Leninsky Prospekt

KATHERINE BUCKNELL

Leninsky Prospekt

For my mother and father and for Uncle Tom

Contents

Title Page Dedication Leninsky Prospekt Viktor was thinking about trees October 6,1962 October 9 Over the next few days October 14 October 17 October 19 October 20 October 21 October 22 October 23 October 24 October 25 October 26–October 27 October 28 About the Author Praise Also by Katherine Bucknell Copyright About the Publisher

LENINSKY PROSPEKT

Viktor was thinking about trees. He leaned back as far as he could and he saw brightness flash and move through his blindfold as the van heaved and tossed its way through whatever streets these were, and he imagined that he could see flickering translucent leaves turning and trembling in their thousands above him, layer upon soaring layer, spiralling up to the blue sky which he knew must lie beyond. It opened his head, what he could imagine today, with the continual changes in air, the thin real light and the ordinary city noises that he associated with Moscow and home. He resisted wondering exactly where he was or why he was being moved. Instead, he journeyed in his thoughts, along a rutted country road lined with white-trunked birch, their peeling bark showing black scored stripes and pink tree flesh among their chalky, breeze-twisted leaves. Beyond the birch, straight, taller firs with their sober-needled boughs marshalled the blue depths of the forest.

The road bent away in front until it was lost to view; he might make it hours still before he arrived at the little dacha, with its polished dark wood walls, its brick chimney, smoke twitching the nostrils, the chairs positioned on the veranda in the last patch of sun, his books and papers on the desk inside where he had left them, his pen still uncapped, the line to finish. Maybe she would be waiting outside, alert on the chair which she favoured, looking out for him. Or, no. Maybe she would be lying on the blowsy red sofa, by the desk, her feet up, reading a book, fidgeting with the splayed brown ends of her braids.

These were savoured images. For months, years, now, going over them and over them, Viktor had found he could make them more detailed, more real. He believed he could probably go on doing this for ever, but he had realized early on that he must be careful not to discover whether he was right. He must be careful not to find himself at the end of his resources. For instance, he tried not to find words for these images; whenever he had pencil and paper, he didn’t write about them. Instead, he forced himself to begin making new images, new scenes to turn to, before he could tire of the ones he loved best. He kept his mind moving, fresh, alive, by planning poems but not writing them down until he had an idea for a new one, a better one. Like a cook, he was always preparing something for himself to look forward to, to indulge himself in, even though he had to cook without meat or even a carrot or an onion for his pot. The feeling of anticipation was deeply pleasurable to Viktor; the feeling of nostalgia was not. He never allowed himself to consider what he had lost. Regret weakened him.

And he never allowed himself to get close to her, close enough, say, to reach for her. He knew that when tenderness turned to appetite, he couldn’t float his imagination over it, couldn’t lift his mind out of the trap he was in, his body. He was better off with sentimentality, with pictures that he softened on purpose in order to comfort his heart. Physical desire was too hard a struggle.

With such disciplines, he had lasted a total of nearly five years in prison. Once, after the first four years, he had been released, shoved into the open: the clamouring, all-talking, over-bright reality where other people’s trains of thought unpredictably crashed in on his. He had not been allowed back to the institute to continue his research, but a friend helped him get temporary work in the library there. The unregimented hours away from his inner life had made him fretful, as if he were starved of sleep. This, too, he had learned to cope with, but then his freedom hadn’t lasted.

Since returning to prison, he had continually practised engaging with others – exchanging messages and making deals at exercise time, giving impromptu lectures, organizing work strikes, hunger strikes, writing letters of complaint, writing on the walls, until, often, he was put into solitary confinement. And he kept an image ready for freedom. It wasn’t an image that he dared to explore at all; it was only a black dot, like a punctuation mark or a hole, which made his breath come shallow and sharp when he considered, even for the briefest second, that it existed. Still, he wouldn’t allow himself to forget it was there: a possibility, hurtling towards him – liberation, confusion, a kind of death – the moment when he might again feel a certain kind of concern about the actions of others. He feared this moment pressing upon his thoughts more even than flesh, more than the likely slide into depravity that he along with all his fellow prisoners continually risked, through lack of choice, through bondage.

