Russian Winter (3 page)

A noise issued from him, a low “Huh.” And then came the sinking feeling, the awful deflation.

Though a month had passed, he had not given up hope—not really, not until now. He had believed, or tried to believe, that there might be some sort of movement toward one another.

Instead, this.

Well, why should he have expected otherwise? It was what he had been purposely avoiding, really. For two years the idea had gnawed at him. But grief had paralyzed him, and then only as it lifted did he find he could imagine trying again. And yet it hadn’t worked. There would always be this distance. He would never get any closer.

He tried to read the article but found he wasn’t taking in the
sentences. His heart rushed as it had the last time he had seen Nina Revskaya, a good ten years ago, at a benefit for the Boston Ballet. From the grand lobby of the Wang Theatre, he had watched her stand on the great marble stairway and make a brief, perfectly worded speech about the importance of benefactors to the arts. She held her head high, if somewhat stiffly, her hair still dark—nearly black—despite her age and in a bun so tight it pulled her wrinkles smooth. Next to him, at their spot at the back of the crowd, Christine held lightly on to his arm, her other hand holding a champagne flute. Nina Revskaya seemed to wince as she spoke; it was clear that every movement pained her. When the ballet director led her slowly down the magnificent staircase and through the lobby, Grigori had thought, What if? What if I approached her? But of course he didn’t dare. And then Christine was leading him in the other direction, toward the company’s newest star, a young Cuban dancer known for his jumps.

Grigori tossed the newspaper down on his desk. That she could want to be rid of him so badly—so badly as to rid herself of her beloved jewels.

He pushed his chair back, stood up. A slap in the face, that’s what this was. And really she doesn’t even know me….

The cocoon of his office was no comfort to him now. Grigori realized that he was pacing, and forced himself to stop. Then he grabbed his coat and gloves and ducked out the door to make his way down the narrow stairs and out of the building.

I
N THE CAMPUS
Café, the morning shift was already in place. Behind the counter a skinny girl with dyed-black hair served coffee and enormous bagels, while the stoned assistant manager, singing happily along with the stereo, took too long to steam the milk. A few conscientious undergraduates huddled around one of the round tables, and
at the back of the room a knot of visiting professors argued amicably. Placing his order, Grigori viewed the scene with a sense of defeat.

The girl at the counter batted her eyelashes artfully as she handed him a thick wedge of coffee cake. Grigori took it up from its little flap of waxed paper and felt immediately guilty; as with his smoking, Christine would not have approved. He thought of her, of what he would give to have her with him at this moment.

“Grigori!”

Zoltan Romhanyi sat at a table by the window, plastic bags full of books and papers all around him. “Come, come!” he called, gesturing, and then hunched down to scribble something in his notebook with great speed despite his shaky, aged hand. For the past year he had been composing a memoir about his escape from Hungary following the ’56 uprising and his subsequent years as a key figure—if somewhat on the sidelines—in the London arts scene.

“Zoltan, happy New Year.”

“Are you sure, Grigori?”

“Does it show on my face, then?”

“You look dashing as always—but tired.”

Grigori had to laugh, being told he looked tired by a man twenty years his senior—a man of delicate health, who had spent much of Christmas break in the hospital, recovering from undiagnosed pneumonia, and who the previous winter had slipped on the ice and broken his shoulder for a second time. “You put me in my place, Zoltan. I have no right to be tired. I’m frustrated this morning, that’s all. But I’m glad to see you. You’re looking much better.”

Perhaps it was odd, that Grigori’s favorite colleague and friend was nearly a generation older than himself—but he preferred that to the opposite phenomenon, professors who mingled with their students in the pub. Zoltan’s deeply lined face, the sags of skin beneath his eyes, the tremor in his hands, the small cloud of grizzled hair resting lightly atop his scalp…none of this spoke of the man
Zoltan had once, briefly, been: the pride and dismay of literary Eastern Europe, symbolic hero to the enlightened West, a young, skinny émigré poet in borrowed clothes. “I’m feeling much better,” he said now. “I love this time of morning, don’t you?” His anomalous accent (hard Magyar rhythms tamed by a British lilt) made him sound almost fey. “You can practically feel the sun rising. Here, sit down.” He pushed ineffectually at some of the papers atop the table.

