Leninsky Prospekt

So she hid from the other wives, went out only when she knew she wouldn’t meet them, and she felt painfully cut off. She found it hard to think realistically about what she wanted, what she had expected. Something that didn’t exist any more, or that she could never really get at, the scenes in Chagall’s prints, an old shattered life. Without really admitting it to herself, she was biding her time, going through the motions of embassy wife, waiting. Maybe she would be herself again only in America. The thought made her feel impatient, fretful. Sometimes it felt like an almost unbearable tension.

As she tied her quilted, raspberry silk bathrobe around her waist, she heard the front door open.

‘Nina?’ he boomed with friendly urgency. ‘Sorry I’m so late. Did you eat already?’ His voice was big, sweet, civil, rolling low and strong from his chest.

She felt herself soften inwardly with relief. It eased everything, John coming home. It was completely dependable. He lit up the apartment with life and purpose, made the straitened hours seem balmy, enchanted, rich. Now she wished she had braised the veal chops already and left them warm for him on the edge of the stove.

She opened the bathroom door, smiling, swathed in warm wet air on the threshold, and he put his stiff, cold raincoat arms around her, kissed her, took off his dripping fedora so that, closing her eyes, she felt first the thin hard hat brim knock against her forehead, then the light brightening around them both as he dropped the hat on the floor, then his grip so muscular that it seemed at odds with his office clothing, his professional demeanour.

How weird, she thought, as she swayed towards him with her contented heart, that he carries a briefcase, knows how to read. And she had often thought this before about John, that the accessories of modern life were beside the point with him, that he was a roving magnetic field, hot energy, barely contained by his lanky physique; that the uniform of adult duty and conventional public tasks couldn’t conceal the natural boy, mostly coursing blood and febrile enthusiasms, on the brink of running wild. His gift with languages, for instance, didn’t seem to be the result of bookish inclination. It had nothing to do with all those years at Dartmouth, at Columbia. It was just an expression of his instinctive chemistry with all mankind. He seemed to feel someone else’s speech from underneath his skin, to sense what was trying to pass back and forth in the words; he learned the book side afterwards, as if to check whether his gut was right, his articulate gut. Nina thought that language was really a sport for him, something that he had picked up through natural athletic gifts, observing it, getting it, joining in the game.

‘Yum,’ he smacked his lips at her. ‘There’s a tender morsel to warm a working man’s belly. Or tender damsel is maybe more the phrase. You smell like a newly washed pullover. You’re not drowning yourself in there in that bath, Nina? Slashing your wrists over my protracted absence?’ He turned her wrists over and held them up to the light from the bathroom door, lightly mocking, then kissed them by turns. ‘Survived another day of Soviet solitude?’ She felt the rough of his upper lip against the blue veins of her wrist; his bleached hazel eyes glowed under their shaggy, slanted brows, filled the doorway, warmed her chest.

‘I’m OK, John,’ Nina laughed. ‘Thanks for asking. The ballet dancers arrived today, you know. So that was fun. Well – interesting anyway. Certainly took up plenty of time, waiting at the airport, going to the hotel with them. Though who knows what help they really need from me. And the airport kind of gives me the creeps – getting in, getting out, the frontier thing.’

She freed one of her hands and reached down to pick up his hat, then pulled him back along the hall towards the kitchenette. John dragged playfully against her weight, then gave in and followed, shrugging off his coat to hook it over one of the pegs on the wall as they passed. It dripped a little on the linoleum floor.

‘How’d you get them to include me, John?’ There was tension in her voice, and she tried to conceal it with busyness. He watched her rummage through a basket of clean laundry for a dish towel, press the folded towel carefully against the wet felt of his hat, then walk back to the hall to dry the floor under his coat.

At last, looking around the doorframe, he said, ‘Don’t be silly, Nina. What American embassy wife speaks mother-tongue Russian, trained at the Bolshoi, and is a Wellesley graduate on top of all that? They leaped at the chance.’

She interrupted him, embarrassed, trying to be light-hearted, ‘Russian is really not my mother tongue, John. You know you’re exaggerating. Mother would do anything to avoid speaking Russian, and there weren’t even many Russians living in our building.’

But John went on with his flattery, courting her with his eyes, ‘To me, you seem most yourself when you speak Russian. Enchanting, passionate, bracingly coherent.’

She wagged a blushing finger at his nonsense, and he grinned.

‘Nina, you just don’t realize how over-awing this town can be. You’ve never had to do it as a real outsider, a stranger. What they know how to do is dance. They aren’t supposed to be linguists or diplomats. They’ll be able to relax and have a little fun with you along to show them around and explain things. Just be a friend. Frankly, we all have a lot on our minds at the office right now, and I know the ambassador feels reassured having you with that group. It’s a serious business, this tour. A showcase. And you should speak up, too, if anything doesn’t seem right.’

