Russian Winter

by Daphne Kalotay

  “Thank you. How nice to see you.” Nina tries to look past Lida, to see if she can catch the man’s eye.

  “And I absolutely adored you last month in Coppélia. You have such a lightness to you.” Nina danced the “Prayer” variation (though she dreams of one day having the role of Swanilda). “It’s my favorite ballet, I must say. Because it has such a happy ending. Simplistic, I suppose, but isn’t a happy ending what we all really want?”

  “Yes!” Nina laughs. But past Lida’s shoulder she sees, with a droop in her heart, that the handsome man is no longer there.

  “It’s so wonderfully comic,” Lida is saying. “Even stupid Frantz is happy at the end.”

  Lida smells just like the foreign minister’s wife. A heavy scent, some kind of perfume, dying flowers mixed with overripe fruit. There is something familiar about it, something Nina has smelled before.

  “Oh,” Lida says, “there’s my husband signaling to me.” She nods at him, and the fur across her shoulder nods too. Nina cannot help but notice that it is slightly decayed.

  That’s what the smell reminds her of. A dead rodent.

  Nina looks down, somehow dismayed, and strokes the borrowed fur on her shoulders.

  Under her breath Lida says, “Time to go.”

  “Already?” Nina hasn’t even tasted the desserts, and quickly pours herself a cup of coffee. But Lida says, “Have a good night,” and hurries to her husband.

  Sipping her coffee anxiously, Nina sees that the other Party folk also are leaving. A mass departure, as if choreographed, the men with their five o’clock shadows and their suits from the Moscow Tailoring Combine, and the wives who smell like their furs. Like in Cinderella, when the clock strikes midnight. The coffee tastes of chicory.

  Not far from Nina, a woman is making stiff commands at a Siamese servant. Perhaps this is her house, not the foreign minister’s at all. Or perhaps it too is a sort of theater, a temporary haven like the Bolshoi, grand and lush—and now everyone is being kicked out. Nina notices that the curtains on the window across from her are frayed, and that the glass itself is cracked. “Nyet!” the woman hisses to the servant, who hurries off, looking confused.

  That is when Nina sees Polina leaving with Arkady Lowny. Probably the tall, handsome man, too, has left, along with his shapely wife. Nina hastily spreads more bread with butter, eats it hungrily—though there is something ruined about the food, now, too, the salmon and sturgeon picked to bits, and a trail of something pinkish where the desserts were. From a large wooden bowl holding a pyramid of tangerines, Nina plucks one off the top and holds it in her palm. It fits there exactly, its skin smooth, cool, perfectly orange; the only things Nina ever sees this bright in winter are the Pastorale costumes in Shchelkunchik. She thinks of her mother at home, her same old black bread and cabbage soup, her net shopping bag limp with a few bruised root vegetables. Looking quickly about, Nina opens her purse and drops the tangerine inside. She shuts it, then takes another and cuts the skin with her thumbnail, releasing its bright, sharp scent. Holding it up to her face, she breathes in.

  “Good for congestion, is it?”

  The man—the tall one—is next to her. Nina feels her heartbeats rush, wondering what exactly he saw. But she manages to calmly peel another swatch of tangerine skin, white veins pulling away from the orange flesh, and hands the piece of peel to the man. “Just pinch it a little.”

  He takes the peel from her as carefully as if it were gold leaf. Then he folds it back, bringing it up to his nose and closing his eyes. Watching his nostrils flare, his lips curling slightly, Nina supposes he must look like this when he is asleep and having pleasant dreams. Just thinking it makes her feel she is witnessing something private—too private for someone she has just met. But then, he might have witnessed her taking the tangerine. When he opens his eyes, she looks down, afraid that he has noticed her staring.

  “For you,” she says, pulling apart the tangerine, holding a half out to him. They eat the wedges in silence. The sweet juice prickles at Nina’s tongue, and all at once she is overwhelmed, by the bright taste in her mouth, and by the distinct sensation that she has entered someplace she isn’t quite meant to be.

