Russian Winter (15 page)

“No,” she says. “Not at all.”

Viktor shakes his head, as if disbelieving. “But surely you must have had a love story!”

“Never.” As for Viktor’s love stories, she has no desire to know them. He is nearly ten years older, and it takes effort not to imagine the women he must have been with. Nina conjures them quite vividly sometimes—not only Lilya…A dark-eyed poetess in Tashkent, or an actress from the Vakhtangov Theatre. Artists and writers less naïve than herself.

“And yet,” Viktor says, laughing, “the men you dance with put their hands all over you, all the time.”

“I don’t think about it that way.”

He laughs. “But maybe they do.”

She tries to explain to him that her partner’s hands on her waist, lifting her onto his shoulders or tossing her high above his head, feel no more intimate to her than the dresser’s fingertips on her back, pausing quickly at each hook and eye. At rehearsal the next day, though, she pays attention to the men in the company, to see if Viktor might be right. She has been so focused on herself for so long—her own image in the long mirrors, and her thirty-two fouettées in a row—that she hasn’t wondered much about the others. Her most frequent partner, Andrei, whose hands she trusts more than anyone’s (though the more difficult lifts leave bruises on her rib cage), clearly finds no particular thrill, other than a professional one, in placing his hands on her body. In fact, he doesn’t seem interested in any of the ballerinas. Afterward, as always, he leaves with Sergei, a dancer in the corps.

Now Nina feels stupid, or small-minded, to have been so slow to understand. But this sort of thing is never spoken of outright. Nina feels suddenly afraid. They could be declared “socially dangerous” and handed five years of forced labor just like that.

As for Nina, it is becoming more and more difficult for her to hold herself, her body, back. This body she has spent over a decade perfecting, honing into the instrument of her art—and that Viktor’s touch has now permitted new efforts and sensations. She thinks all
the time about what Viktor does with her, about what they do to each other. The thoughts are soft powder running through her fingers; she picks up a handful over and over.

On a night in early spring she allows herself to give in. They are on his narrow mattress, her arms stretched above, grasping the metal bed frame. The air smells lightly of their sweat and of Peut-Etre—a gift from Viktor, authentic French perfume, along with a flask of silver and porcelain. Painted on the porcelain is a small butterfly.

“Can’t you take this off?” Viktor whispers, tugging at her under-pants. Nina tugs his off, too, and then there are just their bodies, the surprise of him inside her and her legs strong around his hips, holding him into her, rocking him closer, pulling his weight onto her, the ripples starting inside her. His mouth searches her face, her neck, her shoulders, as if only this will save him. Afterward, she can’t help crying—not from sadness but from the release of her body, and a feeling of something like loss.

“Are you hurt?”

She shakes her head. “It’s just…I wanted to save this for when I got married.” She feels ridiculous for only now admitting this.

Viktor just says, “Then let’s get married!”

His face becomes very serious, and he bends down onto one knee to take her hands in his. In a soft, grave voice, he asks her to be his wife.

Nina bursts out laughing.

“I had no idea it was such a comical proposition.”

She apologizes, horrified to still be laughing. But after so many years of classical ballets, she cannot help seeing, in Viktor’s artful pose, the usual overacted pantomime. “You know those scenes,” she tries to explain. With exaggerated seriousness, she says, “I’ll love you forever,” lightly touching her chest with her fingertips, then reaching one hand forward, palm up, before pressing both hands to her heart. Her voice higher, she says, “But what if you leave me?” hands
reaching out pleadingly. Shaking her head exaggeratedly: “I’ll never leave you.” Arms outstretched: “Promise me!”

Viktor catches her hands in his, pulls her to his chest with a flourish. Grandly he says, “I promise you.” Then he bites her earlobe for good measure.

But hearing him say the words, Nina is struck, suddenly and powerfully, by their weight—the deep need for that promise, the solemnity of it, the many natural fears and anxieties it contains. She pulls away, in order to look Viktor in the eye. Her jaw is trembling when she says, “I promise you.”

Quickly Viktor adds, “But I can’t leave my mother.”

Nina squeezes his hand. “It makes sense for me to live here with you. With the Bolshoi just two steps away.”

When he walks her home that night, it is later than usual. Nina tiptoes back into her apartment and sits on a corner of the bed where her mother is asleep, chest rising and falling with each breath. “Wake up,” she whispers, softly rubbing her mother’s shoulders. “I have good news.”

Opening her eyes, squinting at the faint beam of light slicing the darkness, Mother’s voice is hoarse: “What good news?”

