Russian Winter

by Daphne Kalotay

  How far they have come, Nina thinks to herself, from that June day so long ago, when neither of them even knew what a plié was. Nina recalls, quite suddenly, what she has long forgotten. “Your stage fright.” As soon as she says it, she wishes she hadn’t.

  Vera looks up questioningly.

  “I was just remembering. The audition. At the Bolshoi School.”

  A distant look comes over Vera, as if she just barely remembers. “It was a hard day for me. My parents had just been taken.”

  Her voice is meek, almost affectedly so, and Nina feels a surge of annoyance—that Vera has made this particular claim to grief. After all, everyone knows someone who has been taken away. Of the top three ballerinas here, Semyonova and Lepeshinskaya have both survived their husbands’ arrests; Semyonova’s was executed. Why, just last year one of the girls in the corps was called out of a dress rehearsal by a man from the secret police. Everyone could see from his jacket what he was. The girl never came back. After a few days her name was taken off the roster. No one has ever mentioned it.

  And of course there is Nina’s own uncle, off in a gulag somewhere. Yet Nina knows perfectly well that Vera’s loss was much more extreme. She could have ended up at the NKVD children’s placement center, living with delinquents. Just a year or two older, she might have been subject to the death penalty. Surely there is a file on her somewhere. Even for her to mention any of this, now, is brave. Of course, Polina isn’t in the room to hear it. Still, it shows that Vera trusts Nina, that she knows she won’t tell—since clearly the Bolshoi must not know. Or perhaps they do but are willing to overlook it. Like Semyonova, who for all her acclaim is still the “wife of an enemy of the people.” Then again, maybe Vera’s parents, whoever they were, whatever they did, were simply no one important. Not powerful enough, or famous enough, for anyone to pay any attention to their offspring. Just look at that couple in the photograph on Vera’s dressing table, so humble and unassuming and young.

  Whoever they were, whatever they did.

  For the first time in years, Nina finds herself wondering. Very quietly she asks, “Did you ever find out what they…” She stops, unsure that she wants to continue. “What your parents…?” She doesn’t dare complete the sentence.

  Vera’s eyes close briefly, as if to avoid an unpleasant sight. “What they did, you mean?” She speaks slowly and very softly. “A few years ago an old neighbor who lived in our same apartment told me what happened. She saw the whole thing. It was the couple who lived in the room next to us that those men were supposed to arrest. They went there first, but the couple wasn’t home. So they took the ones next door instead.” She gives a little shrug of her shoulders.

  “But then it’s a mistake!” Nina is horrified. “How could—Somebody needs to—” She hears her own mother’s refrain: If Comrade Stalin knew—as soon as he finds out…

  Vera, though, doesn’t look incensed, just sad, and Nina understands that it is too late, her parents cannot have survived so long. Perhaps Vera has already had word of their demise. Still, such a mistake. Not to mention that it is a permanent mark on Vera’s record.

  “Every time I take a train, or go over a bridge,” Vera says, “I can’t help but wonder, Did they build these tracks? Were they the ones who made these roads?”

  Nina has never forgotten Vera’s words, so many years ago. They’re doing important work. That’s why they had to go away. But now something else occurs to her: Perhaps the old neighbor made that story up, about the couple next door, so that Vera wouldn’t have to know the truth. Perhaps it was the neighbor, not the NKVD men, who lied.

  She feels suddenly, utterly confused.

  The door opens, and the seamstress hands Vera her costume, onto which some errant feathers have been restitched. “Thank you,” Vera says, calmly, almost regally, standing slowly to step into the stiff white tutu, adjusting it over her silk tights, pulling up the white bodice, slipping her arms through the feathery straps. The expression on her face is remote, unrevealing. Nina has noticed this about Vera in her interactions with others. She is one of those soloists who keeps to herself, does not chat with most other dancers—yet her aloofness, her reticence, somehow only makes her more alluring. As the seamstress does her up, Nina sees how well Vera fits not just this costume but this role, graceful yet fragile, something distant and haunted about her.

  “Better go have your makeup checked,” the seamstress tells her before bustling off.

  In a rush, Nina wishes Vera, “Ni puha, ni pera.”