Today, he let himself drive his father’s black Pobeda further than usual along the tree-lined road. He imagined that he had the windows rolled down, until the spreading twilight nipped at his black-haired forearm, muscular as it had once been, lying in the opening atop the car door. To make the trip last longer, he thought again about the leaves, the fractal intricacies of their countless edges, their intimate exchanging of breath with light, with air, as they ceaselessly moved and grew. He didn’t think for a moment about where the van was actually taking him tonight.

October 28 1962. The tiered, red and gold glory of the crowded Bolshoi was prickling and rustling with tension, and the momentary hush before the start of the Sunday evening programme was suffused with almost liquid anxiety, as if everyone in the theatre was drowning in stage fright. Maybe tonight would be their last night on earth. They shrugged off their wraps, licked their reeds, flexed and stretched their calves, their metatarsals, their hopes. Audience, musicians, dancers in their separated spheres struggled to still themselves, to collect their shuddering thoughts, their gossiping fretful tongues, so they could engage one more time with the grandeur of civilization: why not lose themselves in ballet as the planet mutely spun through its final tilted rotation?

The conductor, his wasp-waisted, black uprightness just visible above the creamy, red-lipped orchestra pit, raised his arms over the fidgeting sea of preparation, pulled it towards him like a tide. His bent wrists, his curled fingers lightly commanded the disciplined glance of his musicians. The conductor was American. The musicians were Soviet, mostly Soviet the audience at his back. The hush fizzed and foamed, expanded to the point of pain, to bursting. Then, with a ruthless intake of breath, a brusque snap of his chin, the conductor simply began.

From the Russian strings and winds rose the Second Movement of Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony. The red and gold curtain parted, and on the stage American ballet dancers, dressed in kilts and tartan socks, skipped before the whirlwind, bar by measured bar, step by springing step, jaunty, death-defying. Ballet was their mother tongue, and everyone in the Bolshoi that night understood the music, the dance, the ritual of artist and audience.

The performance wrung tears of nostalgia and of rage from Nina Davenport, who bowed her teased and sprayed chestnut flip over her fists, dashed with blanched knuckles at the hollows underneath her mascaraed eyes. It seemed easy, beautiful, obvious – the years of mental and physical devotion flowering in lively complexity on this foreign stage.

Nina sat alone in the eighth row, one seat left of the left side aisle. Beside her was the only empty seat in the house; John Davenport was at the American Embassy. She cried for John, too, for his absence, for their newly married heartache of impatience, misunderstanding, lapse of conviction. She cried for unfinished mysteries, for the slow pulse of love smashed by anonymous brutality. And she cried for the pale, undying sylph on the stage, circled by the men of the corps de ballet so that, for a yearning instant, her lover couldn’t reach her.

Nina tried to keep the wet of her tears off the wisps of paper crushed in her hands. As she dragged her eyes back to the stage, she dropped the papers onto her lap. They were the same colour as her white wool skirt but more fragile, wrinkled, translucent. The skirt was robust with workmanship, a thickly woven bouclé, soft as a cloud to touch, taut across her pressed-together caramel nylon knees. She felt hot in the matching short jacket, which she wore as she had been told to, with its three saucer-like gold buttons done all the way up to the stiff, stand-away collar. The beige silk lining whispered and slid against her skin as she fretted in her red velvet chair, smoothing the patch pockets of the skirt with the heels of her hands, with her pearl-pink painted fingernails.

She had ordered the suit in Paris the day she and John got off the boat from New York. ‘There’s nothing to wear in Moscow,’ her mother had said fiercely, in her husky, smoke-abused voice, ‘but that doesn’t mean you won’t need things.’ She had given Nina twenty thousand dollars in cash.

