My Sergei
Authors: Ekaterina Gordeeva,E. M. Swift
Copyright © 1996 by Ekaterina Gordeeva
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56518-9
—
Ekaterina Gordeeva
1996
—
Anna Akhmatova
1915
Contents
Romeo, Juliet, and a Froggy Village
For their sweet reasonableness during the brief but intense period when I was immersed in this book, I want to acknowledge
the contribution of my family: Sally, Nate, and young Teddy.
And I would like to thank Katia, whose beauty comes from within, for her trust.
—E. M. Swift
My parents; my sister, Maria; Sergei’s sister, Natalia, for always loving and supporting me.
Ed Swift for his understanding and insight.
Jamie Raab for her energy.
Heinz Kluetmeier for his beautiful photos and generosity.
My dearest friend, Debbie Nast, who has been with me through difficult times and without whom my ideas will never come true.
Our coaches, Vladimir Zaharov, Stanislav Leonovich and Marina Zueva, without whom our successful skating life would not have
happened.
All my friends for their love and support.
My little Daria who gives me strength and Sergei’s Smile!
Special thanks to all photographers whose work is featured in this book.
—
Ekaterina Gordeeva
F
or me, a new life is coming, a different life from that which
I knew. I felt it for the first time when I was back in Moscow, two weeks after my beloved Sergei’s funeral. In my grief,
I feared I had lost myself. To find myself again I did the only thing I could think of, the thing I knew best, the thing I’d
been trained to do since I was four years old. I skated. I went onto the ice, which was always so dear to Sergei and me, and
there, in the faces of young skaters training with their coaches, I recognized their bright dreams and hopes for the future.
The new life is coming, I thought.
A little later, New Year’s night, 1996, I was reminded of it again, this time in the sound of the laughter of my twenty-year-old
sister, Maria, and that of her friends, and in my own laughter from being around them. How wonderful it felt to laugh, if
only for a short time.
And always, especially, I feel stirrings of a new life whenever my daughter, Daria, is near. No matter how I am feeling, no
matter where my mind is wandering in time, I have to smile back at her, because she is always smiling for me.
I have a picture of her father long before he became Sergei Mikhailovich Grinkov, two-time Olympic pairs skating champion.
I seldom called him Sergei to his face. It was Serioque, which is softer, or Seriozha, softer yet, and more romantic, a name
to be saved for special times. This picture was taken when Sergei was nine years old. He is skating on the ice where we trained
as children. His face in the picture is Daria’s face. She is four years old now, and has her father’s shocking blue eyes,
and the blonde hair he had as a child. She has Sergei’s wide and ready smile, so beautiful to me. Sergei was the one who brought
laughter into our house. He brought the sun into my life. He taught me, who was always so serious, how to have fun. He took
care of me without ever telling me that’s what he was doing. Even now that he’s gone, he’s managed to look after me by leaving
me Daria, who is so much a part of him.
I want Sergei to know I will always take good care of her. She’ll be the happiest girl ever. I’ll make sure that she knows
the kind of man her father was, the kind of heart he had. That’s one of the reasons I’m writing this memoir now, before his
lovely echo fades, as it inevitably will, with time.
Not long ago I heard someone ask a friend, If you had to live your life over again, what would you do differently? I’ve thought
about this, and for me, I’d like to live my life over again backward. I’d like to live in a world where tomorrow would be
yesterday, the day after tomorrow two days ago, and so on, because now I have little interest in the future. It’s probably
unhealthy for me to think this way, because of Daria, because I should be looking to the future for her. But it’s true that
any day I’m living now, I would exchange for any day in the past. I hope this will change with time. But I know that, for
me, to find the kind of happiness I had with Sergei isn’t possible. It’s not unbelievably hard. It’s impossible, like trying
to find the comet that was in the night sky last spring, which passes Earth once in seventeen thousand years. No matter what
lies ahead, the best years of my life will have been with my Seriozha, and those years are now laid to rest.
