White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  The tiny, empty shoes, the lifeless costumes, the busts and statues, the bronze cast of Pavlova’s right foot all seemed to Alex unconnected with the luminous enchantment of ballet. He was most attracted to the portraits. Grandmère had been painted full length and almost life size, in an off-the-shoulder pink evening gown with a feather in her hair, and she smiled at him with uncanny vivacity.

  ‘Ah, yes, Kusminskaya. Very brilliant dancer, very athletic, but she wants the music to follow her, not to follow the music, so she always make the conductor crazy.’

  They found him also a photograph of his grandfather, in a small, thick gold frame below the much larger portraits of Mikhail Fokine and Leon Bakst. He knew enough of Lydia Kusminskaya’s life in St Petersburg to understand that his descent from the man who was thought of as her partner and choreographer, not her lover, would need explanation, and since he spoke only a few words of Russian at that time, he had not attempted to claim the relationship, merely asked questions. None of Leo Volinsky’s ballets were still performed in the Soviet Union, they informed him sadly. Salome was still given in the West, he countered with excessive politeness, and he would like the opportunity to see Les Pléiades one day.

  Later, he heard the story of Volinsky’s death, told pointedly by a senior teacher with the aim of instilling a proper humility in him about his background. He had been caught out cutting a class in the history of the ballet. ‘You know, Wolfe, you have sprung from barren soil? America is no place to breed an artist. You must work to make up for your lack of culture. Look at our choreographer, Volinsky, a man with an absolute vocation for the ballet, a very serious artist. Do you know what happened to him in America?’

  ‘No, Sir,’ Alex had replied with a show of alert contrition.

  ‘When the war began in Europe Volinsky went with the Ballets Russes to America but Diaghilev lost interest in an artist once he had made him successful, and he wanted to make his lover Massine the chief choreographer. So he tired of Volinsky, who was offered a chance to stay in America and open his own choreographic academy. He had a family by then, there was the Revolution here at home, so he decided to accept, and so did many others who were cast adrift by Diaghilev in the same way.’

  ‘Where did he settle?’ Alex hoped to divert the lecture completely into his personal history.

  ‘In a desert! In the middle of the country, where there was nothing but cornfields. And the others also. Now you will learn, Wolfe, that a dancer is always a child. The world is not for you. You cannot be businessmen. And Americans have no interest in art, no respect for culture. Ballet to them was just a passing fashion, they also grew tired of it in a few years. So soon Volinsky was bankrupt. His friends all suffered terrible failures – they were reduced to giving tango lessons in dance halls, dancing in cabarets, giving classes to fat women who wanted to lose weight. Diaghilev died, Nijinsky had gone mad. And Volinsky wrote a last letter to Fokine, who was still his idol but was also out of work, and then he went to a big waterfall and threw himself off the cliff into the torrent.’

  ‘The Niagara Falls?’ Alex’s eyes were wide with a peculiar joy at hearing such a note of pure romance echoing from his past, chiming with his own wild impulses. In his early days in Leningrad he had been so crushed by loneliness that he too had been teased by thoughts of suicide.

  The teacher, never having heard of Niagara Falls, did not understand and went on to lecture Alex about cultural deficiency. Later he had asked the Curator to rehearse the story again, and learned that Cleveland was the desert where his grandfather had despaired. The poetry of this coincidence resounded in his mind for weeks. Finally he was able to integrate all of his past, his dull experience and his exotic heritage, into one convincing life story.

  As Alex peeled off his sweaty practice clothes and stood under the rattling shower-head, Anya was on his mind. He adored her so vastly he felt weak when he thought of it. To him she was all legendary women of Russia in one person. In her misty eyes he saw not short sight but the frailty of Anna Karenina. When she pinned up her hair and despaired of its fluffy curls, he saw a hundred heroines of Chekhov and Turgenev at their toilette. With the serious face she wore in class she was the queen beloved of Ivan the Terrible, whose death drove the tyrant to an orgy of destruction. And at night, when they bribed her roommate to disappear and Anya lifted up her bedclothes and welcomed him into her warmth, she was Lermontov’s tribal princess of the Caucasus.