‘Start at Balenciaga, darling.’ Mother’s tone had been resigned, then she had sighed, indulgent, conspiratorial, ‘Cristóbal has absolutely perfect taste. He’ll get your eye in. And that way you’ll be recognized for what you are by anyone who can tell. Nobody else matters. A diplomat’s wife ought to be chic, especially in Europe. He has flair, a touch of flamenco, but he’s never vulgar – he’s a Roman Catholic, you see. And you’ll like the colours he uses. From Goya’s paintings, or maybe from an olive grove he remembers in the Spanish countryside. I know you don’t give a damn about clothes, but you owe it to John, dear.’

Nina had felt impressed but not surprised by how much her mother had learned about such things in six years of restless, unaccompanied circling from Paris to New York, Buffalo to Palm Beach, while Nina struggled through Wellesley, languished behind the reception desk of a well-established, little-frequented Old Masters gallery on Madison Avenue, sat numb at a ballet, fell passionately in love. She had accepted the money in order to soothe her mother’s distress over the fact that she was moving with John back to Russia. And maybe to soothe her own. As if clothes or even money could somehow protect Nina from whatever awesome, difficult experiences Russia was bound to offer her.

‘I understand how you feel about John,’ Nina’s mother had said in another, earlier, conversation. ‘Think how crazy I was about your poor father to follow him there when I was your age. My parents did everything to stop me. I didn’t listen to them; naturally I thought my husband was far more exciting and important than Buffalo, New York or a sewing machine fortune that he had persuaded me no individual deserved to have or inherit when people everywhere were hungry. But I didn’t know anything about Russia, or about life, for that matter. I had been totally spoiled by my upbringing. I had no idea what I was giving up. And then you came along.’

Mother had bitten her tongue on this, stopped short. ‘Not you, dear. I don’t mean you.’ But somehow it had seemed as if she did mean Nina; she so often struck these clumsy, inadvertent blows, then tried to take them back. She had softened her voice, almost pleading, ‘Nina, dear, after everything we’ve been through, I just can’t understand why you and John want to do this. I can’t believe the two of you think it’s safe. I like John; at least I thought I liked John. But what kind of a man is he, that he would take you to Moscow, knowing everything about you as he does? Why is the State Department even allowing it, for God’s sake? That’s what I don’t understand.’

Nina had been firm, confident, justified. ‘Don’t start on the what-kind-of-a-man thing, Mother. It’s my decision. I’m perfectly happy to go back. John has told you he would give it up if I asked him to; you and I both know he means it. His job has absolutely nothing to do with what happened to you and Dad.’

But it had given her another fit of inward trembling. All the while, she had known what her mother was remembering, what her mother had hoped in America to forget once and for all: the ZAGS office near Gorky Street hit by a German incendiary bomb in 1943, every single document in the building burned to cinders, buckets of sand poured on the flames to no avail by the nighttime fire brigades, rain transforming official records into sodden mounds of indecipherable, tar-coloured debris – births, deaths, marriages obliterated. On Nina’s new registration, her mother had written: Born 1937, Buffalo, New York. Afterwards, she had taken Nina straight to the park and begun teaching her to say she was six years old, not four.

Her parents had fought bitterly over her. Their rage still bellowed at Nina down the years.

‘It’s her only chance. You can’t do anything for us now.’

‘Are you crazy? You’ve put her in inconceivable danger – all of us! She’s a true Soviet, why put this mark against her? How could I even be her father if she was born in 1937? You were still in Greenwich Village most of 1937, and I hadn’t seen you for at least a year! Besides that, how the hell will you explain how tiny she is?’

‘Nobody left in Moscow has enough to eat. All the children have stopped growing.’

‘What about the doctor?’

‘I’ll find a new doctor. Lots of people go privately. I can get the money. I have plenty of translating work at the Foreign Ministry.’

‘If she’s six, she needs to start school next year.’

‘She can do it. She’s a smart little girl. I know how to get her ready; I’m a teacher now, after all. Everything around us is in complete chaos anyway. The children who were evacuated have been coming back in mobs. Who will notice?’

And so they had chanced it, on the basis of chaos, counting on bureaucratic inefficiency, gnawing their fingernails to blood when each new year, each new challenge in Nina’s childish life brought a new set of anxieties.

