Leninsky Prospekt

The dancers were greeted with nearly rampant curiosity tempered by puritanical suspicion and self-defensive disdain. Above the chatter and shouting in Russian and in English, Balanchine heard, ‘Welcome to the home of classical ballet, Mr Balanchine!’

Coolly, he threw back, ‘America is now the home of the classical ballet.’

The exchange with the press revealed nothing especially personal, nothing to suggest how Balanchine felt about his hurried, unremarked departure for Berlin on July 4, 1924, about his further emigration to America a decade later, about the deaths during his absence of his bon vivant composer father, his pretty, uncomplaining mother, his mild older sister who had not been gifted enough to become a ballerina. He had not seen them since 1918, the year in which he had turned fourteen. Instead the interview established that the tour of eight weeks would proceed from Moscow to the Kirov in Leningrad – where Balanchine himself had trained as a dancer – to Kiev, to Tbilisi – his boyhood home in Georgia – then finally to Baku; that a group of dancers from the Bolshoi, the twin element in this great cosmopolitan moment of cultural openness, had already taken to the stage in New York throughout the month of September and had been received with ecstatic acclaim.

From the mêlée burst Balanchine’s younger, shorter, only brother, also a composer, Andrei Balanchivadze.

Balanchine cried out, ‘Andryusha, it’s you!’ embracing him warmly. The official Soviet cameras flashed and popped. Then Balanchine somehow interposed his American passport and the cameras stopped.

Nina Davenport stood waiting with the representatives of the US State Department. Now it was her turn to be introduced, not to Balanchine himself, but to a clutch of young women dancers trailing along at the rear of the group.

‘I’d make a friend of Mrs Davenport if I were you, ladies, and I’m sure you won’t find it hard to do, either.’ Fred Wentz, the newly arrived Special Officer representing the International Cultural Exchange Program of the US Government, had his large hand on Nina’s small back, offering her up. His deep, Alabaman voice was honeyed with official enthusiasm. ‘She is just what you need in this town, a native Muscovite. She really knows what goes on. She can answer all your questions’, he lowered his voice, flirtatious, taunting, ‘and tell you what not to ask.’ Then more soberly, ‘The official Soviet interpreters can be a little – formal. So Mrs Davenport has generously offered to spend as much time with you as you like. I understand she loves what you do. And, in my humble opinion,’ grinning again, ‘she’s pretty enough to dance with you, too.’ He ducked his head down to one side, casting a playful look at the ballerinas’ legs, then at Nina’s legs, equally slim, almost as shapely. ‘I’m sure I’m going to love what you do, myself. Anything at all.’

There was a silence as his voice died. The ballerinas all dropped their eyes demurely to the floor and Nina felt herself blushing in irritation at the Special Cultural Officer. She forced a smile.

‘I danced when I was a girl,’ she admitted in her fluty, changeable voice. She cleared her throat, started again on a lower note, nodding benevolently, ‘But I didn’t have the stamina for a professional career – let alone the talent. And I don’t think, Mr Wentz, that you can tell a lot about a dancer just by looking at her legs.’ She tried not to sound prim; she made it more of a sportsmanlike sally. But even so, she felt the bulldog will of her mother rise in her inexplicably, along with her mother’s upstate New York reluctance to move the lips when talking, so that her voice came out all through her nose, awkward, ugly, somehow dismissive, not what she intended.

Wentz was a big man, solid. Underneath his loose-flapping, grey plaid suit, he held his shoulders wide, his chest expanded, so that his whole body seemed to be smiling, inviting attention. His gold hair curled just a little, as if with mischief. He continued to play up, crinkle-eyed, ‘Well, I can certainly tell that I might like to look over my schedule and see how much time I can free up for tour-guiding and hand-holding over the next few weeks.’

There was a splurge of giggles from a bowed head in the depths of the bevy, and then giggles all around.

They are so young, Nina thought. Babies, some of them. The girls began to look up, prattling, smiling, rosy, and she took their hands one by one to shake them, ‘Dobro pozhalovat'. Welcome,’ she said again and again, feeling the weightless, dry poise of their fingers in hers, their shy friendliness. And she said the Russian words with her tongue and her teeth, tasting them like morsels of food, like a whole meal she was hungry for.

