Russian Winter (11 page)

Nina has taken up her other toe shoe and is shaving the bottom in quick, almost careless, motions. “Knew
what
?”

“That something was going to happen with us!”

“So you’re just going to drop Arkady, then?”

“Well, I’ll have to tell him something.” For a moment, with her long, skinny neck and bright makeup and feathery eyelashes, Polina looks just like an ostrich. In a whisper she adds, “He let me keep his cigarette case.”

“Arkady?”

“No, Oleg!” From the drawer of her dressing table, she takes a slim silver box, a section of its lid ornately decorated in what looks to be ivory.

Nina examines the box, the swirl of flowered vines that decorate it. Looking closer she sees, with shock, that they are not flowers or
vines but, rather, two human bodies: a man’s and a woman’s, naked, entwined. Surely that’s why Polina has shown it to her, to prove some sort of maturity Nina doesn’t possess. Pretending not to notice, Nina hands it back.

Polina slides the case proudly back into her drawer and locks it. Since their promotion to first soloists she and Nina have been allotted this more private dressing room, small and cold, without windows. Walls of cracking plaster, lightbulbs too bright. Tights hanging on pegs to dry overnight. Across the top of her mirror Nina has draped a strip of eyelet cloth, to pretty it up a bit. Polina’s mirror has two small photographs tucked into the frame, and her dressing table is cluttered with twice the beauty supplies Nina has. Thick tubes of lipstick, square tubs of sparkling powder, eye paint in every color, cold cream called “Snowflake.” A jar of “Persian mud” containing a secret ingredient from Georgia. Tacked to the wall is a newspaper article by Dr. Yakov Veniaminov, Cosmetician, whose prescriptions Polina follows religiously.

The wardrobe mistress is at the door. She hands them their costumes briskly and leaves.

“Well,” Nina concedes, pulling on the lavender tutu, “I’m glad you met someone you like.” As Polina helps her with the hooks on the bodice, Nina wants badly to tell her that she too has met someone, but already it seems she must have dreamed it. She takes up her toe shoes and at the sink runs cold water over the heels, so that they will bond with her tights. Then she sits down and, pointing her toes, fits one foot down into its shoe, toes crushing against each other as she nudges them all the way in to where she has layered a wad of cotton wool. Her debut in this role, hours of effort ahead of her, no time to think of Viktor…She works the back of the shoe up onto her heel, then takes up the second shoe. Even as she wraps and ties the ribbons securely around her ankles, she is convincing herself that she is prepared, she is ready. But when she tucks the ends of the
ribbons in, quickly stitching them so that they won’t slip out, she sees that her hands are trembling.

The bell. Tossing her cardigan sweater over her shoulders, Nina wishes Polina “No down, no feathers” and hurries to the makeup room, to have the little purple-flowered crown firmly secured to her hair and final touches of color painted around her eyes. Scent of talc, of nerves, as she warms up in the training studio. Even backstage, as the prologue begins, with the princes and pages in their capes, and the queen and king and their attendants all miming along to Tchaikovsky’s stately march, Nina continues to warm up with plié after plié, holding on to a lighting boom for support, while the dressers flutter around making a last-minute check of hair ribbons and coronets, and the corps de ballet girls chatter like sparrows, and the stage manager shushes them and complains that they are tracking too much rosin onto the floor.

One of the prop men hands her a sparkly spray of lilacs—her magic wand—and now the harp strums the opening arpeggio that introduces Nina’s first entrance. Giving herself over to the lullaby-like melody, Nina follows her retinue of tutu-clad girls as they move together on pointe onto the steeply sloping stage, into the bright lights of the Fairy Kingdom. Nina is in the center, the calm, soothing central force even as she introduces the other fairies, gesturing graciously, arms gently waving her lilac frond, lots of little bourrées here and there, none of the fast jumps and spins she prefers; this opening section is a very slow adagio, nothing terribly challenging, only one pirouette into arabesque. Since the Lilac Fairy represents wisdom and protection, Nina tries to infuse her every movement with the thought that good can overcome wickedness, that spells can be both cast and broken. For her first solo (to a grand, somewhat pompous-sounding waltz) she imagines each of her smooth opening
développés
—leg extending high up to the side until her foot is past her ear, as she rises on pointe—banishing the evil to come. As always
when she performs, the minutes pass like mere seconds; already she is making her concluding diagonal across the stage, the repeated sequence of two little
sissones
, then rising up onto
relevé
, and then a double pirouette.