When Nina and her mother had arrived in the USA on Soviet passports in 1956, the US passport office in Washington, DC, had been eager to accept whatever statements they offered. Why would they want to undermine Nina’s right to be an American citizen, her right to hold an American passport? Her father had been dead for three years, but both her parents were American; nobody doubted that. There was already a cable in Nina’s file about her interview at the embassy in Moscow; it was necessary only to confirm certain details. No record of Nina’s birth could be traced, so Aunt Josephine came from Buffalo to swear to it, a rambling, engaging, cunning swear.

‘The weather was so appalling that winter, and Dr Ainsworth was getting old. He must have been way past retirement age. A home birth, in the middle of the night, and then getting out in the snow to file papers? He just wasn’t very professional that way. He was really more of a family friend. And the truth is,’ here, as Aunt Josephine had later told it to Nina, to Mother, she came over all trusting, confidential, ‘you see, the truth is, my sister wasn’t married. My hunch is that Dr Ainsworth was making some old-fashioned attempt to spare embarrassment – leaving the details to the discretion of the family. We were prominent locally, after all. Not that anyone was trying to pretend it had never happened, but maybe just – fudging things a little. My sister left for Russia as soon as she was strong enough, to join the baby’s father. She put the baby on her own passport of course, and then all those documents were confiscated over there. Naturally, our parents destroyed everything to do with my sister, they were so distressed. They’re dead now, and that house has been sold, and Dr Ainsworth is dead, too, and his office closed years ago.’

Thus, it had been established firmly, once and for all. But Mother knew, Aunt Josephine knew, Nina knew, John knew. And at a small, sequestered bank in upstate New York, there had been an enormous pile of money building up quietly during the years Mother was away. Nina’s grandparents hadn’t wished to expunge their daughter from memory at all. On the contrary, they had left her a fortune in hopes of luring her home.

Eventually, Nina’s mother had stopped trying to persuade Nina to wait out John’s Moscow tour in Buffalo or in New York.

‘I can’t go back and sit in that gallery on Madison Avenue all day, Mother. It never meant anything to me, no matter how much I love paintings, drawings. Where could it lead? I want to be with my husband. I need to be.’

She and her mother had silently begun to pretend that Moscow would be Europe: parties, museums, opera and ballet, a desirable post for a young American wife. A post that called for a spectacular wardrobe, because that seemed to be the only preparation they could make.

The trunks and suitcases had already been jammed when the Davenports left Washington; the cartons of books, linen, kitchen and cleaning supplies, toilet paper, were sealed. So in Paris, between fittings and pilgrimages to the Opéra, the Louvre, the Sainte Chapelle, Nina bought another trunk from Louis Vuitton and began to fill its sleek emptiness with the finest personal items she could find, make-up and stockings and belts and scarves and gloves and shoes and fly-away silk nightgowns and chemises and armour-weight girdles that she believed could stop a bullet at close range. Last of all she had packed the beautifully hand-sewn clothes when they were ready. It had seemed like a lifetime’s trousseau, assembled as if she might never be able to visit such shops and such craftsmen again. Some of it she had never even worn, and already the lifetime was running out. Hers and the world’s, ticking away in the agitated, overcast, windy October twilight. Soon, unexpectedly soon.

The tears burned inside her straight, broad nose and around the rims of her wide, blue, ruined eyes. She felt the nuclear panic again, like a black wave rising, smoking at her, and the exhausted sensation of trying to quell it. She straightened her neck from the top of her spine as she had so often watched the dancers do lately, squinted hard at the stage. She considered that there was probably no one in the Bolshoi tonight who remained unaware that the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States had finally reached a cosmic stare-down over the missiles which Khrushchev had positioned in Cuba during September and early October. In some half-conscious, continually patrolling corner of her mind, Nina pictured him wherever he might be – closeted with the Presidium, pacing his dining-room floor, on his way to watch a travelling Bulgarian show – shaking his cruelly belittled fist, scowling pugnaciously at President Kennedy, his accidental nemesis. Both sides were now spitting into the abyss, she thought, the whistling nothingness beyond Armageddon.

