The Turning (2 page)

Vitaly was not so sure he would be going to Paris. His competition was Gregory. Gregory was not as good a dancer as Vitaly, but he was showy and had taken a dislike to Vitaly because Vitaly came from a poor family that had no tradition of culture. Gregory’s grandmother had been a ballerina with the Kirov. “That makes me a member of the family,” he said. He thought he was entitled to the best roles, but he refused to work for them as Vitaly did. Instead, he took every opportunity to make Vitaly look awkward. For the most part, Vitaly ignored Gregory, but I didn’t underestimate Gregory’s ambition.

Gregory was watching as Vitaly held up the latest issue of
Ballet
magazine and waved it in front of me. “Tanya,” Vitaly said, “what will you give me to see your picture in the magazine?”

“Don’t be foolish, Vitaly,” I said, and punched him lightly in the arm.

“If I let you see it, will you let me practice my new way of doing lifts with you?”

“Toss me around all you like, but if I live to be a hundred I’ll never find my picture in that magazine.”

“Don’t forget, you promised.” Vitaly flipped open the magazine to an article on the ballet’s performance of
Romeo and Juliet
. The picture had been taken on one of the evenings I had danced Juliet. My heart was a fluttering bird. When I lunged for the magazine, Vitaly held it over his head. “Remember your promise.”

“Yes, yes, but don’t torment me, Vitaly.”

Some of the other members of the corps, seeing the scuffling, joined us. Looking over Vitaly’s shoulder, we read the article. Gregory, who was a friend of Marina’s, scuttled over to her and whispered in her ear. Her expression froze and she stalked out of the room.

Vera said, “She’ll never forgive you for your picture being in the magazine instead of hers.”

I knew some of the members of the corps believed I had fallen into the role as a piece of luck. That was not true. I had been working toward it nearly all my life. As a special treat for my fifth birthday my great-aunt Marya, who loved everything beautiful, had taken me to see
Swan Lake
danced. How I had marveled at the elegance and grace of the dancers. I was sure they must live in a different world, a world where people could move about in new and wonderful ways. I was so enchanted with the ballet that when the wicked magician tricked the prince, I cried out aloud to warn him, causing my aunt great embarrassment.

After seeing
Swan Lake
, I gave my parents no peace until they allowed me to try out for ballet school. For eleven years I lived and breathed dancing. I dreamed every night of being a prima ballerina assoluta. It did not discourage me that in two hundred years the Russian Imperial Theater had given the title to only two ballerinas. When I wasn’t practicing, I was soaking my poor feet, binding up my wounded toes, massaging the knots and cramps in my legs, and mending my shoes, which cost a fortune.

The school was free, for the Soviet Union took great pride in its ballet; but practice clothes and ballet shoes were horribly expensive. Every penny my parents could spare went toward my dream. My mother, Svetlana, worked for only a pittance at the Hotel Europa as a chambermaid, and my father, Ivan, earned little more as a doctor. My grandfather Georgi and my grandmother Yelena pitched in from their small pensions to help support my dancing. Sometimes I felt guilty, knowing all the things the family went without, but when I said so, my grandmother Yelena told me, “Tanya, the dreams we have for you are worth all the rubles in the world to us.” Now that I was thinking of defecting, I saw my family proudly reading about me as the star in the Paris ballet. If I became a famous ballerina in Paris or America, I could repay them.

“Vitaly,” I pleaded, “lend me the magazine to take home for the night.” I couldn’t wait to show the family that their sacrifices were worth something.

“I’ll make you a present of the magazine, Tanya, but stop eating so many
pelmeny
or I’ll never be able to lift you.” I threw my arms around him. “Don’t smother me, Tanya.” He pulled away and called to the pianist, Aidan, “Come and have some of the dumplings before Tanya eats them all.”

Each day we made a point of inviting Aidan to share our lunch, guessing it might be the only decent meal she had that day. At first she had refused, but her hunger and our goodwill were too much for her and now she came each day willingly. Aidan’s family were Russians who had been sent to Lithuania in the 1920s by the Soviets when they took it over. The Soviets wanted to put as many Russians there as possible. They wanted to colonize Lithuania with hundreds of thousands of Russians so that Lithuania would not try to free itself. A year ago, in 1990, Lithuania had declared its independence from the Soviet Union and was chasing the Russians home. What was happening in Lithuania was happening in all the Baltic countries. The Soviet Union had fought back. Gorbachev had sent Soviet tanks into Lithuania. But the desire for independence was growing in all the republics of the Soviet Union, such as the Ukraine and Georgia. In faraway Chechnya Russian soldiers had been called in to put down an uprising. The people in those republics were tired of being colonized by Russians and angry that the Russians had taken all the best bits of their land. They wanted freedom and democracy, something the Soviet Union had never allowed them.

