anymore.” She swept the room with her eyes, then looked at Pierre again, insistently. “Who told you?” she asked.
He shrugged lightly and smiled. “Stravinsky. You probably don’t even remember that he came to see you while you were in the hospital. You were at your worst then, after they found you frozen to the pavement of the train station in a pool of ice. You were lucky to have escaped with pneumonia.”
“Incredibly lucky,” she said ironically. Shiny dots of fever marked her prominent cheekbones, and on the coverlet her hand trembled, its blue veins marbling the white skin. Suddenly, her face contorted with anguish, and tears streamed from her eyes. “I wish you would let me die,” she whispered.
He turned away, overcome by what he had seen. Regaining control with effort, he said, “I didn’t come to let you sink into abject self-pity, Natalia. I know what that’s like: It’s death-in-life, and I’ve succumbed to it more than once myself. I didn’t make the journey to come to a funeral, either.”
“Well, why did you come?” Her pupils had enlarged, and in her glowing, excited face they shone strangely. Suddenly she said, in small gasps: “Show me what it is to live, Pierre! You used to love me!” She was trying to sit up, her lips parted, her breath rasping. The cover fell from her armpits to her waist, revealing her nightgown open to her cleavage, which had never been deep but which, to Pierre, was riveting now. The beginning of her two firm apple breasts stared at him, glistening with moistness. She did nothing to hide them.
He stood up and began to pace the room. At length he stopped in front of her, and placed his hands on her s
houlders as if leaning on her for support. She raised her hands to his, looking at him through her shining eyes. “It wouldn’t work, Natalia,” he said finally. “I’m not a substitute. A man has to be loved for himself alone—at least, this one does.”
They stared silently at each other. Then Pierre said: “Diaghilev is planning to come to Lausanne with Miassin, to set up a new committee. For the North American season next year. He needs you, Natalia.”
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “Thank you,” she said and pressed his hands with her own.
In the fall of 1915 Natalia received Serge Diaghilev in her suite at the Hotel Metropole. After the chambermaid wheeled in a tray of teacakes, Natalia herself, Russian fashion, poured him the scented brown infusion into a cup of the most delicate Meissen porcelain. He smiled beneath his thin mustache. “Tea in a cup—it seems barbaric, does it not, my dear?” he remarked.
“I have lost touch with Russia, Serge Pavlovitch. Somehow I do not care anymore. Lydia, Katya—they are friends of the past. My life no longer touches theirs, and I have no desire to reintegrate the country of my birth.”
“And I? Am I another ‘friend of the past’?”
“In two years a lifetime can go by,” she said, and then, hearing her own words, she turned aside and bit her lower lip.
“Indeed. Natalia—you must realize how much I miss him, too. We weren’t always on the same side, but we were always friends—ever since I first arrived in Petersburg, at eighteen, and he, at sixteen, was still at the May gymnasium. Not even Serov’s death affected me so deeply.”
“It does no good to talk about it,” Natalia said sharply. She breathed quickly in and out and looked at Diaghilev. “I didn’t mean to be rude to you, Serge Pavlovitch. But I don’t want to hurt anymore. I have nothing left of him except material things—possessions—and so I’m going to pick up from 1908, when I was alone with my talent and my ambition. This may sound hard to you, but I’ve always been a hard woman. I don’t wish to relive my experience of him.”
Her clear brown eyes were fastened on him with an intensity that belied the coldness of her words. He could not meet her gaze and examined his finely manicured nails instead. “Natalia—I am reassembling the Ballets Russes,” he said. “The war nearly broke us totally. The company won’t have many of the same people, as you can fathom. I have Miassin; he could become as great a choreographer as Fokine when properly launched. He doesn’t dance like our previous male star, but in his own way he parallels Nijinsky. I have excellent artists, a young Russian couple, Gontcharova and Larionov. They’ve worked for me before, but now they’ve given us a new perspective. I also hope to rekindle the interest of Pierre Riazhin. Will you join us?”
Color rose to her checks, which were still wan from her illness. “I want nothing else,” she answered simply. She smiled. “And Pierre—I’m certain he’ll be enthusiastic. He hasn’t done anything these past years to equal the work he did for the Ballets Russes, and before that, for the Paris Exhibition.”
Raising his brows, Diaghilev said: “Very true. He had an inspiration then—the Sugar Plum Fairy. But I had nothing against the young man—I believe it was Boris who dropped him from the committee.”
“None of this was my concern,” she replied quietly. Her hands lay folded in her lap, and she sat erect and sylphlike in the armchair. “Will I be dancing my old roles, Serge Pavlovitch? Or something new?”
“A bit of both, of course. We are attempting to conjure up the miracles needed to have Nijinsky released from his political internment. Then you and he can conquer America. The Firebird, Natalia. Otto Kahn asked me to bring him the Firebird. We each see you in a different role: Pierre as the Sugar Plum, Kahn as the Firebird—and I rather fancied you as Tahor. You are a multifaceted dancer, ma chère. A treasure.”
“Thank you, Serge Pavlovitch.”
He scratched his chin and regarded her directly. “One final question, Natalia. Indelicate but necessary. May I ask it?”
“Please do. But I shan’t promise to answer you.”
“You are a wealthy woman. We have our usual financial dilemmas, only worse, because of the impossibility of performing in London and Paris last year and this. Would you provide us with some backing, Natalia?”