  “’K chortu!” and Vera follows the seamstress out the door.

  THE LAST-MINUTE PATRONS, ushered into their seats just as the lights went down, kept ruffling programs and even talking during the overture. Seated next to Evelyn, Grigori found himself focusing not on Tchaikovsky’s music but on the other sounds around him: the coughing of the aged, the wheezing of the overweight, the whispers of little girls in their heavy velvet dresses. A young mother behind him was explaining to her daughter that very soon the curtain would lift and there would be people onstage, while the daughter whined that she was scared of the dark. To Grigori’s right, a line of young women passed a pack of gum back and forth, the sound of crumpling paper continuing up and back down the row. “You’d think we were at the circus,” Grigori whispered to Evelyn. She laughed and patted his arm, in a stroking way that felt good. How long it had been since Grigori had felt that way. She left her hand there, and he looked down, surprised, so that the moment became suddenly awkward; Evelyn pulled her hand away. Flustered, Grigori turned to glare at the young women with the gum. They appeared not to notice.

  At last the curtain lifted, and Grigori was able to lose himself in a world that was beautiful and also a bit comic, Prince Siegfried in his white tights, looking forlorn and pantomiming like there was no tomorrow. After the interlude things improved: the familiar dreamy melody, and the dark, misty forest, the dry ice slowly receding to reveal two dozen swan-girls folded over themselves. The dull trampling sound as they bourréed across the stage, Odette fluttery and fearful in her feathered earmuffs. Their seats were good, so close Grigori could see the trembling of the dancers’ tutus—flat frilled things like white carnations. Evelyn sighed and leaned just the slightest bit into his shoulder. Perhaps it was unintentional; Grigori had broad shoulders, was a big man, perhaps he was simply in the way.

  When the lights went up for intermission, Evelyn joined the rush for the bathroom. Grigori pushed his way down the aisle, out to the arcade, and bought a glass of red wine for each of them. Sipping his wine, he listened to the conversations that wafted by. Beside him a woman recited to a friend her busy cultural agenda. “Next week I have the ART,” she said, pointing at the squares of her date book, “and the Huntington.” She moved her fingertip along the following weeks: “Ballet, ballet, symphony, Huntington, symphony.”

  A man’s voice was saying, “Odette seems a little off tonight.”

  “You think?” answered a woman.

  “Less confident than last night’s,” said the man. “I wonder if she’s injured.” A loud put-upon sigh. “Not to mention that the swans sound more like a herd of elephants.”

  Oh, come on, Grigori wanted to say: You spoiled, spoiled people. The dancer was wonderful, just like the swan-girls, doing their best to deliver them magnificence. If she was “slightly off,” it was nothing Grigori had been able to notice. These people—himself included—were all so thoroughly indulged, could they not simply accept the wonder of it, sitting in this lush, gilded theater while a live orchestra accompanied so much physical exquisiteness? And this man thought he had the right to be disappointed! That these people expected so much, that they could expect that much, and not be ashamed of their petty disappointments.

  A little Chinese girl in a frilly dress was being plied with candy by her pale blond parents. “Anything to get her to like ballet,” the mother said, laughing, to Grigori, when she caught him watching.

  “Is it her first time?”

&nbs
p; “Yes,” the father said. “She’s only four, so I’m not sure how much she’s actually taking in.”

  “But I couldn’t wait,” the mother said, beaming. “I’ve been dreaming of this for ten years.”

  Grigori smiled back. Wonderful to see parents like this, basking in parenthood. This little girl would probably never fully know to what degree she had been wanted, loved, by these parents, before they even knew her. It was something Grigori understood, and still felt—reflexive memory, perhaps, that faint hope and longing. He and Christine had considered adoption, after so many failed pregnancies, but then Christine had said the years of waiting, the bureaucracy of it, the potential for it to all suddenly fall through, was something she no longer had the strength or will to contend with. As much as he had wanted to, Grigori hadn’t had the heart to pursue the matter further. It wasn’t anything he thought about anymore.

  Last year, though, Christine’s friend Amelie, whose twins were now three years old, had said something that remained with him even now: “Pretty much all my life I’ve wondered about my birth parents, wondered who they were, what they were like. But since I had my children, I don’t wonder anymore. Because I look at my kids, and I can see the answer. It’s right there in their features, in who they are. Everything that isn’t Rick and his family must be from my side. It’s my kids who are finally showing me where I come from.”