He stopped suddenly, looked around warily, as if there were presences floating above them on the ceiling, listeners. ‘What am I saying? This isn’t the office.’

Nina laughed. ‘You’re still OK, I’d say – just. But wait. I’m about to start banging a few pots and pans. I couldn’t bring myself to cook supper without you.’

And she set to, clanging a black cast-iron frying pan, a shiny aluminium saucepan, a lid. She chopped an onion, sizzled it in butter, opened a can of chicken broth from Stockman’s in Finland, ran cold water over a small bunch of beets and rolled up her soft pink sleeves to scrub the dirt from the voluptuous red-purple curves.

‘Aren’t these gorgeous?’ she said as she tossed the beets into the saucepan to steam them. ‘I got them from a babushka outside the Metro. Everything else is already starting to look shrivelled. It’s going to be a long winter. Just you wait.’

Then she smiled at John because she knew these bitter little comments of hers worried him. She knew he wondered every single day what he had done bringing his new wife back to the USSR, wondered whether she would make it. She gave him a loopy, lips-together grin and clowned for him a little, shuffling her feet, waving her wooden spoon gaily like a flag, tipping her head coquettishly from side to side. ‘I promise to do something about my hair right after supper, John,’ she said sweetly, pulling the wet, heavy strands away from her face. ‘I must look like a madwoman.’

Now John laughed, just a little. ‘Do you want some Scotch?’ He was reaching for the bottle on the wooden shelves above the table.

‘Love some.’

He poured them each a drink, and they clinked their glasses, just barely, almost stealthily, near the rim, as if they were sharing a secret. They had reached a moment which they reached most evenings alone together when they felt a confident harmony with one another and with their nearly year-old marriage, a harmony which drowned out everything else. They both knew perfectly well how it had come about that they were here together in Russia, of all difficult places; they knew they belonged together, that they had no choice. They had talked about it often, the fact that the love sensation was still bigger than any other sensation either one of them could lay claim to ever having felt. Everything else had to fall in line with that. They would say things to each other like, A whole lifetime isn’t enough time to spend with you. And they understood the meaning of what they were saying, meant it. The newness, the feeling of desperation, was still kindling between them; they were happy, but they were not yet satisfied; married, but still trying somehow to catch hold of each other entirely. When they were alone together, they forgot about everything else. They were building a private world for themselves.

John took off his dark grey suit jacket, loosened his dull blue, paisley tie, settled his long bony frame awkwardly at the little wooden table. ‘Your hair’s fine all mangled,’ he said. ‘I love it however.’ Then he put his fingers in his own close-cut, light brown hair and rubbed it hard, grinning. ‘See mine? Madwoman’s spouse. Let’s just have a nice supper and go to bed. You can fix your hair tomorrow.’

Nina lifted her glass, toasting his appearance. ‘Very attractive.’ And she smiled down at him, sipping, stirring, lifting lids, peering under them. ‘What’s keeping you at that office so much, anyway?’

But John held a finger in the air, alert, reminding her to take care what she said.

She turned on the radio, then the water in the sink, and threw open the window above it, letting the wind and rain blow in along with the faint blare of street noises from far below.

‘Have to clear the smoke out,’ she said brightly. She went back to the stove, checked again under all the lids, then walked to the table and perched on John’s lap, laying her head on his chest with her ear beside his mouth.

He plucked at her wet hair without saying anything until she rolled her head around and looked him in the eye.

‘You’re making me burn the beets.’

He laughed, just a sniffing laugh, and murmured very quietly, ‘Oh, sweetheart – letters, teletypes. We meet, we talk, we translate, we explain. God knows if anyone hears or even listens. Khrushchev never stops thinking about how to get our troops out of West Berlin, and the president is never going to abandon the West Germans. It’s much more interesting here at home, since you are so pretty and, at present, so vulnerably déshabillée.’ He twitched the lapel of her bathrobe, as if to look inside, and she trapped his hand and pressed it flat, helpless, against her breast.

John leaned closer, sealed his lips against Nina’s ear to say something more, then instead took the curling top edge of her ear between his teeth and bit it so that she suddenly sat up. They both laughed.

She gathered her robe around her, stood up with exaggerated, mocking caution, kissed his forehead crisply and said, ‘I’m going to give you supper straight from the stove. Do you mind? No serving dishes?’

‘Of course I don’t mind.’ He picked up his glass of Scotch and drained it.

As she lifted the meat onto the plates, ladled the sauce, fished for beets, John muttered, ‘The thing about democracy is of course that everything gets dropped for these damned mid-term elections.’ Then suddenly, he spoke up loudly, lifting his chin, and called out tauntingly to the walls and to the ceiling, ‘You hear that? It’s not such a perfect system, Western democracy.’

