Dancer

1

Eleven hours of rehearsal, one hour of slow barre work. Impossible to achieve the correct phrasing. You must desire the patience of a stonecutter. Chisel away until everything fits. After dressing room nap, another hour rehearsal with Rosella. In performance nobody — nobody! — noticed, not even Françoise.

Twenty encores, but so what, who cares? Remember: Perfection is the duty.

In an interview Petit says there are certain things that defeat themselves if they are said. That dance is the only thing that can describe what is otherwise indescribable. Yes.

The note from Grace Kelly hung from the lightbulb above the mirror.

Edith Piaf was watching from the veranda. Jean Cocteau smiled from the shadows. Marlene Dietrich was stretched out on the divan. There was talk of Leonard Bernstein on his way from his hotel, perhaps even an appearance by Picasso. Someone began quoting lines from Proust. All for me!

Walked back to the hotel with the bodyguards and heard a roadsweeper on the quays, humming Mozart. I thought that nothing will surprise me anymore, not even my dreams.

The de La Rochefoucauld house — fifteen types of champagne, more caviar than ever seen before. Orchids on the tables. Gold candelabras. Everyone was whirling around, the room had no corners. The talk was of choreographers, critics, audiences, but it swung finally to philosophers, all Western, including Derrida, so they left me disadvantaged. There is much to catch up on. Otherwise they will buffoon me. My reply was based on Sasha’s idea that dance says what nothing else can.

Dance with the balls. The brain follows the balls.

Lots of nodding heads. Snickers behind their hands. I left them alone when really I should have stuck my tongue down their throats to pierce their empty hearts.

Twenty-three years old. The constant (unrevealed) thought of being an impostor. But you cannot become a history of what you have left behind. No tea, no heirlooms, no weeping. No stale bread, soaked in vodka and tears. You must boot yourself down the boulevards of Paris in your white silk shirt!

Mother was weeping uncontrollably on the telephone. Later during the night there was the thought of her at the wireless, turning white knobs: Warsaw, Luxembourg, Moscow, Prague, Kiev, Vilnius, Dresden, Minsk.

Tamara said: You have betrayed us.

Menuhin played Bach at the Salle Pleyel: the heart quickened and almost forgot everything.

A bath. Honey in the tea. Rehearsal. The perfection is not so much in the performance as in the journey towards it. This is the joy. You must burn!

Each corner, each sculpture, each painting takes the breath away. It is like walking through a history book that goes on forever, refuses to meet its own back cover. It is a marvel, a seventh wonder, almost as good as the Hermitage (although half the size and not quite the grandeur).

Already the guards recognize me and one of them greeted me in pidgin Tatar. His family left generations ago. He was with the Impressionists, so I lingered.

Claire took me along the Seine away from the museum. She gave me a pair of giant sunglasses for disguise then pulled the brim of my leather cap down. Four people immediately shouted, Nureyev!

At a stall a bookseller was waving a signed copy of A Farewell to Arms. Only a few weeks dead and his books are selling at ridiculous prices. (Perhaps one should die in the middle of a dance, en l’air, have the performance auctioned, frozen, sold to the highest bidder.) Claire looked in her handbag, but the book seller said he didn’t have change. She bought it for almost one and a half times the price. She was curious that I was so appalled. Later she showed me the workings of the bank account — such foolishness.

Rumors that they tortured Sasha, questioned Xenia, took Yulia and put her in a cell for a week. Surely this cannot be true.

A new hairstyle in Paris: the Noureev. In Le Monde some vulture said it has appeared as quickly as the Berlin Wall, but as Cocteau explained, it is just their desire to commodify me. Oh, to have a mind like Cocteau’s. (He said that in a dream he was once trapped in an elevator listening to Symphony Divine.)

The bearded Jew walked east through the Jardins de Luxembourg, his long overcoat swishing at his ankles. He had his hands behind his back, holding a prayer book. Then he sat on a bench under a tree and picked his teeth. He might have been thinking, Ah, Petersburg.

Madame B. waited while the Algerian tailor measured. Then she bought the black velvet suit. She said I should take endless delight in new beginnings.

In the apartment the maidservant made a disgusting drink of minted tea. I sipped it and immediately spat it back into the glass. Madame seemed delighted, as if she had found the elemental savage.

She came to the divan, ran my suit lapel between her forefinger and thumb. I excused myself to the window. Down below, on the sidewalk, the men walked with their overcoats draped across their forearms and the women wore their hats as if something were alive on their heads. The traffic stalled. Bits of newspaper blew along the Seine.

Madame was at the window, trying to shout down to me as I walked away along the quay.

The wristwatches were all German handmade and they had no price tags. It was difficult to be nonchalant when Madame asked which one I wanted. She desires to smother me with her wealth, yet why should I say to a fountain that I am not going to drink from your water?

Later Madame pointed out that, when nervous, I pull my shirtsleeves down over my knuckles. She said it was uncouth, the gesture of a peasant, but that time would fix it. She leaned back against the balcony railing, holding a long cigarette. Her chin tilted as if she had just said something very wise. I tugged at my sleeve again. She waved her cigarette in the air. Oh, non non non, Rudi, mon Dieu!

Then came the extraordinary look on her face when I flung the watch from the balcony down into the garden.

If you wish to wear your hat indoors, who is to tell you no? (She forgets that a bucket of shit is an easy thing to pour, especially from a spiral staircase.)

You cannot end up mad (Nijinsky) or complacent (Tikhomirov).

A fan was waiting outside the Palais in the rain. Hungarian. Said he escaped in ’59. He stood in the spill from the gutter and said that until he saw me perform he did not know who he really was. Such an idiot. He held a newspaper above his head and the ink had run down his face. Also he reeked of cognac. Still, I signed his autograph book.

Maria took my arm. At dinner we talked about the great ones, Karsavina, Pavlova, Fonteyn, etc. Of course I put Maria top of the list. She blushed.

Later she suggested wisely that one must experience an older dancer as one would eat a lobster claw. She demonstrated quite nimbly, ripping the claw and noisily sucking it clean.

The fools put sequins along my sleeve so that when I lift her they scrape the inside of her thigh.

In the pas de deux there were tears in her eyes, and the streak of blood became apparent. It was dress rehearsal and the crowd was impatient. In the wings she was screaming in pain, God damn, god damn, god damn, I am ruined. She spat at the French costumier. Then she changed her outfit and the doctor patched her skin. All in the space of two minutes.

When she reappeared she had the same angelic smile as always.

The Le Monde critic said she had begun to feel immune to beauty but, after the Bayadère pas de deux, she wobbled out of the theater with tears of joy in her eyes.

Do not allow the critics to make you so good you cannot become any better. Correspondingly, do not allow them to rip the cartilage from your carcass. (Sasha: Your duty is to disprove those who don’t believe.)

Truth: When criticized you go berserk, but in your defense remember that it is those who calmly listen who never change.

Madame arranged for the boy to come over. She said he was from a good family and is studying Russian at the Sorbonne. She answered the door to him. Her lips pursed tight when she brought him into the library. He walked brazenly across the room, tossed his leather jacket on the Louis XV furniture. Madame froze and winced at the sound of the zipper as it touched the arm of the chair.

She put on Stravinsky, then excused herself delicately. We sat looking at each other. He put out his hand and said: Gilbert.

Sometimes the least word breaks the spell.

Gilbert said they had put the silverware on the table in my honor. He watched me eat the melon. I ran my tongue along the fork for him to see and could feel his shivers all the way across the room! For dessert I left the spoon in my mouth an extra few seconds. His young wife looked out from under her thin eyebrows and then excused herself to bed.

On the drive out to Rambouillet, Gilbert licked the steering wheel of his roadster and began laughing. We watched the champagne cork bounce in the rearview mirror. I thought that hundreds must be out on the roads, happy, in the darkness everywhere.

At Dominique’s his friends made a fuss. Rudi! Rudi! Rudi! Gilbert shouted a Cossack toast after stacking glasses in a pyramid. The émigré waiter sniggered at my accent. I threw my coffee in his face, splattering his fine white shirt. The manager came over and groveled, assuring me the waiter would be fired.

Gilbert laughed and kicked me under the table.

Afterwards in the club on rue d’Assis the boys in red halter tops broke into a cancan. The English actor with the black sideburns looked in my direction. Outside, the sun stung my eyes. We walked straight to rehearsal. Gilbert slept on the bench in the dressing room.

The man in the corner seemed familiar but I couldn’t place him. His mustache and eyebrows were thick and gray. He was fidgeting and smoking. I racked my brains, nervous that he might be following me. He did seem Russian, yes, but it wasn’t until he turned to pay his bill that I noticed just how cunning and disenchanted his look was. Then it became clear — he was the émigré waiter from Dominique’s.

He ignored me, left the café, yet made a good deal of noise as he pushed back the tables. He stopped by a fire-eater performing at the corner and then made a show of flourishing a twenty-franc bill, dropped it in the fire-eater’s bucket.

I left the café and kissed the fire-eater’s cheeks (he did not flinch). The asshole waiter watched me from a distance and then finally scuttled away, probably to the rue Daru where he and the others could mourn their paltry existence.

Truth: I conceal my fear in loudness, including performances.

The ovations become more exhausting than the dance. Perhaps one day there will be a ballet of ovations. On mentioning this to Claire she said that any such effort would be very Artaud. I was lost — no idea. Sometimes it is impossible to conceal this blankness. She said it was all right, he’s a French experimentalist, she will get me his books, he might be interesting, something about the theater of cruelty.

