Encore (29 page)

With some effort she reached out to him, holding out tremulous fingers. “Please go tomorrow,” she whispered. “Go to the opera. I won't have the baby without you. Besides, you've kept me up tonight, and it would do me good to go to sleep early tomorrow.”

With a graceful sweep he slipped his arms under her and carried her carefully up the stairs. She was heavy, where before she had been weightless, a flower in the breeze. Or maybe it was merely the mental weight that he had been attributing to the baby. He positioned her carefully on the bed and kneeled down beside her. The little face was still delicate and pale, but it did not seem as frightened as before. He touched her hair and removed one pin, then another, until, free, it fell in soft waves, Madonna-like, around her cheeks and forehead. There was something otherworldly about a woman with child, something poignantly desirable about her intangibility. He drew a line with his fingertip over her nose and chin.

“Sleep now,” he said, feeling oddly moved and not at all ridiculous. “My own sweet girl.”

The following evening he drove into Darmstadt to go to the opera. He felt exhilarated. Natalia was reading in bed, exhausted after having spent a comfortable day; there was no need to worry. Still, a nagging voice grated within him, telling him that he should have stayed. But she had wanted him to go, and frankly he had longed for such an evening. It was such a beautiful time of year, and Darmstadt was a jewel of a town, so gentle and charming,
sogemütlich.

Yes, he thought as he entered the opera house and found his reserved seat, she's right, of course, and I've been a fool to deny it: I do miss the productions, the talent, and the creativity. But I also needed this time alone with her, time apart from the pressures of a jumbled existence, time to sort things out, to grow up a little.

At intermission he went out into the corridor to stretch his legs and smoke his pipe. Decidedly, Darmstadt was not a town of elegant people. Boris leaned nonchalantly against a wall and appraised the theatre crowd. The women had thick waists and florid countenances. Their hats were too broad-brimmed to be fashionable. True, there were some aigrettes, plumes of the egret—His eyes began to wander. All at once he abruptly froze.

Boris felt his body tense into a single, taut nerve. His lips parted. Not more than a hundred feet away stood a man in black evening wear, holding his opera hat in one hand and a champagne coupe in another. Boris could feel himself perspiring into his elegant ruffled shirt. He wet his upper lip. Then the man turned, and could not avoid encountering Boris against the wall. Boris saw the crisp black curls, the black eyes that always seemed to possess a life of their own. There was a new crease in the forehead, lines forming at the mouth. No wonder, he's not a child anymore; he's past thirty, older than I was when we met.

Faced with the dark eyes, Boris made an instant decision. He smiled, inclined his head, and raised his hand in an ironic salute. He had caught the other off-guard. Warming slightly after the first shock, Boris took a step and walked with casual grace toward him. Reaching him he said: “Hello, Pierre. I'm afraid you've brought me up short. I can't think of a single clever thing to say.”

Pierre Riazhin stared at him, nostrils twitching, the color high on his cheekbones. A sort of grimace playing over his features made him look like a wild beast cornered by a pack of bloodthirsty hunting dogs: angry, rebellious, and aware that the outcome was unavoidable. He said harshly: “What are you doing here, Boris?”

Boris smiled. “Enjoying the opera.
Et toi?”

Pierre reared his head, and this time Boris was reminded of a black stallion snorting in the open field. It was odd how one thought of animal parallels when standing with Pierre.

“I live here,” the young painter said.

“You do? And where, may I inquire?”

“What business is it of yours?” Pierre retorted. The hostility in his eyes was like a sliver of ice thrust into Boris's stomach.

Boris smiled. “Come now, Pierre, such animosity toward an old friend! It isn't becoming. But let's leave all that aside, shall we? What are you saying, you live here? In Darmstadt itself? What on earth for?”

“I live at the
Künstler Kolonie.
It's a good place to work. I've built a house there.”

“Indeed?” Boris raised his eyebrows, intrigued. The
Künstler Kolonie
had been set up by the grand-duke from a wooded area, which he had divided into small lots and paved with winding streets. Sculptors, poets, and painters of all sorts had purchased the lots and erected small houses on them.

“Tell me, Pierre. Have you turned your back on Russia?”

