“His job?” Nina asks.
Polina’s voice drops. “He’s with the State Security.”
The secret police. Before Nina can ask if he is an agent or an administrator, Vera adds, “He must have some sort of pull. Surely he knows someone who can do something.”
“But won’t it sound like I’m complaining? I’d hate for him to think I’m unwilling to help. I don’t want to disappoint him.”
Nina says, “You’re a ballerina, not an informer.”
“I suppose I could ask him,” Polina whispers, and a small whimper escapes. “It’s just—I love him, I really do. I don’t want anything to go wrong between us.” Even in a whisper, there’s a wailing sound to her voice. “I feel so sick. I’m sick with it.”
They have reached the hotel. Vera holds the door open for Polina while Nina, feeling around in her pocketbook, finds her handkerchief, onto which she sprinkles some eau de cologne. The woman in the gray hat and scarf lingers outside.
Vera has led Polina to a chair in the hotel lobby. “Close your eyes and take a deep breath,” Nina says, laying the kerchief over Polina’s forehead. “It’s going to be all right.”
It isn’t until many hours later, when they have danced and showered and eaten and are back in their rooms, that Nina finds a moment alone to look at the note in her pocket. On it is printed, in small but clear letters: Passports, i.d. Ernst 11 6275.
THE REST OF that year, the year Grigori turned twenty, was filled with Elsin’s poetry. Grigori returned to the vinyl bag and its contents, the photographs and letters; the pendant remained his secret. He read all he could about Elsin and Revskaya, and like a sleuth pieced the puzzle together. And then came the disappointments: Big Ears’ dismissive response to his essay, not to mention—after his careful and timid approach—Nina Revskaya’s angry green eyes.
But his efforts were not wasted. If nothing else, he now had his topic of study; the socialist realist poetry of Viktor Elsin was soon to become his subject of expertise, and won him a student travel grant—his first trip back to Russia. In Moscow, using the address and bit of information he had gleaned from the hospital certificate, he sought whatever records he might find. The frustration of trying to access those records, a search that, on that first trip, proved futile, was like nothing he had ever experienced. Even when he returned two years later—as a chaperone on a student exchange program—to repeat the attempt, the ordeal was dismaying. First he waited all morning for the burly woman at the housing records office to finish whatever she was doing and pay attention to him; when at last Grigori was allowed to explain his reason for being there, the woman announced that it was her lunch hour. When she returned much later to find Grigori still waiting, she allowed that any files she might be able to locate for him were only accessible, for some reason, between nine and ten thirty in the morning. And so Grigori showed up the next day at the appointed time, only to be told that the woman was not in that day and that, since she was the only person in charge of housing records, no one else could help him. When he returned on the third day, the office was inexplicably closed.
“You look grumpy,” Evelyn said now, as they made their way in Grigori’s Volvo to the home of Roger and Hoanh Thomson, both colleagues of theirs at the university. “Don’t worry, we don’t have to stay long.”
“Sorry, no, it’s—I was just remembering something.”
Evelyn gave him a sympathetic look. Probably she thought he was thinking something sad about Christine. She had been very patient with him ever since Valentine’s Day, had even made a point of saying she was glad that they were “taking things slow.” Grigori sat up straighter and tried to look cheery. It was a cold Saturday evening, the first of March, and they were headed to the Thomsons’ yearly faculty party in honor of International Women’s Day. (Really it was meant to be celebrated on the eighth, but spring break was next week and most people would be away.) This was an event to which “Grigori and guest” were annually invited simply because he and Hoanh—who tutored French and Vietnamese and dressed in aggressively tarty outfits—had offices on the same floor. Though she was not particularly pretty (bad skin, and something cold in her small brown eyes) Roger clearly thought her a sexpot, and everyone at the university (well, perhaps not Evelyn, who knew about fashion) acted like she was, since she wore lots of makeup and form-fitting clothes more revealing than anything they themselves ever dared. Even to this party most of them would surely turn up in rubber boots and baggy turtlenecks and goofy all-weather parkas intended for trekking the Himalayas; you would think they were in the middle of a blizzard. Not Evelyn, of course. She had styled herself in a sleeveless silk blouse, a slim black skirt, and those high-heeled leather boots she looked particularly good in.
