Russian Winter

by Daphne Kalotay

  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.

  “That’s why I wasn’t able to see you until tonight,” he adds. “She was unwell. For a week the doctor didn’t know what to do. But she made it through, I’m happy to say.”

  For the slightest moment, Nina wonders if he is telling the truth. She pictures Viktor’s mother like her own: a once-lovely woman running long errands, each day’s frustrations caught in the knots of her shawl. At last she dares to ask that other question:

  “That woman, with you at the party…”

  “Lilya, you mean? A stunning woman, isn’t she? An old friend. She lives in Leningrad now, but still visits her family here.”

  Nina tries not to show her feelings. A stunning woman…But Viktor seems to have decided the story is finished, and that his meal is too. He deposits his napkin on his now-empty plate, pushes the plate away, and smiles, that happy, untroubled look. The napkin, though, looks tormented—twisted tightly, as though Viktor has been wringing it all night.

  “And you?” he asks. “What about your family?”

  “There’s just me and my mother now. She works at a polyclinic. My father was a scene painter for the Opera. In fact, I suspect that’s why my mother married him. She’s always loved the theater, but she wasn’t brought up in that world. It’s because of her that I’m a dancer. Only recently did it occur to me that the ballet must have been her own dream—for herself, I mean.” As she says it, she pictures her mother’s delicate ankles, her sinewy calves, narrow but strong, like a doe’s. Immediately she feels guilty, wrong to have revealed Mother’s private sentiments. She turns to watch the band.

  Viktor doesn’t seem to mind. “You have such an elegant neck,” he says. “I suppose that’s a prerequisite for ballerinas—part of the audition, even. Is it? Do they measure the length of your neck?”

  Nina laughs. “It’s an optical illusion. We’re taught to go up on our toes and then, when we come down, leave our heads up there.” Though it sounds like she is teasing, it is just what she means. “In a way it’s a kind of magic.”

  “Indeed. Your neck is splendid. I would like to touch it again.”

  Blushing, the flare from her chest to her cheeks, Nina brings her hand to her neck, as if that might hide her hot skin.

  “A neck like yours should have all kinds of jewels, to show it off.”

  His bold statement—the trust it implies—delights her. She has no patience for those types who oppose personal property on principle, who make a point of saying so, as if to prove some sort of superiority. Like the family across the hall at home, who always comment disdainfully about everyone else’s belongings, anything not utterly necessary. Even Mother, with genuine humbleness, claims not to need more than she already owns. Never admits any longing for material goods, and ties a piece of rope around her skirt instead of a belt. Nina surely seems greedy in comparison.

  But with Viktor she again feels the confidence of their first meeting, when they shared the tangerine. It seems like forever since she has felt such closeness with anyone. “What I’ve always dreamed of, actually,” she says quietly, “are earrings.”

  “Earrings…yes.” Viktor narrows his eyes, as if envisioning something.

  “Ever since I was nine years old,” Nina says, and tells him about the woman at the hotel, about the diamonds in her earlobes. Though it risks sounding materialistic, she guesses a man like Viktor can see beyond such judgment. “I’d never seen anything like her. She might as well have come from outer space.”

  Viktor says, “You too shall have jewels in your ears, Butterfly. And strands of pearls so long they reach the floor. They’ll lie there in swirls, like puddles.” He grins then, the grin of a teacher’s favorite, of the boy who always has his way. As if all of life were a lark. There is so much life in that grin, Nina feels her own smile trying to match it. At the same time something inside her is frightened—of the incredible confidence this man possesses, as though the entire world belongs to him.

  And yet, that crumpled napkin, twisted tightly.

  When they have finished their meal, Viktor offers to accompany her home. This time Nina allows him to see the alley that leads to her building, half
hoping—and half terrified—that he might come with her and, in the darkness, touch her again the way he did in the Pobeda. Instead, Viktor says he will watch to see her safe inside the door; he has been nothing but gentlemanly all night, only once lightly taking her arm in his, a proper suitor. As Nina makes her way down the alley to her door, she feels slight disappointment at the same time that she is thrilled. Whatever this is between herself and Viktor seems to have become something respectable and real.

