Russian Winter

by Daphne Kalotay

  Nina stares, wonderingly, at a strikingly beautiful woman, and then drops the ballet slipper. It is Vera, standing there.

  Yes, it really is Vera, smiling, pleased with her surprise. Very slender and long-limbed, no longer a girl. Nina gives a small yelp and embraces her, Vera’s figure slight—though she is taller than Nina—in her arms. The truth is, for a long time Nina hasn’t even thought of her.

  Now Nina says, “You!” because it is all she can manage. She cannot even find her breath to introduce her to Polina; Vera has to introduce herself, while Nina regains her composure and takes in the ways that the years and the war and who knows what else have altered Vera, who now tells Polina, “I’m Vera Borodina.”

  Nina has heard this name—the new young beauty of the Kirov. It’s a different last name, a stage name, she supposes, and then recalls what happened so long ago, the day of the Bolshoi school audition. Vera’s parents gone, and “There was always something strange about them….” The first time in years Nina has thought back to them, that seemingly ordinary couple whose daily life divulged no inkling of where they would end up. Because only now, in adulthood, does Nina understand, in the way her childhood self could not, what must have happened. Not that Nina dares ask Vera—not in front of Polina. Whatever happened, it is in Vera’s best interest to have erased any ties to her parents. And so she has become Vera Borodina….

  Nina regards her with surprise, notes that her face, though thinner than years ago, has blossomed, her cheekbones more prominent and delicately rosy. Front teeth surprisingly straight, with little spaces between them, giving her an air of youth as she stands there smiling. Hair a deep reddish brown. Big dark eyes set wide apart, something melancholy, almost strange, about them. Perhaps it is the way her eyelashes have been crafted with mascara into little clumps, making her look young and innocent, almost as if she has been crying.

  She has in her hand the same small drawstring sack all the dancers are given, in which they all carry their tights and tunics and precious bars of soap. It must mean that Vera is joining the company. But at that moment Nina is still focused on other thoughts: Vera is alive; she has survived; she has returned. Polina says, “Well!” as if she too once knew Vera years ago and nothing could have surprised her more.

  When Vera confidently drops the sack onto the chair of the vacant dressing table that for two years has been shoved into the corner of the small room, Nina feels a small proprietary flinch; now three of them will have to fit here. But it is Vera, she tells herself—Vera Borodina…Still, Nina’s guard is up, as it always is in the presence of someone new. Vera, meanwhile, in brisk, distracted motions, flicks dust off the table. To be in this dressing room means she will be dancing solos and the occasional lead. Nina supposes the director must have recruited her, or that Vera knows someone in the administration—in the Kremlin, even. The Bolshoi pays attention to connections—friends, family, relationship to the Party. Just look at Lepeshinskaya, once the embodiment of youthful vitality, now almost forty yet still dancing lead roles; she is married to the head of the General Staff of the USSR, and everyone at the Bolshoi is terrified of her.

  Vera too must know someone important. Nina can see that Polina is wondering the same thing, the way she keeps stealing glances at Vera, perhaps envious of her beauty, or simply curious, or fearful of who she might turn out to be. Because Vera is now one more person to have to compete with. She too, like any ballerina, must want what they want: to rise to the very top.

  It becomes clear the moment they see Vera in class that she is indeed here on her own merit. Agile and precise, with feet quicker than theirs. Her beats are clean and sure, her pas de bourrée exact. More important, she has that quality—the elusive, magical one—that Nina too has been said to possess: the spark that makes people want to watch you.

  And yet Nina witnesses how Leningrad-style dancing can be somewhat cold. There is a strictness to Vera’s movement, all expression confined to her upper body (clad in a thin wool sweater, her delicate collarbone visible, her skin very pale). This contained perfection is a reminder to Nina: that not only have their experiences of youth, and of growing up, been different, but their bodies too have been variously trained.

