The Turning (8 page)

After he left, I cleaned Kuzma’s cage and tidied the small room. Before I was finished, Nadya Petrovna drifted off to sleep. My curiosity got the better of me. I lifted the cover from the painting. The icon of St. Vladimir was identical to his grandmother’s icon, but unlike the other icons Sasha painted, which were meant to look old but which you could tell with a little studying were reproductions, this one was different. Sasha was painting this one to look authentic: the colors faded, the gold dark with age. Perhaps, I thought, that’s the way the church wants it to look. But would a church want to fool people? I remembered Sasha’s guilty look.

When he came back, his arms full of sheets and towels, all tumbled together, I was waiting for him. I pulled him outside the apartment and closed the door. I whispered, “You’re going to sell that icon to Mr. Brompton and pretend it’s the original.”

“What if I am?”

“That’s dishonest.”

“I don’t care. Brompton has given me the advance for my paintings, and I was able to get Grandmother the medicine she needs. See how much better she is already.”

“Your grandmother would rather die than have you steal and end up in jail.”

“You didn’t tell her!”

“Of course not. What do you take me for? But you have to stop at once.”

“Not as long as I need the money. If he is stupid enough to buy it, let him.” Sasha gave me a furious look. “If you’re just going to stand here and lecture me, you can go home. I don’t want to hear your holier-than-thou accusations.”

He looked so miserable, I put an arm around him. “Sasha, there has to be a better way to get money.”

“Then go and find it.” He pulled away from me and disappeared into the apartment. I heard his grandmother asking if I had left. “Yes,” he said. “Tanya left a while ago.”

“Such a nice girl, Sasha. I like to see the two of you together.”

Crossly Sasha answered, “I’d be happier with Tanya if she weren’t always telling me what to do.”

With his hurtful words in my head I hurried off. Only a week before, I had told Vera how much Sasha needed money for medicine, thinking her family might help, but Vera had shaken her head. “Things have gotten hard at home. Since Yeltsin was elected president, he is making it difficult for Papa.” Hard as I tried, I could think of no other way for Sasha to get money.

I followed the Neva to the bridge that leads to the railroad station where trains departed for Finland. Though I had never been on a train, I loved to watch passengers depart and to imagine that like them I was traveling to some distant country. In front of the station was a huge statue of Lenin, his arm stretched out in a kind of salute. People made a joke of it and said he was hailing a taxi. Grandfather would not let us turn Lenin into a joke. “He has the blood of Russians on his hands,” he said. “It is not a laughing matter.”

I wandered back though the Summer Garden, where hundreds of scarlet geraniums bloomed like a field of red soldiers. Even the fragrance of the lilac bushes could not cheer me. I knew there were severe penalties if an artist were caught faking old icons and selling them for the real thing. If Sasha were put in jail, there would be no medicine for his grandmother and no one to care for her.

CHAPTER 7

MAKING TROUBLE FDR GREGORY

The next morning when we entered the practice room, there was a feeling of suspense in the air. We guessed that at last we would hear the news we had been waiting for. Maxim Nikolayevich gathered the entire ballet troupe together to tell us that the tour would be going to Paris in August. “First we will take the train to Moscow, where we will stay for two days. That will give us an opportunity to attend a performance of the Bolshoi. We will see how ballet is meant to be performed.” Maxim Nikolayevich gave us a wicked smile, for the competition between our Kirov Ballet and Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet was legendary. Maxim Nikolayevich would have fought anyone who suggested we were not better than the Bolshoi.

“Unfortunately,” he told us, “we will not be able to take the entire troupe. That makes me very sad, but remember this: Although all of you will not go, your hearts will go with us and will help us to give a performance that will bring Paris to its knees. As for those of you who are going, in the next months you will curse your fate, for you will work until you wish you had never been chosen. If it is a question of working you to death or giving a mediocre performance, you will be worked to death. Depend upon it.”

That afternoon the list of the lucky ones who would go on the tour was posted. As we jostled one another to read the list, there were cries of joy and tears. My name was on the list, and so were Vera’s and Marina’s, but Vitaly’s name was not there. Before we could comfort him, he ran out of the practice hall. I ran after him, but he called over his shoulder, “Just leave me alone.”

