“Please understand,” Nina Revskaya said, looking peeved, “we all were in danger, everyone, all of the time, not only artists like myself. That was the world where we lived. Anyone could turn in anyone else, for any thing. Small things. Owning more than one’s neighbor. Speaking the wrong thing, telling the wrong joke. You must understand how common these arrests were. It was impossible not to know someone who was arrested.”
“Horrible, horrible!”
“Jesus Christ,” Stephen said.
Nina Revskaya said, “It was a method for the government to warn us, you see, to make sure we behave.”
“Thank goodness you got out of there!” The News 4 woman shook her head, her gold-tinted hair barely moving. “I think our viewers will agree that the jewelry that came with you represents, in a very moving way, that tragic past.”
“Tragic, yes. For millions of citizens.”
“The amber in particular is symbolic, in that amber literally captures and holds moments of the past. In its resin, I mean. Because the little insects and things that are caught in it are extremely old, aren’t they? In that way these amber pieces are more than just gorgeous; they offer a glimpse into the past.”
“I suppose.”
“Do you have any idea who the mystery person is who owns the necklace that matches your own set?”
Drew felt herself leaning toward the television, as if about to be handed something new. All Nina Revskaya said was, “It could be from anywhere.”
“Who’s that?” Stephen asked, with a small laugh, pointing.
“Who?”
“There’s someone in the back corner there, see? Just an arm, but—”
“Where? Oh, I see.” In the shadow of the screen’s periphery an arm, clad in purple, was becoming just barely noticeable, someone leaning slowly in.
“But isn’t it surprising,” the News 4 woman asked, “that the matching pendant would also be here in the United States, and not back in Russia?”
At the edge of the screen, the entire side of a woman’s body, in slacks and a purple sweater, was now discernible, loitering at the rear of the room. As Nina Revskaya spoke, the person, a slim black woman, leaned more fully in, then looked straight at the camera and, for a split second, gave a smiling wave before quickly pulling herself out of the camera’s view.
“You mentioned theft,” the News 4 woman was saying. “Do you think the pendant was stolen?”
“It is very probable,” Nina Revskaya said primly. “The bracelet and earrings were handed down, you see, to me through my husband. They belonged to his family, but in the civil war many of their valuables were lost.”
“Oh, now you tell me,” Drew said. If the jewels had been handed down through Revskaya’s husband’s family, their names might be recorded in the jeweler’s ledger books. Why hadn’t she said so before? Drew would have to call her tomorrow morning, or go there, have Nina Revskaya spell out her husband’s relatives’ names in Cyrillic, as far back in his ancestry as possible—in case Drew ever did manage to track down those records. To Stephen she said, “This woman is going to drive me crazy.”
“Now, now.” Stephen jokingly patted Drew on the shoulder—but quickly withdrew his hand, to show he understood the rules of their relationship. Again Drew felt her heart drop. If there were some sort of spark, she might at least try; but then there would just be more potential to hurt him. She simply could not imagine feeling about Stephen the way she would have liked to feel, that ideal that had been her undoing: true partners in love and life. Otherwise she might as well have remained in her marriage with Eric, just two people living in tandem.
She still recalled, palpably, the uncomfortable feeling of growing past him, and the moment when it had seemed there was no way back. It began with her first truly good job, one that paid, in the design department of a national insurance company; Drew was an assistant to the man who assessed and recommended art purchases for the company’s many business properties. The man, Roger, was an older gentleman, soft-spoken and kind, probably gay although he made a point, in a somewhat strained way, never to mention his personal life. What mattered was that he liked Drew and took her with him on his many buying trips—not just to antiques dealers on Eleventh Street, or to auctions outside the city, but abroad, to sales in London, to Athens and Paris, to Bolivia and Turkey and Morocco. This was in 1996; the company was happy to pay. Drew had found herself emboldened, thought nothing of wandering alone through markets where voices chattered words that to her ears were little more than music. She bargained in pantomime, in high school French and guidebook Greek and Sesame Street Spanish, and felt the small, bright thrill of those minor accomplishments.