  At first Nina experiences something close to envy, not just of Vera’s technique but also of her form—those long, delicate limbs and highly arched feet. Nina suffers a pang she has felt before, knowing she would do almost anything to have such a body (though it has been years since she and her classmates sat on one another’s outstretched feet attempting to shape higher insteps, or massaged one another’s bulging calf muscles to try to make them slimmer). From the tips of her fingers to the strong points of her toes, Vera is the embodiment of the quiet dignity the Kirov is known for. Her thin frame and her big soulful eyes make her look almost ethereal. Nina cannot help envy that otherworldly quality—not to mention Vera’s wide cheekbones and thick russet hair. She reminds herself that she has her own strengths: energy and airiness; passion and musicality; fast turns and seemingly effortless jumps. Being petite and strong is a gift itself, and a more standardly pretty face, if lacking mystery, has its own allure. Really it is a blessing that she and Vera possess different styles and physiques; it means they will not, most of the time, be competing for the same roles.

  She has to stop herself from asking too many questions that first day, as Vera arranges the contents of her sack in her locking drawer. But she asks where she will be living.

  “With a family I don’t even know. There’s a bed in the pantry. Just until the ballet can find me someplace.” Easier said than done, with the housing shortage. “The man and his wife play in the orchestra—and have three little boys.” Vera makes a face, and Nina feels sorry for her, all of them surely crammed into one room. “It’s almost funny, if you think about it: I’m actually lucky enough to have a permit”—a Moscow resident’s permit—“but there aren’t any rooms available. And meanwhile I keep hearing about people who are worried because they have an apartment but no permit!”

  On her dressing table she has set a small framed picture—a young couple, so very young that it takes a moment for Nina to recognize them as Vera’s parents. From the back of the frame Vera takes a yellowed square of paper, which she unfolds and tucks into the corner of the mirror. When Nina looks more closely, her heart gives a tug. It is a telegram.

  Without having to read the words, Nina knows it is one of the messages her mother so carefully wrote, all those years ago, as if she were Vera’s mother, too.

  Her mother, alone in the room full of sighs…Now that she has been pensioned from her desk job, and without Nina at home to tend to, she seems less devoted to her own life. Even her many benevolent errands have lessened. Instead of being freed from prison, Nina’s uncle last year was sent to exile in the Urals. And the old woman downstairs, whom Mother used to check in on daily, has died. Yet Mother continues to keep a spotless home, fills the windowsill with straggling plants repotted in tin cans. Her strength seems to come directly from caring for others, even though she herself has never been good at accepting help. Even when Nina buys new clothes for her, Mother continues to embroider the neck and cuffs of her baggy old sweaters, dons her same old fading flowered kerchief to make her way to and from the Gastronom—but these days she makes her rounds slowly, her shoulders stooped though she is barely fifty. She who with clipped, brisk steps led Nina and Vera like ducklings to the audition at the Bolshoi School…

  Nina recalls how much her mother always loved Vera, too—and that they still have, against the wall, the iron cot with the cotton mattress where until last year Nina slept.

  “If you could stay with my mother,” Nina asks, “would you prefer that?”

  “Oh, but surely she wouldn’t want me taking up space?”

  “She loves you, Vera. She’ll be so happy.” Nina glances at the telegram tucked into the mirror. How many of them did her mother send? And when did she stop? Nina wants to ask Vera, as much as she longs to tell her the truth
, as evidence of her mother’s love for her. But she knows that some secrets are meant to be kept.

  A week later Vera installs her black karakul coat and five pairs of shoes and a large travel trunk in the apartment that Nina left nearly a year and a half ago. That the two of them have swapped places, in a way, seems right. After all, Vera had to leave here so abruptly, all those years ago; now she again has her hometown and her best friend and a mother, even if each of these things is now altered. Nina’s mother is more than glad to have Vera there, and Nina and Vera often go back to the apartment together, sometimes with Viktor, to join her for tea. These first weeks are filled with confidences, the filling-in of so many years apart, a rush of stories exchanged, scraps of memories here and there, like knitting a big messy sweater together, watching it grow in bursts around them both. Soon they have found a new rhythm—much like the old, if only in that it continues day after day.

