The Model Page 6

  “I had made my own plans,” replied Elena smiling.

  She had noticed that Lexi had never yet asked her name. She supposed this to be because a ballerina’s real name is unimportant. Lexi had also begun to smoke, exactly as if Elena had been a male comrade. Soon the air was thick.

  Despite what she had said, Elena fully realized how advantageous it was to be traveling with a person who could call upon friends for a bed or beds almost anywhere in Russia.

  “It was very kind of you to help me,” said Elena from quite deep down.

  “I am part of your spell,” Lexi chanted back.

  Elena nodded. She looked at him again. This time, she fancied that the top part of his face was feminine, the lower part masculine. People’s constitutions changed with their moods, or with the tides, as did their dependability.

  “Who is Irash?” inquired Elena.

  “The most perfect fellow,” replied Lexi. “The most perfect fellow you’ll ever meet.”

  “He gave me a box of dancers, with jointed legs and arms.”

  “Do not tire them.”

  Elena had, in fact, carefully packed the box away under all the boxes of tools, and under the model in another box.

  “If you are the Patron of the Opera,” she persisted, “what is Irash?”

  “He is the creative genius, mademoiselle. It is always useless to have an opera, and no creative genius. It is a mistake commonly made.”

  Lexi was puffing steadily, filling the coach with almost black smoke.

  Elena was not to be deflected. It was the personal aspect that counted, as with everybody. She, a star rising with immense rapidity, was alone in a coach with the Patron of the Opera, and him half-intoxicated with nicotine.

  “Will Irash teach me to dance better than the others?”

  “If you are in Irash’s hands, you will need no tuition, mademoiselle. Irash is creative, not didactic. Perhaps you do not know the meaning of those words.”

  What Lexi had said seemed very surprising, but at that exact point something began to stir within Elena, as something had begun to stir when she had been seated with her eyes on the spotty ceiling and the bucket of bulletty cherries between her legs. What was stirring now, Elena had no idea, any more than on the earlier occasion. The future could be depended upon to disclose.

  “What does Irash do at the Opera, and what do you do?”

  “I am responsible for everything and nothing. I am the mere titular deity. Irash creates, directs, exalts.”

  “I don’t really understand,” said Elena, after careful thought.

  “In art there is very little definition, mademoiselle.”

  “But don’t I need to understand?” asked Elena.

  “Not at all, mademoiselle. Only to trust.”

  “Trust who, Lexi? Trust Irash?”

  She had actually used Lexi’s name, and quite without forethought.

  “You have an inner voice, mademoiselle. Or shall we say, a Muse? Irash heard it call, or no doubt you would not be here in my carriage. He will enable you to do as it bids. It is your true self that you must trust.”

  “Ah!” said Elena. It was all so contrary to familiar teachings, and to Bábaba’s in particular.

  But now the cavern of Lexi’s big pipe glowed like the bowl of Elburz or Etna. The floor of the coach was being strewn with fiery particles, which instantly died as the damp struck them. The air was hot and strong. A portent from Heaven was the least that could have been expected, had the atmosphere outside been clearer.

  “I think I understand,” said Elena, cautiously.

  “There is no doubt about it,” squeaked Lexi, holding in the smoke for a moment, like a conjuror.

  And then there was a portent. Suddenly, everything, inside and outside, was bright sunshine, and the Gates of Smorevsk were visible, only two versts away, across the peat bog.

  Mist and fog can be very local in their distribution, especially in mid-autumn.

  Within the coach, Elena felt much too hot, as if her Mother had been there.

  Above the gates were the usual ghastly heads on spikes, which no one ever quite knew when to remove. Around the gates, and depending from the walls, sometimes hardly less dexterously than Ismene, were people of all colors, all costumes, all languages, all purposes. No effort was being made to protect them from one another, or even from themselves.

