Russian Winter

by Daphne Kalotay

  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.

  Blur of days and nights, of weeks and now months, as she learns new roles, one after the other, Kitri instead of the Queen of the Dryads, Princess Aurora instead of the Lilac Fairy. Her curtain call has become that of a star, the entrance just a bit slower, more stately, taking her time. She is allowed requests—extra safety pins and greasepaint, and more clips for her hair—and before performance nights spends all day in bed with her feet up on a pillow. Already she has learned to ignore the envy and faint malice that waft her way from some of the other dancers.

  Her partner is Petr Raade, beloved by the public, with a haughty bearing and the most daring of jumps. Other times she is partnered by Yuri Lipovetsky, another great showman. Four years ago, on a night when Stalin himself was in attendance, Yuri was called into the Great Leader’s box for a private meeting. This story Nina has heard numerous times, Yuri describing, in great detail, how Stalin sat there behind a table, very serious, with a bowl of hard-boiled eggs in front of him. “He told me,” Yuri informs anyone who will listen, “that he found my style ‘reflective, especially in the shoulders.’”

  For four years, Yuri has been trying to tease some meaning out of this comment. When he asks Nina for her interpretation, she dares suggest that perhaps it doesn’t mean much at all. After all, Stalin doesn’t possess a dancer’s vocabulary; perhaps he was simply trying to think of something to say.

  “He’s our great leader, Nina, he must have meant something.”

  “But he isn’t a dancer. Maybe he didn’t know quite what he meant. Or how to say what he meant.”

  Yuri squints at her. She has been too bold, to suggest that the Great Leader didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “What I meant was—”

  “I know. But still, it must mean something.”

  Tête-à-têtes like this, with one of the most famous stars of the Bolshoi…Nina dances premieres now, and receives fan mail, and watches performances from a red armchair in the spacious, satin-lined director’s box. Yet her routine remains the same, back and forth to rehearsals and performances and the obligatory political hour. Sewing satin ribbons onto her slippers, soaking the heels in warm water, bending the shanks back and forth. Mending the holes in her stockings, carefully pulling the threads back up with a tiny hook. Mondays—her day off—she spends what time she can with Mother, and in the evening scurries from one solo recital to the next, and at last rests her feet very late, dropping into bed limp as the day’s lingerie. Time with Viktor has been reduced to mere scraps of morning, of late night, and the occasional precious afternoon in between. She loses track of which man Polina is in love with, of what is happening between Vera and Gersh. Though they still have their nights at the Aurora—vodka, spicy radish salad, cold celery and beets with sour cream—Nina is rarely able to join them, since, despite dancing in fewer Bolshoi shows, she now performs on her nights off, too. It is how the top dancers earn more on the side: private concerts and parties, and solos at the cinema before the films start. And so on her days “off” Nina dances even more than other days. And of course there are more diplomatic events of the sort where she first met Viktor.

  She is even given a new dressing room, larger and at stage level, shared with the one other young premiere danseuse. Back into her little sack go the contents of her dressing table, her eau de cologne and good luck charms. Vera and Polina are not present when she cleans out her drawer and removes her sweater and leg warmers, tights and leotard, from the peg on the wall.

  She takes a last look at the little room where so many of her dreams—of the ballet, and of romantic love—first became real. And yet it is just a bleak little space, with its bare lightbulb and austere walls. The yellowed newspaper articles by Polina’s aesthetician are no longer tacked up, shrine-like, in her corner; Polina has instead begun following Vera’s much simpler beauty regimen (lanolin soap and lukewarm water) as if it might turn Polina into a beauty, too.

  Something else important happens that year—and continues, Nina notices. Something that has nothing to with the ballet. The city, life in their city, is improving. The shops on Gorky Street have more goods than last year, and food is no longer scarce, plenty of crabmeat and caviar. The fabrics, even the cuts, of dresses have improved—are of better quality and more varied. Mother even accepts a new skirt Nina buys for her, of a lovely flower pattern. When in November the new shoes arrive from Czechoslovakia, there is an array of colors and styles, in canvas as well as the usual squeaky imitation leather.

  No more live wires dangling here and there. Buildings are re-painted, loose stones reset, holes in the sidewalk filled. New apartment houses are rising everywhere, immense “high houses” with big square towers that grow in tiers, taller than anything Nina has ever seen. Across the city, construction cranes stretch into the sky like the skeletons of some prehistoric animal.

  Just as Viktor always says—he was right after all. After so many years, things really are, finally, better.

  Worker girls are repaving the streets. Passing Manezhnaya Square, Nina watches them unloading bricks from trucks, shoveling gravel, pouring hot asphalt, steam reaching at their ankles in the brisk air. They are her age, these girls—early twenties, perhaps younger—in flimsy skirts, headkerchiefs tucked into the collars of their quilted jackets. Some drive steamrollers slowly along, like royalty atop ceremonial elephants. But of course they are nothing like royalty; they are country girls brought in from the steppes, living in barracks on the outskirts of the city, carried back home each evening piled onto freight trucks like so much cargo…. As Nina hurries by, she is acutely, uncomfortably, aware of them lugging and lifting, smoothing the hot asphalt, transforming the square with their own physical force.