Grigori took a seat. “I can’t stay long. I have a tutorial at eight thirty.”

“And I have mine at one.”

“Do you?” Grigori tried not to show disbelief. He had heard whispered in the department that Zoltan’s only class for the semester had been canceled; just two students had registered, insufficient for a course to go ahead.

“Poetry and the Surrealists,” Zoltan said. “Two young students of truly interesting minds. There was some talk of the course not running, you know, but when I proposed to the youngsters last week that we continue to meet either way, they agreed. Who needs official credit? I admire their enthusiasm.”

“They know what’s good for them.” They knew that this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, to study with a man who had known in person some of the very poets whose work he taught, and whose most off-the-cuff remarks contained not just nuggets of wisdom but often a morsel or two of world-class gossip. Zoltan’s first book of poetry had been translated by a popular British poet shortly after his arrival in London, briefly turning Zoltan into Europe’s—well, certain circles of it—new enfant terrible. Zoltan had been something of a dandy then, with his sleepy eyelids and a confident smile; Grigori had seen photographs in subsequent translated editions (all of them now out of print). And though Zoltan wasn’t one to name-drop, his own name turned up in more than a few memoirs of painters and playwrights, art collectors and choreographers, muses and stars of
the stage. Just a line here or a paragraph there, but Zoltan had clearly made his mark. Subtle probing of his memories teased out reminiscences of Mary Quant and Salvador Dalí, and sighing, surprising asides (“Ah, Ringo…He had those long eyelashes, you know”).

The problem was, with the new Web sites that students used to publicly evaluate professors, word had spread that Zoltan’s classes were demanding and odd, more like prolonged conversations, for which students had to be impeccably prepared. He expected them to have not simply read but pondered, analyzed, even dreamed about the assigned works. And so students warned each other to stay away from Zoltan’s courses.

Grigori had resisted the temptation to look up what his own students said about him. At any rate, he tried to stay away from the Internet. His most daring online escapade had taken place four years ago, when he made his first and only eBay purchase: a 1959
Hello
magazine containing an article all about Nina Revskaya’s jewels. A four-page photo spread of earrings and watches, necklaces and bracelets, the majority of them gifts: from admirers and international diplomats and self-promoting jewelers. A photograph on page three of an amber bracelet and matching earrings had confirmed—in its way—what Grigori had long suspected. He kept the magazine in his office, in the top drawer of the filing cabinets reserved for his Russian Literature notes, behind a folder labeled “Short Fiction, 19th C.”

Now, though, the jewels were to be auctioned. So much for proof. So much for confirmation. Grigori must have sighed, because Zoltan’s voice shifted to concern and asked, “How are you, really, Grigori?”

“Oh, fine, please don’t worry.” The sad widower role was fine for a year or so, but after that it became tiresome. As for the news item about Nina Revskaya, he was not about to add today’s disappointment to his list of grievances. For some time now the adamant chatter of Carla and Dave and his friend Evelyn (who always made a point of inviting him out and taking him with her to movies and other
cultural diversions) had made it clear that Grigori was expected to behave as so many men did after six or twelve or eighteen months alone—find a new woman and settle down and stop looking so glum all the time. Accordingly, Grigori had over a year ago stopped wearing the little pink ribbon pin from the hospital. Now that the second anniversary of Christine’s death had passed, he had even removed his wedding ring. The gold band lay in a small covered tray with a few tie clips he never wore. It was time to buck up and stop being tedious. To Zoltan he added, “No new complaints.”

“Who needs new complaints if you have a good old one?” Zoltan’s eyes were smiling, but his mouth frowned. “Odd, sometimes, what the whims of the universe cast at us.”

“And you?” Grigori asked.

