Free Nijinsky by Lucy Moore Page B

Schweiner, fed her titbits of information; once a girlfriend entered Nijinsky’s room at the Hotel Bristol while he was dressing ‘as if she was making a mistake’; in Monaco Romola lay on a bench under a blossoming magnolia tree as Nijinsky, Diaghilev and their party had dinner on the terrace at the Hotel de Paris, ‘and watched them for hours and hours’. Having exhausted Bolm and Cecchetti, she had moved on to Baron de Günzburg, one of Diaghilev’s most important backers, and by his side had complete access to the Ballets. It was with Günzburg that she had watched the first night of
Sacre
, squashed in among the mob of dancers and friends watching from the wings, looking out for Nijinsky’s pale, tense face in the crowd.
    Nijinsky in evening clothes by Valentin Sverov, head back and eyes half-closed, wearing the distant expression that fascinated Romola de Pulszky.
    She was delighted to find herself on the same train as Vaslav – she always instructed her maid Anna to find out when he and Diaghilev were travelling, but this was the first time Anna’s information had been accurate – and, hanging out smoking (at this time a very racy activity for a woman, especially an unmarried woman) in the corridor near his compartment, was overjoyed when he asked her in his broken French if she was looking forward to being in London. It was their first conversation. On the sea crossing to Dover they spoke again and Romola triumphantly told Anna, who took a dim view of her crush on Nijinsky, that flirting was a great cure for sea-sickness.
    In London she tried as much as she could to be where Nijinsky and Diaghilev were, badgering her English relations to take her to dine at the Savoy, where they were staying. Nijinsky ‘seemed now almost to take it for granted that I was here, there, and everywhere he appeared in public. He must have wondered how I managed it. I was really glad now that I had spent so much on my clothes in Paris,’ Romola wrote. ‘As I always went with some friends, it must have seemed natural to Diaghilev that I was present. He realised that I moved in the same society as he himself.’ Nijinsky was unfazed by this pursuit; indeed, sometimes when he looked at her she noticed the shadow of a smile on his face.
    One morning Nijinsky and Karsavina arrived early for their class with Cecchetti, before Romola’s class had been dismissed. She took a long time to change so that she could watch them. Every day Cecchetti began with a little speech: ‘Tamara Platonova, Vaslav Fomich. You may be celebrated, great artists, but here in my class you are my pupils. Please forget here all your crazy modern movements, all that Fokine, Nijinsky nonsense. Please,
ras, dva, tri, chetyre …
’ They obeyed without question, helping sprinkle water on the floor, executing whatever he asked of them with the precision of clocks, listening to his criticism ofthe performances of the night before and his inexhaustible complaints about the terrible modern music they had to dance to. A few days earlier, for his birthday, Nijinsky had given Cecchetti a cane with a heavy gold top; Romola said she and the girls in her class wished there was less gold in it, because Cecchetti rapped them with it when they made mistakes.
    The Opera House in Covent Garden was full every night for their season and again London surrendered for two weeks to the Ballets Russes’s spell. Muriel Draper and her husband went to the first night of
Sacre
with the pianist Artur Rubinstein and marvelled at the sound Monteux extracted from the orchestra, ‘a sound that is still sinking down through me with every blood-beat’. Nijinsky’s geometrical, ‘beyond-human’ choreography, thought Draper, intensified the music’s power. When the curtain fell, ‘the house broke loose’. As they filed off to find their drinks at the bar, the audience was stunned, shaken,