Nina opens her mouth to speak, but instead of words there comes a sob. Her mother sits up, alarmed, and brushes Nina’s tears with rough fingertips. Then she holds her the way only she can, all warmth, the thin cotton of her nightshirt a flimsy barrier between them. That is why Nina is crying—the thought of leaving this: the scent of her mother’s bed-mussed hair, and the indentations of the pillow in the flesh of her cheek, and the gentle scuffing of her leather slippers across the wooden floor. Her mother, who has given her this life, and woven her own hopes and dreams into her braids. Who every single night when Nina arrives home is here, always here, asleep in this bed. And so it is a few minutes before Nina is able to speak, to tell her, “I’m getting married.”

T
HEY ARE WED
on a bright spring day when the city itself seems to be starting anew. Replanting has begun, new maples propped along the streets. The militiamen at each intersection have swapped their dark winter coats for white cotton jackets.

Viktor’s mother does not join them, which is fine with Nina; the two have met just once, and it did not go very well. But she forgets that now, as her own mother and Gersh accompany Nina and Viktor to the registry office. Since first meeting Viktor two months ago, Mother has grown fond of him. Nina wears a new belted dress and holds a bouquet of white arum lilies from Latvia. Viktor wears his good suit, and in the buttonhole a lily from Nina’s bouquet.

They have no wedding rings. The ones at the Mostorg are poorly set, even the good-quality stones, so Nina has told Viktor not to give her any of those. He instead presents her with an oval brooch bordered in gold. The lava cameo inside is not of a bust but rather, Nina sees when she looks closer, the tops of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The tiny picture is exact, the cathedral’s onion tops bizarre, minute, and perfect. And so Nina knows that Viktor has the same memory of the snow drive: the warm car, the glittering snow, and the absurd beauty of the cathedral there in the distance, another world just slightly beyond them.

I
n the dream the letter arrived by special delivery, a thick white envelope like something you might see in a cartoon. Around it was a ribbon, as for a wrapped gift. Just Grigori’s name there, no return address. The penmanship was somewhat shaky, that of an elderly person. This seemed perfectly natural, and Grigori felt as if he had expected it, had known all along that it would arrive. Yet he untied the ribbon slowly, so as not to betray his excitement. Even in a dream, he wanted to prolong that moment of hope, the heightened expectation. He slit the envelope open with the silver letter opener Christine’s sister had bought for them at the Shaker Museum. The letter slipped out, and Grigori unfolded it eagerly—but more calmly than he might have in real life.

There were no words. Nothing written on it at all. Instead, like a blotch of black ink, in the center of the page, at the crease where the letter had been folded, was a large, dead, squashed spider.

I
N WINTER, WHEN
the air was too cold for jogging, Drew took long walks along the Charles River. She liked to watch its changing surfaces, crinkly, smooth, muscled, rough. In fair weather it would be dotted with the white peaks of sailboats, or in early morning the
smooth shifting and gliding of sculls. Other days it turned a shiny dark metallic color, something cruel about it. At night, the gleam of city lights hopped about on the surface.

Today, a frigid windless afternoon, the water was very pale, an opaque grayish white that mirrored the snow on the ground. Just a touch of blue in the white. Drew walked briskly and every once in a while brought her hands close to her mouth, dosing the tips of her gloves in a brief puff of white, as if that might prevent her fingers from going numb. She liked the cold air on her face, liked its cold clarity, its sharp reminder of what life was, that glorious intensity that was also sometimes painful. Now that she had reached the footbridge, she turned away from the water and mounted the stairs to cross Storrow Drive, so that she could make her way along the north side of the Public Garden over to the farthest corner of the Common. Her lunch break was almost over, but she had a work-related errand.

Back in college the very thought of library research had at first made her stomach knot up. She had even managed to pass an entire semester without setting foot in the imposing, cathedral-like library that crowned her school’s leafy green campus; inside, Drew had been told, were mazelike hallways and steep spiral staircases that led to closets and gables and far-off hidden rooms to which, for some reason, only the skinny albino guy in her dormitory possessed the keys. But a history course during her second semester, requiring the examination of various “primary sources,” had meant that she could no longer avoid the library, and then, during her second year, for a class on developmental psychology, she regularly found herself in deep, low-ceilinged basements where mobile stacks rolled toward each other and apart when she cranked a handle. At some point in her third year, when she had switched her major yet again, back to art history, something changed. Her hands no longer felt dirty after reading the battered publications on reserve; she no longer cringed
to touch the dusty covers of a portraiture book in the oversize stacks. She began to enjoy the hunt through dark, narrow labyrinths, climbing precipitous staircases to the upper galleries or tunneling her way to some obscure elbow of the building where the reproductions of fifteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints were confined. The sleuthing was as satisfying as ultimately finding what she was looking for, and as being told by the woman at the circulation desk that Drew was the first person in thirty-five years to have borrowed this or that book.

