Nijinsky (31 page)

He took up skeleton-running, hurtling wildly head-first, face-down on a small sled down what was called the ‘village run'; he took Romola down with him sometimes, and, to Romola's terror, Kyra too. When they went out in the sleigh he would drive recklessly fast, occasionally into the paths of other sleighs. He began drawing strange insects with human faces and staring eyes and weird circular rhythmic patterns. At night Romola would wake to find Vaslav staring at her. Once, very deliberately, he pushed her and Kyra down the stairs. Just as when he was under the influence of Kostrovsky, he refused to eat meat, and he tried to prevent Kyra eating it too. He took to wearing a large gold cross given to Kyra by Emilia over his clothes and trying to engage strangers
in religious conversations. Sometimes he would go into the village and spend thousands of francs on paints, scents, shoes, presents, a rainbow-coloured pile of sweaters.

But at the same time, he also had moments – even days – of lucidity. Romola's sister Tessa and brother-in-law came to stay. At Christmas, he and Romola wrapped all the presents for their household and took packages to the children in the village. They decorated a Christmas tree with sweets, toys, silver nuts, garlands and a silver star at the top, but when they awoke on Christmas morning the tree had fallen. The decorations were scattered all over the floor and the silver star lay in two pieces. Trembling, the maid managed to stammer out that a fallen Christmas tree was bad luck.

Their young stoker, who as a child had run errands for Friedrich Nietzsche further down the valley while he was going mad during the 1890s, hesitantly told Romola that he had acted and looked as Vaslav did just before he was taken away. Romola consulted a local doctor, Hans Frenkel, who had studied under Eugen Bleuler, the psychiatrist who eight years earlier had invented the term ‘schizophrenia'. Frenkel gave Vaslav word-association tests and prescribed chloral hydrate as a sedative, which may have made his already wandering attention worse, and recommended to Romola that she take Vaslav to see Bleuler. He also embarked upon an affair with Romola. It is not known whether Vaslav knew about this affair. Joan Acocella, the dance critic and editor of the first complete English translation of Nijinsky's diary, has argued, I think convincingly, that he did not.

The young French writer Maurice Sandoz met Vaslav at this time, watching a figure-skating competition. He was wearing black sports clothes with the gold cross prominently displayed on his chest, and he was pulling a toboggan on which sat
‘an exquisite little girl
', Kyra. They fell into conversation about the skaters.

‘He skates with his heart. That's the right way.' Sandoz agreed that the skater was the most graceful of the competitors. ‘Grace comes from God. Everything else can be acquired by study.'

‘But grace too can be acquired by study, can't it?'

‘The kind that can be learnt stops short; grace that is innate never ceases to grow.'

Sandoz asked if Vaslav's little girl would follow in his footsteps.
‘Oh no! Her grandfather
could only walk, her father can only dance. She'll have to fly! You'll fly, won't you?' Kyra clapped her hands and laughed as he threw her high up over his head.

In early January 1919 Vaslav decided to give a recital in the village at the Suvretta House Hotel. He told Romola a few days before, when they were discussing his costume with the dressmaker, that he wanted to
‘show how dances
are created. I will compose them there before the audience. I want the public to see the work. They always get everything ready-made. I want to show them the pangs of creation, the agony an artist has to go through when composing, so I will even make the costumes in front of them.'

On the afternoon of the performance, Vaslav, Romola and the dressmaker drove over to the Suvretta House. As always before dancing, Vaslav was silent, his face pale and intense between the dark fur collar of his coat and the fur of his Russian hat. When they arrived, Romola asked what time she should ask the Hungarian accompanist, Bertha Asseo, a friend of her sister's, to begin playing.

‘I will tell her
at the time. Do not speak.
Silence
!' he thundered. ‘This is my marriage with God.'

About two hundred people were waiting in the hotel's ballroom. Vaslav came in in his practice clothes. According to Sandoz, who was one of the guests, Nijinsky was in good humour, greeting people easily, while, despite her slender elegance, Romola looked worried.

