Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  Dominika was the only child of Nina and Vassily Egorov. Nina had been concertmaster in the Moscow State Symphony, a rising virtuoso who had studied with Klimov and had such massive potential that she was allocated Guarneri’s magnificent 1741 Kochanski del Gesù by the Glinka State Central Museum of Music and Culture. Fifteen years ago her anticipated promotion to the Russian National Symphony Orchestra was denied her when Prokhor Belenko, a toad-eating violinist of inferior talent—but married to the daughter of a Politburo member—demanded that he be promoted, and was given the position. Everyone knew what had happened, but no one said a thing.

  Along with her brilliance in playing the red-varnished skripka, Nina Egorova was known for her fiery disposition, including a simmering temper that exploded whenever she had seen enough. Before the amused eyes of eighty fellow orchestra members, Nina had walloped Belenko above the right ear with his own music stand during his last rehearsal with the State Symphony. Nina was unrepentant. She was also a woman in the then–Soviet Union. They took away the Guarneri. She refused to play a lesser instrument. They moved her from the first to the third seat in strings. She sent them to hell. Administrative leave morphed into dismissal when the Ministry of Culture called the symphony director and her career was over. Now, years later, the elegant neck had bent, the strong hands had curled, the dark hair was gray and in a bun.

  Dominika’s father was the famous academician Professor Vassily Egorov, Senior Professor of History at Moscow University. He was one of the most respected and influential figures in Russian letters, with the rank of Meritorious Professor. His gold-and-blue Order of St. Andrew hung framed on the wall; the claret bowknot he wore every day on his lapel was the Medal Pushkina, the Pushkin Medal for achievement in literature and education. Ironically, Vasya Egorov didn’t look distinguished or influential. He was short and slight, with thinning hair combed carefully across his head.

  Unlike his wife, Vassily Egorov had survived the Soviet years by avoiding politics, allegiances, and controversy. Cocooned in the university, he succeeded chiefly by carefully cultivating a persona of studious fair-mindedness, discretion, and loyalty. What no one knew was that Meritorious Comrade Professor Vassily Egorov maintained a secret, separate soul, the conscience of a totally different being, in which he harbored a moral thinker’s revulsion for the Soviet. Like all Russians, he had lost family in the 1930s and 1940s to Stalin, resisting the Germans, the purges, the katorga. But more than that. He rejected the imbalance and illogic of the Soviet system, he despised the top-heavy favoritism of the cheloveki, the insiders’ sloth and self-indulgence that crushed the human spirit and had robbed Russians of their lives, their country, their patrimony. It was an apostasy shared only with Nina.

  All Russians harbor secret thoughts, they are accustomed to it. So it was with Vassily and Nina, who hid their revulsion at how modern Russia had not changed. Even as Dominika grew older and could begin to understand, Vassily dared not speak to her of their feelings. Both parents yearned to give her a clear vision of the world, to let her see the truth for herself. If they could not expose Russia’s hellish evolution—from Bolshevik rage to Soviet rot and now, even after glasnost, into the Federation’s parasitic greed—Vassily at least resolved to instill in Dominika the real majesty of Russia.

  The spacious three-room apartment (after Nina’s dismissal they were permitted to keep it, thanks only to the continued position and prestige of Vassily) was filled with books, music, art, and conversation in three different languages. Her parents noticed, when Dominika turned five, that the little girl had a prodigious memory. She could recite lines from Pushkin, identify the concertos of Tchaikovsky. And when music was played, Dominika would dance barefoot around the Oriental carpet in the living room, perfectly in time with the notes, twirling and jumping, perfectly in balance, her eyes gleaming, her hands flashing. Vassily and Nina looked at each other, and her mother asked Dominika how she had learned all this. “I follow the colors,” said the little girl.

  “What do you mean, ‘the colors’?” asked her mother. Dominika gravely explained that when the music played, or when her father read aloud to her, colors would fill the room. Different colors, some bright, some dark, sometimes they “jumped in the air” and all Dominika had to do was follow them. It was how she could remember so much. When she danced, she leapt over bars of bright blue, followed shimmering spots of red on the floor. The parents looked at each other again.

