Russian Winter (27 page)

“I don’t know what it is. I’ve had them for days. They go away, and then they come back. I thought my makeup would cover them up.”

“You really should see Uncle Feliks.”

“I did. He thought it was an allergy. That I ate a bad egg.”

“Well, try not to scratch.”

“I’m trying, believe me, I have such sensitive skin, you know.”

The door swings open, the assistant stage manager calling, “Five minutes.”

“No down, no feathers,” they tell each other, as Nina turns to leave. Her entrance is in the first scene following the prologue. “And don’t scratch!” she adds, before heading downstairs.

W
AITING BACKSTAGE, IN
the downstage wing, Nina looks out anxiously, across the tops of the heads of the musicians, over to the front of the opposite side of the stage. There, above the orchestra, draped with long red curtains forming a shield from the rest of the audience, is an armored side loge: Box A, where a cluster of bodyguards surrounds the Generalissimo himself. Nina sees them there and, searching, just barely glimpses him, seated behind a table. Broad shoulders, heavy cheeks, thick sweep of grayed hair. He really is here, really will be watching her perform Kitri’s twirls and arch-backed leaps.

The fact is, he has his favorites. Marina Semyonova, for one. And
fearless, flirty Olga Lepeshinskaya, a delegate to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, no less, who despite her compact build and less classical line Stalin has nicknamed “Dragonfly.” Well, it doesn’t matter, Nina tells herself, as she dips her pointe shoes in the rosin box and makes sure the little drawstrings on top aren’t sticking up. Already, now that the prologue has ended, she feels that combination of sweat and chill that sometimes overtakes her before a first entrance. Focus, she tells herself, take a deep breath and stay focused.

But thoughts slip in, about Gersh, and Vera…. A flash of recollection, Gersh on Nina’s own wedding day, grinning beside her and Viktor at the registry office, in his baggy suit with its faint smell of damp laundry…

Focus, concentrate. You are Kitri, Lorenzo’s strong-willed daughter; no one tells you what to do. You are fierce and flirtatious and in love. Let everything else fall away.

She knows it will, that as soon as she steps onstage little else will matter—that in the midst of dancing, any misery, no matter how grave, becomes instantly somehow less, lessened. Even during the war, when each day brought news of devastation, and hunger sat like a sharp stone inside her, Nina’s anemic body always awoke to dance, always found some reserve of strength that she hadn’t known she possessed. Sometimes she even feels rapture, becoming one with the music, no longer a person but simply movement, euphoric, a complete obliteration of the crises of the world. The physical sensation of dancing—despite the constantly sore feet and bruised legs and sweaty tights stained yellow from rosin—has always managed to erase other hardships.

Now the dressers are making one last check of her costume and hair, and the prop man hands her her frilly black fan. For act 1 the stage has been converted into a bustling town square, and the moment Nina runs confidently out from the wings and with a flourish of her hand whips out her fan, the audience begins applauding.
Nina is smiling broadly, proudly; this opening sequence is what establishes Kitri’s personality, her bright self-assurance. She is a flirt and a free spirit, but she knows what she wants.

Following Minkus’s spirited waltz, Nina revels in the leaps and kicks and high jumps her body loves. She feels strong and light, sure of her fast chaîné turns. She greets her Spanish girlfriends in mime and flirts with some of the young men, all the while aware that Stalin is watching—yet even as she makes her sequence of leaps around the square, slapping the ground firmly with her fan, Nina feels fully in control. When she dances her first variation, clicking her castanets defiantly, her
sissonnes
are fully split, so that as she arches her back in midair, her head points back parallel to her leg and her arm behind her almost touches her outstretched back foot. Petr, her Basilio for the night, hasn’t let his nerves get the best of him; he supports Nina’s pirouettes smoothly and for the one-handed lifts overhead is as brazen as he is secure, pressing Nina high up into the air as if such a thing is easy and utterly natural.

