In 1896 the court came out of its year’s mourning for Alexander III and the imperial family returned to the theater and so did I. During that truncated season of 1894–1895 at the Maryinsky, my family had endeavored to distract me. My brother had taken me with him to Monte Carlo to dance an engagement there for those members of the imperial family who vacationed on the Riviera to escape the rigors of mourning demanded of the court back home. After that, my father brought me to Warsaw, to the Grand Theater, where we danced together the czardas and the mazurka, my father’s specialty, even at his age of seventy-four! I was gone so much from Petersburg that rumors began that I had died of a broken heart, the very broken heart my family tried so hard to stitch back together. They hoped that with Niki now married and the routine of the theatrical seasons restored, I would recoup the exuberant high spirits of the Maletchka they once knew. But the routine of the theater was not exactly the same. Niki no longer visited the school or applauded the annual graduation performances of the students. Grand Duke Vladimir took over that responsibility. Alix, apparently, did not want Niki in such close proximity to the harem or me ever again. And though Niki still attended the theater, soon enough he never attended on nights when I performed. This seemed to be the new order, as permanent as a tsar’s decree, as permanent as the sentinel ordered by Catherine the Great to stand in the Summer Garden after she spotted a lone flower, ahead of its fellows, rising up through the snow. A soldier was stationed in the garden that day to brush away any flake that fell on the petals of that flower, and because Catherine never revoked her order, every day, for years after, a guard was remanded to that spot. Rain, snow, heat, there he stood. So did I imagine Alix’s order stood equally absolute.
Yes, so, 1896. I went back to the theater after Russian Christmas, which never falls on the same day as Western Christmas but two weeks later, nor does our Easter match the day the West celebrates the Resurrection of Our Lord. We went by the Julian calendar, you know, until the revolution, at which time in 1918 January 31 suddenly the next day became February 14, in line with the Gregorian calendar used in Western Europe. But the church never made the switch. So who is right? In 1896, after Russian Christmas, I danced a new role, that of Nikiya, a bayadère, a temple dancer, in the ballet La Bayadère, another of Petipa’s fairy tales, this one fitted with bangles and saris, banana trees and the Himalayas with their mourning veils of silver snow. A Hindu temple dancer falls in love with a warrior prince, a kshatriya, who, alas, is already promised to the daughter of a rajah. Both the rajah and his daughter conspire to rid themselves of the bayadère and she is delivered a basket of flowers, an asp hidden deep within the stems and petals, an asp which springs out and plunges its fangs into her breast. After her death, her Shade haunts first the prince’s opium dream and later his wedding, unnerving the bride and groom. Before the ceremony can be completed, thunder, lightning, and earthquake destroy the great hall of the rajah’s palace and bury within its ruins all the participants. A perfect vengeance. Odd, don’t you think, for me to be cast in the role of the dancing strumpet who spoils the young couple’s wedding bliss? Perhaps Vzevolozhsky, having failed to get rid of me by tattling to Polovstov and to Grand Duke Vladimir, thought he’d try again, by sticking me in a role designed to remind Niki and Alix of my past with Niki and of my present as the girl whose ghost haunts their bedroom as Alix’s ghost once haunted mine.
If true, Vzevolozhsky’s plot almost succeeded. All innocence, I performed the ballet on a Sunday, January 28. I remember the date because it was the last Sunday I was to dance almost that entire year. It was not hard to see the imperial family that night, situated as their box was to the right of the stage and not very far above it. One had to ask their permission to perform an encore, which the highest-ranking member of the family granted with a nod of the head, so we had to be able to see them. Their faces were as clear to me as the faces of the dancers who played my beloved prince Solor, the rajah, and his daughter, Gamzatti. I could see Niki in his red dress tunic, and his sash, braids, and medals, all gold; his mother, hair piled high and loaded with the jewels convention dictated should have been given to Alix, the reigning empress, but which Sergei told me Marie Fedorovna could not bear to give up, having given up so much else the past year; and Alix herself. It was the first time I ever saw her, and I felt—I felt cold, as if I had drunk a pitcher of ice water in the wings and it had filled up my limbs instead of my belly. She looked, with her red-gold hair, exactly like the German and English princesses in the fairy-tale book my sister used to read to me when I was four. My sister read while I studied the colored engravings of the princess in the tower, the princess asleep in the woods, the princess trying on a slipper, the princess disgorging pearls and flowers from her open mouth. Alix wore a gown of silver cloth that rendered her skin a luminous white, and the pearl-and-diamond tiara planted in her curled hair she must have wrestled from her mother-in-law in a palace catfight. And I stood before them in a ridiculous pair of pantaloons, copied exactly from an engraving in the Illustrated London News that documented the Prince of Wales’s journey to India in 1876, my arms stacked with bracelets, my skin tinted brown like an old cup of tea, and around my neck, in deliberate provocation, the tsar’s necklace. I admit it: I was not all innocence. I might not have recognized the echo of our lives in the ballet, but I certainly recognized an opportunity to vex Alix and the new tsar. And I did vex them. Niki’s face I had not seen since that gala for his sister’s wedding, and yet he did not look happy to see me. He regarded me from his box with an expression both stern and wary. Sergei had told me Niki was displeased with me—I just hadn’t understood how much. It had been a mistake, perhaps bigger than I realized, to stage crying fits at rehearsals, to have written those letters to Alix, to have worn the necklace tonight. And with that realization, the ice water sloshing around in my limbs turned solid, and I had to drag and hoist my arms and legs through all the movements of the first act. I supposed I would be given no signal from the emperor to dance an encore.
Thank God much of Act I is mime—my horror at the Great Brahmin’s declaration of love for me, my filling of a vase with water to offer it to the other temple dancers and the fakirs, the men who jump through fire and wave daggers and knives in their religious ecstasy, my conversation with Solor in which we declare our love—for I don’t think I could have danced. But somehow I moved my arms. Our theatrical miming was so elaborate the court balletomanes took lessons in it to understand what we gesticulated about up on that stage. Yes, it was during one of those extended mime interludes that I peered over the shoulders of my beloved Solor and witnessed a small commotion in the imperial box. Big splotches now reddened Alix’s face and she breathed as heavily as if she had been the one dancing here on the stage, not I. She leaned toward Niki, made a gesture of distress, at which signal he stood immediately and pulled her chair back into the shadows of the box—into her own Kingdom of the Shades. Let her remain there. What did I care, if only Niki reappeared. But he did not. Vzevolozhsky’s ploy had succeeded, though not the way he had intended. He had rid the theater of the emperor and empress, not of me! After that the sovereigns and I shared the Maryinsky. It was arranged always to have me dance midweek, on unfashionable Wednesdays, the nights the imperial family did not come to the Maryinsky, while Pierina Le gnani, that Italian pigeon, short, stout, plain-faced, performed her bag of tricks each Sunday for the tsar. I had been made prima ballerina assoluta of the Imperial Theaters, but I would never dance before the sovereigns. I might as well be dead.