Russian Winter (20 page)

“We both are,” Evelyn told him.

“Evelyn is a professor of Italian,” said Grigori, “while I profess the Russian language and its literature.”

“Oh, that’s right, Drew told me how she once tried to learn Russian.”

Drew’s face had turned pink. “I’m afraid I’m no good at languages,” she said awkwardly. “But I grew up with a romantic notion about Russia, so I finally signed up for an intro Russian course. But really I’m no good—”

The bell sounded, loudly, signaling the end of intermission. “Oh, there you go,” Grigori said quickly, “I suppose we’d better get back to our seats,” though he knew perfectly well that the lights would not go down for another ten minutes.

“Yes, us too!” Drew said, clearly as relieved as Grigori at having found an exit from the conversation. “Enjoy the rest of the show.”

“Nice to meet you,” added the young man.

“Oh, so they’re not even your students,” Evelyn said, laughing, as Grigori turned toward the auditorium doors. “Did you just strike up a conversation while I was in the restroom?”

“We were sort of thrust together by the throng,” Grigori told her, happy not to have to lie, exactly. They made their way down the red-carpeted aisle and settled into their seats. Evelyn had reapplied her makeup and brushed her hair, so that she looked particularly bright and healthy. Yet Grigori found himself unable to chat as easily as he had before. The feelings that had warmed him during the first act were gone, or perhaps just submerged. Though Evelyn sat as close to
him as before, there was a space, a discomfort, between them. It had to do, Grigori realized, with the young woman, Drew Brooks; how flustered Grigori had been, not knowing what to say, how to explain things. Even now he felt anxious, restless, aware that she was still here somewhere in the theater with him.

The conductor had returned. The orchestra again began its thankless task, and at last the curtain lifted, revealing the various princesses, and now wicked Odile made her entrance, masquerading as Odette. Though Grigori had seen
Swan Lake
numerous times (back when he and Christine were subscribers), something about tonight’s performance—Odile’s evil confidence, her consuming beauty, the wicked precision of her twirling fouettées—overcame the ridiculous setup and the interminable solos, the coy princesses showing off endlessly. The story really did feel tragic: How could anyone
not
fall for this gorgeous woman’s trick? Quite suddenly Grigori felt real pity, not only for poor Odette, trembling hopelessly somewhere in the forest, but for Siegfried and his unknowing betrayal, a victim himself. After all, it was an honest mistake. Funny, Grigori had never really thought about it much before, hadn’t cared enough to think more than, “Poor Siegfried screwed up.” But now, having watched Siegfried jump and leap and spin himself to the hilt, Grigori understood the ballet in a new, felt way. The same thing sometimes happened when he read good poetry, or any great literature: the truth of it had reached his core, and would not let go.

“M
Y TWO BEAUTIES
,” Viktor says when Nina and Vera meet up with him and Gersh afterward, their cheeks rosy with success. The performance has gone splendidly—though Vera, always self-critical, insists she nearly tripped in a bourrée as she made her exit at the end of act 2. Yet Nina can see from her eyes that Vera feels the same pride and immense relief that she does. Their dressing room could
barely contain all the bouquets they received. Nina gave the largest and brightest, full of zinnias and calendula, to Mother when she came backstage afterward—looking, in her maternal way, even more proud than usual, not just of Nina but of Vera, too.

Vera, meanwhile, cut a blossom from one of her own bouquets to pin to Mother’s coat collar and, when Mother had gone home for the night and Vera and Nina were washed and dressed, did the same for Nina, pinning a gladiolus to her left lapel—the one over her heart—so that the petals, white edged with pink, faced down. “To show that your heart is already taken.” For herself, Vera has chosen a snapdragon, its many small petals pale white, and pinned it facing upward.

Now they are at Kiev, a new restaurant operated by the Ukraine Ministry of Trade, eating pork swimming in a sauce of carrots and onions. A small band shoved into the corner of the room serenades them boisterously.

“The way you moved your arms, Verusha,” Viktor says, “honestly, I heard feathers rustling.” He is always at his best in the presence of a beautiful woman. Though he has met Vera just a few times, he already treats her like an old acquaintance; Nina has told him about their childhood years, and about auditioning together for the Bolshoi school—but she has not mentioned Vera’s parents being taken away. When Viktor commented, the first time he met Vera, on the deep sadness in her eyes, Nina simply explained that although Vera managed to escape Leningrad during the war, she lost her entire family in the Siege. It wasn’t exactly a lie.

