Russian Winter (30 page)

“Do they even own a turntable?” Grigori asked petulantly.

“They’re for decoration,” Evelyn said, and pinched his arm. “Stop being a humbug.”

“But it’s my defining characteristic.” He filled a shot glass of the homemade liqueur and handed it to her.

“Ooo, yum, it’s good, Grigori, you should try it. Hello, Zoltan.”

“
Kezét csókolom
.” Zoltan had taken Evelyn’s hand and kissed it.

Grigori reached out and shook his hand. “I have to admit, Zoltan, I’m surprised to see you here.” Zoltan always made a point of saying he had no time for “the petty one-upmanship of academic banter.”

But now he said, “I decided I must, since it will be my last one.”

“What do you mean?” After what he had been through with Christine, Grigori could not help worrying; perhaps Zoltan too had received bad news from a physician.

“Ssh.” He pulled them away from the drinks table and whispered, “This is my last year on the faculty. As chair of the department, you are now officially the first to be informed. But please don’t tell the others yet. I’d hate for anyone to think they have to do anything, you know, a big party or ceremony or what have you. I’d like to avoid any commemorations.”

A doubt entered Grigori’s mind, that his colleagues, or the university administration, could be quite so generous. He would have to come up with some appropriate way to show their gratitude. Zoltan added, “Believe me, it’s better this way. Just slip off quietly into the night.”

“But where will you go?” Evelyn asked, and Grigori understood what she meant—that the academy, with its steadfast faith in intellectualism and its own arcane scholarship, was the only place for a man like Zoltan, whose artistic devotion was rarely so passionately embraced in the quotidian world. After all, universities themselves were museums of a sort, places where people like Zoltan, and others who did not quite fit in, could comfortably ensconce themselves for decades—entire lives, even—worrying away at whatever esoteric subject they chose, until their hair had receded and the last of their youth disappeared.

“I plan to return home,” Zoltan said.

“Home?” Evelyn asked, but Grigori knew what that must mean.

“Hungary,” Zoltan said. “A cottage on Lake Balaton awaits me.”

Grigori asked, “How long have you been planning this?” and, hearing a hurt tone in his voice, added, “It will be bleak without you here.” He meant it. Who else was there to argue about Mahler with, to compare translations of Baudelaire, to commiserate over the sorry state of the fiction in the
New Yorker
? Zoltan could become red-faced over a doltish
Times
book review, it didn’t matter whose book or what subject. He would telephone Grigori when a particular recording of Schumann was being broadcast, and showed deep affront if a student claimed never to have heard of Diaghilev or Brodsky or Vanessa Bell. “I’ll miss you,” said Grigori.

“Me too,” Evelyn said obligingly.

“You will, and then after a while you won’t.” Zoltan poured himself a Scotch with shaky hands. “As for me, it’s time to go home.”

“I didn’t even realize you had planned to go back.”

“I hadn’t. But when I started looking back at my journals, it’s funny, it jogged something in my mind. I began to remember things. I’d put so much out of my mind. This Christmas, I was on the T, seeing people’s decorated trees through the windows, and I thought for the first time in decades—decades!—of a bonbon we used to have, wrapped in crinkly paper. We decorated the Christmas trees with it. And for a full day I couldn’t remember the name. That was when I knew it was time to go home.”

Grigori nodded. He knew that feeling, that urge—and yet what was home, now, for Grigori? He had been asking himself this since Christine’s death. Lately he had even considered moving—not leaving Boston but finding a smaller place, perhaps a condo somewhere.

“What’s the word?” Evelyn was asking. “For the Christmas candy.”

“
Szaloncukor!
” Grigori glimpsed the glee of a child in Zoltan’s eyes. “I think it will be an amazing thing to go back to a place I once had to run from. That now I can say what I want, without any worry for my safety. Or perhaps it won’t feel that way; perhaps it will be a reminder. Living here, one forgets what it was like. Not just for me. For any intellectual. Always some mortal threat or other. Always watching your back. Simply for being who you were—appreciating what you appreciated, understanding certain things.”

It
was
amazing, what Zoltan, in his perhaps small, perhaps quiet way, had accomplished, even if he was but a footnote to the list of triumphs of art in the face of authoritarianism. And buoying to consider that as Zoltan’s literary executor Grigori might too be part of that chain of hands, if only he could secure a translator and publisher for Zoltan’s later work. It would be a long project, that was certain—but then, what was life, really, without such challenges?

