Russian Winter (23 page)

They unload bags and provisions: canisters of paraffin, sacks of potatoes and carrots, fat heads of lettuce, thick-necked bottles of Zhigulevskoe beer, round jugs of Napareuli wine. With her valise under one arm, a watermelon under the other, Nina inhales the scent of pine and nudges open the squeaky gate; it stretches a spiderweb into a nearly invisible net. “Thank you,” Viktor says, marching right through the web, past the small, half-shaded stone terrace, with his cache of canned fruit and vegetables from Eastern Europe. Gersh follows, balancing the various sacks and boxes, but Vera pauses next to Nina to look at the house, taking a deep breath of the woodsy air. “There’s the river,” Nina says, pointing just beyond the patch of woods.

The air swells with the hum of insects. “It reminds me of summers when I was a boarder at the ballet school,” Vera says. The
country sunlight reveals the reddish highlights in her hair. “They used to take us to the Black Sea. The ones who couldn’t go home, I mean.”
Orphans
is the unspoken word—or children from Alma-Ata and Chelyabinsk and other places too far to travel home to. “We stayed in wooden barracks, and slept on stacked bunk beds, and I never wanted the top bunk, because there were always spiders on the ceiling.”

Nina says, “There are probably spiders here too.”

“Oh, they don’t scare me anymore.”

The dacha is spare, its walls appropriately flimsy, its toilet outdoors. Whitewashed walls. An iron washtub. A stack of firewood next to a brick stove with a tall chimney pipe. Hazel-switch fishing rods in the corner. Cane-seat chairs, kerosene lamps, a cupronickel samovar. Metal-framed beds with hard, straw-stuffed mattresses. Soot from so many burned candlewicks. The
banya
is out the back, so that they can go from there right into the river.

Nina loves the gentle slap of bare feet on the wooden floor—not a sprung-wood one, but it will do for indoor practice. Sunshine seeping through the scrappy white curtains as early as three in the morning, and sifting through the trees all afternoon. The bright yap-ping of sparrows and magpies. Shared meals under the pines, water fetched from the spring, the ground moist, the air delicious, the river green and cool.

The evening glare spreads orange coins across the water. There are swims in the river, and volleyball matches. Though plenty of group activities are offered over at the Writers Recreation Center, Nina and the others remain here, quietly together. Viktor has vowed to write a poem a day, and Gersh works from sketches of a new piece, whistling melodiously. Vera hums along, often simply sitting beside him, or reading, her long bare legs tucked up under her skirt, lighting the lantern at nightfall. Nina wonders if Vera is as glad to
be free of Nina’s mother as Nina is to be away from Viktor’s, whom poor Darya continues to care for, while Nina’s mother makes her own rounds and visits with friends at Bear Lake.

And so this is a month of perfection, of leisurely freedom, of lazy afternoons spent on the terrace in long, wandering debates that spin off into the air without conclusion. Wildflowers sweeten the air, and butterflies tumble by—nothing like the exquisite pin Viktor gave Nina for their anniversary, but no less magnificent, with their nearly translucent, brightly spotted wings. Gersh and Viktor spend hours on the terrace in the wicker chairs, looking quite satisfied in their striped pajamas as they argue lightly back and forth. Gersh teases Viktor for being an “Esteemed State Artist.” It’s one of those honorary titles that didn’t previously exist, and that span the whole range of cultural pursuits, not just the finer arts. “Cheap incentives,” Gersh calls them, and names a singer they know who is always traveling all over the Republic to this and that region, collecting as many titles as he can. But the fact is, “Esteemed State Artist” is the reason Viktor is allowed to travel abroad and can afford a dacha like this one. If he or Nina ever becomes a “People’s Artist”—the highest title possible—there will be even more perks.

“You know very well that I have nothing against popular entertainment,” Viktor says, clearly hoping to incite. He enjoys these debates with Gersh, the kind most people won’t engage in. “What’s the point of creating anything, no matter how beautiful, if it doesn’t manage to speak to the people? If it never
reaches
the people?”

“You sound like Zoya!” Gersh says, as Viktor surely expects him to. He can mention her today, because Vera has gone off on one of her long walks, gathering mushrooms. By the gate, her hand resting on the iron fence, Nina moves through her daily barre exercises. She hasn’t skipped a day of training. Even a week of missed practice could mean bruised toes and aching limbs when her muscles are forced to work again.