  Only days later, when she is home, wondering when she will next see him, does Nina again recall the cloth of the napkin wrung tight. When a week has gone by and the roses have faded—and she still hasn’t heard from Viktor—she clips a few inches off the stems. She brings a pot of water to a boil and dunks the fresh ends in, holding them there briefly as the steam reaches up at her hand. Quickly, her hand red from the heat, she transfers the bouquet back to the vase and refills it with cold water. Because if she can just keep these roses alive…

  Within an hour the flowers have perked up.

  LOT 23

  Perfume Flask. Silver, marked sterling. 1¾ in. long from top of lid. Flacon 1¼ in. wide. Carnelian screw-off stopper. Handpainted butterfly design on off-white porcelain over glass. Weight 18 g. $1,000–1,500

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Good god, Carla,” Grigori said, entering the Department of Foreign Languages. “You smell positively edible.”

  “It’s that new cleaner the janitors are using. Pineapple something.”

  Grigori’s gloves as he removed them were stiff from the cold. “A whiff of the tropics—how subversive.” Outside it was snowing again, tiny dry flakes that blew about in a faint shimmer. Grigori had taught his graduate seminar, “Poetry of the Acmeists,” while still musing in frustration about the Revskaya broadcast last night. Yet his students, with their passionate readings of the assigned poems and their almost tender interest in the Russian language itself, had cheered him, distracted him, made his existence feel briefly necessary.

  He entered his office and closed the door behind him, removed his coat and hat. This room too smelled like a piña colada. Lighting a cigarette, Grigori leaned back into the firm weight of the swivel chair. Across from him, framed degrees on the walls displayed their indecipherable calligraphy, the Latin that no one any longer knew how to translate. Since Christine’s death he often found he needed to look back at them, to be reminded of his accomplishments. He was somebody, had made himself into somebody: Grigori Solodin, chair of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, owner of a restored Victorian (the bottom floor rented out to another couple) and a sturdy Volvo that had made numerous trips to Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, and various bed-and-breakfasts across the Berkshires. The wooden plaque on the wall across from him declared him Professor of the Year, and though that year was long past, it was a year that had indeed existed. At the same time, Grigori supposed he might just take down that plaque. There was something pathetic about it, like those faded newspaper reviews posted in dreary restaurant windows.

  No, he decided, tapping ashes into the little dish he kept in his desk drawer, it was important to leave the plaque on the wall, for those moments when his only comfort came through concrete objects: the thank-you letter, still tacked on his bulletin board, from the Tolstoy specialist; the note of congratulations for his second book—a comparative approach to three Soviet poets—from a revered editor (now dead); the announcement about the award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. He had been in this same office for so long, who knew what he might find if he ever dared to clean it out. At least one drawer of his desk contained mail dated from the previous decade.

  He had expected too much, that was the trouble, he told himself now. Even in giving in, he had expected too much. For he felt no lighter, really, having surrendered the amber necklace. That chunky oval wedge with the surprise inside…Of the small collection of objects in his possession, the pendant was the only one Grigori had ever shown to Nina Revskaya. After all, it was one of a kind, the only one that felt truly powerful. Of course the letters too had once seemed that way, utterly convincing, but that was when he was young and stupid…. cool and delicious, the checkered shade of those branches. I sometimes think, that is what I live for, days like that, perfect.

  Allowing the thought, Grigori walked over to the tall, broad bookshelf—a wall of books, a pleasure to him. In one eyeful he could take in the sum of his knowledge. Now he turned to what he mentally referred to as “the Elsin shelf.” He slid out a slim volume in hardcover, Selected Poems of Viktor Elsin: A Bilingual Edition. In smaller print was “Translated and with a Foreword by Grigori Solodin.” He was still genuinely proud of this work—unlike his dissertation, Three Soviet Poets: A Comparative Study, which he rarely looked back at, or The Socialist Realism Reader, an anthology that had required all kinds of annoying legal permissions in order to reprint the various selections. Thoughout his time spent on both of those projects, Grigori had been working simultaneously on the Elsin translations. They were a labor of love and had nothing to do with academic hurdles. The book had had a print run of just five hundred copies.

