It was closer to a pot high than anything the champagne could have produced, for I was lifted to the miraculous state where time stretches without limit in both directions. Crammed with a psycheful of perceptions about myself, all the most honest and profound I could produce, each minute seemed a day.
Some of the reflections were so piercing that I felt touched by an oracular gift. Sitting at our table, I detected lines in Anastasia's hands and face I'd never noticed before. She wasn't simply more beautiful; she had attained a higher level of beauty, which I recognized through a new feeling of communion with her as a fellow being with her own links to the awesome source of universal life that was streaming into me. Walking back at my side, I saw a figure of sacred dignity taking her place, in the black gown, on the throne of the audience.
The third ballet plunged me deeper into visions. Petrushkd's first flute call haunted me as if I had never heard it before; the dancers in the motley crowd of its opening scene were like the first performers I'd seen on a stage. I immediately realized that what I had taken for fanciful episodes portrayed, on the contrary, the profoundest truths of national character; that I was about to see not a ballet but a revelation coming from the creators' deepest unconscious sources. Russia's history and art, everything that made it sad and great, were passing before my eyes. The sidewalk player lifted his concertina; I understood why man needs music and Passion plays. The gesture was boundlessly melancholy and hopeful, totally mystifying and revealing. Free of time and space, I floated toward ultimate causes.
Although most of the visions were forgotten in the same microsecond of their divulgence, some landmarks remained in my sight, as if after the illumination of some cosmic lightning. The old man—still in the first scene, before I caught my breath—beckoning passersby into the show booth where the puppets would perform explained why my grandfather left his Lvov ghetto in 1901, an event whose importance to me I had never acknowledged even to the extent of asking the question.
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Next the hoi polloi milling in the Saint Petersburg street were showing me that I and my failures were part of humanity, somehow related to art's eternal concerns.
Snare drums beat out a foreboding tattoo: something fatal was going to happen in this tableau. An old juggler, the symbol of carnival magic, took command of the theater. Slowly I became aware that a titanic debate had started between my pro- and anti-Anastasia forces and was quickly building in the context of the larger apocalypse. The moment I understood what was going to happen to poor Petrushka and the light-headed Ballerina, I saw that Anastasia and I must not continue as we were. No compromise alternative was available for a Russian and a foreigner; the only remedy was . . . marriage.
Matrimony, holy wedlock, eternal union—I wanted their absolution. But would the cure be worse than our ailment?
The world was there, on the spell-struck stage. The juggler was toying with it; the sounds of his enchanted flute told me that was the decision of my life, and only the premonition that something I'd glean from his tricks would make it for me kept me from groaning with tension.
Recognizing that the verdict would determine whether I was to be a phony gay blade forever or a normal man, virulently antagonistic sides of me joined forces for the battle. That my leaning toward lifelong bachelorhood always derived from a suspicion that a girl like her could never love me—a dodge against admitting I was unable to love—had strengthened the fear of committing myself. I might conquer that now. But did this unorthodox creature merit sealing all escape routes?
The stakes were all or nothing. Not marrying was losing her forever; I couldn't pop over from New York for weekend visits. It wasn't a marriage but an irreversible break with the past—for her, too, since she'd be moving to a new world.
She might travel badly. Her capriciousness could be disastrous in the West: a child of nature who keeps losing her own passport might refuse to take telephone messages, throw away my notes, discover a principle for supermarket shoplifting. Wouldn't it be crazy for me, with my milksop's sense of loyalty, to assume this triple risk?
Yet only a marriage with some extraordinary challenge could
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tempt me to take any risk at all. The attraction was precisely in the uncommonness. I'd backed away from a dozen arrangements with the Wellesley girls I was supposedly destined for. I'd never take a vow unless it promised the total commitment I needed.
The fight rages across my skull like a Hopalong saloon brawl. The anti- forces score a tremendous knockout. The notion of such a marriage is so preposterous that only I, in my goalless groping, could have entertained it. The temptation is finished forever; she's my best girl in the port of Moscow, but no more. The immense relief of this certainty lasts long enough for a street dancer's bounds across the stage. It is already being undermined by doubts, longing and sadness at my loss when shock troops strike a stunning blow for the pro- side. Suddenly I see incontestable signs that Anastasia is my one-and-only. To give her up would be my greatest possible act of self-destruction. Thank God I've seen the light in time; thank God the decision has been made for me! I savor my relief, while the next counterattack advances from my innards to my brain.
I must do something, must decide; I'm back in the panic of recognizing that being fit for nothing else, I'll also never be a professor. All hope for redemption turns on the right decision, while the wrong one will deprive me of her splendor, extinguishing every chance for what I've always yearned. Anastasia is unique; she's manifestly not good enough. She has an incomparable capacity to enjoy; she lacks intellect. She'll be a dazzling success in New York; she'll seem a second-rate hick. And the decision is crucial; I must have the best because ... I don't know why, but in this crucial matter I'm special and deserve it—which, of course, is why I don't. . . .
I know I'll marry only once. But if I do it now I'll never have a chance at the others. Never Liv Ullmann, the librarian in the Frick Museum; not even the new Tanya on our dormitory floor, who gave me to know I wasn't fantasizing: I can have her. Committing myself to Anastasia is substituting real for visionary beauty, which is always more glorious, isn't it?
This battle in my head! And now my squalid stinginess sneaks in some lower blows. Will I have to support Anastasia in America? Maybe she won't want to study, but get a fat job as a model instead. Disgust for this selfishness pushes me to think of
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whether she can be happy away from Russia. Because Fll have the extra bonus of talking Russian all my life—her kind, with the instant plays on words. She'll be my movable Russian feast with the permanent taste of this year's adventure. And in Paris, Venice, Barbados, her sensitivity will heighten my own. Who else could respond to the cabman with the gypsy girls on the stage as she is responding now, with every cell of her being?
The deafening ding-dong quickens in pace, like a gargantuan metronome breaking its springs. Yes, no, relief, horror, grin of victory, moan of defeat. Concertina, balalaika, piccolo. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all my days—and the suspense will end. Yes, I'll beg for her hand. No, no, i must not; it can't work even for a single day. I want to swim clear of the tension but can't remember which way is up.
Yet I'm still transfixed by the performance, beholden for its unique aesthetic gift. The company plays and dances as if atoning for the forty-year unpersoning of Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Nijinsky, the geniuses of twentieth-century ballet. Each glittering dissonance of the score—truant clarinets, burlesque bassoons, tender-jazzy piano—tingles my imagination. The carnival bear romps on his leash; suddenly I understand the symbolic place of bears in the Russian consciousness. The old juggler brings Petrushka, Ballerina and Blackamoor to life with his magic flute, and the human sap animating their floppy limbs revitalizes my long desiccated emotions. I'm alive!