Russian Winter (42 page)

“Is it?”

“Yes. Because even though it didn’t work out for them, in the end, it can still work out for you. You have the chance to live out what they didn’t. To create your own life. Your own family.”

There was a tearing sensation across Grigori’s chest, his heart breaking at the same time that it was refilling with something. He reached for Drew and ran his fingers through her hair. His body remembered, now, what this had felt like, what he had forgotten, the ache of wanting, of needing this other person, running his fingers down her back, touching the small bumps of her spine, becoming lost in time, hours like minutes. At some point, Drew stood and led him into her bedroom, and what amazed him was the ease of it, even as it seemed that what they had begun was something utterly exceptional that no one had ever quite attempted before.

N
OW THAT SHE
is in the corps dressing room, she can hear the company manager calling her name, on the other side of the door, slamming in and out of the “star” room. It isn’t long before he, the
Komsomol representative, and the theater manager are making their way through the halls, tromping up and down the stairs. They have twice looked into the corps room, to the protest of the dresser and a few half-naked girls. They didn’t explain what they wanted, whom they were looking for—an effort, perhaps, to preserve the illusion of nothing having gone terribly wrong. Both times Nina, already in her swan costume, the feathers of her headwreath reaching down over her ears and cheeks, was bent over her toe shoes, re-stitching the tips of her shoe ribbons into the sides, her shoulders hunched in a way that feels utterly unfamiliar. The big round clothes rack in the middle of the room, full of frilly tutus hanging upside down, helps obscure the view. To Nina’s right, underneath the corps girl’s coat, are her shoes and sweater and makeup case.

Already she is feeling doubtful. And guilty, at having bribed that poor German girl into her scheme. What is the worth of a diamond, no matter how big, if the girl is caught, if anyone finds out that she has helped Nina? Nina’s heart sinks with worry for the girl as much as for herself.

She mustn’t lose her nerve. Affecting great attention, she leans over her legs, massages her calves, while all around her dancers preen. For the first time in her life she appreciates the great narcissism of ballerinas, each girl in this room interested solely in herself, her costume, her hair, her makeup, barely noticing the others. Whenever it seems someone might be looking her way, Nina fiddles with her feathered headband, with the bun of her hair, always something up around her face, even as she and the rest of the swan maidens are herded out toward the backstage door.

Then there is some kind of commotion at the other end of the corridor. Nina recognizes the Bolshoi manager’s voice. “What’s that? Are you certain?”

“She left,” a man’s voice, thickly accented, replies. “Franz just told me. A woman with the exact same coat you described.”

A third man’s voice protests something in German. “He didn’t know,” the second translates, as his fellow German continues. “He says…he could have sworn it was a dancer he sees all the time. She looked like she was going home for the night.”

The Bolshoi manager’s voice says, “Quick, let’s go.”

Nina feels something inside her release, though surely the building is still teeming with patrols. Not to mention that she is now trapped in the pack of girls backstage, a crowd of swans awaiting their entrance—and that as much as she might try to hide among them before slipping away, she must still be recognizable, should anyone take the time to look at her. But no one here has ever seen Nina close up, and surely everyone’s focus will be on the two principal dancers (first Siegfried, then Odette in her grand entrance) rather than on the many swans surrounding them; the love duet is a main highlight, and true stars never lose an audience’s attention. Even if some balletomanes in the audience might notice Nina, the theater guards most probably don’t know what she looks like. And with the manager and his assistant gone, there will be fewer people here who have ever seen her in person. If only she can find some way to slip out.

The Berlin girl, her savior, has told Nina her number in the lineup—by stroke of luck toward the rear of the corps, no “Dance of the Little Swans” for her. The girl must indeed be a novice. Nina takes her place as if stepping back in time, back to her early days, giddy and nervous, the mass rustling of crinoline and tulle. But tonight the fearful trembling that the swans must enact is, for Nina,
real
—not simply nerves but true fright. She is, she realizes, petrified.