The fingers stiffened in her lap. “I do not want to step into his shoes,” she said in an undertone. “I am a dancer. Let me dance for you—but do not use me to take his place. Someone not long ago told me that no man could accept being a substitute. No woman can, either. Besides, my assets are for the most part tied up in France, and I couldn’t get them out because of the war. Maybe later, if no one else can aid your enterprise.” She coughed and looked at the cup of tea in front of her. “I need to recapture Oblonova,” she said, “and to forget the Countess Kussova.”
“Of course, my dear.” Diaghilev rose and bowed over her hand. “Rehearsals will be starting soon. And we shall expect you to participate in our committee meetings at my house in Ouchy.”
She stood up, too, and now a surge of hope pierced through her, a burst of energy and courage. Looking into his massive dark face, she said, somewhat breathlessly: “I would be honored, Serge Pavlovitch. But there’s something else—something that I’d discussed with Borya long ago.” She hesitated, losing her nerve, then resolutely plunged in: “I should like the opportunity to choreograph a ballet. You know I could do it!”
He gave her a piercing stare, cocking his head to one side. Then he patted her arm. “Sweet Natasha,” he replied, smiling, “a child must learn to walk before it can run. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Ease your way back in, like a good girl.”
Maybe he was right, maybe it was too soon. When he had left her alone, she walked pensively to the window. Ouchy was a mere village by Lake Geneva, directly below Lausanne. Could she summon enough courage to open up her house on Sauvabelin? Even if she didn’t now, wouldn’t she eventually be forced to confront that city?
She went to her secretary and rolled back the top. On a piece of strong vellum she began to write, dipping her quill in the sunken inkwell. “Pierre,” her note read:
If both of us are to move to Lausanne to rejoin Diaghilev’s Ballet, I shall have to take up quarters in the house I own there. You will need to live somewhere, too. Come as a guest in my home, and I shall be grateful for your presence. By myself I could not leave Geneva.
Her head sank softly onto her outstretched arms, and she closed her eyes. There was never any respite from the pain. It lurked in each corner of her existence and laughed at her like an evil spirit, a Caliban. But I need to dance, she thought desperately. I shall have to go.
Nothing had remained static. Natalia felt like a woman who had awakened in the dark and had to blink to get her bearings; her world was like a kaleidoscope that had been shaken, all the colored pieces reassembled into a different landscape.
Pierre’s presence in the chalet was disconcerting. He was so large, so vital, that she felt him in the house even when he was elsewhere. It even smells of him, she thought, recalling in a flash the distinctive scent of his bedroom. He had begun to work with Larionov on a new ballet of Miassin’s composition, The Midnight Sun, and there were pots of paint and canvases all over the living room. Brigitte was frightened of him and went scurrying to Alfred in the garden, telling stories about the black-haired, savage-looking painter from the Caucasus. Had the countess taken leave of her senses, inviting such a man as a guest? And what was worse, without a chaperone? But Natalia was thankful for Pierre’s presence and indifferent to convention.
Pierre, on the other hand, was caught up in his work. For the first time he would actually sign his name to a set design. He and the Muscovite Larionov spent hours sketching, then painstakingly converting their drawings to models, or copying back cloths. They were making a huge sun with a backdrop of the deepest blue, almost black. High-strung and ebullient, Pierre sustained Natalia’s strong attention. It was as though life had taken his shape, and was being held up in contrast to her
own haunted nightmare of death.
Bakst often came to see Pierre at the chalet, and sometimes the committee held meetings there. Natalia sat silently among old and new associates, listening to plans. Ideas were fermenting around her, and the American season was imbuing everyone with nervous expectancy. New York had witnessed Pavlova’s classical dancers, and also Lydia Lopokhova, who would join her old company there. But the magic virtuosity, the opulent rush of style characteristic of the Ballets Russes, would be a totally new experience for this young nation. Conversely Natalia did not know what to expect of America. Once, a decade ago, she had viewed France through new eyes, too. How long ago that seemed now!
Rehearsals began, and so did the most excruciating physical ordeal of Natalia’s life as a dancer. Her muscles ached as though she had never exercised them before, for her months of inactivity, with only isolated hours of solitary practice, had left her body unused to such travails. The younger dancers watched her with awe as she perspired and strained at the barre, cords standing out in her throat—for, at twenty-five, she was the sole representative of the prewar Ballet and its only star. But she huffed and puffed with greater determination than any of the newcomers, as though her very life were on the line.
December came, and finally, at long last, she was ready. Diaghilev set up some charity matinées for the Red Cross, and Natalia danced the Blue Bird pas de deux with Adoph Bolm. If anyone remembered that this was the anniversary of Arkady’s death, not a word was mentioned. Natalia would not have allowed it. Pierre watched her anxiously from the wings, and thought: She has never been so lovely or danced so superbly. But when he took her home afterward, he did not break her silence. Her eyes glistening, her chin firm, Natalia shut away her feelings with a furious, driving determination. She had never had a son, never lost her husband. She had always been Natalia Oblonova, alone and proud.
But when she went to bed that night, she could not control the trembling in her hands. Her teeth were chattering. New York! That’s what I need, she thought, a place as far removed from Boris as snow is from the Equator. A place where I won’t have to remember.
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