Russian Winter

by Daphne Kalotay

  Vera asks, “But you can tell?”

  “I get this heavy feeling in my abdomen. And then my breasts hurt. After the first time, now I know what to look out for.” She shakes her head. “But I can’t bear to tell Viktor again. He was so happy the first time. He thought I wanted to keep it. The next time I didn’t even tell him. And I told him we could try this summer. I feel horrible.”

  The steam is settling again, so she stands up to ladle on some more water, and is briefly dizzy. “Of course not having children is one more thing his mother holds against me. You know what she told me? That all my jumping around onstage was what was keeping me from getting pregnant.”

  After a moment, Vera says, “She puts vodka in the tea.”

  “Viktor’s mother?” Nina sits back down on the bench. “Really?” Lying down again, she says, “I can’t believe it,” although of course it makes perfect sense. Always feeling “flu-ish”…

  “I can’t believe you didn’t notice.”

  An edge to her voice. For a moment Nina thinks she must have misheard. She looks over to Vera—still reclining passively, as if she has said nothing of note.

  “I’ve been busy working hard for almost two years straight,” Nina says, trying to remain calm. “I don’t have time to notice every detail of other people’s lives.” But already her adrenaline has surged. “I dance nonstop. I don’t take ‘leave’ here and there. I don’t have Uncle Feliks write me a note every time a tendon hurts.” It’s the truth. Nina dances on sprained ankles and jammed kneecaps. The last show of the season she performed with a broken toe—froze it with chlorethyl and wrapped it tight, and then danced a four-act ballet flawlessly.

  Vera’s posture has changed, stiffening as she props herself up. But Nina cannot stop herself. “I have work to do. I don’t have time to always…push myself into other people’s business. Prostitute myself with whichever man offers himself to me.”

  “I’m not prostituting myself!”

  “What do you call it, then?” Nina sits up, too quickly; her head rushes.

  “Caring! Trying to help someone! Thinking about someone other than myself!”

  “I think about people other than myself!” The two of them shouting, like anyone, no better than the awful apartment neighbors at home…

  “Do you?” Vera’s voice changes. “Do you really?” Her tone flat, she says, “But you’re a ballerina, a star. How can you possibly have time to worry about other people? You’re so busy all the time. So busy you haven’t even noticed that your mother is…dying.”

  Wincing in the burning air. “What are you talking about?”

  A slow, concerned exhale. “She’s ill, Nina. The doctor came just before I left.” Vera waits a moment, seems to be thinking. “It’s probably just a matter of months.”

  “Months?” Nina feels faint, damp with sweat. “Were you ever going to tell me?” And then, as if it is Vera’s fault that her mother is ill, “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I assumed you would have noticed how sick she was. I thought you would have noticed the great change in her. But you’ve been running around so much, and resting up so much, and thinking about yourself so much, you’ve barely had time to check in on her. Even when you do, you don’t really see her.”

  Nina has begun trembling. Because it’s all true. She barely sees her anymore, Mother in her skirt full of flowers…. “Yes, I’m a bad daughter. You’re the good one.” She stands up and swoons from the heat. “I have to go.”

  Vera says, “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just—”

  The air stings as Nina pushes toward the door.

  Outside she quickly wraps herself in a rough, stiff towel. The river below looks green, the droopy willow dipping its reflection as a troop of ducks drifts passively along. Nina feels how bright red her skin must be—with shame, she thinks, hurrying back to the house. “Viktor!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I need to go home. Right away. I’m sorry. I’ll take the train back, if you’ll take me to the station.” A fresh sheath of sweat has surfaced, and she wipes it away with the towel, too roughly, scraping the skin on her arms.

  “Nina, stop that, you’ll rub your skin off. What’s going on?”

  “I need to help Mother. She’s ill. You can stay on, I’ll know more soon. But I have to go.”