  He dried himself and dressed, mentally promising his half erection its proper exercise in the evening as he settled it into his jeans. At the door the white-haired concierge scuttled out of her booth squeaking, ‘Cold, cold!’ She tried to fasten the snaps on his anorak and insisted that he produce his hat from his pocket and put it on.

  Outside snow was falling, tiny flakes like a shower of powder, thin at roof level, thick as it approached the ground. There was no breeze. The end of the short street could just be made out, the sky was invisible. He drew in a breath and felt the clammy air spreading like fatigue through his body. The atmosphere in the city was so saturated with damp that on still days like this it was an effort to fill his lungs. The air seemed almost viscous and reluctant to yield oxygen; within a few hundred yards he felt smothered and tore open his anorak again to free his chest.

  He turned into Lomonsonov Square and loped across the empty streets to the embankment of the little Fontanka river, hardly bothering to turn his head and look out for traffic; when a vehicle approached he was warned by the noise of its engine ringing across the ice and echoing between the buildings.

  ‘On the corner which Kamenovsky Street makes with the Rimsky-Korsakov Prospekt. So you go past the Yussupov Palace – such a beautiful garden, the lilacs in the summer had such a wonderful scent you could smell them on the far side of the canal. So where the canal joins the river you follow it.’ Grandmère had drawn him a map and he held it now in his bare fingers, noticing how the thick pencil lines showed the grain of the wooden table top.

  He loitered without urgency, by now familiar with the route. When he first left for Leningrad, she had said nothing about the city to him. He had returned, both enchanted and appalled by the great half-empty avenues and their blistered façades, and shocked by the wilful neglect, the locked cathedrals and palaces used as offices with their marble floors unswept and their mouldings smashed to fit ugly lights. He had begun to pester her with questions about the days before the Revolution. She had refused to answer, raising her hands to push away his words and straining her stiff neck to turn aside her head as if avoiding a blow.

  ‘It’s no good, there’s no point. You’re going to tell me that everything’s gone now, everything beautiful. I don’t know this place you’re talking about.’ Now he understood: she was afraid of hearing that her Russia, so vividly remembered, no longer existed; she was like a soldier’s mother whose son had long ago been reported missing in a battle but who still dreaded to hear that he was dead. ‘The city I knew is gone,’ she had declaimed. ‘The life I led is over. The people I loved are dead. We lived in beauty, don’t you see? I know it isn’t like that now, it’s all ugliness everywhere. You don’t have to describe it to me, I know already. The past is the past, it’s gone, finished – except in my heart, in all our hearts, there it is eternal. But don’t try to tell me about this place, Leningrad. I never lived there. And you haven’t been sent to make me sad.’

  To reassure her he began to drop details into his conversation, mentioning the sun on the gold church domes or a statue in a park, and after some weeks she snapped suddenly awake from an afternoon doze and demanded, ‘The bombing. What did they destroy? It wasn’t much, they said it wasn’t much.’

  ‘In the war, the Germans?’

  ‘They said they never got to the centre of the city.’

  ‘That’s right, Grandmère. In the siege the front was three miles out, they took us there.’

  ‘But the centre?’

  ‘It’s all still there.’

  Then she qu
izzed him, street by street, drawing a chair up to the table to scrawl maps on the paper which had wrapped the morning’s bread, until his memory was exhausted and it was evident that the buildings still stood but many names had been changed. Marie sat down and tried to join the conversation, but stalled at the simple task of remembering the street on which she had lived. This unexpected failure almost visibly deflated her, and she sat in silence, patting her white hair.

  ‘When you go back, go and see my house,’ Lydia ordered. He was sharpening her pencil with the old penknife which lived with two peacock feathers and an ivory letter opener on an enamel tray. ‘Here, I’ll draw you the way. It must be there if Turgenev Square is there. When you see my house, then you’ll understand what I was, what really La Kusminskaya was. You must take a picture with your camera. But don’t show it me if it’s ugly.’

