Russian Winter (14 page)

“His poems were heartbreaking,” Viktor says very softly.

Taking a seat on the divan, Gersh says, with a kind of finality, “Yes.
That
’s what I mean when I talk about art.”

“It’s for the masses,” Viktor says, to no one in particular, and Nina can tell by his tone that he wants to switch topics. “Poetry, juggling, magic shows. They’re all ultimately for the same good. It’s not about the performers or their work so much as the people. No matter what the art.” He sips his tea doubtfully. “Mmm, I can swallow it now, thank you.”

“Well, right, ‘for the masses,’” Gersh says. “But you know what that comes to.” He shifts farther back on the divan, seeming to have recovered from whatever shock or anger or fear he feels. Then he reaches over and casually presses a cushion over the telephone. “For three days last month I sat with my fellow composers listening to the Central Committee reiterate its ‘guidelines’ for Soviet music. Three days of everything we’re doing wrong: ‘anti-people’ this and ‘formalist’ that and ‘Muddle Instead of Music,’ et cetera, et cetera. Nineteen thirty-six all over again. We had to nod along while Zhdanov listed all the culprits in the audience: Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian. Who knows why my name wasn’t on that list.”

Nina has heard about that meeting—quiet grumblings from the rehearsal pianists and conductors at the Bolshoi, whispers and frowns on the musicians’ faces. She wonders if Gersh ought to complain in front of someone like Zoya, but decides that he must understand her well enough to know.

“The most middling, second-rate composers were of course delighted,” he continues. “Good for mediocrity, you know. The speakers kept saying, ‘The Central Committee wants beautiful, graceful music.’ That was the phrase they kept using. ‘Beautiful and graceful.’” He raises his eyebrows. “Well, who can argue with that?” Something almost like a smile crosses his face. “I was talking with poor Shostakovich later. He told me about when he and Prokofiev were invited to meet with Zhdanov. And Zhdanov told them that the most important element in music—” Though his tone is slightly scornful, Gersh’s eyes seem to be laughing, crinkling at the sides. He stops, lights another cigarette, exhales. Now he affects an expression of exaggerated gravitas. “This is advice for our two greatest living composers. Zhdanov told them that what matters most in a piece of music is that it has a melody that can be
hummed
.”

Nina and Viktor laugh lightly, while Gersh shakes his head in a sad way. Zoya’s face seems not to know what to do, as if she wants to but cannot quite disapprove. Lips pressed together, her eyes, on Gersh, shine—the bright flash of fascination. Glimpsing it, Nina wonders if her own eyes, when she looks at Viktor, reveal her so nakedly.

Viktor, in his usual way, has begun telling jokes.

Nina has seen him do this before, deflect sadness or disagreement with some humorous story. He has an endless supply. Soon Nina too, she can’t help it, is laughing.

“I know one,” she says, happy to have remembered one—a cartoon from Polina’s
Krokodil
. “A woman in a dress shop is trying on a dress. The shopkeeper asks have you made up your mind, and the woman says, ‘I don’t know. I like the way the fabric feels, but I don’t like the pattern.’ ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ the shopkeeper says, ‘the pattern will completely disappear as soon as you wash it.’”

The others laugh, but then Viktor says, “Patience now. You’ll have your pretty dress soon enough.”

Nina feels momentarily chided—but Zoya quickly says, “I’ve got
one. A farmer is standing between two tractors, looking confused. He asks, ‘Which one’s been fixed, and which one still needs repairs?’ ‘Run them,’ the other man says. ‘I already did that,’ the farmer says. ‘Neither of them runs.’” Her lisp makes her seem innocent and very young. Viktor doesn’t seem to mind her joke. A brief surge of annoyance courses through Nina, at the way Viktor always acts around women—how he courts their attention in small ways, even now, with Nina by his side.

Zoya offers to refill their cups. But only she takes more of the tea, with a small, contented sigh. “I’ll have the other stuff,” Gersh says, and Zoya pours him more liquor. That flash again, across her face, of adoration.