  THOUGH SHE TRIED to read through the page proofs with care, Drew had to stop repeatedly, to refocus, each time she became distracted by the odd turn of her heart. Sometimes she even found herself shaking her head, as if that might clear it of those other thoughts. Leaning into him, the weight of him. At certain moments it seemed impossible that she had really done that, leaned into his body, stepped up to him like that. And then she would recall how good it had felt to do what she so rarely allowed herself—to act on her feelings.

  Really, she reminded herself, there was no time for personal disruptions. Between coordinating with Miriam in Exhibitions and dealing with Public Relations and giving various small jobs to her new assistant, there wasn’t time for much else at all. If she could just sign off on the galley proof of the supplemental brochure, that would be one less thing to worry about. The printer would send back five hundred copies on good thick glossy paper for next week’s pre-auction dinner, where it would be perused in distracted boredom as attendees waited out various speeches and the clinking of glasses and whatever other activities had been planned. Then the folded programs, printed out on good, thick paper, would be tossed away with the rest of the garbage.

  Funny, how none of it seemed to matter so much, now. Not the auction, or the jewelry, or proving anything to herself. What mattered was that she might be able to find something out for Grigori.

  Just this morning Drew had contacted yet another “expert” whose name she had been given, and who might know something about where to find the jeweler’s archives. No matter that it was something of a pipe dream, or that there was little chance she would discover anything in time for the auction. Normally Drew would have looked forward, at this point, to putting the entire project behind her. Now, though, she wanted to keep trying, to find something that might help Grigori figure out if what he thought about Nina Revskaya was correct.

  A family relation of his…a family connection. Drew found her thoughts following that same well-traveled route, from Nina’s bracelet and earrings to Grigori’s pendant—all of which now lay sealed in unceremonial clear plastic baggies, awaiting next week’s preview. The pendant, Grigori Solodin’s pendant, and the spider with a pouch like a parachute underneath it…The letters Nina Revskaya said were not hers…

  Drew’s heart sank all over again, recalling how she had caused Nina Revskaya to cry. Just by showing her those two photographs…In fact Drew herself had felt shaken, at the reality of those pictures, at their silent reminder: that the people we are closest to can disappear like that, even the people most rooted in our lives, the ones we think of as constant. Jen and Kate and Stephen; her mother, her father. They too, like Drew herself, would at some point exist merely in images—photographs, recollections.

  At the thought, Drew pulled her shoulders back, shook her head again. Photographs—the supplemental, the final proofs. There were still blank spaces where the pictures would go. Drew turned to her computer to make a final check. First came a photograph of the young Nina Revskaya leaping, her legs a horizontal line in midair. Then a newspaper clipping announcing her defection, and then a glamour shot from a Van Cleef & Arpels photo shoot. Next Drew had added the image of Nina Revskaya and her husband, cropped from one of Grigori’s photographs.

  For the final page of the brochure, on the back, Drew had selected a candid image: Nina Revskaya and three other Bolshoi dancers, leaning against the barre in a practice room. Drew had found it on the Web, where there were archives of such photographs, dancers in rows at rehearsal, or off to the side, watching a teacher’s demonstration. It was these unposed photographs, especially ones of the corps, that Drew found most intriguing
, the way they captured who these dancers were—just girls, most of them, with still-young bodies and youth in their eyes, the nameless girls no one remembered anymore. They really were nameless, some of them: every once in a while a photograph would list an “unidentified dancer,” so that Drew found herself pausing, wondering about these girls who, despite having been part of one of the world’s best ballet companies, had been excluded from historical record.

  As she double-checked the image that she had selected for the back page, Drew noticed something. The woman to Nina Revskaya’s right. Something ethereal about her, and familiar. That dark look in her eyes. Drew thought for a moment, then turned back to the folder containing the items Grigori had lent her. She felt sad all over again as she found the photograph with the couple she had cropped out for the brochure. Yes, she was right: this was the same woman—the one Nina Revskaya had called her best friend. So she too was a dancer. According to the online archive, the woman’s name was Vera Borodina.

