My Sergei (24 page)

The theme she had created for us with the
Moonlight
Sonata was that of man celebrating woman as the mother of all mankind. She said that Sergei should get on his knees before
me, because only the woman can give birth, only the woman can give him his children. Marina, who had studied music at the
National Theater Institute in Moscow, said that most composers thought of Beethoven as the foundation of classical music,
just as woman was the foundation of mankind. She told us to show the audience how we’d grown as people and as parents since
the Calgary Olympics.

The beginning of the program was very soft, and we opened our arms to show the audience and judges that we were opening ourselves
up to them. We were showing them not a program, but the story of our life. If you listen to the
Moonlight
Sonata, the music can only represent a man and a woman’s life together. It can’t mean anything else. It can’t mean a season,
or a march, or a dance, or a storm, or an animal. It’s more, even, than love.
Romeo and Juliet,
that music was about love. But the
Moonlight
Sonata is for older people who have experienced real life. It expresses what changes love can bring about in people, how
it can make them stronger, make them have more respect for each other. How it can give them the ability to bring a new life
into the world.

In the middle section, the slow section, there was one point where Sergei came and slid to me on his knees, offering me his
hands. I put my knees on them, and he then stood on his feet and lifted me. It was quite a difficult lift, because he had
to get up from his knees very gracefully. And he didn’t hold me there as if I was on a pedestal. Rather, everything was done
to movement, and he had to turn around and keep skating. It took a long time to learn this lift, but except for that one element,
everything about this program was natural for us. It was easy and comfortable. If Marina told us to do something, it happened.
She never said, “You have to show the audience how you love him.” She’d say, “How would you hug him if you wanted to tell
him you’re grateful?” or, “What if you wanted to sit on his knees? How would you do it?” We were just being ourselves on the
ice. She wanted us to show everyone how we’d become adults.

During this period, Marina’s thirteen-year-old son, Fedor, was training with us. We spent long hours on the ice, and Fedor,
who’s a promising young singles skater, started complaining to Sergei about it. Sergei, as I mentioned, had his own set of
rules, his own code, which he seldom shared with anyone. But he gave some advice to Fedor: (1) If you want to finish well,
never hold back on the warm-up; (2) always take yourself to the limit; (3) if you start something, always try to excel at
it, or don’t begin at all; and (4) don’t whine, because it doesn’t make practice any shorter.

Sergei lived by these rules, and Fedor, I’m certain, will never forget them.

I
n early August we went back to Moscow, and one of the
first things we did was to visit our friends Sergei Ponomarenko and Marina Klimova. We brought some cake with us to their
three-room apartment, which was much larger than ours. We kept telling them they should have kids to help them fill up all
that space. “No, we should work,” they said. “Soon, soon.” But how soon no one knows.

We wanted to ask their advice about whether to pay any money to the president of the Russian ice skating federation, Valentin
Piseev. We were thinking maybe a couple of thousand dollars, and even had this money in an envelope. We were worried that
if we didn’t do something like that, Piseev might declare one of our lifts illegal at the Nationals, and suddenly our Olympic
dream would be finished. He was also in charge of doling out ice time for practice. That’s the way business was being done
in Russia then, and Marina Zueva also thought we should give some money to Piseev.

Sergei Ponomarenko only said it would be a nice gesture, not a bad idea, and that Piseev would certainly like it. He didn’t
tell us if two years earlier, before Albertville, they had given Piseev money. He didn’t say it was absolutely necessary to
do it. He only said that Piseev would appreciate it. Ponomarenko added that he didn’t think it was necessary to do it right
away; it would soon become clear if this bribe was essential or not.

We left without making a decision, but as it turned out we never made the payment. We realized we were quite important to
the federation, even without the money. Piseev did ask us to do him a favor, which was to skate in a couple of exhibitions
in the town of Arkhangelsk, and we were only too happy to do it.

We were training at the army club, and we asked our old coach, Vladimir Zaharov, the man who had put us together, to keep
an eye on our skating and correct us if something was wrong. We had long since normalized relations with him since he’d refused
to coach us after Sergei, age sixteen, had missed too many practices. For years we had trained on the same ice as he and his
young students. We couldn’t very well not talk to one another. So now, Zaharov watched us every day, and he helped us, too.
Little things, he noticed, like Sergei’s knees had to be more bent on the death spiral, or we needed more speed, or our arms
weren’t parallel when they should be. Things we couldn’t see by ourselves. He was very good.

Vladislav Kostin from the Bolshoi theater made our costumes again, and for the
Moonlight
Sonata he came up with navy-blue velvet with white piping around the collar and down the front—very stark, very simple,
almost like priests’ robes. Marina wasn’t sure that these costumes fit the program’s theme: mother as foundation of mankind.
It was not a bad point. She suggested maybe a light gray and yellow costume for me, as if I was the moonlight, and something
very dark for Sergei, as if he was the night. But Valentin said absolutely no, he couldn’t imagine any other color for Beethoven
than navy blue. He was quite intractable on this point. He said to try it for one competition and then decide.

