Russian Winter (28 page)

“Men today,” she says. “They have no manners. No one holds the door for a lady. No one helps you with your coat.” Shaking her head so that the big natty bun moves back and forth, the tortoiseshell comb flashing its tiny embedded diamonds. She doesn’t seem to notice Nina. “A country of boors. No wonder my heart has stopped beating.”

Vera looks thinner and paler than usual. When Nina tells her hello, she looks up, but Madame hasn’t heard. “As for that woman, she can’t hold a candle to you, I’m sure. Here, dearest, have some more tea.”

Even Viktor’s mother, then, can’t help but be attracted to Vera.

A loud, desperate squawking issues from Madame’s room. And then, as if the bird understands what she is saying: “
S’il vous-plaît!
” Lola, angry at being left there in her cage.

Only then does it occur to Nina that Viktor might not want Vera to witness this—Madame in her ancient dress, flaunting her patrician past. Vera, though, sitting so still, doesn’t seem to even notice. Her eyelashes flutter when she wipes a few tears from her cheeks.

“I know how you feel,” Madame says, her voice suddenly soft. “I know how it is to lose the one you love. I lost my husband. I had everything taken from me.”

Vera looks so frail, those narrow shoulders, the sad slant of her neck…. Nina goes to her and embraces her, tells her, “It’s going to be all right.” But now Madame, too, appears to be crying. “He gave me these,” she says with a sniffle, gesturing to her neck at the short strand of plump pearls she always wears. “They came all the way from Japan. Sea pearls, from oysters.” She lifts them from her neck, and Nina can see that the string is rotting. Already a few of the pearls have shifted.

“They should be restrung,” Nina says. “I can find someone—”

“I will not remove them. Pearls must be worn, or they lose their color.” Proud jut of her chin. “I never take these off.”

Nina says, “It’s just that it looks like you might lose some pearls—see?” She reaches out to where the string is visibly deteriorated, but Madame flings up her arms.

“You are NOT to touch my hair.”

In the bedroom, Lola squawks. “
S’il vous-plaît!
”

Nina pulls her hand back, looking to Vera for support, but she has shed more tears and is wiping at them desperately. The quick, small movements of long, smooth white hands. Petersburg affects, Grandmother would have said: little flurried gestures, a prideful tilt of the head. Madame, looking past Nina, tilts her head at Vera, narrows her eyes as if suddenly recognizing something. She lifts her lorgnette
and squints into it. “You look like Sonia.” New tears emerge from her eyes. “Her very coloring. Here, have some more tea.”

During the following weeks, Vera often accompanies Nina back home from rehearsal or after performances, to wait for a message from Viktor. Though her Achilles is improved, Vera has been dancing less than usual, until her injury has fully healed. The rest of her time (apart from sleeping, at Mother’s apartment) is spent here at Nina’s, since Viktor’s messages from Gersh are often impromptu; Vera never knows when Gersh might find himself suddenly free of Zoya, and summon her. At the table with Madame, she plays cards and sips tea, while Madame reminisces, or counts the silverware, or bosses slow, weary Darya, or declares herself without a pulse. Vera seems not to find this anything more than slightly odd, but Nina can’t help being aware that now there is one more person who knows about Viktor’s lineage.

“Zoya’s supposed to be leaving for Katovo this evening, for a show tomorrow,” Vera explains one afternoon when Nina has arrived home to find her there at the table with Madame and squawking Lola. Darya is in the kitchen down the hall, angling for a stove on which to prepare their supper. “Viktor will tell me when it’s safe to go over there.”

Nina wonders if Vera might perhaps, somehow, come to enjoy her new status as the “other woman.”

Lola is poking at something propped on the table. Stepping closer, Nina sees that it is a framed photograph: two young women, with a young man in between them. “I’ve never seen that.”

Madame looks annoyed to have to share it with Nina, too. “Here I am,” she says, “with my sister and brother.” As she says it, her face changes, softens. The young man, looking older than his sisters, is tall and slender and wears some kind of uniform. The girl to his left is equally slender, with dark, almond-shaped eyes that look away slightly, while the girl to his right gazes straight ahead at the
camera, with what looks to be the beginning of a smile. Looking more closely, Nina realizes that this girl is Madame. But how does that happen, she wants to ask, as childish as it sounds; how does a girl like that, with bright smiling eyes, turn into this other person?

Madame is pointing at the other girl. “Sonia,” she says, and her voice sounds different, almost an echo.

“She’s very beautiful,” Nina says. As if to show agreement, Lola pecks at the glass, and then at the shiny frame.

“Yes, she was, as well as talented. We’re a good family. Strong bloodlines—lucky for
you
. Your children will have that, at least.”

At first she thought it was her imagination, but now Nina acknowledges the truth: Madame’s insults have become worse. Ever since meeting Vera.

