These first Nureyevs were raised in happy, middle-class, two-parent families who adored them and showered them with praise. They were given puppies, had fairy tales read to them and were given holidays on the banks of the Saint-Laurent River. They went to puppet shows. An effort was made to paint everything pink and blue and green.
Cartons of butterflies were brought in from Brazil and were let loose in the town square. It looked as though someone had opened a window while a nerd was working on her stamp collection and the wind had lifted them all up in the air. The children ran around with their arms stretched out in joy. The butterflies died of shock and fell to the ground hours later, but they were quickly swept up by groundskeepers. The townspeople made the boys crowns of dandelions and daffodils to wear on their heads, telling them that everything was always going to be all right.
However, to the scientists’ dismay, when this generation of Nureyevs became teenagers, they had very little interest in dance. They were sensible and well balanced, and so they wanted more reliable careers, ones that promised economic security. They wanted to become political attachés and commodity traders.
Those who could dance did so with proficiency but had no edge. No one would be throwing underwear at them, let’s put it that way.
One of the boys was given a biography of Nureyev to read. A scientist thought he would be inspired by the glory and fame that Nureyev had achieved. Instead, the young clone was horrified. He shared the book with the other clones, who were equally shocked. All they took away from the biography was how rude and irritable the dancer had been, how miserable and conceited, and how difficult and unpredictable life as an artist was. They slammed the book shut, like a folk dancer pounding his foot on the floor to announce the end of an act.
With the next generation of Nureyevs, the scientists decided they’d try a less hands-on approach. They hired local childless women to raise the Nureyevs. The scientists allowed them to be raised unsupervised, in order that they might have normal childhoods.
But it was found that the mothers had too much influence on the Nureyevs. One of the mothers spent all her time watching medical dramas on television. This boy grew up wanting to be a surgeon. He wore a white bathrobe around the neighbourhood, carrying a clipboard and insisting on checking other children’s pulses. Another mother was very good at making cupcakes. To the scientists’ consternation, her little Nureyev announced that he was going to open his own bakery and name it Jeannette’s Delight, in honour of his mother.
Then, rather disturbingly, one of the clones opted for a career playing the accordion. The scientists tried to account for this abnormality. After questioning his mother, they found that she had sung a Parisian ditty about the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to him when he was a little boy. Now he wore a black beret, smoked all the time and had changed his name to Pierre Gaston. His cigarette smoke wavered above his head like a French philosopher’s thought bubbles. The shock of this forced the scientists to re-examine their methods altogether.
When the Russian government read Pierre Gaston’s self-published volume of poetry, called A Lonely Winter on the Seine, they withdrew significant funding.
Exasperated, the scientists decided to make one group of young clones dance like Nureyev by force. These young boys had to endure eight hours of training a day. The dance instructors humiliated and hit the boys when they messed up their steps. The callous teachers threatened to murder their dogs if they didn’t execute their pirouettes perfectly. They wouldn’t let them eat unless they managed a grand jeté. Half-starved Nureyevs would crouch in the corner, massaging their aching legs and whimpering unhappily. So joyless was this group that they barely resembled boys anymore.
This was indeed a dark period. They practised so much that they didn’t even have a chance to change out of their leotards. You would see a sixteen-year-old Nureyev, in a black leotard with little red sequins and boots, standing outside for but a moment, trying to figure out who he really was. His sequins glimmered like a distant galaxy whose constellations were emitting their tragic messages in Morse code.
Nonetheless, the scientists achieved some surprising successes with this group at first. As a whole, this generation was composed of remarkably skilled dancers. But by the age of seventeen, when they should have been ready for an adoring public, they hated dancing with a fervour. So repelled were they by the thought of spending their lives on stage, they began to sabotage their dancing careers. They were known to jump off the roofs of two-storey houses. This wouldn’t kill them, but it was almost certain to break both their ankles. They threw themselves out of cars. One ate hamburgers all day, and he became so fat that he couldn’t jump at all anymore. One would close his eyes when passing ponds, so that he didn’t have to look at swans reaching about gracefully with their necks. He ended up falling in and drowning.
It is almost impossible to believe that these dark events took place. It is hard to get anyone to admit to having taken part in these Nureyev years. Participants explain how their own jobs and livelihoods were on the line. The events scarred everyone, especially Latska, who was known for wanting to bring whimsy back to science. This project was turning into something ugly.
The government threatened to withdraw funding anytime one of these generations of Nureyevs didn’t work out. The project was diverting money from Olympic teams, the circus and outer space. It was with some level of desperation that Project Siberia was launched.
Project Siberia generated the most press in relation to what The Globe and Mail referred to as “the Nureyev Debacle.” It is always brought up in documentaries about the subject as evidence of the insanity of the project as a whole. There was, however, a very clear method behind the madness. The scientists were, in essence, looking for the missing link that would turn Nureyev the man into Nureyev the dancer. They weren’t quite sure what they were leaving out, so they decided to omit nothing whatsoever. A large-scale effort was put into place to more accurately simulate the conditions and main events of Nureyev’s actual childhood. Nureyev was famously born on the Trans-Siberian train near Irkutsk, Siberia, and he often cited that as being the most romantic event of his life and symbolic of everything that followed. He had been raised in the town of Ufa, south of the Ural Mountains. The scientists tried to make the part of the town where the clones were cloistered resemble the time and place where Nureyev had come into this world, opened his eyes and decided who he was going to be.
The Nureyevs were told that their country was engaged in a great war and that all the men were at the front fighting. The scientists had citizens walk around with crutches and with their heads bandaged in order to appear as if they had recently returned from the front. Everyone wore sheepskin hats and leather boots. Citizens were supposed to dress up as soldiers. It didn’t seem to particularly matter what war they were supposed to be taking part in. Teenagers opted to wear red military band jackets with gold buttons and piping, looking more like members of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band than soldiers. It became trendy for girls to wear grey caps resembling those worn by Confederate soldiers in the American Civil War.
In order to recreate the harsh poverty in which Nureyev had been raised, the boys were only allowed to eat gruel. They couldn’t find the recipe in The Joy of Cooking, but one of the town’s cooks improvised with some watered down Quaker Oats. Under strict instructions from the top, the groundskeepers air-conditioned the Nureyevs’ bedrooms all the time. In summer, the foster parents were told to keep the lights on in their rooms while they slept — in order to recreate the white nights in Russia, when the sun never sets. All the little Nureyevs had dark rings under their eyes from trying to get some sleep under eight lamps with one hundred — watt bulbs glowing around their beds.