  She reminds herself that she has her own burdens; all week she has felt the weight of a predicament of her own. She turns away to avoid the sight of the girls mopping their faces with their neckerchiefs. Off to the side a girl is leaning on a shovel, her head down. Though Nina tries not to look, she can’t help but see. The girl’s shoulders heave as she cries silently.

  When Nina arrives home that evening, Viktor, reclined on the settee where he always writes, is holding a glass of liquor, looking tired and somehow sad.

  “What is it?” Nina asks. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, it was to be expected. It can’t be helped.” He takes a swig from his glass. “The necessary speeches.” The Writers Union meeting, he must mean. His voice drops very low. “Hard to sit through, though. A very long speech.”

  “About…?”

  A lazy nod, eyes half closed, as if she ought to know.

  Of course: the cosmopolites. “Bezrodnye kosmopolity” is the phrase one hears, more and more these days. That and “alien bourgeois elements.” But it is that first one, “rootless cosmopolitan
,” that Nina finds most telling. The usual officially cryptic language, such a brilliantly awkward substitute for “wandering Jew.” Nina lowers her head as Viktor continues, in a whisper, “All the while Leo Stern was right next to me, just sitting quietly. Having to act as if it wasn’t about him at all.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I know that.”

  “What I mean is, there’s nothing you can do.”

  “Of course not.” His voice returns to normal decibels. “It has to be said. Antipatriotism…” A loud sigh. Viktor gulps from his glass. “We have Tolstoy, we have Mayakovsky, Gorky. Our work doesn’t need the West. What we need, as Comrade Stalin himself has said, are Soviet classics. ‘Revolutionary clarity’…” As he takes another gulp of liquor, Nina sees that his hand is shaking.

  “It’s all right,” she tells him. “You can’t be expected to…defend people.” But as she says it, she hears another thought: that someone might do that—someone with a death wish. That must be why she is saying this; she is telling Viktor, Don’t even think of speaking out. Don’t put yourself in danger. Stay safe. For me.

  “I happened to see Gersh yesterday,” he tells her. “By chance, on Prechistenka Street. We were walking toward each other. I saw him just when he noticed me—and he ducked his head and looked away. He was going to walk right past me. I’d been over at his place two days ago! I went up to him and said What are you doing? He said, ‘I’m trying to make it easy for my friends to ignore me.’”

  Nina closes her eyes. “Oh, Gersh…He knows we wouldn’t do that.”

  “There was another article in the paper,” Viktor says. “Yesterday. Not about him, specifically, but his name was mentioned.”

  Nina realizes that she is avoiding looking him in the eye. There is nothing more to say—not here, at least, not indoors, so many people around. She joins Viktor on the settee, pulling him close and laying her head on his shoulder. She waits in silence, until she is sure he has nothing else he wants to say. Now is as good a time as any to tell him.

  She had planned on doing so somewhere outdoors, the only place one can have a truly private conversation. A walk outside, just the two of them. But to suggest that now, the mere words “Let’s go for a walk, what do you say?” might provoke all sorts of anxieties, wondering what she could want to discuss—and she doesn’t want her news to be treated as much at all.

  She takes a preparatory breath and glances toward Madame’s door. The light is off; she must be sleeping. Just outside their door, someone is talking on the hall telephone, saying, “Yes, but—” and sighing, over and over.

  Very quietly, Nina tells Viktor what she still hasn’t quite accepted herself. “I’m expecting.”

  Viktor’s face changes—brightens so visibly, it takes Nina by surprise. “Sweetheart. How…utterly magnificent.”

  Nina looks down. “But I can’t have a baby,” she whispers. “Not now. It’s impossible. It’s not the right time. I’ve been principal barely three months.”

  Viktor doesn’t understand just how difficult it is to return to dancing after a pregnancy—the toll that childbirth takes on the body, how it alters it, permanently, despite so much physical fine-tuning and careful refinement. Not to mention the lost time, so many months away from her career and training, and in these prime years. Even so, Nina never would have thought she would make this decision. Just a year or two ago the idea of having a baby with Viktor made her feel warm inside, something romantic about the very idea—not just of a child but of a family, their own family, creating one together. Now, though, it is clear to her that that dream will have to wait, and that this must be what it means to be an adult: the difficulty of choice, of decisions that really do matter.

  Viktor readjusts his expression. “Right, of course.” He breathes loudly through his nostrils. “Yes, well.”

  “I wanted you to know.” Her voice is nearly silent, she whispers so softly. “I’ve arranged an appointment. Monday.” The procedure is illegal, could mean two years in jail—but everyone does it. Well, everyone who can pay for it. Nina knows from other ballerinas whom to go to, how to proceed. Viktor gives a small nod, and it occurs to Nina that she must have chosen to tell him now, here, in this building teeming with people, on purpose: to avoid a long discussion, to have it over and done with.