  Grigori’s parents had not given him the full account of his adoption for many years. For one thing, his mother, despite her scientific nature, believed strongly in fate; she had not wanted, Grigori understood much later, to corrupt the miracle of his late arrival in her arms with the dour truth of the circumstances that had put him there. It was an unpleasant story, she had told him, of which they had only a few facts. As for his father, Feodor had always preferred to avoid unnecessary complications. Keep it simple, he always said—as if life might allow such a thing.

  Grigori still saw in his mind, sometimes, his mother, the straight line down the middle of her scalp where she parted her long fading brown hair. As a child he had admired the neatness and simplicity of that line, the way it seemed to embody Katya’s patience and concentration. Once, when he was very young, when they still lived in Russia, Grigori had witnessed his mother brushing out her hair at night; no longer twisted up into clips, her hair was suddenly longer, smoother, and Grigori had been shocked to see Katya become, all at once, a young girl. As much as wonder, he recalled, even now, his deep fear at the suddenness of the transformation, how quickly someone he thought he knew had become someone else.

  Sudden transformations awaited all three of them. When Grigori was eleven, his father defected while attending a research conference in Vienna. As they had planned, Katya managed to transport Grigori and herself into Norway, where Feodor met them five months later.

  It was in Norway, when he was still a boy, that Grigori overheard his parents’ friend, the woman who lived in the apartment next door, tell his mother in a teasing yet matter-of-fact way, “Your problem is that you’re Russian: you don’t know how to be happy.” That statement too remained with Grigori, though he did not necessarily believe the woman’s words. If his mother—and his father, too—came across as somewhat grim, surely it was because they had lived in fear and left much behind: friends, some family (though there had been few relatives), rooms they felt at home in, language that rolled without effort from their tongues. Not until much later had Grigori understood that their departure from their homeland had something to do with their science, with what they knew and believed. So much about them Grigori had never really known. The three of them had lived in Norway for two years before moving to Paris, and then, when Grigori was sixteen years old, Katya had accepted a position at a university in New Jersey, where Feodor was offered good work at a lab. And so young Grigori, gangly and adolescent, became, to the degree that he could, American.

  He had told Christine this, and all he recalled of the secretive trip to Norway, and about arriving in France not understanding a word. About his first time shopping, with his mother, in a non-Soviet store, the great shock of hearing the proprietor tell them “Thank you” when they made their purchase. About never having seen so many types of lettuce before he came to Paris. About the plane descending for landing in America, and viewing from above the rooftops all the shining blue circles and squares, and his disbelief when it was explained to him that these were swimming pools. He told Christine all of this on their third date, and from that night he loved her, because of how she listened, with complete attention, as if trying to picture it all. It was the first step, he recognized much later, in his own version of Amelie’s experience—discovering one’s hidden self through love for another.

  He told Christine about his long-faced, intelligent parents, who after the move to America seemed to lose their former worldliness, as if having left it behind on some luggage rack. While they had managed to adjust to life in Norway, and then France, with few problems, they negotiated this last new country with timidity and incomprehension. Even the most benign American customs seemed all the more bewildering: the baffling “How are you?” to which no real answer was expected, the thank-you cards for dinners or birthday gifts for which they had already been thanked in person…Only much later did Grigori realize that much of their confusion came not so much from themselves as from how people viewed them and treated them: the older couple with the awkward teenage son—the one with the imprecise accent and odd sense of humor. Sometimes people thought they were his grandparents. Grigori supposed it had to do with their apprehensiveness more than their age. Or perhaps people sensed the progression of something Grigori had long felt: that despite his love for this tight little knot that was his family—the only family he possessed and was a part of, as stippled with complexities of emotion as any other family—the truth was that he had always felt a certain, if small, unbridgeable distance between him and his parents. Then, when he was in his late twenties, they had died.

  “Oops, excuse me. Oh. Hello.”

  In front of Grigori, caught before a small cluster of people crowding the concessions stand, was—it took a moment for him to understand—the woman from Beller. “Drew. Hello.”