She also promised the Richter recording. With a portable hi-fi I could listen to him on the road.

I thought at first it was a joke. I almost cursed her in four languages. I realized it was indeed Margot and almost choked. She said the whole thing was arranged.

Outside Covent Garden. Taking off my beret elicits a roar.

Rehearsal is pure and unpolluted. Margot’s fierce intelligence. She dances from the inside out. For the pas de deux she took tiny faltering steps, dropped them perfectly on stage like tears. She makes us see not only the dance but also what the dancer sees.

Afterwards she brought me to her home at the Panamanian embassy and made a lamb stew, laughed when I pulled my shirt over my head and inhaled the smell. (Over dinner she made a joke that she is the mutton and I am the lamb, but the two decades between us mean nothing to me.)

For the Savoy reception she dressed up fashionably, someone said it was very Saint Moritz, whatever that means. When we walked in all the heads swiveled.

The English claim to civilization is pure shit! They allow their reporters and photographers everywhere. The problem with them is that they see dance as an aperitif, not the actual bread of their lives.

The French critics say you are a god when you dance.

I doubt that.

You doubt the critics?

I doubt the French.

(laughter all round)

I also doubt the gods.

Pardon me?

I’d say the gods are far too busy to give a shit about me or anybody else for that matter.

Walked in the rain, past the National Gallery, the Tate. The bodyguard didn’t understand my terror, near Kensington Palace Gardens, on seeing the Soviet embassy.

Then it clicked and he bundled me away, his arm around my shoulder.

At Margot’s, she heated the leftover stew and made a bitter English tea. Tito was away at some Panamanian function. She wore a low-cut silk blouse. Her neck could have been painted by da Vinci at the very least. She asked about home, said she could imagine Mother in her mind’s eye, she must have been a beautiful woman. Unsure how to answer, I got up from the table and went into the back garden. She came out to say that she hoped she had not offended me.

Margot has a projector set up, dozens of cans of film, arranged by dates, beginning in 1938(!). Sat up all night unraveling the cans of film until I found some of Bruhn. His glorious formality. I went to my bedroom, couldn’t sleep, paced.

The vultures ask about Cuba. I will not let them rope me in. A particularly stupid headline in the Daily Express: Che será será.

Elephant and Castle: one expects a magical fairyland but simply finds another part of Kiev.

Manager, agent, accountant — Gillian claimed they are the holy trinity of any great performer’s life. At the end of the meeting Saul suggested he might be able to squeeze five thousand dollars from the German TV company. A twenty-minute performance, which means two hundred and fifty dollars per minute! I pretended to balk and could see him sweating at the other end of the table. (Margot says: Do not lose sight of the dance.)

Erik arrived in the lobby of the Savoy. Tall and lithe. He wore all white, even the stitching and zipper teeth of his jacket were white. We circled for a while, out-complimenting each other. He had just spent an awful lot of money on a Miró and the conversation swung between Miró and Picasso — we were surely talking about ourselves (Erik as Miró of course, me as Picasso.)

After champagne we asked the bellboy to find tea and cigarettes for Erik. He sat chain-smoking. At two Erik left for his room with an apology and a tortured smile. He avoided the elevator. The thought occurred to me that the greatest (second greatest?) dancer in the world was taking the steps four at a time.

Together we did an hour of barre, then went to class. The light streamed through the Covent Garden windows.

In the Tate, beside the Turner painting The Chain Pier 1828, he touched my shoulder. Later, on Saville Row, he wondered how we would look in the suits and bowler hats. The clerk pretended to be busy. I grabbed the measuring tape from around his neck and whispered to Erik that he should check the length of my inside leg. We wore the new bowler hats through the city, laughing.

Into the cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue. Darkness.

Erik’s tall silhouette by the window in the Savoy, rain outside.

The English shoemaker was so different from what I had expected. Bald head, dirty suit jacket, face like a Cossack. Above his desk he has a framed picture of Margot. I could hardly breathe in the factory, stink of cow hides and buckets of glue. But his work is glorious. He spent hours preparing the shoes, meticulously going over every detail. Simply slipping the shoes onto my feet seemed to give a new energy.

(The maker on Kaznacheiskaya could learn a thing or two.)

Afterwards in the dressing room, a light burned out in the row of bulbs above Margot’s mirror. She came to my door, knocked a couple of times and grew frantic when I didn’t answer. Rudi, dear, make a wish! (She is very superstitious. Sometimes she catches an eyelash that has fallen on her cheek or a petal from a vase, and she is convinced this will affect everything.)

In Edinburgh the snow came down, brought me back to Leningrad.

Clarinda and Oscar (under a pseudonym) are writing the account of my defection for a publishing house, which is altogether ridiculous but the only thing that interests people. They say it will sell books, that readers want to know what happened, how I defected, blah blah blah. (I can’t even remember the date, July 17 perhaps, who cares?) But I will cooperate and rattle on about freedom.

Their Kensington home is spacious and warm and they invited me to stay a month or two. She promised to wash my clothes, cook meals, look after me, why not? It costs nothing and she’s more cultured than a slave.

In the afternoons they like to listen to dramas on the radio, so very English. They make tea and scones, light a fire. I lie on the bearskin rug. At night they put more wood on the fire and make hot chocolate. Clarinda loves to listen to me play the piano. She says I am brilliant (which is quite a lie, even for her). Perhaps I am getting better, but how I wish I could stretch my fingers farther. To be my own orchestra.

Clarinda found the magazines and stacked them strategically under the three Ionesco plays. I felt like a naughty son, yet I kept my jaw solid, said nothing.

The hotel room was full of assistants, lights, wires, hairdressers, waiters with trays. The makeup artist whispered that Avedon was likely to make a flamboyant entrance. I watched the door, waited. It was a trick, a good one. In reality he was there all along, among his assistants, watching, getting to know me, preparing the angles in his mind. He told them all to leave and the champagne was opened. When I took my clothes off he said: Me oh my.

In the morning I awoke crazed with fear. Gillian called his studio and threatened to sue if he ever published the pictures. Avedon sent me a telegram: Your (big) secret is safe with me.

Erik lay back and fell asleep. (I recalled Anna making Sergei’s imprint on her pillow.) His breath was uneven and stank of cigarettes. Song of a Wayfarer. I kissed him and packed.

Instead of coming through a tunnel the limousine driver wanted to cross the upper deck of a bridge. He said I should see the city lit up. My escorts thought it would be uninteresting, they said the bridge was old and decrepit, but I shouted: Let’s go across the fucking bridge! The driver grinned.

The city was a crazed jewel. I stuck my head out of the window. One of the escorts kept repeating that fewer apartments were lit up as it was a Jewish holiday. (Another neurotic kike.)

I couldn’t stand their chatter anymore so I switched seats and sat with the driver up front. On instructions he closed the glass screen behind us. He was listening to Charlie Parker on the radio. He says they called him Bird because he never had his feet on the ground.

(Nijinsky declined to come down at all. Perhaps every madman prefers it in the air.)

Walked up and down by the newsstand, watched people pick up their copies of The New York Times, thinking, I am en l’air in a million arms. The photograph caught me in perfect line.

Sasha! Tamara! Mother! Father! Ufa! Leningrad! Do you hear me? I am hailing you from the Avenue of the Americas!

Snow and not too much traffic. The fur coat drew laughter and a few smiles. Outside the Apollo a woman recognized me and a crowd gathered. Someone said: Do a Sammy Davis! I stood on a fire hydrant, pirouetted and they roared.

Back down St. Nicholas Avenue in the car. (Nobody believes me when I say there are no beggars in Russia.)

On The Ed Sullivan Show he simply couldn’t pronounce my name.

He had no interest in ballet and he said as much. But he was a pure gentleman with perfect manners. Each hair combed into place. He said that dance was Jacqueline’s joy, so for years he had been trying to develop an honest interest. He claimed that watching Margot and me on television had changed his perspective completely (a brazen lie of course and quite stupid).

He ushered us into the Oval Office. His suit was cut beautifully and his tie was slightly loose. He swung in his chair the whole five minutes. Towards the end of the pleasantries he looked at my feet, said I was a symbol of pure political courage.

Outside, on the lawn, the secret service agents were hovering. Later Jacqueline came in carrying tea and he had to excuse himself.

Walking Margot and me to the helicopter, Jacqueline hooked her arm in mine, said she hoped we would return, that she and her husband hold us both in the highest artistic esteem. In the helicopter we sat in an awed silence while the figures on the lawn grew smaller. (I was momentarily climbing a staircase in Leningrad and the police were chasing me.)

Newsweek: You seem to plow your soul under in order to seed your very own Albrecht.

(a sudden panic imagining Father at the garden plot.)

Pardon me?

For Albrecht you successfully create a new persona.

I am an actor.

But surely you are more than—

Oh no more stupid questions please.

In the room next door I could hear her, already awake. I went to greet her. She smiled and began stretching — neckrolls and leg stretches in a carefully timed sequence. Without thinking, Margot was able to put both her feet behind her head and carry on a conversation. The irony is she claims to be afraid of growing old.

(Lesson: continue to work always for mobility.)

The cover of Time and Newsweek—in the very same week. Gillian was ecstatic.

November 22, 1963. The weeping started outside the windows in the late afternoon, but nobody told us until six o’clock. Margot turned to the pianist, asked her to play Bach, but she was too overcome by grief, her fingers shaking above the keys. We sat in silence, then sent a telegram to Jacqueline. Our performance was canceled. In the streets people carried candles.