“Thanks, noodle.”

“Please, Gersh,” Viktor says, “the dear girl is not a comestible.”

“It’s because I told him I didn’t like to be compared to an animal,” Zoya says. “Even ‘kitten’ bothers me. So he started calling me other things.”

“You see? She asked for it.” Gersh reclines on the divan.

“He’s quite a ladies’ man,” Viktor remarks to Nina afterward, as he accompanies her back to her apartment. “Collects women the way a tree stump collects mushrooms. Likes to have them around.” Viktor says it in a prideful manner that suggests he once viewed himself, too, that way. “Lately he’s calmed down, though,” he adds, as if to appease Nina.

Yet Nina feels somehow sorry for Gersh; he has a musty smell—the stale, lonely odor of clothes left too long in a drawer. Quietly she asks, “Did he really need to put the cushion over the telephone?”

“Oh, you know,” Viktor says, “people have been doing that for years.”

“But why?” As much as she knows to be careful of what she says, she is ignorant, from so many hours of ballet, just ballet and home to bed, and little else.

“Rumors,” Viktor tells her. “Of recording devices left over from the war. Confiscated from the Germans.” He makes the face she loves, the insouciant, slightly obnoxious one. “People flatter themselves with the notion that their own quarters have been fitted with these things.” He tosses the butt of his cigarette to the ground.

F
ROM THE FRONT
hall came a shuffling sound and small thud, the usual shower of bills and catalogs that her across-the-hall neighbor always dumped through the slot in the door. Nina paid it little attention; she rarely wrote to anyone, expected no significant mail. Well, there were holiday cards from former students, and the odd package from Shepley or Tama, and once a year or so a long letter from Inge. Today’s pile of mailings lay on the floor like litter—until Nina happened to glimpse, on top, a cream-colored envelope.

She rolled her wheelchair forward, closer, to see if she was correct. Yes, just like the other one, the address in confident, dark black ink.

At first she sat in her wheelchair just looking at it. Then she tried to bend down to reach it, but her hand went nowhere near the floor. This in itself was an embarrassment, an affront. Yet Nina tried again, first breathing slowly and deeply, as she had learned to so many years ago. She breathed and stretched, then breathed and stretched again, and indeed her hand was able to move closer. Nina took another breath, exhaled. Her hand moved closer still. But not close enough.

After a brief rest, she tried again. She knew that any physical challenge took time. Inhale, exhale, reach. She moved slowly, gradually stretching one inch, then another, by sheer force of will. Now her hand was nearly at the floor. Just one more inhalation, and then exhale. Her arm stretched impossibly, fingers trembling as they approached the corner of the envelope. But then her right side gave in, all at once, collapsing without warning. Nina crumpled over the armrest, pain shooting across her ribs.

She had to wait until five o’clock, when Cynthia finally showed up. “Here you go, sugar.” Jade bangles on her wrist knocked against each other as she handed the pile over.

“Thank you.” Nina tried to act as though she had little curiosity about any of it. But as soon as Cynthia had gone into the kitchen to start dinner, Nina took up the cream-colored envelope, carefully tore it open, and slid the letter out.

Something awful flared inside her. Across her hips, the pain was returning, despite the tablets she had swallowed three hours ago. She had taken them last night, too, had given in, though she often went without them for days at a time. But then the pain would become so extreme it would wake her, or simply prevent her from sleeping, or cause her to cry out—before she could stop herself—in the presence of some unwanted witness like Cynthia. The dark bedroom at night always made it somehow worse, when the walls were so black, she might have been anywhere. But the tablets brought with them their own muddied sleep, left her foggy-headed in the waking hours, given to long, rambling chats with Cynthia. Or she would catch herself dozing; once she had woken with drool on her blouse. And so she would again swear off the tablets, and again the cycle would begin.