“Go on and eat that cake,” Zoltan said. “You nibble, as if it’s on someone else’s plate.”

Grigori smiled. It was true. Just give in, give up.

Give up. Give it up.

Grigori realized that he was nodding to himself, as much as he disliked the thought that came to him next.

But it was the only way. If nothing else, it might prove…what? That he was done with it. That he respected Nina Revskaya, and that she need not be afraid of him. That he had surrendered.

Yes, he knew what to do. Feeling much lighter, he finished the cake, while Zoltan immersed himself in another fit of scribbling. Then Zoltan looked up, and his voice became suddenly serious. “We must talk—at your earliest convenience.”

Grigori paused. “I’m sorry, I thought that was what we were doing.”

Zoltan shook his head angrily, whispered, “Not
here
.”

“Oh.” Grigori looked around, but there was no one listening. He wiped the crumbs of cake up with the waxed paper. “Then shall I call you at home?”

“No, no, in person.”

Grigori shrugged, perplexed. “Well then, you let me know when. I’d best get going.” He stood and pulled on his gloves, as Zoltan nodded furtively. Two more café patrons took a seat at the next table, but now they murmured something and moved to another one, farther away. Grigori realized that this was due to Zoltan, that they thought him a vagrant, with his dirty plastic bags and stained, if perfectly tailored, gabardine pants, and his silk cravat with its many escaping threads. Well, that was America, the great equalizer—where revered poets were mistaken for homeless men. Grigori said, “All right, Zoltan. Until then.”

“I look forward to it.” Grigori heard a genuine hopefulness in Zoltan’s voice. He tried to recall, as he turned away, when he himself had last looked forward—really, truly—to anything.

He had been young and hopeful, once. He could still see in his mind the stiff canvas backpack he had carried with him from Princeton, the one with the long thin straps that never fit him properly and the stains at the bottom from so many floors and sidewalks and lawns. He remembered how his T-shirt had smelled after all the hours on the Greyhound, and how hungry he was as he made his way along the avenue. He was nineteen years old, tall and long-limbed, his hair shaggy and less than clean. He had gotten off at the wrong T stop and so went a longer distance by foot than planned. The only cities he knew were Paris and New York, and in comparison the old Back Bay buildings looked both quaint and stately. All that mattered to him, though, was the address he had written down, the building with the tall stoop and the wrought iron railings. The big front door, of thickly carved wood, was propped slightly open. Grigori took a deep breath and wiped his hands on his pants. But he was still sweating, so he pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow.

In the front vestibule, he took the large manila envelope from his
backpack, holding it anxiously, ready to put it back into the pack if no one was home. Inside were the various items he had come to think of as “proof.” Grigori found the intercom and the correct button beside it. All of his hope he aimed at that one button.

He could still hear, in the remote bays of his memory, her voice on the intercom, suspicious, doubtful: “Yes?”

In Russian he announced himself.

“Your name again?” she asked in Russian. She sounded perplexed but not annoyed.

“Grigori Solodin. My parents knew neighbors of yours. In Moscow.” It wasn’t exactly true, but it sounded true enough. “I was hoping to speak to you about something important.” He had a brilliant thought and added, “Briefly.”

“Wait, please,” she said firmly.

The wait for her to arrive…watching through the glass partition, his heart pounding as he eyed the elevator, waiting for its narrow doors to open, to reveal her. But then she emerged from around a corner on the stairs, that elongated neck, the long thin arms, and there she was, stepping down as if floating. She looked at him through the glass, politely inquisitive, her face a perfect oval, her dark, dark hair pulled back sharply. Those incongruous hands, already old though she herself wasn’t yet, pushing the door open just a crack, their knuckles already enlarged.

“Now, who exactly are you?” she asked in Russian. She seemed to have a tiny smile in the corners of her mouth, perhaps at how young and bumbling he looked.

There Grigori always forced himself to stop, to prevent the memory from rolling forward. He had to. The rest was no good.

I
t is decided—in that silent, abrupt way that adults make decisions—that Vera and her grandmother will go live with an aunt and uncle, in a town far north of Moscow.

