Nijinsky by Lucy Moore

Author:Lucy Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2013-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Mephisto Valse

1914–1918

IN LATE JULY 1914 they went to Budapest to introduce Kyra to her grandmother. From there they planned to travel to St Petersburg to see Eleonora and meet Bronia’s little girl, Irina, but Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary on 29 July in response to the Empire’s invasion of Serbia. All trains going east were suspended and it was impossible to find another way out of the city. There was nothing the Russian consul could do to help; he was trying to flee too. After a few days, a shy police officer, dressed in civilian clothes, came to Emilia’s house and told Vaslav and Romola that as enemy subjects they were prisoners of war and would have to remain for the foreseeable future in Budapest under house arrest.

No one was happy about this turn of events. Emilia Márkus did not want a Russian living in her house and urged her daughter to divorce Vaslav so that she could be Hungarian again. Romola, however, did not want to live with her mother. Nijinsky was miserable because there was nowhere for him to practise; and the war troubled him deeply, as all around them euphoric soldiers with soft cheeks went off singing to the front. ‘All these young men marching off to their death,’ he said, ‘and for what?’

The servants distrusted their Russian house-guest and Vaslav did not endear himself to anyone by refusing to dance a benefit for the Hungarian soldiers who were going off to kill his countrymen. His consolation for being in Budapest – hot chocolate layered with cream and Dobos torta at the old-fashioned Ruszwurm Patisserie near the Coronation Church – was soon curtailed by wartime rationing. Everything that went wrong was blamed on him: when the boiler broke down or when the unused parts of the house became damp. When Emilia’s cat – a very ordinary sort of cat, Romola commented crossly – went missing, she accused Vaslav of killing it. What Vaslav later remembered of this period was being depressed; he and Emilia ‘quarrelled for eighteen months on end’.

Thrown together in a hostile atmosphere, Vaslav and Romola learned to lean on one another: their relationship, their young family, was all they had. Though in some places in his diary he wrote of hating Romola, particularly her obsession with money, other memories make clear that they did love each other. ‘I loved her terribly. I gave her everything I could. She loved me.’ Living with the Márkus family (it has to be said, including Romola) was like inhabiting a den of snakes; Sigmund Freud, who published On Narcissism the year war broke out, would have had a field day with them. Romola believed her mother and stepfather were informing on Vaslav to the authorities; her sister, Tessa, charming but too heavy a drinker, tried to seduce Vaslav, inviting him into her room while she was undressed, deliberately lying on the bed in front of him, wearing ‘small silk panties and thin camisoles’; if Emilia thought Oskar was looking at the servants, she would slap their faces.

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