So we did. Our first pre-Olympic competition was Skate Canada, in Ottawa, which we wanted to do first because Marina lived
there, and also because our first international competition ever was Skate Canada, in 1985, and we thought it might bring
us luck. Piseev’s federation wasn’t happy about this decision because they thought that with Isabelle Brasseur and Lloyd Eisler
being from Canada, the judges might put them first. As it turned out, Brasseur and Eisler weren’t even in the competition.
We skated very well and we won, the only problem arising when, during the short program, I caught a thread from my costume
on Sergei’s button, and it unraveled, so I had this huge black thing trailing after me. We were also quite surprised how much
money they were now paying to amateurs: we got three thousand dollars for the event.

Training at the Army Club before the 1994 Olympics with
(left to right)
Leonovich, Zueva, and Zaharov.

That fall Sergei’s sister’s boyfriend, Dmitri, died. That dear woman has had much tragedy in her life. Dmitri was in his late
thirties, no more, and Natalia had loved him for two years. He died in her arms of a heart attack.

Sergei and I went to Dmitri’s funeral, and Sergei was holding Natalia all the time, squeezing her hands. She’s very strong,
and wasn’t crazy or crying with grief, but she looked almost gray in color. Some members of Dmitri’s family were bothering
her, saying Dmitri had owed them money and asking her to pay his debts. Such terrible things. I don’t know how people can
act this way in the face of another’s misery. Sergei was so tender and compassionate with his sister, whom he loved so. He
called her not Natalia, but Natooshik. At their home following the funeral, he said to her, “Natooshik, Dmitri’s all around
us. He’s not in human form, but he’s in this kitchen right now; he’s in this bedroom. He can see you and hear you, even if
you can’t see him.” It was very helpful to her, and made her feel so much better. I had never heard Sergei talk this way before,
and when Natalia reminded me of this after Sergei had died, it made me feel better, too.

• • •

We went to Navagorsk to get ready for the Nationals. The competition was very important, since if we performed badly, we would
not be invited to represent Russia in the Olympics. We had heard that the Saint Petersburg pair of Artur Dmitriev and Natalia
Mishkutenok, gold medalists in 1992, were skating very well, and we knew they’d be our toughest competition.

At Navagorsk, they were now charging money to the athletes who trained there. Also, athletes from other countries were using
the facilities—Finnish soccer players, Ukrainian volleyball players. No longer was the Russian government expending its
limited resources on the country’s elite athletes. Administrators of sports facilities had to figure out ways for them to
support themselves, and charging room and board was one solution. It was just one of the many changes since the breakup of
the Soviet Union. The hotel at Navagorsk was still quite clean, but the food wasn’t as good as it had been. No caviar anymore.
Fortunately for the skaters, the head coach of CSKA, Elena Chaikovskaya, had found a commercial sponsor, a Russian company
called Anis, which was picking up the tab for our expenses.

It was much harder to get into competitive shape that year than it had ever been for me before. Much harder than I’d ever
imagined. Sergei pushed me and pushed me, whereas when we’d been younger, I was the one trying to push him. He got me to go
to the gym. We skated twice a day, in the morning and evening, and he worked hard with me to get my double axel, my nemesis
jump, perfect.

St. Petersburg during the 1994 Nationals.

Sergei had never given me skating advice before, so I was excited to listen to him. And he always had good tips. Sergei would
have been an excellent coach. You don’t just tell a skater that she should be jumping higher. You say, You have to use this
arm when you jump. You have to have your body positioned exactly so. If I said we should try something again, in years past
he’d have responded, “It’s okay, Katuuh, we’ll leave it for tomorrow.” But this year he’d stay out on the ice with me as long
as I wanted.

And, of course, the other difficult thing was spending so much time away from Daria. She never came with us to Navagorsk,
and we didn’t even have a crib for her in our little Moscow apartment. When she was with us, we just pushed two armchairs
together for her to sleep on, and that was fine. But usually she stayed with my mom, and we tried to visit her every day.

So it was tough—mentally, physically, emotionally. But whatever sacrifices were involved in getting ready for the 1994 Lillehammer
Games, I was willing to make them. It was only for a short while, and this Olympics was going to be different from the first
one. One of the reasons I wanted to go to another Olympics was I didn’t remember half of what happened in Calgary. It was
almost like I’d been blind to everything but the skating. I’d been sixteen, and everything was too easy for me. The Olympics
was just another competition.

Not this time. I was determined to remember all the faces, all the people, all the experiences, all the feelings—whether
we won or lost. I would try to take everything inside me and hold it there, so I could call upon it forever.

Sergei and I won at the Nationals in December, skating well except when I two-footed my double axel in the
Moonlight
Sonata program. Everyone loved the program, though. It was the first time we’d won the Nationals since 1987, which in truth
was a harder competition for us than either the Europeans or the Worlds, because of all the young and hungry pairs teams who
compete in Russia.

That year we celebrated the new year at home, in my parents’ apartment, and I bought fresh mussels for us to eat. The last
time Sergei and I had been there for the New Year’s festivities was in 1988, which also boded well for our luck. I remembered
very well that night six years earlier, when Sergei shyly came to our party, and I gave him the needlepoint I’d done of the
clown. That was the first year we’d broken the plate at midnight, and I’d grabbed a piece and hidden it somewhere very safe
and I made a wish that I would skate well in Calgary. That truly seemed like a lifetime ago. We forgot this tradition of breaking
the plate, however, and at the stroke of midnight, Sergei and I were debating whether or not to wake Daria. We decided not
to. We didn’t stay up very late that night to welcome in 1994, because we had to go to Garmisch-Partenkirchen the next day
for the annual New Year’s show.