Leninsky Prospekt

Nina was silenced, ruminating on the toughness that could dance professionally, talk so boldly, and yet needed a baby. Was a baby something you could leave thousands of miles away? she wondered. Alice didn’t match any picture Nina had of a ballerina. Nor did she match anything Nina had come across at Wellesley, where the girls had been generally brainy and genteel, voluptuous, lazy, strong, and nice-smelling. Amateurs – willing, well-trained, eager to please. Both of these young American dancers, with their crisp, maidenly manners, their spindly, self-conscious physical aplomb, their seemingly reckless commitment to their vocation, made her sting with uncertainty. A sense of something she had forgotten – or misunderstood. They affected her almost like some kind of personal rebuke.

Nina had spent hours watching ballet during the last six years. In New York, even when she was at Wellesley, she got hold of tickets, dragged her mother, dragged John, went alone. She used to explain to them that ballet was, for her, the most immediate, the only way to think about life, to understand all that had happened to her, to make sense of who she had been and what she was becoming – Russian, American. But she knew that the hours in darkened auditoriums had also been an anaesthetic, a form of hypnosis. The ballet carried her back to something purely physical, impersonal: joy she knew she had felt in girlhood – music, movement, the excitement of wordless grace. She didn’t think about the dancers onstage as real people; she lost herself in the full, concrete experience – what they did, what they made. Sometimes she watched in staring blankness, thoughtless, content.

When she and John became engaged to get married, she went less and less – not much at all after the wedding, until Paris and Moscow. Now, talking to Alice and Patrice, she began to think for the first time in years of what she had known about dancers when she had been a student at the Bolshoi training school. All at once, unexpectedly aching with it, she remembered edgy, single-minded devotion to teachers, ferocious, permanent silence, determination cloaked in meekness and hardened by constant work. Of course, they had been much younger, she and her classmates at the Bolshoi, and they had not had – any will of their own. They hadn’t needed it. Everything was decided for them. Nina had been taught that ballerinas needed no will. She had even come to believe it could only be a danger to them. But Alice clearly possessed plenty, and probably Patrice, too.

She bestirred herself. ‘If you two are rooming together, you might want to bear in mind that it’s wise to –’

Both girls leaned towards her with such alertness that Nina abruptly stopped talking, bridled uncomfortably. She deliberately didn’t look around her; she dropped her eyes to Alice’s green vanity case and her own gloved hands still gripping the strap on it. This wasn’t the place, she was thinking, to be giving out advice about conducting private conversations. But where was the place? She didn’t want to act as though it was some big drama.

So she went on in a low voice, eyes down, ‘I guess you’ve already been advised to just keep it kind of bland when you’re talking in your hotel room. Don’t mention specific names of anyone you meet. I mean names of – Russians. If you’re even allowed to meet any.’

She turned her head a little towards Alice, and then the other way, towards Patrice; the girls’ eyes were wide, intent. They wanted to know; they’d been waiting to hear. And yet Nina could feel her own face flushing. She cursed her lack of subtlety, her heavy feeling of alarm. How was this done, she wondered, the duenna role, the gracious, light-handed introduction to local customs?

But then she wondered, What’s gracious about electronic eavesdropping? There’s no good way to introduce that, she thought. It has no charm whatsoever. And how could you tell such open, unaccustomed faces these sinister truths? It seemed impossible, looking at their dimpled attentiveness, that anyone would need or want to monitor the private conversations of Alice and Patrice anyway. But innocence could be such a danger; maybe not to them, but to someone. And Nina saw in their solemn anticipation, in Alice’s deep-pulling brown gaze, in Patrice’s menthol stare, the little tongues of fear flickering, the restless adrenaline that liquefies the eye, and she heard in their throats the tiny inbreaths of excitement. She was familiar with these signs.

After all, there must be plenty of infighting and backstabbing in the company, she reassured herself. They didn’t get this far by being ninnies, by being kind.