In the Russian Tea Room the maître d’ asked for a minute of silence, disturbed only by some fool who knocked his fork from the table.

A letter came through from Yulia to say she is divorced. She has nowhere to live. Our shithole country.

Another twelve hours in preparation for Raymonda. It is strange that the corps is so surprised when they come to watch me rehearse or when I give class. They sit in the corridor, smoking foul cigarettes, which makes me want to kick them in the ass down to the Ministry of Labor, if there is such a thing. They are lazy shits, their weak legs, unworked turnout, careless feet, they need to be transformed, one and all. The trombones sound like sick cattle, the pianist even worse. Not to mention the stagehands, who threatened yet another strike because the parrots are real and their shit falls from the cages in the wings. The poor bastards complain because they have to mop up.

Margot could hardly talk, her voice quivered uncontrollably. She said the bullet entered Tito’s chest and came out the other side.

In Stoke Mandeville Hospital, after the visit with Tito (lying in bed, saying nothing), we were guided around the wards. The fourteen-year-old girl paralyzed from the neck down said she often imagines being Margot and then her legs can move.

A beautiful eight-year-old had drawn a crayon picture, using her teeth. It was a picture of me dancing in a field, and the little girl had drawn herself watching from the perch of a flowering tree. There was a loveheart on the flip side, both our names in the middle, Oona and Rudolf.

I told her I would hang it in my dressing room. The child could barely move her head and there was spit on her lips, but her eyes were bright blue and she almost was able to turn her mouth into a smile. She said she didn’t wish for much but if she ever got to heaven the first thing she would want to do is dance.

(Some asshole photographer caught me weeping in the corridor.)

Tito will never walk again so Margot must go on performing to pay the hospital bills. Of course she is so very English, she doesn’t see the irony of this. (I am loathe to tell her that Tito deserves what he got.) Outside, she switched her handbag from side to side, dabbed a handkerchief at her eyes, then rushed back in to see him once more.

The telegram from Princess Grace for the opening night. Quite daring: Merde! With love, G. Other greetings, the King of Norway, Princess Margaret, etc. Twenty different bouquets in the room. Out the window the rain seemed to shine in a dozen colors. The hotel doorbell rang — a bouquet from Margot to say everything is all right, she wished she were dancing.

All Italy was there. Yet the presence of fame does not compensate for the absences in my performances. The Raymonda pas de deux was, of course, abysmal without her, but even the solo was a bucket of shit. Afterwards Spoleto seemed to have lost its magic, and the thought of the hotel room was depressing. I canceled dinner, dismissed everyone, remained all night to repair the evening’s mistakes.

The stagehands found me in the morning, sleeping on their tarps. They brought me cappuccino and a corneto. I rehearsed again, found the temperament. On the second evening I danced with a fire in my hair.

Margot was waiting in the lobby. She held an envelope. Her face contained the story. The concierge lowered his eyes and pretended he was busy. The news had obviously arrived earlier in a telegram. I was convinced at first it was Tito. But with tears streaking her face, she said: It’s your father.

On the phone with Mother, she was too saddened for words. Later: Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerti 1 and 2, Sanderling and the Leningrad Philharmonic, taking me back to other days. Father’s shoes being polished and his face being shaved, his coat on a wire hanger, his dirty nails.

Erik canceled New York.

The only sadness: Father never once saw me dance.

I told Gillian and Erik there will be no rain or grief. We popped a bottle of champagne and toasted.

Reading the translation of Solzhenitsyn, there was a brief flicker of light on the page. The desire to resurrect Father was suddenly overwhelming. (Tamara’s letter sat in my pocket like a wound.)

Outside Café Filo in Milan a boy was singing an aria I had never heard before. Erik asked for the aria’s name, but the boy shrugged, said he didn’t know, kept unloading the bread. Then the boy caught a glimpse of my face and ran up the street after me, shouting my name. He handed me a fresh loaf. Erik fed the bread to the pigeons in the square, kicking at the birds as they crowded around his feet.

Margot’s generosity with everyone but herself is stunning. This of course is the ultimate in kindness. Given all the fuss with Tito she is terribly tired. Still she managed to arrange a parcel for Mother and Tamara. (The realization that there would be nothing anymore for Father was a shock.) She asked which color scarves would suit. I had forgotten for a moment how they looked in my mind, especially Mother. All my photographs are ancient.

Margot packed the box herself, to be carefully sent through the Finnish embassy.

On the table, between the window and the four-poster bed, stands a vase of white lilacs. The sea outside is a rare blue. Through the window, the wind is a cold fresh slap. Rudi has anticipated her desires: a view to the ocean, sheets laundered in lavender water, hot tea early in the morning, wildflowers on the tray. He has given Margot the east-facing room on the island since she is inclined to enjoy the dawn.

Yesterday afternoon, just for her, he flew a piano in all the way from the mainland. The helicopter broke the expanse of blue and circled the island twice, gauging the winds. Suspended by ropes and cables, the piano seemed to have a flight of its own. Soft padding was put on the tennis court so the piano would land gently. Seven islanders were hired to navigate it into place. Rudi himself took hold of one of the legs and Margot smiled momentarily at the thought of herself as the piano, held aloft. It was a crazed venture, the piano could have been brought by boat, but he wanted it instantly, wouldn’t listen to her. At first she had felt a thinness of emotion, such a waste, but then she was surprised by an acute wedge of ecstasy.

Rudi wore a sleeveless shirt. He was stronger even than the islanders. Their caps blew off in the wind from the helicopter rotors. Later he paid the men and dismissed them with a wave of his hand. He tuned the piano himself and sat to play until late in the night. Even when she had gone to bed Margot could hear the notes floating, high, sirenic. She thought that a life like this would be intolerable if constant and yet, precisely because it was unusual it was precious.

It frightens her to think that she is forty-five and he is just twenty-six, his life occurring so soon. Sometimes, in the way he moves, she thinks she can discern a whole history of Tatar arrogance. Other times — walking along the beach, choreographing a move, adjusting a lift — he is bent into submission, her experience towering over him.

Through the window she sees the piano in the middle of the tennis court, covered with a sheet of plastic that is coated with dew-drops. She will scold him later, mother him into bringing the piano indoors, but for now the view strikes her as fabulous, unresolved, the tennis net lying flaccid beneath the varnished legs.

Margot moves to the edge of the bed, where she stretches, gently at first, until her palms touch her feet, and then she reaches further with her fingers, to the soles, noting the calluses. She runs a tub of hot water. In the bath she sands her feet with a pumice stone, easily working with circular sweeps. She examines a mosquito bite on her instep, touches the small red welt, and then, out of the bath, she rubs herbal cream over her feet. They have been rehearsing together for a run in Paris and her toes ache from the temporary floor he has installed in the basement. She feels the gradual warmth of the lotion as she massages it from ankle to toe, repeating the stroke.

The rise and fall of the waves outside is barely perceptible, a fine corduroy of foam lines turned red by the dawn. A few seabirds ricochet on the air currents and in the distance Margot sees a yacht, its yellow sails unfurling.

Her eyes stop suddenly on a rip in the landscape as an arm lunges from the sea. A flash of dryness in her throat. She holds her breath, but then another arm rises, complementing the first, and she exhales — it is simply Rudi swimming, his hair turned dark by the sea. She sits down on the bed, relaxes, begins to pull her right ankle high in the air, placing her foot behind her neck in a stretch, a morning ritual. She releases the foot, wiggles her toes, and pulls her left leg behind, adjusts herself on the bed and then brings both legs back simultaneously, her long hair over her ankles feeling cool.

Releasing the grip, she reaches across the bed to call Tito at the hospital, to tell him she misses him, she will soon return to take care of him, but the phone rings on, unanswered.

Loose from the stretch, Margot moves closer to the window.

She watches Rudi’s slow rise from the water, head first, then shoulders, then chest, his tiny waist, his penis large even after the chill of the water, his giant thighs, the tough calves, the michelangelo of him. She has seen him naked many times before, in his dressing room, unperturbed as a child getting ready for a bath, and she could make a map of his body if she desired. She has, in dancing, touched every part of him. His clavicle, his elbow, the lobe of his ear, his groin, the small of his back, his feet. Still, she raises her hand formally to her lips, as if to compensate for her lack of surprise.

His skin is glaringly white, almost translucent. The lines of his body are sharp, a scissored cutout, as far removed from Tito as she can imagine.

With a pang of pleasure she watches him walk from the beach towards the long grasses beyond the rocks, stepping through the growth barefoot. She hears the piano’s plastic cover tear against the wind and the quick run of Rudi’s fingers across the keys. Beneath the sheets, she feigns sleep as he comes in to wake her, carrying hot tea upon a tray, saying: You slept in, Margot, get up, it’s time for rehearsal. After he leaves, she smiles, not her stage smile, nothing regal or controlled, and then looks out to the sea once more, thinking that even if there was nothing else there will always be the memory.

Cosmopolitan: The world’s most beautiful man. One must confront the fact that the face will change and the body is vulnerable. But so what? Enjoy the moment. The world’s most beautiful man! When I’m seventy and sitting by the fire, I will take the photos out and weep, ha!

Somebody stuck the cover on my mirror and added devil’s horns. I wouldn’t mind but the bastards ruined my eyeliner pen — it is probably the fat cleaning bitch who left in tears yesterday.

