It was very cold outside, and she shivered in her gown. He walked at a fast pace, and although her legs were long for a girl’s, she had difficulty keeping up with him. Finally he stopped in the amber light of a streetlamp. Leaning against its post, he regarded Galina as if noticing for the first time that she had come with him.
“Ah,” he said, blinking in some bewilderment. “Galya. Why did you follow me?”
“I didn’t follow you. I had to lead you out before you destroyed the sets. Why was this such a failure, Pierre? I don’t understand. I thought the production was marvelous.”
“But you were never here for a real success! Then, my dear, you would have been struck by the amazing difference. Tonight’s audience was bored and disappointed. Revamped Petipa isn’t for Londoners. They liked Fokine too much. Even Massine.”
Galina wrung her hands and looked away. “Poor Natalia,” she said. “Her first choreography—”
“She’ll do many more. No one is blaming her. Her dancing was perfect, the arrangements were good. It was my sets that didn’t work! But she will not let me forget this. I ruined her first show. Mark my words, sweetheart, she will never allow me to live this one down.”
“You’re wrong!” Galina retorted angrily. “How can you speak of her this way? You act as though you hate her! Why, you’re a selfish, cruel man, Pierre Riazhin! All these years she loved you, and took care of you, and paid your bills! And yet you accuse her of—of unmentionable insensitivities.”
He started to laugh, and she stopped, overcome with anguish and horror. She stepped back and he bent over, clutching his stomach. “Ah, my pet, the bills, the bills!” he exclaimed between gusts of bitter merriment. “Have you known all along that she was ‘keeping’ me? She doesn’t love me and never did. I serve a purpose, though God knows what it is at this point, because I don’t!”
As he continued laughing, Galina began to cry. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and small sobs came to her lips. She brought her hands to her face, and held them there. “Come now, I can’t be that evil,” Pierre said, and he was not laughing any longer. His face was serious and drawn, the cheekbones well defined in the changing light.
“If my mother and father had lived,” Galina whispered fiercely, “they would have known how to love each other. You and she—you are criminals! Yes, criminals—I’m not exaggerating. People who waste love, who distort it the way you do, both of you …Oh, Pierre, why do you do it? Is it really so hard to love someone, to cherish that person and treat her well, to fill one’s home with harmony and joy, instead of this endless wounding? You are two emotional assassins. I don’t know why I stay with you, I really don’t!”
But he had seized her hands and was caressing them softly. “You stay because we need you,” he replied quietly.
In February Natalia was visited in her suite at Claridge’s by Serge Diaghilev, around whose eyes deep circles had been etched. He appeared old, and his massive bulk seemed proportionately shrunken. A hardness came into Natalia and, as she offered him tea and crumpets, she thought: He feels I have been forced on him, he’s never liked me. And yet how hard I’ve tried for him—every time!
“Are we floundering badly?” she demanded, sitting across from him and cupping her chin in her hand.
“Box office receipts are disastrous. You know what’s been happening, ma chère. The Sleeping Princess is simply not being accepted by the London public. Sir Oswald Stoll is threatening to seize everything because we have not recouped his advance.”
More kindly she said: “You can’t be right every time, Serge Pavlovitch. It’s a lovely ballet—in spite of our calamity on opening night, when Pierre’s Enchanted Forest creaked and groaned and didn’t rise. Nobody could have helped that.”
“But you were right. It was the wrong public for it, the wrong time.” His eyes sought hers, and he smiled slightly. “We’re going to have to close, Natalia. Just like that. There’s no other option at this point. Do you see one?”
“Frankly, no. We are none of us Croesus, Serge Pavlovitch. The best I can do for you is one thousand pounds.”
“Thank you, my dear. It will help. I shall repay you.”
She shook her head, all at once angry. “No. Use it to quell some of the troubled waters around you. All the artists who haven’t received any of their salaries. The Ballet is disbanding, Serge Pavlovitch, because you were too extravagant on the decor. Yet this is a ballet for dancers! If anything, Petipa’s works should have proven that to you. Above all, The Sleeping Princess, like The Sleeping Beauty, on which it is based, displays the plastic arts first and foremost. But if you insist on paying more for an Enchanted Forest than for a Florimund—what can I say?”
