Russian Winter (6 page)

Not until Polina’s variation, while Nina catches her breath, does she note the ballroom’s high vaulted ceilings, the vast buffet, the many candles, lanterns, and flowers. As if the barrenness of these past years, the fatigue, the hunger, no longer exists. And to think that this is someone’s
home
. Clatter of cutlery, of dishes being refilled, even as Polina dances. Watching, the guests smoke cigarettes, and fill their mouths, and chew and swallow, and clink their glasses.

Nina feels her legs already beginning to cool down; there is a bad
draft from somewhere. But now it is her turn again, adrenaline rushing as she tries not to stumble on the seams of the gritty makeshift floor.
Chink-chink
of dishes, the chewing mouths. Already it is over, Nina and Polina taking their carefully choreographed curtsies before being shooed back to the changing room.

“Did you see the food?” Polina whispers, already untying her shoe ribbons, her tights smudged with dirt from the dance floor.

Nina nods, and her stomach gives a twinge; she hasn’t eaten for hours. Now that she acknowledges it, she feels immediately famished.

“I recognized some of them,” Polina adds, stepping out of her costume. Her legs and arms are splotched pink with cold.

Nina too recognized some faces: the deputy foreign minister with his winged white hair, and the chairman of the Arts Commission. But they were eating, some of them barely looking, gulping and masticating while she danced….

“They’ve seen both of us now, up close,” Polina says excitedly, and Nina wonders why she herself doesn’t feel that way. She has never been interested in politics, her enthusiasm for such matters limited to the watching of parades and air shows. She attends as few Komsomol meetings as possible; as a young girl her only interest in the Pioneers was for the folk dancing and the neat red scarves. Even now she has to force herself to sit through the mandatory Marxist lectures, and rarely sings along to the Party songs with the rest of the troupe on the touring bus. Because what does any of
that
have to do with dance?

She has just finished dressing when a servant taps on their door: Nina and Polina have been invited to the table of the deputy minister of foreign affairs.

Polina’s eyes open wide, while Nina quickly takes up her small pocketbook and drapes the white fur around her neck. Her heart gallops all over again as they are led back out to the great ballroom. The twinkling lights of the chandelier make the room seem warmer
than it is, softening everyone’s skin, so that no one looks quite so sallow. At a table with a small group of others, the deputy foreign minister, red-faced and jolly, introduces Nina and Polina to the guests of honor. They are from Holland, the wife in a dress of a style Nina has never seen before. Its fabric, when the woman stands to shake her hand, rustles like aspen leaves. “This is Nina Timofeyevna Revskaya. Our Butterfly.”

He must have read the newspaper article—the review that called her that, just last week. “N. Revskaya’s buoyancy, her seeming weightlessness, the boundlessness of her leaps, make her look, at times, caught in the air. Her every movement contains a wholeness that is not simply physical but also emotional, of the mind as well as the body.”

The guests say something that the translator, a flustered-looking gray-haired woman, turns into a compliment about Nina’s dancing. The very sounds of this strange language make Nina anxious; normally even the briefest chat with foreigners could mean a trip to the secret police. At the same time, Nina cannot stop staring. These are the first Westerners she has seen close up. The only foreign cities she has been to—with the ballet—are Budapest, Warsaw, and Prague.

“For you,” the deputy foreign minister says boisterously, as he offers them goblets of red champagne. His wife, a stocky woman with a fox fur around her neck, emits a smell—something unpleasant yet familiar. Could it be perfume? Nina’s own scent, Crimean Violet, always evaporates as soon as she puts it on.

Now everyone at the table is raising their glasses: “To peace.” Nina clinks her glass with the others, but there is no food in her stomach to soak up the red champagne. It is with relief that she and Polina are ushered over to the buffet. Polina exclaims at the cold meats and salads, and smoked sturgeon, and black and white bread, and blinis with caviar and sour cream…Baked apples, too, and in the middle of it all, an enormous half-eaten salmon. Nina’s stomach
growls, though she is used to hunger. Only this month was the complicated rationing system terminated. Mother still stretches milk with water and brews carrot peels in place of tea, and returns from the markets having struggled over a few rotting potatoes and a wizened parsnip or two. Yet now, here, all this…Their escort has stepped away, no one is watching as they fill their plates. Breathing the distinct aroma of coffee, Nina arranges the delicate chain strap of her purse over her shoulder so that she can help herself to bread that she spreads with real butter. Even the cutlery—gleaming forks and knives and serving spoons—is stunning. Nina spreads the butter thickly, eagerly, so hungry, her hands shake. The knife slips from her grasp.