The fans slept all night outside in the cold in Floral Street. Gillian made several flasks of hot soup and convinced me to go along with her — she said it was good publicity.

When we arrived there was a sort of hush, but then came a high-pitched scream which unleashed all the others. They ran forward, asked me to sign everything — umbrellas, purses, leg warmers, underwear. Gillian had, of course, arranged for a photographer to be there. Before I left one of the girls reached forward and tried to grab my crotch. (Perhaps I should wear the leg-warmers over my cock for protection!)

As a choreographer he steals liberally from everywhere, from the Greeks to Fokine to Shakespeare, etc. He says: In the end, after all, many hands touch the artist’s brush. Margot took his suggestions and remolded them beautifully, although at first I felt I was dragging a carcass across the floor.

Every hour she phones Tito. Imprisoned by him. (Now that he can fuck nobody else, he must fuck her, her life.)

The heart returns to Paris. There is some sort of sticky tar there. (Tell Claudette to furnish new apartment, find four-poster bed.)

The letter came, sealed with red wax. A momentary hesitation, perhaps it was a Soviet ploy. (You cannot put anything beyond them, acid on the envelopes, etc.) But the seal was Royal and the note was handwritten and it had been folded very carefully. I said to the housekeeper: Oh shit, not another letter from Her Majesty!

The new bodyguard (part-time) once protected Churchill. He told me he met Stalin at Yalta. Tried to explain that Stalin was very polite. (A train whistled in my mind, the hospital, watching from the trees as the old babushkas washed the soldiers — how many centuries ago now?)

Found the Derrida text in a secondhand stall along the Seine. Also found a treatise on Martha Graham at the same stall, what a coincidence. Both were water damaged and had their pages stuck together. I told Tennessee Williams about the books (he was drunk at the Desjeux party) and he said it was an obvious metaphor, though he didn’t explain why, perhaps couldn’t. His fingers and even his beard were stained with ink. He was astonished I’d read him in Russian. He put his head on my shoulder and said: Oh such a nice child.

He grew tiresome and spilled a cocktail on my suit and I told him to kiss my ass. He replied with a grin that he’d be enchanted.

Claire brought a tape with Rostropovich scrawled in crude, spidery handwriting on the case. The Violin Concerto number 2, second movement, brought me to tears. Once, in Leningrad I stupidly told Yulia that I would allow Shostakovich to sit in the rain.

Smelled a plate of radishes in the kitchen at Lacotte’s. Was transported back. Had to leave, much to Lacotte’s displeasure. At the door he wagged his finger. Woke up dreaming of a white cloth being put over Mother’s face.

Perhaps Margot is correct when she says that I dance so much—too much—in order not to think of home.

Such difficulty in talking to anyone about Mother. When the facts are in order the mood is wrong. When the mood is correct the facts are in tatters. She worked in a weapons factory. She sold matrushka dolls. She was chased by a wolf. Sometimes, in the same interview, I forget exactly what I’ve said, so it becomes even more tangled in fantasies. For the Austrian journalist she somehow turned into a seamstress in the Ufa Opera House.

The times I hate myself the most inevitably collide with the times I dance badly. In darker moments I think perhaps my best performances were in the Kirov. (The phantom feel of Sizova’s hips against my hands.)

Erik ran into an acquaintance of Richter’s who told him that when Prokofiev died there were no flowers left for sale in Moscow. They had all been bought for Stalin’s funeral. Richter played at the funeral, then walked across Moscow to place a single pine branch on Prokofiev’s grave. (Beautiful, but is it true?)

Mister Nureyev, your movements seem to defy possibility.

Nothing is impossible.

For example, when following on from the sharp flourish of your ronde de jambe are you aware of your body?

No.

Why not?

Because I am far too busy dancing.

My desire to comfort the journalists is almost as strong as my desire to alienate them. Afterwards I can feel my heart ballooning with apology.

The true mind must be able to accept both criticism and praise, but in the Saturday Review he said I hold my hands too high in arabesque, that the movement looks bloated and uncontrolled. If I ever meet him again he will hold his balls too high in his throat and then we’ll see who looks bloated and uncontrolled.

As for Jacques, he is a typical L’Humanité shithead, another one of those socialist bastards with a vendetta. He said I was being too literal. But what does he want, my legs to deal in symbols, my cock to reel off metaphors? I would tell him to do something productive for his politics — commit suicide, perhaps — but the weight of his fat ass would probably bring the ceiling beam down to the floor.

In the pub in Vauxhall a picture of me was suspended from the staircase on a thin rope. I asked the bartender if it was Yesenin but he didn’t understand. At the counter there was a hush when Erik and I took our seats. The bartender asked me to sign the photo, which I did, across my chest, and everyone clapped.

All evening they expected some outrage, something Russian, something Nureyev. Smash glasses, kick bottles from the table. I drank four vodkas then took Erik’s arm. We could almost hear the place moan.

There was another death threat waiting at the hotel. The police said the note had been clipped from the headlines of a Soviet émigré paper. Who are these assholes? Can’t they understand that I am not their fucking puppet?

(Margot says to ignore them all, that the best way is to smile and be polite. Unleash it all onstage, she says. I haven’t the heart to tell her she’s talking rubbish. She, of all people, knows that everything I do is already sprayed with my blood.)

Secret wish: a house by the sea, children on the beach, a chamber orchestra on the rocks being soaked by the giant waves. I would sit in a deckchair, drink white wine, listen to Bach, grow old, though of course that too would become a bore.

Wisdom Defending Youth Against Love, Charles Meynier: $47,500.

In the beginning he presents himself to her without, at first, betraying his true feelings. He is acutely aware of how he must look at her, neither revealing nor unrevealing. He must play this game of emotional roulette, fastidious, until they break into each other and become the movement (ratchet up the pas de deux and extend the solo).

He must be reinvented, after all, otherwise the role is pure shit — he will be a cardboard figure, a cipher without vitality.

Conceive the role as a fantasy of the protagonist’s mind. In the end he must suffer agonizingly and, in full consciousness, be aware that all is lost.

A perfect rehearsal! We took an afternoon off.

He must remain in the wings long enough for everyone to feel uncomfortable and then he must burst from the other side of the world, frighten the mundane lives out of all who watch. For her, keep the tempo slow. She must arrive in cold at first. And then he must warm her into the dance. With every garment she takes off, it must look as if she is stepping into a future self. Finally she is spirited away from him, carried off, ghosts moving in diagonal lines, a moving vee. Light (moonlight) never quite touches the ground. Keep strings muted, do not allow the music to overwhelm.

“If and when Nureyev retires, it is obvious that his future as a choreographer is assured.” Dance magazine, December 1966. Ha! “He does not create solely for the body, he creates on it.”

Erik suggested that I am increasingly obsessed with Mother only because I am so far away. (As if he could talk, the ghost of that gray-haired Viking bitch still hanging over him.) After I slammed the car door and walked through the traffic it suddenly dawned on me that I knew none of the Copenhagen streets. I went back and sat instead in the front seat with the driver.

Later, crawling into bed, Hamlet (how he detests this nickname!) admitted his error. It is so difficult to drive him to anger, and yet he becomes voracious when ignored.

Boating on the lakes. Champagne. Fireworks. The Hamburg woman with the necklace: You are a Rimbaud of the steppes!

Mother’s exit visa application was turned down again, but this time the butchers asked her to sign a document refuting her desire to leave.

Erik waited at the airport, wearing glasses and a hat for disguise.

Within hours we were on the dance floor. A boy wore a white silk shirt and silver platform shoes. Ah yes, Piccadilly! I followed him outside.

The horse’s hooves chopped up the immaculate green park as the other guests played polo in the rain. Erik came up behind me and put his head on my shoulder, nibbled my ear.

At dinner (mousseline d’ecrivisse, poussin rôti aux herbes, salad, purée of celery) the Baron looked at us severely. I whispered to Erik that the Baron was certainly a fine horseman but probably unable to control his whip. Erik laughed so hard he spat his sherbet out on the tablecloth.

The hollow of his neck. We dozed.

A speedboat to Galli. Erik, Pablo, Jerome, Kenzu, Margot, Gillian, Claire and me. Margot spent the whole weekend on the phone to Tito. We decided to get an orchestra boated in from the mainland. They were a ragtag bunch and we dismissed them but paid handsomely to borrow their instruments. We took turns playing until four, then dragged the piano inside to save it from the dew. (Erik quoted Homer about the sirens. The champagne was flowing. Jerome suggested that I plug everyone’s ears with wax and tie myself to Erik’s mast!)

Pablo sat naked to play Shostakovich (badly) and his ass left a sweat stain on the piano stool.

Early in the morning Erik came to watch me swim. I made my way underwater to the rocks, surfaced and hid. He called my name and soon became frantic. He jumped up from the sand and began to scream for help. After five minutes he dived into the sea in his pajamas. How he hates the chill of the sea. He didn’t notice me until a few meters away, then in Danish called me a cunt.

I told him I had seen a bright star move in the darkness. He said it was obviously a satellite looking down on me, perhaps Russian. He was getting his revenge, but the thought was chilling.

In bed we read Flaubert’s letters from Egypt. Outside the sea crashed.

The pair of underpants hung on the bedpost. An exuberant flag.

The stewardess hardly seemed pleased when she told me to take my shoes down from the seat and I replied that it was a first-class cabin, would she prefer my foot somewhere else — up her enormous German ass for instance?