  NINA WOULD NOT have even acknowledged that it was Valentine’s Day except that Cynthia decided to celebrate it. Of course there had been a delivery of ridiculously expensive chocolates courtesy of Shepley, and a somewhat depressed phone call from Tama, but neither of those required comment. Now, though, along with that day’s dinner ingredients, Cynthia brought a long-stemmed rose and a greeting card. The Senior Services people must give them to all their employees, Nina supposed—but then decided to allow that Cynthia might have arrived at the gesture on her own. The card stock was thick, with a photograph of a puppy holding a cutout paper heart in its mouth. Cynthia had signed it in red felt-tipped pen, drawing a heart and then printing her name out in big letters, as if Nina had trouble reading.

  The rose she put in a tall thin crystal vase, which she placed on the table in the front hall, so that Nina could see it from the salon. The bud was already opening, from the heat of the radiator; Nina supposed it wouldn’t last long. Well, wasn’t that like romance itself—the sudden blooming, and then the petals falling, first slowly one by one, and then suddenly all at once.

  Viktor, the surprise of him, there at the dressing room door, his arms full of roses.

  “You okay out there, sugar?” Cynthia called from the kitchen. No onions today, of course. Billy had made reservations at a restaurant in the South End—a “brasserie,” Cynthia called it.

  Next to the rose, the puppy on the greeting card gazed out eagerly. “Yes, fine, thank you,” Nina said, though already that other feeling was returning: a dark and overwhelming, if imprecise, shame. Cynthia went on to make lots of clanking noises with the pots and pans, as if to ensure that Nina didn’t drift off again. And now the telephone started up, a loud clattering sound.

  “I have it, Cynthia,” Nina managed to say in a calm voice, though in her experience a ringing telephone most often meant something unpleasant.

  It was Drew Brooks. “From Bell—”

  “I recall who you are, Miss Brooks, no need to say to me.”

  “Yes, well, I’m just calling to let you know of a slight discrepancy in your collection.”

  A horrible staggering in her chest, dread of what more trouble there could be.

  It was the stud earrings that the St. Botolph’s list referred to as emeralds, Drew explained, her voice not the least bit anxious. “In going through the collection, our appraisers noted that they’re actually chrome diopside.”

  The term was nothing Nina had ever heard of. Her pulse hastened at having been caught—if unwittingly—in a lie. “I did not know,” she said. “I was misled.”

  “Oh, it’s a common confusion,” Drew told her. “In fact, the slang term is ‘Siberian emerald,’ it’s so common in that region. I’m not surprised you have some of your own.”

  “Then they are emeralds after all,” Nina said, with relief. “Siberian ones.”

  “Well, no, that’s the thing. They’re called ‘emeralds’ because of their color, but as stones they’re only semi-precious. Much less valuable than emeralds.”

  “I see.” Absurdly, her heart dropped—just as it had, if only for a moment, on the day she first opened the little square box and glimpsed the small green earrings there. The slight embarrassment of her own confusion.

  “It happens often enough,” Drew was saying. “With these and also tsavorite garnets. We see those a fair bit.”

  Nina’s throat felt tight. Of course she couldn’t help but wonder if Viktor had known. Siberian emeralds…Or had he, too, thought the earrings were real?

  “Are you all right?” Drew’s voice was loud in her ear. “Are you there?”

  “There is no need to scream.”

  “Just making sure.” Something in the way Drew said it made it sound like she might laugh. Even when she came by the other day, to fetch the written names of Viktor’s family members, Nina had sensed in her only the briefest annoyance at having made the trip when really Nina had only one name to offer. Nina had printed it out for her in Cyrillic, explaining that other than her mother-in-law, she had never known any of the people on Viktor’s maternal side, nor anything past his father. And yet Drew had remained unperturbed, as if her inquisitiveness could only work out for her in the end.

  “I also wanted to remind you,” she was saying now, “about the supplemental information for the pre-auction event we talked about. For the accompanying visuals, I’m hoping to include photos of any objects that might be related to the jewelry. Personal, memorabilia-type stuff, if possible. For instance, if a particular jewel was a gift, maybe you still have the card that came with it? Or a picture of the person who gave it to you? We can scan them for digital photos.”

