Flight of the Swan Read Free Page B

on the hem of her costume, she pretended nothing was amiss. She danced around the scoundrel with a radiant smile, and as soon as the curtain went down, she’d turn around and give him a sound slap across the face.
    In any case, Madame had every right to be so demanding with other dancers, because she was just as exacting with herself. She could rehearse a combination of steps, which took ten seconds to perform, for hours; repeat a battement tendu, a bourrée, or an arabesque so many times the dancers began to feel the ground give way under their feet. The few times I watched her do the devilishly difficult fouettés, her leg an iron pivot on which her whole body turned while it churned like a butter pole, the other leg a whip of bone and flesh lifting and falling forty times in perfect rhythm, I was so amazed I was sure the holy Pantocrator was hovering over the stage, miraculously sustaining Madame inside the iris of His eye.
    Once, just before a performance, Madame was watching the audience through a tiny peephole in the velvet curtains, leaning forward and already costumed to appear on the scene, when she said to me: “Look at them, Masha, how self-satisfied and complacent they are, after a rich dinner and an expensive bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Their bodies have taken over and their spirits are unable to rise. We’ll try to help them with our dancing, but we can’t promise them anything.” The moment the curtain went up and she appeared onstage, it was her winged power countering their heaviness, her élan vital pitted against their dead weight. Madame’s profile was serene and chiseled in snow; her walk unfaltering, like a panther’s. By contrast, I was ugly and awkward, my face was full of pimples, and my arms were gawky; I was always tripping over myself and clumsily dropping things. But I couldn’t let her see how much I loved her. When you revered Madame she exploited you all the more—and then discarded you like a dried corn husk.
    Madame exerted a mysterious attraction on those around her. An aura emanated from her that pulled young girls to her like moths. One had to be careful not to get too close, or one could fall into the fire. When I was a child in Minsk I saw the Imperial Ballet give a presentation in the garden of a castle—my stepmother took me there because she worked in the kitchen. It was the first time I ever saw a ballerina, and they looked like fairies, dancing among the flowers. Madame was my fairy godmother.
    When Madame lost patience with the girls, calling them muttons or vaches , Mr. Dandré immediately came running, supposedly to defend them. But he was really after something else: he wanted the girls to become dependent on him , so later he could do as he wanted. On one occasion, a month before the company arrived in Puerto Rico, we were staying at the Ansonia Hotel in New York when tragedy struck. A young dancer named Maria Volkonsky, who had recently arrived from Russia, was feeling very lonely. As a result of her anxiety Maria had begun to eat fattening foods and had gained ten pounds. Dandré realized it, and he immediately took advantage of the situation. He began to coddle her; he supervised her meals and was with her constantly, trying to win her confidence so that she would let him in her room when he tapped on her door at night. Maria felt terrible because, apart from me, she was the dancer who most revered Madame. Yet the more she admired her, the more Madame despised her because she was fat. Finally, Madame refused to let her perform. She made Maria teach the understudy her roles, and this made the girl even more unhappy. Maria became so distracted one night that she threw herself from her hotel window, which opened onto one of New York’s dreary back alleys. It took the company weeks to overcome its grief and to be able to dance again.
    One day Nadja Bulova, Madame’s understudy, was feeling ill and Madame sent for me to rehearse the pas de deux of Les Sylphides