Pretending not to notice, Nina says, “Your brother was quite handsome.”

Madame nods, and her eyelids droop as if to prevent unwanted visions. “Now you’ve met my family.” Her voice is soft. “Killed. Replaced by boors. The Armenians next door…”

Vera reaches over to pat Madame’s hand, as Madame so often does for her. Feeling suddenly in the way, Nina goes to lie down on the bed.

“Viktor’s been at the office since early this morning,” Vera says, as if aware of Nina’s feelings, trying to include her. “The office” is that of the magazine where Viktor is the poetry editor.

“They work him so hard,” Madame says, and sighs loudly. “At least they’re sending him to France next month. All my dresses were made there.” She nods toward Nina. “It’s a shame he won’t be taking you along.”

Nina pretends to ignore this, though really these trips, to places she has never been, pain her. It isn’t just the separation; she hates not being able to picture, in her mind’s eye, just where Viktor is. At least when he travels to places like Peredelkino, or the cities where Nina
herself has toured, she can, in the moments when she most misses him, imagine him there.

That night, when Viktor arrives home and Vera, with visible relief, has gone around the corner to Gersh’s, a funny thought comes to Nina. She says it aloud, an hour or so later, when Madame has gone back to her room and shut the plywood door. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think she’d been sent to spy on us.”

Viktor laughs, setting his clothes neatly aside, readying himself for bed. “Quite a mole she’d make!” Then comes a long sigh. “I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I were her.” He slides under the covers, gives a dramatic shiver. “If you’d done that to me, Nina. Gone off with some other man instead of me.”

Nina raises her eyebrows. “You know perfectly well the worry was the other way around.” Though she trusts Viktor’s love for her, at times it takes all of her strength not to wonder—about whom he meets, whom he sees, during the long days that he is not with her, and what he does on the nights that she is dancing. After all, Nina knows how attractive he is to other women, and the extent to which he is fueled by that attraction. As she joins him in bed, pulling herself quickly under the covers, she puts her feet on his shins, trying to keep warm.

“I’m sleeping with an icicle,” he says, with mock surprise, and Nina wants to say something funny back, but she is too tired, and then she can’t help it, she is already tumbling into sleep.

F
or a few years, first in Norway and then in France, Grigori’s imagination found much inspiration in that shiny vinyl pocketbook. Youthful fantasies about who his birth parents might have been turned his father into a sort of Robin Hood and the ballerina a secret partner in his do-good crimes—but then Grigori entered the lycée and his fantasies were of the redheaded girl in the schoolyard, his energies focused on his studies, careful
explications de texte
written laboriously on regulation graph paper, his penmanship compact with concentration. His main goal was simply to blend in, to find his own clutch of friends to smoke with after class, to swap LPs and sneak into the cinema with. He answered to “Grigoire” and, mimicking his classmates, wore a knit pullover tied casually over his shoulders. And then, just when it seemed he had mastered that persona, his parents announced the move to the United States.

There he became skilled at yet another language, dove back into his studies, focused on where he might be offered a scholarship to college. When it came to musing about his birth parents, such flights of imagination stopped altogether. There were more important activities: Grigori learned to drive a car, made weekend trips to New York City, and, most incredibly, found himself with a girlfriend, a perky brunette also on the chess team. He graduated from high school,
went to college. Then, during his second year at the university, he was suddenly called back to Tenafly. His father had had a stroke, to which he would ultimately, two years later, succumb. At home with his mother, having made daily visits to Feodor immobile in a hospital bed, Grigori retreated to the bedroom where he had spent only two years, his heart now charged with a pain he had not known before. It was too awful, seeing them like this, his father incapacitated, and his mother suddenly so much older. Without consciously considering what he was doing, Grigori went to the closet where he had, after first arriving here from Paris, stashed the old vinyl purse.

He took it out, opened it, removed the contents, and laid them out on his bed, like a museum display, or a surgeon’s tools. He looked at them, wondering about the hands that had once touched them. But his old curiosity was no longer there. He did not reread the letters (which he basically knew by heart), though he looked again, somewhat passively, at the people in the two photographs. Then he sat down on the bed—and felt something jut into his hamstring. He stood up to see that he had taken a seat on top of a corner of the pocketbook. He wondered what could have poked him. His hands on the outside of the bag, he felt along the vinyl until he came to a small bulge, then put his hand inside to see what was there. The interior of the bag was lined in a satin-like material—but now Grigori noted a rip at the top of that side, just under the seam of the vinyl. The tear was small; he had to turn the bag upside down and worry the object out like a mole through a tunnel. And there it was, a gold chain and, hanging from it, framed in matching gold braid, a big wedge of amber.

