Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  This letter dated October 9, 1987, from Liuba Romankova (now Myasnikova) confirmed Rudolf’s fears. He had not spoken to his mother for months and was having recurring anxiety dreams about her. (In one he saw her at the top of a flight of stairs, but he could not climb up to her because the stairs were made of bread.) There was a telephone in the Ufa apartment where Farida lived with her granddaughter Alfia and her family, but on the few occasions Rudolf had managed to get through, Alfia would promise to fetch Farida and then the line would go dead. Douce, who had traveled to St. Petersburg in the spring of ’86 to attend the exhibition “Three Generations of Wyeths in American Art,” spent an evening with the Romankovs also trying in vain to call. After Douce had gone back to Paris, Liuba persevered, and “after the hundredth attempt” reached Alfia, who told her that Farida had been ill for a long time. “The doctors could do nothing for her, and Alfia did not know where to turn.” Her own mother, Lilia (Rudolf’s deaf-mute sister), was also bedridden, having recently been nearly paralyzed in a hit-and-run accident, and in addition to “shuttling between two helpless, silent women,” Alfia was working as a bookkeeper and caring for her husband and four-year-old son. “I have never seen such misery,” Evgenii Petrovich told Liuba on his return, urging her to contact Rudolf immediately to say that if it was impossible for him to come to Russia himself, he must at least arrange for his mother “to die in decent circumstances.” But with all her letters having failed to reach the dancer in the past, Liuba thought it best to wait until October when she was away from St. Petersburg working on an archaeological site in the then Russian province of Tadzhikiskaya (now Tajikistan). “I’m hurrying to write to you from here in order to give this letter to Moscow people,” she added. “They’re flying back tomorrow, and can post it from there.”

  Although every word in the letter rang true, Rudolf could not help suspecting a trap: The Soviets had used the excuse of his sick mother before. Taking Liuba’s advice, he telephoned Phail, the Ufa acupuncturist (“causing a great scandal in the hospital where he worked”), who confirmed everything she had said, explaining that it was only by performing acupuncture to stimulate the cerebral cortex that they had been able to coax Farida into showing any sign of life. Jean-Luc Choplin remembers a tired, disheveled-looking Rudolf coming into his office one morning and (not mentioning any letter), announcing, “I dreamed last night that my mother is dying. I have to get to Ufa.” They started making calls.

  Over the past two years times had begun to change in Russia. When Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power as general secretary in 1985 he made one of his priorities the release from internal exile of Nobel Peace Prize—winning dissident Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist and human-rights advocate. Would Rudolf be considered important enough to receive a similar dispensation? In order to get his seven-year prison sentence revoked, authorization was required from the highest level, something Choplin claims hurriedly took place. “My understanding was that Mitterrand did it—called Gorbachev directly.” The result was a Soviet visa valid for just thirty-six hours.

  But for all the new openness (glasnost) in Russia, many members of the Politburo’s old guard had survived, the KGB still retained its intimidating power, and the ending of the Cold War was three years away. Understandably Rudolf could see things only as they were when he left, fearing even as plans went ahead for the trip that he “might end up in Siberia.” Wanting someone official to accompany him, he had telephoned the Cultural Ministry’s Roch-Olivier Maîstre at home, stressing the urgency of the mission. He had also been in touch with Janine Ringuet, the impresario’s assistant who had been responsible for first bringing him to the West, still regarding her, she felt, “as some kind of symbolic link with Russia.” But with only a week to go before his departure, Rudolf could hardly contain his excitement. When Liuba returned to Leningrad, her mother told her that Rudik had already called three times to say that he would be arriving in Moscow the following Saturday and wanted her to meet him there. She had barely walked in the door when the telephone rang again. “Well, Liubashka, about time! What do you think—is it too dangerous to come?… I’ve already telephoned Jackie, just in case, and asked her to sound the alarm if I’m not back in Paris after three days.”

