Flight of the Swan (2 page)

At that time Cuba was at the crossroads of the Americas. Travel by boat was imperative if you wanted to reach South America, and there was neither rail nor road between New York and Buenos Aires. Businessmen sailed down the Caribbean on their way to their various destinations—Curaçao, Caracas, Panama—inevitably stopping at La Habana where ships took on coal. Karajaieff, Algeranoff, and other Russian friends of Madame who had fled the revolution and had already found refuge in New York knew Bracale, and cautioned her that he was secretly related to the Mafia, although no one was able to prove it. But as usual, Madame trusted Mr. Dandré blindly and agreed to go along with his plan. She told Lyubovna Federovna and me to pack her clothes and toiletries: her silk georgette nightgowns; her L’Heure Bleue and Narcisse Noir perfume bottles; the silver swan hand mirror, brush, and comb; and in less than a week we were ready to leave.

New York was a heady experience. Madame danced every night to enormous crowds at the Hippodrome, throwing all her previous scruples about Imperial Russian ballerinas appearing before rowdy vaudeville audiences to the winds. People needed to be happy and to forget about the Marne and Verdun, about the horrors of trench warfare and poison gas. Three months later, the United States would begin to ship soldiers to the front, and its youth would become cannon fodder. But no one could foresee the impending tragedy.

We sailed to Cuba full of expectations, sure that the presentations of
Giselle
and
Coppélia
at Teatro Nacional would be a huge success. Cuba was in the news then as the second greatest sugar-producing country in the world, and La Habana’s bourgeoisie was said to be enormously rich. We needed desperately to send money home to our families. That winter in St. Petersburg was one of the worst in history: millions of people were starving and dying of the cold. Letters—when they got to us—told how people were burning fences and lampposts, and using the furniture in their homes as kindling. The money we sent was taken by friends to the Belgian or Swiss borders so that a few of our relatives, after endless struggles, were able to escape and cross over.

Madame, on the other hand, had heard that the Cuban capital was very chic. She ordered a completely new wardrobe made in New York for her dancers, as well as new scenery. Madame was a professional artist; once she signed a contract, she delivered the best performance she was capable of, no matter what sacrifice it meant. The hold of the S.S.
Courbelo
carried dozens of decorated flats, twenty hat boxes full of wide-brimmed pamelas wrapped in clouds of gauze and adorned with silk blossoms, and 194 trunks holding three hundred lace and velvet costumes glimmering with sequins. “She’s the czar’s ballerina,” the customs inspectors in New York would say, nodding to each other knowingly, convinced the costumes all belonged to Madame herself. Little did they know what the real story was! Madame probably would have stayed in Russia if it hadn’t been for Mr. Dandré. She was in London after a tour of the Baltic cities when Mr. Dandré, who was a member of the Duma (the Russian elective legislative assembly, or lower house of parliament) and served in several municipal commissions which allocated city funds, was caught stealing the czar’s rubles. He was thrown unceremoniously in jail. Madame bailed him out, but he could never go back to Russia.

After the first performance, when Cuba’s upper crust turned out in full force to see Madame dance, La Habana’s impressive Teatro Nacional remained discouragingly empty. Political turmoil was rampant on the island, and people were afraid to go out after dark; the city’s streets were deserted, except for President Garcia Menocal’s hoodlums firing random shots from racing black Packards in the middle of the night. The threatening atmosphere reminded us of St. Petersburg during the recent uprisings. At night we could hardly sleep.

Madame, as usual, had spent a fortune before we shipped out of New York—a good part of her earnings during her successful tour of the United States—but not on herself. She would do anything to help her dancers feel confident on stage, and a magnificent costume was a good start. Her extravagance put the rest of us on a tight budget: we weren’t living from hand to mouth as we would be later in Puerto Rico, but Mr. Dandré counted every penny we spent.

Our tour was financed in advance by Max Rabinoff, a millionaire impresario from New York who was a friend of Bracale’s, and at this point his losses exceeded $150,000. In New York, headlines appeared in the press accusing Madame of dancing away fifty thousand dollars, which was really spent on our costumes and stage decors bound for Cuba. Apparently Mr. Rabinoff was in the middle of a divorce, and the money he lent Dandré had belonged to his wife, who had inherited it from her family. She filed suit in court, but the Cuban fiasco made it impossible for Dandré to return any of it. That’s when we received the first of several anonymous threats, telling us that if we didn’t pay up, our lives would be in danger.