Diaghilev’s brow shot up quizzically, and he touched the white lock of hair mingling with the dark on his head. It was always carefully dyed and had earned him the nickname Chinchilla. “My dear Natalia,” he declared, irony seeping into his voice, “surely you cannot begrudge me Fokine’s three sine qua nons for a good ballet: the music, the setting, and the choreography in equal proportions? Come now!”
“I begrudge you nothing at all,” she answered sweetly. “It is Sir Oswald who does the begrudging, and your company of dancers. Pay them, Serge Pavlovitch. And pay my husband. But do not tell him at any time that I gave you this check. I don’t want him thinking that I pay his emoluments.”
“I would try to be nice to Natalia, my dear boy,” Diaghilev warned Pierre. “Sometimes you are impatient and cause her pain. I am concerned about her.”
Something in the director’s undertone caught Pierre off-balance. He glanced quickly at Diaghilev, then turned away, and a sudden flare of anger swept inside him. “A few years ago you were informing me that Riazhin was more important to you than Oblonova,” he said, his voice compressed with resentment. “Now you are reprimanding me! Why, Serge Pavlovitch? Because she is the financial backer, and I am the one responsible for the unenchanted forest? Well, it was not my fault. Blame the English machinery, but don’t lecture me about my own wife!”
“Easy, Pierre. I was merely cautioning you. Natalia is a charming girl and you have not always been considerate—shall we say?—of her sensitivities. I like you both, dear boy. There is no other purpose on my part. Only sympathy.”
Pierre stood very straight, his black eyes wide with anger, and regarded Diaghilev with the most profound hatred possible. But the director laid a hand on his arm and said, quite softly: “I mean it, Pierre. No false moves, no bad feelings. We are about to crumble to ashes, and that means your reputation as well. Oswald Stoll is closing us down.”
“Then I shall do what others have done in this company!” Pierre cried. “I shall go to Massine at Covent Garden and join him!”
Diaghilev’s eyes, fishlike and shining, grew narrow. “He wouldn’t want to take you right now, my boy,” he said in an almost singsong undertone. “I’d take another risk with you, but he isn’t in that position. Think it through, my impulsive young mustang. Think it through. Because Natalia’s absolutely right: Her choreography was perfect, and I allowed your work to overshadow it. My mistake, it would appear.”
“May you both be damned!” Pierre exclaimed and strode from the room. As he passed across the threshold, he nearly collided with Natalia, whose face looked white and pinched and whose eyes he avoided with a flush of shame, hostility, and embarrassment.
Sir Oswald Stoll regarded the check in Natalia’s hand and smiled delicately. “I’m sorry to say that this won’t cover my expenses,” he said in a tone of deep regret. “I am truly sorry, Madame Riazhina, but your Serge Pavlovitch has been intractable. He’s been refusing to pay the tradesmen, and his credit is nil. What can I do? I told you, I am a businessman, not a high-spirited creator.”
Natalia sighed. “I understand. But it will have to do, Sir Oswald. This is as far as I am willing to go. I own two houses and am supporting, in effect, two daughters—my own and my niece. I do not want the Ballets Russes to disband. But I cannot be the dishrag
that cleans up every spill.”
“Then I shall have to seize the properties, the costumes, and the scenery,” the impresario said in a dull voice.
Natalia looked at him carefully. “Do that,” she said.
Diaghilev was irrepressible, and, like a small boy in search of allowance money, he was soon in contact with former backers on whose resources he had not drawn in recent months. Like the boy whose father is annoyed by his spendthrift habits, he went to one of his godmothers—this time the Princesse de Polignac, in Paris. But the sets of The Sleeping Princess could not be recovered. The best that Diaghilev could hope for was the possibility of another season—which in light of his bankruptcy had seemed out of the question. Natalia had predicted this outcome and thought: At least this time he has had to face some of the consequences himself.
Shortly after the debacle in London Diaghilev met with the Riazhins in Paris. “I have a project for both of you,” he announced, his cold eyes appraising them from behind the facade of his smiling countenance. “It originated as a score by Igor Stravinsky—Les Noces. Massine and Nijinsky both wanted to produce it during the war. But I can’t see their work in this, my dears. It bears Natalia’s stamp. A Russian peasant wedding without pageantry. Instead of joy, there is the heaviness, the sadness of a prearranged ceremony—the couple as objects. Come—we must listen to the music together.”