  Again, digital photographs, they were everywhere. It was epidemic.

  “Excuse me?” Drew asked.

  “I do not have for you any of that.”

  Drew seemed to be waiting for something. “Yes, well, it doesn’t have to be directly related. It could simply be something from the ballet. Or from when you moved to Boston. Or even just the names of specific people. In the meantime, I’m going to look for archived photos. It’s of interest to the public, that’s all.”

  “All right,” Nina said, knowing that it was the only way to end the conversation.

  Drew thanked her and said she was very excited about the project, and wished her a good evening. But as Nina put down the telephone, all she felt was frustration.

  Siberian emeralds.

  That was the very problem with the auction house, the catalog, these assessors…Too much unpleasantness to discover.

  LAST BURST OF autumn warmth, of pale purple phlox, the whole city tinged yellow with fading leaves. Sweaty hands on the barre, endless morning drills and afternoon rehearsals, infinite anticipation of evening. In the dressing room before the second performance of the season, Nina sits with her feet resting on Polina’s chair and watches as Vera beads her eyelashes. She learned it from one of the Kirov dancers. Over a candle, she heats a tiny skillet the size of a soupspoon, on which she melts a bit of blackish makeup. Then she takes a drop of it onto the tip of a little wooden stick, which she touches to the tip of one of her upper eyelashes. Now a tiny bead clings there.

  “Painstaking,” Vera tells Nina as she takes up the next tiny black drop, “but worth it. Especially for a night like tonight.” The Bolshoi’s prima ballerina assoluta, Galina Ulanova, has taken ill, and so her role—they are opening the season with Swan Lake—has been divided in two: Vera will play the Swan Queen, Odette, and Nina will play her evil double, Odile. “I can help you do yours,” Vera adds, “if you want to try.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure.” Hot waxy stuff, so close to her eyes. Though she hasn’t said so, Nina is feeling slightly insulted, that the management doesn’t think her—or Vera, either—capable of dancing the full, dual, starring role. Have they not the same faith in Nina’s delicate bourrées and battements, in the way her body listens and responds to every shade of mood in Tchaikovsky’s music, as in her double pirouettes and arabesques and fouettées? The ballet master has rehearsed them and given his pep talk, reminding them that the
conductor can prompt them should they need help. The seamstress has refitted the black-feathered Odile costume to Nina, but for now she wears the loose pajamas that are her lounging clothes; she will not be onstage until after intermission. “It might affect my vision.”

  “Oh, you get used to it really quickly.” One by one, the minuscule beads form at Vera’s eyelash tips, and with each one Vera’s face opens up, becomes more innocent, her eyes somehow larger and wider. Nina finds herself once again surprised, as she continually is, by Vera’s beauty—by the very fact that Nina somehow missed, when they were children, just how beautiful she was. The surprise, and the small, slightly painful pang that accompanies it, is one of the new sensations Nina has begun to grow accustomed to, a natural consequence, she supposes, of having a true close friend her age, a girlfriend, a sister, this gift she hasn’t known since childhood: the gift of female friendship. These weeks have been a readjustment not only to what it means to share her life this way, the give-and-take of it, but also to Vera herself, this new, adult Vera, who is, after all, a different person from the one who left Moscow so many years ago.

  Tonight, though, she can’t help but wonder: If Vera hadn’t joined the company, would Nina perhaps be dancing Odette, too, and not just Odile? Don’t be jealous, she tells herself, and goes back to darning her toe shoes, stitching around the edge of each point with thick pink thread to make them last longer. She will need her most sturdy pair tonight, for all the fast turns Odile performs. And she must focus, concentrate, think not about poor Odette but fierce, strong-willed Odile, about Von Rothbart using her to such evil ends. Her stomach gives a nervous turn, at the thought of performing the role in public for the first time.

  Having perfected her eyelashes, Vera blows out the candle and wipes the mess of maquillage from the little frying pan before hiding it all in her drawer; the theater management doesn’t allow candles in the dressing rooms. To finish things off, she adds a small red dot at the corners of her eyes.