During the interval we dancers retreated to our dressing rooms and to the wings to shriek and moan, and some, less concerned, to eat sandwiches!, while the audience outside made a ruckus in the small salons behind their boxes and in the hallways and foyers and smoking rooms. And as if all this were not happening, Colonel Teliakovsky came to my dressing room, as is customary, to present me with the tsar’s gift upon my retirement. The imperial present, as it was known, was normally for a man a gold watch and for a woman a jewel set in gold, the setting stamped with the crown or the double headed eagle, but I knew I would be getting a gift far better. As my father and brother bent over me, the feathered plumes of their hats skimming the bare flesh of my arms, Teliakovsky made a little ceremony of handing me the velvet jeweler’s box, and with a little trepidation and much expectation, I unlatched the clasp. What would Niki have chosen for me? Inside the box lay a coiled serpent, its scales specked with diamonds as it strangled a cabochon sapphire, the polished convex shape of the gem a smooth blue apple. The brooch, Teliakovsky told me, was designed by the empress herself for this great occasion. The serpent, Teliakovsky continued into my silence, is the symbol of wisdom.
Really.
The serpent was a deceiver, a trickster, the offerer-up of apples.
The gem is very valuable, said Teliakovsky the salesman, at least fifteen carats. A great tribute.
Tribute? This was no tribute, this was an insult, a provocation, and my retirement performance had become an inadvertent comedy full of broad slapstick and shenanigans with the audience dissolved in laughter. While my father oohed and aahed and handled the brooch as carefully as if it were a real snake, my brother peered around him at my dark face. I snapped closed the jeweler’s box and announced that I was going to dress and leave the theater, but my brother and father erupted, my brother in protest, my father in bafflement, leave the theater?, while Teliakovsky stood there with his mouth as open as the box had once been. I was Kschessinska, not some coryphée, Josef said, while my father nodded vigorously, and I was still for this last night the figurehead of the Imperial Ballet. I could not abandon it just because a few pieces of canvas did not please the antiquities out front. I’ve told you my brother was a modern man. But it was not just the scenery that bothered me. What about this brooch? I said. And Josef said, Pin the brooch to your costume and show the empress you do not care, and then he pinned it deftly to my bodice himself. There! So did I go home? No, I did not. I remained at the theater. I would dance Acts II, III, and IV. My brother had appealed to my pride. I could not walk out on my own farewell performance and I would not let Alix think her serpent had stung me.
By the time the curtain rose on the third act and the balletomanes saw the grotto of the gnomes, which looked like a thick forest of tree stumps, cut flat across, some hanging from the ceiling like stalactites and others sprouting from the stage floor, all decorum had fled the house and the audience began to whistle, to catcall, to hiss. When the gnomes led me to their rough hut to dress me in a costume of leaves, they did so to a chorus of laughter from the boxes and parterres. I had been booed before on the stage by claques loyal to Preobrajenska or more recently those loyal to Pavlova, but this differed in the totality of the disruption. Although we were not responsible for any element of the physical production, this act of protest did not punish Teliakovsky, Golovin, or Koreshchenko so much as the dancers. I and the other dance artists bore the humiliation of it, while Teliakovsky and his brethren cringed in the wings. M. Petipa stood back there, too, slightly away from them, such an old man, eighty-four years, his waxed moustache a silvery white, his face trembling and his hands made into impotent fists. And so it continued throughout each scene, each act—and as I counted them earlier, they are many. There was no escape, no retreat for me as Grand Duke Vladimir brayed from his box, Let us all go home! I could see Colonel Vintulov quite clearly as he shouted, Get rid of Teliakovsky—he will ruin the theater!, his bald head slick with indignant sweat. And in the midst of all this the emperor and his entire family sat politely in the imperial box, watching the pas d’action on the stage, though their presence there did not suppress the hubbub in the slightest. Yes, I picked my way through my delicate variations with the zephyrs and the stars, my romantic pas de deux with the prince against the backdrop of the moon. I bit into the poisoned apple and laid myself in my glass coffin. I mimed my awakening and my betrothal in a castle hall painted in bold diamond patterns and ornamentation that looked like giant pineapples and cabbages, but I did all this in a state of mortification so extreme I have no memory of any of it. In the imperial box, the women spoke to one another occasionally behind their fans. Alix smiled now and then and lifted a hand to conceal a laugh. Niki, though, watched the ballet steadily, and at its curtain, amid a frogs’ chorus of croaks and boos, I looked up at him. He pulled a droll face, Who cares?, and gave me a conspiratorial wink.
Right after the curtain came down, with the dancers crowded about me, Teliakovsky presented me with the theater’s gift: a crown of gold laurel leaves, each leaf engraved with the name of a ballet in which I had over the years appeared, and wouldn’t you know, the top front leaf read, Le Miroir magique. Gold or not, I snapped it off.
Teliakovsky blamed Petipa for the whole debacle and forced him to retire along with me after that night. Petipa consoled himself with the writing of his memoirs. I remained in Petersburg and consoled myself with the triumph coming to me soon on a stage far more vast and far more public than the Maryinsky’s. I told my family all about it the next day to prepare them for what awaited me and, by association, them. The tsar has come back to me, I said, and they stared at me as if I had gone mad. They all thought the loss of Sergei and the disaster at the theater had robbed me of my reason. He comes to visit me at my dacha. My mother shook her head as if I were some sad creature. Even Julia looked askance at me and said nothing in my defense. My son is the tsar’s son, I told them, not Sergei’s, and one day he might be tsar. My father said, Mala, enough, as my brother scoffed, Your son as the Tsar of All the Russias? Does your ambition know no bounds? My judgment must have been toppled by all those grand dukes who supped at my tables and entertained themselves in my bed, he said. By no stretch of the imagination would Vova be anything more than the illegitimate son of a dancer, as marginalized by society as any other illegitimate son. Did I think that by all my tricks I could ease the circumstances of his birth? I snapped my fingers at him. My father instructed my sister to talk some sense into me. I stared at her indignantly. She had seen the letters I sent with Ali to the tsar. She had driven in my carriage past the three plots of land the tsar had purchased for me on Petersburg Island. Did she, too, think all this was fantasy on my part? Had she only been humoring little Mala? I suppose she thought that Ali had crumpled up in his fists my letters to the tsar and that my plots of land belonged to Baron Brandt, next door. I hated her looking down her long Kschessinsky nose at me. Well, she would soon see. Everyone would soon see. And everyone included Alix, who I knew would be doing her best to rid herself of me.