The impresario noted the spark of interest in Natalia’s eye, a quickening of color in her cheeks. He turned to Pierre, whose face was already lit with inner passion. They were sitting in the Riazhin salon, and now Diaghilev rose, and, withdrawing some sheets of annotated music from his coat pocket, he settled himself at the shining grand piano. The strains that emanated from his fingers brought rural Russia to Natalia’s mind. The percussive notes, the asymmetrical bars evoked the traditions of the Russia of her childhood, where one merely survived, with little individual freedom of choice. But now and then something gay pierced through—a wedding, after all, was one of the events at which a peasant could relax, dance, and revel.
“I see it in four scenes, each delineated by Igor Feodorovitch’s music,” Diaghilev said when he had finished and was rolling down the piano cover. “The benediction of the bride; the benediction of the groom; the departure of the bride from her parents’ home and her resultant despondency; and finally, the wedding celebration. What I’d like to see first of all, Pierre, are some sketches. Then we can set Natalia to work and unite you both with Stravinsky.”
Natalia’s lips parted, and a spark of defiance flashed through her eyes. But she nodded. “Very well,” she agreed. “I see something very stark, very simple. I’d like to have an idea of what to expect—I could work with Pierre—”
Diaghilev’s eyes narrowed, and he shook his head. “No. Pierre must think through his own ideas, Natalia. Think about the choreography, but give him the chance to reach his own conclusions. Husbands and wives can sometimes impede one another’s progress—it isn’t a usual sort of collaboration. The ballet is of primary importance—not your feelings, or his.”
He knows, Natalia thought. He knows about Sir Oswald Stoll. He must know, or suspect, that I allowed him to seize the costumes and sets. He is threatening me with this—threatening my marriage. If Pierre knew I had let him take his favorite decor—his beloved models of The Sleeping Princess—he would never forgive me. But Diaghilev and Pierre were wrong about the ballet! Both of them, in their own selfishness, are seeking to push me down.
During the weeks that followed, she did not see Pierre’s work. He hid himself among his sketch pads and his paints, and she sat in her boudoir, thinking of the new ballet that would be the supreme challenge of her career. She drew on large pieces of cardboard massive formations that merged and reformed. Group dancing. Ritual heaviness. When at last Diaghilev called them together he looked first at the piles of designs that Pierre had prepared. ‘These are perfect,’ he said. Only then did he allow Natalia to peer at them over his shoulder.
She saw the brilliant peasant headdresses, the colorful skirts, the gay costumes, and slow rage began to gather inside her chest. “You’re not exhilarated by these boyar celebrants?” Diaghilev demanded. Her husband’s beautiful black eyes were riveted on her face, and she saw in them expectation, joy, pride. She swallowed and held her hands together in front of her.
“Serge Pavlovitch,” she murmured softly, “what we have here is from the same genre as the exuberant dancer of The Midnight Sun. Or another Polovtsian Dance from Prince Igor. I can’t work with these ideas. First of all, I want visual uniformity—this isn’t a true celebration, it’s a ritual, a rite. I want something more subdued. I want to be able to group and regroup, so that the eye is caught by the movements of the corps rather than by the flashy costumes. Oh, Pierre! They’re beautiful, they’re splendid! But this ballet demands something else—something simpler.”
Pierre stood up, and two of the drawings fell to the floor, fluttering down like dry autumn leaves in the light breeze. His cheeks scarlet, he exclaimed furiously: “You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you, Natalia? To demean me in front of Serge Pavlovitch. To devalue me as an artist. You simply can’t bear the thought of sharing credit for this production. It galls you! Ever since The Sleeping Beauty, you’ve criticized all my ideas—and yet one day, those very designs are what will be most remembered! Heavy or not, they were beautiful!”
“And none of us could move around in them! You had us weighted down as if we were construction workers! These”—and she pointed at his sketches on the table—“are just as heavy, just as impractical. You forget for whom you are working, Pierre! You’re working for a ballet production! For men and women who need to move, above all! Don’t you understand how well a dancer needs to know his own body—its weight, its leverage?”
