Russian Winter (36 page)

Then Drew realized something: she recognized someone else now. One of the “unidentified dancers,” a skinny girl with a long neck. Drew looked carefully at the on-screen image and then back at the other black-and-white photograph from Grigori, the one in front of the dacha. Yes, this was her, the girl whom Nina Revskaya had called a “friend.” They too must have become friends through the Bolshoi—although this skinny girl must not have gone on to have the same success as these other two.

The thought occurred to Drew that she could ask Nina Revskaya
her friend’s name. Then maybe Drew could figure out a way to e-mail the people who had archived these photographs, and let them know who this girl was. That way she would no longer be an “unidentified dancer.” The thought was almost enough for Drew to telephone Nina Revskaya. But she didn’t dare, not after the other day, how quickly Drew had upset her. Besides, there was too much else to do. And anyway, in the end, whether or not anyone would know this girl’s name probably didn’t really matter.

N
INA SETTLES BACK
in her old apartment, where she cares for Mother as best she can, even while she too is recovering—from the surgery that has taken care of her own condition. It was best to have the procedure done before Viktor’s return, to rest up in her (now Vera’s) old iron cot.

She has hired Darya to come by each day after she leaves Madame’s, to help with the cooking and cleaning. Mother looks much thinner, older, in her skirt of faded flowers. Her body worn out, her smile black where her teeth used to be. Those once-proud shoulders now hunched, from so many treks from shop to shop, from waiting in lines and in offices and her seat at the Bolshoi…A mother’s life, one long errand. One enormous chore. Like those worker girls Nina sees along the roads, and loaded up onto trucks at the end of the day, atop sacks of cement, to be driven home like so many planks or logs or metal beams…

Nina remains there until the end of August, when Viktor returns and helps her move Mother to their apartment, into their bed. He and Nina will sleep on a mattress on the floor. Mother has already become much more feeble and soon lies in bed all day. At times she barely seems to take in her surroundings or note what is happening around her. “Is it catching?” Madame asks when she emerges—for meals only, now—from her room, sniffing the air for microbes.
Never has she deigned to say good day to Mother. Darya too seems intent on ignoring her. Though Nina has continued to pay her extra, Darya refuses to do any more than her usual cooking and cleaning here in Madame’s household. It takes over a week for Nina to figure out why: Madame has instructed Darya not to.

Her rage boils up all over again—but she is tired of fighting, tired of her own constant, simmering anger. It is all so petty, yet so all-consuming. She still hasn’t spoken to Vera, has no energy or urge to reconcile. And yet when Viktor describes their days at the dacha, he seems completely unaware that the two of them have quarreled. Vera must not have said anything about what happened.

“Fortunate in a way that you didn’t stay. You would have had to put up with that Serge character.”

“He came back?”

“Twice. I don’t like him.” Jealousy in his voice. Only now does it occur to Nina that she perhaps did something unwise, leaving Vera and Viktor there together. After all, as devoted as Viktor might be, it seems no one is inured to Vera’s allure.

“Where has she gone to?” Madame asks one day in September, when she has emerged from her room to eat some of the watery soup that Darya has cooked. “That beautiful Vera. It’s ages since I’ve seen her.”

Nina’s own mother, too, misses Vera, and has more than once asked when she will visit. “She’s busy these days,” Nina says as an excuse, aware that, other than looking after Mother’s apartment, and Viktor’s solicitous checking in on her, really Nina has no idea, anymore, of what Vera is up to.

T
HEN ONE NIGHT
Viktor does not come home.

Nina lies awake very late. Has it happened to him too…because of Gersh…Has something horrible happened?

When she dares to wake her mother-in-law, to ask if she knows where he has gone, Madame scolds Nina, loudly and angrily, for disturbing her sleep. She doesn’t seem worried that her son has not returned.

It is nearly four in the morning when Nina hears his key in the door, his footsteps entering the darkened room. She has to stop herself from shouting. “Where were you? What happened? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Look at you, you’ve gone pale. What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? You don’t come home until four, don’t tell me where you’ve gone. I thought you’d been—I didn’t know what to think.”

“I told my mother, didn’t she tell you?” And then, “I took Vera to visit Gersh.”