  Jackie was Jacqueline Onassis, who was concerned enough about Rudolf’s safety to contact her brother-in-law on his behalf, and on November 13, Washington’s Soviet ambassador, Yuri V. Dubinin, received the following letter from Senator Edward Kennedy:

  I am writing on behalf of my friend Rudolf Nureyev. Mr. Nureyev is traveling to the Soviet Union from Paris on Saturday, November 14, for a two-day visit with his family. The purpose of his trip is to see his mother who is quite ill.

  I would be grateful if you would convey to Ambassador [Anatoly] Dobrynin and to Foreign Minister [Eduard] Shevardnadze my own personal concern that Mr. Nureyev’s trip go smoothly. It is a very sensitive time in relations between our two countries, and I think you would agree it would be important to avoid any incidents.

  Arriving at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, a striking figure in a long herringbone overcoat, Missoni scarf, and tam-o’–shanter, Rudolf was immediately surrounded by representatives of the world’s press. Asked to comment on Gorbachev’s new policies, he nimbly deflected the question by paraphrasing Joseph Brodsky: “I believe Mr. Brodsky said, ‘I would rather have him at the head of government than someone else.’ ”* When he spotted Liuba in the crowd he called her over, saying with mock pomposity, “Would you like to share my fame?” But still nervous of being publicly linked to a defector, she dropped her glove in order to duck down and avoid being photographed. Rudolf, who with his two minders had been invited to the French Embassy, asked Liuba to join them, but that was out of the question, she said. “For me to get permission to enter a foreign consulate would take six months!” Instead she suggested they go to the apartment of a close friend, who was waiting to receive them.

  Tanya Petrova, an attractive widow, lived with her French-born mother and teenage daughter near the Leningrad railway station, in what Maîstre described as “a cheap, tiny Muscovite apartment which barely had electricity and running water.” The elderly Elena Mikhailovna Nikiforova had been extremely agitated at receiving not only the infamous dancer but two foreigners in her home, and yet gave them a typically Russian welcome—a celebratory spread of soaked cowberries, salted mushrooms, and blinis. While the French sat down to eat, entertained by sixteen-year-old Masha playing the guitar and singing folk songs, Liuba asked permission to go to another room with Rudolf “to talk and talk and talk.”

  It was difficult at first. We had to find each other again. “Twenty-eight years had passed—a whole life!” I told him. “Not whole life,” he said. “Maybe just the best part. See, I haven’t changed that much—I don’t have glasses, I still have all my teeth.” I told him he was crazy to be addressing me as “vy [the Russian equivalent of the French formal vous],” and he explained that in English there is only one word for “you.” But I said, “Let’s behave as if nothing has happened, and go back to how things were in our youth.” He agreed, and after that all the barriers disappeared. I asked him about his life, about his feelings, about ballet, about his plans for the future (we both understood that his dance career was coming to an end). He asked me about our life, about my parents, about the new line of policy, about Kirov Ballet, and mutual friends. It was chaotic! We jumped from one subject to another, but in the end it was much too little time.

  The three visitors were still expected at the French Embassy, where a dinner had been planned before their departure to Ufa. To Rudolf it was just a blur. “He hardly said a word,” recalls Janine. “For him this was such an event.”* As they were due to leave around midnight, he had assumed that a private plane had been arranged specially for him, but he discovered on arrival at Moscow’s domestic airport that he was just one of a hundred other people booked on an Aeroflot flight. Sitting unrecognized at the back of the plane, “squashed up with all the peasants w
ith cases and cartons on their laps,” Rudolf looked half stunned, clearly appalled by the conditions. Slowly, however, he began to open up, reminiscing to Janine about his life as a child. “Everything was coming back. He told me for the first time how their father was never there, and how it was their mother who did everything for them. He said how strong she was—strong and clever—and I felt from the way he spoke of her that it had become a kind of idealization.” (Jackie Onassis had felt much the same watching Rudolf in Swan Lake at the moment when Siegfried kisses the Queen’s hand—“the homage, the duty, the respect he has for the idea of a mother.”)