Gersh, who has met Vera just once before, says, “I realized at a certain point that I’d forgotten it was you. I mean, that you had
become
Odette.” Vera really did transform herself, became half woman, half swan; at moments as she moved a feather would float from her costume and drift to the ground, as if to expose her fragility. When she dance-mimed the story of how she and the other swan
maidens first became spellbound, her sad pleading seemed genuine, not corny at all. It took no leap of the imagination to understand Siegfried’s obsession. Stroking invisible feathers with her cheek, plucking at her invisible wings, Vera seemed truly birdlike, enchanted, and even managed to make her spine quiver, that ripple across her back, from one arm to the other, as on tremulous feet she bourréed across the stage.

“And you,” Viktor says to Nina, “I have to say it again, you took everyone’s breath away.”

It’s true that the audience gasped when Nina did her thirty-two fouettées. They began applauding when she was just halfway through, so loudly that she couldn’t hear the music and had to hope the conductor would simply follow her. With each whip of her leg she spun faster, beads of sweat flying, stinging her eyes—and yet she finished cleanly, precisely, and counted calmly to five before releasing the pose. Secretly, though, Nina finds it cheap, these technical feats. A cheap way to impress, nothing subtle or artful—just virtuosic display, demanding of applause and dropped jaws. Nina wants to do more than fancy tricks; she wants her body to sing, her eyes and her hands and the very angle of her head to convey every nuance of the music, and each facet of whichever character she is called upon to play.

Still, it was a good night. Even as she took her first step she sensed that it would be so, that her body would not let her down, that already she had the audience at her command.

“Well, then, we have multiple reasons to celebrate,” she says, and explains to Vera, “Viktor’s new book has got glowing notices.” Gosizdat, the State Publishing House, has just published a new collection of his poems, which both
Izvestia
and
Pravda
have heralded with ecstatic reviews.

“Yes, a toast!” Gersh says, lifting his glass of Ukraine vodka. “To our two Pavlovas,” looking to Vera and Nina with his healthy eye, “and of course,” now toward Viktor, “our next Annabelle Bucar!”
They laugh; it’s the name of the author of the big best-seller
The Truth about American Diplomats.

Nina says, “I’m going to be serious now,” and turns to Viktor. “I love your poems. I know I’ve told you before, but I don’t know how else to say it.” She finds his work beautiful and unpretentious, loves the unabashed joy in his language, the purity of his phrasing. Short lyrics, vivid imagery. “I’m proud of you.”

Gersh says, “Ninulya, we’re supposed to be celebrating you and Vera!”

“Please, Gersh, why stop them?” Viktor says. Vera is refilling their glasses with vodka. Lifting hers, she says, “To poetry!”

Viktor, putting on a mock expression of competition, says, “To dance!”

Nina, looking at Gersh with a laugh, says, “To music!”

Gersh, raising his eyebrows for suspense, waits a beat before saying, “To
love
!”

As they swallow their vodka, the music suddenly becomes confused; the band falls out of tempo, then loses the tune altogether. Within a few beats the melody has changed, become an American song everyone knows. Nina and the others glance toward the door. The song means that foreigners are present.

Indeed at the entrance are two foreign couples, the women in camel-hair coats, the men in long coats but no hats. The maître d’ leads them in and seats them not far from Nina and Viktor’s party, close enough that Nina can hear their voices. French, but not the familiar vocabulary of ballet, and nothing Nina can understand despite her mandatory language lessons at the Bolshoi School. Nina feels a tug of yearning, and an unaccountable shame—of not understanding, and of wanting to understand. “I wish I spoke another language,” she says, very softly.

“You do,” Viktor says. “The language of dance.”