  Lexi had no trouble in signifying either his rank or his position. Elena noticed that the big gates were stuck down and rusted. Probably they had not been closed for years and years, whatever the regulation might be. Security was in the hands of the gatemen, who were covered with ornamental knives and antique pistols from shoulder to knee. Here too, Elena wondered how she would have fared, had she emerged footsore and without papers. She was much too young to have papers, besides being a female.

  The streets were crowded with charlatans, mountebanks, and nursemaids. There was a samovar at every corner, either steaming or being mended. The thousand churches tinkled their bells gloriously, as if to welcome the new ballerina; the gold decorations everywhere flashed in the sun; the multicolored doves swooped and wheeled and purred. Elena did not know whether there really were a thousand churches, but it seemed likely. Everything was completely different from her own small town.

  Birs and Fors were imbibing now, as well as munching, and singing too, though less blithely than Mikhail, and neither in unison nor in harmony. The dogs plodded engagingly, as if still crossing the boundless fens, even though none of the populace seemed to see them, let alone make way for them. Every now and then a young officer of dragoons galloped past with a message. Each one of them either saluted Lexi or waved gaily to him, and in some cases, there was time for Elena to bow slightly.

  “Dear Smorevsk!” murmured Lexi, knocking out his pipe on the underside of the coach seat. “City of Joy, I always say.”

  He even let down both windows, so that the inside of the coach smelled of people in the streets and not only of combustion.

  They drove straight to the Opera House. Had not Lexi so directed almost immediately he had ingathered Elena? The building had a stone facade in a scholarly classical manner, but was smaller than Elena had expected, or had provided for in her model. A monk was preaching Repentance on the other side of the square in a pulpit improvised from carbine boxes. All the time Elena could hear his words through the open window.

  But Lexi proclaimed too: “Alight, enter, and conquer,” he cried out when the carriage had come to a standstill.

  “Aren’t you coming too?” gasped Elena, too appalled to think.

  “I am the administration and the finance, and it is not for administration and finance to break rudely in upon parturition and interpretation.”

  The dogs were silently clustering round the coach in their usual way, despite all the urban uproar, and the men on the box were beginning to thwack one another, in sport or otherwise.

  “I can’t go in alone,” gasped Elena, too scared to breathe, let alone to move her legs, or even her arms.

  “It was what you intended, mademoiselle.”

  Elena thought about that for half a minute at least.

  “So it was,” she then said, and began to gather herself together, even though she was shaking as Lexi had shaken after he had suddenly kissed her.

  “You are under a spell,” Lexi reminded her.

  Elena nodded.

  Then she turned to Lexi. The men on the box were now punching rather than thwacking. For a moment they reminded Elena of her brothers. Elena straightened her dress.

  “Thank you, Lexi. Without you, I should have had many troubles.” She believed it was a line from Pushkin, or, if not, then from someone else.

  “Without you, mademoiselle, I should have had for company only my ancestors, my serfs, and my mission.” Elena almost giggled at his high, thin voice.

  “We shall meet at the opera.”

  Elena was drawing on her different and better gloves.

  “I enter only at cris
is, mademoiselle.”

  “Then—”

  Shaken once more, Elena stopped pulling for a second or two.

  “I am in the hands of my mission; you of your Muse.”

  “What is your mission, Lexi?” After all, it was the first she had heard of it; at least in so many words.

  “To free Russia.”

  In Lexi’s case, it really did seem unlikely, despite what he had said to her when the dragoons were blocking the road. But Elena had learned by now that the most surprising men commonly said something of the kind, and that it was never worth pestering or arguing.

  Elena, sensible always, dismounted from the carriage, therefore, with her few small objects. Birs and Fors were in no position to offer any help. In the square before the Opera House, it was not too hot, as in the coach, or too cold, as in the abodes of the Countess and the Baron; it was perfect.

  “Thank you, Lexi.” And Elena curtsied most beautifully.

  She would of course be doing that more and more. How invaluable had been all her practice with Tatiana and the others!