Jan. 6. New Year promise to Margot: I shall keep my mind free from attachments to everything but dance.

Valentina’s classes: her movements are like prayers in a church. One feels almost shy in her presence.

A bad class and the day was ruined. Then at performance the lights were too bright and I was looking down more than usual, away from the glare, and my feet tangled. Arthur, in his high pitch, said: We all have our nights. The glass narrowly missed his head.

(At times like these I hate myself. The idea of being a genius-madman is tiresome.)

At the gathering Bacon asked why dance? I retorted, Why paint? He dragged on his cigarette and said painting was the language he would give his soul if he could teach his soul to speak. Yes!

Each night he waits for the cue, stretches, meshes his fingers. Onstage, Margot unspools a length of chaînés, sweeps, descends and is still. He touches his left ear for good luck, waits a moment beyond the quietness, breaks the wings, takes flight, is released.

Music reaches into his muscles, the lights spin, he glares at the conductor, who corrects the tempo, and he continues, controlled at first, each move careful and precise, the pieces beginning to fit, his body elastic, three jetés en tournant, careful of the landing, he extends his line, beautiful movement ah cello go. The lights merge, the shirtfronts blur. A series of pirouettes. He is at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into his arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher, and is skyheld.

The audience leans forward, necks craned, mouths open. He descends, lands and is off again towards her, the wind rushing past his ears, a blur of unbroken energy, to where she is waiting, headbent. He plants his feet before her, she accepts him, he lifts her upward, she is light, she is always light, he stays away from her ribs, bruised from rehearsal. A bead of sweat spins out from his hair. His face against her thigh, her hip, her stomach. Both of them burning away, they are one movement, a body nation. He allows her down, a gasp from the hall, they are alive — a French audience, the good ones are always French, even in Lebanon, New York, Buenos Aires, Vienna, London, they’re always French — and he can smell her perfume, her sweat, her approval, he moves stage left and off. She will control it now, her solo. Standing in the shadows, he regains his breath, tissues his face, dams the sweat, his chest rising and falling, begins to calm, ah yes this darkness an embrace.

He scuffs in the resin box for traction, waits as she receives her applause. Here it is now, take it, grasp it, explode!

He returns from the wings already in midair, moves through four cabrioles, keeping his line long until the sound catches up, an instant of conjunction, a flash of muscle and he sweeps the stage with his body, owning it, no limits. Eight perfect entrechats-dix, a thing of wonder, the audience silent now, no body anymore no thought no awareness this must be the moment the others call god as if all doors are open everywhere leading to all other open doors nothing but open doors forever no hinges no frames no jambs no edges no shadows this is my soul born weightless born timeless a clock spring broken, he is in flight, he could stay like this forever and he looks out into the haze of necklaces eyeglasses cufflinks shirtfronts and knows he owns them.

Afterwards in the dressing rooms there are exaggerated complaints to keep themselves going — you changed your perfume, you sweated too much, your chaînés were abysmal, you missed the cue, you stayed out too late, you pirouetted like a donkey, let’s do it better tomorrow — and they exit the stage doors together, arm in arm, laughing, smiling, the crowds waiting, flowers and shouts and invitations, they sign autographs and programs and shoes, but as they walk away the dance is still in their bodies and they search for the quiet point the still point where there is no time no space only pureness moving.

The crowd outside the Sydney Opera house was boisterous, charged. Some protesters were shouting about Vietnam. Margot and I sent in a dummy limousine and drove ourselves to the entrance instead. The crowd cheered when they realised it was us.

Rock Hudson came to the green room, shirt ambitiously undone. He said he was shooting some movie somewhere and sat in the dressing room while I applied make-up. He mentioned that he had found a restaurant with the most perfect oysters in the world, he would see me after the show if I desired. I caught a glimpse of him in the audience. He was turned away from the stage, looking at someone through binoculars.

At the restaurant Rock was loath to pay the bill since I had brought fourteen people with me (ha!). He went to the bathroom and came back re-energized.

In the museum café we fought about the impulse for Albrecht. Frederic suggested that intuition was an excuse. He tried shoring up his plate of shit with a quote from Goethe who said that nothing belongs to Nature once the artist has chosen it as his subject. As if that is even mildly relevant!

I threw my coffee at him but later in the Sobel Hotel at the bottom of the Kings Road (yet another Kings Road!) I thought perhaps he was just frightened by the enormity of the task. I sent him a telegram, charging it to the hotel bill.

Such fine choreography. (At last he learned his lesson.) For the second act he showed us a photograph of a kingfisher tossing its prey in the air after stabbing it, both bird (alive) and fish (dead) gloriously turning in midair.

The Persian rug was worth eighteen thousand francs. The owner saw me admire it and then said it was mine — for free. Erik said the first thing I would do is set up a model train on it, which is not entirely true. The owner seemed disturbed, his great gift cheapened, so I said that a journalist from Vogue was coming to my apartment and I’d mention the name of his store. He beamed and took out his business card with great formality.

Outside I threw the card into the gutter. Erik was horrified to see the owner staring at us through the window.

The woman in the Jacuzzi complained about my feet, said they were cracked and anyone with an open wound was not allowed in. I told her who I was and she smiled stiffly, sat up in the water, left shortly thereafter.

Beckett was at the café counter. He nodded hello. He was pouring his coffee into his cognac, rather than the other way around.

Somebody said I should smoke the marijuana cigarette, that even Brigitte Bardot might seem humorous if I was high. Even then I had no interest. Why lose the mind, even worse the body?

At home I sought refuge in Richter. His mischief. It is said that he can stretch his hands to twelfth.

Margot’s ligament tore. Antony asked her how she felt: Rather sore, I’m afraid.

The search for a replacement. Evelyn has been told in no uncertain terms that her performance is shit, there is far too much marking in her movement, that if she is to be worthy of Basil, if she is to dance at all, she will have to learn to perform at least a half-decent grand jeté. She warmed up for a full hour and then bourréed out onto the floor. She soared high and arched her back so far that her nose actually touched her calf, like a scissor blade meeting the round thumbhole. It was as if she had no bones at all. Then she snapped her legs together with wonderful violence. I could only applaud. She picked up her bag (full of barbiturates?) to leave.

She was so elegant throwing the scarf over her shoulder that I offered to partner her for the rest of eternity, but already the elevator door was closing, ah well. (Perhaps I really did feel something for her, but the truth is we are apples and oranges.)

A call from Gilbert. The suicide notion. If you don’t come back soon, Rudi, I will leave a gap between the floor and my feet. His wife, it seems, has taken to bed in distress.

I told Ninette that, as a Tatar, I had spent centuries contemplating the gap between floor and feet. She shot back that she was Irish and had already spent hundreds of years in the air.

Mrs. Godstalk is almost a perfect copy of Madame B., except she once danced with Balanchine and now keeps her old toe shoes in the freezer, as if she will one day dance again. She took me to Madison Avenue at eight in the morning, before the antique shops opened. She said she would buy anything I wanted, even put it on an airplane to Paris rather than shipping it.

I suggested the Russian library chair in the shop on Sixty-third. It cost perhaps four years or more of Soviet wages. Later in the afternoon the envelope arrived with confirmation of purchase. What an idiotic cunt she is! She phoned eight times in three days until I used a pay phone in the rehearsal corridor and said in a French accent that Monsieur Nureyev had run off with her white poodle to serve it sautéed to the corps, who were all broke and very hungry.

(Margot laughed so hard she began hiccuping.)

Later in a moment of stupidity I reduced the chair to kindling. I called Mrs. Godstalk to say it had happened when a box of books fell from the shelf, shattering the legs. She sighed, said she was not naïve but that it was all right, she understood the artistic impulse.

Truth: I rope them in, then lock the gate and walk away laughing. Not very human, but true. The other voice says: Fuck them, they have far more money than sense.

Another call from Gilbert. The suicide notion yet again. There was the thought of returning to Paris, fucking him, then lending him a rope.

Margot was so happy with her recovery, she was smiling to herself and saying how warm the night was and did I see the old man in the orchestra seats, that was Bernardo Bertolucci.

The bewildered cockroach (it was New York, after all) crawled through the resin box. I nailed him with Margot’s spare toe shoe. The orchestra was tuning up and it drowned out most of her screaming. But she managed to laugh when I flicked the dead roach under the curtain down into the pit near the contrabasses.

The doctor, Guillaume, said it was absurd and dangerous, but I danced through the fever anyway. Hard to believe, but even the stagehands interrupted their poker game to watch the solo, presumably waiting for me to collapse, but I danced better than ever, could feel the fever vaulting out of me. Afterwards my temperature was almost normal. Guillaume stood there perplexed. The stagehands brought me a bag of ice.

Pneumonia. Erik rubbed goose fat on my chest. A full recovery inside two days.

On the phone Mother’s voice was old and sad, even when I told her about the goose fat. She was coughing. I went walking afterwards in Mendocino along the cliff face. The seals were hacking into the air. (Later Saul called to say he had almost doubled my money on the gold market. He interpreted my silence as joy.)

At first Erik was dancing like three buckets of shit, but then he braided his feet back and forth in the air beautifully, without losing any definition, and I thought, We all keep certain secrets, don’t we? For the entrechat-huit (reversed, with the eight beats descending) he paused for a second midair. Glorious. One could feel the audience straining forward. (You can tell how good the work is from the way it shapes itself into the crowd.) I was first to my feet for the encore. The whole house followed. Erik smiled, took Violette’s hand, and they bowed together.

