Leninsky Prospekt

Again they giggled.

‘So why isn’t everyone pregnant?’ asked Nina.

‘Good question. Maybe they are?’ Then Alice abandoned her smart-alecky tone and said soberly, ‘But you know, sometimes I think ballerinas just aren’t that fertile. I mean, we miss our periods half the time anyway. Some girls are on the pill, but it makes you fat is the thing.’

‘Well, so does being pregnant.’ Nina laughed again, but she no longer felt light of heart. Suddenly, she felt afraid, assaulted by her obsessive private anxieties which she couldn’t share with Alice. It made her conscious that she was pretending to be friendly, trying – because she envied Alice’s candour about personal matters, her apparent freedom – for a girlish chumminess that she had never really been that good at.

Nina had thought constantly about the pill since arriving in Moscow, wishing she had asked her doctor for a lifetime’s supply before she left Washington. But in Washington, she hadn’t foreseen not wanting a baby. And since arriving in Moscow, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to inquire about the pill with the embassy doctor. It wasn’t that she feared he might disapprove. Although that was part of it. It was also that she didn’t want to risk the disappointment if he told her he couldn’t supply it, couldn’t lay hands on it. And above all, she feared the further loss of her privacy: the doctor knowing, the doctor judging, the doctor reporting to someone else about her most intimate life. It was natural to feel embarrassed, but she felt more than that; she felt as if wanting birth control might cast doubt on her character, as if it revealed something overly sophisticated, libertine, decadent in her appetites – wanting sex but not wanting a baby. Pleasure for its own sake.

She had considered going out to Finland to a doctor, but she thought a medical visit abroad would alarm John. Anyway, it was melodramatic. Everyone would ask why she needed to see a Finnish doctor. Her minders wouldn’t ask her directly, but they would ask someone, and they would probably find out.

So she had become paralysed about birth control, about sex. She felt the world intruding, watching, conferring, as she had often felt in her girlhood, teachers at the Bolshoi discussing her physique, medical officers examining her, her own mother puritanically accusing her about boys, loudly consulting the Szabos after her father’s death, reviling Nina’s lack of self-control, her vulgar appetites. What was it they all needed to know about her – the spies, the eavesdroppers? And she was trying to clutch a veil around her person, around her body, to hide something precious, her shyness, a sense of delicacy. Lately it had felt almost as if her married state had been taken away from her, society’s permission to embark on an adult relationship, to feel and do anything, everything, in complete privacy, without hesitation, without guilt.

In the silence that fell between her and Alice now, Nina sensed there was a possibility of nearer friendship. She chewed her lower lip; Alice watched the dancers onstage, silently critiquing, memorizing. Nina began to want to reach for the possibility. Alice’s easy banter was seductive. Could I launch myself like that, copy her? Find out? Her lip curled with self-disdain. Posing. Faking. And she thought, I’m just a middle-class housewife. She’s a dancer, an artist. There’s an allowance for however it is that Alice might misstep, surprise, even shock, as long as she’s not onstage. She’s supposed to be – bohemian. I’m supposed to get it all perfect. I’m not a debutante in Russia. What she ended up telling herself was that Alice would be leaving Moscow in just a few weeks anyway, so what was the point of becoming friends? Although she knew full well that Alice’s certain departure was the very reason she felt safe with her.

Just then the stage manager came up to Nina, pulled her back into the wings, spoke jovially in Russian.

‘Everything is found,’ he said, ‘you will be glad to know. The men are bringing up the trunks now, to the wardrobe. Go look in the elevator. You’ll see it’s completely full with big metal boxes. But you should help direct – boys’ side, girls’ side – if you don’t want to waste any more time. The writing is all English. Only one of these guys from the USA speaks Russian. It’s laughable for us.’

Nina looked around for the costume mistress, saying, ‘I’ll get someone to come right away. Was it all at the Kremlin?’

‘Not at all. Don’t be silly. It came straight to the Bolshoi, just as it should. The drivers were held up at the Polish border and also at the Czech border. As if on purpose. How should I know why? Maybe the Poles and the Czechs want to wreck our relations. It wouldn’t surprise me. Anyway, the border guards look through everything for security. And these trucks are carrying a lot of things. Mountains.’

As Nina started through the door, he added smugly, with a broad smile, ‘By the way, I’ve requested extra ironers. More women are coming now. You Americans will be pleased how hard they work.’