“This utilitarian view of art makes my insides squirm,” Gersh says. “You know that, of course.”

“Why do you put up with her, anyway?” Nina calls.

“Who?”

“Zoya!”

“She makes me look good, don’t you think?” Gersh says in his teasing voice. In a lisping imitation, he adds, “Upright citizen. Party spirit and all that. Perfectly commendable, actually.”

Nina doesn’t laugh; even in his mocking, Gersh seems uncomfortable. Perhaps Zoya really does feel to him like some kind of badge of approval. There has been more anti-Semitic commentary: editorials in the press, even another swipe at Gersh himself by one particularly belligerent critic whom Viktor has nicknamed “the Rottweiler.” More than once Nina has glimpsed the slogan “Down with the Cosmopolites!” Maybe Gersh really does see Zoya as a protector of sorts.

“I’m not joking,” Viktor says. “I mean what I said. About reaching the people. There’s a reason front-row seats cost only three rubles at your theater, Nina. Life is hard, people are tired. You bring them beauty. You make them proud. You remind us of all we’re capable of—that we ourselves are a work in progress, creating a great new society. Why do you think our Iosef Vissarionovich himself prefers the biggest, most colorful productions? He knows it’s the monumental stuff—the most colorful scenery, the brightest costumes—that has the strongest impact.”

“Exactly,” Gersh says, “this is exactly the problem! There’s no room for complexity, for sensitivity, for anything the slightest bit challenging. Instead we’re supposed to pander to the audience. When, really, how are they ever going to learn to appreciate anything truly profound? Everything always has to be exaggerated. And you know why: because people need to be
cued
. They need to be
told
what they’re supposed to think—”

“They’re tired,” Viktor says. “They work hard, they—”

Gersh cuts him off. “They need to have it made absolutely clear to them how they’re supposed to react.”

“I’m not sure it’s that,” Viktor says calmly, though Nina can tell he is wondering. “I think it has to do with…making things straightforward—simple, available to everyone.”

“I’d hardly call the glamour of Bolshoi productions ‘simple,’” Gersh puts in. “All that pomp and glitter. As if it has anything to do with everyday life. You’re awfully quiet over there, Nina, by the way.”

“I’m considering what you’re saying,” she calls back. She has begun her foot exercises, grabbing with her toes the heavy braided rag rug she has placed on the ground in front of her, pulling it toward her and then, with the toes of her other foot, grabbing it again to try to drag it back out to where it was. “I mean, isn’t that the way theater ought to be—magnificent?” It’s true that Bolshoi productions are outsize, majestic, nothing restrained about them. Swirls of color, brash acrobatics. For a few hours, the audience exchanges real life for the plush velvet seats of a glittering auditorium, its five tiers of red and gold balconies, and glowing candelabras, and gilt ceiling and ornately draped Tsar’s Box, and giant chandelier suspended regally, dripping with crystal. For those few hours there is beautiful music, and dancing that will restore anyone’s faith in the world.

Gersh says, “Perhaps, but—”

“You underestimate our populace,” Viktor tells him. “I don’t think they need to be told how to feel. Great art communicates instinctively. One can’t help but understand it.”

This Nina too believes. It is when she is dancing—not marching in a line or singing Party ballads on the tour bus—that she feels, truly
feels
, the common humanity of the world. Only onstage, performing for the public, is she aware of herself as a comrade in a great nation. And yet…she recalls her night as Odile, the audience’s
wide eyes as she performed her technical tricks, like some circus dog. Their automatic applause, not at her musicality or artfulness, but at that long string of show-off fouettées. That’s not what it means to be an artist. Nina knows this deep down. She has witnessed the exhilaration that Ulanova, her favorite ballerina, creates when she dances, how her nuanced movements seem to lift, palpably, the audience to a higher plane. What Nina would do to achieve that same level of artistry, performance that is itself life-affirming…

“That’s your problem,” Gersh is telling Viktor. “You’re a romantic.”

“A Romantic? Not at all!”

“Not your poetry. I’m talking about your outlook, your faith in the greater good. In your leader. You idealize everyone.”

That’s the thing about being out in the woods like this, Nina thinks to herself. One can talk this way, unrestrained. No one around to hear you.

