Russian Winter (40 page)

“Ms. Revskaya?”

Nina had to close her eyes. Of course Viktor had not been “hiding” the amber from Nina but from others in the apartment, the way one places anything of value aside in a safe spot. Of course. But then why had he not told Nina about it? Probably he had meant to. Probably he would have, if Nina had been home when he first
brought the amber back from Gersh’s. But greater issues had consumed them both: Gersh’s arrest, his sentencing, his transferral to the psychiatric prison…

The pain inside Nina’s chest was awful. If the baby was Gersh’s—only that would explain why Vera did what she did. Which would mean that she really had in fact visited Gersh at the prison camp. She must really have been alone with him, that was why Viktor wasn’t there, wasn’t with them, he was telling the truth.

Oh, Viktor.

Or was
that
how Vera had managed to visit Gersh: favors for Serge? Awful Serge, there on the sidewalk. Such hazardous providence.

But no, because if the baby was Serge’s, then surely Vera would not have kept it. Unless, perhaps, she was not certain whose child she was carrying.

And yet, if the child was Gersh’s…

“Ms. Revskaya!”

Gersh’s baby, and Vera’s—and Nina had done nothing for him, just turned her back, hurried out of the hospital, left him there. When I knew his parents better than anyone…Viktor and I were his only connection to them.

“I’m going to hang up now and call an ambulance.”

“No. No need for ambulance. Please.” But she could feel her heart galloping, a horrible panicked feeling. Fate, it could not be helped. But oh, Vera. Dear Gersh. And Viktor…

“Are you really all right?”

“Please. Just wait. Let me…think.” But no, it wasn’t
fate
. How could she not have seen that? Serge right in front of her…Not fate but circumstance. Distrust everywhere, whispers and secrets. The world around her: little betrayals every day. Probably she had never fully trusted Viktor, not as she thought she had. Probably that sliver of doubt was always with her, lodged inside her, as it was inside everyone, about everybody else.

Not fate but simply inevitable.

Drew said in a pleading voice, “Really, I would feel better if you’d let me call a doctor.”

“My nurse will be here very soon. She comes at five.” Nina could hear how weak she sounded.

“Well…all right.” Drew sounded fearful. “But please call me if you need any help before your nurse arrives.”

With what energy she had left, Nina said, “Yes. Good-bye.”

A
LL AFTERNOON
G
RIGORI
tried to understand. If what Drew suggested was correct, then the man whom he had thought his father might be another man altogether. The composer Gershtein. And the woman he thought was his mother…But then why did Nina Revskaya have two of the amber pieces? And why had she acted so oddly toward him? Not to mention what she had said in the News 4 interview, about the amber being from Elsin’s family. Why would she have said that, if it was not so?

Perhaps Viktor Elsin had not told her the truth—that the beads had been given to him by (or taken from?) Gershtein. Or, no, maybe it was Gershtein himself who gave them to Nina Revskaya, maybe he was in love with her. But no, not with that other, beautiful woman leaning into him in the photograph, and his face lit with love…

Already the rush of thoughts and suppositions had caused his head to pound. Grigori took some Tylenol and went to his desk, to read, yet again, the original letters—the ones he had for so long believed to be written by Viktor Elsin. For one thing, there was the “please forgive me,” at the beginning, which Grigori had always supposed to be from some marital spat. And that “big net so wide and inescapable”—which he had often pictured like the spider’s web in that other, final, poem. Well, perhaps that might be a bit of a stretch…. But what about this, the same image as in “Night Swimming”:

Grigori did not need to see the “Night Swimming” poem in front of him to hear the echo of that letter:
Patchwork shade, pine needle carpet
,
ocher-resin drops of sun. The air hums…

Surely it was the same hot bug-filled summer day. The shade gone from “checkered” to “patchwork,” and the same pine needles. The “ocher-resin drops of sun” surely recalled the tree sap:

Of course lots of people described drops of liquid as tears. A poet, Elsin had in “Night Swimming” turned the sap into “drops of sun.” Just as in his very last poem, where he referred to “that bright jewel the sun” and “ancient tears, like hearts, harden”—all of which, Grigori was certain, revealed Elsin’s view of both the sun and the sap as amber….
The
amber, framed in gold. What the letter called “little drops of sunshine.” There was poetry in that letter. Perhaps nothing outstanding, but it made sense that a poet—the poet Viktor Elsin—had written it.