For the first time in years she will have to dance in unison, the carefully coordinated positioning of arms and legs, even the tilt of her head, her every movement matching those of her fellow swans—no standing out, no personality or flair, the very opposite of a prima
ballerina. In a way, tonight’s role is the greatest challenge of her career: how to unlearn all of her training, to conceal the very qualities that have made her a star, to be good enough but not too good. She prays that her body will know what to do, will submerge itself, suppress its expertise—and that no one looks too closely at the new swan there in the back. For the moment, it seems possible. Even right here, crushed close to one another in the back wing, the other swan-girls are too preoccupied with shoe ribbons and hairpins to notice an unfamiliar face among them. The stagehands, too, are so busy with their work, negotiating props and lights and curtains, that not one of them pays attention to the dancers.

Nina keeps her head down, pretends to be adjusting her feathers. If any of the other girls should notice her, she tells herself, she will give a confident wink, as if it has all been planned, nothing but a little prank. But there is no need: here is their cue, and with the rest of the swans, Nina drifts onto the stage.

T
HE FAMILIAR BLOCK
of sunlight stretched across the faded purple blanket. Hurrying past, grabbing her purse, Drew said, “It’s going to be crazy all day, you know.” Though the auction was not until four o’clock, she had much to take care of before then.

Grigori nodded, taking his coat from the lumpy sofa. “A friend and I were planning to stop by the auction. But don’t worry, I know you’ll be working.”

Drew had to smile, seeing him there. “Come find me afterward. I’ll just need another hour or so to finish things up.”

As natural as it felt to say this, she felt a ruffle of something else, something between fear and excitement, and a kind of disbelief, that this was her, Drew, that she had taken this step toward a new person. Even to be with him now, here in her home, brought her a feeling not
just of warmth but of exposure—her self, exposed and vulnerable. Scraped clean, that was how she felt: her old skin peeled off, and new, tender skin exposed. As much potential for pain as for tenderness and love.

Grigori helped her into her coat, pausing to look at her with a small smile. They were about to step out the door when he stopped. “You wanted to show me something. Your grandfather’s journal.”

“Oh, that’s right!” The package had arrived just yesterday, a small padded envelope posted by her mother. It seemed ages ago that she had mentioned it. Today itself seemed miles and miles away from yesterday.

The journal was a small, square booklet slim enough to fit in a coat pocket. Showing it to Grigori, Drew felt moved just fanning through the many blank pages at the end. “He died not long after he started it. I remember my grandmother showing it to me.”

Grigori held it gingerly, looking at the first written page, and nodded as if to say that he could do this. “May I take it with me?”

She told him yes, and they left the building, stepped out onto Myrtle Street to find the air almost warm, full of a sweet spring humidity. Parents were walking their children to the playground, their coats open to the breeze. You would never have thought that it had snowed just two days before, one of those last-minute March dumpings, thick wet heavy flakes that create a big mess before quickly melting away.

Feeling his warm hand in hers, Drew turned with Grigori down Joy Street toward the Common, so that he could take the Green Line home. And though Drew would have liked to ride the train with him for the brief two stops to Beller, simply to remain in his company a bit longer, she decided to walk. With the bright sunlight and the air nearly warm, she wanted to savor—without a crowd of strangers and rush-hour noise around her—this new, oddly calm elation, the bewildering sense that she had somehow, at last, landed where she was meant to be.

T
HE BODY REMEMBERS.

Like a cat remembers the way home, instinctively, Nina thinks afterward, back in the dressing room, hastily slipping her tutu down from her hips. Each movement came to her like breathing, like drinking water, perfectly naturally. Never has she felt so grateful to her body, to the familiar heat of the stage lights, to the haunting music that her muscles know by heart.

Now, though, her hands fumble as she rushes to pull on her skirt and shoes and cardigan sweater. The other swan-girls have only brief minutes longer onstage; Nina simply could not risk staying on any longer, with the curtain call so soon to come. She can hear her own breathing, quick and anxious, as she slips her arms into her new coat—the corps girl’s coat, not at all as nice as hers, but of course that is the point. She needs to vanish yet again. At least there is no sign of the company manager or anyone from Komsomol; they must not have returned since leaving to search for her.

Seeing an exit arrow at the end of the hallway, Nina takes up her makeup case and ventures into the corridor. She hurries to the first intersecting hallway, a smaller, narrower, darker one, and steps into it, waiting. Soon she hears voices, a small group coming along the other corridor. When they have passed, she peeks out, watching as they leave the building. Indeed there is a guard there, although he does not stop anyone in the group, seems to know them, or at least knows that they are not Nina.