In Romola's account of the evening, which differs from Sandoz's, Vaslav ignored the guests. Instead of dancing, he picked up a chair and sat facing the audience for what felt like half an hour, staring at them as if he wanted to read their minds. Then, hoping to prompt Vaslav into action, Bertha Asseo began playing some Chopin. Still he didn't move. Romola went up to him and urged him to begin dancing.

‘How dare you disturb me!
I am not a machine. I will dance when
I feel like it.' Close to tears, Romola fled the room. When she returned Vaslav was dancing.

Sandoz did not notice this delay. What he noticed was the precision with which, when Vaslav did start dancing, each movement corresponded exactly to each chord, emphasising the fragmentary quality of the music (it was Chopin's Prelude No. 20 in C Minor). Sandoz was surprised at the time but, over the years, thinking about it again, he realised how right Vaslav had been, how intuitive and full of musical understanding. After a brief rest, Nijinsky stood up and shouted,
‘We're at war
.' He laid out the fabric he had brought with him – long rolls of black and white velvet – on the floor in the shape of a cross.

Romola remembered him saying,
‘Now I will dance
you the war, with its suffering, with its destruction, with its death. The war which you did not prevent and so you are also responsible for,' and standing with open arms at the head of the velvet cross, his body forming another cross above it.

‘And we saw
Nijinsky [continued Sandoz], his face ravaged with fright and horror, walking to the sound of a funeral march on a field of battle, striding over a rotting corpse, avoiding a shell, defending a shallow trench which was soaked in blood that clung to his feet, attacking an enemy, running from a tank, coming back on his steps, wounded, dying, tearing, with hands that spoke volumes, the clothes which covered him and were now becoming rags and tatters.

‘Nijinsky, barely covered with the shreds of his tunic and gasping for breath was panting hard. A feeling of oppression came over the room, grew tense and seemed to fill it. Another moment and the audience would have cried out: “Enough!”

‘One last spasm shook his body which seems riddled with bullets, and another dead man was added to the victims of the Great War.

‘This time we felt too much overwhelmed to applaud. We were looking at a pitiful corpse and our silence was the silence that enfolds the dead.

‘If Nijinsky had stopped there, our memories of him would have been perfect.'

Romola said that he had danced at once gloriously and terrifyingly:
‘it was the dance
for life against death'. She did not mention the last sequence of the evening, in which according to Sandoz, Vaslav turned to the wall while the accompanist played a Bach fugue and, half-listening, made strange manic movements like some kind of mad magician.
‘A shiver of fear
passed through the room.' Asseo stopped. ‘What are you doing? That's not dancing.' A rigid, haughty expression came over Vaslav's face, ‘the mask of an offended idol': ‘I am an artist.' There was a moment of embarrassed silence and then Asseo began playing a Chopin Ballade. ‘No, I don't want to hear that music,' shouted Vaslav. ‘I know it. I want some music that I don't know, some music that nobody knows.' Asseo played something else and he danced, briefly, with ‘delicious grace'. Then she got up and the performance was over.

Afterwards Asseo had tea with Romola and said to her kindly,
‘It must be very, very difficult
to be married to a genius like Nijinsky. I almost wish you could be free to marry one of our nice, charming, inoffensive compatriots.'

When they got home, Vaslav retreated to his room and carried on feverishly writing in the diary he had begun earlier that day.
‘The audience came
to be amused … [but] I danced frightening things. They were frightened of me and therefore thought that I wanted to kill them. I do not want to kill anyone. I loved everyone, but no one loved me, and therefore I became nervous,' he wrote. ‘I felt God throughout the evening. He loved me. I loved Him. Our marriage was solemnised. In the carriage I told my wife that today was the day of my marriage with God.' It was also the day that Romola realised that there was nothing she could do to stop her husband's psychological collapse.

Nijinsky's diary is an extraordinary document. Written during a period of forty-five days between 19 January and 4 March 1919 in Russian (very bad Russian, according to his translator Kyril FitzLyon, but perhaps that is not surprising for a man who had done as little schoolwork as possible) with tremendous speed, it was, said Romola, almost illegible except for the fact that
‘the sentences repeated
themselves continuously and
that the two names Diaghilev and God dominated' the pages.
‘To my knowledge
,' writes Joan Acocella in her introduction to its first full English translation, published in 1999, ‘it is the only sustained, on-the-spot (not retrospective) written account, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis.'