So I step into the future, as bravely as I’m able, with my heart longing for a time I’ll never see again. With Sergei and
me, everything was natural, almost inevitable. First we were skating partners. Then we were friends. Then we were close friends.
Then we were lovers. Then husband and wife. Then parents. I lived in a world in which I always had my favorite thing to do,
which was to skate. I had my favorite man around me all the time. I had my beautiful parents, Elena Levovna and Alexander
Alexeyevich Gordeev, who wished for me only happiness. I never heard angry words from people, never experienced unkindness,
because the one person I cared about loved me. I never looked closely at the world around me and examined it for flaws. I
only paid attention to Sergei.
Then God took him away at the age of twenty-eight. Sergei died without warning of a heart attack on November 20, 1995, during
a routine training session in Lake Placid. I lost my husband and best friend, the father of my daughter. I lost my favorite
thing to do, because now I had no skating partner. The only thing God left me with was Daria. It was like He was sending me
a message: Start your life over again, Ekaterina. Open your eyes to the world around you. Experience what it’s like not to
be so blessed. And this I now do. I am learning the disappointments of life.
Marina Zueva, who was Sergei’s and my choreographer from the beginning, told me something after his death that I don’t understand.
Or maybe I understand it but cannot believe it. She told me she’s not sorry for me.
Maybe she said this because I had such a beautiful life, and no one can expect such a beautiful life as I had with Sergei
to last. Maybe because she’s sure that I’ll be okay. I don’t know. I do know that I never thought that humans could handle
so much. I never imagined people could be so strong, so resilient. Humans can handle any pain. Words, however, can cut the
heart to the quick. Words can make the pain that never goes away. It’s so true. And they can also make happiness that lasts
forever.
I always felt Sergei was on a higher level than me, that he was stronger and smarter and more stable than me, and that he
would always protect me. Now that he’s gone, I feel vulnerable, unsafe in ways I never felt before. I’m scared to trust people.
I’m afraid to say things, afraid that I may hurt people’s feelings, or that people may say things that will hurt me. I never
had any of these worries before. I find that I’m unsure of people’s motives.
I never thought before I wasn’t brave. I was always the first to jump from the heights into the water. Now it’s like I’m out
of my home for the first time in twenty-five years. It’s like I was living in a fairy tale before, and now I’ve been abandoned
in a wild forest.
That is what life was like with Sergei: a fairy tale. He was so honest and calm and solid. Sergei was a man first and then
a skater. Not like me, who was a skater first, then a woman, then a mother. I wish I wasn’t that way. I wish I’d saved more
of my strength and power for Sergei and my daughter. I’m trying to learn to be more like Sergei, who was such a good father
and gentle husband, strong and yet tender. I leave, and always did, too much of myself, too many of my feelings, on the ice.
I can’t explain why, but I’ve started to make a list of things that Sergei wanted to do.
He wanted Daria to learn karate.
He wanted to skate in the Nagano Olympics in 1998. He had made one small mistake in Lillehammer, where we won our second gold
medal. It was the only mistake that he ever made in a competition. The only one. He was so dependable, and he only missed
this one time because he was worrying about me. So he wanted to compete again, to erase that single blemish from his thoughts.
He kept this wish inside him for over a year before mentioning it to me. A third Olympic bid. I didn’t think I could handle
the pressure of another Olympics, but I couldn’t say no, because I saw the hope in his eyes.
Sergei wanted to get a big globe of the world for our home. He loved to look at places we’d been, to study geography, and
he wanted to be able to show these places to Daria.
He wanted his sister, Natalia, to visit us, and he wanted Natalia’s daughter, Svetlana, to learn English. It was Sergei’s
great regret not to speak English, although he understood it very well. He was a perfectionist, and was too shy to speak until
he could do it without any mistakes. Tutors in Moscow are expensive, about five hundred dollars a month, but Sergei said he’d
pay for Svetlana’s tutoring no matter the cost. She’s thirteen, which he thought was a good age to learn.