It occurred to her now, as she crossed past the old gold-domed State House and mounted the low gray stone steps of the Athenaeum, that maybe her conversion in that first library had been the first sign of her work to come, her appreciation of old, overlooked, and sometimes hard-to-find things.

Luckily the auction house had arranged for a group membership; the reference librarian was expecting Drew and had set the requested book aside.
Russian Gold and Silver Marks.
Lenore hadn’t even worried when Drew pointed out that their house copy had been misplaced. She said that the information they already had was good enough. But Drew hated the thought of what they might possibly be overlooking. She had even thought to call in an entomologist, to identify the exact specimens in the amber.

Feeling hopeful, Drew took the book—heavy and square, with a thick shiny cover like a slab of tile—into the reading room, where two different old men in tweed jackets and bow ties did not bother to look up from their periodicals. She made herself comfortable in a firm leather armchair. If indeed the amber had been handed down through Nina Revskaya’s husband’s family, and if Drew were able to narrow down the possible date of origin, or the date of purchase, then perhaps…And yet Drew could not help wondering if what Nina Revskaya claimed was true. First she had said she knew nothing about the amber’s origins, and then she seemed to just toss off
that comment about her husband’s family. Well, it wasn’t the first time Drew had been given contradictory information by a client.

Scanning the table of contents, Drew first turned to the section on maker’s marks, to see if by some (very) small chance there might be more than one mark for Anton Samoilov—if the mark might have changed over time. She had once seen this in the case of a goldsmith whose mark, in later years, had been slightly altered to indicate the addition of his sons to his business. Something like that might narrow down the time frame of when these pieces were made. But no, here was a photograph of the little AS imprint, same as the one on the suspension loops of the earrings, and on the clasps of the necklace and bracelet. (Well, the one on the bracelet was a bit rubbed.) Drew had to admit that it was as she had expected.

Now she flipped to the section on city marks. Here was what she wanted, toward the back of the book: “Town Marks before 1899.” Two pages of little drawings of each town’s crest or coat of arms, from Astrakhan (a cartoonish pointed crown floating above a horizontal sword) to Zhitomir (a palace of sorts, with three towers, looking in the reproduction more like a birthday cake with three candles). Since these were stamped images, they were difficult to make out, the ink as blurred as an imprint in silver or gold would be. Irkutsk’s looked like a cat holding something dead in its mouth, while Kazan’s appeared to be a duck wearing a crown. For Moscow there were ten different marks, beginning in 1677, first the Imperial Eagle—the one with two heads—and later on, the profile of a sword-carrying chevalier on horseback: St. George slaying the dragon.

Drew found herself pausing, wondering what Moscow would have looked like in those years. Not that she possessed an image of how it was now. But she had told herself that one day she would visit Russia, the country of her mother’s father—whom her mother had never known; he had died shortly after her birth, after two years that Grandma Riitta called the happiest of her life. This was a story
Drew had heard so many times, she pictured it as clearly as if it were a movie she had watched over and over.

Grandma Riitta, at thirty the old maid of her village, had returned home for the weekend, as she often did, a dutiful eldest daughter. For years she had lived in Helsinki, where she worked as a lab technician, but she continued to visit her parents when she could and tried not to be bothered by the way that, each time she returned, she immediately became the person they believed her to be: a peculiar, impatient girl, attractive enough yet too old and odd for the village boys who had once been her friends.

Now it was springtime. She had just fetched the mail from the post office and was driving her family’s three-wheeler back to the house. It had rained, and the route was muddy. At the side of the road she saw an old man walking slowly, and leaned out the window to call to him.

“Can I give you a lift, Uncle?”

The man looked up, and Riitta saw that he was not so old as she had thought. But his back was hunched, his clothes faded. He did not seem to understand her.

More loudly she said, “Your boots are right muddy, Uncle. Hop on up.” She patted the seat beside her.

The man’s face looked surprised and then softened into a smile, revealing gaps where some of his bottom teeth were missing. Yet the softening of his face made him look younger again, a young-old man. He pulled himself up onto the seat, and she smelled him. It was the smell of hard work and unwashed clothes, overlaid with a stronger smell, the one Riitta loved and missed in the city, of wet leaves and mud and hay. He must have done his sleeping out of doors.

He gave a grateful nod, said, “Thank you,” with a heavy accent. So he wasn’t deaf after all, he was a foreigner. Riitta saw, to her surprise, that despite the many lines in his face he was handsome. She said, “Someone roughed you up.”