  Viktor reaches out and pulls her toward him, slowly, across the settee. “Come here.” For the first time Nina sees in his face the very quality he always—only he, no one else—has seemed to lack. Resignation. The resigned look of tired eyes, of heavy shoulders.

  Nina lies alongside him as he places his arms around her, a strong grip that is somehow more than physical. Closing her eyes, she feels herself enveloped. Only when she has fully settled into Viktor’s warmth does it occur to her that his embrace, the affection in these arms, is not just for her, but for the tiny almost-being inside her.

  PERHAPS SHE SHOULD call Tama. She was the one Russian friend Nina could really talk to, easily, effortlessly, without ever having to search for the right word, without that unwanted rhetorical distance. And even though Tama was younger than Nina, perhaps she too might have experienced, at times, this odd onslaught—memories passing before her like images on a screen. But their friendship was not about sharing secrets. None of Nina’s friendships were. Growing up, secrets had been dangerous, and as for the few secrets Nina had once been privy to—well, even now she preferred not to think of them. Even after she left home, those same impulses (silence and self-protection) remained with her. She had never fully relaxed into the chattiness of girlish friendship, the giddy ease, the whoops of laughter and frank whispers that she heard around her, and even received, but simply could not reciprocate. No, it was impossible, even as those first real friends, in Paris and then London, had received her openly. Something in her had tightened, something had locked. It had taken only a few years until her body, too, was assailed by that same rigidity.

  And so it went for love, too, though when Nina first began her new life she had carried within her, if only tenuously, some hope for romance. Nothing too passionate. Nothing overwhelming. But surely there was another sort of love, something less full and perhaps less beautiful, but perfectly adequate nonetheless. A light spring jacket instead of a fur coat. A nice soup and salad rather than the eight-course buffet. That would do, something simple. Something she could look forward to.

  And there had been, in fact, numerous offers. In Paris, where she was at first a news item, she was nearly overwhelmed with suitors—but they were like gnats in her hair, even the most alluring. They blurred into each other, she could not focus on just one. Yet she enjoyed the attention, and told herself there would be someone. After all, she was still young, her mind open to so many new things. But her heart…No, even when she tried to will it open, first with big, jolly-faced Armand and then, after a dismayingly painless breakup, with sly, quiet Patrice, Nina’s heart would not budge.

  After that she had not even tried, really, to get to know anyone quite so well. It was too difficult to do what they wanted, to “open up,” to say “what’s on your mind.” Not to mention that, deep down, she simply did not trust them. Not one. It was simply a feeling she had. In London she was frequently matched up with this Sir or that Lord, seated next to handsome bachelors and distinguished widowers. Her life had become even more public, her agenda always full. She dressed impeccably, wore jewels from her ever-expanding reserve, had her picture in the magazines. She felt not superior but separate, never truly among the London throng. If she were to be honest with herself, she would have to admit that she had never fully settled in, just bumped along from this to that, taught her students with devotion, attended opening nights and premieres, held teas for an expanding circle of perfectly nice but not close friends. A few of her old students she still heard from even now, though they too were now retired.

  Most of the people from that swath of time had been forgotten. Nina might be able to find them in her mind if she tried, but she ha
d no reason to. Except of course that the girl from Beller wondered if Nina had any “ancillary materials” relating to the jewels. Perhaps she did, somewhere, cards and notes and photographs—the French and British jewelers fawning over her, inviting her to model this and that, and the photographs in the socialite pages, and the days and nights so busy, there was simply no time for memories.

  Instead these other figures kept returning, these oldest friends of all, unreachable and yet for long minutes each day, now, here, right in front of her.

  “So, what happened with him?”

  Nina jerked her head back.

  Cynthia was sitting across from her on the divan, watching her intently, waiting, Nina supposed, for the soup to cook. “With Lord what’s-his-name? Did you two go out again?”

  Was this old age, then, at last? Not merely advancing years but true old-lady-ness, dementia, the past gradually overtaking present? She did not want to become one of those invalid old people who lost track of the days and could no longer tell morning from night and ate meals from their bed, crumbs in the sheets. “I…well—” She looked toward the window, out at the trees crusted with snow. Snowdust blew through the air like glitter.

  Never had she even considered that senility might touch her. It was nothing she had witnessed in her own family—but then, so few had lived into old age.

  Cynthia was saying something about boyfriends and blind dates, how she was lucky to have found Billy and be done with all that. Saying so, she paused to admire the small square diamond on her ring finger. Billy had proposed to her on Valentine’s Day.

  “My first husband wooed me with hibiscus flowers. Kept bringing them to me like it was all he had to do each day.” She laughed. “Next thing you know I was married and living with my in-laws.”

  Nina looked at Cynthia, still in her nurse’s scrubs and white shoes, as if meeting her for the first time. “You were married.”

  “From twenty-one to thirty-four. Three kids to show for it.”