  Holding a plastic glass of wine, some of which had trickled onto her hand, she looked surprised. “Sorry to bump into you like that. At least I didn’t spill on you. Oh—this is my friend Stephen.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Grigori said, firmly shaking the man’s hand, as Drew said, “Excuse me,” and blotted up the spilled wine by bringing her mouth to the back of her hand. “Stephen, this is…Grigori Solodin.” The look on her face changed then, suddenly almost pained. Immediately Grigori understood that it was due to the auction house and Grigori’s confidential status there. No one was supposed to know.

  Grigori said, “So nice to see you here, Drew,” to show that he had full faith in her and was confident she wouldn’t goof up. As some other patrons squeezed by, the young man, handsome, somewhat slight of build but with a confident smile, put his hand lightly on Drew’s back to nudge her forward.

  “Are you enjoying the show?” Drew was asking, still looking uncomfortable.

  “Very much. And you?” Past her shoulder, approaching them, Grigori saw Evelyn, and felt himself tense; hopefully Drew would understand that Evelyn, too, knew nothing of his involvement in the auction. She had stepped up to the three of them and was looking at Drew and Stephen expectantly, as Grigori handed her her wine. With luck she might think these two former students. Grigori said, “This is my good friend and colleague Evelyn Bennett.”

  Evelyn asked, “Are you students of Grigori?”

  Drew looked to Grigori as if wondering how to answer, just as Stephen said, “Oh, you’re a teacher?”

  “We both are,” Evelyn told him.

  “Evelyn is a professor of Italian,” said Grigori, “while I profess the Russian language and its literature.”

  “Oh, that’s right, Drew told me how she once tried to learn Russian.
”

  Drew’s face had turned pink. “I’m afraid I’m no good at languages,” she said awkwardly. “But I grew up with a romantic notion about Russia, so I finally signed up for an intro Russian course. But really I’m no good—”

  The bell sounded, loudly, signaling the end of intermission. “Oh, there you go,” Grigori said quickly, “I suppose we’d better get back to our seats,” though he knew perfectly well that the lights would not go down for another ten minutes.

  “Yes, us too!” Drew said, clearly as relieved as Grigori at having found an exit from the conversation. “Enjoy the rest of the show.”

  “Nice to meet you,” added the young man.

  “Oh, so they’re not even your students,” Evelyn said, laughing, as Grigori turned toward the auditorium doors. “Did you just strike up a conversation while I was in the restroom?”

  “We were sort of thrust together by the throng,” Grigori told her, happy not to have to lie, exactly. They made their way down the red-carpeted aisle and settled into their seats. Evelyn had reapplied her makeup and brushed her hair, so that she looked particularly bright and healthy. Yet Grigori found himself unable to chat as easily as he had before. The feelings that had warmed him during the first act were gone, or perhaps just submerged. Though Evelyn sat as close to him as before, there was a space, a discomfort, between them. It had to do, Grigori realized, with the young woman, Drew Brooks; how flustered Grigori had been, not knowing what to say, how to explain things. Even now he felt anxious, restless, aware that she was still here somewhere in the theater with him.

  The conductor had returned. The orchestra again began its thankless task, and at last the curtain lifted, revealing the various princesses, and now wicked Odile made her entrance, masquerading as Odette. Though Grigori had seen Swan Lake numerous times (back when he and Christine were subscribers), something about tonight’s performance—Odile’s evil confidence, her consuming beauty, the wicked precision of her twirling fouettées—overcame the ridiculous setup and the interminable solos, the coy princesses showing off endlessly. The story really did feel tragic: How could anyone not fall for this gorgeous woman’s trick? Quite suddenly Grigori felt real pity, not only for poor Odette, trembling hopelessly somewhere in the forest, but for Siegfried and his unknowing betrayal, a victim himself. After all, it was an honest mistake. Funny, Grigori had never really thought about it much before, hadn’t cared enough to think more than, “Poor Siegfried screwed up.” But now, having watched Siegfried jump and leap and spin himself to the hilt, Grigori understood the ballet in a new, felt way. The same thing sometimes happened when he read good poetry, or any great literature: the truth of it had reached his core, and would not let go.