thanked him in Russian, ‘Spasibo.’ But when he smiled at her friendly gesture, she felt an inexplicable wrench of sorrow. It was the way he leaned down to her, the patience with which he paused. She had to look away from his warm, solicitous eyes, his obvious concern.
She couldn’t face vodka, champagne. She took a glass of ice water, and nodded, keeping her eyes down until he was gone.
You’re completely pathetic, she told herself, sipping it. Then she made herself get up from her chair and put the glass on the table. She smoothed the stiff green silk zibeline of her sleeveless Givenchy cocktail dress and went on into the bland modern ballroom.
The rows of tables draped in heavy white cloth were stacked with crested blue and gold-rimmed plates and lined with bowlegged silver frames waiting for chafing dishes to be set in them. Beside a row of napkins folded like bishops’ mitres, cutlery protruding from inside, Nina found baskets of bread already set out. She helped herself.
The first soft, white American roll made her feel famished; she looked around her, took another furtively, then swung full-circle and leaned boldly against the table as she chewed.
She felt better after the second roll and ventured back towards the party.
The rooms were filling up, throbbing and swaying. The crowd swelled around the ambassador in slow bunches whenever someone important arrived, the Soviet minister for culture, the Soviet foreign minister, the British ambassador, and Nina watched a few familiar visitors slipping by without shaking the ambassador’s hand. They made off quickly around the corners to the music room and the small green dining room where they couldn’t easily be seen. She admired their daring; at a party like this, a Russian could lose his watchful companions and mingle freely, privately, for a few precious moments. Some had concerns which might be regarded as professional; others were seriously interested in the food. But everyone knew that the opportunities were brief, chancy.
When Balanchine came in, the receiving line broke down in chaos. Guests who had been glad-handed through now surged back against the flow to congratulate and praise him. But he moved deftly forward, leaving plenty of their attention to the ancient Bolshoi ballerina Elizaveta Pavlovna Gerdt who was escorting him. He was soon surrounded by American and Soviet press in a space he instinctively created for himself in the middle of the main salon. One of the aides standing near the ambassador to mouth names in his ear broke away to join Balanchine’s group, making it somehow official.
Nina sensed a hearty, authentic excitement in the air. A few of the ballerinas came in still holding armfuls of bouquets. Had someone advised them to do this charming, inconvenient thing? she wondered. Or had they been offered nowhere to leave the flowers, no vases, no water? She felt the energy of their upright, strong-footed beauty filling the room, and she went to help them, as if she were now joining in with a performance. She signalled to a waiter, and together they made great show of relieving the girls of their flattering burdens, raising the flowers high in the air, bearing them off to a basement pantry to be kept fresh in cold water until the end of the evening.
When Nina came back she was smiling happily and went in search of a drink from the bar set up on a table in the music room.
‘It was a terrific success, though,’ Fred Wentz was saying to a tall, imposing man with a monumental, cadaverous face and close-cropped dark hair. ‘If you think the applause was reticent, you have to bear in mind it was mostly official Moscow in the audience tonight. They are bureaucrats, civil servants, heads of various unions and labour organizations. They are not the ballet lovers. They attend because it’s a great state occasion and the tickets are given to them as a reward, a form of recognition.’ He dropped his voice. ‘The point is, they have to attend, whether they want to or not.’
‘No reaction at all for Serenade,’ the man grunted. His voice was Yankee, cultured, clipped.
‘Have you met Nina Davenport?’ Wentz asked, half turning towards her, pulling her into the conversation as she stepped back from the bar with her icy Scotch tilting in her hands.
The tall man nodded at her with faint recognition, his tan eyes electric, watchful behind horn-rimmed eyeglasses.
She said, ‘I was hanging around the theatre, trying to help find the sets.’
‘Oh, yes. Thank God,’ he replied, with a tone of dry impatience that conveyed Olympian disdain for the amateur uselessness of the personnel in charge of costumes and sets.
It struck Nina as comical, but she restrained a burbling laugh.
Then he held out his gigantic hand, and hers was lost in its bone-cracking grip. ‘Lincoln Kirstein.’
Her eyes widened in excitement. ‘Oh! Mr Balanchine’s – partner. What an honour.’
He pressed his lips together and stared at her solemnly.
So Nina continued, ‘But it’s true, you know, what Mr Wentz was just saying. The party officials and workers who were there tonight are a stolid bunch. There’s a mania here for ballet, for art generally. Very articulate and informed. The Soviet audience will have no trouble at all appreciating the New York City Ballet and Mr Balanchine’s work. Really. They are primed for it – starved, even.’
Nina felt Kirstein’s eyes leave hers and rove over her shoulder; her earnestness felt superfluous, embarrassing. His lips in repose had the shape of a sneer, of doubt; he wasn’t listening. She stopped talking as the rotund figure of a powerful Soviet ballet critic inserted himself into their group just beside her, nodding, sweating a little, gripping a tiny glass of vodka in his fist.
But now Kirstein asked her in a stentorian voice, ‘Starved?’
Nina shrugged, reluctant to explain herself in front of the critic. She said demurely, awkwardly, ‘It will be interesting to see how a broader Russian audience responds – to – to – so many new combinations, such an unfamiliar choreographic vocabulary. I think they’ll see right away that there is meaning even in Balanchine’s “plotless” ballets. The Russian audience is – very special.’
Kirstein’s eyes flickered from her face to the critic’s and back again until Wentz bestirred himself to make introductions all around.
The critic preened and smoothed back his thick, oily hair. Then he remarked in sonorous, archly cultivated English, ‘I understand Mr Balanchine chooses to ignore the Soviet request to remove Prodigal Son from upcoming programmes. May we suppose he clings to this old-fashioned and narrow-minded religious narrative because it reveals something of personal importance about how he feels on returning to his own fatherland?’
Nina was struck by the suggestiveness of this question, but it was offered with numbing pomposity, and the agenda she recognized behind it warned her not to respond.
There was a silence.
At last, Kirstein, with a formal little bow of his head, a large, precise finger adjusting his eyeglasses, slowly said, ‘Fascinating question. I wouldn’t care to reply for Mr Balanchine. It’s a good ballet. Overly ingenious in places; deeply moving – the vulnerability of the son at the end, his shame finally covered by the father’s cloak. The father implacable. I’ve always felt pleased Mr Balanchine agreed to revive it. At one time he didn’t believe in reviving anything, only in moving forward. The past doesn’t appear to interest him; now is what interests him, now and what is still to come. The language of ballet is a breath, a memory, and soon looks out of fashion. There’s Prokofiev’s music, of course – a Russian who did return.’
This
