Chapter 1: A Vagabond Soul Early one morning when six-year-old Rosa Kolesnikova woke up, she remembered first of all that she was on the train, and then she noticed the three Nureyev girls sitting on the bunk opposite. The toddler was whimpering, and her eight-year-old sister was trying to comfort her. She saw to her annoyance that her friend Lilia, who was also six, had taken her toy and was clutching it. Their mother was nowhere to be seen. Something was going on. In the corridor people were rushing back and forth talking excitedly, but no one would say what was happening. Later she noticed that next door there were sheets curtaining off the Nureyev compartment and doctors in white coats were going in and out.Tyotya-Farida must be ill.

Throughout the morning, making some excuse, she and the other children walked by to see if they could peek through a crack in the screen of sheets, but her mother would call them back and try to distract them. "Look, Lake Baikal! Lake Baikal! Isn't it beautiful?" she cried. It was a cold, clear morning, and the lake, a sunlit ocean of ice, seemed to merge with the far-off white mountain ridges of Khamar Daban. For most of the day the train traveled along the southwestern shore beneath sheer cliffs and steep woods, offering sudden dazzling views of Baikal as it threaded through the tunnels. With its legend of the vengeful Old Man Baikal, who hurled a huge rock at his runaway daughter, the lake was a wonder for children: Its size alone was breathtakingfour hundred miles long and one mile deep in the middle. By late afternoon, however, its fascination had worn off, and everyone was glad to get to the Mongolian city of Ulan-Ude, where the train stopped for several hours. Almost all the passengers went into town to shop in the trading arcades and the poplar-lined main street, Leninskaya Ulitsa. When they returned, one or two of the women came up to the children with a large box and told them to look inside.

There they saw a tiny baby swaddled tightly: "We bought him in Ulan-Ude," they said, laughing. "It's a little Tatar brother for the Nureyev girls!" Rosa found this hard to believe. It didn't make sense that a Tatar child would be for sale in a place full of people who looked so foreign, with their big foreheads and slanting eyes. Besides, before they arrived, she had heard the adults talking about a new baby on the train. Rosa had a six-month-old brother of her own, but even so she was full of envy of the Nureyev sisters and tremendously excited. "We were all in ecstasies, and in the carriage there was such jubilation! It was like a holiday, with everyone happy and wanting to share in the celebration." Word of the event spread quickly, and for the rest of the day people crowded into the carriage to see the new arrival: Rudolf Nureyev's first audience. His birth, he would later say, was the most romantic event of his life, symbolic of his future statelessness and nomadic existence.

It was to be a life lived mostly en route to places, navigated by what he called his "vagabond soul." To Rosa he was never Rudolf or even Rudik, its diminutive, butMalchik kotoriy rodilsay v poezdesaid in one breath as a name: The-boy-who-was-born-on-a-train. The order for the soldiers' families to leave had come suddenly. Almost full term in her pregnancy, Farida Nureyev knew she was taking a risk by traveling at this stage, but she had had no choice. For the last two months, Farida and Ekaterina, Rosa's mother, had regularly gone together to the authorities to find out when they were going to be permitted to join their husbands, who were serving in the Red Army's Far Eastern Division. One delay had followed another until at last, at the beginning of March 1938, the wives were.