Madame, on hearing this, was incensed and wanted to return to New York. She was sure she could contact another millionaire there who would finance the rest of the trip to South America. But Bracale was adamant. He refused to pay for the company’s fares north, or to count on the dubious promise that they would find a patron to subsidize their way to Río de Janeiro. The best thing the company could do was to reach Puerto Rico and make some money there. He cobbled together a fresh itinerary for us, and after waiting an anguished week for our names to be put at the top of the passenger list on one of the local steamers that sailed from Santiago de Cuba, where the company gave one last performance, we finally boarded the S.S.
Courbelo
, bound for San Juan, on April 4,1917. The first day on board Dandré looked solemn and morose. He was dressed all in black, as if to underscore the seriousness of our situation. That morning he brought us all together and came sternly to the point: business in Cuba was a fiasco, and he simply was not in a position to risk another disastrous season. Either the dancers would have to accept a temporary solution—a 25 percent reduction in salary, which meant we would be making three dollars a day—or the tour would have to be abandoned. To some, this was onerous. Smallens, the English orchestra director, for example, spent three dollars a day on beer alone, but most of us were used to living on air, and we even paid our own expenses just to be able to dance on the same stage as Madame.

W
E HAD NEVER HEARD
of Puerto Rico before, but as it was on the way to Panama and Peru, where Dandré had scheduled numerous performances for us during the coming months, we gladly boarded the ship. Dandré pointed out that the island was the smallest of the Greater Antilles and that it was a possession of the United States. “Under the American flag there’s bound to be progress,” he said, dusting off his bowler hat before putting it back on as we walked up the ship’s gangplank. “The island was until recently under military rule. There will be order and discipline and we will be paid in dollars,” he added, looking satisfied with himself and plucking at his mustache, as he did whenever he didn’t want anyone to contradict him.

None of the dancers cared for Mr. Dandré very much, and we felt sorry for Madame, who, in spite of being a star, couldn’t live without him. He took care of her as if she were a child, and lavished attention on her. When we were on the S.S.
Courbelo
, for example, the captain improvised a pool made of canvas and pumped it full of seawater, so Madame could cool off from the heat. She spent hours diving and swimming in it, but when Dandré begged her to come out, calling “Nanushka! Nanushka! Please, it’s time for dinner,” she would laugh and shriek, and send Poppy, her terrier, scrambling out of the water to jump all over him, so he would get dripping wet.

Mr. Dandré was very organized and solved all the logistical problems of our tours. He planned the itineraries and made the reservations, contacted the impresarios and thrashed out the contracts with them, figuring out the expenses of the trips as well as the possible profits and losses. But money often seemed to evaporate mysteriously in his hands, and then we’d find ourselves at the mercy of people like Bracale, who would send his thugs to threaten us or to supervise our performances. On one occasion, when we were playing at the Metropolitan Opera House just before we left on the trip for South America, a group of men wearing wool masks broke into the back office, blew up the safe, and made off with twenty thousand dollars, three quarters of it from Madame’s back wages. After that, Madame took special care of her personal valuables, especially her jewels, which she carried everywhere with her in a small alligator case.

Dandré was always laughing and looking at the bright side of things. But he had a lecherous disposition and was constantly trying to pinch the girls’ fannies or burst into our dressing rooms unexpectedly when we were changing our costumes. “Whenever Mr. Dandré is away,” the girls used to tease Madame—and he traveled often because of the complicated quartermaster duties he performed for the company (or so Madame said, with a shamefaced smile)—“we all rejoice. You belong only to us then, Madame, to your sacred nymphs.”

I felt the difference more than anyone. When Dandré wasn’t around, Madame paid much more attention to me. She didn’t have to drop everything at six in the afternoon to run him a bath, darn his socks, or see about his dinner that evening. “Time for Masha the ugly, time for Masha the awkward,” I’d whisper to her under my breath; and then I’d do a little jig for her sake, to celebrate our privacy. In her hotel room I’d beg her to teach me how to weave my arms like a willow in the wind or to fly like a butterfly instead of like a moth.