  After the lack of preferential treatment on the plane, Rudolf was pleased to see a photographer awaiting his arrival in Ufa. “Good, good. Splendid,” he said when Viktor Vonog greeted him on the runway, announcing that he would be recording the whole trip. “Is anybody meeting me?” “Yes, your sister, nephews and niece.” In the Intourist lounge were Razida and her two sons, Viktor (twenty-five) and Yuri (eighteen), as well as Alfia, whom Rudolf had last seen hours after she was born. “I remember you as so small and red,” he said teasingly, but to Alfia it was her uncle who “looked very odd—so odd that everyone turned to stare.” As it was now almost 5 a.m.—the time in Ufa is two hours ahead of Moscow—everyone was too tired to start getting to know one another, and so they arranged to meet later that morning, Rudolf heading off with his two acquaintances to the Hotel Rossiya. (He must then have gone out again, because when Viktor arrived to pick up him as planned, the attendant on the floor said that he had not been back long and was still asleep.) At around eleven Viktor returned to drive Rudolf to the October Prospekt apartment, but when he asked to photograph the reunion with Farida, Rudolf snapped, “With my mother, no!” instructing him to come back in forty minutes.

  This was the moment Rudolf had been anticipating for years. “There’s so much I want to ask her,” he had told Linda Maybarduk, who remembers how “he had always been curious to find out things like the time of his birth, and whether he was really born on a train.” He had no delusions, understanding that when finally they met, he and his mother would be different people to each other—“We would have to relearn everything.” And now, of course, he knew about her desperate state of health. Yet nothing had prepared him for the shock of what he saw—the picture of poverty and misery that Evgenii Petrovich had described. “The room was completely bare … just a worn ottoman covered with an oilcloth and a small night-table. An old woman was lying in a doubled-up position.… She did not even open her eyes. Only the fact that she slowly moved her legs and fingers from time to time told you that she was alive.”

  To this day Liuba regrets not having suggested to Rudolf that Phail go with him, since “with acupuncture, maybe their contact could have been more fruitful.” As it was, Farida showed no reaction to Rudolf’s presence. “She didn’t know me,” as he later told friends. Razida says that after he left she asked their mother if she realized who had been there. “Yes. It was Rudik,” she murmured. But what shattered Rudolf was not so much that his mother had shown no sign of recognizing him but that he had not recognized her. “She had become someone else,” he confided to Charles Jude, saying that it had been the same with Erik. “Like something finish.” Once again Rudolf had arrived too late, and this time it was the Soviet government he could not forgive. They were “masters of torture,” he told Linda Maybarduk. “They delivered last blow.”

  Rudolf had stayed in the room less than ten minutes, and although he said nothing when he emerged, his relatives could see that he was badly shaken. “That I know for sure,” says Alfia. “But he managed to hide his emotions and act as if everything was normal.” The family was also putting on something of an act, doing their best to show Rudolf that they were doing well. “They bought meat in the marketplace, made pelmeni, were happy to see him. But it was all just a ‘Potemkin village,’ ”* remarked Evgenii Petrovich. “Were Rudik to have arrived unannounced, he would have seen the real situation.” In fact, a large meal was the last thing Rudolf wanted but, to be polite, he ate the Russian bread he loved with butter and drank four glasses of tea. “We all felt a bit awkward,” Razida remembers. “It was hard to start a conversation because we didn’t know what to say. We could see the difference between him and us.” Rudolf told them that it was difficult for him to speak Russian because he had to translate it to himself first into English and then back again. But aware how unapproachable he must seem, he did most of the talking, questioning his nephews with genuine interest about what they did in Ufa. To Yuri’s reply that he was learning German, Rudolf said, “Hmm, that’s good. Anything you do you must do well. If you work hard success will come.” And then he asked Razida, “What would you like to do? Is there anything you would like to learn?” No, she was too old, she protested, and he smiled, as if to say, “Well, so be it.”