  Later another thing occurred to her. ‘Don’t expect a palace. They requisitioned my house, you know. Nobody told me but I heard in the end. Made my cook serve them, drank all my wine and took my car. So who knows. I had such beautiful things, such beautiful things. No doubt they burned the furniture, maybe even the floors. I hung the drawing-room walls with yellow silk – it’s a good thing to do in a northern climate, the colour gives the impression of sunlight.’

  Angela Partridge, visiting for the first time after a fall which had kept her in hospital for a month with a broken wrist, rasped agreement. ‘Absolutely right, she’s absolutely right. I remember my own mother telling me the same thing. Of course, we never see the sun in England either.’

  ‘The furniture was from Meltzer, everyone went to them. Except the bronze bits and pieces, they were from Paris. Who knows what will be left of it all now? One thing I had, which nobody else did – I had a safe in the house for my jewellery. Even Kchessinskaya didn’t have that – she kept all her big pieces at Fabergé. A nuisance, sending couriers to and fro every day. She was really envious of my little safe. You go and take a look – the corner of Kamenovsky Street and Rimsky-Korsakov Prospekt. Everyone wanted to move out that way, it was terribly smart.’

  ‘There were no factories there.’ Marie was gratified to have one useful memory to contribute. ‘But the prices went right up – Basil couldn’t possibly have afforded it.’

  ‘I say, it would be too good if the house was still there.’ The Englishwoman lifted her bandaged hand on to the table with her free hand, enabling her to turn confidentially to the young man. ‘You will have a look, won’t you? It does mean a lot to your grandmother. I do believe she’s talked about that house every single day ever since we met.’

  When he first took to the streets with her map Alex discovered that Grandmère’s geographical recall was poor. For the most part, and once the Curator had found him a simple plan of the inner city as it had been before the Revolution, she had the names of streets correct, but their relationships to each other were all wrong. He found Rimsky-Korsakov Prospekt. It made corners with six other streets, and crossed a small canal, but none of these carried the name Kamenovsky.

  A day or two after this setback, Anya proposed a solution. ‘Six crossroads, twelve corners … why don’t you just take your little camera and photograph all the buildings on the corners – then Granny can pick out her old house for herself?’

  ‘They’ll arrest me.’ Random photography was among the many activities which, he had been warned by the American consulate, were forbidden in Russia.

  ‘No they won’t – or only for half an hour, until they find out who you are. Hide the camera in your pocket and just be casual, don’t make a fuss about it. Do you want me to come with you so we look just like any other young couple?’

  ‘You’re a darling but this is something I want to do alone,’ he told her abruptly, unwilling to explain. If they were caught he knew that the consequences for her would be serious.

  The camera was buttoned into his anorak pocket, with a pair of gloves stuffed underneath it to bring the lens up to the edge. He could bring his hand up as if pulling his collar around his ears to keep out the cold, and press the shutter. It might be difficult to frame the shots but he was prepared to waste a film on a trial session this term. He set off at a brisk pace down Rimsky-Korsakov Prospekt. The people on the street in Leningrad mostly moved swiftly and purposefully, three shifts a day hurrying to and from their work and the metro stations in silent herds.

  To avoid crossing the road too often and attracting attention, he decided to work down one side of the street, then cross over to the other side and return. Living in Russia made everyone paranoid; people spied on each other routinely, normal actions were crimes and fear of the KGB shaped daily life. To his relief, there were no more intersections with the city’s major thoroughfares after the first canal, and the crowd dwindled to a few self-absorbed pedestrians who kept their heads well down against the cold.

  His nerves had settled by the time he passed the church of St Nicholas of the Sea; the gold cupolas on its slender spires carried a visible sprinkling of snow on their windward side. Surely Grandmère would have mentioned such a landmark, even if it was less massive than the central cathedrals. If the house had overlooked a canal she would have told him that as well – or would she? Her reminiscences were always so emotional. Best to be utterly conscientious and record everything – if the less distinguished buildings were certainly not what he was seeking they might still stimulate her memory.