With the new letter in her lap, Nina rolled her wheelchair into the study, to her desk, and unlocked the top drawer, where the first letter still lay shoved toward the back. Again Nina’s urge was to crumple it in her cramped hands—but of course that would accomplish nothing. She slid the letter forward and removed it from its envelope, feeling once more that perverse urge: to see what she had long ago told herself she would forget. Unfolding the page, she took the photograph between her trembling fingers and thumb. The picture was in color, remarkably clear, the detail surprisingly crisp. Nina supposed it was one of those digital ones she kept hearing about. The girl from Beller, too, had said they would be taking digital photographs, to post “online” for potential bidders.

This one had been taken close up, showing the bead its actual size, a big thick spoonful of honey. Nina felt the same surprise as before, that even in this reproduction the color was exactly right, exactly as she remembered it, a clear dark reddish orange hue. She brought the photograph closer to her eyes, to better inspect the bead. Despite the trembling of her hand, she was able to find what she knew was inside. But it felt improper, somehow, to look. The brisk and horrible feeling flared again. She must put an end to it.

She turned the photograph face down. Then she slipped a sheet of creamy paper from the blotter before her and uncapped a nibbed pen. “Dear Mr. Solodin,” she began, in thin blue ink. “I have received your correspondence.” She saw how the letters cramped together, tightly, like her knuckles themselves. She brought the pen nib down again, trying to think what to write—something firm and final—but a spot of ink began to bleed where the tip met the paper. She lifted the pen and stared at the page, aware that she was doing the same thing as always: reacting too quickly, not stopping to think, not pausing to take a calming breath. She put the cap back on the pen and placed the paper inside the drawer, along with both of Grigori Solodin’s letters. No more rash decisions, she told herself. This was going to take some time, to decide what, exactly, to do now.

N
OT LONG AFTER
that night at Gersh’s, Viktor brings her back to the same big, square building, the same bored, chilly militiamen out front—but this time they enter on the other side, around the corner, and walk up to the apartment where Viktor and his mother reside. Like Gersh’s it is off a gloomy corridor, this time at the very end, across from the telephone. A woman in a dressing gown is talking loudly into the receiver and only briefly glances at Viktor as he ushers Nina into his room. Dim, fusty, with windows facing Shchepkinsky Passage, it has been divided in half by a wall Viktor constructed himself, so that
his mother has her own room. “But don’t tell anyone!” Viktor warns Nina teasingly—because then he could be said to have two rooms, one of which would certainly be given to some other family.

“Shh, won’t we wake her?”

“No, she barely hears anything. She’s what I call ‘willfully deaf.’”

“I suppose one has to be, with the phone right there.” Nina can hear the woman’s voice in the hallway: “You told me eighty rubles. I did not ‘mishear.’” Though the hour is late, plenty of other sounds reverberate along the hall: a man coughing, a cat whining, the clatter of pots and pans.

The plywood door to Viktor’s mother’s side is shut, no light under the crack. “Anyway, she’s fast asleep,” Viktor adds—but Nina is self-conscious at being alone with Viktor, who now brings his mouth to the back of her neck, his hands on her buttocks, moving slowly. She glances toward the door to his mother’s room, ready for it to swing open, while Viktor for the first time peels her clothes off and leads her to his narrow bed. The mattress is thin and the pillow heavy as a sack of sand, and then Nina feels just Viktor’s hands on her skin, until his fingers find their way inside her, Viktor whispering, “It’s all right,” when she can’t help but cry out. It is very late when he accompanies her home and she slips back into her own narrow cot.

After that, whenever they go to Viktor’s apartment, it is always late enough that his mother’s light is out and the other residents along the corridor have settled into their various nighttime routines. When one night Viktor for the first time presses himself against her, Nina makes a surprised sound. Viktor laughs and sits up, brushes back her hair—long ago loosed from its coiled bun—and looks at her with fascination. “It’s true, then?” he asks, his mouth in a pleased smile. “You really haven’t done these things before?”