“I don’t idealize,” Viktor says. “It’s simply a matter of perspective. We are inventing a new nation, a new great people. It’s a difficult process. You choose to see the negative side of this. When really there’s much that is positive.” Nina loves this about him—his optimism, his gentle wisdom and genuine hope.

“Yes, of course,” Gersh says. “Because you’re still able to do what you love and have it matter. Not to sound grandiose, but really, let’s be honest, there’s nothing left for me in this country. I have no future here. Everything I compose now is for the desk drawer.”

He’s probably right, Nina thinks to herself. No orchestra would dare play his work now. No one will record him. Yet she hears herself say, “That can change. You know that—it can change overnight.” Because that, too, is true.

That night the four of them make mushroom soup and potato hash, and drink so much wine that Viktor, when their glasses are at last empty and the sound of crickets fills the air, grabs his abdomen,
groans with pleasure, and says, “I’m sorry, Nina, we may have to forgo lovemaking tonight.”

“Look!” Vera says, nodding lazily toward the open window. “Fireflies.” She is wearing a white linen dress with folk embroidery, and leaning back into Gersh’s arm. In the pale white linen, with her glimmering hair and the flickering light of the kerosene lantern, she looks almost mothlike. Gersh pulls her closer, nuzzles her neck. In moments like this, his crossed eye makes him look somehow dashing.

“Ach!” Vera pretends to pull away. “You smell like a bachelor.”

Gersh pulls her close again. “I say we all go for a swim.”

Viktor says, “With all this food in me? I’ll sink.”

But Nina drags him up out of his chair. “Come on, I’ll save you.”

The river is just below their slope of forest, a sudden clearing lit brightly by the moon. Tied to a log at the edge is the canoe they sometimes take out. Nina regards the soft black mirror of the water, its smooth, dark skin. Black shadows all around. She and Vera undress with care, but Gersh and Viktor simply strip down and run like children straight into the water. Nina walks forward to where the shoreline ends, the earth soft with silt, and continues in up to her waist, then leans forward to submerge her arms, as if slipping them into long evening gloves. The water is surprisingly warm. When she dives in, she feels herself enveloped. Reemerging, she leans back, lifts her feet, and floats on her back. Above her the sky is dark black, an endless stretch dotted with tiny stars.

The sound of night, the thick, rich quiet—and the hooting, every few minutes, of an owl. Nina still hasn’t grown used to this quietness, the hidden, elusive sounds of nature, instead of Moscow’s loudspeakers broadcasting patriotic songs out over the streets day and night.

Gersh has returned for Vera, who is still close to shore. “Come here,” he says, wading toward her.

Viktor paddles on his back until he is next to Nina. His fingers
touch hers, wriggling in the water. She wiggles hers against his. Gersh has begun to hum, a song Nina recognizes. Now Viktor puts his hands underneath Nina’s shoulders and pulls her along, swinging her slowly through the water. “I love the sound of the crickets everywhere,” she says. “Like they’ve overtaken the world.”

Viktor is quiet for a moment, then says, “You know what it is? It’s the sound of vastness.”

Leaning back in his arms, pleasantly exhausted, the sky embedded with stars, Nina feels—actually feels—the vastness of the world, that it stretches on and on, and that she and Viktor and Gersh and Vera are the merest part of it. She senses, for the first time, how far away one can be from one’s own life, how contentedly distant. The gaping enormity of the universe, its endless possibility…She feels it, an aura, an inkling: the illusion of absolute freedom.

I
n his mailbox in the Department of Foreign Languages, Grigori found a single piece of paper, folded.

His heart gave a little kick. Could it be a response at last? No, no, of course not, ridiculous to even hope. Even if Nina Revskaya did decide to write to him, surely it would not be like this, in the open, without an envelope. That squashed spider…Perhaps the note was from Evelyn, an invitation, some friendly suggestion. She had been away at a conference much of last week but had sent a few chatty e-mail messages. Grigori recalled that she was due back last night.

