Nijinsky

It was there that on the stage of a theatre for me undistinguishable-through a mass of unimportant plasterwork-from an esplanade of the forest, I saw for the first and last time, Nijinsky. We had already reached the third year of the war; he himself had just escaped from a concentration camp, and for me, the acute accents of the little orchestra which under Ansermet's baton was addressing the backcloth through the curtain wave mingled simultaneously on that strange Antarctic shore, with the noise of the! ocean flinging its prodigious fireworks against the breakwater of Beira Mar, and that of the ever present cannonade over there. l was like someone who is about to enter a ballroom from the outside, throws his cigar one way, and casts a final glance the other way towards the horizon where a dreadful moon is spreading its blaze behind a curtain of poisoned vapours. The storm had thrown up between Capocabana and the Sugarloaf the gaily-painted vessel of the Russian Ballets, and I was invited to take my ticket like those one-time emigrants going to applaud some exile from the Royal Opera on a chance stage of Coblenz or Spa. ...Nijinsky appeared. Romola Nijinsky