  Rudolf did not go back in again to see Farida, and when Viktor saw him approach the car, he noticed “something in his face, some cloud of sadness.” They began a tour of the city, stopping off at the market, where Rudolf bought babushki’s woolen stockings, which he planned to wear in class as leg warmers. It was not the same Ufa he remembered, most of the wooden isbi having been replaced by modern apartment houses. “I sort of regret that it goes modern,” he later remarked. “Nice wide streets, the highest building is five stories, so it’s not too ugly, a lot of trees.” He wanted to go first to the opera house, and headed straight up to one of the studios, commenting on photographs of dancers he remembered. The director arrived, and Rudolf asked to be taken onstage, where he tried out a few steps, grimacing at the floorboards’ lack of spring. “Metal?” “No, no,” replied the director, oblivious to the irony. “The floor is oak.” “Metal,” repeated Rudolf. As he was being led around he asked Viktor to call the information service for three or four numbers, one being that of Zaituna Nazretdinova, the ballerina who had danced in Song of the Cranes on the day the seven-year-old Rudik’s fate was sealed. When neither she nor anyone else answered the telephone, he shrugged, “Oh, well, what can we do then?” Victor suggested going to 37 Zentsova Street, which used to be the Nureyev’s home, but was now the site of a corrugated-iron garage. After asking to be photographed in front of a typical isba and in the yard of another (“very much reminiscent of Polenov’s painting”), they went to the hill of Salavat, where he used to sit watching the trains beckoning him West. As the Muslim cemetery was nearby, Viktor suggested that Rudolf visit his father’s grave and was shocked when he refused, asking instead to be driven to School number 2 on Sverdlova Street.

  School number 2 had become Ufa’s Choreographic Academy,* and its director, Alik Bikchurin (the Vaganova pupil Rudolf had once persuaded to introduce him to his Leningrad teachers), claims that the authorities had deliberately sent him two hundred kilometers away so that he wouldn’t be there to welcome Rudolf. “They wanted to give the impression that they were indifferent to his visit, that it was a stranger who was coming. In the theater they gave everyone the day off.” At the Philharmonic Hall the musicians, who had been rehearsing, were sent home an hour before the star’s arrival, and at the Nesterov Museum a surly woman guard followed Rudolf around, yelling with fury when she saw him take a photograph. Aware of the farcical turn his visit was taking, Rudolf was more than ready to leave when the time came to catch his flight.

  At Moscow’s Domodedova Airport the attitude was just as hostile. “I began to be a little afraid,” says Janine, describing how customs officers had immediately confiscated the Bashkirian honey that Rudolf’s family had given him. The reason, she discovered, was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, after which certain produce (mushrooms, too) from even thousands of kilometers away was forbidden to be sold. “You must explain that,” said Janine, noticing Rudolf getting angry. “I’m not allowed to,” the offical replied.* “Well then, I shall.” Just as unpleasant was the squalor of the terminal with its stinking urinals and human detritus spread around on the floor, “like Calcutta,” murmured Rud
olf. But he cheered up when he saw that standing waiting for him with Liuba was her brother, Léonide, the object of his youthful crush.

  Although he was reluctant to discuss his time in Ufa during the hour-long journey into Moscow, sitting wedged between the Romankov twins in the embassy car, Rudolf soon relaxed into their old intimacy. He told them how much he had envied the tranquil cultural atmosphere of their home; how in listening to their conversations about painting, samizdat literature, or the poets of the Russian Renaissance, he had been afraid to speak for fear of exposing his provincialism. He had not stopped trying to educate himself since then, he said. “But everything I know has been grabbed here and there in bits. When I was doing a ballet I would read Shakespeare or Byron, but never with any real depth.” They went to the home of the young Bolshoi star Andris Liepa, whom Rudolf wanted to meet. The twenty-five-year-old dancer had a performance of Giselle that night but was so anxious to have enough time with Rudolf that he arrived still wearing full stage makeup. They drank a lot, talked a lot, and at last, in the company of these like-minded Russians, Rudolf felt that he had come home.