Unfolding the piece of paper, he saw that it was from Zoltan. Another photocopied page from the diary. February 1962. Zoltan would have been just twenty-nine years old; perhaps by then, after six years there, he considered London a permanent home. Grigori wondered if, in rereading these pages, Zoltan longed to be that sought-after young man again, instead of the eccentric old one he had become. Zoltan’s thickly slanting letters, handwriting from over forty years ago, rushed forward:

Having reached the end of the passage, Grigori closed his eyes. He felt deeply and abruptly sad, and somewhat guilty, as if having spied on someone. It was not mere sadness for Nina Revskaya and Viktor Elsin, nor for Zoltan and his faded diary. His sadness, he realized, was for the poems he had loved, for the innocently wistful herders of goats and sheep, the dreamy landscapes and vivid forests, the weary yet satisfied peasants whose bright hopes never seemed desperate, just pure. Surely there was some truth in them. Because if Elsin hadn’t believed…what would it have felt like, to write poems he knew were also a form of propaganda? Was it with cynicism, too, that he had written them? It wasn’t a vision Grigori liked to have of Elsin, and it always evaporated before fully taking hold. Then again, what else was a poet to do? Either you made the most of the rules and regulations, or you…what? Did an Esenin: slashed your wrists and wrote a poem with your blood, and then hanged yourself for good measure.

Or you escaped, like Zoltan. Lived to tell the truth. It was one of the reasons Zoltan’s work mattered so greatly, each poem a message that had jumped a wall, burrowed a tunnel out of prison, survived to tell the rest of the world its news. So many others—other people, other poets—never made it. Even Zoltan’s newer work, Grigori reflected, would be marked by that experience. If only someone would publish it…

Grigori sat down, put the page on his desk. If Viktor Elsin had really felt that, really believed, or
had
to believe, as he told his wife, then what could he have done, really, to have ended up where he did? Not that the charges would even have had to be true. It was enough to simply associate with the wrong crowd; one need not be guilty of any specific political offense. Of course, it was more attractive to think that Viktor Elsin had in fact acted subversively than to admit that he had simply toed the line. Grigori had long found a certain thrill in the thought that Elsin had, despite his seemingly naïve good faith, ultimately rebelled.
Black velvet night, pinned wide and high by pinprick stars
…It was the opening phrase of “Night Swimming,” an uncharacteristic poem, and the one Grigori had put such stock in so many years ago. The rhythmic imbalance of his translation still bothered him—but the images and their precise wording were what had mattered most.

It was one of Elsin’s final poems, and one of the least typical. So much melancholy. But could one call it seditious? If looking for seditious material, perhaps, that tone of regret, of loss, the water and sky so black. Yet it had made it past the censors—though that meant little in the scheme of things. Such decisions (what passed, what didn’t) could at times seem nearly random; an editor might have been owed a favor, or a work was allowed into print but the number of copies, or their distribution, suppressed. And even if this poem had been explicit—or the opposite, if Elsin had never written a problematic word—what could any of it prove? Neither possibility would necessarily indicate that Elsin had done something, had acted on any thoughts, any doubts.
Unseen, the nightingale, too late
…

And even if he had…well, then
what
exactly had he done?

This pattern of thought was an old one, a loop Grigori’s mind had followed many, many times. It never landed anywhere new. Yet now he felt oddly hopeful, as if the pattern might be about to break. This feeling had to do, he realized, with Drew Brooks, the way she had sounded when she told him, “I’m thinking we might be able to find something.” Grigori still heard her voice in his mind, the hopefulness and possibility of her words. Had she perhaps managed to get hold of any of those jeweler’s archives? Grigori felt a sudden urge to pick up the phone and dial her number. But not a full week had passed since he last spoke to her, that day at Beller. And he would have heard from her, wouldn’t he, if she had found out something?
No news is good news
, he told himself—though what did that saying mean, really?

T
HE FIRST SCANDALOUS
thing at the ballet the following season, autumn 1950, is the night one of the prima ballerinas falls. Of course dancers fall—an overzealous leap, an off-kilter pirouette, one must take risks. But this one has passed her prime; she is overweight and
warms up with hot showers rather than exercise. The next thing everyone hears, she is out on medical leave.

The next day’s rehearsal call has Nina listed separately from the others. In an upstairs practice room she is sternly coached by the ballet mistress, and on the following week’s schedule her name is written at the very top, next to “Giselle.” Giselle, the pinnacle of classical dance, from the story about the Wilis, ghosts of girls jilted on their wedding day; in the woods at night they emerge from their graves in their bridal attire and dance until dawn—but any man caught in their path must dance himself to death. For years Nina has longed to perform Giselle’s
déboules en diagonale
, to spin hopelessly into insanity and then death. Now an extra line of little hooks is added at the back of both Giselle costumes, taken in to Nina’s frame. She receives new pointe shoes and, for her act 2 pair, hammers the toes until they are soft and pulpy, so that they will make no sound on the stage. She wants to create the illusion of ghostly lightness—the nearly silent steps of feet that seem not to touch the floor.