We had known a choice would have to be made between Vitaly and Gregory, but we had all been sure Vitaly would be chosen, for he was clearly the better dancer. If talent had been the criterion, Vitaly would be going to Paris, but Gregory had started a malicious rumor. He had whispered to Madame that Vitaly was negotiating secretly to join the Bolshoi in Moscow. Of course there was no truth to the rumor, but Madame believed Gregory because he flattered her shamelessly, begging her to tell him stories of the days when she had been a ballerina. He would coax her to bring out her scrapbook with its clippings of her performances. “You must have had lovers by the dozens,” he would tease Madame, and she would blush. When Madame was out of sight, Gregory would make fun of her, calling her an “old cow.” We guessed that Madame, who had a weakness for flattery, had believed the rumor. Thinking that Vitaly would use his trip to Paris only as leverage to join our rival, the Bolshoi, Madame would have backed Gregory over Vitaly. We all thought it unfair; even Marina whispered to me before the evening’s performance of
Romeo and Juliet
, “I’ve a notion to give the little rat some trouble tonight.”

As excited as Vera and I were over our good fortune, we felt bad for Vitaly and for everyone who wouldn’t be on that plane to Paris, but our own joy spilled over onto everything. We dug up copies of our French-language textbooks and spoke only French to each other. We hung out in the bookstores reading the fashion magazines and hopelessly comparing what we saw in the magazines with our own clothes, trying to figure out how we could turn them into something Parisian. Aunt Marya, who kept bumping into Vera and me among the French Impressionists at the Hermitage, complimented us on our new interest in art.

We did not allow ourselves to think of what Madame would say if she knew of our treachery. We were not planning to leave the Kirov for the Bolshoi; we were planning to leave Russia altogether.

I began to look at my family in a different way. I had always taken them for granted, as if they would always be there. Now I realized I would soon be leaving them, perhaps forever. Under Yeltsin more travel was allowed, but no one in my family could afford a trip to Paris, and if I ran away from the ballet, I knew I would not be welcomed back into Russia. I watched Mama in the mornings as she dressed in her maid’s uniform, arranging her long hair into a neat knot, putting on ugly shoes that would be comfortable for the long hours she worked in the hotel. I saw Papa come home late at night because there was a shortage of doctors at the hospital. After a fourteen-hour day he would slump down at the table while Mama fixed him tea. I would miss Grandmother in her corner of the apartment, typing poems on her ancient typewriter.

And how would I get along without Grandfather? I could hear him say, “What! Run away from your country just to live in the decadent West? You will sell your Russian soul for a television and a pretty dress. That is not the way of the Gnedich family. We have laid down our lives for our country.” When those words popped up in my head, I was ashamed, and only Vera’s reminder of the magic city that lay ahead of us and my own determination that leaving Russia would be better for my dancing career kept me from changing my mind.

Soon there was no time to think about what it would be like to leave my family and my country forever. Maxim Nikolayevich had employed a new choreographer, so we had additional routines to learn. As soon as we had mastered a routine and performed it, the trouble would begin. Maxim Nikolayevich would shout and stamp his feet and tell us how miserable our performance was and how he would be ashamed to take us to Paris or indeed, because of our clumsiness, to the smallest country village in Russia. Back we would go to our practice sessions, which now lasted from dawn to dusk—and dusk in Leningrad’s July was all night.

We lost weight. The towels we kept around our necks to catch the sweat never had time to dry. We wore out a pair of shoes a day. At night we soaked in the tub to ease our sprains and pulled muscles. Every toe had a bandage. At each practice session at least one person would break down in tears. Sometimes we took our frustration out on one another. Yet there were times when everything came together and all the laws of gravity were broken. We soared, we fell into the music and made it our own, and then even Maxim Nikolayevich allowed himself a small smile.

During the excitement Vitaly had grown strangely quiet. He seldom joined us for lunch, and at the end of practice he hurried away. I tried to talk with him, but he ignored me. One day when he and I were alone together in the cloakroom, I noticed that on top of Vitaly’s tote bag were two more bags stuffed to bursting.

“Vitaly, why do you have all your things piled up like that? Is your family moving?”