It’s worse, being in the audience, she decided. The dancers can at least dance. Being forced to stand by, to take it, whatever comes – you almost wish it would just goddamn happen and be over with. Khrushchev goes on giving orders, writing letters; the president holds meetings, makes speeches. As if they’ve narrowed down the whole universe to just the two of them. And they can’t even talk to each other. Don’t speak each other’s language. Still she couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t conceive of it.

She longed pathetically for the fear-free ebullience of the New York City Ballet’s opening night at the Bolshoi two and a half weeks ago. And she remembered from the opening programme the ballet called Agon. Contest. Struggle. It sums up everything, she thought; it might as well have been a prophecy. She stared at Scotch Symphony but what she saw now was the endless blue-lit set of Agon, without floor, without walls, the plain modern leotards and tights. It had begun with wit, with saucy, twisting shoulders and hips – sophisticated, playful; but then a darkness, an undertow of mistiming, anxious syncopations had set in, bodies moving perfectly out of time, on top of the beat, before it, beside it, with deliberate mismatched precision; the swing of a leg kicking off the swing of some other leg, catapulting it further, so that the energy escalated, towards the limit of control. In the pas de deux, the guarded pride of the rooted, muscular black dancer, the haughty energy of the ballerina. The tension that had built between them was more than sex, more than race; it was every tension, every conflict epitomized, acted out. They and the others, gladiators, had issued challenge upon reckless challenge, dare upon bodily dare, raising the ante to impossible heights of technical virtuosity, chancing the edge of doom. Even now, Nina heard Stravinsky’s bright, hectic music above Mendelssohn’s; even now she saw those dancers and that dance.

October 6,1962. The New York City Ballet arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport like a glamour bomb, an explosion of self-confident, long-limbed physical beauty, spreading and undulating past the green-clad border guards towards the truck-mounted floodlights, official photographers, grim-faced journalists, and ubiquitous, grey-suited, hummingbird-eyed officers of the KGB.

Sixty-odd pairs of perfectly muscled legs sauntered and flickered with restrained braggadocio over the colourless airport floors and past the drab bureaucratic demands of official paperwork, washed hair coiffed and swishing, perfectly fitting suits barely aeroplane creased, eyes glowing under false lashes, pastel-coloured vanity cases professionally gripped.

In the vanguard, George Balanchine, fifty-eight years old, slim, hawk-faced, spruce in cowboy shirt and string tie, stepped warily upon the Russian soil he had last trod when he was only twenty. He had been master for many years of his own ballet company, and his bearing consummately revealed that he felt himself master, too, of his own destiny. This tour to the Soviet Union was not, for him, a homecoming. He flaunted his American passport in his hand; he inflated his chest inside his Wild West costume. He would not easily submit to any nonsense of Soviet political choreography.

The dancers were greeted with nearly rampant curiosity tempered by puritanical suspicion and self-defensive disdain. Above the chatter and shouting in Russian and in English, Balanchine heard, ‘Welcome to the home of classical ballet, Mr Balanchine!’

Coolly, he threw back, ‘America is now the home of the classical ballet.’

The exchange with the press revealed nothing especially personal, nothing to suggest how Balanchine felt about his hurried, unremarked departure for Berlin on July 4, 1924, about his further emigration to America a decade later, about the deaths during his absence of his bon vivant composer father, his pretty, uncomplaining mother, his mild older sister who had not been gifted enough to become a ballerina. He had not seen them since 1918, the year in which he had turned fourteen. Instead the interview established that the tour of eight weeks would proceed from Moscow to the Kirov in Leningrad – where Balanchine himself had trained as a dancer – to Kiev, to Tbilisi – his boyhood home in Georgia – then finally to Baku; that a group of dancers from the Bolshoi, the twin element in this great cosmopolitan moment of cultural openness, had already taken to the stage in New York throughout the month of September and had been received with ecstatic acclaim.

From the mêlée burst Balanchine’s younger, shorter, only brother, also a composer, Andrei Balanchivadze.

Balanchine cried out, ‘Andryusha, it’s you!’ embracing him warmly. The official Soviet cameras flashed and popped. Then Balanchine somehow interposed his American passport and the cameras stopped.