‘It’s not a big deal,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it.’ She wanted them to cope with Moscow, to like it. But the girls fell quiet. Were they taking her advice to heart? Or were they struck dumb with anxiety? Give them something lighter, Nina thought to herself, give them a titbit of pleasure now.

She looked past Alice, out the window into the populous, electrified Moscow night. ‘Look, there’s the river. We’re nearly at the hotel. Wait till you see it!’

Suddenly it loomed up over them, the Ukraina, Stalin’s pale, uncanny skyscraper, a tower of raw-hewn geometry poised on the river bank, its lower floors like colossal insect legs elbowing the dropping sweep of lawn and ringed by listless, flood-lit Ukrainian poplars.

John was late coming home that night, so Nina left the uncooked veal chops out on the wooden drop-leaf table in the kitchenette and washed her hair. What was the point of another supper getting cold? The charmless, roomy apartment on the eighth floor of the staring modern block on Leninsky Prospekt seemed to have an endless supply of hot water. She just about filled the narrow bath and lolled in it, wetting and soaping her hair.

At moments like these, when she was unfocused, alone, memories batted at her like moths, slight, powder-winged, urgent. In America she had made it her habit to brush them away, swat them down with resolve, even crush them; but as the days passed in Moscow, growing shorter and darker into the autumn, there were little memories, twilight-coloured, grey or brown, mere sensations once put to sleep, with which she felt she might be safe enough. In her solitary, undisciplined existence, they even offered a kind of companionship, and she felt inclined to accommodate them, to hold up the light of her attention so as to draw them to her, lure them into the palm of her hand where she might study them. They came in no apparent order, yet Nina sensed there was some way to assemble them, to pin them down, which might help her to be more at ease with herself in her new circumstances.

Now, for instance, as she lay in the miraculous convenience of her bath, she tentatively recalled that her father’s apartment in Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lane had never seemed to have any hot water at all when she was growing up. It had never seemed warm, either – an old house, stucco, badly insulated. The heat bled out at the windows and probably through the roof – the wind-rattled, iron-sheeted roof which leaked rust down the outside walls when the snow melted, when it rained. From these practical considerations, her thoughts crept cautiously on to others more vivid, more enveloping: how sometimes the whole house had seemed to sag with wet, the splintered, tilting staircase, soft under your tread as you climbed, smelling of darkness, rot. How winter had always felt like a cruel tonic, abrasive, reassuring, the dank walls going hard and clean with the shock of ice in the air, the shock right inside your chest.

Then came one of the pinpricks of insight – sharp, conclusive – that, really, Nina was after, that fixed something in place: Mother made the cold her excuse not to be home, Nina thought. She never complained, but she used to say it was warmer at the school where she worked, or at the library, a museum, a lecture, even at a film if there was money. At least, Nina nodded to herself, I don’t remember any complaining. Mother just went out. But waiting for her to button her coat was – oh, God. Dad and I held our breaths or something. She buttoned it like murder.

Nina plunged her hair back under the bath water, holding her breath even now, remembering. She felt her ribcage expand; she floated and bobbed, half-submerged. I’m not going to struggle with that rubber hose, she thought, stroking the red-brown weed of her hair free of suds under the water. She immersed herself a little deeper; she didn’t struggle back towards the present.

Whenever she was going to take me with her, Mother breathed snorts while we hunted for my mittens. Accusing me. We racketed up and down the echoing, wood-floored hall, slipped our hands inside felt boots, under cushions, folded back the musty corners of rugs, searching. That must have been when I was pretty small. I can still feel the anger up around her head, around her heart, like a dark halo, an aura. Did I lose my mittens every time? Or did Mother forget how young I really was, forget that she had taken away two years of my childhood so that we could pretend I was born in America?

Somehow I know that Mother thought Dad could have gotten them to turn up the heat in the apartment if he had made more of a big deal about being a registered invalid. Maybe turn up lots of other things, too. Dad wasn’t like that, and Mother was perfectly aware that he wasn’t. I never heard her say anything out loud; at least if I did hear, I can’t remember the words. But she left Dad alone. Maybe that was worse than complaining.