Between acts, she and Petr head to the backstage corridor, to wait in the side hall at the principals’ table. From there they have a clear view of the door to Box A, right there at the side, and Nina can’t help glancing at it every few minutes. She wonders what might happen if that door were to open, how it would feel to be spoken to by—or even to speak to—
him
. She has fantasized about it often enough, always with a little skip of the heart. She has imagined how gracious she would be, what a good impression she might make, if only she could keep from fainting. Now, though, another thought comes to her: that if only he knew what was happening to Gersh, surely Stalin could do something to help him.

Or perhaps he does know. How could he not? The most powerful man in the nation…

And yet, if that door were to open, would she really be able to speak out, to ask him for help? The thought overwhelms her. She
tries not to think too much, tries to focus on the ballet. If only she herself possessed, offstage, Kitri’s strength of nerve…. Petr too is quiet. He too must be wondering about Box A, perhaps thinking about Yuri’s story, about being called in to speak to Stalin, imagining what that might be like.

Then their break has ended, they are back on the stage Nina knows so well, her fears falling away, and there is only the feeling of her body, dancing.

When the ballet has finished and she takes her curtain call, bowing first to the side loges as always, Nina pauses at that most important one, acknowledging that
he
is there. Then she continues as usual, to the center and then the back of the house before smiling up at the balconies. After she has acknowledged the conductor and the orchestra members, a surge of applause for their work, Nina departs from routine, turning once more to Stalin’s box, performing a deep
révérence
. Only after the curtains have rushed together before her, muffling the applause on the other side, does Nina realize that she has been pleading, with her body, for him to help her.

At home, late that night, wholly exhausted, curled up in the not yet warm bed, she asks Viktor why Zoya would marry Gersh, no matter her feelings for him, no matter her competition with Vera. “She’s such a social climber—at least she strikes me that way. What does she have to gain?”

From the hallway come the sounds of the man next door yelling at his wife in Armenian. “You know Zoya,” Viktor says, “how she gets worked up about things. She’s an organizer. A planner. It’s her job, she always loves a project. Maybe that’s how she sees Gersh.”

The wife screams something back, even louder than her husband.

“A project.” Nina recalls first meeting Zoya at Gersh’s, the big to-do she made over the tea and the chipped cups, as though nothing pleased her as much as a bit of a fuss. “But it’s such a bad time for him. I’m surprised she would take on a project like
that
.”

“Gersh says it’s because she’ll do anything to not have to keep living with her parents and sisters,” Viktor says. “But you know what a cynic he is.”

Nina’s thoughts land back at what Polina said: that Zoya would do anything to win Gersh back. Nina considers her own feelings for Viktor, the ferocity of her love, and has to conclude that really Polina is the one who, instinctually, without a second thought, without even knowing Zoya, put her finger on what is surely closest to the truth.

Viktor’s hands cup Nina’s face. “We’re so lucky. We were able to follow our hearts. Not everyone gets that chance.”

It’s true, the incredible luck of it, Viktor next to her in this bed, his warm palms against her face, thumbs stroking her cheeks. Just the smell of his skin can bring her exhausted body back to life, no matter how tired she is.

“But what about Vera?” she asks. “What’s going to happen to her?”

“If Gersh has his way, nothing different from what she’s always had with him. Only now it will have to be on the sly. I told him I’d be their go-between.”

Nina sighs, as Viktor’s hands move down her skin, thumbs stroking her shoulders. “As though it’s some child’s game.” The yelling next door has set the cat off, crying in the corridor. And though Nina’s limbs tremble with fatigue, and sleep calls heavily to her, she cannot stop from reaching for Viktor, wanting no space at all between them, just the movement of his muscles against hers.

B
Y THE TIME
the “emergency” meeting came to a close, Grigori felt he might strangle someone. If he were not the department chair, if he were not quiet, slightly aloof Grigori Solodin, if he were anyone else, he might have sat this one out, or at least left early. But no, he had sat through the entire “emergency,” aware that at some point
Drew Brooks would be in the same building, expecting him, looking and not finding him there.