Of course Madame didn’t tell her. Nina bursts into tears, too exhausted, too shaken, to be fully angry. Viktor puts his arms around her, whispers, holds her, it’s all right.

When she has managed to stop crying, she rubs her face against his chest, wiping her tears on his shirt. She hates the sound of her own sniffling. But now that she has calmed down, she is able to think more clearly. “You took Vera?” Softly, so as not to wake Mother. “I thought they only accepted family visitors.”

“Yes, well, they’re open to persuasion.”

Nina raises her eyebrows, as Viktor adds, “It seems there are ways to finagle a visit.”

He steps back, sits tiredly in one of the wooden chairs. Did he bribe someone, or forge something? Again Nina tenses, at the thought that he has put himself in danger. If only she could stop being furious at him. “Is Gersh all right? How is he?”

“According to Vera, not terrible.”

“You didn’t see him?”

Viktor shakes his head. “Vera was the only one allowed in. As ‘family.’”

“Family.” Nina considers what this could mean, and drops wearily into the chair next to Viktor. Perhaps Vera’s putting up with that horrible Serge has paid off. “I still don’t see how she managed it. What about Zoya?”

“It seems now that they’ve gotten a new director, Zoya has stopped showing up.”

Nina raises her eyebrows. So, it’s true, then, what she and Viktor suspected: that it was the previous director, and not Gersh, whom Zoya was so keen on seeing. “Just when I’d convinced myself she really loved him.”

“Maybe she did.” Viktor shrugs his shoulders in a way that annoys her. How can Zoya be so fickle? How can a person’s love just skip from one person to another? When Viktor puts his arm around her, Nina lays her head against his, searching for comfort. If only she could stop feeling angry with him. If only she could relax, and believe that everything is all right, that Viktor hasn’t compromised himself by helping in Vera’s ploy.

Only after they are in bed, her head on his shoulder, does Nina ask, not sure if she really wants to know, “What was it like there?”

“I told you, I don’t know, I didn’t see.”

Viktor sounds annoyed, so that Nina too feels a surge of irritation. “Why did you go all the way there if you didn’t even see him?”

“To take Vera. I told you.” He pulls away, rolls onto his side.

Nina tells herself that this is better than arguing, better than erupting into a true fight. And yet she feels dissatisfied. Perhaps Vera is just an excuse. A ruse, a way for Viktor to go…where? To do what? Nina thinks back to when she first met him, shapely blond Lilya at his side, and to the pleasure he takes, even now, in women’s company. Of course a man with his success has admirers. Thoughts swirl in Nina’s mind so that she cannot sleep. Everyone is suspicious
to her now. As if the earth were no longer solid but some shifting thing, no foundation at all, nothing to stand on. Every day there are fewer people she can trust.

I
T WAS A
day or two after Drew Brooks’s visit that Cynthia, having put the soup on, came out from the kitchen and, instead of going back to her magazines or the auction catalog, took a seat across from Nina’s wheelchair. “I’ve been thinking about what you said to that young woman the other day. About your friend. You sounded like you wanted to talk about it.”

Honestly, this woman could not just simply cook a soup….

“Her life was hard. She suffered.”

Two days straight, now, of bad memories. All today Nina had tried to distract herself—put the Bach CD on again and flipped slowly through a book on Gauguin, a big coffee table album she had not bothered to look at for years, all kinds of wonderful pictures for her to focus on. The pain slid in all the same. “Sometimes I tell myself that her suffering was her punishment.”

Cynthia’s eyes opened wider. “She’d better have done something pretty horrible, then.”

Nina considered this, thought of her own body and how it had betrayed her. “I do think we receive what we deserve. Look at me: in this wheelchair.”

Again Cynthia made a surprised face. “I don’t care
what
you did, no one deserves to be stuck in that thing.”

This straightforward statement—instead of the typical voyeuristic pity—and the light singsong tinge of Cynthia’s island accent had a strange effect. Nina began to cry.

“Oh, sugar. Here.” Cynthia reached over and dabbed up some of the tears with a tissue.

To Nina’s surprise, the tears continued. Slowly she told Cynthia, “I did to her something heartless.”

“You only tell me if you want to. If it will make you feel better.”