No matter how hard Dandré tried to whittle down classical ballet to a mere way of making money, to crass bourgeois showmanship, it was much more than that to us. As Madame preached many times, giving us a little speech before class, dancing was a spiritual experience. In ancient times man’s devotion to the gods, his happiness and bereavement, were all expressed through movement. The body was the harp of the spirit, the medium through which we achieved union with the divine.

When Madame approved of the way a dancer performed a difficult sequence of steps, she would stand before the stage lights during rehearsal and cry
“Harasho!”
while clapping ecstatically But she wasn’t always so generous. Sometimes she could be terribly cruel with girls who took a long time to learn the choreography for a new ballet. She would show them how to do a sequence of steps once, and if the student didn’t remember all the details the first time around, she would explode.
“You have expression like cook! Are you artist or not?”
she’d call out from the sidelines. And if someone gained a pound or two—something easy to do in these islands, where the best food is fried by the roadside in smoking black cauldrons by turbaned black women, she would immediately call out to us:
“Vaches! How can you pretend to be dancers when you look like chateaubriands!”

Dancers with weak ankles or legs had a hard time in our troupe. Madame was merciless with them, ridiculing and shaming them. Don’t be misled, Madame only
looked
frail. Her exceptionally arched insteps, her slender ankles, her delicately drawn neck made her seem as fragile as a porcelain doll, but her muscles were tempered in steel. She wasn’t like a swan at all; she was a hare, a racing machine. She never got tired; she could dance fifteen hours a day without stopping, sleep for six hours, and keep going the next day. She earned the right to every minute of the spotlight in every performance she was in, by sheer stamina. She was like a force of nature, and she rejected everything that was weak.

Madame was a jealous guardian of her leading roles, and with good reason. In classical ballet, as in every walk of life, there are opportunists lurking behind every painted flat, and mediocre dancers often take advantage of the excellence of others. For this reason, when she went onstage, if her partner got too close to her during a supporting turn, or if he stepped on the hem of her costume, she pretended nothing was amiss. She danced around the scoundrel with a radiant smile, and as soon as the curtain went down, she’d turn around and give him a sound slap across the face.

In any case, Madame had every right to be so demanding with other dancers, because she was just as exacting with herself. She could rehearse a combination of steps, which took ten seconds to perform, for hours; repeat a battement tendu, a bourrée, or an arabesque so many times the dancers began to feel the ground give way under their feet. The few times I watched her do the devilishly difficult fouettés, her leg an iron pivot on which her whole body turned while it churned like a butter pole, the other leg a whip of bone and flesh lifting and falling forty times in perfect rhythm, I was so amazed I was sure the holy Pantocrator was hovering over the stage, miraculously sustaining Madame inside the iris of His eye.

Once, just before a performance, Madame was watching the audience through a tiny peephole in the velvet curtains, leaning forward and already costumed to appear on the scene, when she said to me: “Look at them, Masha, how self-satisfied and complacent they are, after a rich dinner and an expensive bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Their bodies have taken over and their spirits are unable to rise. We’ll try to help them with our dancing, but we can’t promise them anything.” The moment the curtain went up and she appeared onstage, it was her winged power countering their heaviness, her élan vital pitted against their dead weight. Madame’s profile was serene and chiseled in snow; her walk unfaltering, like a panther’s. By contrast, I was ugly and awkward, my face was full of pimples, and my arms were gawky; I was always tripping over myself and clumsily dropping things. But I couldn’t let her see how much I loved her. When you revered Madame she exploited you all the more—and then discarded you like a dried corn husk.

Madame exerted a mysterious attraction on those around her. An aura emanated from her that pulled young girls to her like moths. One had to be careful not to get too close, or one could fall into the fire. When I was a child in Minsk I saw the Imperial Ballet give a presentation in the garden of a castle—my stepmother took me there because she worked in the kitchen. It was the first time I ever saw a ballerina, and they looked like fairies, dancing among the flowers. Madame was my fairy godmother.