Now the corridor has filled with the bright girlish voices of the corps. Finished for the night, they bustle back to the dressing room. Just a few more minutes pass before they emerge yet again and begin to leave the building, clusters of them giggling and chatting as they head down the hallway and out the door. Perhaps none of them noticed Nina after all. No, there’s sure to have been someone…. Her
thoughts skip back and forth, her pulse racing, as she waits. When a larger group of dancers comes along, she decides, as they pass her, to try.

Quickly she steps out and bustles along behind them, just another faceless dancer eager to leave for the night. Now they have reached the door, where the armed guard awaits. Act natural, don’t hurry, you’re a ballerina leaving work, with your little case of necessities…. When the girls directly in front of her laugh at something, she smiles broadly, as if she too finds it funny. And like a dream she drifts right past the tired guard, who does not stop to question a single one of them.

I
t wasn’t until she arrived at work that she realized she had forgotten her garnet ring.

For a moment Drew felt suddenly, utterly naked. It was the first time that she hadn’t noticed at the last minute and gone back for it. To forget it completely, today of all days…Drew knew better than to be superstitious, yet even as she shrugged off this small lapse—and sat down to turn on her computer, bracing herself for the latest onslaught of e-mail—she felt somehow unarmed, not to have the ring with her.

At the top of her in-box was another forwarded message from her mother. This time it was a fund-raising message from her mother’s friend Laurie, whose son would be running the Boston Marathon to raise money for AIDS orphans in Uganda; there was a link to a site where you could donate to his fund. Though the message itself was innocent enough, Drew found herself recalling the most recent tidbit that had slipped from her mother’s lips: that Eric and Karen, who was apparently a long-distance runner, had started training for the Dublin Marathon next fall. Annoyed all over again, Drew for a moment considered writing her mother yet another brief, brisk reminder that, if she must send such e-mails, they ought to go to Drew’s private account.

Yet something prevented her—stopped the impulse itself. It had to do with Grigori. Not just her happiness at the thought of him, but also what he had told her yesterday, about his parents, his adoption, about his longing and confusion, and that long, ultimately ungratifying search. How lucky Drew was to have this mother of hers, this constant, reliable, if at times irritating presence in her life—this mother, like so many mothers, beloved and blamed. Lucky she was to have experienced, through her mother, the twisted intricacies of deep, and deeply complex, love.

After all, her mother had probably suffered these feelings too. Drew thought of Grandma Riitta, that even she—with her strong will, her inescapable straightforwardness, her permanent cache of intimate stories—must have at times exasperated her daughter. Wasn’t that partly why Drew’s mother had so stubbornly ignored much of her past? Had turned away from her native language, away from her own history. Had erased any last residue of foreignness, and named her daughter “Drew.”

Thinking this, Drew felt something other than her usual resigned understanding. She picked up the telephone and dialed her parents’ number.

When her mother answered, the first thing Drew did was to thank her for having sent the journal. “I’ve already given it to someone to translate.”

In a brisk, light way, as if it didn’t really matter one way or the other, her mother said, “Well, you’ll have to tell me what you find out.”

Drew said what she had been considering. “I thought we could read it together.”

Her mother’s surprise was audible.

“I thought I’d bring the transcript when I come visit,” Drew continued.

“Oh! Are you coming here, then?”

“I could come for Dad’s birthday.” The idea had just now crystallized. “Since it’s on a Sunday, and I have that Monday off, for Patriots’ Day.”

“Patriots’ Day…”

“And for his birthday present I was thinking—”

“He’ll be delighted you’re coming!”

Drew waited for her mother to say that she too was delighted. And even though, as the conversation continued, she did not say those exact words, the tone of her voice seemed to reveal that she did, in fact, feel that way.

G
RIGORI DRIFTED THROUGH
the morning as in a dream. Funny how one thing, one wonderful thing, could alter everything, make it seem that nothing in the world, no goodness or luck, was too much to wish for. After all, if this could happen to him—if love could happen, again, for him, Grigori Solodin, widower aged fifty—then why not other good things, for other people, too?