He began writing to express, describe and justify what he thought he was going through. Knowing Romola was worried about him and fearing, because of the hallucinations he was at this stage only experiencing intermittently, that he might be going mad – he wanted to show that what seemed (even to him) to be madness was in fact an ascent to a higher plane, a mystical union with God in which he would translate God's message to the world. The message was simple, heavily reliant on Tolstoy, and throughout he never deviated from it, wherever his free-falling mind took him: materialism and opportunism were destroying the world and the remedy was not thinking, but feeling. FitzLyon notes that feeling as Nijinsky used the word
‘means intuitive perception
, the ability to understand something – a person, a situation – by merging with it emotionally … akin to a spiritual experience'.

Several themes recur amid the rambling repeated phrases, disjointed memories and associations, wild swings in mood, back-to-front arguments (
‘I am afraid
of death and therefore I love life'), apparent contradictions and cries of existential anguish. The first is God, the closeness Vaslav feels and longs to feel to Him, and the torment he suffers when he feels detached from Him. He has no time for the Church as an institution or for the Pope; his spirituality is based on an intense personal association with the divine, through Christ in particular.
‘I am God in man
. I am what Christ felt. I am Buddha. I am a Buddhist and every kind of God. I know everyone. I am acquainted with everything. I pretend to be mad for my own purposes. I know that if everyone thinks I am a harmless madman, they will not be afraid of me. I do not like people who think that I am a madman who would harm people. I am a madman who loves people.' (This passage gives a good indication of the style of the diary. As one critic has written,
‘Reading it is like
watching an autistic child rocking back and forth, back and forth, absorbed in the
patterns of a speeding universe but unable to waylay them long enough to process into purposeful action. It's a terrible sight. We want to stop him, comfort him. But we know he's doomed.')

His ideas recall the sense of oneness for which Buddhists strive, and remind me of
The Way of a Pilgrim
, a classic of Russian mysticism, about an itinerant peasant trying
‘to find out
what it means in the Bible when it says you should pray incessantly'; it is the book J. D. Salinger's Franny Glass (in
Franny and Zooey
) can't let go of. Sometimes he verges on delusions of grandeur that make him think he might actually be an omnipotent deity; most of the time he seems to mean, when he says he is God, that he sometimes feels attuned to a communion with the divine in which anyone could participate.
‘I am not a magician
, I am God within the body,' he writes. ‘Everyone has this feeling, only no one uses it.'

But then he is overtaken by torturous doubts: he is evil, he does not love anyone; he is an animal, a predator, a masturbator. He is the angriest man in the world. The very worst things he can contemplate he will do:
‘I will eat everyone
I can get hold of. I will stop at nothing. I will make love to my wife's mother and my child. I will weep, but I will do everything God commands me to. I know that everyone will be afraid of me and will commit me to a lunatic asylum. But I don't care. I am not afraid of anything. I want death. I will blow my brains out if God wants it. I will be ready for anything.'

And just as he does not flinch from the darkness in his own soul, so too does he seek to understand the baser instincts that animate the world around him. The stock market is a brothel, he writes; men become rich by fraud; politics is death. Lloyd George, whom he blames for the war, is as aggressive and power-hungry as Diaghilev. They are both eagles
‘who prevent small birds
from living'. Amid the flashes of insight are moments of wild delusion: he will gamble on the stock exchange to make money to give to the poor, he will invent pencils that never go blunt, he will ask Gabriel Astruc to arrange for him to dance for the poor artists of Paris, and if they understand him he will be saved.

He can comprehend everything spoken in front of him, no matter
what language it is.
‘To understand
does not mean to know all the words,' he writes, referring to Romola and her sister Tessa speaking Hungarian in front of him. ‘I know few words, but my hearing is very well developed.' This delusion is less odd than it might sound: Vaslav must have been extraordinarily good at picking up on non-verbal communication. He had spent most of his adult life speaking and listening to languages in which he was not fluent, saying little but understanding a lot. I think of those endless champagne-drenched dinners in mirrored private dining rooms, with everyone but him fighting to make their voice heard and Vaslav just listening; and of the way he could express so much on stage with a glance or a gesture.