Only later, as she and the others stand patiently immobile waiting out a pas de deux, does she allow herself to look out at the many-tiered theater, past the footlights and above the heads of the orchestra, searching, as if amid the red velvet seats and darkness-obscured faces she might—if she wills it hard enough—find Viktor.

Instead, there is her tiredly beautiful mother, in the side loge where she always sits. Now that Grandmother has passed away, it is just the two of them in their bare-floored room. Mother still spends her days working at the polyclinic, afternoons filled with ongoing errands for friends and relatives too weak or old, always someone or other in hospital, not to mention Mother’s brother in prison for three years now. (He is innocent, there has been some mistake; as soon as Comrade Stalin finds out, Mother always says, he’ll put everything right.) Neither she nor Nina ever mentions a word of the brother’s predicament, even as Mother makes her way from one end of town to the other in search of food and medicine for him—an endless quest, standing in queues in every weather, summers in her white cotton kerchief, winters in her dark woolen one. Yet she never misses Nina in a new role, attends at least one performance of every ballet she dances, happily flapping her program at her, watching each ballet intently, as if she has never seen it danced quite so well.

Tonight, though, Nina longs to see Viktor’s face instead, his proud nose and almond-shaped eyes and the flare of his nostrils. Just thinking of him, she feels a small bird rustle beneath her rib cage.

Before her entrance in the second act, she puts herself right up against the front wing, just next to the stage, so that she can look out farther into the theater, although she of course knows the rule: If you can see the audience, they can see you. She looks out, searches
the seats. And now the stage manager is telling her to step back, she is too near to the boom and might cast a shadow….

The applause ends, the curtains have closed, the lights are up again. She has danced well—she knows it, the audience knows it, she hears it in their applause. Even her comrades onstage congratulate her.

Nina’s mother is waiting in the rear hallway, beneath the “We Celebrate with Work!” poster. Her face is glowing, her shoulders pulled back straight in a way that she rarely holds herself at home, as if to show the dancers that she too, given a different turn of events, might have been one of them. “Everyone is saying how beautifully you danced, you should hear them!” Then, as always, come the complaints: “That blond girl was in the way. When you were all in a diagonal in the wedding section. I could barely see you.”

Nina is used to this; none of it will ever be enough for her mother. “She’s supposed to be in front of me. It’s part of the choreography.”

“She was showing off.”

“I’ll be sure to tell the director.” Nina laughs, kisses Mother on each of her smooth cheeks. “It’s late, I don’t want you to have to wait for me.” She embraces her again and wishes her good night, glad that she witnessed this important evening. Then she dodges the congratulations of the other dancers and heads back to the dressing room, exhausted. Cold stale air—perfume and old sweat. Nina unties her slippers, frees her tired feet, her poor blistered toes. She peels off her false eyelashes and places them back in their little case. On their little foam pillow, they look like centipedes.

A knock on the door. “Come in.”

“You were magnificent.”

Viktor, holding an armful of roses. Nina gives a start, nearly knocking the wooden stool over. “How did you find me?”

“An arduous process. I bribed the stage doorman. Here, these are for you.”

Most bouquets are just something easily grown, marigolds or
lupins, in winter artificial ones—nasturtiums and violets of orange and purple fabric. But roses…“So many!” Nina says, and counts to make sure there is an odd number; an even number would mean bad luck. Viktor says, “I wanted to give you something as beautiful as you.”

“They’re perfect,” she tells him, losing count. “Just like tonight. You’ve made it perfect.”

“Well, that remains to be seen,” he says. “Will you come dine with me?”

She manages to say, “Yes,” but as much as she wants to sound calm, her voice is shaking. “Just let me wash up. All this awful makeup.”

“I love it. You look like a Caspian call girl.”

The wardrobe mistress opens the door to take Nina’s costume, but seeing her still wearing it—and Viktor with her—turns away. “You go ahead and wash up, then,” Viktor says. “I’ll wait in the hall.” He steps out the door as swiftly as he arrived.