By the time Nina arrived at the opening night party at the American ambassador’s residence, Spaso House, she felt winded with tiredness. She took John’s arm as they climbed the broad, shallow steps from the vestibule, and she leaned on it more and more heavily as people pressed and darted around them in the receiving line.

‘What did you think, dear?’ asked the ambassador’s wife, reaching for Nina’s hand, pulling her along with professional insistence to greet the ambassador, to keep the line moving through the soaring pillared entry into the main salon. ‘You’re our expert.’

Nina tried to smile. She ought to have a remark prepared; she was familiar with the instant of greeting at the second pillar. Ambassador Kohler and his wife, Phyllis, both small, unimposing, always received by the second pillar. And they were kind, these two childless Midwesterners, gentle and homey with the embassy staff.

Out tumbled, ‘Beautiful.’ That was all Nina could manage. She repeated it, hopelessly, ‘Beautiful.’ It didn’t begin to describe what she had seen that night at the Bolshoi, what she had felt, the tumult of awe, the ecstatic pleasure.

It didn’t even describe the ostentatious splendour of Spaso House on a night like tonight: the pre-revolutionary palace ablaze with light from countless sconces and hanging fixtures and from the stupendous crystal and gold chandelier festooned with gem-cut beads, orbited by candles, and suspended like a celestial apparition in the three-storey dome of the eighty-foot salon.

Nina let go of John’s arm to shake hands, and she drifted alone to the round, marble-topped table centred under the chandelier. She tried to collect herself. The carpet, with its rich circular pattern, red, black, blue, spun away on all sides towards the endless weave of the blond parquet, dizzying, and so she lifted her eyes to the turquoise-and-gold-embossed vault of the ceiling and the balconied loggia of the first floor beneath it. Still she felt bewildered, hurried. Her heart, or maybe it was her lungs, felt tight and dark, congested with a faint sense of alarm.

I’m just not used to so much company all day and so much talking and arguing, she told herself. Did I ever even sit down? Not until the performance; and by then I was so overexcited that it was more like anguish than joy. Tomorrow will be easier. Tomorrow I can relax a little.

I need something to eat, she thought, something to ballast myself. There was a bad taste in her mouth, nausea rising in her nose like a chemical odour.

On she floated to the dark-panelled state dining room. The light and the noise seemed to drop away in the distance. A little group strolled ahead of her, right through the dining room into the ballroom beyond as she came in, so that she was alone. The elaborate curtains hanging down around the open doors, the gleaming, wood-lined walls, the grandiose fireplace with its mantel upon mantel supported on great twisted columns of wood reaching higher than her head, seemed to hold the world at bay. She felt insulated, soothed.

The long dining table had been pulled to the end of the room in front of the fireplace and its flanking glass-doored display cabinets. There were three big vases of bronze chrysanthemums standing in a row on the table. Nina studied them ruefully. The good wives, the sociable ones, will have arranged those flowers, she thought. And I wasn’t here. Then she thought, But I was helping. Trying to help.

The chairs with their yellow satin seats and backs were lined up against the walls. Can I sit down now? she wondered, sinking wearily onto one.

A waiter rushed through with a tray of drinks, suddenly stopping when he saw her, bending to offer one.

‘By the way, madam,’ he said in soft, careful English, ‘you will have supper in the ballroom when the ballet arrives.’

Nina thanked him in Russian, ‘Spasibo.’ But when he smiled at her friendly gesture, she felt an inexplicable wrench of sorrow. It was the way he leaned down to her, the patience with which he paused. She had to look away from his warm, solicitous eyes, his obvious concern.

She couldn’t face vodka, champagne. She took a glass of ice water, and nodded, keeping her eyes down until he was gone.

You’re completely pathetic, she told herself, sipping it. Then she made herself get up from her chair and put the glass on the table. She smoothed the stiff green silk zibeline of her sleeveless Givenchy cocktail dress and went on into the bland modern ballroom.

The rows of tables draped in heavy white cloth were stacked with crested blue and gold-rimmed plates and lined with bowlegged silver frames waiting for chafing dishes to be set in them. Beside a row of napkins folded like bishops’ mitres, cutlery protruding from inside, Nina found baskets of bread already set out. She helped herself.

The first soft, white American roll made her feel famished; she looked around her, took another furtively, then swung full-circle and leaned boldly against the table as she chewed.