A sign. A secret message. As though the necklace had been hiding there. It had waited for just the right time—when the only father Grigori had ever known had unknowingly abandoned him, when there was only this other story to continue. The amber possessed its own secret. Inside was a spider paralyzed in mid-action, with
something else, a large pale bulge—like a parachute, or a balloon—attached below it. Grigori stared at it for a long while, wondering.

He decided, without any real deliberation, not to tell his mother. She was still lost in her own profound grief; it could only hurt her to see Grigori focused on these other parents. And anyway, what was she to make of the necklace? Only that it must have cost quite a bit of money. Perhaps the ballerina who died was
someone
—someone famous, wealthy. Or perhaps the necklace was the only expensive thing she had owned. Quickly, with disappointment, Grigori realized that, as much as it felt like a sign, the necklace really could not tell him much at all.

Back at the university that same year, another sign, even more meaningful in its randomness, confronted him.

In the campus library, reading a book called
Socialist Realism and the Russian Writer
, Grigori came across a photograph. “Plenum of the Writers Union, 1949” was the heading. Rows of men facing the camera, looking very serious in their dark suits. In the front row, so that his features were very clear, was the man from the photographs—Grigori’s photographs, his mother’s photographs, from the vinyl pocketbook.

Grigori’s heart gave a kick, then began pounding wildly. He brought the page close to his eyes, more certain with every passing second that it was the same man. But who was this man? Grigori began flipping through the book, nearly recklessly, pausing at every photograph in case the man should appear again. Just when he was certain that he would have no such luck, he found him. This time the man stood with two others. According to the photograph, they were editors and writers at the
Literaturnaya gazeta
, their names listed below. Grigori quickly wrote out the one of the man at the right, the tall one with the almond-shaped eyes. Viktor Elsin. The name was vaguely familiar; Grigori seemed to have heard it before. Only later did he realize where he had seen it, in two of the poetry anthologies
he had perused for a paper the previous semester. For now, he did what research he could, spent hours in the dark basement of the library snapping cartridge after cartridge into a microfiche machine, sliding the flat tips of roll after roll of shiny brown film through the wheel, so that the illuminated screen filled with decades-old newspaper and magazine articles. There he learned what little he could of Viktor Elsin’s fate, as well as surprising information he could not have even hoped for, would not have dared dream up on his own: that Elsin had been married to the ballerina Nina Revskaya, who—he discovered after more frenzied searching of microfilm—currently resided in Boston, Massachusetts.

“S
HE’S REARRANGED THE
furniture,” Vera reports, a few weeks after Gersh’s marriage to Zoya. Vera, Nina, and Polina are with a small Bolshoi group in Berlin, Nina’s first time in this ruined city, streets not yet rebuilt, darkened buildings and bombed-out plazas still piled with rubble. At their hotel (an underheated structure on an oddly empty boulevard) the three of them are finishing an afternoon meal. Not in the dining room—no money for that. Even with her promotion Nina has only a meager travel salary. Like the others she has stuffed her suitcase with food from home, biscuits and canned beans and sauerkraut, a few hard dry sausages. Anything to save a few kopecks. In Vera and Polina’s room, she has warmed the beans on a portable burner, so that the place smells like a campsite. And though her own room, shared with the other young
premiere
danseuse, is larger and on a quieter floor, for a moment, eating the beans and biscuits here with Vera and Polina, it feels like the old days (only less than a year ago, really) when they were all three of them eager first soloists, sharing the stark little dressing room.

“Zoya’s clothes all lined up on a rack,” Vera continues, calmly, almost passively. “The apartment is basically
hers
now. Oh, and did
you know she collects recordings of Stalin’s speeches? Apparently she’s been playing them over and over on Gersh’s phonograph.”

Nina laughs. “I suppose that’s his punishment.”

“I don’t know how you can forgive him,” Polina says. Something really is wrong with her skin; though the welts are gone, there are small dark patches on her cheekbones. Not bruises, exactly, more like hives, but a gray-black color instead of red.

“It’s because I feel sorry for him,” Vera says. “It’s clear Zoya has had her eye on his apartment from the start. She’s just using him, so that she doesn’t have to live with her family anymore.”

So that’s what Vera has decided to tell herself, or what Gersh has convinced her—and perhaps himself—to believe. Well, probably it is one facet of the truth. As Nina contemplates this, Polina looks at the clock and says, “We should get going.” This afternoon is their one chance to sightsee; in other words, to shop. Though they are confined to the Soviet sector, there is a good chance that with the American, French, and British sectors so close they might find goods unavailable back home. “I’ll go check in with Arvo”—the Komsomol representative traveling with the troupe. They are supposed to keep him informed of their every coming and going.

“Oh, let him figure it out,” Nina says. After all, chances are that one of the small contingent of East German chaperones, whom they met at the welcoming dinner yesterday and who seem always to be hovering about, will be waiting for them in the lobby.

