Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

And her narrow hand in rings.
"Ever since Blok wrote these lines in The Unknown Woman, every woman in Petersburg
wants to wear a hat like this one. Where did you find it?"
"Oh, Konrad bought it for me in Berlin over a year ago."
With much laughter, the three, Vladimir on the left, Alexandra in the middle, set out for
the theater. She offered her arm to Vladimir, "to complete the masquerade," she said.
The theater was an improvisation, a long, narrow room with a tiny stage, bent-cane
chairs in rows, the audience a motley crowd of the fashionable and the marginal, hungry
students with nickel-rimmed glasses, ladies from the upper society, men in well-tailored suits,
the intelligentsia of Petersburg. The small place was sold out.
The musical was an improvisation too, but a masterful one. Meyerhold was listed on the
handbill as the director and as Pierrot. A Colombine and a Harlequin completed the cast.
"Meyerhold is a genius, he has been looking for such a vehicle for years," whispered
Vladimir.
The curtain opened to a minimal set of symbolic pieces of furniture, a couple of chairs, a
few paper decorations and standing amid this plunder Pierrot: tall, lanky, a fantastic hook-nose,
no beak-mask needed, his costume an abstraction of the Commedia dell’Arte.
Meyerhold moved his lanky arms in jerky gestures like an old-fashioned mechanical doll.
With a grating voice he shouted. "Help, help I am bleeding to death!"
He made a pause and pointing at a growing puddle on the floor said as an aside, "Sok
Klyukvy?"–cranberry juice. From underneath his costume dripped red juice.
Laughter.
This beginning proved a gag. Quickly the poetry became sufficiently ambiguous that
Alexandra had to interpret for Konrad several times. Pierrot loved Columbine, of course, but to
Blok she also represented his Death—smertj, feminine. Kuzmin’s hackneyed tunes, sung by
the characters without instrumental accompaniment off-set the sophisticated text: banal, erotic,
sentimental, deliberately simple. Like the melodies at the Varieté in Berlin they crept under
Alexandra’s skin.
In the end Pierrot stopped at the ramp facing the audience with a drooping head and
pendulous arms said. "Life is sad, the world a farce."
Suddenly he jerked up his long arm, pointed at the audience and shouted, "And you
think this is frivolous amusement. You idiots."
He pulled a flute from the folds of his garment and played a melancholic tune as the
curtain closed behind him.
A minute of dumbfounded silence, and then a storm broke loose, whistles and cat calls
mixed with ecstatic applause and shouts of "Bravo!"
Meyerhold dragged Blok and a reluctant Kuzmin onto the stage. Blok tall, an even, oval
face surrounded by an aura of curly blond hair, a sensuous mouth, gray eyes, and Kuzmin his
complete opposite, dark, large, ancient near-Eastern eyes, a few flying hairs on a balding head
too big for his small body. Lemur or Cagliostro?
Vladimir seemed to know everybody. With obvious pleasure he showed off Alexandra.
Konrad played his role most convincingly. Meyerhold tried to flirt with Alexandra in Italian and
then switched to a Viennese-tinged German. Nobody suspected her Georgian origins.
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