That is what happens, Nina acknowledges, when your parents must go away. When two other people, ones you’ve never seen before, come to live in their room. It is what would happen if Nina’s own mother were to suddenly depart. But maybe Nina could stay here with Grandmother instead…. She comforts herself with this thought as she and Mother accompany Vera and Vera’s grandmother to the train station. It is a bright, mild morning, the second of September—the day before the first day of school. The streets are suddenly full again, everyone back from summer holiday, boys looking goofy and big-eared with their freshly trimmed hair, and all the girls purchasing the prescribed bows for their ponytails. The station, too, is crowded; at the track where Vera’s train is to arrive, there is barely space for them among all the waiting people and tattered wicker hampers. All Nina can think is that now Vera won’t be starting at the Bolshoi School with her, won’t be here to play in the gritty courtyard, concocting elaborate games with convoluted, indispensable rules.

Vera, though, looks untroubled, proud of her cumbersome suitcase and little wrapped package of food for the train. Mother and Vera’s grandmother make polite, strained talk a few feet away.

“I got a telegram,” Vera whispers.

Nina looks at her with wide eyes; she hasn’t ever seen one. “When?”

From the pocket of her overcoat, Vera takes a crisp square of paper and unfolds it, her back toward the others, as if shielding an important secret. “See?” Words typed in the center of the slip of paper, very brief, so that the message seems rushed and all the more important:
We love you Verochka Mother and Father
.

Vera looks at Nina proudly. “They’re doing important work. That’s why they had to go away.”

It is more of an explanation than Nina’s mother has been able to give her. Nina accepts it. Vera looks back at the telegram, reads it to herself once more, then folds it and returns it to her pocket.

A loud clanking sound, and that hot coal smell—the train easing heftily into the station, spitting puffs of white steam, and Vera’s grandmother saying, “Stand back, people are going to have to get off first. Oh, well, now look at your hair.” Old gray hands smooth Vera’s auburn braids, sweeping a stray lock back behind her ear.

“Well, girls,” Mother says gravely, turning to gather up Vera’s grandmother’s bags. “Time to say good-bye.”

Vera does so tearlessly, while her grandmother laboriously pulls herself up onto the train, not helped by anyone. Nor does Nina cry, distracted by the rush of passengers, as Vera is sucked into the depths of the train. Mother has said Nina and Vera can write letters and stay friends through the post, but all Nina can picture, all the way back home, is the train carrying Vera away.

Now they stop at the post office, where Mother asks Nina to run around the corner, to get in the line for bread.

Nina hurries off and at the bakery joins the crowded, silent
queue. She likes to watch the cashier counting on the abacus, the quick snap of the wooden beads back and forth on the wires. But after a few minutes, as the line moves slowly forward, she realizes Mother has forgotten to give her money. She scurries back to the post office.

Inside she finds Mother and runs to her side. But her mother hasn’t noticed her; with great focus she is carefully printing something onto a special form.
Be good sweet Verochka. All our love Mother and Father.

Nina turns and runs out of the post office, into the blinding September sunlight. Her chest feels cold, and the backs of her eyes ache. For a moment she wants to yell, to shout, to tell someone, anyone. The sad trick of it, this lie, this double secret. And that other, awful chafing feeling: that Mother must really love Vera, very much, to do such a thing. That she would do that, for Vera.

Waiting by the entrance, Nina tries to calm the pounding of her heart. It is a good thing Vera is gone, she tells herself, so that Nina cannot tell her what she knows.

T
HE TELEPHONE INTERRUPTED
her thoughts. It had been ringing every few hours, but Nina refused to answer. More of those Charles Street estate jewelers, probably, nobody she need attend to. She was too exhausted to speak to anyone. These past few days had been bad ones, and nights of pain instead of sleep. Cynthia kept trying to make her take her tablets.