“Though this country has been my home for a good while,” Zoltan said, “it’s a different kind of home. I’m not sure I ever quite belonged. I was reading my journal this morning—I don’t know, Evelyn, if Grigori has mentioned that I’m writing a memoir. I was
looking back at entries from when I first arrived in America, and it was so curious to see what I’d noticed back then that I no longer notice at all. I’d been in London quite a while by then, and didn’t realize how differently the United States would strike me. But from the minute I stepped off the plane, the difference was visible.”

“How so?” Evelyn asked.

“Oh, everyone rushing about, gesturing to each other, the physicality of it. Here everyone is always in a hurry.”

“No one in England was ever in a hurry?”

“They don’t show their emotions the way people here do. Americans don’t hold back. They swear and curse and slap each other on the back. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it before.”

Grigori was nodding, recalling that sensation of newness. “For me it was the houses. I’ll never forget first time I saw a suburban American house. I couldn’t believe how big it was. And that there were extra rooms that people didn’t even use. ‘Guest’ rooms.” He shook his head and laughed.

Zoltan nodded. “This country has been good to me. But it doesn’t hold the indentation of my body on the mattress, if you see what I mean.”

“Yes, well, nor does it mine, I’m sure,” Grigori said.

Evelyn said, “You egotists,” and laughed.

“Egotist!” said Zoltan. “I’ve been in the splendid company of one all week, actually. I’m reading Berlioz’s memoirs. Talk about an ego.”

He began to describe the book, but Evelyn said, “I hate to be rude, but my feet are freezing. You two continue. I need to get over to where the carpet is.”

Grigori could see, now, that she was shivering. “You poor thing,” Zoltan told her. “Do go warm up.”

Watching Evelyn make her way toward the fireplace, Grigori felt again his own self-reproach; he ought to accompany her. She looked
diminished without her sleek boots. He blamed himself as much as he did Roger and Hoahn. How must it feel, to have a person agree as easily and willingly as Grigori had to “take things slow”? Well, he was simply trying to be careful and not rush things.

Natalie Gluck, one of the sociology professors, had come up to the drinks table, and now Zoltan was telling them about Berlioz’s early fitful love affairs, until Grigori was no longer following. He was thinking, he realized, of Drew Brooks. She had called him yesterday. Grigori was sorry to have gotten the message too late, after business hours. A warm chattiness to her voice on the recording: she had meant to call earlier, she said, but this week had been so busy; she had gone on vacation and was still catching up…. Grigori liked her self-assured manner, her energy and poise. He liked the very fact that Drew used the telephone instead of e-mail, that she was not afraid, like so many younger people, to encounter a human voice at the other end of an appeal. “I’ve been reading your translations,” she had said in her message, sounding truly interested. “I’d love to discuss them with you.”

Relief washed through him. After two weeks of hearing nothing from her, he had begun to wonder if by lending her the book he had saddled her with another task; perhaps she felt she could not speak to Grigori until she had read it. Or she had tried to read the poems but was uninterested. Or even disliked them.

But she had devoted a good deal of the past month to Nina Revskaya’s life and treasures. It made sense that she might be drawn to Elsin’s poems. Grigori wondered, now, nodding along to his colleagues’ conversation, how she might react if he simply told her the truth: about the necklace, about the poems and letters and photographs in that vinyl purse. Just give them all over to her, for the catalog or pamphlet or whatever that thing was that she was working so hard on producing. She had read the poems, after all. Perhaps she would be intrigued to see how the poems and letters matched up.

No, no…But, then, why not? He could go there, show them to her. Though why should she care? No one did…. And yet—the thought came to him now—perhaps she might.

Grigori’s colleague Bill Muir had approached him, was talking to him, the usual chitchat, shaking his head at the president’s latest ultimatum. “They’ve supposedly started dismantling their missiles,” Grigori said hopefully, if mainly out of some grudging need to contradict Bill. “Maybe Hussein will follow through after all.”

“Right. And the Sox will win the World Series.” Bill Muir shook his head again, and made some typical, tiresome comment about the president, how there was just one more year of this madness and then they could be rid of him. Grigori was able to commiserate politely, heard himself speaking, heard Bill answering—and yet he was aware of not being here, really, not with his soul. He had no interest, he had lost heart, could not commune with these people, his own colleagues. When had it happened? When Christine died, or just now? He had been here too long, perhaps, in this department, teaching the same subjects, attending the same conferences, presenting paper after paper on Viktor Elsin and his cohort. Only now it seemed meaningless, all of it meaningless, these colleagues around him whom he at times thought of as friends—but now he simply did not care.