At the back of the little group she saw one or two older faces, and she recognized in the features and the names as they were introduced that several of the girls had their mothers with them, chaperoning. That’s dedication, she thought. But she felt nothing good about the mothers. A chaperone’s role is to prevent, to restrain. Nina disliked restraint. A young girl wants to make up her own mind, she reflected. Why shouldn’t she? How late she stays up, what she eats, how she fixes her hair, how loudly she laughs if there are boys nearby. The mothers looked tired, frowning, impossibly dumpy beside their glowing offspring; they were dressed to inspire hesitation in bulky, dark wool coats, one colour, one size, no shape.

Nina glanced at Wentz, wondering if the mothers were necessary. If mothers were ever necessary. Then suddenly she felt confused about her own role. A made-up job, she thought, to keep me busy, shepherding the younger women dancers. She felt overwhelmed with embarrassment. What do they need me for? Why am I here? All dressed up in a bright blue dress and jacket ensemble from Balenciaga, mink pillbox hat, brown gloves. This is – fake. I’m really not old enough to look after anyone, to stand alongside mothers. She wondered whether John had pressured somebody at the embassy to let her join in so that she could pretend to have something to do. It seemed that the professional embassy staff, the ballet company itself, and the Russians, had already provided enough chaperones and interpreters.

And just at that moment, as if to prove it, one of the official Soviet interpreters, a woman, approached to be introduced, with a cat-like smile which silently asserted, Nina thought, I know what you all would like to do, and I know how I will stop you. I know how I will make you do what I want you to do. Highly trained, ambitious, in her single-breasted charcoal suit, her single-minded composure, the official interpreter would guide the dancers around Moscow, would engage and control them, would mark their every word and their every movement, their every passing interest. She would look after them perfectly. And she would report on them in full detail every day.

Nina stepped back. She did not want to be noticed, to be observed, not even in an official public place. She had been followed almost constantly since she and John had arrived in August. It felt odd to be thrown, now, into competition with someone reporting to the KGB. Some of the Americans at the embassy laughed off their minders, but Nina knew how minders could squeeze the soul, shut it down, just by watching, just by telling. She felt more and more impatient to leave the airport, this place of coming and going, passports, papers, entry and exit. It created in her a burning anxiety.

As they made their way to the buses waiting in the dark outside, Nina, head down, abashed, fell into step with a silent, brown-haired girl.

‘Can I help with that stuff?’

The girl was tiny. She had a monster fur coat slung over one arm, a big square make-up case hanging from her hand, and an enormous sack-like handbag over her other shoulder. She grimaced and tilted her head, friendly. ‘Thanks. It’s OK.’

But Nina thought she could see the childlike forearm trembling with strain in its thin camel cardigan sleeve.

‘Oh, come on. Please let me,’ she said casually, and she took the make-up case in both hands, pausing for the girl to unclench and unstick her fingers from the handle. It must weigh thirty or forty pounds, Nina thought, hefting it up before her in both arms as they followed the meandering line through the airport doors and collected on the pavement beside three smoke-belching buses.

‘You’re Alice, is that right?’

‘Uh-hm.’ Alice nodded, accepting Nina’s attention reservedly. She was pale, pretty enough, but without much contrast in her colouring, as if someone had wiped away any drama along with her stage make-up. And she kept her eyes hidden.

They climbed aboard the second bus and pushed towards the back, piling their laps high like everyone else’s.

After a few minutes, Alice said quietly, ‘I was all ready for them to search my stuff at the airport. They didn’t even open my suitcase.’

Nina glanced around, then leaned near. ‘They’ll do it later, at the hotel,’ she said, ‘when you’re out.’

‘What?’ Alice was startled, hugged her things closer.

‘You probably won’t even be able to tell. They won’t take anything. Unless you brought cigarettes or stockings to give away and you leave some right on top for them.’

After another silence, in which she seemed to be considering this, Alice asked, ‘So how can you be a native Muscovite, or whatever he said?’