  Clicking back through the computer windows, Drew returned to her cache of archival photographs. Indeed she was able to find two others of Vera Borodina, one of them particularly beautiful, a still from Swan Lake. So she too had been famous—or at least on her way to being famous. Behind her, in the dark background forest, were five other swan-girls, the nameless ones—wishing, Drew supposed, that they might one day play the lead swan.

  Then Drew realized something: she recognized someone else now. One of the “unidentified dancers,” a skinny girl with a long neck. Drew looked carefully at the on-screen image and then back at the other black-and-white photograph from Grigori, the one in front of the dacha. Yes, this was her, the girl whom Nina Revskaya had called a “friend.” They too must have become friends through the Bolshoi—although this skinny girl must not have gone on to have the same success as these other two.

  The thought occurred to Drew that she could ask Nina Revskaya her friend’s name. Then maybe Drew could figure out a way to e-mail the people who had archived these photographs, and let them know who this girl was. That way she would no longer be an “unidentified dancer.” The thought was almost enough for Drew to telephone Nina Revskaya. But she didn’t dare, not after the other day, how quickly Drew had upset her. Besides, there was too much else to do. And anyway, in the end, whether or not anyone would know this girl’s name probably didn’t really matter.

  NINA SETTLES BACK in her old apartment, where she cares for Mother as best she can, even while she too is recovering—from the surgery that has taken care of her own condition. It was best to have the procedure done before Viktor’s return, to rest up in her (now Vera’s) old iron cot.

  She has hired Darya to come by each day after she leaves Madame’s, to help with the cooking and cleaning. Mother looks much thinner, older, in her skirt of faded flowers. Her body worn out, her smile black where her teeth used to be. Those once-proud shoulders now hunched, from so many treks from shop to shop, from waiting in lines and in offices and her seat at the Bolshoi…A mother’s life, one long errand. One enormous chore. Like those worker girls Nina sees along the roads, and loaded up onto trucks at the end of the day, atop sacks of cement, to be driven home like so many planks or logs or metal beams…

  Nina remains there until the end of August, when Viktor returns and helps her move Mother to their apartment, into their bed. He and Nina will sleep on a mattress on the floor. Mother has already become much more feeble and soon lies in bed all day. At times she barely seems to take in her surroundings or note what is happening around her. “Is it catching?” Madame asks when she emerges—for meals only, now—from her room, sniffing the air for microbes. Never has she deigned to say good day to Mother. Darya too seems intent on ignoring her. Though Nina has continued to pay her extra, Darya refuses to do any more than her usual cooking and cleaning here in Madame’s household. It takes over a week for Nina to figure out why: Madame has instructed Darya not to.

  Her rage boils up all over again—but she is tired of fighting, tired of her own constant, simmering anger. It is all so petty, yet so all-consuming. She still hasn’t spoken to Vera, has no energy or urge to reconcile. And yet when Viktor describes their days at the dacha, he seems completely unaware that the two of them have quarreled. Vera must not have said anything about what happened.

  “Fortunate in a way that you didn’t stay. You would have had to put up with that Serge character.”

  “He came back?”

  “Twice. I don’t like him.” Jealousy in his voice. Only now does it occur to Nina that she perhaps did something unwise, leaving Vera and Viktor there together. After all, as devoted as Viktor might be, it seems no one is inured to Vera’s allure.

  “Where has she gone to?” Madame asks one day in September, when she has emerged from her room to eat some of the watery soup that Darya has cooked. “That beautiful Vera. It’s ages since I’ve seen her.”

  Nina’s own mother, too, misses Vera, and has more than once asked when she will visit. “She’s busy these days,” Nina says as an excuse, aware that, other than looking after Mother’s apartment, and Viktor’s solicitous checking in on her, really Nina has no idea, anymore, of what Vera is up to.

  THEN ONE NIGHT Viktor does not come home.

  Nina lies awake very late. Has it happened to him too…because of Gersh…Has something horrible happened?

  When she dares to wake her mother-in-law, to ask if she knows where he has gone, Madame scolds Nina, loudly and angrily, for disturbing her sleep. She doesn’t seem worried that her son has not returned.