Bill must have noticed; he excused himself and wandered away, while Natalie and Zoltan discussed bullfighting, and Billie Holiday, and then Mallarmé and Verlaine. Grigori listened without joining in. I ought to engage more, he told himself. I ought to go chat with Evelyn.

She stood not far from him, conversing with the new sociology professor, Adam somebody, athletic-looking and fair like Evelyn. There was a hole in her stocking where her toe had poked through. Even from here Grigori could see the toenail, painted a dark shiny purple color, like a bruise. And though Evelyn appeared to be enjoying
the conversation, she held her arms across her midriff, hands over elbows, as if to comfort herself. Grigori felt a surge of tenderness for her. There were different ways to love a person, he told himself; there were different kinds of love. With a fresh drink in hand, he turned to make his way toward her.

M
ARCH
8,
A
holiday, though still a workday. Usually men give flowers, but Viktor has given Nina a tiny gold watch, the most delicately functional object she has ever seen. Swiss, bought on his visit to France. The band is a gold chain slinky as a water snake, the face of the timepiece a tiny shining thing Nina has to squint at to read. Its near inutility is the very embodiment of luxury.

Having removed the watch for rehearsal, she is now placing it back on her wrist, trying to catch the clasp at the end.

“There you are.” Breathless, Vera, already in her street clothes, has found Nina in her dressing room. “It’s Gersh. He had a call this morning—from Stalin’s secretary.” She pauses, as if unable to believe it. “Telling him to come to the Kremlin.”

Nina feels her eyes open wide. “What about?”

Vera just shakes her head. “It can’t be good news.” And with desperation, “Can it?”

“What time was the meeting? Has it happened yet?”

“This afternoon sometime. But I can’t go over there to wait for him, because Zoya might be home.”

“I’ll tell Viktor. If nothing else, he and I can be there when Gersh gets back. And I’ll tell you anything I find out, as soon as I can. I promise.”

And so Nina and Viktor are in Gersh’s apartment with Zoya that evening when Gersh returns from the Kremlin, his face tired but only somewhat drawn. Zoya, who has been pacing anxiously for hours,
rushes to him. “What happened, what did they say? Did you meet him? Did you speak to him?” Her tone changes on the word “him,” reverent, eager.

“Just his secretary. But it wasn’t a conversation, really. He simply read a decree to me.”

“What decree?”

“Nothing new, really, same as always.” Gersh looks suddenly exhausted. “But then he handed me this.” He holds out a typed page.

Zoya quickly takes it from him, and Nina and Viktor read over her shoulder. It is a memorandum, from the deputy chairman of the Committee on the Arts. “Under the aegis of the Council of Ministers of the USSR,” Gersh has been expelled from the Composers’ Union.

Zoya’s curls quiver as she shakes her head. “It’s because of what you said about bel canto. That must be it.” To Nina and Viktor she explains, “He can’t help it—you know how he loves Rossini and all that.” Her voice is sad yet matter-of-fact. In a harsher, brisk tone directed at Gersh, she says, “I told you to get rid of those Donizetti records.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

But Zoya doesn’t look angry so much as galvanized. “It’s a misunderstanding. Don’t worry, it will just take some turning around.”

Amazing, that nothing seems to frighten her, that she never becomes disheartened. She rarely appears the least bit confused by the things happening around her. Nina, on the other hand, has felt puzzled by so many things recently. Not only this latest harsh treatment of Gersh. As much as Nina used to think she knew whom she could trust, lately it seems impossible to ever really truly know what other people are up to. What Polina told them, in Berlin last month, about being asked to inform…And the note
from that woman in the junk shop. Was Nina supposed to pass the information along to Polina and Vera? Or was Nina singled out for some reason—because of how she looked, like a person who might need or want that information? Did her eyes say that? Did she look needy, or wise? For the hundredth time she wonders if Vera and Polina each received a little slip of paper, too. In the end Nina just rolled hers into a tiny pill and shoved it into the corner of one of the compartments of her makeup case, too scared to show anyone, especially after learning about Polina.