She took Eric with her on one of her trips, for a long weekend in London after her two days of work. On their first morning together, they went to take the Tube to Bloomsbury, and just as they descended the steps toward the platform, a train’s doors slid open. Drew said, “This is the one we want!” and swiftly stepped onto the subway car, but Eric paused, asked, “Are you sure?”—and the doors slid shut. Amid the crush of passengers, Drew mouthed to Eric through the window the name of the subway stop where she would wait for him. But as the train pulled quietly away, she could not help but feel that something irreparable had happened.
Pushing the memory away, Drew found herself again on Stephen’s sofa, in front of the enormous television screen. “I was looking through our archives,” the News 4 woman was saying, “to find photographs of the amber bracelet and earrings, but I couldn’t find any of you wearing them. I did find a number of amazing pictures, though—the one of you and Jackie Onassis made my day!”
When Nina Revskaya showed no reaction, the woman said, “I would have loved to see a picture of you wearing those gorgeous amber earrings.”
“They did not suit me.”
“The color, you mean? Amber?”
“Big beads need a broad face, and height, too. Otherwise they weigh you down. No, they were not for me.”
WINTER’S GRIP, THE quivering gray mornings, perpetual dusk. Sometimes the Bolshoi tries to save money by not heating during the day; Nina rehearses in woolen tights and long knit sweaters and layers of leg warmers that make her thighs feel thick. Before performing, she soaks her feet in hot water. She still hasn’t heard from the man named Viktor, though for a week now she has anticipated another meeting. Painted her nails a color called Pearl, and patched the soles of her good shoes. She even managed to find a nice rayon dress at a commission shop. Now she is in the little dressing room, scraping away some of the leather from the bottom of her toe shoes, to help keep them from slipping. Each time she pulls the rasp across the bottom, she tells herself not to think of Viktor. She must focus, prepare herself: tonight is Sleeping Beauty, and she is dancing the Lilac Fairy.
At the dressing table next to hers, Polina, who will be playing the Diamond Fairy, is gluing on false eyelashes, saying that she is in love.
“With Arkady Lowny?” Nina hears how incredulous she sounds. Really she sees this sort of thing often enough, dancers making as many Party “friends” as possible. It is a way to work one’s way up the ranks regardless of actual talent. Not that Polina isn’t talented. But she lacks that most elusive quality, the one that no amount of practice or training can guarantee: charisma, stage presence, the allure of a true star. Perhaps it is lack of confidence. There is something brittle about Polina, too studied, not quite natural, despite her long strong legs and perfect attitudes. She dances with her muscles but not her heart.
“No, not Arkady,” Polina whispers. “His friend.” Eyes open wide, only one of them lined with the feathery lashes, so that the other eye looks smaller and oddly beady. Like Nina she has already made up her face, so that her skin looks brightly false. “Oleg. He’s a department chief at the Ministry of Trade.” Polina always has a worshipful tone when she mentions people in government. She turns back to her mirror and dreamily applies the second strip of lashes, her smile small as if concealing mischief. “Arkady
took me to dinner at the Riga, and this friend, Oleg, was there. He’s so charming, Nina! He looked at me across the table in this way, I can’t explain it except to say I just knew.”
Nina has taken up her other toe shoe and is shaving the bottom in quick, almost careless, motions. “Knew what?”
“That something was going to happen with us!”
“So you’re just going to drop Arkady, then?”
“Well, I’ll have to tell him something.” For a moment, with her long, skinny neck and bright makeup and feathery eyelashes, Polina looks just like an ostrich. In a whisper she adds, “He let me keep his cigarette case.”
“Arkady?”
“No, Oleg!” From the drawer of her dressing table, she takes a slim silver box, a section of its lid ornately decorated in what looks to be ivory.
Nina examines the box, the swirl of flowered vines that decorate it. Looking closer she sees, with shock, that they are not flowers or vines but, rather, two human bodies: a man’s and a woman’s, naked, entwined. Surely that’s why Polina has shown it to her, to prove some sort of maturity Nina doesn’t possess. Pretending not to notice, Nina hands it back.