  When he has finished the last of the tangerine, the man grins at her, as if they have shared in a prank. This grin is stunning in its boyishness, the grin of someone utterly unworried. Nina has not seen such a grin in an adult ever. It is as if he has never seen hardship, never felt hunger. Even the way his teeth pile into each other pleases her, because it is the only thing she has seen of him that isn’t smooth and aligned. She finds it attractive on him, this very slight crookedness.

  Perhaps this is why she decides she can ask him. She makes her voice so quiet it isn’t even a whisper. “Why is everyone leaving all at once?”

  The man looks like he might laugh. “New to these events, I see.” More quietly, he adds, “It’s always this way. Show up as is your duty, get as drunk as possible, and leave as soon as you’ve filled up on dessert.”

  His frank talk emboldens her. “But the guests from Holland—”

  “You yourself know, surely, not to be friendly with strangers.” Again he looks as if he has told a joke.

  “Ah, Viktor Alekseyevich, there you are.”

  Coming toward them is Vladimir Frolov, from the Society for the Dissemination of Political Knowledge. A frequent presence at the ballet, he is a short, beaming man with a friendly, somewhat doughy face. Hair parted in the middle and graying at the temples. “I’ve been meaning to give you my congratulations. Oh, good evening, Butterfly, you’re still here, how wonderful.” He lifts her hand—the one that mere minutes ago held the tangerine—to kiss it, while Viktor says, “I agree. Quite wonderful.”

  “Did you know,” Frolov asks her, “that our dear friend here has received excellent notices for his latest book?”

  Nina doesn’t dare ask what kind of book. It appears she should already know.

  “Excellent notices,” Frolov continues. “I look forward to reading it myself. Nina, beware of this man. He is a poet of devastating talent.”

  Nina says the first thing that comes to her: “You don’t look like a poet.”

  The man named Viktor raises his eyebrows. “And what should a poet look like?”

  “Sleepy” is what comes to mind. Both Viktor and Frolov laugh.

  “Rumpled, I mean. But in an otherworldly way.”

  “It’s you who are otherworldly,” Vladimir Frolov exclaims. “Isn’t that right, Viktor?”

  Viktor gives a slow nod. “Like you’ve drifted in on a raft of stars.”

  “See that?” Vladimir Frolov says, his eyes comically wide. “He really is a poet.”

  Nina says, “Or perhaps he just has a way with words.”

  “Words have their way with me,” Viktor says. “Sometimes they won’t even let me sleep.”

  “Well,” Nina says, “I congratulate you on your new book.”

  “I’ll give you a copy.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid I never read anymore.” Though it is the truth (the ballet leaves her no free time), she worries it sounds rude, and adds, “I used to love to read when I was little, but now all I have time for are the notices on Gorky Street.”

  “We’ll have to change that.”

  Frolov looks annoyed at having been briefly excised from their chatter. “More than a poet, you see?” he says. “He has a good eye, not just a good ear; see how quickly he managed to find the most beautiful woman in the room? I forbid you to monopolize her. Come, both of you. I’m taking you for a snow drive!”

  He ushers them away from the buffet table, toward a small cluster of people he has already rounded up. Nina can’t help feeling uncomfortable, surrounded by so many new faces. There is a woman who sings in the Opera, and another functionary like Frolov, from the Central Council of Trade Unions, with thick, wild hair and rosy cheeks. His wife, looking like something out of the past, wears dark lace and holds a gold lorgnette. To his other side is another man, lar
ger and stockier, with a yellow mustache, looking very drunk—he is a character actor from the Moscow Art Theatre. “Good evening,” they all greet each other, with practiced, if false, poise, while Nina realizes, with the thrill of surprise, that for the first time in her life she is in a group of the privileged few. The very spontaneity of this outing—not part of a club or association or organization of some kind—is a privilege.

  “Yes, yes, bundle up, let’s go,” says Vladimir Frolov, taking from his pocket a key, dangling it in front of them.

  Nina retrieves her bag and costume and coat and follows the group outside, where the street is white. It has continued to snow, and now the flakes are tiny, like sparkling dust. “Oh!” Nina slips on ice. To her disappointment it is the big stocky character actor, not Viktor, who catches her.

  “You’re light as a feather,” the man says, and she can smell the alcohol on his breath.

