Russian Winter

by Daphne Kalotay

  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.

  BOOK II

  LOT 50

  Tiara. Rhinestone and Austrian crystal, h. 1¾ in., dia. 5.5 in., plated in sterling silver, comb tines on each end. $800–1,000

  CHAPTER NINE

  In 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:

  Thursday. Gray and rainy but I like it, I do, it seems to express, I think, all the beauty and sadness of being merely human, so many of us plodding along in our overcoats, aware and unaware of who we are and our place in the rainy world. Went to a luncheon put on by a member of the House of Lords who thinks himself a poet. Who am I to contradict him, though I do wish he would use less alliteration. Samuel was there with his latest model girlfriend. I thought I knew her, then realized it was her face I had seen, without ever speaking to her, on so many advertisements and magazine covers. All around, in fact, were recognizable persons: MPs, and the blond folksinger whose name I can never remember…Something came over me, a longing for the wet air outside, I can’t explain it, only that I felt I had to separate myself or I would become less real, less genuine. So I took my leave, early and perhaps rudely, but with that priceless feeling of sudden, exquisite freedom. It was as I was leaving that I saw the Butterfly herself, Nina Revskaya, with her sharply pretty face and dark hair. A sadness about her that I find quite beautiful, something just under the surface. Though she can’t yet be forty, age shows in her hands—big, painful-looking knuckles—and in her eyes, which are a magnificent green, bright and sharp yet somehow equally pained. She surprised me by following me to the coatroom. I didn’t notice until I turned around, ready to put on my coat, and there she was in a green wool dress with a fur collar. I wanted to tell you something, she said. When we spoke at the Christmas party, when you asked me about my husband and his poetry. I want you to know why I think that.

  She sat down on the divan all in one movement,
a Z folding itself primly, hands together on her lap, no space between her knees or ankles. “There was a day one time,” she said, “when I showed frustration at the situation in my country. My husband did not share my anger. I yelled at him, ‘How can you be this way? How can you act as if nothing is wrong?’ He walked away, because of course it was dangerous to do what I was doing. Later that day, my husband came and sat down next to me and said to me, so quiet, he said, ‘Don’t you see, I have to believe in him.’ He meant Stalin. He said, ‘I have to believe. Otherwise, how can I get up out of bed in the morning?’”

  Her face barely moved as she said this, but her intonation changed, so that I wondered if as she said it she was hearing his voice. She stood and I would like to say she looked unburdened, but she did not. She wished me good day and walked out of the room.

  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.

  NIGHT SWIMMING

  Black velvet night, pinned wide and high

  By pinprick stars. Faces under moonlight.

  Faint echoes float atop the river.

  Our reckless splashes toss them here and there.

  How very young we were, one floating year

  Ago. Wet tresses draped our ears.

  And in the air, the hum of crickets chanting

  Apologies we could not, did not, hear.

  Gone, gone, the forest’s past perfection:

  Patchwork shade, pine needle carpet,

  Ocher-resin drops of sun. The air

  Hums…Unseen, the nightingale, too late,

  Thrums its stubborn song—caught somewhere

  Between the deep black water and sky.

  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?

  THE 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.