‘I know.’ Nina nodded sympathetically.

Alice glanced at her sideways, brown-grey eyebrows raised in question.

‘My parents were both American. They brought me here as a tiny child.’

‘To – the embassy – or something?’

‘Well, no.’ Nina gathered her strength for the explanation. ‘My father wasn’t in the embassy. Actually, he gave up his American citizenship. So anything to do with the embassy – wouldn’t have been –’ she felt constrained, picking her words, ‘– possible.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘People don’t,’ Nina said, ‘Americans don’t.’ Again, she glanced around. There was nobody especially near them who wasn’t already talking, fully engaged. Black, massed trees flashed past the windows. ‘My father was pretty radical for America.’ She lowered her voice. ‘A communist, is what I mean. We came here because this is where he wanted to live, what he believed in. He wasn’t comfortable in America. He was – involved – in – the labour movement. I mean he wrote articles, gave speeches, explaining to workers where their interests really lay, encouraging them to stick up for themselves, band together, whatever. It was all before I was born. Or you for that matter. The world is a different place now. And America is different.’

She waved a hand as if she could rub it out, the past. Then she went on positively, bouncing the words out like a list of points, like an argument for her father’s beliefs, ‘The Soviet Union was his dream; he came here as royalty – not an approved Soviet word, but, still, in the beginning that’s what he was. He was an engineer, which they needed here. He helped build the Metro – the Moscow subway system. You’ll ride on it, maybe. And he talked my mother into – joining him. We lived just off Gorky Street, in Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lane.

There was a silence. Alice unwrapped her arms from her belongings, leaned back a little, and said, ‘Good grief. You sound so American. I mean – you must have been there? The government must have let you in?’

Nina laughed, ‘What? America? Of course they let me in – and my mother. Getting out of here was the hard part. But we were allowed to go –’ Her voice let her down. She swallowed the word, tried again, ‘– home, a few years after my father died. So I went to college in America and then worked in New York for a while. All my friends are over there. Who knows why the Soviets have let me come back again.’

‘Really?’ At last Nina got a look at Alice’s eyes – brown, amazed, unguarded.

‘I’m just kidding.’ She tapped Alice’s forearm with two fingertips, ever so lightly, smiling. ‘I mean, I know why. It’s because of my husband. He is at the embassy. It figures, doesn’t it, that I would marry someone obsessed with Russia, the Russian language, the Soviet Union? So they let me come back in with him. American diplomats are privileged privileged privileged. Anyway it’s only for a few years this time.’ Nina’s voice was joking, offhand, but suddenly she found she couldn’t hold Alice’s simple, curious gaze, and she had to look away.

From across the aisle, a tall, bony girl dropped her bag on the floor beside them. It made a loud, slapping thud.

‘God, I’m sick of that thing.’ She lifted her shoulders in her tightly fitting, light blue and white plaid wool suit jacket, circled them, stretched her arms delicately, beautifully, touched the smooth French twist of her hair, as if adjusting a pin, then looked around under her thatch of waved blonde bangs to check who was watching her. She smiled at Nina. Nina smiled back.

‘Hi, Patrice,’ said Alice, wagging her head familiarly. And then to Nina, ‘Patrice and I room together, unless my husband comes.’

‘You’re married? You seem –’

‘Young?’ asked Alice.

Nina shrugged, conceding.

‘I’m twenty-one. Plus, I have a baby boy at home.’

‘Wow,’ Nina said, her voice lifting in surprise. ‘A baby?’

‘Nearly killed me to leave him,’ Alice whispered. ‘Mr B. can’t stand it – babies and ballerinas.’ Now it was Alice who looked around to see who was listening. ‘But I’m not a nun, you know. I’m as strong as ever, stronger. Everyone’s different, that’s all. A ballet career doesn’t last, no matter what you give up for it. So, who knows?’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m not the only one; look at Allegra Kent. She dances with even more guts now than before, and Mr B. knows nothing scares her, not him, not her body. She gives off heat like a bonfire.’ Alice blushed ever so slightly.