  “Here we are.” Vladimir Frolov’s face glows with pride. In front of them is a big black Pobeda crowned with fresh snow. The men brush the drifts off with their hands until the car is uncovered, round and shiny. Opening the back door, Frolov cries, “Please, hop in!”

  Three of the others pile into the front, and for a moment Nina worries that Viktor is among them. But no, he is still here, and Nina slides in beside him, on this seat that smells like tobacco. She can practically hear the wardrobe mistress scolding her, for dropping her costume in a crumpled mass at her feet. On Viktor’s other side are the thick-haired man and his wife. Very casually, Viktor drapes his arm around Nina’s shoulders. She is shocked; the most any man ever dares in public is to take a woman by the arm. But Viktor’s face shows nothing. His arm might as well be resting on the back of a chair and not her shoulders with the borrowed white fur. Nina decides to act as if she doesn’t notice.

  The car is cold, and her breath makes a mist. Frolov turns the key and gives a few tries at the motor. Though the streets and sidewalks have been cleared earlier, a new sheath of snow has accumulated. Now the motor roars. Frolov pulls wildly out into the road and begins driving toward the center of town, and Nina feels herself tossed lightly, first toward the door and then toward Viktor. The others are oohing and aahing at the glittering night, and at Frolov’s swerving.

  Looking out the window, Nina thinks, For once the city looks beautiful. Most of the year she finds it drab, everything covered with a gray-brown film of mud or dust. Now the snow has made it clean, sparkling. “Moscow never looks quite so beautiful, does it, as when it’s all covered with snow.” She says it quietly, so that only Viktor will hear.

  “The opposite of a woman,” Viktor answers. He too speaks almost in a whisper, his breath warm on her ear. “Our city looks best when everything’s covered up. And a woman is most beautiful when there’s nothing in the way.”

  Nina feels her shoulders tense, at his nerve, his insinuation. But she follows her instinct and removes the white fur from around her collar, placing it on her lap, where the folds of her coat open in a V. As she does so, she affects a bored expression, in case Viktor is watching her face.

  He moves his hand just the slightest bit forward. Nina feels his fingertips touching the side of her neck, stroking her skin. Heat shoots through her, while Vladimir carries on a commentary from up front, calling out, “There is nothing like it, I tell you, nothing like driving in fresh snow!”

  She wants to look at Viktor but doesn’t want to turn her head. She can see at her periphery that he is still facing forward, as if she weren’t even there.

  Frolov and the others are laughing at something, and Nina sees that they are now on the Arbat, sliding past movie theaters and bookstores and commission shops. “Overtake and Surpass” banners ripple tensely in the wind. It is so late, only the plainclothes police are out, looking forlorn among the drifts of snow. In the windows are New Year’s trees covered in tinsel, and glittery images of Father Frost. With the decorations sparkling, the street itself looks like something out of a fairy tale. And although music filters as usual from the big outdoor speakers, the snow mutes it, makes it sound far away.

  The drunk man in the front seat is mumbling the words to a song Nina doesn’t know. She isn’t drunk at all, cannot afford to be, with her dancing. What about Viktor, she wonders: Is he drunk? Is that what has emboldened him to put his fingers where they are now, stroking her neck, so lightly, as if they just happened to land there? And what about that woman, the blond shapely one…

  In the front seat, the man’s singing becomes louder. He has switched to a song from the end of the war, “Glory to Comrade Stalin.” Nina feels herself tense; the man’s drunkenness makes the song sound, just slightly, mocking.

  “Too bad it’s not our operatic friend instead,” the man next to Viktor says, clearing his throat somewhat anxiously, as the drunk man continues, off-key.

  Frolov, clearly eager to set everyone at ease, calls out, “The green snake gets the best of us.” He has to raise his voice over the man’s. But the man must sense the problem; he switches his singing, to a folk song that quickly fades into nothing.

  Snow floating down again, flakes bigger than before. The Pobeda skids through the white streets, but Nina feels safe despite the speed and these strangers and this man’s fingertips on her neck. Odd, how protected she feels—by the snow, the sidewalks glinting with it, and by the warmth and absurdity of all these bodies packed into the car, tossed against each other with each swerve, this random congregation, like characters in a joke.