Polina slides the case proudly back into her drawer and locks it. Since their promotion to first soloists she and Nina have been allotted this more private dressing room, small and cold, without windows. Walls of cracking plaster, lightbulbs too bright. Tights hanging on pegs to dry overnight. Across the top of her mirror Nina has draped a strip of eyelet cloth, to pretty it up a bit. Polina’s mirror has two small photographs tucked into the frame, and her dressing table is cluttered with twice the beauty supplies Nina has. Thick tubes of lipstick, square tubs of sparkling powder, eye paint in every color, cold cream called “Snowflake.” A jar of “Persian mud” containing a secret ingredient from Georgia. Tacked to the wall is a newspaper article by Dr. Yakov Veniaminov, Cosmetician, whose prescriptions Polina follows religiously.
The wardrobe mistress is at the door. She hands them their costumes briskly and leaves.
“Well,” Nina concedes, pulling on the lavender tutu, “I’m glad you met someone you like.” As Polina helps her with the hooks on the bodice, Nina wants badly to tell her that she too has met someone, but already it seems she must have dreamed it. She takes up her toe shoes and at the sink runs cold water over the heels, so that they will bond with her tights. Then she sits down and, pointing her toes, fits one foot down into its shoe, toes crushing against each other as she nudges them all the way in to where she has layered a wad of cotton wool. Her debut in this role, hours of effort ahead of her, no time to think of Viktor…She works the back of the shoe up onto her heel, then takes up the second shoe. Even as she wraps and ties the ribbons securely around her ankles, she is convincing herself that she is prepared, she is ready. But when she tucks the ends of the ribbons in, quickly stitching them so that they won’t slip out, she sees that her hands are trembling.
The bell. Tossing her cardigan sweater over her shoulders, Nina wishes Polina “No down, no feathers” and hurries to the makeup room, to have the little purple-flowered crown firmly secured to her hair and final touches of color painted around her eyes. Scent of talc, of nerves, as she warms up in the training studio. Even backstage, as the prologue begins, with the princes and pages in their capes, and the queen and king and their attendants all miming along to Tchaikovsky’s stately march, Nina continues to warm up with plié after plié, holding on to a lighting boom for support, while the dressers flutter around making a last-minute check of hair ribbons and coronets, and the corps de ballet girls chatter like sparrows, and the stage manager shushes them and complains that they are tracking too much rosin onto the floor.
One of the prop men hands her a sparkly spray of lilacs—her magic wand—and now the harp strums the opening arpeggio that introduces Nina’s first entrance. Giving herself over to the lullaby-like melody, Nina follows her retinue of tutu-clad girls as they move together on pointe onto the steeply sloping stage, into the bright lights of the Fairy Kingdom. Nina is in the center, the calm, soothing central force even as she introduces the other fairies, gesturing graciously, arms gently waving her lilac frond, lots of little bourrées here and there, none of the fast jumps and spins she prefers; this opening section is a very slow adagio, nothing terribly challenging, only one pirouette into arabesque. Since the Lilac Fairy represents wisdom and protection, Nina tries to infuse her every movement with the thought that good can overcome wickedness, that spells can be both cast and broken. For her first solo (to a grand, somewhat pompous-sounding waltz) she imagines each of her smooth opening développés—leg extending high up to the side until her foot is past her ear, as she rises on pointe—banishing the evil to come. As always when she performs, the minutes pass like mere seconds; already she is making her concluding diagonal across the stage, the repeated sequence of two little sissones, then rising up onto relevé, and then a double pirouette.
Only later, as she and the others stand patiently immobile waiting out a pas de deux, does she allow herself to look out at the many-tiered theater, past the footlights and above the heads of the orchestra, searching, as if amid the red velvet seats and darkness-obscured faces she might—if she wills it hard enough—find Viktor.
Instead, there is her tiredly beautiful mother, in the side loge where she always sits. Now that Grandmother has passed away, it is just the two of them in their bare-floored room. Mother still spends her days working at the polyclinic, afternoons filled with ongoing errands for friends and relatives too weak or old, always someone or other in hospital, not to mention Mother’s brother in prison for three years now. (He is innocent, there has been some mistake; as soon as Comrade Stalin finds out, Mother always says, he’ll put everything right.) Neither she nor Nina ever mentions a word of the brother’s predicament, even as Mother makes her way from one end of town to the other in search of food and medicine for him—an endless quest, standing in queues in every weather, summers in her white cotton kerchief, winters in her dark woolen one. Yet she never misses Nina in a new role, attends at least one performance of every ballet she dances, happily flapping her program at her, watching each ballet intently, as if she has never seen it danced quite so well.