“That sounds good,” Grigori had told her when she asked if he wanted to carpool. That was how she put it, “carpool to Roger and Hoanh’s,” as if even phrasing it some other way—“Would you like to go to the party together?”—might not be “slow” enough for him. Of course, no matter how she phrased it, their colleagues would whisper when they showed up together. Fine, let them talk. It didn’t matter.
“Oh, brother, I forgot about the no-shoes policy.” Evelyn looked put out as they came upon the sad-looking lineup of dirty boots and sneakers and salt-stained galoshes arrayed on a layer of newspaper in the foyer. The Thompsons’ home—a roomy apartment on Med-field Street—was toasty, the fireplace emitting its woodsy scent. “My whole outfit is about the boots.” Evelyn gave a good-natured laugh, unzipping the slender boots, and slid them off, as Grigori silently stepped out of his loafers. Though he too found the no-shoes policy inhospitable, something stopped him from showing sympathy for Evelyn, even when he saw how small she now became, a good three inches shorter in her sheer-stockinged feet. “Well, here goes,” she said, opening the door. Feeling guilty and ungenerous, Grigori held it for her to go ahead of him.
“Welcome, Greg, and Evelyn, I salute you.” Roger greeted them and handed a tiny bouquet of pinkish rosebuds to Evelyn. This too was part of the tradition, little posies for all the women, and on Roger and Hoanh’s stereo music by female artists only. By the door was a framed declaration of International Women’s Day and a donation box for the Girls’ Fund of America.
“Mmm, this way I can keep smelling them,” Evelyn said, carefully pinning the posy to her silk blouse, as Roger hung their coats on the wall rack. “Thanks, Roger.”
The other guests stood around in fuzzy socks and pilly sweaters, drinking Roger’s homemade coffee liqueur. Deplorable, thought Grigori—though his trousers too were somewhat rumpled. New England winter…Yet even Christine, in the long last winter of her illness, had not fallen into the torpidity of perpetual poly fleece.
Roger said, “You’re looking lovely, Evelyn, I must say.” It was true; the shimmer of her silk blouse made her eyes look even brighter, and she held herself straight and proud, in that petite, fit way of hers, unlike so many of the others here, lumpy in their heavy sweaters. “So, you know the ropes. Drinks, et cetera, over here, edibles over there.” Roger indicated the table over by the window, said, “Oh, my bride is beckoning,” and went over to where Hoanh was standing in a tight, stretchy dress that somehow managed to accentuate her pubis.
Grigori was glad not to have to talk to them. The truth was, he couldn’t stand Roger, a sociologist who studied fripperies such as “the social impulse” and even got away with teaching a course on “friendship.” There was a falseness about him, a posturing, and that embarrassingly transparent pride at having managed to marry a skinny Asian fox of his very own. Something so practiced about him, always a new sleek tie, or suits he wore with Converse high-tops. In better weather he rode an old Schwinn three-speed to work; he had spent months researching retro bicycles before having it shipped from Chicago. Even this apartment seemed a pose rather than genuine, the African masks and Vietnamese water puppets carefully commingled with a circus poster, a London transit map, and photo-booth Polaroids in which Roger and Ho
anh made faces of forced jollity. Atop the living room bookshelf, record albums were propped for display—Joan Baez, Laura Nyro, Patti Smith, Joan Jett—though really all of the music was coming from one of those iPods advertised everywhere these days, plugged into a speaker system in the corner.
“Do they even own a turntable?” Grigori asked petulantly.
“They’re for decoration,” Evelyn said, and pinched his arm. “Stop being a humbug.”
“But it’s my defining characteristic.” He filled a shot glass of the homemade liqueur and handed it to her.
“Ooo, yum, it’s good, Grigori, you should try it. Hello, Zoltan.”
“Kezét csókolom.” Zoltan had taken Evelyn’s hand and kissed it.
Grigori reached out and shook his hand. “I have to admit, Zoltan, I’m surprised to see you here.” Zoltan always made a point of saying he had no time for “the petty one-upmanship of academic banter.”
But now he said, “I decided I must, since it will be my last one.”