She felt better after the second roll and ventured back towards the party.

The rooms were filling up, throbbing and swaying. The crowd swelled around the ambassador in slow bunches whenever someone important arrived, the Soviet minister for culture, the Soviet foreign minister, the British ambassador, and Nina watched a few familiar visitors slipping by without shaking the ambassador’s hand. They made off quickly around the corners to the music room and the small green dining room where they couldn’t easily be seen. She admired their daring; at a party like this, a Russian could lose his watchful companions and mingle freely, privately, for a few precious moments. Some had concerns which might be regarded as professional; others were seriously interested in the food. But everyone knew that the opportunities were brief, chancy.

When Balanchine came in, the receiving line broke down in chaos. Guests who had been glad-handed through now surged back against the flow to congratulate and praise him. But he moved deftly forward, leaving plenty of their attention to the ancient Bolshoi ballerina Elizaveta Pavlovna Gerdt who was escorting him. He was soon surrounded by American and Soviet press in a space he instinctively created for himself in the middle of the main salon. One of the aides standing near the ambassador to mouth names in his ear broke away to join Balanchine’s group, making it somehow official.

Nina sensed a hearty, authentic excitement in the air. A few of the ballerinas came in still holding armfuls of bouquets. Had someone advised them to do this charming, inconvenient thing? she wondered. Or had they been offered nowhere to leave the flowers, no vases, no water? She felt the energy of their upright, strong-footed beauty filling the room, and she went to help them, as if she were now joining in with a performance. She signalled to a waiter, and together they made great show of relieving the girls of their flattering burdens, raising the flowers high in the air, bearing them off to a basement pantry to be kept fresh in cold water until the end of the evening.

When Nina came back she was smiling happily and went in search of a drink from the bar set up on a table in the music room.

‘It was a terrific success, though,’ Fred Wentz was saying to a tall, imposing man with a monumental, cadaverous face and close-cropped dark hair. ‘If you think the applause was reticent, you have to bear in mind it was mostly official Moscow in the audience tonight. They are bureaucrats, civil servants, heads of various unions and labour organizations. They are not the ballet lovers. They attend because it’s a great state occasion and the tickets are given to them as a reward, a form of recognition.’ He dropped his voice. ‘The point is, they have to attend, whether they want to or not.’

‘No reaction at all for Serenade,’ the man grunted. His voice was Yankee, cultured, clipped.

‘Have you met Nina Davenport?’ Wentz asked, half turning towards her, pulling her into the conversation as she stepped back from the bar with her icy Scotch tilting in her hands.

The tall man nodded at her with faint recognition, his tan eyes electric, watchful behind horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

She said, ‘I was hanging around the theatre, trying to help find the sets.’

‘Oh, yes. Thank God,’ he replied, with a tone of dry impatience that conveyed Olympian disdain for the amateur uselessness of the personnel in charge of costumes and sets.

It struck Nina as comical, but she restrained a burbling laugh.

Then he held out his gigantic hand, and hers was lost in its bone-cracking grip. ‘Lincoln Kirstein.’

Her eyes widened in excitement. ‘Oh! Mr Balanchine’s – partner. What an honour.’

He pressed his lips together and stared at her solemnly.

So Nina continued, ‘But it’s true, you know, what Mr Wentz was just saying. The party officials and workers who were there tonight are a stolid bunch. There’s a mania here for ballet, for art generally. Very articulate and informed. The Soviet audience will have no trouble at all appreciating the New York City Ballet and Mr Balanchine’s work. Really. They are primed for it – starved, even.’

Nina felt Kirstein’s eyes leave hers and rove over her shoulder; her earnestness felt superfluous, embarrassing. His lips in repose had the shape of a sneer, of doubt; he wasn’t listening. She stopped talking as the rotund figure of a powerful Soviet ballet critic inserted himself into their group just beside her, nodding, sweating a little, gripping a tiny glass of vodka in his fist.

But now Kirstein asked her in a stentorian voice, ‘Starved?’

Nina shrugged, reluctant to explain herself in front of the critic. She said demurely, awkwardly, ‘It will be interesting to see how a broader Russian audience responds – to – to – so many new combinations, such an unfamiliar choreographic vocabulary. I think they’ll see right away that there is meaning even in Balanchine’s “plotless” ballets. The Russian audience is – very special.’