Backstage he was listening to Liszt’s Concerto number 1, Richter with Kondrashin and the LSO. We drank Château d’Yquem. It seemed like a perfect night but after taking off his shoes, he looked pained and began rubbing his feet ferociously, then said he thought he might have chipped a bone in his toe after a particularly big sauté. (Liszt once played piano with a slight fracture in his left hand and said he could literally feel the notes skipping from bone to bone.)

No breakages nor fractures, but at the hospital the doctor told Erik that his feet were ruined, he might not be able to walk properly as an old man. Erik shrugged and laughed. Ah well, I’ll just have to bourrée along instead.

Erik says that increasingly after performances he feels distanced from himself. He sits in his dressing room alone and exhausted, still in character. He changes clothes, faces the mirror, sees only a reflection. He must keep looking long enough until he finally recognizes an old friend — himself. Only then can he leave.

A series of rare Bashkirian woodcuts: 8,000 francs.

The thought of them sitting in Ufa, plain bread and borscht, a glass of vodka, Mother darning her blue smock, Tamara coming back from the market. My guilt is overwhelming but what is there to do?

When Elena (how beautiful she is) first arrived in France, she made a living sewing wedding dresses for the bourgeois families who had come before her. Then she told the story of her boat trip from Kiev to Constantinople — the boat was full of people fleeing with their most precious possessions, ridiculous things, lamps, letter openers, family crests. She stayed at the bow for most of the journey, which took many extra days in bad weather, and she said — quite wonderfully — that ever since, she has always felt there was water moving in everything, most especially history and violins.

He is fair, narrow, young, boyish. Such beauty sometimes makes me look at myself, though I fear nothing, he is shit, dances as if weighted with lead.

He broke down in fits when (as expected) he didn’t even make the corps. I thought of comforting him yet again, but I do not lead my entire life guided by my penis, whatever Claudette says. Well, not always! How to make him understand that he needs more ambition, that being in the corps is not enough, a molecule of air within a drum, condemned to make a small noise in a small space.

He sat with his hair over his eyes, in imitation no doubt. I promised to help him. In the rehearsal room he needed to be convinced of the importance of slow adagio to give enough control to land and still hold a clean position. And he still wouldn’t listen until I climbed to the windowsill and leaped, landed, frozen solid. (How I detest that linoleum floor.)

I watched him fail time and time again. What is there to do? He has no salt or pepper in his spirit. He finally said: I’m tired. I told him that if he left now he would be cutting the branch he was sitting on but he left anyway, his finger hooked under the shoe straps.

He wants to write a biography but what do I tell him, he is a shit, he reeks of garlic, he has too much bacon on his belt, his brain is stunted, and his entry into the Museum of Shitheads is undoubtedly assured. After explaining all this to him (!) he told me how much better I would be if I were shy and listened properly. I replied that yes indeed I look forward to being dead.

(Gillian says that my use of bad language, in English French Tatar Russian German etc. has become a virus.)

I carried Yulia’s letter to the Tuileries, sat on a bench. The letter had been folded and refolded many times and had taken many leaps, arriving first for Margot in London, forwarded to the Austrian embassy in Paris, and from there to Gillian.

Yulia’s writing is grand and looping. She had been meaning to write for a year but had postponed it for several reasons, none of which were important anymore. Her father had been found dead in the house in Ufa. Sergei must have known he was on his final journey, since he was wearing his hat, which he never did indoors. Pen in his hand, notebook on his chest. He had left a letter for her: Whatever loneliness we have felt in this world will surely become understandable when we are no longer lonely. He said he was not at all scared of death, that nothing frightened him, why should it, he was about to join Anna, he had always loved her even in the terrible moments of darkness.

I sat on the bench, the sun beating down. Immeasurable remorse.

Ended the day with Richter’s interpretation of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata number 2, third movement — Andante, Prague. What mood could Richter have been in to offer this gift to humanity?

God, if he exists, is surely a visitor to the new farmhouse in Virginia. In the morning the air is cool and fresh enough to make everyone hungry. The horses gallop and neigh. The light is dense and yellow, the trees old and gnarled. (This is not the America I imagined when young.)

I went for a ride. The brown mare bucked me and stood, poising one hind leg behind the other, almost in arabesque, then she dipped her head down. Her mane touched the side of my face. For no particular reason I called her Yulia.

At the party, having drunk too much, I was struck by the idea that, as life goes on, there is a double for everyone, no matter whom. (Perhaps this is a result of the sudden spate of difficulty.) I looked across the room and saw that Sergei was standing by the buffet, minus his hat. He was talking to Tamara (only she never would’ve been so well dressed). Father sat in a corner. I searched for Mother and found someone vaguely similar — Lee’s old friend from Colorado, although Mother’s hair would be grayer by now. An older Polish woman reminded me of Anna. (An eerie trip back and forth across the Styx.)

When I saw Sergei’s double making his way towards Anna’s double it raised the hairs on my neck. He had his overcoat draped over his arm and even carried a hat.

On searching for myself I realized there was nobody.

In the dressing room: a full kilo of Black Sea caviar and twelve bouquets, including a dozen lilies. Sergei, old man, I thought of you.

Onassis had hired two young men to wash the white trousers, white shirts, white hats, white socks, white underwear, white vests, white everything. The Greek boy smiled at me from the deck, said he would like to give me something personal for my birthday, he could hardly believe it was my twenty-ninth.

After the celebrations I excused myself below deck. The boy was at the end of the corridor, waiting, wearing only a T-shirt, cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve.

Check with Saul: Why pay taxes when my country is a suitcase?

At the interval at Porte-Saint-Martin, for Hair, she leaned across and asked quite casually if I’d heard what had happened to Gilbert.

He had used a pair of my old socks to stuff the exhaust and left the car running. His wife found him in the garage, Mozart at full blast, an empty bottle of sleeping pills at his side.

Jacques suggested he would much prefer a communist hell to a capitalist one — the communists would inevitably have a fuel shortage!

Later in the evening he came up with the idea of a ballet about the Berlin Wall. The wall was, he claims, built in a day (is this true?). A Russian mason who fell into the mortar was not pulled out and so his bones still shore up the wall.

He said the Russian mason’s lover (call her Katerina) will move along the wall, feeling from brick to brick, trying to recapture the spirit of her dead sweetheart. Against her better instincts, she will fall in love with an American soldier on the other side of the wall. But to cross to the soldier she will have to break through the remains of her Russian lover’s body. (To dance a wall and the terror on both sides.) In the end the young American will cross to her and will be shot dead while straddling the brickwork.

(No dying fall.)

A monstrous idea, but we were drunk.

There are rumors that Sasha has discovered a young genius in Leningrad. Erik said my face went pale. (What bullshit.) Anyway, if this genius ever comes west he will just fire me to even greater things.

Before Margot dies, she says she will ask for one perfect performance to repeat itself in her imagination, one perfect performance, one so astounding and beautiful that she can relive every step of it in her head.

She did not say which one it would be, maybe she has not even danced it yet. So far, she said, she could possibly choose from eight to ten.

For me, at least one would be at the Kirov. My legs still feel for the floor’s rake. In a dream I was barefoot in the resin box.

She is sitting in a darkened hotel room when a young girl enters, smiles and opens the curtains. Good afternoon, says the girl, your appointments are here. She places a bowl of cut flowers on the table and Margot waits for the procession to begin.

Out the window is another city, all sky and light and glass, although Margot can’t quite remember which city it is. Her ankle has recovered, although she wears it bandaged. Earlier, on the telephone, she talked to Tito, who said yet again that it was time for her to retire, it has been three and a half decades, she should have quiet now, come back to the ranch in Panama.

Tito, the runaround. Tito, the flirt. Tito, the man she adores, wheeled around their house these days, reduced to eye movements and hand waves.

She recalls standing at the foot of the stairs a week ago when he told her he still loved her. When she said the same thing in reply his face seemed to shed layers, and they played catch-up on their lives. In bed Margot positioned him so that he snuggled against her neck. She hadn’t been able to sleep and so she rose, stood for a while by the door listening to his raspy breath and found herself moved by the shape of his body. When she told Rudi about watching Tito sleep he understood, he was able to fathom how hushed and vulnerable she could become — it is at times like these, when Rudi is good to her, that he protects her and they dance well together.

The room begins to fill with promoters, publicists, a journalist. Sporadic conversation, elegant and well-meaning. But after an hour Margot declares she is tired — most of the morning was spent at class with Rudi — and when the room eventually empties, she pulls back the covers on the bed to take a nap. Her dreams are merciless and Tito-peppered, visions of pushing a wheelchair through a river but the current is too strong and the chair is fixed in one place.

A foghorn wakens her and she remembers now: Vancouver, late summer.

It is then, from the neighboring room, that she hears the sound of Rudi and another making love, the noises alarming, fierce, intimate. She is knocked off balance, they never normally share adjoining rooms, one of their rules, and so she turns the television loud.

Vietnam at first. Then a cartoon. She presses buttons, finds a soap opera — a woman strides lightly across a floor to slap another woman’s face.

There is a pause in the program and she hears a moan from next door, then the jingle of commercials. In the bathroom she runs hot water and adds herbal powders. Margot has worked her body hard in recent weeks, beyond previous extremes. The violence tells in her everyday gestures, the way she checks the time on her wrist or brings a fork to her mouth. She is aware of how extraordinary it is, what the body does to the mind, and what the mind does to the body, one convincing the other it is in control.