“What do you mean?” After what he had been through with Christine, Grigori could not help worrying; perhaps Zoltan too had received bad news from a physician.
“Ssh.” He pulled them away from the drinks table and whispered, “This is my last year on the faculty. As chair of the department, you are now officially the first to be informed. But please don’t tell the others yet. I’d hate for anyone to think they have to do anything, you know, a big party or ceremony or what have you. I’d like to avoid any commemorations.”
A doubt entered Grigori’s mind, that his colleagues, or the university administration, could be quite so generous. He would have to come up with some appropriate way to show their gratitude. Zoltan added, “Believe me, it’s better this way. Just slip off quietly into the night.”
“But where will you go?” Evelyn asked, and Grigori understood what she meant—that the academy, with its steadfast faith in intellectualism and its own arcane scholarship, was the only place for a man like Zoltan, whose artistic devotion was rarely so passionately embraced in the quotidian world. After all, universities themselves were museums of a sort, places where people like Zoltan, and others who did not quite fit in, could comfortably ensconce themselves for decades—entire lives, even—worrying away at whatever esoteric subject they chose, until their hair had receded and the last of their youth disappeared.
“I plan to return home,” Zoltan said.
“Home?” Evelyn asked, but Grigori knew what that must mean.
“Hungary,” Zoltan said. “A cottage on Lake Balaton awaits me.”
Grigori asked, “How long have you been planning this?” and, hearing a hurt tone in his voice, added, “It will be bleak without you here.” He meant it. Who else was there to argue about Mahler with, to compare translations of Baudelaire, to commiserate over the sorry state of the fiction in the New Yorker? Zoltan could become red-faced over a doltish Times book review, it didn’t matter whose book or what subject. He would telephone Grigori when a particular recording of Schumann was being broadcast, and showed deep affront if a student claimed never to have heard of Diaghilev or Brodsky or Vanessa Bell. “I’ll miss you,” said Grigori.
“Me too,” Evelyn said obligingly.
“You will, and then after a while you won’t.” Zoltan poured himself a Scotch with shaky hands. “As for me, it’s time to go home.”
“I didn’t even realize you had planned to go back.”
“I hadn’t. But when I started looking back at my journals, it’s funny, it jogged something in my mind. I began to remember things. I’d put so much out of my mind. This Christmas, I was on the T, seeing people’s decorated trees through the windows, and I thought for the first time in decades—decades!—of a bonbon we used to have, wrapped in crinkly paper. We decorated the Christmas trees with it. And for a full day I couldn’t remember the name. That was when I knew it was time to go home.”
Grigori nodded. He knew that feeling, that urge—and yet what was home, now, for Grigori? He had been asking himself this since Christine’s death. Lately he had even considered moving—not leaving Boston but finding a smaller place, perhaps a condo somewhere.
“What’s the word?” Evelyn was asking. “For the Christmas candy.”
“Szaloncukor!” Grigori glimpsed the glee of a child in Zoltan’s eyes. “I think it will be an amazing thing to go back to a place I once had to run from. That now I can say what I want, without any worry for my safety. Or perhaps it won’t feel that way; perhaps it will be a reminder. Living here, one forgets what it was like. Not just for me. For any intellectual. Always some mortal threat or other. Always watching your back. Simply for being who you were—appreciating what you appreciated, understanding certain things.”
It was amazing, what Zoltan, in his perhaps small, perhaps quiet way, had accomplished, even if he was but a footnote to the list of triumphs of art in the face of authoritarianism. And buoying to consider that as Zoltan’s literary executor Grigori might too be part of that chain of hands, if only he could secure a translator and publisher for Zoltan’s later work. It would be a long project, that was certain—but then, what was life, really, without such challenges?
“Though this country has been my home for a good while,” Zoltan said, “it’s a different kind of home. I’m not sure I ever quite belonged. I was reading my journal this morning—I don’t know, Evelyn, if Grigori has mentioned that I’m writing a memoir. I was looking back at entries from when I first arrived in America, and it was so curious to see what I’d noticed back then that I no longer notice at all. I’d been in London quite a while by then, and didn’t realize how differently the United States would strike me. But from the minute I stepped off the plane, the difference was visible.”