“Well, I haven’t forgotten that I’m not working for you!” Pierre retorted angrily, his eyes unfocused, his nostrils dilating. “We’re equals, Natalia—equals, not boss and underling, for God’s sake!”
“You are both working for me,” Diaghilev said in an even, sweet-tempered voice. His stare bored into Natalia, then into her husband. “And this time I shall make the final decision. Pierre’s designs have enchanted me and will enchant Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky. Perhaps,” he added coldly, “someone else should choreograph Nes Noces, ma chère Natashenka. I’ll reserve another piece of work for you.”
Pierre’s look of intense exaltation was the last thing she saw as she turned to leave the room, making certain that her head stayed tilted proudly upward. But when she had calmly shut the door behind her, she fled into the bathroom and stood shaking by the sink.
Chapter 27
In the spring of 1923 Tamara turned six, Natalia was thirty-three, Galina was not quite eighteen and Pierre had made the precarious jump to age forty. Diaghilev seemed to have abandoned the idea of producing Stravinsky’s Les Noces; after a financially unstable season in London, the Ballets Russes had entered into a quasi-partnership with the Opéra of Monte Carlo, which was housed in the ornate Casino, its cupolas encrusted with turquoise and gilt. Every winter, beginning with the coming one, during Monaco’s opera season, the Russian dancers were to provide accompaniment to the singers; and every spring, the Diaghilev Ballet was to play its own repertory in the sumptuous Salle Gamier, all golden curlicues and frescoed ceilings. The company became the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, under the direction of Serge Diaghilev. This left six months for holidays and any other engagements, in Paris or abroad, while also ensuring the dancers and artists time and space in which to compose and practice their new productions.
Looking at Natalia, Galina thought that for her, at least, the change would be beneficial. She admired her aunt tremendously: Natalia’s compressed energy, her never-ending creative fire and discipline, her artistic vision that shone like a beam of pure light, unimpeded by outbursts and histrionics. She had seen Natalia at her worst, in London when The Sleeping Princess had failed so miserably, and memories of this haunted
Galina as part of the kaleidoscope of nightmares from her past. It hurt her physically to remember Natalia’s exhausted yielding to tears, the nakedness of her misery: she, a woman who was so reserved, so controlled in her emotions. Natalia was neat and whole, and her art was biting and satiric but never strident, never overdone. In the clean lines of her dancing, Galina saw the same form as in Natalia herself. Galina, tall and statuesque, with cascading waves of brilliant blond hair and eyes of an arresting sapphire blue, thought that there could be no greater loveliness, no finer elegance than that which was embodied in her aunt.
Galina’s eyes followed Natalia round a room when she walked, always delicately poised and yet strong, ever a dancer. She envied the older woman’s small stature, her sloping shoulders—her own shoulders were so straight, so imposing, almost square, and Galina was ashamed of them, finding her bearing masculine. Natalia’s hair, soft and brown, was still bobbed, emphasizing the heart shape of her face, with its great deep eyes, eyes that missed nothing, eyes that expressed love and hate far more eloquently than did her words. Natalia’s dainty carriage was ideal for the new fashions, the low-waisted tubular dresses that displayed her slim legs and boyish grace. Everything about Natalia was easy, lithe, airy, yet modern, whereas Galina felt big, awkward, overflowing into unfashionable generosities of breast, hair, and feet.
The move to Monaco would be a good one. Natalia had accepted it with a clearing of her brow, a relaxation of her features that had interested Galina. It was as though Diaghilev’s announcement had relieved her, calmed her. She herself knew nothing of Monte Carlo, but in her heart there was a flutter of wistfulness for Paris, for the excitement of its cosmopolitan atmosphere. She had been taking drawing classes at the Académie des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank, because Natalia had made her promise to “develop her technique” before allowing Pierre to teach her the intricacies of set and costume design. They had disagreed about this, he insisting that Natalia knew nothing about art but that Galina was already talented and capable, and that her interest should not be made to lie fallow for the sake of a conventional education. Natalia had argued that if Galina wished to be an artist, she should at least be given the option of choosing which sort of artist, even if today she had her heart set on the theatre. Galina had said quietly that this was her life and that Natalia had a point, but perhaps Pierre might, in his spare time, begin his coaching? She had started her lessons at the Académie the preceding year and had simultaneously begun to study with Pierre.
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