He gave her a helpless look, said, “My Finnish no good.” An apologetic shrug of his shoulders. “Russki.”

Russki
. The enemy. Briefly, but not long ago at all; Riitta’s own uncle had been killed in the Winter War.

But this man didn’t look like an enemy—just a weary soul. Riitta tried English. It was the language she had studied in school, and she knew it well enough. But the man did not. Perhaps he was an escapee. A convict. Though he would have had to walk very far…

In Finnish, with hand gestures, she asked, How is it that you ended up here, of all places, old Russki who walked out from the woods?

He understood her question, drew train tracks in the air, made steam engine sounds. When Riitta said the word
train
, he recognized it, said, Yes, train. But then why was he here, in this village? He just shook his head, said, “I very dirty—sorry.”

She took him home and fed him lunch. Nourishment turned him younger yet again; now he was perhaps in his forties. His thin gray hair still had some dark black in it. Riitta invited him to come along with her when she went to neuter the pigs.

It was the sort of farming activity she had lost touch with during her years away, and she was proud not to have forgotten. The pigs were still young and cute, and for a moment she worried the Russian might be upset at all the squealing. But he had done this before, too, had once been a country boy—and surprised her by stepping in to help her. Only later, thinking back on it, did she see the cruelty in what she had forced on him, this man who had himself been neutered, in a way, over those past years, and had for a time lost his own virility.

She collected the testicles, to cook for dinner. By then she and the man had exchanged names. His was Trofim. He did not offer up any information as to where he had been, but Riitta could imagine. It was becoming clear that he knew more of her language than he
could speak. She invited him to stay, despite her parents’ concern. He bathed and shaved and borrowed some clothes her brother had left behind when he moved to Turku. It was the first stage of what Riitta thought of as his rebirth—emerging from the washroom in trousers too big for him and a buttoned shirt whose sleeves puffed out like billows, his face glowing from the fresh shave, his visible relief at being clean. “A working-class face,” she always called it. (Drew’s mother always balked at that part.) “Good looks, but a roughness to them. You could see he’d never had it easy.”

The second stage of his rebirth she thought of as that evening, at dinner, when, like bones carefully exposed by the gentle brush tips of a patient archaeologist, his personality began to emerge.

He was a joker. The fact of it, after what he must have been through, surprised Riitta as much as the realization that such things made themselves known with or without language. Within minutes of sitting down to dinner with Riitta and her parents, Trofim made them laugh. His first joke was about the testicles, with facial expressions rather than with words, but it was how Riitta first witnessed what would turn out to be his very core.

She took him back with her, to the city. He had no other place to go. Within a week he had found a job in a bottling factory. It was a longer time till he first kissed her, suddenly and boldly, one evening when she had just returned from work.

One of the old men cleared his throat very loudly over his bow tie and tweed jacket. Startled, Drew looked up, recalled where she was, reminded herself why she had come here. Looking back down at the big square book in her lap, to the list of town marks, she found Moscow again, and St. George on his horse. In some stamps he faced right, in others, to the left. Drew scanned the years, 1783…1846…Here was the precise one from the amber suite: the little
zolotnik
number and, to its right, St. George’s left-facing profile. This was it exactly.

According to the list, this was the mark used from 1880 through 1899. The same span of time Lenore had approximated, weeks ago, without even having had to refer to a book…

She had so wanted to narrow down her search. Yet even this was no help in finding a more precise date. Drew told herself to look on the bright side: if indeed she was lucky enough to locate the jeweler’s records, nineteen years would not be
too
many to sift through. She tried not to be disappointed, as she returned the book to the circulation desk and made the brisk walk back to work.

N
INA SITS AT
the wooden table in Viktor’s home, a week or so before they are married. It is the first time she has been in his apartment during daylight hours; she is here to meet his mother, as soon as she awakes from her nap. Viktor has stepped out into the corridor, to discuss something with someone from the House Management Committee. Nina can tell from their voices that the problem will not be easily resolved. She sits alone, sipping lukewarm tea, looking around the plainly furnished room where Viktor has lived for three years. Just as at her own home, the floorboards have been painted a deep orange color in place of a carpet. But along the hallway side of the room are a cupboard and a small portable stove and a broad shelf stacked with dishes and cookware. Then comes a settee and, tucked against the next wall, the bed Nina will share with Viktor. Past the large steamer trunk there is the window wall, with a low armchair and side table and a drying rack full of Viktor’s socks, dripping onto the newspaper spread underneath. Finally there is the plywood wall—the one Viktor made to create a separate space for his mother—against which stand a tall wooden wardrobe and a narrow set of cabinets.