“How so?” Evelyn asked.
“Oh, everyone rushing about, gesturing to each other, the physicality of it. Here everyone is always in a hurry.”
“No one in England was ever in a hurry?”
“They don’t show their emotions the way people here do. Americans don’t hold back. They swear and curse and slap each other on the back. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it before.”
Grigori was nodding, recalling that sensation of newness. “For me it was the houses. I’ll never forget first time I saw a suburban American house. I couldn’t believe how big it was. And that there were extra rooms that people didn’t even use. ‘Guest’ rooms.” He shook his head and laughed.
Zoltan nodded. “This country has been good to me. But it doesn’t hold the indentation of my body on the mattress, if you see what I mean.”
“Yes, well, nor does it mine, I’m sure,” Grigori said.
Evelyn said, “You egotists,” and laughed.
“Egotist!” said Zoltan. “I’ve been in the splendid company of one all week, actually. I’m reading Berlioz’s memoirs. Talk about an ego.”
He began to describe the book, but Evelyn said, “I hate to be rude, but my feet are freezing. You two continue. I need to get over to where the carpet is.”
Grigori could see, now, that she was shivering. “You poor thing,” Zoltan told her. “Do go warm up.”
Watching Evelyn make her way toward the fireplace, Grigori felt again his own self-reproach; he ought to accompany her. She looked diminished without her sleek boots. He blamed himself as much as he did Roger and Hoahn. How must it feel, to have a person agree as easily and willingly as Grigori had to “take things slow”? Well, he was simply trying to be careful and not rush things.
Natalie Gluck, one of the sociology professors, had come up to the drinks table, and now Zoltan was telling them about Berlioz’s early fitful love affairs, until Grigori was no longer following. He was thinking, he realized, of Drew Brooks. She had called him yesterday. Grigori was sorry to have gotten the message too late, after business hours. A warm chattiness to her voice on the recording: she had meant to call earlier, she said, but this week had been so busy; she had gone on vacation and was still catching up…. Grigori liked her
self-assured manner, her energy and poise. He liked the very fact that Drew used the telephone instead of e-mail, that she was not afraid, like so many younger people, to encounter a human voice at the other end of an appeal. “I’ve been reading your translations,” she had said in her message, sounding truly interested. “I’d love to discuss them with you.”
Relief washed through him. After two weeks of hearing nothing from her, he had begun to wonder if by lending her the book he had saddled her with another task; perhaps she felt she could not speak to Grigori until she had read it. Or she had tried to read the poems but was uninterested. Or even disliked them.
But she had devoted a good deal of the past month to Nina Revskaya’s life and treasures. It made sense that she might be drawn to Elsin’s poems. Grigori wondered, now, nodding along to his colleagues’ conversation, how she might react if he simply told her the truth: about the necklace, about the poems and letters and photographs in that vinyl purse. Just give them all over to her, for the catalog or pamphlet or whatever that thing was that she was working so hard on producing. She had read the poems, after all. Perhaps she would be intrigued to see how the poems and letters matched up.
No, no…But, then, why not? He could go there, show them to her. Though why should she care? No one did…. And yet—the thought came to him now—perhaps she might.
Grigori’s colleague Bill Muir had approached him, was talking to him, the usual chitchat, shaking his head at the president’s latest ultimatum. “They’ve supposedly started dismantling their missiles,” Grigori said hopefully, if mainly out of some grudging need to contradict Bill. “Maybe Hussein will follow through after all.”
“Right. And the Sox will win the World Series.” Bill Muir shook his head again, and made some typical, tiresome comment about the president, how there was just one more year of this madness and then they could be rid of him. Grigori was able to commiserate politely, heard himself speaking, heard Bill answering—and yet he was aware of not being here, really, not with his soul. He had no interest, he had lost heart, could not commune with these people, his own colleagues. When had it happened? When Christine died, or just now? He had been here too long, perhaps, in this department, teaching the same subjects, attending the same conferences, presenting paper after paper on Viktor Elsin and his cohort. Only now it seemed meaningless, all of it meaningless, these colleagues around him whom he at times thought of as friends—but now he simply did not care.
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