As if to confirm this, his voice mail contained a message from an editor interested in Zoltan’s poetry. He had started a new translation series under his own imprint, at a reputable press. “I’ve long been a fan of Zoltan Romhanyi’s work and am really thrilled at the prospect of publishing his new poems,” his message said. “Let’s make it happen.”

Full of a lightness he could not quite recall feeling before, Grigori was aware of something else in his heart, another kind of letting go. It had to do with the letters, with the poems, with the way those images matched up. If indeed the letters were not Viktor Elsin’s, Grigori still might never know whether Elsin had ever seen them, or had perhaps even borrowed images from them. But what mattered more, he felt now, was the fact of the letters themselves—that they were
real, someone’s real life, someone’s real words.
Whose
life,
whose
words, was not something he might ever solve with any concreteness, as much as he still desired some kind of certainty. But that desire had been eclipsed by a greater one, and by an understanding that Grigori must have already possessed all along. An understanding that such uncertainties were part of the mystery of this life, and would always coexist with those things that are certain: his love for Christine, and now Drew, and his friendships, his passions. Of course Grigori could return to the poems yet again, make an even more obsessive study of them, try to answer the question for himself, if no one else. But the question, though still a teasing, perplexing one, no longer nagged at him. His body itself felt lighter, unburdened.

Turning to his desk, he took up the little journal Drew had given him. He had only a few minutes before his lunch meeting, but he could at least take a cursory look, to see if the handwriting would be discernible, how difficult a task it might be.

Between the covers was that typical penmanship of Soviet schooling, small, no margins at all, using every inch and both sides of each page.

Grigori realized that he was smiling. This man, too, was a writer. Amazing, really, that he—Grigori—was able to hear that man’s voice now, and so clearly, so many years later. The voice of the man without whom there would be no Drew.

Grigori was aware of his heartbeat having quickened, and of that other, rare and startling, sensation: the certainty that he was on the brink of something. He glanced at his watch. The meeting would have to wait.

The rest of the book was blank. At first Grigori just sat there gazing at the old dried ink. It’s true, was his thought: we are all connected. And it took fifty years for me to understand this…. He realized that his eyes were teary, and wiped them with his handkerchief. It must be the abruptness, he told himself, that is making me cry: another life cut short. Turning back to the opening page, he looked to see when that first entry had been written. There was no date.

Grigori began to read again from the beginning. Amazing how just a few brief pages revealed so much about the person who had composed them: his outlook, his good nature, and, despite his lack of schooling, his ear for language. Those empty pages at the end were no longer simply blank but painful in their blankness. The curiosity Grigori felt was as strong as what he had felt for Elsin’s poems, yet less needy—simply eager. This other man’s words, pure and unaltered, the man himself pared down to what little language he had…His words were concerned not with art but simply truth, and therefore contained, in their own way, the beauty of art.

This man, Drew’s grandfather. Her mother’s father, an un-schooled man, a farmer, a prisoner. A man with a sense of humor,
a man who understood the worth of taking the time to write down one’s thoughts, one’s life. How many other men like this, unknown and uneducated, had left such documents behind? Grigori thought now of the KGB archives that had recently been opened, the many confiscated diaries and letters it must contain, records as important as any of Viktor Elsin’s poems. How many other people’s stories must be lodged there, unread but waiting. Waiting for someone like Grigori to take a look, and to let the world know.

Full of a new energy, Grigori set to work typing out his translation of the little journal’s pages. It would be his gift (the phrase that went through his head was “my first gift”) to Drew.

A
T THE AUCTION
house, the seats were already filling by three o’clock that afternoon. People kept peering about as if they might get a glimpse of Nina Revskaya herself, though surely they knew better. Drew recognized a few of the regulars, trades people and private buyers: the handsome dealer from D.C. who specialized in diamonds; the middle-aged woman who always bid on about twenty necklaces but rarely ended up buying any; the young millionaire who brought a new girlfriend to every auction, whether it was jewelry or furniture or wine; and the skinny bald guy who never bid on anything, just stood around at the buffet table eating the free hors d’oeuvres. Today the caterers had put out crudités, very thin cinnamon cookies, and big percolators of coffee. One of the water pitchers already needed refilling. Drew notified the intern.