Encore by Monique Raphel High Read Free Book Online Page A

displayed, a candy box wherein the Sugar Plum Fairy was queen and mistress.
    Natalia came out among the small pupils, the various sweets that peopled this land of fantasy. All at once calmness diffused through her from head to toe. Her nervousness had stilled, after its first quick flare-up behind the scenes, and the lights blinded her view of the spectators. She felt at ease forming the familiar steps. The Nutcracker-turned-Prince arrived with small Clara, and she thought: I know him, he was a senior last year, but I can’t recall his name. The Prince did not smile at her; with singular sympathy she could understand why. She did not smile at him, either.
    All at once they were performing their pas de deux, the short piece that was this ballet’s dessert. In the Kussov stall, Pierre Riazhin suddenly came alert. He focused his opera glasses on the small billow of pink tulle swept into the air, horizontal above her partner, who was holding her by the thighs. Her tiny, boneless arms were like wings, her head reared up as though poised for flight. This was a teasing, impish fairy: translucent, ethereal, yet conspiratorial. Pierre began to smile. Next to him Boris had stiffened, and in the absolute stillness even Svetlov and Diaghilev seemed to have stopped breathing. Pierre’s heart soared, as it had when he had ridden his beloved stallion bareback in the Caucasus. Through the glasses he could define her face, the face of a figurine, with disproportionately large eyes, chin too small, and the nose perhaps too long. He wanted to cry out, but instead he bit his lip and regarded Boris. His patron had risen in his seat and was now flinging something from the stall, his features concentrated on the stage and the little ballerina.
    Natalia saw nothing of her public, for the stage lights separated her from them, but at the back of her mind she was aware that flowers were being cast from the loges to the dancers’ feet. She had been told that the dowager empress, Maria Feodorovna, was present, but this fact was meaningless to her moving limbs. She had blended with the air, created a momentum that made her magic. During the playing of Tchaikovsky’s favorite instrument, the delicate celesta, Natalia even ceased being aware of her partner: He had become as separate from her as an icicle from red-hot fire—odorless, sexless, ageless, as distant as an angel from the human heart. This feeling of separateness created a disorientation that, added to the lights, made her dance with yet a stronger appeal to the unseen public. She seemed to say: Play with me, believe in me, but don’t think that I am made to last!
    It was over with the abruptness of an awakening. She curtsied to the bejeweled people in the stalls. Looking up briefly, she was startled to recognize the tall blond stranger whom she had encountered in the corridor of the Mariinsky. More luminous than the others, radiant as a bright bird, he could not be missed. Through a blur, she saw his raised arm; something was floating through the air over the heads of the orchestra players. It landed at her feet. Her Prince had seen it, too, and was now bending with infinite grace to retrieve it. He handed it to her with a courtly, sweeping gesture, and she executed her final révérence and disappeared as swiftly as a frightened doe, her face tingling, her limbs trembling. Behind the stage she did not stop, continuing her steps to allow the momentum to decrease naturally. Then it was over, truly over. She could hear the ovations from the theatre but already she had blanked them out.
    No one had found her yet behind the scenes, and she crouched down, touching the bouquet of rosebuds that the stranger had hurled to her. They lay nestled among soft leaves. She counted fifteen rosebuds, white, pink, red, and yellow. And then, curled between two sprigs of baby’s breath, she saw a stiff card. Surprised and intrigued, she pulled it out, and saw a family crest