When I danced Act II of La Bayadère now, on my Wednesdays, after the great procession of Badrinata I put down my little guitar and picked up a basket of waxed flowers; within the wicker recesses lay not the prop master’s rubber snake, but a live one, drugged, and that is what I thrust to my breast to simulate its bite. I have always been fearless on the stage—no one comes to the theater to see a performer restrain herself—and on the stage I never restrained myself: nor off the stage much either, if truth be told. The other dancers reared back when, snake licking its way up my arms, I circled the stage to show them my injury and my inevitable fate. Some nights, under the hot lights that bedazzled me and the colorful dervish of pantaloons and saris and veiled headdresses, I wished that snake would wake and in its confusion bite into me—and then, like the famous Gypsy singer Varya Panina, who one night, spying her former lover in the audience, sang to him a song of ruined love and drank a glass of poison, I, too, might die right there on the stage. Better to become a legend than to be known as a scorned lover dancing to a vacant imperial box on Wednesday nights.
At the end of the year, I learned with delight I had been given a Sunday to dance—only to hear that Vzevolozhsky had persuaded the tsar to see a French play that night at the Mikhailovsky instead. When I heard this, my delight turned to a bitterness so fierce, I raged through my house, absolutely raged through it like the propellers of the imperial yacht, the Standart. I would not be so thwarted. I would not be entombed at the theater like a piece of old scenery or a decrepit prop. I sat down at my little writing desk and wrote a letter to Niki in hysterical script big as a placard, and at the end of it I signed my name with its grand flowery M. I wrote in Russian and when Sergei arrived that evening, as was his habit every night duty did not require him to be elsewhere, I planned to beg him to translate the letter into French, which I would then copy over neatly in my beautiful, tiny penmanship. I had no real education, you know—the academics at the Imperial Theater Schools were laughable—even Vaslav Nijinsky, a true imbecile in the schoolroom though a genius on the stage, managed to graduate. But it was important to me to write the final copy in French, the language of the court, as this was a formal letter from a wronged subject to her tsar, not a love note from some petite danseuse. I had written that if I had lost the privilege of dancing for the emperor I no longer wished to dance and if I did not dance then I had nothing, not him and not my art; that I accepted the punishment of not seeing him privately, but I could not be doubly punished by not seeing him even at the theater. Was I or was I not his prima ballerina assoluta? And as such, were my talents not the ones he should be applauding, rather than those of some imported il secondo?
Sergei that night read over my letter—I had rushed to him at the front hall and stuffed it into his hands like a child with a broken toy for her father to fix—and when he finished, he said, So, Mala, you are delivering an ultimatum to your tsar? Are you sure you want to do this? I nodded, though truth be told I had not thought much beyond Niki reading my Gypsy song of lamentation. What if his irritation with me now was so great he said, Fine, leave the theaters? But my desire to have him understand the injustice done to me was greater than my interest in the outcome. And so, reluctantly, Sergei translated my letter for me after which I covered him with kisses, and the next morning he put it in his pocket to take to the tsar, for he served that day as Niki’s aide-de-camp, a privilege the grand dukes rotated among themselves. Who else could have delivered to Niki such a letter and from whom else would Niki have accepted it? Once it was in his hands, I knew he would read it, not only because I had written it, but also because even this early in his reign he had shown he took pleasure in dealing with little matters—the budget of a provincial school, the petitions of peasants who wished to officially change their names from the crude monikers the village had assigned them, such as Ugly or Stinky—even the notorious Rasputin’s name came from a nickname, Rasputinyi, meaning dissolute—petitions that required the tsar’s attention. Well, this was my petition.
On that Sunday I prepared as I usually did the day of a performance—I stayed in bed all day, ate a few spoonfuls of caviar at noon, refused to drink a drop of liquid, even water, arrived at the theater two hours early to warm up. This habit of arriving early to the theater had been with me since I was a little girl. Because of my father’s position, when the theater needed a tiny child to pull the Tsar Maiden’s magic ring from the fish’s mouth in the last bit of Le Petit Cheval bossu, I was chosen—and though I did not set foot on the stage until almost the end of the ballet, I insisted my father take me with him to the theater one hour before curtain. On the stage this night behind the lowered curtain, the other dancers grumbled as usual about having to dance with me when my presence guaranteed the emperor’s absence. If the tsar and his suite were not in the theater, even the audience was affected, for the court came to the theater as much to see the tsar as to see us. And we artists longed to be seen by him, as well. I cannot explain this—his power conferred on us heightened senses, as does love.
I had not received a reply to my letter and Sergei had not watched Niki read it, and so I myself could only pray that what mattered so much to me still had the power to move him a little. I walked, as if casually, through the forest of trees, the bananas, amras, madhavis, their branches intertwined, and along the side of the pagoda, for I was dancing, once again, as luck would have it, La Bayadère. It had an elaborate set, for the court loved to see a lavishly outfitted stage and loved, too, the machinery of it—flying figures, apparitions, whirlwinds, trap doors, fountains and floods, creeping webs and thickets, the crumpling of great castles, floating barques transformed into sparkling palaces—Vzevolozhsky earmarked most of the year’s budget for the opera but made sure there would be spectacle enough for the ballet. I made my way through the stage to the peephole in the blue velvet curtain.
The imperial box was deserted. Vzevolozhsky I could not see at all. It was his job to greet the emperor at the private drive, and with his peculiar gait—his back was bent, curved perhaps from so many years of bowing to the sovereigns?—to escort him through the private hallway and salon to his box. Perhaps Niki had gone after all to the Mikhailovsky to see the French play. Vzevolozhsky would be there to meet him. I put my finger to the peephole as if by crooking it I could draw Niki toward me. Come here. Come here.
In the pit the musicians tuned their instruments, and broken bits of various melodies from the score floated up from below—now the turti and the vina, the bagpipes and the small guitar of the bayadère’s dance, now that of the violin used in Act II in the Kingdom of the Shades. With the imperial box still dark, the curtain drawn at the back of it, I felt myself shrink and my bracelets slipped past my wrists. As I bent to retrieve them, I heard all around me, competing with the orchestra, a great cacophony of voices as the news spread from the house to the wings to the stage: The tsar is here. The emperor is here. It was like the French farce the emperor would not, after all, see tonight—the theater administrators colliding with one another in their rush to phone the Mikhailovsky Theater and have Vzevolozhsky, in his formal blue coat with the star of Vladimir pinned to the left lapel, rerouted to the Maryinsky to greet Niki, in their efforts to reach the private drive to greet their sovereign themselves in case the director could not hasten back quickly enough. What had Niki told Alix to explain this change of plans? Did she know what I had written him? My smile as I turned from the peephole was triumphant. I knew he would come, I told the court of the rajah Dugmanta now assembled in their places for Act I. I was looking out the curtain for him. And I put away my poor, drowsy reptile and took in its stead the rubber one from the prop master’s cabinet. I was dancing on Sundays again.