He started to walk away, but his expression of hurt troubled me. I realized I had been so preoccupied with my own excitement that I had put Vitaly’s unhappiness out of my head. I grabbed his arm. “Hey, Vitaly, it’s me, Tanya, your friend. Don’t run away.”

Vitaly sank down onto the floor and I settled next to him, my arm around his shoulder. In a choked voice he said, “I’m going to join a dance group planning to tour Siberia. Siberia isn’t Paris, but it gets me away from home, where they don’t want to see my face.”

“Siberia! That’s impossible! You can’t be serious. How could you give up your career here? This is the greatest ballet company in the world.”

“First of all,” Vitaly said, “the greatest ballet company in the world doesn’t care what happens to me. Second, they kicked me out at home. If I join this troupe, even if it’s going to Siberia, I’ll have a roof over my head.”

“What do you mean you’ve been kicked out at home?”

“The Old Soldier always hated the idea of my dancing, but when it looked like I was going with the troupe to France, and when my father actually saw an article about the tour in the paper, he started bragging about me to his friends. Now that I’m not going, my father is finished with me. He told me I must be no good, a failure. We had a fight and he threw me out. A friend will put me up until the end of the month, and then I’ll take off with the Siberian tour.”

“Vitaly, promise me you won’t sign anything. I have an idea. Give me a few days.”

He shrugged. “What can you do, Tanya? You mean well, but Gregory is going to Paris and I’m not. That’s all that matters.”

“Vitaly, trust me for just a few days.”

I waited until Marina was by herself and then hurriedly said, “Listen, I have to talk with you.”

“Go ahead and talk.” She looked at me with suspicion as I led her off to a hallway where we wouldn’t be seen.

“It’s about Vitaly. His dad has kicked him out because he didn’t make the Paris tour. Now Vitaly is going to run off with some second-rate dance group and bury himself in Siberia.”

“That’s insane,” Marina said. “It will be the end of his career. It’s all because of that miserable thief, Gregory Ivanovich, and his vicious rumor. How I would like to tear him to bits. He never loses a chance to upstage me. He manages all the lifts so that they end with him facing the audience perfectly composed and me any which way.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s the same with me. Look, what if in my performance tonight and yours tomorrow he should stumble a little, maybe even fall? If it happened with just one of us it would be suspect, but if it happened with both of us, Maxim Nikolayevich would pay attention. Everyone knows there is no love lost between you and me, so no one would dream we would plot something together.”

Marina stared at me and then a sly smile broke out on her face. “Why shouldn’t he get what he deserves?”

In the
pas de deux
that evening, as Gregory lifted me, I shifted my weight, leaning just enough to the right to destroy his balance. He listed like a crippled ship to the left, nearly falling. As he lowered me to the ground, he hissed through tight lips, “You clumsy cow.”

“Sorry,” I whispered, and danced away.

Afterward Maxim Nikolayevich was furious with Gregory. “You looked like a first-year student. Were you asleep?”

“It was Tanya’s fault,” he said. “She shifted her weight. It was like dancing with a bag of beans.”

Maxim Nikolayevich looked at me. “If it makes him feel better,” I said, “let him blame me.”

The next night
Romeo and Juliet
was performed with Marina as Juliet. Gregory snarled at me, “At least tonight I won’t have to dance with an elephant.”

“Cow, elephant, make up your mind, Gregory.”

“Don’t think I don’t know what you are up to, Tanya. You are trying to get Vitaly back with the tour, but you don’t have a chance. He’s finished. Just watch me tonight with Marina.”

As the first notes of the introduction ended in the orchestra, Marina leered at me. Loud enough for everyone backstage to hear she said, “If you want to have a lesson in how a
pas de deux
is danced, watch us tonight.”

My heart sank. What if she had agreed to our plan just to make me look bad? I was onstage with the other members of the corps when Gregory and Marina began the
pas de deux
. During the
enlèvement
I was only a few feet away when Gregory fell. I had no idea how Marina managed it. You could hear the audience gasp. Gregory was so shocked to find himself sprawled on the stage floor that, instead of an immediate graceful recovery, he lay there for whole seconds, unable to believe what had happened. I could hear Maxim Nikolayevich from the wings spit out, “Get up, you fool.”