Then again, the letter was so sad, its reference to “the future” so dismal…. Elsin would have had to have written it after something bad happened. The arrest of his friend Gershtein…Wasn’t that what that last poem referred to, the “Pitiless wind” and “rattling hazelnut tree: Encore, encore!” A musical reference, surely, as in “Night Swimming”: “the air hums…Unseen, the nightingale, too late, thrums its stubborn song….”

Grigori realized he was holding his head, fingertips pressed into his scalp. As if the pressure, the grip of his fingerpads, might release some new insight. He considered the way the letter had been signed, “Yours and yours alone”—how could Gersh have signed a letter that way if in fact he had both a wife and a girlfriend? Then again, people did not always write the literal truth. Especially in a letter of apology.

The checkered shade of those branches
and the pine sap staining her skirt.
Whose
skirt? Could there have been more than one woman there? Or two couples—the ones from the other photo, the dacha photo, including whoever had taken it.
The impossible perfection of that summer…

Stop, Grigori. Remember what Drew said: start with what you know.

He knew the letter had been written by someone, to a woman he loved. If it were Gershtein, that would explain the mournful tone, of having lost someone—the woman he did not marry, the beautiful one in the photograph. That could make sense.

Could the letters have been sent from prison, was that why they were so remorseful?

A friendly jaunt. Grigori had never troubled himself much with who “dear V” might be—so many names started with that letter, it was pointless to try to guess. What struck him now, though, was a new possibility: that the V stood for Viktor Elsin. And then there was the one sentence Grigori had long wondered about: Don’t forget
to bring ID. An odd, probably pointless warning, in a time when no one ever left the house without their papers. ID would have been a given, as automatic as a wallet in your pocket. No need to state it outright. Unless it was code for something more particular. In which case “only if the weather is clear,” too, began to sound like code. Grigori closed his eyes, overwhelmed, his head still pounding.

Both possibilities made sense to him, now that Drew had brought Gershtein into the picture. He certainly did sound like a man caught in some way, a man banished or punished. But the poems—they were Elsin’s. About that, at least, there was no doubt.

A thought came to Grigori, an odd one, but he stopped to consider it. Might Viktor Elsin have read the letters and borrowed the phrasing?

No. Impossible. He was a poet, he didn’t need to pilfer from others’ correspondence.

But they were the same images. Or, if not quite the same, similar…

Similar enough to create a hypothesis, to write a paper that was given an A. But did that mean Elsin had stolen from Gersh? The poems were certainly different from his others. But not so different as to indicate that they had be
copied
…And why would he ever do that?

Maybe he hadn’t meant to do it. But he had read the letters—delivered them, perhaps? As an emissary to the prison?—and the images remained in his mind. After all, this was his closest friend….

Or maybe he hadn’t read the letters at all but had been present, with Nina Revskaya, who was such close friends with that other ballerina. And so Gershtein too had been there, two couples, at the dacha, at the river, taking refuge from the sun under a pine tree.

Grigori realized that he was chewing on his lip. Taking a long, slow breath, he tried to calm himself. But he could not stop, and found himself looking again at the photographs he had taken back from Drew, his own photographs, which he knew so well, and that he
had been so relieved to show her. He tried to reimagine it all, rewrite the story in his mind—though really he didn’t look like Gershtein any more than he looked like Elsin, or Revskaya or the other woman, for that matter. Well, his chin looked a bit like Elsin’s. But then his eyes—they definitely had something of Gershtein in them, he had to admit. And his mouth, wasn’t there something in Vera Borodina’s mouth that was exactly like his? And his cheekbones—so much like Nina Revskaya’s.