“Lucky you,” Polina says when it lands on the floor. “A man is coming to call.” She ascribes to numerous superstitions. “And I’m going to meet my Prince Charming tonight. I feel it in my bones.”

Nina bends down for the knife. “How do you know it’s not the flu?”

“Ha! I have a good sense for these things. I can smell it in the air.” Polina is always falling in love; for it not to be in the air, she would have to not breathe. “You might meet yours, too,” she adds, in a tone that makes it clear she doesn’t really think so. She knows that the only kissing Nina has ever done has been in ballets, her brightly painted lips pressed dryly against her partner’s. And although as a dancer Nina is used to being touched by men, guided, lifted, tossed high in the air, she has rarely felt physical attraction toward them, with their wrestlers’ bodies—thick thighs from so many squats for the
prisiadka
, bulging pectorals from all the acrobatic lifts. Andrei, her adagio partner, has legs like mutton drumsticks. He sometimes flexes the muscles of his buttocks just to make her laugh.

“Do you see anyone?” Nina asks, though of course the question is moot. Any men close to their age would have been eaten up years ago by the war. The only healthy young men Nina ever sees are danseurs in the ballet, and even some of them have lost their teeth to scurvy.
The rest were killed in action, or exiled if they happened to have a German name. Nina’s romantic fantasies are just that, fantasies, childish ones, of brave parachutists, aeronauts, deep-sea divers—no one she’s ever met. She looks out at the clusters of military men and Party officials, members of the Secretariat, all of them twice her age. Dessert has officially begun, petits fours and scoops of ice cream. Nina spots the foreign diplomats, visibly alien in their fitted suits and neat haircuts, eating contentedly. No chance, of course, for any one of them to be a Prince Charming. A new law has made it illegal to marry non-Soviets.

Her own countrymen look comparably scruffy, their suits rumpled the way only men are allowed to be, their cuffed trousers pooling at their ankles. Nina watches the Dutch wife, who with her clean new shoes and prim dress looks so different from the Russian wives in their furs and long gowns of panne velvet. “Do you know anyone?” Polina asks, her chin high.

“No. Oh, well, there’s Arkady Lowny.” Aide to the culture minister. A face like the fat pink boiled hams at the Gastronom. He goes around with a broad, inexplicable smile, as if he has just been told good news—but his hands, Nina has noticed, are always trembling. Now he is approaching them, grinning.

“Good evening, ladies.” Brushing his hair to the side with a shaky hand. Polina says a bright, “There you are!” clearly relieved to know someone. Soon she and Arkady are deep in a back-and-forth of meaningless chatter, Polina’s freckles disappearing as she blushes. “Oh, but you do!” “No, I don’t!” “I’d say you do!”

Just a step away from Nina are two other couples in conversation, one of the women slightly familiar. It is Ida Chernenko, the famous wild-animal trainer, older than in the posters. The other woman is younger, with a shapely bust and a long wave of golden hair, her hand resting just above her hip in a way that makes her waist look slender. Like many of the women she wears a big flashy oval ring on
her index finger, and a string of amber beads. The man next to her is different from the others, younger, and tall rather than stocky, somehow elongated, not a Muscovite at all. He is telling a joke; Nina can tell because of the way Ida and the other man are listening, the corners of their mouths already upturned, their eyes crinkling, certain of a punch line. On her bosom Ida wears an enormous brooch, and when the man finishes his joke, she laughs so hard, the brooch flops back and forth like a small, severed head.

“Please, no more,” the other man is saying, cheeks red from drink or from laughter. “Your jokes are a strain on my liver.”

The younger woman just smiles in an elegant, amused way. The handsome man must be her husband. Square jaw, aquiline nose, thick gleaming brown hair. Long-limbed, so that his baggy suit drapes him in a way that seems refined rather than poorly constructed. He must not have served in the war. He looks too healthy and content.