  There was even a strip of colored carpet or drugget all the way up from the teeming gutter into the heart of the structure, or at least into the interior. The strip was worn in places, especially at the edges, and Elena realized that it was probably stretched for a very grand personage who had attended or was about to attend; but she preferred to believe that it was the spell rising to its first climax.

  Lexi was waving adieux from the open window. The dogs seemed more numerous than ever, and also, Elena had to admit, more unearthly. Birs was leaning one way on the box, Fors the other way. The monk had begun to denounce her as a brand for the burning. Doubtless all of her kind were included, but his finger was pointing at her personally, as she was well aware. His present congregation of strollers and visionaries was small, his language confused and chiliastic.

  Nothing remained but for Elena to enter the Opera House and her destiny.

  The first person she met was Irash himself. He was dressed in what she took to be working costume.

  “You are rather late,” he cried, springing about as he looked up at the big gilt clock in the elaborate foyer. Elena saw at a glance that the clock was wrong.

  “We were delayed on the road by dragoons,” explained Elena.

  “We? Is there anyone else?”

  “I was given a lift by someone you know. The Patron of the Opera, Prince Popelevski.”

  “We seldom see the Prince. He is often a thousand versts away. He is a Freemason.”

  “I thought so,” said Elena, a little smugly.

  “If the Tsar but knew!” cried Irash, casting his eyes up to the ceiling, painted with martial gods and half-martial goddesses.

  Elena was not sure in what tone Irash had spoken. So she simply said, “The Tsar cannot know everything.” She had noticed that it was always an acceptable response.

  “To work!” cried Irash, as if everything else was a waste of time.

  Elena noticed also that he was no longer addressing her as Mademoiselle. She resigned herself to being clay in his hands.

  “I suppose I ought to start with exercises and things?” The book had been far from a working manual.

  “You are too late for that,” cried Irash, leaping an inch or so in the air, possibly with impatience.

  “Then I ought to rehearse?”

  “Too late,” cried Irash, leaping again.

  “Then what am I to do?”

  “Come upon the stage and meditate.” Though Elena had never before meditated, the idea in other respects exceeded her wildest dreams. She tried to disclose no excitement. By now she was all but trained in reserve, in showing and feeling nothing, or as little as possible.

  She and Irash were alone in the great void. The curtain was down, and there was only a single gaslight, high as a fixed star. Irash stood silent, as at a previous critical moment in their life together. Elena meditated on what to ask or say.

  “Where is the scenery?” she asked at length.

  “You had no time to paint scenery.”

  “No,” said Elena. “I had to leave at once.”

  “We can do without scenery,” said Irash. “Soon most people will do without it.”

  “Oh, I do hope not,” cried Elena. “It was simply that I had not time.”

  “Fortunately, you completed your dress.”

  “Yes,” said Elena doubtfully. She was far from sure of her workmanship. “But is it the right red?”

  “The audience will decide that.”

  Elena shuddered slightly. But at that moment the risk did not seem very great. Elena darted to the place where the curtain parted in the middle and tugged a corner of its outer surface into the faint gaslight.

  “Incredible!” she cried. The curtain was blue, and somewhat crumpled, and the bottom of it was spangled with silver.

  Irash tripped across the stage and seized her arm.

  “You must try on your dress,” he cried. “You may have grown stouter or slimmer on the journey.”

  “Slimmer, I think,” said Elena, a matter, surely, of importance to a dancer.

  They tore along black and dusty passages; raced up steep, broken, and endless stairs. They reached an area under the roof. It was lighted by gas flames in odd but meaningful positions. It was tawdry with fabrics. It was very hot from the heaped stove spluttering in one corner beneath the low ceiling.

  “This is Grandma Gort,” said Irash, waving his arms. “This is Elena Andreievna Timorasieva.”

  Grandma Gort was all in indigo, with sparse white hair, and a lined face, greened by the gaslight.