Nina sighed with the pleasure of her bath. She could make the comparison; she could see how lucky she was. It must have been a nightmare. Devastating. At first, Mother might have been able to believe that whatever Moscow was like, it would get better. Because people do believe things like that. And maybe it was comfortable enough. Maybe in the beginning they were warm. Before I was born.

Twenty years though, she mused. No money. No way to get out. Christ.

She considered how many trips her mother had made to the dentist lately, in Buffalo, in Manhattan. It was because of Russia, those trips to the dentist. How it ravaged your teeth, your very bones.

Obviously Mother had lost interest years and years ago in anything she couldn’t actually see. She stopped believing in love, marriage, babies, any of it. That’s why she tried to scare the hell out of me. What does she live for now? Every morning she gets out of her lace-canopied bed, dresses with meticulous care, sees to the house, her cook, her plans. She doesn’t need to work, not for money. But she has such a challenge before her, such a task; she has to gather to herself everything she is entitled to. She has to wear her clothes, use her wealth, feel the existence, the benefit, of all her possessions; she has to reassure herself that everything is there, that she controls it, that nobody will try to stop her. It’s an obsession, an illness. Like a child with too many toys, exhausted by his own greedy rota, his obligation to use each one. Where’s the freedom in that? wondered Nina. What’s the point? Trying to have her childhood back, play for ever with no consequences.

Like a bright, black movement inside Nina’s head, somewhere behind her closed eyes as she lay supine, almost afloat, the crude, long-ago elevator dropped to the floor of the rough-walled shaft. Freighted with consequences. She imagined the maiming, heavy smack reverberating. Then silence, clods of earth skittering. As if her father were dead, gone. No cry, no groan in the cavernous tunnel.

Oh God, Mother’s bitterness. Somehow, silently, blaming everyone around her for the ruin of her life, the smell of darkness on the stairs, the house rancid with disappointment, with sorrow.

At least Dad didn’t have to fight in the war. We were never separated. That can’t have been official sympathy, the State letting us care for him?

It wasn’t just Dad’s accident. It was everything. The whole dream, the whole idea. And it’s still going on, and I still don’t understand it. Nina thought with bewilderment, with intense frustration, about the city that lay eight floors below her – a remote, impenetrable scene. I might as well be a prisoner in a tower, not allowed down because I’m an American. Then the image reversed itself, height becoming depth, towers becoming shafts, so that she felt the metropolis soar and sink to stupendous distances, and its vast constructed, mechanized features seemed to have no reality at their centre, no human fleshly life. Yes, she thought, sometimes I felt as if Dad had left me underground, in the dark, in the maze of unfinished tunnels – here and there a station I recognized, a ray of light, even parts that looked beautiful. But so much that Dad believed he was building, taking part in, he just never explained to me. The socialist state. I needed a map, a blueprint. I don’t even know exactly where he was when the accident happened; I only know vaguely when – 1940. What was he trying for? Where was it all supposed to lead? He seemed – content.

After she drained the bath, Nina made herself clean it, dry it, polish the chrome fittings with a soft cloth. Yelena Petrovna won’t even know I’ve taken a bath, she grunted to herself, rubbing. Fine. It satisfied Nina to flummox the maid, to cover her tracks. Why supply any clues at all? Nina wondered. We always used to clean the bath for Professor Szabo and his wife. She cringed, recollecting their forced crepuscular intimacy – Madame Szabo’s grey-shadowed, diabetic skin, Professor Szabo’s broad, flapping bottom. And she felt as though she could hear her father’s tired, persistent assertion, ‘They compactified others much more harshly than us. With us they’ve been generous.’ But housing two invalids at the top of a long, narrow flight of stairs? Where was the generosity in that? Dad needed help just to climb in and out of the bath tub.