Some days she recognizes the private graveyard of her body, the callused toes, the headaches from pulling her hair back all these years, the mangle of her knees, yet had she known as a young woman how her life would be she wouldn’t have cared, she would have danced it anyway.

She slips into the bath, lays her head against the rear of the tub. The sounds from next door take on a new form, muffled yet amplified, more intense for their lack of clarity. She puts two pieces of cotton wool in her ears so the voices disappear. Years ago, with Tito, he would always open the windows when making love.

Later she wakes, someone shouting her name from behind the doorframe, Margot, Margot, Margot! She opens her eyes, sits up in the bath, and the water breaks in waves around her. She smells cigarette smoke, knows immediately who it is.

She takes the cotton balls from her ears and says: I was just back in my good years, Erik. I was dreaming.

But it is Rudi, not Erik, who steps forward with a bathrobe, holds it open. She rises from the bath as he places the robe around her shoulders and kisses her forehead. Behind Rudi stands Erik, smoking. She feels a flush of warmth, these two beautiful men spoiling her.

We phoned, says Erik, pulling hard on the cigarette, but nobody answered. Rudi was afraid you were drowning.

The clerk took one look, threw his arms wide and said he had a pair of red drainpipes that would suit me to perfection.

The disco lights spun. We took a booth, ordered a magnum of champagne, and how we laughed! Lara was funniest of all. She is aware of Erik but still she said my lips were sensuous to the point of irresponsibility! I told her I would marry her. Her joke about the French nurse: Roll over, Monsieur, I have to jab you. And then, when the others were dancing, she leaned across with her long hair in my lap and she tickled my balls in full view of everyone!

Her grandfather was from Moscow but emigrated before the Revolution, made his fortune, she said, selling paper clips. (This crazy country.) She now owns four houses and, bizarrely, six swimming pools. She whispered that she enjoyed nude bathing, as if I couldn’t have guessed. She was so drunk she said she had an idea for a nude ballet — Orpheus Descends (!) — curtain comes up, gentle cellos, soft moonlight, and then swinging penises everywhere. I told her I would dance it except I didn’t want to bruise my thighs. When I explained the joke (silly girl) she spilled her drink down the front of her dress.

She said being alive is the bread, yes, but sex is the yeast.

RosaMaria appeared at the door. I recognized her instantly. Red satin dress, white rose in her hair. Erik nudged my elbow as she ran across the room to me, arms open. I twirled her in the air and her foot briefly caught on a tablecloth, but she extricated it with perfect grace while still spinning, then kissed me.

Everyone watched, especially Erik, as we went out onto the veranda. The night warm with cicadas. Tell me everything, I said. But she wanted to talk about me, the success, the years gone by. I beseeched her and, after much cajoling, she told me that when she had returned to Chile in ’59 she had married a young journalist, a Communist, who had ascended in politics until he was killed in a car accident. She had moved to Mexico City and that was it. She danced for six years until her ankles gave in. She said she would like to dance with me just one more time, and yet she was clever enough to know that it would be nothing more than sympathy on my part.

Erik came out holding three champagne glasses and we toasted. In the end RosaMaria was cornered by a handsome Mexican writer with gray hair who wrapped her up in his eyes. We bid good night and she wiped away a tear.

His raspy baritone, his tough face, the hair over his eyes. He woke and his name escaped me, though I remembered him saying he was amazed any man could live that hard. The whole day had been spent fucking, rehearsing, fucking, performing and then fucking again (once during intermission).

He got out of bed, jubilant, made me tea, five lumps of sugar, and prepared a scalding bath in a claw-footed tub with gleaming brass fixtures. He sat on the edge and sprinkled fragrant salts. Precision. I left immediately afterwards, still couldn’t remember his name.

Erik had left a message at the hotel front desk. You shit, in very shaky handwriting.

Do you regret anything, Monsieur Nureyev?

When everything is said and done I would not swap anything I have either said or done. If you look back you’ll only fall down the stairs.

That is very philosophical.

I can read.

On Fifth Avenue all the heads in the crowd turned like a field of sunflowers. Warhol shouted Goddamn! and hailed a car. He said that it was a gypsy cab and that the price was outrageous. He refused to tip. When we stopped, the driver spat out the window, almost hitting Warhol’s shoes. Andy is a pompous ass, although he said he will sketch me some day.

In his office there was a consignment of cakes from The Erotic Bakery. He handed me a doughnut and then tried to take a Polaroid. I had to rip it from his hands. He would probably sell it for thousands. He ran all around the office trying to evade me, screaming wildly in his bright green trousers.

He ended up in a back room where there were two sets of giant black-and-white dice on the ground. There were words written on each of the six sides. The first said: You Me They We Us Joker. The second said: Fuck Suck Kiss Finger Handjob Joker. The object is to roll the dice and come up with matching words. We Finger. You Suck. They Kiss. With the Joker one does whatever one wants. Warhol calls it human poker. He said the permutations are endless but that at least eight people are needed to play or it can be boring.

I said he should choreograph the game. He screamed: That’s it, that’s it! and scribbled something in his notebook. The asshole will probably put it in a movie (without a credit).

When I slapped her the sound rang through the gallery and out onto Fifth Avenue. She was, after all, pestering me for an autograph and I was trying to look at the painting. The owner came over but I refused to budge. My hand stung for a whole five minutes. In truth I wanted so much to apologize but couldn’t.

Gillian said I should get the totem pole out of my ass, that it was time for me to grow up. I fired her and she said: Yet again? She began painting her toenails bright red.

Thankfully the slapped girl was an aspiring ballerina and doesn’t want to press charges for the sake of her career, but Gillian is adamant that we do damage control in case it gets into the papers.

The suggested design:

Jumping through the lips I needed six stagehands to break my fall. The Post said it was the most astounding exit ever seen in ballet. (Bullshit, of course.) The photograph was taken by some moron who caught me, back bent, out of line. Still, it sent the audience into raptures and they roared. (Polanski, Tate, Hepburn, Hendrix were there.)

The reviews were good, except for Clint, who called it all a diseased contrivance. (Asshole.)

A story appeared in the gossip pages, with a photo of me and Hendrix. Rudi and Jimi pirouette. His fingernails were blackened (perhaps with old blood) from playing guitar so hard. At the club he disappeared in a cloud of marijuana smoke but showed up later on the dance floor. I was surrounded by a dozen gyrating women. A tall black boy joined us, leather shirt and motorcycle boots. We removed ourselves to the courtyard and the party began.

The birthday celebration took place only to be forgotten. Thirty-one years old. Margot bought a beautiful crystal goblet and Erik gave me a Gucci watch. All I wanted was to walk along the beach. The stars over St. Bart’s seemed almost as bright as those over Ufa when I went ice fishing, centuries ago.

Leopard skin boots! To the thighs! A là Twiggy! Backstage I was told they were deliciously wicked. At Le Bar I couldn’t move for the gauntlet of erections. I spied one boy, he seemed two different people in one, a Janus, so that from the right he was beautiful but from the left he had a hideous scar. In the morning the boy kept trying to show me the good side of his face, which bored me, so I kicked him out.

Mother said that the snow over Ufa had deadened all other sound. Tamara says she wants to understand me, my life, but she is so foolish, how can she understand me? Nobody does.

Erik complains that I talk more and more shit each day. As if he doesn’t. He says I should just do the one thing I know — that is, operate in my sacred space, onstage.

He detests my idea that dance makes the world a better place. It is sentimental, he says. I want to make a statement about beauty, but Erik (who spends his time watching the news from Vietnam and Cambodia) says that dance changes nothing for the monk who sets himself aflame and the photographer who watches through the lens.

Would you set yourself aflame for something you believe in? he said.

I asked if he would keep his finger on the shutter if I was burning. He would not answer at first but then he finally said: Of course not.

We fought until the alarm clock rang. I told him I had set myself aflame a long time ago, did he not realize this? He sighed and turned his back and said that he was sick and tired of it all, that he simply wanted a cottage by the sea in Denmark where he could sit and smoke and play the piano. I slammed the door and told him to go fuck himself.

He yelled after me: Yes, that might be preferable.

I said he certainly wouldn’t get an encore.

The ice packs were not frozen and the Epsom salts had disappeared. I wanted to throw the small fridge out the window. The only deterrent was a crowd of cheering fans below.

Margot keeps threatening retirement. She is well aware of Bettina’s power, for example, Joyce’s also, even Alessandra’s, perhaps even Eleanor’s. Yet every partner brings me inevitably back to Margot, her magnetism. On the phone she said she is torn. On the one hand, she says Tito needs her. On the other, she needs the money. (And she is afraid she will wither.)

Erik is correct although I screamed at him and hurled the flowerpot, just missing his head. I probably have, yes, been dancing terribly. Fuck!

The new masseur might well release me, however. He has suggested there are trigger points in the body where he can remove the tension. He manipulates it to other parts of the body where it dissipates. (Certainly on the beach I finally felt relaxed after six countries in just fourteen days.) Emilio has the strongest hands I have ever known.

I have grown to hate the standing ovations in restaurants, how infantile.

Victor is crazed and vulgar and lovely, a walking disaster (silk gown and ostrich feathers) and yet nobody makes me laugh more. The theme of the party he organized was Nureyev. He said the hairstylists all over New York were packed solid, that even Diana Ross had to bribe to get her hair done. (Later she told me that I was divine as myself.)