  It is nearly four in the morning when Nina hears his key in the door, his footsteps entering the darkened room. She has to stop herself from shouting. “Where were you? What happened? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Look at you, you’ve gone pale. What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong? You don’t come home until four, don’t tell me where you’ve gone. I thought you’d been—I didn’t know what to think.”

  “I told my mother, didn’t she tell you?” And then, “I took Vera to visit Gersh.”

  Of course Madame didn’t tell her. Nina bursts into tears, too exhausted, too shaken, to be fully angry. Viktor puts his arms around her, whispers, holds her, it’s all right.

  When she has managed to stop crying, she rubs her face against his chest, wiping her tears on his shirt. She hates the sound of her own sniffling. But now that she has calmed down, she is able to think more clearly. “You took Vera?” Softly, so as not to wake Mother. “I thought they only accepted family visitors.”

  “Yes, well, they’re open to persuasion.”

  Nina raises her eyebrows, as Viktor adds, “It seems there are ways to finagle a visit.”

  He steps back, sits tiredly in one of the wooden chairs. Did he bribe someone, or forge something? Again Nina tenses, at the thought that he has put himself in danger. If only she could stop being furious at him. “Is Gersh all right? How is he?”

  “According to Vera, not terrible.”

  “You didn’t see him?”

  Viktor shakes his head. “Vera was the only one allowed in. As ‘family.’”

  “Family.” Nina considers what this could mean, and drops wearily into the chair next to Viktor. Perhaps Vera’s putting up with that horrible Serge has paid off. “I still don’t see how she managed it. What about Zoya?”

  “It seems now that they’ve gotten a new director, Zoya has stopped showing up.”

  Nina raises her eyebrows. So, it’s true, then, what she and Viktor suspected: that it was the previous director, and not Gersh, whom Zoya was so keen on seeing. “Just when I’d convinced myself she really loved him.”

  “Maybe she did.” Viktor shrugs his shoulders in a way that annoys her. How can Zoya be so fickle? How can a person’s love just skip from one person to another? When Viktor puts his arm around her, Nina lays her head against his, searching for comfort. If only she could stop feeling angry with him. If only she could relax, and believe that everything is all
right, that Viktor hasn’t compromised himself by helping in Vera’s ploy.

  Only after they are in bed, her head on his shoulder, does Nina ask, not sure if she really wants to know, “What was it like there?”

  “I told you, I don’t know, I didn’t see.”

  Viktor sounds annoyed, so that Nina too feels a surge of irritation. “Why did you go all the way there if you didn’t even see him?”

  “To take Vera. I told you.” He pulls away, rolls onto his side.

  Nina tells herself that this is better than arguing, better than erupting into a true fight. And yet she feels dissatisfied. Perhaps Vera is just an excuse. A ruse, a way for Viktor to go…where? To do what? Nina thinks back to when she first met him, shapely blond Lilya at his side, and to the pleasure he takes, even now, in women’s company. Of course a man with his success has admirers. Thoughts swirl in Nina’s mind so that she cannot sleep. Everyone is suspicious to her now. As if the earth were no longer solid but some shifting thing, no foundation at all, nothing to stand on. Every day there are fewer people she can trust.

  IT WAS A day or two after Drew Brooks’s visit that Cynthia, having put the soup on, came out from the kitchen and, instead of going back to her magazines or the auction catalog, took a seat across from Nina’s wheelchair. “I’ve been thinking about what you said to that young woman the other day. About your friend. You sounded like you wanted to talk about it.”

  Honestly, this woman could not just simply cook a soup….

  “Her life was hard. She suffered.”

  Two days straight, now, of bad memories. All today Nina had tried to distract herself—put the Bach CD on again and flipped slowly through a book on Gauguin, a big coffee table album she had not bothered to look at for years, all kinds of wonderful pictures for her to focus on. The pain slid in all the same. “Sometimes I tell myself that her suffering was her punishment.”

  Cynthia’s eyes opened wider. “She’d better have done something pretty horrible, then.”