Nina couldn’t recall a time when they hadn’t shared that apartment; Mother used to say, ‘Two rooms were perfectly OK without a baby.’ So – the Szabos must have known exactly how old I was, and they never told anyone. Why were they made to share an apartment anyway, a professor at Stalin’s Industrial Academy? Though it must have been the biggest one in the building – high ceilings, the bathroom.

They were witty, the Szabos. And they spoke English with us. That should have won Mother over. Dad would have had no one at all to keep him company, nor would Madame Szabo in her dim, semi-blind world. Madame Szabo took trouble over Dad, fussed in the kitchen for tea, waddled about with his ashtrays, accepted certain confidences. And Professor Szabo made it a point of honour to compete with Dad to do my math homework, as if they were colleagues discussing work, some matter affecting the foundation of socialism. These were gallantries, courtesies, human kindnesses.

I never seemed to catch up at school though, no matter how much they helped me. When we finished, they would give me chocolate. Mother said, ‘The poor woman can’t have it, so she gives it to you to cheer herself up. Honestly, Nina.’ Honestly what? Nina wondered. She flung another handful of water around the inside of the tub to rinse it again. I was too old for chocolate? Would get too fat to dance? Or something about being weak, being drawn in. Dependent. Implicated. Because Mother wanted us to keep to ourselves, keep a difference, a distance. In that apartment? They weren’t even Russian anyway, the Szabos. They were Hungarian. And usefully well-connected in Moscow, generous, with no children of their own to strive for.

Dad would have – what – thrown himself in more? Not just winking at me to eat the chocolate when Mother wasn’t there, but participating in – everything. Life, Soviet life. It’s just that – he couldn’t.

And Nina thought, The kindest thing Professor Szabo did was slaving over bits of Tchaikovsky on his violin. Fast, tricky passages, so that I could do steps for Dad. It must have looked awful, kicking the walls, tipping over laughing. Dad loved it. Especially when Masha was allowed back from the Bolshoi school with me, and we took turns showing off, pretending we didn’t feel smug with the praise, telling them all they were too easy to please, that they had no idea how our teachers would have scorned such foolishness, sent us back to the barre, given us eight of this, sixteen of that. We boasted of how strict school was, its huge demands, which we loved.

Fair, wiry Masha. She was entirely the colour of a raw almond, her skin, her hair, pale white-yellow all over. And from inside the perfect eggshell of her face, her eyes glowed out like uncanny lights, startling blue, serene. Nothing fazed her; she was never tired, never worried. And she looked exactly as she was, unblemished, innocent. Dad liked to call her my best friend, because he wanted me to have a friend like that. She and I would never have voiced such an embarrassing thing. We hardly spoke to each other at all.

Masha was accepted into the class for girls of ten when she was only nine; I was only eight, but she never knew that she was the older one. 1947 – everything so disorganized after the war that they were glad to have any strong bodies at all. We were too young to sweat even, had no smell to one another, might as well have been kittens, with limbs like air, of lightness, deftness, covered in feathery invisible hairs. Our friendship was all about holding hands. Always partners, always the same height; from year to year we must have grown at the same rate. Wordless, intense, upright, inseparable.

Where is Masha now? Nina wondered. Why haven’t I noticed her at the Bolshoi? Not even in the corps? She must have given up, too, in the end.

Amidst these recollections, Nina knew perfectly well that really she was polishing the taps because she had nothing else to do. In her few months back in Moscow, she had committed herself as vigorously as possible to the smallest domestic chores just in order to make the minutes pass. She hated to be still, hated to wait, had never seen the point of leisure. Last week, she had spent a whole morning hanging four Chagall lithographs above the blue living-room sofa. She had bought them in Paris with guilty sums of her mother’s money, paid for the simple frames, justified the purchase as making up part of her wardrobe in some other sense, the wardrobe of a diplomat’s apartment, where he might entertain.