But no one is there when they hand their keys to the sharp-faced sentrywoman stationed at the elevator, nor when they leave the building and step out into the cloudy gray day. Vera simply shrugs her shoulders, and Polina seems to relax, as they make their way along the run-down streets. Nina notices the way people look at them as they walk by, wonders if it is their clothes that make them stand out, though their clothes aren’t all that different, really. But no, it isn’t their clothes, nor is it their being Russians; it is that they are so
clearly
dancers
, with their poised, open-stance ballerina walk, and their hair pulled into high chignons. Polina especially has the exaggerated, ducklike stride of a dancer, when really there is no reason to walk that way—except that that walk, too, is part of Polina’s very identity. It occurs to Nina that each of them has a signature gait: Polina’s is self-conscious and somewhat forced, her turnout coming from the ankle rather than the hips, while Vera is blessed with natural turnout, her steps easy and light on high-arched feet. Nina knows she too has her physical quirks—the long neck and proudly held head and relaxed yet perfectly erect posture, shoulder blades pulled back instinctively so that her spine forms a strong vertical line. Quite a contrast to the marketgoers shuffling around them, hunched forward as if to burrow their way through their errands, or to duck from the cold.

With little difficulty, the three of them find the stage apparel shop they have been told of. What they most want are nylon tights, which won’t sag at the knees like the silk ones from home. But this shop is sold out. After they have stocked up on grease sticks and face powder, the shop’s owner writes down another address where they can find what they want, he explains with a shrewd look, eyes narrowed, pointing out the U-Bahn stop and describing, through gestures and broken Russian and little knowing nods, how to get there.

They board the subway feeling adventurous, the car so crowded they have to stand. Two stops later, though, nearly everyone in the car shuffles off. Nina looks out at the sign on the wall of the tunnel, big black letters with the name of the subway stop. Below, something longer is written, the words too long and foreign for Nina to make sense of. “Why do you think so many people are getting off?” Polina asks nervously—and the door slides shut.

Only as the car lurches forward again does Nina allow what the reason might be. Her heart speeds at the thought; she doesn’t dare
speak. The next stop is the one the shop owner told them, and they are there soon enough. With Vera and Polina, Nina steps out to the platform.

They emerge from the subway to a bustling street, oddly bright though the sky is as gray and cold as before. Shop windows glow with neon signs, and above them, big and clean, are billboards such as Nina has never seen, colorful and spotlit even though it is daytime. People everywhere; even their coats and hats look brighter, somehow. “That’s why everyone had to get off.” Nina says it even though it is clear from Polina’s and Vera’s faces that they too understand.

“We’re not supposed to be here,” Polina says.

“We didn’t know,” Vera whispers, eyes wide as she takes in the scene before them, the people walking at an easy clip, unworried, and the buildings that, while still somewhat derelict, are cleaner and free of rubble, with lights illuminating their windows.

“Well, we’re here now, we might as well find what we came for.” Nina tries to sound confident, though in her mind she hears the repeated warnings of Arvo and their East German hosts, that they are not to leave the democratic sector, that evil Western capitalists might kidnap them at any turn. In a voice of forced calm, Nina reads out the shop address while Vera searches the map. “It’s this way,” Vera says, finding the street sign. Nina and Polina follow her. At the corner, though, they come to a stop.

In front of them is a vegetable kiosk. And there, heaped at the end, like something out of a fairy tale, is a stack of bright yellow bananas.

Polina and Vera too stare, as Nina allows herself to fully take in the scene around her, people walking calmly without the least sign of wonderment at the bright shop windows, the billboards, the bananas. Their easy chatter and relaxed faces, the quick, optimistic clicks of shoes on the sidewalk…

“We’re just following directions,” Polina says defensively, turning away from the bananas. Nina fights the urge she has—to spend her
money not on tights but on this gorgeous, exotic fruit. But Vera is pointing at a narrow side street. “That’s it. We might as well go in.” After all, they simply want to buy dance supplies.

The address the shop owner has written down is a tiny place, something of a junk shop, no sign out front. Inside are all kinds of wigs and tights and costume materials and fabrics they never see back home. Not just costume jewelry but also real jewels and perfumes and coffee beans and English cigarettes. The owner is an older woman with her hair in a very long gray braid. No one else is with her. Nina and the others lose themselves for a long while, calculating dreamily, deciding what to splurge on. Nina purchases fabric for her mother, cigarettes for Viktor, and tights for herself, while Vera and Polina continue sorting through the fabric. When the woman hands over Nina’s change, she presses something into her hand.

“In case you need it.” The woman’s voice is so soft, her German-accented Russian so quiet, Nina might have dreamed it. But the woman’s hand is adamant, insistent in its pressure, forcing something into Nina’s palm. A little slip of paper. Nina is so taken aback she doesn’t dare look at it. She just nods thank you and slips the tiny note, with the money, into her pocket.