He has noticed Nina staring and glances up, a pleased look spreading across his face. Opening his mouth to speak—

“Oh, good, you’re still here!” Lida Markova, who runs the State Archive for Literature and Art, beams at Nina. A thick wall of a woman, with coarse hair and a booming voice, and glass beads hanging from her earlobes. Lida loves the ballet, always seeks out the company of the newer dancers, who are not as aloof as the more senior stars. “So wonderful to see you dance tonight.”

“Thank you. How nice to see you.” Nina tries to look past Lida, to see if she can catch the man’s eye.

“And I absolutely adored you last month in
Coppélia
. You have such a lightness to you.” Nina danced the “Prayer” variation (though she dreams of one day having the role of Swanilda). “It’s my favorite ballet, I must say. Because it has such a happy ending. Simplistic, I suppose, but isn’t a happy ending what we all really want?”

“Yes!” Nina laughs. But past Lida’s shoulder she sees, with a droop in her heart, that the handsome man is no longer there.

“It’s so wonderfully comic,” Lida is saying. “Even stupid Frantz is happy at the end.”

Lida smells just like the foreign minister’s wife. A heavy scent, some kind of perfume, dying flowers mixed with overripe fruit. There is something familiar about it, something Nina has smelled before.

“Oh,” Lida says, “there’s my husband signaling to me.” She nods at him, and the fur across her shoulder nods too. Nina cannot help but notice that it is slightly decayed.

That’s what the smell reminds her of. A dead rodent.

Nina looks down, somehow dismayed, and strokes the borrowed fur on her shoulders.

Under her breath Lida says, “Time to go.”

“Already?” Nina hasn’t even tasted the desserts, and quickly pours herself a cup of coffee. But Lida says, “Have a good night,” and hurries to her husband.

Sipping her coffee anxiously, Nina sees that the other Party folk also are leaving. A mass departure, as if choreographed, the men with their five o’clock shadows and their suits from the Moscow Tailoring Combine, and the wives who smell like their furs. Like in
Cinderella
, when the clock strikes midnight. The coffee tastes of chicory.

Not far from Nina, a woman is making stiff commands at a Siamese servant. Perhaps this is
her
house, not the foreign minister’s at all. Or perhaps it too is a sort of theater, a temporary haven like the Bolshoi, grand and lush—and now everyone is being kicked out. Nina notices that the curtains on the window across from her are frayed, and that the glass itself is cracked. “
Nyet!
” the woman hisses to the servant, who hurries off, looking confused.

That is when Nina sees Polina leaving with Arkady Lowny. Probably the tall, handsome man, too, has left, along with his shapely wife. Nina hastily spreads more bread with butter, eats it
hungrily—though there is something ruined about the food, now, too, the salmon and sturgeon picked to bits, and a trail of something pinkish where the desserts were. From a large wooden bowl holding a pyramid of tangerines, Nina plucks one off the top and holds it in her palm. It fits there exactly, its skin smooth, cool, perfectly orange; the only things Nina ever sees this bright in winter are the Pastorale costumes in
Shchelkunchik
. She thinks of her mother at home, her same old black bread and cabbage soup, her net shopping bag limp with a few bruised root vegetables. Looking quickly about, Nina opens her purse and drops the tangerine inside. She shuts it, then takes another and cuts the skin with her thumbnail, releasing its bright, sharp scent. Holding it up to her face, she breathes in.

“Good for congestion, is it?”

The man—the tall one—is next to her. Nina feels her heartbeats rush, wondering what exactly he saw. But she manages to calmly peel another swatch of tangerine skin, white veins pulling away from the orange flesh, and hands the piece of peel to the man. “Just pinch it a little.”

He takes the peel from her as carefully as if it were gold leaf. Then he folds it back, bringing it up to his nose and closing his eyes. Watching his nostrils flare, his lips curling slightly, Nina supposes he must look like this when he is asleep and having pleasant dreams. Just thinking it makes her feel she is witnessing something private—too private for someone she has just met. But then, he might have witnessed her taking the tangerine. When he opens his eyes, she looks down, afraid that he has noticed her staring.

“For you,” she says, pulling apart the tangerine, holding a half out to him. They eat the wedges in silence. The sweet juice prickles at Nina’s tongue, and all at once she is overwhelmed, by the bright taste in her mouth, and by the distinct sensation that she has entered someplace she isn’t quite meant to be.