Waiting for her entrance, she feels her legs begin to tremble. With her first steps, it is as if she has been set on fire, nearly numb and at the same time so hot, her face must be bright red. This opening section requires as much miming as dancing, lots of shy little runs away from Albrecht, delicate skips and hops. Girlish in her pretty peasant dress, Nina calls upon her own recent past, how it felt to be young and naïve and newly in love, the surprise and doubt and elation.
He loves me, he loves me not
—she plucks the daisy, tosses it away, Albrecht sitting next to her on the bench. Not until she has accepted his love and circled the stage with him in joyful leaps does the last of Nina’s tension dissipate. Her body carries her along expertly, spinning serenely, the graceful arch of her back as she makes slow twirls on one foot and then the other. How well her feet know this floor, the steep rake of the stage, every tiny nick in the wood, each trapdoor and footlight and patch of colored tape. When it comes time for the
little hop on one toe nearly all the way across the stage, Nina’s confidence is such that she tosses Albrecht a little kiss halfway through. She feels her comrades watching from the wings, rooting for her, critiquing her—knows Vera (who as Queen of the Wilis won’t be on until act 2) is looking on from a spot in the back, while Polina, by the rosin box, does a last warm-up for her scene full of teasing jumps; a perfect coquette, she is dancing the “Peasant Pas de Deux.”

Now Nina has arrived at one of the most difficult parts: the “mad” scene at the end of act 1, when Giselle learns that the handsome peasant boy supposedly in love with her is really a prince—and already engaged to the duke’s daughter. Shocked, horrified, she looks down at the gold necklace Bathilde has given her; she tears it off, throws it to the ground, and runs to her mother’s embrace. To show Giselle’s sudden unraveling, Nina has prepared by imagining how she would feel to be tricked like that, recalling how Viktor too first presented himself to her—a man of simple upbringing, the woods his home—before revealing the truth. As if in a trance, her gaze distant, her hair fallen loose and dark against her pale face, Nina dances as though lost, moving in halting, distracted steps, imagining how it would feel to really be Giselle, breaking down, her mind and her body.

Tremendous applause at the close of the first act, even louder after the difficult adagio in the second. Mother is there in the audience, happily flapping her program at Nina, but Viktor witnesses none of this. He is home with Madame, checking her pulse, laying cool washcloths on her forehead; she has worked up a fever and is delirious, prostrate on her bed. Though Nina supposes she ought to be worried for her, she knows, too, that by the time the night is over, Madame will have miraculously recovered. It is not the first time the old woman has fallen ill the moment Nina is to debut a new role.

Nina tells herself it does not matter that Viktor is not here to see it. There will be other nights like this, tonight is only the
beginning…. And then the performance has ended, the audience is applauding, a long, loud ovation, their claps becoming synchronized, persistent, so that Nina must take repeated bows. Only offstage does she briefly burst into tears—of relief and exhaustion.

Within just a few performances it seems she was meant for this: the audience cheers her entrances, and tosses flowers at her feet, and calls her back out so many times, she is still bowing after the orchestra has left, their seats and music stands abandoned the moment their duties have been satisfied. The concert hall is packed, patrons leaning out over the boxes as if to try to get closer to her—yet becoming perfectly still, engrossed, as soon as she begins to dance. Viktor is there, too, now that Madame has finally given up her illness and given in to her daughter-in-law’s success.
Pravda
salutes Nina’s “great artistry and exquisite lightness” and calls her “the Bolshoi’s newest star.” Within weeks she has been officially promoted.

Principal dancer: a ballerina at last. Fetching her pay from the cashier’s window at the end of the month, she is handed double her old salary. And when she passes a Bolshoi advertisement on the street, it is her name in big bold print on the poster. Yet at first it all feels so tenuous; why, it might have been Vera’s name, or Polina’s, up on that bill, had the director decided to choose one of them instead. Probably they too have had that thought. Or perhaps they too can see, no matter their feelings, that it is Nina whose name deserves to be up there.