  “I like red and blue and purple,” said Dominika. “When Batushka reads, or when Mamulya plays, they are beautiful.”

  “And when Mama is cross with you?” asked Vassily.

  “Yellow, I don’t like the yellow,” said the little girl, turning the pages of a book. “And the black cloud. I do not like that.”

  Vassily asked a colleague from the Faculty of Psychology about the colors. “I have read about a similar condition,” said the colleague. “Sensing letters as colors. It’s quite interesting. Why don’t you bring her by one afternoon?”

  Vassily waited in his office while his professor friend sat with Dominika in a nearby classroom. One hour stretched to three. They came back, little Dominika happy and distracted, the professor pensive. “What?” asked Vassily, looking sideways at his daughter.

  “I could sit with her for days,” said the professor, packing his pipe. “Your little girl shows the attributes of a synesthete. Someone who perceives sounds, or letters, or numbers as colors. Fascinating.” Vassily looked at Dominika again. She was now happily coloring at her father’s desk.

  “My God,” said Vassily. “Is it an illness, is it insanity?”

  “Illness, burden, curse, who can say?” He stuffed his pipe. “On the other hand, Vasya, perhaps she is odarennyi, gifted.” Vassily, the brilliant man of letters, was at a loss. “There’s something else,” said the professor, looking over at Dominika, her head bent over her drawing. “Her synesthesia appears to extend to human reactions. Not only words or sounds, she also sees emotional content as colors. She spoke to me about what sounds like halos of color around people’s heads and shoulders.” Vassily stared at his friend. “Perhaps she will develop into something of a savant in matters of human intentions.

  “Of course, there is the prodigious memory. She flawlessly repeated twenty-five digits back to me several times. It is not uncommon in these cases,” continued the professor. “But you already have seen that.” Vassily nodded. “And another thing, not so common. Your little girl is prone to buistvo, define it as you like, temper, mischief, a short fuse. She swept my papers to the floor when she could not solve a puzzle. Something she will have to control later in life, I would imagine.”

  “Bozhe,” said Vassily, and hurried home to tell his wife.

  “This comes from your family,” said Vassily dryly to Nina, as red-faced Dominika would glower when the music was turned off, gravely displeased, eyes ablaze. If she was this way at age five, what would she be like later on?

  When at the age of ten Dominika auditioned at the Moscow State Academy of Choreography at second Frunzenskaya 5 she impressed the admissions panel. She had no technique, no formal discipline, but even at that young age they saw in her the intensity, the natural skill, the instincts of a great dancer. They had asked her why she wanted to dance, and had laughed at her answer, “Because I can see the music,” and the room grew still as her already strikingly beautiful face darkened and she regarded the panel through narrowed eyes as if contemplating doing them all physical harm.

  Dominika made her saucy, triumphant way through the academy, the great feeder school for the Bolshoi. She flourished despite the rigors of the classical Vaganova method. She had by then become accustomed to living with the colors. Her ability to see them, whether while listening to music, or dancing, or simply talking to people, now felt more refined, somehow more under her control. And she began deciphering the colors, associating them with moods and emotions. It was not a burden. To her it was simply something she lived with.

  Dominika con
tinued to excel, but not only in dancing. She achieved highest marks in the academy’s middle and upper schools, where her ability to remember everything she had been taught served her well. This was something new, something different. Dominika listened to the political lectures, the ideological lessons, the history of communism, the rise and fall of the socialist state, the history of Soviet ballet. Of course, there had been excesses, and there had been corrections. And now modern Russia would continue to grow, a sum greater than its parts. Her young mind made the leap, accepted the cant.

  By age eighteen, Dominika was promoted to the first student troupe at school and led her study class in political achievement. Each night she would return home to tell her secretly horrified father what she had learned. He tried to counterbalance her growing enthusiasms with the lessons of literature and history. But Dominika was in the full flight of her adolescence, in the grip of her young career. If she sensed the nature of his desperate message, if she read the colors above his head, she gave no sign. Vassily could not be more clear. He dared not speak out openly against the system.