Once the Russians were expelled back to Russia, like the returning Soviet soldiers, there was no housing for them and no jobs. In Lithuania Aidan had been a well-known pianist. Her husband had been a leader in the Communist party. Here in Russia, at forty years old, Aidan could not find concert work and earned only a few rubles for playing for our practice sessions. She was bitter toward the Lithuanians. “I never asked to go to their miserable country,” she said. “It was my grandparents who were sent by the Soviet government. Now the government will do nothing for us.” But she was even more bitter toward Gorbachev. “If he were a proper Communist, he would have seen that the Russians remained in Lithuania. He would have sent more soldiers. What we need is a stronger Communist party.”

I was sorry for Aidan, but I was all for the Lithuanians. After years of being trampled on by the Soviet Union, the Lithuanians wanted to be free of Russians. Only a week ago Russian tanks had lumbered into Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Fourteen Lithuanians fighting for their freedom from Russia had been killed and many more crushed under the tanks. Vera and I had seen pictures on
The Fifth Wheel
, the Leningrad TV show, of Russian soldiers crushing the Lithuanians. I didn’t understand how Aidan could see such pictures and still think the Russians should rule Lithuania.

“Aidan, there are more dumplings than we can eat,” I said. “Here is a bit of greased paper. Wrap them up and take them home for your husband.” Aidan’s husband had no job. Some days Aidan came to practice with red eyes and sometimes—it broke our hearts to see it—with bruises. We guessed that her husband in his misery got hold of vodka, which brought out a cruel streak.

The heat from our bodies and the dumplings in my belly made me sleepy, but one word from Madame and I was wide-awake, and at my
chassés
, my
battements
, my
pirouettes
. Soon I was nothing but a streak of energy existing only for movement’s sake. From the corner of my eye I saw Marina watching me. If I did fifty
battements
, she did sixty. If I did a dozen
pirouettes
, she did two dozen. Her jealousy set her on fire. Finally Madame called, “Marina, it is not how many, but how well. Don’t just do, think of what you are doing.” After that, even more of Marina’s dark looks were sent my way.

CHAPTER 2

POLITICS

When rehearsal ended, it was four in the afternoon and already quite dark. In winter, daylight in Leningrad was as rare as darkness was in the summer. I threw on my jacket, pulled a knit cap over my hair, and ran out the door. If I hurried, I just had time to get to Vasilievsky Island and the Academy of Arts, where Sasha’s classes would be ending. I couldn’t wait to show him the magazine. The streetlights were on, and in their glow the fine snow that was sifting down turned golden. When I started across the bridge, the wind all but picked me up and nearly blew me down onto the icy Neva River. I hung on to the railing, feeling the cold of the iron through my mittens. The backs of the ancient stone sphinxes that crouched on either side of the academy were covered in snow, a strange sight on statues that had come from the deserts of Egypt. Students poured out of the Arts Academy, brushing past me, eager to get home to warmth and dinner. At last I saw Sasha.

He was eighteen, two years older than I was. His face was long and thin, with high cheekbones and dark eyes that turned down at the corners. When he thought to wash his hair, it was very nice and curled at his shoulders. He was like a birch sapling, thin as a whip and birch-bark white because he never got out of doors. He was either in class at the academy or in the corner of his grandmother’s room, working on his paintings or on the icons he sold to tourists. Icons are paintings of sacred people—saints and angels and the holy family. The old icons are said to have special powers of protection and healing and have been handed down from generation to generation. Sadly, many of the ancient icons were destroyed when the Communists ordered the churches closed and emptied.