  On his way back, with the church just appearing in view once more, he had almost forgotten his fears, and took his time to photograph a building whose frontage was partly obscured by scaffolding. An official sign informed him that the renovation of the Palace of the Young Pioneers was two weeks ahead of schedule already. Some of the workers who were hacking at the green-painted façade were female; the sight of women doing manual work had first shocked and now intrigued him. He delayed until one was clearly in view, swinging her pick-axe in profile like a bas-relief figure on a Soviet monument.

  Before he could press the shutter there were shouts of alarm and the sound of falling rubble from the interior. A cloud of thick white dust burst from a hole where there had once been a window and obscured the heroic worker. Alex waited for it to clear, absorbed in capturing the picture he wanted.

  He heard the command ‘Stop!’ bellowed as a group of three men ran out of a small doorway directly in front of him, and froze with fear. Although they were covered with plaster dust he saw that they were violently agitated; a fourth man leaped across the cracked doorstep and seized the nearest by his shoulder. ‘Stop, you fools!’ he repeated in a lower voice. ‘Think, boys, think! Do you want …’ The terror drained from Alex’s body as he realized that he had not been discovered. The men were quite unaware of him, although they were separated only by a row of iron railings.

  The four now drew together confidentially, their furtive manner amusing Alex. Russians normally hammed their emotions like silent film actors – naturally the drama coach thought his own subtle style was wooden. She just didn’t understand, in the West audiences would laugh if he did what she wanted.

  The men were examining something which one of them had hidden in his jacket. There was a sudden agreement, a quick back-slapping which raised more dust from their clothes, and they returned inside. The woman on the scaffolding was swinging her pick-axe again. Alex shook himself and stepped back to reframe the photograph before continuing on his way.

  In half an hour the assignment was complete. The cold pinched his cheeks and toes unbearably, and he ran back northwards along Garden Street as fast as the icy surface would permit to stir his blood and warm his limbs.

  The next destination was a small apartment above a fish shop on the Nevsky Prospekt where he went twice a week for Russian lessons. The shop window amused him when he was in a buoyant mood, but depressed him otherwise. It was decorated with flat wooden images of boats, fishermen and the god Neptune, painted in dull shades of blue. Real fishing nets of knotted twine were draped between the boats, carrying a catch
of dummy tins of salmon and herring. Today he was able to smile at them and be charmed by the old salts and their cheery, two-dimensional grimaces. He was relieved to find that the shop was empty; one day there had been a long queue, and the impatient people at the head of it assumed he was pushing past them and set on him, ready to knock him down until the shopgirl screamed at them, that he was only her mother-in-law’s pupil.

  The teacher was a wiry woman whose energy and black frizzy hair belied her stated age of sixty. Alex spoke and understood the language reasonably now; with a working knowledge of three languages he had revised his opinion of himself as a man without words. When he heard himself talking French and Russian comfortably he was so impressed to be communicating at all that the disparity between his deep feelings and the simple words he could command seemed insignificant.

  On paper he was less confident. The teacher gave him a story from the Leningrad edition of Pravda to read aloud, then rewrite in flowing Cyrillic script. He did both lamentably. Perhaps there had been a sign for Kamenovsky Street after all, and he had simply failed to recognize it. He asked the teacher to write the name for him; she said the name was familiar, but could not find it on her street map. Alex fidgeted and was plainly anxious to be away. When she discovered it was his girlfriend’s birthday she sent him off early with two mushroom pies and a gay smile.

  At the ballet school’s hostel he unloaded his camera and hid the film in his canvas summer shoes, then set out to complete the preparations for the party. Across the corridor was the room nicknamed the Little Caucasus, inhabited by two Armenian boys and Andrusha, a Georgian, who had returned that weekend from a family funeral in Tbilisi. All Georgians were dealers, adept at playing their vast networks of contacts and favours to procure anything for anyone at a price, and Andrusha, charged by the American to supply the celebration in exchange for a pair of genuine Levis bought to his own measurements and a bottle of whisky, had returned with a suitcase containing a box of cherries, sticky honey and almond cakes, and a small jar of caviar. There was also the sausage, a salami so fragrant, meaty, tightly packed, perfectly rosy in colour and handsome in proportion that he suggested to his client it might be wiser to consume it immediately since on sight of it Anya was likely to transfer her affections. Alex immediately blushed.