Nina put his plate in front of him, amused, stepping back to let him rant. But he wrapped a long arm around her light, bundled torso, pulled her close, and went on in a loud whisper, ‘A few pretty loud-mouthed Republicans have been sounding off about how the president should be more aggressive on Cuba. Nobody likes the fact that the Russians have been shipping military equipment in there all summer, but the Cubans are entitled to defend themselves. And the president’s so busy dealing with that kind of criticism that he really doesn’t listen to anything else. All his time and energy just now is aimed at making sure his side stays in power; forget foreign relations.’

Nina leaned down and whispered back, ‘It can’t be any different in this country, my dearest. Just because there are no elections doesn’t mean people don’t have to fight and compromise to hold onto power. Everyone struggles to stay in power.’

‘You are so damned smart, Nina. Yup. So maybe that explains why our Russian friends are being so sympathetic to the president’s plight. They’ve promised, on the quiet, to just lay off until after the November elections, especially on Berlin.’ He shrugged a little, in mild surprise. ‘The president will give them another summit if they don’t stir things up.’

Nina took a step towards the stove, reached for her plate, and brought it around opposite him. ‘Sympathetic – just to be nice?’ It made no sense to her at all, a sympathetic Russian leader. She raised her eyebrows cynically. ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’

There was a pause, and then she leaned right across the table, her thick bathrobe almost touching the food on her plate. With a babyish pout, her lips pushed out as if to be kissed, she crooned very low, ‘Don’t let your fetching American sense of fairplay and your boyish idealism blind you to the Soviet character – or to human nature, for that matter. If the Soviets think the president is seriously preoccupied, they’ll find some way to take advantage of it. And by the way, I’m not any smarter than you are, dearest. I’m just far less of a gentleman.’

John started to smile, but then looked startled, thoughtful. Silently he lifted a forkful of food to his mouth. For a few moments the only sounds in the room were the strains of a crackling, turgid symphony barely audible over the radio, the water running into the sink, and the tinkling knocks of their cutlery against the china. They glanced at each other from time to time as they chewed, then down at their plates, cutting, spearing. Suddenly, the window banged closed.

They both jumped with alarm, chastened by the frankness of their conversation. They knew they shouldn’t talk in the apartment about anything political. The trouble was that Nina loved it so much, and was so hungry for conversation of real substance, that John couldn’t bear to keep things from her. And she was astute in such unexpected, convincing ways that he couldn’t resist finding out her opinions. He felt that whatever views she had, belonged to him, that he ought to know them all, that they were a valuable resource, that they shouldn’t go to waste. He hardly realized the extent to which he was continuously at work trying to master and make use of her Russianness.

They went on eyeing each other dubiously, anxiously, as they cleaned their plates. Finally, they broke out in grim laughter.

Nina said, slowly, quietly, ‘Our guys were in here sweeping for bugs again just yesterday. I know they miss things, but maybe …’ She puckered her lips, twitched them about like a rabbit’s quick nose, nervous, as if she might smell a listening device or do away with it by magic.

‘We didn’t say anything we shouldn’t have.’ Even if they had, they couldn’t take it back now. They had to brazen it out.

‘So tell me about George Balanchine,’ John finally said with a shrug.

Nina got up, latched the window, turned off the water.

‘Well,’ she began, with a lilt of self-deprecation, hands plunged in her pockets as she stood in the middle of the floor, ‘I didn’t get to meet him personally. Not yet anyway. A real scene at the airport. A lot of press and – all the usual onlookers.’ She said this with sarcastic emphasis, not mentioning the KGB or any elements of the State propaganda machine. ‘And he was interviewed in very pointed fashion, to elicit certain – newsworthy answers. But after all, he’s a Russian. They want to look upon him as one of their own, and from what I could see, he knew exactly what he was doing. One of the reporters called out, “Welcome to the home of classical ballet,” and he said, “America is now the home of classical ballet.” Incredibly bold, as if it all belonged to him, the whole tradition, and he had just taken it all with him when he left. I think his work will make the Bolshoi stuff look fat and dull, romantic, old-fashioned. The Russians’ll be stunned.’ She paused, her eyes sparkling. ‘You remember when you went with me in New York?’

‘Not in the way you remember, Nines. It was beautiful, but I had no idea why.’

‘Well, it’s the speed, the decisiveness, the musicality, and the – the inventiveness. It’s so original, so complex.’ She was breathless with it, springing a little on the balls of her feet. ‘Even I was gagging with boredom the last time we went to the Bolshoi; there are only so many times you can watch a swan die.’