Sasha’s icons were popular, for it was illegal to sell the old icons and Sasha had learned what kind of paint and gilt to use to give his copies an ancient look. Money from the sale of the icons helped to keep his grandmother in medicine. Sasha’s parents had died when he was a baby, and his grandmother had raised him. He never talked of his parents. Many families in the Soviet Union had been broken up by arrests and disappearances, my own family among them. It was best not to ask too many questions. One of the most imposing buildings in the city of Leningrad was at 4 Liteyny Prospekt, the home of the KGB, the secret police. Thousands and thousands had entered those doors and disappeared, the lucky ones to exile in Siberia.

The joke was “What is the tallest building in Leningrad?”

“The KGB building. You can see Siberia from its basement.”

I waved the magazine in front of Sasha, and we huddled together, sheltering the magazine from the snow, while Sasha read the article. “Ah, Tanya,” he said, “now you will be so conceited you won’t want to look at a poor peasant like me.”

I poked him in the ribs. “Don’t tease me, Sasha. I’m afraid the article means trouble for me. Marina looked daggers at me today.”

“That old lady. You can dance circles around her.”

Sasha saw the ballet whenever he had a few extra rubles. Many of his paintings were of dancers. I had met him when he came to our rehearsal room and sweet-talked Madame into letting him draw the dancers while they practiced. She was indignant and tried to throw him out, but while she was shouting at him he drew her and then showed her the drawing with her mouth open and her fist raised. At first she was furious, then she began to laugh. “Ah, you are a clever fellow. Very well. You may stay for an hour, but no longer, and you are not to talk to the dancers. Not one word. If you disturb their work, you are out on your bottom.”

He had not said a word but he had managed to pass me a note that said “I’m going to spend my life drawing you.”

Before he left Madame demanded to see his work. “Well, you are a perceptive fellow. You have a talent for capturing the grace of dancers. It almost reminds me of Degas’s sketches, but don’t let that go to your head. You are a long way from the master.”

After that she allowed him to return, and each week, on his day off from the academy, he sat quietly in the corner sketching us. One afternoon he walked home with me. After that we began to see each other, spending hours in the
pyshechnayas
, the doughnut shops, over a cup of coffee. I told myself we were just good friends, but the truth was Sasha was becoming more and more important to me. When something happened, it didn’t seem real until I told Sasha about it. It was a terrible effort to keep secret from Sasha the idea that I might defect, but Vera had sworn me to secrecy. I wanted to share everything with Sasha. When I saw the article in the magazine, I thought at once of him.

“I’ll treat you to the metro,” I said, and the two of us ducked into the entrance of the underground station to escape the snow and raw wind. At the bottom of the stairway, the station was like a grand ballroom with marble walls and crystal chandeliers, but no one behaved like they were in a ballroom. Everyone pushed and shoved for a place in one of the cars. Sasha hung on to me, taking the excuse of the crowding to hug me close, causing one woman to frown and another to smile. Sasha kissed the top of my head, winking impertinently at the first woman and grinning at the second.

It was only a short distance to our stop, but the line ran beneath the frozen Neva River. It was always amazing to me to have the river over my head, as if I were a mermaid in some magic kingdom under the sea. We emerged from the metro stairway onto the Nevsky Prospekt. The headlights of the cars illuminated the curtain of falling snow, and along the Prospekt the streetlamps washed the buildings with light. With Sasha clasping my arm, everything seemed bright and cheerful. I glanced up at Sasha to see if he was as happy as I, and was taken aback to see a worried expression on his face.

“Sasha, what is it?” I asked.

“It’s my grandmother, Tanya. The only place I can find the medicine she needs is on the black market, and the cost there is more than we can afford. I am painting on both sides of my canvases to save money.”

“Sasha, what can you do?”

His face became tighter, more closed in. “Never mind. I’ll find a way. Go home and show your family how famous you are.” He gave me a hug and was soon lost in the crowds.

I tucked the magazine inside my coat to keep it dry. For the thousandth time I thought of the escape Vera and I were planning. It would be hard to leave Sasha. Where would I find someone who understood me so well, someone who knew what I was thinking before I knew it myself? Then I thought of Sasha’s struggles to take care of his grandmother. What kind of life could Sasha and I have together? If I escaped, I would leave behind me all the sad stories, all the miseries of people like Sasha’s grandmother and Aidan and her husband and Vitaly. My grandfather Georgi kept saying that a new day would come for Russia, but how could I believe him? If I wanted happiness, I would have to risk the danger of finding it in another country. I would have to dance my way to it.