At her post by the window she took in the view, snow in heaps after this weekend’s blizzard. Along the mall knobby trees, still strung with holiday lights crusted in ice, seemed to shiver; Nina could see past their branches to the other side of the avenue, where parked cars crowded up against thick banks of snow. Nina often sat here, in the salon. It was her favorite room, with its tall windows and good
light—and the stereo sounded best from here. The only bother was the cold air that leaked in from the crack above the middle window. This had been going on for two years now, ever since the top pane had somehow slipped down an inch, but Nina hadn’t bothered to mention it to anyone. In the warmer months it didn’t trouble her, except on breezy days, when it caused the Venetian blind to make an ominous flapping noise.

Today the blind was up all the way. From the open space at the top of the window, a long-dead leaf, remnant of autumn, slipped in and fell quietly to the sill. It lay there like a secret missive, brown with age, and for a few minutes Nina simply looked at it. Then she reached out and with cold fingers felt the crisp delicacy of its tiny, cracked veins.

Would anyone other than herself ever notice the gap at the top of the window? The thought seemed to Nina profound. She rarely had visitors anymore. Cynthia was the only other person who ever spent time in this room, when her casseroles were baking and she came to sit and ask Nina lots of nosy questions. The cleaning women—Marya and a nameless crew of helpers who loudly, hastily blew in and out of the apartment once every three weeks—did a less than thorough job, taking no notice of details. Not to mention that they had yet to clean a single window.

No one else had any reason to enter this room. Nearly a decade had passed since Nina had entertained. When it came to Boston friends—real friends, close friends—in this last and longest chapter of her life, she had never really made any. There were plenty of acquaintances, of course, and colleagues from the ballet, but no friends as she had loved in Paris and London. No one she cared about as she cared for her Russian friend Tama, or dear Inge, “the Berlin girl,” as she still thought of her. Well, there was Shepley, whom she had known, as astonishing as it sometimes seemed, for forty years now. But ever since his move to California, Nina had felt less connected to him.

Like Veronica back in England, Shepley was a fan who had gradually become a friend. As a young lawyer and balletomane, he had insinuated himself into Nina’s life in a gentle, measured way, through small gifts and intelligent, respectful notes. His attention was never overbearing, nor disturbingly selfless, but wise and reserved. Even Nina—who, despite shedding fully and completely the first third of her life, never could meet a new person without feeling wary—had liked him immediately. She still thought of him as a skinny young man with a calm, youthful voice; on his annual visits it always shocked her, at first, to confront a gray-haired fellow in his sixties.

Back when her illness began to take hold, over a decade ago, Shepley (who had not yet met the love of his life in L.A.) had become doting and indulging, a pleasing combination of nephew and servant, driving Nina to her doctor’s appointments and tests by specialists, visiting her regularly, and always including her in holiday celebrations. But it had been eight years since he moved west to be with Robert, and Nina had grown used to his absence. Only rarely did she miss him, mostly after one of his visits, when he took her to tea at the Four Seasons and shopping at Saks in Prudential Center (though she didn’t need to buy anything and always felt exposed in public). At her apartment he would cook roasts and bake cakes and freeze things for her to eat for months to come, and afterward his joyous babbling and lurid anecdotes hung in the air—clung to the apartment itself, like cheery wallpaper—for a few days, and then fell away.

Other than Shepley, Tama, a Russian-born journalist a decade younger than Nina, and whom she had known since 1970, was the only friend she still spoke to regularly. Tama telephoned often, long distance from Toronto, mostly to complain. But her complaints were the benign sort that always cheered Nina up, and the ease of gossip in her native tongue was a pleasure.

Shepley too telephoned regularly, but anxiously—to make sure
she was still alive, Nina guessed. She suspected she was a bane to him. Not that he didn’t truly care for her, but his care, his concern, was itself the bane, a weight on his shoulders, since of course Nina wasn’t well and wasn’t ever going to become well, and there was no avoiding that basic fact. That she continued to live was itself problematic, in a daily, logistical way that had ultimately led Shepley to step in and make arrangements with Cynthia. And yet Nina had no desire to die. She passed her time with interest, listened to the radio and read the papers—she took the
Globe
and the London
Times
—and each day chose a different album from her collection. Shepley had set up the sound system for her, and regularly sent new recordings of Nina’s favorite works. Today’s was a recent issue of Brahms’s string sextets. If only the telephone wouldn’t keep interrupting. Nina continued to ignore it.