  Of course, Nina was pleased that her daughter was progressing so rapidly in the junior ballet company. It was fine, a secure future was assured. But she too watched in dismay as her little girl became a model Modern Russian Woman, an ultranationalist, a tall, chestnut-haired beauty who walked with the elegance of a ballerina, and who behaved like the apparatchiki of the old days.

  Dominika lay on the carpet in the living room, her mother combing her dark hair softly, rhythmically, with the long-handled brush that belonged to her great-grandmother. The tortoiseshell brush with gently curved handle that, along with a framed photograph and a silver samovar, was the only family belonging rescued from the elegant house in pre-Bolshevik Petersburg. The hog’s-hair bristles made a quiet stirring sound, crimson in the air. Her hair was radiant. Dominika, stretching after a long day of ballet, interrupted her father’s soft-spoken narrative by relating what she had heard at school. “Father, do you realize that outside influences are threatening the country? Are you aware of the growing number of dissidents advocating chaos? Have you read V. V. Putin’s article concerning Zionists working against the state?”

  With a dull ache, the parents looked down at their daughter. Gospodi pomiluj! God forbid! The state. V. V. Putin. Dissidents. On the floor, Dominika stretched deeply, her long legs and lithe figure already Their instrument, her good mind slowly being brought into Their service. Nina looked at Vassily. She wanted to tell her daughter the truth, to warn her about the pitfalls of the system that had killed her career, of a system that had forced Vassily to blank his exceptional mind and stay silent for his entire life. Vassily shook his head. “Not now, not ever,” he said.

  At twenty, Dominika was selected prima ballerina of the First Troupe. Her evaluations uniformly were outstanding and her athletic ability prompted her ballet master to compare her to “a young Galina Ulanova” the prima ballerina assoluta of the Bolshoi after the war. Now, when she danced, the colors she saw no longer were elemental shapes and hues, but sophisticated waves of variegated lights, rolling and pulsing and carrying her aloft. The sepia tones surrounding her dancing partners let her more perfectly combine with them. She was hot to the touch, precise, strong in back and leg, exquisite and tall on her toes. The ballet master insisted it was time she began preparing for the yearly audition to join the Bolshoi troupe.

  As she grew stronger and more supple, there was something else coming alive within Dominika’s body, an extension of the rigors of dance, an awareness of her own body. It was not lasciviousness, for she carried her sexuality within her. It was a private awakening, and she tested her corporeal boundaries without a thought of shame. As far as she could determine, neither of her parents was this way, so perhaps a long-forgotten relative had been a libertine.

  In her darkened bedroom, when her body called her, she explored her sensations, explored them as intently as she practiced at the barre, her breathing deep red behind her eyelids, and she shuddered as she discovered how she was wired. It was not a fetish, nor an addiction, but rather a secret self that grew more aware as she grew older. She enjoyed her secret self. It was not all nature-child innocence, however. She occasionally felt the need for something edgy, forbidden, and she closed her eyes tight, on a night of a colossal thunderstorm outside her window, amazed at herself, as she held the swan-necked handle of Prababushka’s brush in her long fingers, timing the lightning flashes to match her own rhythms. Wanting more and more, amazed still, she trailed the humid point lower and held her breath and felt the even sweeter surge of the handle suddenly pinning her like a beetle in a display case. Thank God she had now taken to combing her own hair in the evenings after ballet school.

  Though she had casual friends, Dominika was not friendly with her classmates. For all that, she was class leader, concerned and consumed with nothing but the troupe’s progress, its record of excellence, the triumphs in competitions with other schools, especially those from Saint Petersburg, the spiritual center of Russian ballet of the imperial style. Dominika lectured her weary fellow dancers about the Moscow School’s purity, its essential Russian nature. They all called her klikusha, the demoniac, behind her back, the New Russian Woman, the gladiator, the star, the devoted, the true believer. Oh, shut up, they thought.