Tonight, though, Nina longs to see Viktor’s face instead, his proud nose and almond-shaped eyes and the flare of his nostrils. Just thinking of him, she feels a small bird rustle beneath her rib cage.
Before her entrance in the second act, she puts herself right up against the front wing, just next to the stage, so that she can look out farther into the theater, although she of course knows the rule: If you can see the audience, they can see you. She looks out, searches the seats. And now the stage manager is telling her to step back, she is too near to the boom and might cast a shadow….
The applause ends, the curtains have closed, the lights are up again. She has danced well—she knows it, the audience knows it, she hears it in their applause. Even her comrades onstage congratulate her.
Nina’s mother is waiting in the rear hallway, beneath the “We Celebrate with Work!” poster. Her face is glowing, her shoulders pulled back straight in a way that she rarely holds herself at home, as if to show the dancers that she too, given a different turn of events, might have been one of them. “Everyone is saying how beautifully you danced, you should hear them!” Then, as always, come the complaints: “That blond girl was in the way. When you were all in a diagonal in the wedding section. I could barely see you.”
Nina is used to this; none of it will ever be enough for her mother. “She’s supposed to be in front of me. It’s part of the choreography.”
“She was showing off.”
“I’ll be sure to tell the director.” Nina laughs, kisses Mother on each of her smooth cheeks. “It’s late, I don’t want you to have to wait for me.” She embraces her again and wishes her good night, glad that she witnessed this important evening. Then she dodges the congratulations of the other dancers and heads back to the dressing room, exhausted
. Cold stale air—perfume and old sweat. Nina unties her slippers, frees her tired feet, her poor blistered toes. She peels off her false eyelashes and places them back in their little case. On their little foam pillow, they look like centipedes.
A knock on the door. “Come in.”
“You were magnificent.”
Viktor, holding an armful of roses. Nina gives a start, nearly knocking the wooden stool over. “How did you find me?”
“An arduous process. I bribed the stage doorman. Here, these are for you.”
Most bouquets are just something easily grown, marigolds or lupins, in winter artificial ones—nasturtiums and violets of orange and purple fabric. But roses…“So many!” Nina says, and counts to make sure there is an odd number; an even number would mean bad luck. Viktor says, “I wanted to give you something as beautiful as you.”
“They’re perfect,” she tells him, losing count. “Just like tonight. You’ve made it perfect.”
“Well, that remains to be seen,” he says. “Will you come dine with me?”
She manages to say, “Yes,” but as much as she wants to sound calm, her voice is shaking. “Just let me wash up. All this awful makeup.”
“I love it. You look like a Caspian call girl.”
The wardrobe mistress opens the door to take Nina’s costume, but seeing her still wearing it—and Viktor with her—turns away. “You go ahead and wash up, then,” Viktor says. “I’ll wait in the hall.” He steps out the door as swiftly as he arrived.
Quickly Nina rubs oil into her face and massages off the makeup Viktor claims to love. Even as she showers—in the good hot shower that is so much stronger than the one at home—the bird rustles in her rib cage. Drying off, buttoning herself into the bright pink brassiere she barely fills, wishing she had thought to wear the rayon dress…Meanwhile Polina has returned and is perched on her wooden stool, examining her raw toes. Nina asks, “Do I look all right?”
“Lovely.” Polina barely glances up, absorbed in bandaging her toes. Nina fits herself into her coat with its new trim and nestles a sheepskin turban tight on her head. But when she steps out to the corridor, there is only the long rack of costumes for tomorrow’s show, covered with a sheet. Her heart sinks—until she sees Viktor behind the rack, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette in a relaxed, slouching way, as if he comes here all the time. For the slightest second, Nina feels a fleeting doubt, or perhaps it is fear—that this is some kind of a trick, that he is not who she thinks he is, that he doesn’t feel about her the way she feels about him. And what about that fair-haired woman from the party? Then Viktor sees Nina and grins, and the doubt and fear flit away.
Russian Winter Page 10