  Now the Pobeda has slowed. Slinking along, past floodlit Red Square—empty and vast, the poor stiff soldiers freezing on each corner, guarding Lenin’s tomb and the old round-walled execution block and the spruce trees lining the walls of the Kremlin. “It’s coming down harder now,” the woman in the front seat says. “Look how thick the flakes are.”

  But Nina is looking just ahead, toward the south end of the square, where St. Basil’s Cathedral, marvelous and absurd, stands like bonbons on display. The rest of the city may still be in tatters, but St. Basil’s is dazzling, freshly restored, its striped domes patterned with bright swirls of color. “Somebody made that,” Nina says, with surprise. “People made that.” Her realization is genuine; she has never, so clearly and precisely, thought of it that way. Seeing it in the midst of the incredible snow, she is aware, unmistakably, that that vision in the distance is the product of human effort.

  It is at that moment, as the car creeps past the whipped peaks of St. Basil’s, that Viktor lifts his hand away from Nina’s neck.

  She feels him swoop a lock of hair back over her ear. Then he pulls his arm back, no longer around her shoulders, and with one easy motion slides his hand under the white fur in her lap, to where the edges of her coat meet, and then between the folds, lightly pressing the fabric of her dress between her legs. It is the back of his hand, as if it just happened to land there, his knuckles against her, nudging her thighs apart. Nina takes a quick breath, but says nothing.

  The car swerves to the right, and Frolov gives a yip of delight. The couple in the back laugh fearfully as he fishtails toward the bridge. Nina closes her eyes, alarmed by the new feeling inside her. She leans her head against Viktor’s shoulder.

  “Aha!” cries Frolov. “You see what this car can do!” The other women squeal, while Nina swallows hard. In the front seat, the drunk man has begun to protest, saying he does not feel well. “It’s too much,” Nina hears him say, and Frolov says, “All right, then, I’ll stop.” He drives more slowly.

  Nina closes her eyes against the new feeling overtaking her. The couple next to Viktor is debating something about the desserts at the reception, while the drunk man in front continues to make complaints. Nina feels her hips shifting, her neck tightening. She is terrified of what is happening. The feeling is rising, her stomach fluttering, and without a thought she reaches out toward Viktor’s other hand, to grab it. Holding it tightly as the car continues forward, she struggles to act as though nothing is happening.

  When th
ey drop the drunk man off, Nina lets go of Viktor’s hand and moves hers away. His other hand moves only slightly, opening up so that his palm now rests on her thigh. It remains there as Nina’s pulse gradually slows, as Frolov stops to drop the older couple at their building, and continues on to deposit the opera singer at hers. By then the pounding of Nina’s heart has returned to normal. “And you, Miss Butterfly?” Frolov asks, as he again swerves out into the street. “Where shall I deliver you?”

  Nina gives him an address, not of the building where she lives with her mother, but of the larger street that abuts it. Viktor’s hand pulls away then, out from under the coat and back to his own lap. Nina straightens herself and reaches up to tidy her hair, as if it too has been flustered.

  “Here we are!” Vladimir Frolov cries happily, slowing the car to a stop.

  Nina picks up the fur from her lap and brings it back to her neck. She does not want to leave the side of this man whose very existence was unimaginable to her just hours ago. It is the first time in her life that she has felt this way, the first time she has wanted to feel someone else’s skin against hers, the first time the heat inside her has become something all of its own.

  “Good night,” she tells them, as Frolov steps out of the front seat to open her door.

  “Indeed,” says Viktor, and takes her hand, not at the palm but further down, facing up, so that his fingertips are at her wrist bone. Nina is speechless, because of what he has done to her body. Surely he can feel her pulse.

  He kisses her hand—but on the inside, toward the top of her palm, as Frolov opens her door. Nina eases herself away from Viktor, takes her bag and purse and costume up from where they have been crushed beneath her knees. She really will get a talking-to from the wardrobe mistress. She finds her voice again to thank her host. “Good night,” as Frolov returns to the driver’s seat. Then she steps toward the building that is not hers, where a guard stands passively on patrol. The car lurches away with Viktor inside, and Nina reaches for her neck, for the borrowed fur; it feels ruffled, as if having gone through a blizzard.