  At twenty-two, Sonya Moroyeva probably had one final year to move up from the academy to the Bolshoi, but with Egorova in the running that year, her chances were not good. She had been dancing all her life, was the daughter of a full member of the Duma, and was at the core a spoiled and vain young woman. She was, frankly, desperate. She had been recklessly sleeping with a boy in the troupe, blond, lynx-eyed Konstantin, an incredibly risky activity that if discovered by the instructors would have guaranteed their instant dismissal from the school. But after fifteen years in the academy she knew the quiet times, and when the sauna room was deserted, and how long they had for their sweaty sessions, with her supple legs bent over her head, and she whispered in Konstantin’s ear for a week, and told him she loved him, and ground her hips up at him, licking the sweat from his face, and begged him to save her career, her life.

  Experienced ballet students know as much about anatomy and joints and injuries as a doctor. Konstantin, rabbit-mad in his gluttony for Sonya’s pizda, waited until he was paired with Dominika. Practicing a pas de deux on a crowded floor, he stepped hard on her heel when she was en pointe, forcing her foot forward, and the colors bled and her world went swirling black, and she buckled to searing pain and total collapse. They carried her to the infirmary, her classmates frozen and pale along the barre, Sonya palest of all. Dominika had looked at her then, had seen her guilty expression, the gray miasma swirling unseen around her head, and knew. On the infirmary table her foot was turning black and eggplant-purple, the worst, and the pain radiated up her leg. The doctor muttered, “Lisfranc fracture of the midfoot,” and after a series of orthopedic examinations and surgery, and a cast on her foot to the ankle, Dominika was dropped from the academy; her dancing career, her life for ten years, was over. It was that fast, that final. All the honeyed phrases about her being the next Ulanova evaporated. The masters, the coaches, the trainers wouldn’t look at her.

  In young adulthood she had learned to cope with the buistvo, the mounting rage, but now she let it grow, tasted it in her throat. She hysterically considered denouncing Konstantin and Sonya for having sabotaged her. They too would be expelled if their assignation was revealed, but in the end she knew she could not. She was still numbly contemplating her future when the call came from her mother.

  Her father had suffered a massive stroke and had died on the way to Kremlyovka Clinic in Kuntsevo, reserved for citizens of privilege and wealth. He had been the most important person in her life, her guide, her protector, and now he was gone. She would have held his hand to her cheek, told him of her release from the ballet academy, of the treachery of her classmates. She would have asked him for advice, for him to tell her
what she should do. She could not know it, but Vassily would have whispered to his idealistic daughter that one may fall in love with the State, but the State does not reciprocate, ever.

  Two days later, Dominika sat in the formal parlor of their apartment, her right foot extended in the cast, her eyes dry, her elegant neck and head held high. Her mother sat beside her, in black, quiet and calm. The house was full of guests, scores of people who came to pay their respects, academics, artists, government officials, and politicians. The sound of their voices filled the air with elemental shades of green, the color she associated with sorrow and grief, and which seemed to push the air out of the room. Dominika struggled to breathe. There was food from the kitchen, traditional blini with red caviar, smoked sturgeon and trout. On the sideboard, carafes of mineral water, a steaming silver samovar, fruit juice, whiskey, and iced vodka.

  Then, looming in front of the couch was Uncle Vanya, leaning over her mother, mouthing words of condolence. The brothers had never been close, their personalities and temperaments nearly polar opposites. Dominika was not sure what he did, but one hardly uttered the letters KGB or SVR. Then he came close, sitting beside her, his beefy features inches from her face, intruding on her grief. She saw him appraise her, dressed in black, hair back, in mourning. Her throat constricted in the familiar way, and her mother reached over to squeeze her hand. Control yourself.

  “Dominika, my deepest condolences,” said Vanya. “I know how close you were to your father.”

  He reached out and gave her a paternal embrace, brushing his cheek against hers. His cologne (Houbigant from Paris) was lavender-scented and strong. “Let me also say that I regret your injury, how it affects your career.” He nodded at her cast. “I know what a good student you had become, both with the dancing and in school as well. Your father was always very proud of you.” He sat back in the couch as another family friend passed by, shaking hands.