He nearly laughed at the idea, four parents now, instead of just two. Six, if you counted Katya and Feodor. His dear parents, the most real ones of all, whom he sometimes, just every now and then, wished he might see again. Well, then what did the past matter? His life was here now. Drew was here, had been right next to him. And he had stomped off.

Grigori looked at his watch. Though it was after five, he quickly reached for the telephone, to try calling Drew at work. When her machine answered, he left an apologetic message—but it wasn’t enough, he knew that. He felt suddenly desperate. Turning to his computer, he found the telephone index for the Boston area. Though there were three Drew Brooks in the city of Boston, only one was not listed as part of a couple. Grigori immediately dialed that number.

Drew’s voice came up on the answering machine. At first Grigori’s heart sank, not to have reached her. But at least, he told himself, he now knew that this was the correct number, the right Drew. His Drew. Checking the address once more, Grigori put on his coat and went to find her.

C
YNTHIA DROPPED HER
purse and her nurse’s bag and hurried over to Nina. “Sugar, you look awful.”

“Then my look is how I feel.”

“Why didn’t you call me? Did you call the doctor?” Cynthia had
already reached out to take Nina’s wrist in her hand, and began to check her pulse.

If Vera really did visit Gersh in the psychiatric camp, and Viktor really did take her there, then Viktor had not, after all, been having an affair with Vera or anyone else. No, Gersh had asked him to hold the jewels so that Zoya would not take them, so that he could pass them along to Vera. And Madame—why, she thought she was simply spoiling Nina’s surprise. Just her usual mother-in-law antics. Probably she had not known at all how much confusion she would cause.

“Your pulse is low. But not in the danger zone.” Now Cynthia was looking through her nurse’s bag, and plucked out a thermometer, removed the tip from its sterilizing wrapper. “When did you start feeling sick?”

When she did not bother to answer, Cynthia stuck the thermometer in Nina’s mouth.

“We might have to go in,” Cynthia said. “To the hospital. I’m not taking any chances with you.” She continued to say such things, about doctors and tests and the pallor of Nina’s skin, but Nina stopped listening. She was thinking about Viktor, how she had hated him, so much, in those hours following Vera’s death. How she had loved Vera too, and how she should have known, must have known, in fact, deep down, all along. Was that why I ran away from that young man, Grigori Solodin, so eager there at my doorstep, those years ago? I must have known that, too—known that he could do this to me, reveal to me this truth.

As long as she had not known for certain, it had not felt quite so awful when she found herself, reluctantly, unwillingly, thinking of what Viktor must have gone through because of her. If I hadn’t left that night, things would not have looked at all suspicious. There would have been nothing to prove, nothing to make him look guilty. I gave them a reason, nothing Serge needed to make up. When really
there was no reason for me to leave, no reason at all. Because I knew perfectly well how much Vera loved Gersh, I knew what she was willing to do for him. But then there was Serge, horrible Serge, right there on the sidewalk…Vera saying,
He said he can pull some strings
. The chance, the randomness of it—that he should be there at that very moment.

If only I had never seen him, our lives might have been different. The look in his eyes: anger and grief and retribution. And Polina, like a ghost floating in the doorway…

Nina was aware of something desperate happening within her, a frantic searching for a way out—some way to convince herself that none of this was quite so awful. Thoughts flew, glimpses of what might have been, and of what had happened instead. Well, there was Inge, she told herself, feeling only the slightest relief. If Nina had never left, she would not have been able, after all was said and done, to secure Inge the position in Bonn. That at least was something.

Cynthia had reached over, was wiping Nina’s tears, trying not to knock the thermometer from her lips. Nina did not mind; the pain of movement had become too much for her, each time she used even the smallest muscle.