“For the moment. I like it here. I have even learned German.” Pierre hesitated, then laughed shortly. He coughed and asked, “What are you doing here during this off-season? No ballet?”

There was a moment's silence, then Boris regarded Pierre from narrowed eyes. “Natalia is expecting a child,” he said.

Pierre's face became suffused with blood. He made an impulsive motion to spring forward, then caught himself. His lips worked. For a moment Boris felt sorry for the young man. Pierre's black eyes had begun to glow with a strange red glint. “It's been difficult for her,” Boris said, to cover the tension. “She's going to give birth any day now, but she hasn't been able to dance for nearly seven months.”

Pierre uttered a small noise in the back of his throat, and then burst out: “Difficult? Any day now? Why, you disgusting—” He stopped, took a deep breath, and asked: “Whose is it? Obviously not yours!”

Swiftly, in one movement, Boris closed the distance between them and, before a single person could notice, he slapped Pierre squarely on the cheek. Pierre did not utter a word, but his eyes grew wide, and he seized Boris by the lapels of his dinner jacket and began to shake him. “I'm going to kill you,” he said, raising his voice so that several people turned to stare at them.

Boris thrust his shoulders up, making Pierre's hands drop to his sides. “You haven't changed much, Petya,” he said. “And that's a damn shame. People change, you know—or they should. They don't necessarily become better human beings, and that's all right. Yet they do change. I'd rather hoped you would have shed your Neanderthal behavior in favor of more intelligent ways. But I see it's still eluding you—adulthood, I mean.”

They remained staring at each other for a minute. Then Boris slowly turned and walked resolutely into the auditorium. He sat down stroking his mustache and smiled at the old woman seated next to him. But the churning in the pit of his stomach was almost blinding him, and when the curtain rose, red dots still played before his eyes.

Pierre Riazhin stood still in the corridor, clenched fists at his sides. His nostrils flaring with a rising tide of rage, he took the champagne cup, which he had deposited on a ledge, and hurled it against the wall where Boris had been standing. The corridor had been steadily emptying. Before anyone could stop him, Pierre ran out of the opera house, his heart pounding and his throat hoarse from panting.

I'm going to kill the bastard, he thought, his mouth filled with an acrid taste. He tried to think, began to sort out the words. It wasn't true! Fury seized him once again, shook him within its grasp of crimson madness, and he said aloud: “I'm going to kill him!”

Boris could not sleep. His body was alive with tremors that shook him like an ague. His stomach twisted in knots, and disembodied thoughts came at him like screeching trains passing at full speed by a motionless onlooker. At the forefront of his mind lay Natalia, slumbering at his side like a misshapen goddess always hovering on the edge of pain.

He had refused Dr. Fröhlich's suggestion of a clinic. To place Natalia there away from him, to surround her with antiseptic bleakness, filled him with such dreadful feelings that the famous Darmstadt specialist had demurred. Boris had always considered himself an enlightened man—but the idea of a clinic harkened back to inexplicable superstitions: His mother had died in one, of consumption, and Marguerite had been sent to one after a serious mental breakdown. In his mind this Kussov birth, so unexpected at this stage of his life, had become endowed with mystical qualities that he could hardly reconcile with hospitalization.

“Of course, if she or the baby will be in danger otherwise, you must make any arrangement possible,” he had added hurriedly, a sense of doom assaulting his insides. But Dr. Fröhlich had compromised: a nurse, Fräulein Bernhardt, was kept on hand in the village of Zwingenberg, lodging at the house of the cabinetmaker during the last three weeks of the pregnancy; and the medical men deemed the enormous bathroom adjoining the Kussov suite at the inn convenient enough for giving birth, with its open space in the center, the tub against one wall, and the sink, table, and chairs on the opposite side.