Quentin Crisp whispered drunkenly in my ear: I am much too much every man’s man to be the only man of any man. (I’m sure he stole the line from somewhere.)

I told her that if she continued her career she would, at the very least, get to kiss the toad. She could be heard weeping outside the rehearsal and someone ran to get her a cigarette. Gillian said a cigarette will stop anyone crying. A thought: packages should be unceremoniously shoved into any available hole presented by hysterical women, dancers, lovers, accountants, stagehands, customs officers, etc.

The performance was full of error. Terrible. The movement is pure shit. He couldn’t choreograph a Latin orgy. For the entrance I should blaze onstage as if it is the absolute beginning of the world. Open the body’s windows and build the mystery from there.

Broadway, front row. The show was shit but Erik said we couldn’t leave, people would gossip. I pretended to have a toothache and left, but returned for the party later. The lead actor asked if my teeth were okay so I bit his arm and said yes, they seemed to have recovered.

He went around all night with a bandage on his arm and his sleeve rolled up.

Gillian asked me how can I dance after fucking, and I could only reply that I could not dance without fucking. (One only wishes the intermissions were longer!)

Patrick uses the needle between his toes so nobody can see the marks. Before he goes onstage he cuts his finger and sprinkles salt into the cut (excruciating agony) to wake himself from his stupor.

In the bar on the corner of Castro I suspended myself from the balcony while the boy unzipped me and performed his quiet miracle. He was the same height as Erik and blond also. I almost pulled a shoulder muscle, hanging from the balcony so long. I suggested we return to the hotel for a friendly nap.

The Canova statue: $47,000. (Mrs. Godstalk!)

Warhol says the run-up to my thirty-second birthday will be like the final days of the Roman empire. He has ordered a red vinyl jockstrap for the occasion, which he may well wear outside his trousers. I couldn’t help thinking that he will fade away into obscurity. His fashionability is waning. (Being around him is like inhaling one of those ridiculous poppers.)

At the post-party party the nude ice sculptures began to melt. There was a cake baked in the shape of an ass — marzipan dimples and creative icing. I blew out the thirty-three candles (one for luck) but then Truman Capote jumped up on the table in his frock coat, flung off his white hat, and planted his face into the cake, came up miming a pubic hair between his teeth.

Victor collapsed from exhaustion and was rushed to the hospital. Later he came into Studio 54 with the intravenous drip still in his arm. He guided the metal stand through the dance floor under the flashing lights. Soon everyone was cheering and applauding and whistling.

Victor bowed and took a booth in the far corner, readjusted the dripbag, and tried to buy everyone a drink before he collapsed once again. (He would have loved it if he could have seen himself being carried out by none other than Steve.)

Margot says, Slow down.

I told her that the countless small devils (sex, money, desire) mean nothing to me when stacked against the angel of dance.

Sasha fell in the park, it seems. Heart attack. Tonight I stayed late, sent everyone home, danced him alive.

Wandered into a courtyard where the last blacksmith in Paris was shoeing his first horse of the day. He allowed me to sit on the wall and watch him. The horse’s leg in his hand and sparks at his feet.

Telegram and flowers for Xenia.

Fuck! The ankle just seemed to go out from underneath me. (Sasha all those years ago: What, are you not friends with your body anymore, Rudi?) Three months recovery, Emilio said. In exactly four days I will throw the crutches into Central Park.

(three in fact!)

Two long weeks recovering on St. Bart’s. No phone calls, nothing. It was so hot that the rain over the sea evaporated before it hit the water. Clouds of yellow butterflies rose from the trees. The world was far away and small.

The locals get up with the early light to work on their flower beds. Erik said the old men have a better life than the flowers — they have even less to do and can move to the shade when they desire. (Such a strange thing to say.)

After dinner he vomited in the bath. Food poisoning, he said. The housemaid cleaned him up. In his bathroom kit there were bottles of painkillers. In bed we turned back to back. He ground his teeth and kicked. By dawn the sheets were damp with sweat.

Photo from Tamara. Her heavy breasts, her stocky trunk, her abbreviated legs, how Russian she has become.

Twenty-four repetitions instead of twelve. Emilio has increased the weights and each day he measures the muscle. We walk the streets with the weight strapped to my ankle. The convict walk. Soon to be back dancing. Never before has he seen anybody recover so quickly.

Whole mornings doing massage. Hip extension. Torso twist. Hamstrings. Most of all my thighs and calves. He hangs my feet off the end of the table to prevent cramping and grows angry if I try to read a book on the special stand.

He says he can tell the plot of whatever I’m reading just by running his hands along my spine.

Perhaps the leg is stronger than ever before. The crowd in Verona, under the stars, give a twenty-minute standing ovation, even through a late drizzle. No word from Erik. The Chicago Sun-Times said he looked pale and, when he withdrew, the announcement was intestinal flu.

Margot has figured that we have danced together, in total, almost five hundred nights and she says to hell with it, she will go on, she will try for seven hundred, a lucky number!

Emilio’s cure for insomnia: Pour water on your wrist, dab it gently with a towel, return to bed, warm your hands beneath your armpits.

Our final quarrel surely. Every piece of china was smashed except the teapot, which Erik cradled to his stomach. He lit a cigarette in the doorway, still holding the pot. When I turned away he dropped the teapot without even the hint of emotion. Good-bye. A stinging finality to it.

Gillian said it was inevitable. I slammed the phone down. I do not need to be told. Margot was with Tito in Panama. No answer. Victor came to listen, took a flight all the way. My head was reeling.

Tried getting through to Mother but all the lines were down.

2

It begins with scarves, dark ones bought at the Missoni store on rue du Bac; gradually, over the years, he gets to know the store owners so well that they open for him alone on a Sunday morning. The scarves become brighter, more patterned, until he is so famous they are an advertisement, unpaid for, some of them smuggled home to his sister and mother, who find them loud and gaudy. In London a Saville Row tailor makes him a high-collared tunic, a Nehru, not unlike the one he wore in school, except it is cashmere, and it is his joke to say that this is how he feels inside, cash-a-mear, spoken like three words accidentally met. In Vienna he buys a Rococo-style Murano glass chandelier with fifty-five lights and twenty replacement bulbs. In Cairo he finds a pair of antique Persian slippers. In Rabat he kneels on carpets made for him by a blind Morrocan man to whom he tells the story of the Leningrad choreographer who listened so intently to floorboards. The Moroccan loves the story so much that he repeats it to other customers, so the story shifts and changes as it makes its way through living rooms around the world, told and retold, the choreographer becoming a dancer from Moscow, or a Siberian musician, even a deaf-mute Hungarian ballerina, so that years later he hears the story, distorted, and he bangs on the dinner table and shocks everyone silent with the words: Horseshit! That’s horseshit! He was from Leningrad and his name was Dmitri Yachmennikov!

He buys antique English bookshelves and folding tables. Romanian glassware hundreds of years old. An imperial dinner set from Austria. An Argentinean folding desk. Stained glass from a church in Bavaria. Iron crosses smuggled out of Czechoslovakia. A series of crucifixes by an artist in Vatican City. An intricately carved mirror from Chile, which he gives as a present to a stagehand from Santiago. He acquires musical scores handwritten in the 1930s for Vera Nemtchinova, pores over them late at night, teaching himself how to read the scores, how to hum them into his occasional insomnia. He orders maps drawn by a Soviet émigré in Mexico City, with the Republic of Bashkir firmly seated at the center, the town of Ufa finally finding a place for itself in cartography. One map is created for each of his homes, so eventually he has seven, a lucky number to him. The maps hang in gilded frames with a special nonreflecting glass. In Athens he buys a first-century Roman marble torso after the Diadumenos of Polykleitos, the body slightly chipped at the rib cage. His Virginia farmhouse has cabinet shelves that display precious carvings from Ghana. He buys Olga Spessivtzeva’s slippers, shows them to his maker in Covent Garden, who learns a new stitch from them. On Madison Avenue in New York City he haggles over a Charles Meynier painting, Wisdom Defending Youth Against Love. He carries the painting back to his apartment in the Dakota rather than pay the extra hundred dollars for delivery.

Antique accordions, violins, cellos, balalaikas, flutes, fiddles, a mahogany grand piano from William Knabe and Co: he surrounds himself with music.

In Stockholm he buys a glass case of rare fossilized ammonites. In Oslo, a cabinet made by Georg Kofoed Mobelfabrikant. In Rome he unfolds Chinese wallpaper panels depicting military scenes against a backdrop of herons, trees, temples. They are shipped to his island home on Le Galli near Capri. He makes a special trip to Nice to buy a series of Nijinsky photographs so he can study the poses, reset the steps, for which there is no written record. From Prague he orders hand-blown light fixtures from a glass craftsman. An Australian woman who deals in books sends him a steady supply of first-edition masters, mostly Russians. He rescues a grandfather clock from a trader in Singapore. From New Zealand he acquires a series of tribal masks. In Germany he buys a full set of dinner plates once used by a kaiser, the bone china trimmed with gold. From Canada he requests a cedar chest, since he doesn’t like to use mothballs, he has heard there is a particular forest where the cedar is best. He has flowers flown from Hawaii to his London home. And in Wales, where there is a mastery and respect for the form, he has a train set built for him by Llewelyn Harris, a craftsman in Cardiff, the models so real that when he lays them out on the floor he can sometimes remember himself at six years of age sitting on the hill above Ufa station, waiting.