But all Nina feels is the rare, acute urge to know more than her
own country, to see places she can only imagine, to hear the sounds of truly foreign tongues—not just the usual Georgian and Kalmyk, Latvian and Uzbek. She can’t help being slightly jealous of Viktor, who has traveled more than she has, has even been to England; that was just last year, on a public relations assignment of sorts. He and two other writers (and their MVD escorts) were sent to visit a Russian poet who has been living there for thirty years.
Woo him back
, was the unstated goal—though Viktor and the others, despite their best efforts, were unable to change his mind. What they did accomplish was no less exciting: purchased suits of fine gabardine, turtleneck sweaters, gleaming ties of Liberty silk—and, more important, English penicillin, much better than the stuff at home. For Nina and the other wives, there were nylon stockings and Western cosmetics.

Nina’s own travel, with the Bolshoi, has been limited to more familiar borders. The presence of these Westerners so close to her tonight reminds her that the world is large and full of mysteries. She recalls, as she often has since her girlhood, the woman stepping out from the grand hotel, with her jaunty hat and the tiny diamonds in her earlobes. That same feeling returns, a yearning, the understanding that Nina’s own country, this majestic nation, despite its vastness, is but one piece in the great mosaic of the world.

The nightclub has become less lively now, the other patrons cautious—their conversation muted, their toasts brief. Only a young couple toward the back, inebriated, allows their voices to rise. As they begin to sing an old Gypsy song, loudly slurring the words, Nina feels, again, that odd shame; she wishes she were elsewhere.

Viktor and the others, too, are ready to leave, yet reluctant to say good night. They decide to stop at Gersh’s. Nina much prefers to spend time in that room—smelling of cigarette smoke and reheated tea and Gersh’s fusty shirts and old curtains—than in theirs in the opposite corner of the building, with Madame behind the plywood door feeling “flu-ish,” or at the wooden table counting the cutlery, aloof
and disapproving, demanding grandchildren, thrusting out her wrist for Viktor to palpate. Viktor nearly missed tonight’s performance, thanks to Madame’s own little drama, a long coughing fit Nina is sure she worked up on purpose. Sometimes the way Madame looks at her makes everything painfully clear: that Nina is no different from the other boors along the hallway, an average girl claiming what ought not to be hers—Viktor, and even the physical space itself, the very proximity to “Her Excellency” and her noble blood.
You’re not Lilya
.

But Viktor is devoted to his mother. There was a day, a few months ago, when he filled a big basin with hot water for her to soak her feet in. Nina peeked through the crack in the door, as if it might help her understand something, to see Lola on Madame’s shoulder, avidly pecking at her earring, while Viktor lovingly (it is the only way to describe it) placed the heavy sloshing bucket at his mother’s feet.

Since then, Nina hasn’t dared spy on them together, hating how it made her feel.

She wonders if Vera ever feels a similar reluctance to return home, to enter the slightly sad (Nina always feels) room of Nina’s own mother.

At Gersh’s, Vera drops wearily onto the hard, dark sofa facing the piano. “You’ll have to have more success like this,” she tells Viktor. “So that we can always have a reason to celebrate.”

Though visibly delighted by her praise, Viktor manages to remain nonchalant, asks, “Well, now, where did these come from?” seeing an array of chocolates wrapped in fancy tinfoil.

“They’re from Zoya,
actually
,” Gersh says. “Help yourself.”

Viktor peels the colorful foil from a chocolate, while Nina recalls that bright-eyed, curly-haired woman and the adoring way she looked at Gersh. Such an improbable couple. Nina has asked Viktor about her connection to Gersh, wonders where she is tonight. As Gersh heats water for tea, Vera slips off her shoes and folds her legs
so that her feet are tucked underneath her. Nina and Viktor, after distributing the bonbons, take the love seat next to Vera, who asks, “Ninochka, do you remember our kicking contest?”

It was something they used to do, that last summer together, after they had been admitted to the Bolshoi School. “We would see who could kick her leg higher,” Nina tells the men. “We didn’t even know the term for
grand battement
.”

“And then one day,” Vera says, “I was sure I would win, and I kicked my leg so high, it lifted me right up into the air, and I landed flat on my behind!” She laughs, and rearranges herself just slightly on the sofa, her knees visible below the hem of her skirt. That she can be so comfortable here, so at ease, her feet tucked up under her like that, Nina takes as a compliment of sorts; that it is Nina’s own presence, the fact that these men are of
her
, in a way, that allows Vera to be her full self, rather than the cool, composed version she usually presents. “Plunk, there I was, lying on the ground. Little did I know how many times that sort of thing would happen in my professional life!”