Quickly Nina rubs oil into her face and massages off the makeup Viktor claims to love. Even as she showers—in the good hot shower that is so much stronger than the one at home—the bird rustles in her rib cage. Drying off, buttoning herself into the bright pink brassiere she barely fills, wishing she had thought to wear the rayon dress…Meanwhile Polina has returned and is perched on her wooden stool, examining her raw toes. Nina asks, “Do I look all right?”

“Lovely.” Polina barely glances up, absorbed in bandaging her toes. Nina fits herself into her coat with its new trim and nestles a sheepskin turban tight on her head. But when she steps out to the corridor, there is only the long rack of costumes for tomorrow’s show, covered with a sheet. Her heart sinks—until she sees Viktor behind the rack, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette in a relaxed, slouching way, as if he comes here all the time. For the slightest second, Nina feels a fleeting doubt, or perhaps it is fear—that this
is some kind of a trick, that he is not who she thinks he is, that he doesn’t feel about her the way she feels about him. And what about that fair-haired woman from the party? Then Viktor sees Nina and grins, and the doubt and fear flit away.

At the Aragvi they sit at the back of the room, where a band is playing Georgian songs. Nina has been to a fine restaurant only a few times, and so she lets Viktor order for them: a bottle of Teliani wine, and fish salad and caviar to start. Shashlik for the main course.

“Did you always want be a poet?” she asks him. “When you were a child, I mean.”

“Not at all. Like every boy, I wanted to be a polar explorer.” He laughs. The band, aware of having an audience, has become noisy, and he has to raise his voice to tell Nina about growing up in a town outside Moscow, an only child, with his mother and maternal grandmother. “More of a village, really. My mother was a teacher, and it was my grandmother who raised me, since my father died shortly before I was born. She loved the outdoors. My real home is the woods, I always say.”

“My father died too,” Nina says. “When I was three. He had some kind of blood condition.” And then, “What subject did your mother teach?”

Viktor looks briefly surprised. “Languages,” he says quickly, as if unsure of which ones.

“That must be where your linguistic talent comes from.”

He smiles. “I suppose I have her to thank. Although I had no plans to become a poet. As soon as I was old enough, I enrolled in an FZU, to become a welder.” He tells her about his years at the factory school, and that despite his efforts he never quite excelled. “I had no talent for industrial work—although I didn’t want to admit it. The whole time I was apprenticed, I made up little songs and verses, just to keep me going. Or to keep me from admitting my own failure, I suppose. I wrote some of them down, and a teacher found them.
He sent them to a magazine that was printing an article about the Institute of Steel. I saw my poems there and felt a sense of accomplishment I never had as an apprentice welder. I’m still convinced my teachers purposely arranged things that way—so that I’d switch careers and get out of their school!” He takes a swig of wine. “Fortunately I was admitted to the Literary Institute after that.”

When the kebabs are served, he tells Nina about the poet from Leningrad who mentored him. There is something warm and direct about the way he speaks, an ease, an openness, his eyes looking right into hers. He describes being evacuated to Tashkent during the war, and his three years there with other artists—musicians, actors, filmmakers. “I’ve never felt such heat,” he says, gnawing contentedly on a piece of lamb. “It was the first time in my life I understood why people would want to sit in the shade instead of the sun.” He tells her about riding camels with the local Uzbeks, about eating fresh apricots, and picking mulberries from a tree just outside his window at the House of Moscow Writers. “Seventeen Karl Marx Street,” he says, dreamy with the memory. “And all around, almond trees.”

Then his face becomes serious. “Of course it was nothing we could enjoy—knowing our brothers were losing their lives each day. I wish I could have fought alongside them. I would have, if they’d let me.”

“Why wouldn’t they let you?”

“I have a hole in my heart. That I was born with. The doctors can hear it with a stethoscope.”

“A hole!”

“Well, that’s the simplified expression. Really it’s a valve that doesn’t quite close. Nothing lethal, although it does make my heartbeat somewhat irregular. It made me exempt from service.”

Nina recalls how she guessed, the first time she set eyes on him, that he hadn’t served. Yet clearly it is his status, and not his heart, that kept him from battle. Because really, in the end almost anyone
at all, no matter how ill or unqualified, ended up being sent to the front. Only his being a respected poet would have saved him from that fate—just as most of the Bolshoi folks were shipped off to Kuibyshev, far from harm’s way. But Nina simply nods as Viktor continues his story, telling her about his return to Moscow, and living in an artists’ building with his mother.