The meeting was, in fact, a bit of an emergency, their first-choice hire for the new Slavic Studies slot having suddenly bowed out. They needed to find a replacement as soon as possible, had two other candidates to choose from—but of course Walter and Hermione completely disagreed on which one was better suited, and spent an hour and five minutes going back and forth about their respective picks. They loved meetings like this, the longer the better; why decide anything over the phone, or via e-mail, if you could hold a lengthy, contentious meeting instead? Grigori knew he was being hard on them, yet it was true, that was how they were, this was their life, what made them feel good, subcommittees and search committees and “emergency” meetings. Had they no one to go home to—Grigori grumbled to himself as he let himself into his own cold, dark house—had they nothing better to do? No sense of time passing, of how short life was, how quickly time sped by, especially when you calculated it (as Grigori often had, before Christine died) in broken toasters, or new coats of house paint, or Christmas cards indistinguishable from one year to the next.

He turned the thermostat up, put his coat in the closet, poured himself a Scotch. Drew, showing up to find his door locked, the book propped against it, or perhaps it had slid to the floor, like an old sinking tombstone…Well, Grigori told himself, probably she was glad not to have to talk to some old Russian professor; probably she was on her way out somewhere, meeting up with the boyfriend he had met at the ballet.

From his briefcase he took the page she had typed up for him—neatly, patiently, all the possible phrases he might look for in Russian describing the amber pieces and the jeweler who had made them. He turned on his computer, shifted the keys to Cyrillic. At first, typing in the name of the jeweler and a few key terms regarding the
pendant, waiting for the search engine to whiz through its calculations, Grigori felt hopeful. A wealth of facts at his fingertips. But it quickly became apparent, as he tried yet another possible combination of words, in every possible Russian variation, that much of what appeared before him was repeated information, the same Web links over and over, so that there was really not so much at all.

Frustrated, Grigori typed yet another phrase in Russian and braced himself for the slew of unrelated information that would now litter his computer screen. Mostly other auctions or antique dealers, and lots of Russian Web sites. As for the house of Anton Samoilov, Grigori found nothing like the mark books Drew had described. When he typed in anything about archives or family logbooks, he instead found all kinds of unrelated people by that name listed, while a separate, irritating box kept popping up on top of everything else, flashing on and off, with the words,
Are you a SAMOILOV? Find other SAMOILOVs on FamilyTree.com. Free 24-hour trial
.

Clicking on the corner of the box to make it disappear, Grigori could not help recalling the first time he had truly considered the idea of a family history, when he was a young boy newly arrived in Norway. His teacher had given an assignment: Go home and write out your family tree. Grigori had at first taken on the project with excitement, drawing a not very lifelike tree and listing all he could from what Katya and Feodor told him of their parents and their parents’ parents, the sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles. But their information—the precise details he craved—was not nearly as complete as he had hoped. He began to wonder again, as he did every so often, about those other parents, his birth parents. Though his adoption had not been kept secret from him, each time Grigori asked for more information about who those other people had been, his parents simply said they did not know.

And so, as he questioned his mother that evening about her and Feodor’s ancestry, and added the information to his artlessly
sketched family tree, Grigori had felt that it was just a story, one that in reality had little to do with him. “What’s wrong? Why do you look that way?” Katya asked, and when Grigori told her his feelings—that he could not help but wonder, could not help but feel shut out from his own original lineage—closed her eyes and gave a decisive nod. Then she stood and went into the bedroom, and brought back the stiff vinyl pocketbook. “You’re a big boy now. And really this belongs to you.” It contained, she added, the only information they had been given: a hospital certificate, some letters folded together into a small square wad, two photographs tucked in between them, and a few other odds and ends. No identity card. No name. Still, here was proof of an actual woman, his mother, who had indeed existed, had given him life. She was a dancer, Katya said, a dancer with the ballet—that was all the information the nurse had been able to tell them. That and the fact that the dancer (here Katya’s face was long, her voice grave) had not survived.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
Nina returns home from visiting Mother to find Vera sitting at the wooden table. Across from her, seated proudly in a bird-soiled dress, clucking disapproval, is Madame.