These are images which matter to me, she had thought, taking them from their cardboard wrappings in Leninsky Prospekt, methodically polishing the glass. Not Old Masters. These show something of what I longed for when I sometimes used to long for Russia. There was the angel-faced, clown-trousered artist, carrying his village house in one hand, his palette in the other, as if he could recreate his forsaken beginnings, the babushka crying out for him on the doorstep, a peasant self perched out of her sight on the warm chimney pot. They aren’t real, these images, Nina had observed to herself. They don’t exist. But they are true. And I recognize them. An émigré’s daydream, his fantasy. An idyll because it is lost.

There were the lovers, big-eyed and blessed like icons, beside the sacred, fabulous tree, flush with leaves, with songbirds. There the maiden offering her bouquet, the best of herself, to the courtly, horned violinist, beseeching his beastly self-absorption as he dances his gay dance. There the poet at peace on the bowered breast of his uneasy beloved, the intense red sun so strong, so close.

Hesitantly, with two of the prints hung and two still leaning against the sofa, she had sidled off to the shelves where her books were stacked side by side with John’s, mingled casually, indiscriminately. From among the Russian-language ones, she had taken down a thin brown volume, desiccated, alarmingly creased, powdered with dust, saying to herself, ‘It’s only a book.’ She hadn’t opened it in five years. Was it dangerous to have it here in Moscow? she wondered. Camouflaged among the rows of other books?

On the loose endpapers, there was no printed title, no list of contents, only the name of the author, Viktor Derzhavin, and at the bottom of another page, Moscow, 1954. But Viktor had written in his dense, emphatic hand, ‘Sylvan Philosophies. For dearest Nina. 23 October 1956. V.N.D.’

They were short lyric poems, twenty of them, about the woods and the changing seasons – chopping up a dead tree, finding a path through the snow, fetching water from a stream, damming the stream to make a pool for bathing, building a fire of fallen leaves, sparrows scattering and rising when a raven drops among them, a spring that arrives unbearably late. At the start of each poem, Viktor had written the revealing, satirical titles which had eventually gotten him into so much trouble: ‘Revolution’, ‘Pioneer’, ‘Virgin Lands’, ‘KGB’, ‘Ghosts’, ‘Thaw’.

For Nina, October 23 had not been about the start of an uprising in Hungary, but about visiting Viktor on Granovsky Street, in one of the massive old reddish stone buildings there. His father’s big, warm apartment had honey-coloured parquet floors, brocade-draped windows, heavy, pale wood furniture tinkling with crystal-hung candelabra and glowing with shaded brass lamps. There in Viktor’s room – strewn with open books, heavily marked papers, heaped ashtrays, up a step at the end of a long, book-lined corridor – he had read the little book to her, pausing as he came to the end of each poem to write out its title, ceremoniously, in silence. Hardly any words passed between them that day apart from the words of the poems. He had been excited, intense, grey eyes alight, urging the verses on her, and she had felt a crystalline energy of attention between them, the sensation of being drawn up out of her body into the excitement of the images, the little explosions of sound.

Yet his unmade bed had waited behind her all the time, and she had listened rigid with the certainty that soon he would touch her, touch her face, her hair, any part of her at all. By the time he did, they had to hurry. Viktor’s father would be returning; she was expected at home. And it had seemed to her like something fumbled, something that created an appetite rather than slaked it.

Leaning against the bookcase in Leninsky Prospekt, studying the slight, brown book spread open in the palm of her hand, Nina thought, I felt he had written each poem for me, to transport me to the woods; I felt transported. And then the prick of clarity, Of course, he must have written them all before he even met me; they were just what he had to offer that day. She stared at the stately Cyrillic script, the cheap paper, and heard Viktor announcing in his triumphant way, from deep in his throat, as if with his heart and soul and even some part of his guts, that he would recite the titles out loud the next time he read the poems publicly: ‘You inspire me to this.’ She shut the book, finished hanging the Chagalls.