No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone. Her early life of always sharing, never a private moment or corner or closet shelf of her own, had left her hungry for this, ever appreciative of solitude’s most basic sensations: rolling her wheelchair from one room to the other with not a soul in her way, and lying in her bed at night hearing only the occasional sidewalk voices or sporadic tire-swish of an automobile in the street.

This current infiltration (as she considered the newspapers and the auction house and the telephone calls of these recent days) threatened to destroy that peace. And ever since that girl Drew had been over, memories—so vivid, they left Nina feeling weak. Even now she could feel them lurking, and something horrible ready to sidle up to her. She tried to focus on the Brahms, and looked out the window. When the ringing started yet again, she felt the last of her patience crumble.

She rolled her wheelchair to the marble table to pick up the telephone. “Yes?”

“Hello, Miz Revskaya, this is Drew Brooks at Beller.”

Though she would have preferred to simply ignore her, Nina said, “How do you do.”

“I’m very well, thanks—excited, I should say. There’s been an unexpected development.”

Nina felt her heart lurch.

“An individual who wishes to remain anonymous has brought us a piece that appears to match your amber bracelet and earrings. A pendant, Baltic amber with inclusions. The mounting and hallmarks are identical to those of your demi-parure. The owner maintains that the necklace is not only from the same source but that it belongs with your earrings and bracelet. That they’re a full suite.”

Nina realized she was holding her breath.

“Miz Revskaya?”

“Nina.”

“Nina, yes. We have all three pieces together here, and while we’ll of course have to confirm that the pendant is genuine, our appraisers believe, based on the mountings and maker’s mark, that these may indeed be a set.”

Slowly Nina said, “Does it not occur to you that the appraisers maybe are wrong?”

“Well, of course, appraisal is always a matter of judgment, on a sliding scale, we like to say. Not to mention that clasps and chains can be removed—and sometimes even authentic mountings have had their gems replaced. So we’ll be sending this to the lab to make sure it is indeed Baltic amber. But we wanted to call you in case you know anything about it. You see, the pendant’s owner would like to include it in the auction. As a donation. It’s quite incredible, actually.”

“I do not know about it. I have one amber bracelet, with matching earrings. That is all. They are very rare.”

“Yes, well, it occurred to us that perhaps you had owned the necklace, too, at some point. Or that you might have known that it was missing.”

“I did not think anything missing. I have owned this bracelet and earrings since 1952. They came with me when I left Russia.”

“The appraisers thought they might have been a gift, or something handed down in the family. And that perhaps they were divided up at some time.”

Her voice tight, Nina said, “Then the appraisers I suppose will know.”

“Well, that’s the trouble with amber. Since the beads are formed naturally, rather than by a jeweler, it’s nearly impossible to confirm which items began as part of the same collection. Some pieces—particularly the more exquisite ones—might be listed in the maker’s archives, but without that data or a serial number, we can’t be one hundred percent certain.”

Nina’s breathing relaxed slightly. “I have nothing to say of this.”

“That’s fine.” Drew’s voice was unexpectedly firm. “I simply needed to ask you, in case you might have…forgotten.”

Nina felt the blood in her cheeks. “I am old, but I am not senile.”

“No, no, of course, I didn’t mean—”

“You must understand, Miss Brooks, that dancers remember. We must remember everything.” Physical memory was what she meant, muscle memory, quite different from what Drew Brooks was intimating—but Nina wanted to put her in her place. “I have in me, still, entire ballets. I recall clearly where my jewels come from.”

“Yes, of course.” A sharp breath. “All right, then. I just wanted to see if you might happen to recall anything. If you do, please let us know.”

“Of course.”