  “Here I must leave you,” said Irash. “I have the opera to interpret as well as the ballet to create.”

  Without a single word, Grandma Gort began to undress Elena. Elena never thought to object because, as soon as she had entered the room, she had seen the red dress. It glowed, not as if the stovelight were reflected in her Mother’s eyes, but as if it had been a live and breeding ruby.

  In an unbelievably short time Elena was wearing the dress, and Grandma Gort was making good the errors, pulling and tightening, thrusting in long pins everywhere, several of which entered Elena also. Each time Elena gasped, but she realized that the life of the theater was often much harder than ordinary people fancied. The book had left her in no doubt of that.

  Everything in the world seemed to require sacrifice, Elena thought in the middle of the pushing and pulling. All the more reason, perhaps, for not going in for it unnecessarily. She would endure like an Aztec maiden on the altar. Her distant cousin, Admiral Marek Vassilievitch Molotov, had played his part in digging some of them up during the days of the Mexican Empire. She noticed that a thin dark girl had set down her sewing and emerged from the many shadows.

  With a final sharp twist to the bodice Grandma Gort was finished and signaled that Elena was to disrobe. Elena made to scramble into her tunic and skirt, far too hot for life in a theater costume room. But Grandma Gort signaled for her to desist. Elena walked over to the stove and waited. She wondered if Grandma Gort was dumb, like their postman at home, who had been committed for opening all the letters, including the most passionate and intimate love letters.

  Grandma Gort might speak little or not at all, but now she was doing six other things at once: drawing in and letting out; lengthening and shortening; tacking and splicing. Needles gashed, scissors slashed. Pins flashed like dragonflies.

  Elena glanced at the other waiting girl, and smiled slightly. Then—

  “Asmara!” she cried.

  It was impossible but true, as at the moment were so many things.

  Asmara smiled slightly too, but instantly raised her right forefinger and laid it vertically across her lips. Asmara, though still very thin, appeared to be coughing her life out no more.

  Elena, smiling still, tiptoed across the room and extricated a bonbon from the pocket of her gray tunic. After her journey, it was the last one left. She held it out to Asmara, indicating
in dumb show that it might have suffered on the way and from the heat of the costume room. Still smiling, Asmara accepted it, indicating in dumb show that these dilapidations mattered not at all, but that she was sorry about the lack of a bonbon for Elena.

  Soon the alterations to the red dress were completed and now it was adhering to Elena like a dream. The various excellent semiprofessional dressmakers in her small town could not, between them, have achieved in years what Grandma Gort had achieved in what seemed like minutes. But of course the original design had still been Elena’s and unaided even by a watercolor drawing.

  Asmara indicated in dumb show that Elena should descend to be inspected by Irash. Asmara went first, as Elena could not yet remember the way. Previously, Asmara could never have descended all those dark and broken and endless stairs, let alone climbed up them again.

  “Asmara,” said Elena, “I am so glad.”

  Asmara did not stop to look back at her, because of the steps, but Elena knew that she was still smiling.

  When they reached the stage, Asmara turned and spoke in her soft voice. “Thank you, Elena Andreievna.”

  “But what happened?” gasped Elena, from within her tight bodice.

  “I am well again,” was the only explanation Asmara had time to offer before Irash advanced, and stretched out his hand. Elena noticed that it was very dark in color and very hairy.

  “Timorasieva!” he said reverently. “The name is perfect.”

  Elena had never deemed it to be anything but a quite usual name, nor had Tatiana ever differed from this. Now her name began to crackle and sparkle round its edges.

  Irash’s eyes were taking in every detail at once.

  “Do you like my dress?” inquired Elena, twirling a bit, as if truly still with Tatiana.

  “It has been always in the mind of time,” said Irash. Elena knew she had designed the dress herself, but she saw that both things could be true at the same moment.

  There was a pause while Irash continued to gaze at her.

  “Shall I go back and take it off?” asked Elena in the end.

  “No, the audience is assembling.”