On another long, lonely morning, Nina had tacked black and white photographs to the wall in the kitchenette. The wedding party. Her two roommates from Wellesley – Jean and Barbara – and John’s little sister in tightly sashed, full-skirted, watered silk dresses with close-fitting, scoop-neck bodices and little cap sleeves. Christmas wreathes on their hair, of stephanotis, holly with berries, ivy. The dresses had been soft crimson, the sashes apple green. Not quite Christmas, Mother had suggested, the colours should be more subtle than that. John’s brother and Nina’s five first cousins in tailcoats and striped morning trousers, all tall, all dark, their faces soft-fleshed, smiling in the winter sunshine. The girls had been too cold for pictures outdoors, but the boys had stood it with shouts, horseplay, frosty breath in front of the rugged grey stone walls of the Episcopal church.

The wedding had sealed Nina’s American identity. And there it was, on the wall in front of her eyes, a second life that also now seemed to have slipped just out of her reach, under glass – the family she had longed for in childhood, the much confided-in girlfriends she would once have feared to tell things to, the holes in her education filled by American history, French philosophy, twentieth-century avant-garde culture, by freedom, by long hours of hard work. It was a strange flip-flop of fate: falling in love with John, she had ceased to think much about Russia. She had been entirely certain that she could settle down with John anywhere. And yet, studying the photographs while she had arranged them on the wall last week, it had crossed her mind that, from the very beginning, she had somehow expected John to bring her back to Moscow. She had resigned herself to it long before they had talked of marriage – an unavoidable destiny; she loved him no matter what he asked of her, no matter where he wanted to take her.

Wasn’t that partly why I felt so absolutely sure about him? Because I knew he cared about Russia? I must have known it was a journey we would have to make. Not so soon, though; I did that for John. And she thought, Chagall shows that – about love. How it makes such a display of perfection, how it wants to disregard darkness, difficulty, even guilt. Her eye fell again on the girl in the print, alone in her wakefulness, startled.

Nina had told herself, as she laboriously tapped in the pin-like brass nails with the heel of her loafer, that she ought to go and buy a hammer because she would probably need one again for something else anyway and that it would make her little home seem real, seem permanent – having a hammer. The errand could use up a whole morning. But no sane American would stand in an interminable line to buy a tenth-rate Russian hammer anyway. She could manage fine with the heel of the loafer. With this logic, she had pretended to disguise her true feelings from herself: that something in her was not settling down to this Russian sojourn, was already packing up and preparing to leave. After all, if she didn’t want to buy a hammer, she could easily have borrowed one, from the General Services Office at the embassy or, even better, from a neighbour. But if she had borrowed a hammer, she would have had to spend a few minutes chatting. And there would have been the next visit, when she returned the hammer, offered an invitation to come for coffee, try out her cake. That was how it should have begun, her life as an embassy wife, cultivating a niche in the small, involving, warm-hearted expatriate community.

Nina was finding it difficult to face the central challenge of her new life, being an American embassy wife. The other wives were so friendly, so inquisitive. They asked all about where she had lived as a child; they wanted her to take them shopping in some authentic Muscovite market away from the central places, or drive out of town together to hunt for mushrooms, boletuses with their white legs and brown caps, growing on moss pads in the woods since late August. Nina couldn’t bring herself to do it. It had seemed easy sometimes to reveal to Jean, even to Barbara, this or that about her old Moscow life; her Wellesley friends had never pressed her. But now that she was here, there seemed to be so much more of her past, so much she was unsure of, and the embassy wives seemed too interested, pushy almost. How could any one of them – resourceful, cheerful Americans – possibly understand who she was, what she was? She had found she couldn’t explain herself to anyone just now. It was practically illegal to try. Sometimes even John didn’t seem to understand her all that well. And everything that she tried to make herself do felt somehow artificial. No matter where she went in Moscow, she was almost all imposter. What if she came across someone she recognized? If that were to happen, she needed to be alone. Everyone at the embassy knew how dangerous it could be for Russians to be seen meeting with foreigners. She hardly knew whether she would feel able to signal some acknowledgement, whether she would say little, or nothing at all. But she dreaded giving the impression of flaunting new American friends, of preferring them.