  Perhaps that was why he kept all praise for his translations in a separate file in the big metal cabinet. These congratulations came not so much from scholars as from poets—artists whose talents Grigori could only hope to imitate. One had called his work “as close an approximation to Elsin’s voice as I can imagine even myself ever producing.” Another, in a review journal, praised Grigori’s “fidelity to the formal constraints of Elsin’s work while capturing the easy exuberance of his phrasing.” Even Zoltan, who as a youth in postwar Hungary had been force-fed Russian in school, said Grigori had “a poet’s ear” for the nuances of Elsin’s verse.

  The fact was, as popular as Elsin had been in his lifetime, he could never be called “major.” Much of his work’s beauty came from its simplicity, the very simplicity that had made him popular not only with the public but also with his publishers, who had of course worked according to government decree. His earliest poems celebrated the countryside of his youth with the direct simplicity of country folk, using humor and argot, playing with language while safely following official regulations of topic and tone; his lathe-turners were always handsome, his milkmaids always fair. As his writing matured, he had managed as well as anyone could while faithfully remaining within the stylistic and topical guidelines. Though, in selecting Elsin’s poems for translation, Grigori had weeded out a good bunch of somewhat facile verse, other poems were quite moving—beautiful, even. Patchwork shade, pine needle carpet / Ocher-resin drops of sun. The air / Hums…

  Sometimes it all seemed so futile—Grigori’s efforts, his curiosity, each small discovery. His very profession, even, and the embarrassing fact that his dearest concern remained, in the end, closed to him. He had spent fifty years on this planet for what, exactly? To write endless letters of recommendation for students named Courtney and Heather and Brian, so that they could head off to their Semesters-at-Sea or wherever it was they went to continue the endless keg party that was an American college education.

  A knock—probably Carla, to say something cross about the smoke. Grigori placed the book back into its slot on the shelf, then went to the door and opened it warily. “Oh, Zoltan, hello, come in.”

  Zoltan entered looking, as always, slightly hunchbacked, something about the way his broken shoulder had healed. Or perhaps it was from carrying the grubby plastic bags stuffed with notebooks and papers everywhere. “I found something interesting in my journal last night, that made me think of you. A reference to your ballerina. And a little thing she said about her husband.”

  Your ballerina. For years Zoltan had called her that, since Grigori was the “expert” regarding her husband’s work.

  “I was reading my journal and came upon a description of a party—quite a party, I must say, as proper as it supposedly was. Princess Margaret, well…” He laughed to himself about something he decided not to say, then reached
into one of the plastic bags. “I marked it for you.”

  “It’s very thoughtful of you,” Grigori said, though Zoltan’s past discoveries of Elsin-related diary references had never amounted to much. Although Zoltan had met Nina Revskaya briefly in London, he had known her only slightly. Now he opened a somewhat battered-looking journal and ran his finger down a page. “It’s not much, really just…where did it go? Ah, here. Do you want to hear the whole thing, or just the mention of Viktor Elsin?”

  “The whole thing, of course.” Grigori retrieved his cigarette and took a long drag.

  In a slightly louder voice, Zoltan read: “The Butterfly” was there, looking more like a praying mantis—long and harshly folded into herself. It is always surprising to me how very slight these ballerinas are in person. She was positively draped in pearls, and herself possessed a pale luminosity. She speaks excellent English, always correct, if with syntactical quirks I cannot replicate here. At first our chatter was quite on the surface but then she softened. Isabel and Lady Edgar were at the other side of the room performing what I believe was a salacious song—despite my so-called “splendid” English, I did not catch many of the references—and Nina looked only slightly amused. I suspect she did not understand all the words, either. She confessed to me that she had been shocked the first time she attended one of Roger’s soirées, said she had never seen people so casual, sitting on the floor and kicking their shoes off. One of those differences you notice then gradually forget, she said. I already know what she means. Little things I found fascinating just one year ago I’ve now nearly forgotten. But the Butterfly still didn’t look comfortable, and when someone later brought up Margot—Zoltan looked up at Grigori to add, “Fonteyn, of course”—it was clear the rumors are true and the two no longer get along. Not that she said so, but it was evident from her manner, the sharpness in her eyes and her bones.