Boris had never felt so helpless and inadequate in his life. On one elbow he examined Natalia, wondering if she were truly asleep or in that awkward twilight in which she often passed between rest and uncomfortable half-dozing awareness. He reached out to touch her white brow, then held back: He did not want to risk awakening her if she was asleep. Guilt trickled into his consciousness: to have turned this figure of grace and genius into a mountain of flesh, to have placed her wit and verve behind such bars was an appalling selfishness. Natalia had never wanted a child, and now she might die giving birth to one—to his! And yet sheer joy followed lustily on the heels of his guilt. Nina had felt sure that Natalia would want a child. He had never even considered the possibility—how could he? Now it was imminent, and he was overwhelmed with gladness. Gladness, pride, and hope filled him—but also terror at an unknown so dreadful and so vast that it paralyzed his reason.

He had felt sudden fear when he had first become adjusted to the idea of the pregnancy, wondering if the old disgust would surge up again to destroy everything that he had built with Natalia. He had been afraid to come near her, to see her growing stomach become round and fecund and fully female. Somehow she had sensed this and given him space. But with hesitation he had watched the process. Within the first three months she had begun to show the child inside her, and he had been fascinated and touched, awakened to a new level of sensitivity. Their child!

She moved on the bed, and a spasm passed over her pale face. Her eyelids flickered open and she looked at him, her dark eyes alive with questions. Poor angel, my poor sweet girl, he thought. She knows as little about this as I do. We are babes in the wood. He took her hand and found it moist and feverish. She uttered a sharp cry. Alarmed, he rose from the bed and turned on all the lights. “Something horrible is happening,' she said, the words like small pointed daggers in the still night air. “My body is ripping open with something—a liquid—”

Boris did not wait. He seized his dressing gown and ran out into the corridor, frantically searching for the room where he knew the innkeepers slept. When he found it, he pounded on the door until a man in an incongruous night bonnet threw it open and stared at him, dumbfounded. “Herr Walter, it's my wife!'' Boris said quickly. “Where is Frau Walter?”

The woman was arriving, attracted by the noise. She smiled. She was large and round, with a creased red face and small brown eyes. Natalia had nicknamed her Henny Penny from a nursery story that she had learned in England. “Go back to bed, Hermann,” she told her husband. “Babies are not within your province, as I can see they aren't within the count's.”

Boris and the woman did not speak in the corridor, but inside the room she walked rapidly to the bed and turned to Boris. “Please leave us,” she said somewhat severely. She gave him a small, unceremonious push, and when he had gone into the small sitting room next door, she threw back the covers. “Ach,” she exclaimed, shaking her head, “it's what I thought. The water broke. You're a young one,” she said to Natalia, who was looking at her with silent terror. “There's nothing wrong at all. You've just never been through this. I don't think it's time yet to call Fräulein Bernhardt, though I suppose your husband will insist. Men! Useless, if you ask me!”

Unexpectedly, Natalia laughed. Frau Walter smiled back, pleased with their complicity. “We're going to have to change the sheets,” she said, and went to the adjoining door.
“Herr Graf,”
she called to Boris, “please carry the
Gräfin
to the sitting room while I put clean linens on the bed.”

There is nothing like a German
Hausfrau,
Boris thought with some humor. He took Natalia in his arms to the small sofa and sat down near her. Her face seemed brighter, more flushed, and her eyes more alive. “It's all right,” she said to him in a strangely normal voice. “The worst is over. The worst was thinking that the baby would die along the way. Now we know it's going to be born.” But he thought: What if you should be the one to die, from my selfishness and from my stubbornness concerning the clinic?

Frau Walter settled Natalia comfortably against the pillows and went to telephone Fräulein Bernhardt at the cabinetmaker's in the village. Boris paced the room, thoughts hurtling through his brain. Natalia said evenly: “You're making me nervous. Sit down and read me something, will you? Something not too deep—Turgenev?”

“I'm not a living library, Natalia,” he said. “But perhaps you want me to perform a one-man ballet for you. It's too late to cable Vaslav to come.”

She bit her lower lip and giggled. “I don't know what else to make you do to stop from fretting. You can't very well play the piano. It must be three in the morning!”

Suddenly she pressed her hands against her stomach and writhed in pain. His face turned white. For a moment she could not breathe, but then, slowly, the color returned to her cheeks. Frau Walter returned with the meticulous Fräulein Bernhardt in a clinical white smock and neat gray bun. “I think I've had a pain,” Natalia told her. “Just before you arrived.”