If she could shake her head, or just let it drop dejectedly onto her chest, Nina would have. But the knot at the back of her neck was so tight now. No longer her grandmother’s lovingly tied scarf. These days it was a noose, a stranglehold. “Nothing will ever make it better. It is too late.”

Cynthia dabbed up more tears. “It’s never too late. My father always said, whenever you think there’s nothing you can do, you need to think again.”

“Please, Cynthia, do not try to kill me with your good nature.”

Cynthia laughed, and as if by magic, the knot at the back of Nina’s neck loosened, just the slightest bit. But she decided not to mention that to Cynthia, lest she continue to put forth her father’s platitudes.

E
VEN WHEN REHEARSALS
have begun again in late September, Nina and Vera do not speak; whenever they see each other at the Bolshoi, Vera turns away, looking bashful, almost guilty. Well, she ought to be. It still doesn’t make any sense to Nina, why Vera would have tried to keep Mother’s illness a secret from her. Yet it confirms that mystery that Nina first sensed about Vera, back when she first appeared in the little dressing room two years ago. Something enigmatic about her. What does she do with her free time, now that she has no secret visits to Gersh’s room, no card games with Madame? All alone in Nina’s old apartment, the entire room to herself…Apparently she visits Mother only when Nina isn’t home.

Nina finds herself avoiding Polina, too, speaking to her only when they happen to cross paths at the Bolshoi. The rash has returned, hives on her neck, and blackish marks on her cheekbones, so
that Nina assumes Polina is still being asked to report on people. But what information could she have? Nina cannot help feeling sorry for her, how thin and anxious she looks.

It is early October when Mother drifts away for good, Nina hovering above her, listening for a heartbeat or a breath. For a brief moment she again hears something, her mother is still here with her, but then Nina understands: it is her own heart she is hearing, the relentless thud of final understanding, that it really is over. Only later does it strike Nina that, unlike so many others, Mother has managed to die on her own, a natural death—from illness, not starvation or war or imprisonment or some other inhumanity.

At the funeral service, under a cloudless sky, in the small nearby cemetery, Nina and Vera barely speak. Now, though—having lost the person they have both lived with and loved as a mother—their silence seems preposterous. Nina is relieved when Vera lingers behind afterward, as they walk slowly away from the lowered coffin laden with snapdragons.

Nina allows Viktor and the others to go ahead, and waits for Vera to near. “I’m sorry,” Vera says. “I loved her. I want you to know that.”

“I know.” In her mind she hears her mother’s voice, the soft way she always answered Nina’s knocks at her door: “Yes, yes, yes,” and the shuffle of her slippers as Nina let herself into the apartment.

“I’ve been thinking how if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have this life. Not just in Moscow. I mean my career.”

The Bolshoi audition. Nina nods. “I was thinking about that, too, the other day. How we followed her like two little ducks to the ballet school. And going through the rotating doors at the Metropol.”

Vera closes her eyes briefly. “You and I went around that same door, but I’ve always felt when we stepped outside again, we stepped into two completely different places.” Her parents, she must mean, what happened to them, and her move to Leningrad, and the Kirov school.

Nina says, “I think the men must have been flirting with Mother, don’t you, letting us go around in the doors like that? She was so slender and pretty.” She wants to be able to smile again, to laugh. To hear her mother’s soft voice,
Da, da, da
…

Vera’s eyes are still sad and dark. “I know I should have told you right away that she was sick. But you have to understand…” Her voice trails off, and she looks away.

“Understand what?”

“It wasn’t…
that
.” Vera lowers her head, looks at the floor.

“What do you mean,
that
?”

“I mean that the doctor—didn’t really say that. That she was dying. I thought she looked ill, but the doctor…He never told me that.”

“You mean you…made it up?”

“I must have sensed it, she looked so poorly.”

“So instead of simply telling me that my mother looked ill, you…you said
that
.” Clenching her jaw, Nina exhales loudly through her nose. “You said it, and it became true.”

“I didn’t
will
it.”

“What kind of person makes a…a…
trick
out of someone’s life or death?”

“It just came out! I suppose I knew it, somehow. And I was angry, you were having all your success, while I was the one—”