Leninsky Prospekt

After she drained the bath, Nina made herself clean it, dry it, polish the chrome fittings with a soft cloth. Yelena Petrovna won’t even know I’ve taken a bath, she grunted to herself, rubbing. Fine. It satisfied Nina to flummox the maid, to cover her tracks. Why supply any clues at all? Nina wondered. We always used to clean the bath for Professor Szabo and his wife. She cringed, recollecting their forced crepuscular intimacy – Madame Szabo’s grey-shadowed, diabetic skin, Professor Szabo’s broad, flapping bottom. And she felt as though she could hear her father’s tired, persistent assertion, ‘They compactified others much more harshly than us. With us they’ve been generous.’ But housing two invalids at the top of a long, narrow flight of stairs? Where was the generosity in that? Dad needed help just to climb in and out of the bath tub.

Nina couldn’t recall a time when they hadn’t shared that apartment; Mother used to say, ‘Two rooms were perfectly OK without a baby.’ So – the Szabos must have known exactly how old I was, and they never told anyone. Why were they made to share an apartment anyway, a professor at Stalin’s Industrial Academy? Though it must have been the biggest one in the building – high ceilings, the bathroom.

They were witty, the Szabos. And they spoke English with us. That should have won Mother over. Dad would have had no one at all to keep him company, nor would Madame Szabo in her dim, semi-blind world. Madame Szabo took trouble over Dad, fussed in the kitchen for tea, waddled about with his ashtrays, accepted certain confidences. And Professor Szabo made it a point of honour to compete with Dad to do my math homework, as if they were colleagues discussing work, some matter affecting the foundation of socialism. These were gallantries, courtesies, human kindnesses.

I never seemed to catch up at school though, no matter how much they helped me. When we finished, they would give me chocolate. Mother said, ‘The poor woman can’t have it, so she gives it to you to cheer herself up. Honestly, Nina.’ Honestly what? Nina wondered. She flung another handful of water around the inside of the tub to rinse it again. I was too old for chocolate? Would get too fat to dance? Or something about being weak, being drawn in. Dependent. Implicated. Because Mother wanted us to keep to ourselves, keep a difference, a distance. In that apartment? They weren’t even Russian anyway, the Szabos. They were Hungarian. And usefully well-connected in Moscow, generous, with no children of their own to strive for.

Dad would have – what – thrown himself in more? Not just winking at me to eat the chocolate when Mother wasn’t there, but participating in – everything. Life, Soviet life. It’s just that – he couldn’t.

And Nina thought, The kindest thing Professor Szabo did was slaving over bits of Tchaikovsky on his violin. Fast, tricky passages, so that I could do steps for Dad. It must have looked awful, kicking the walls, tipping over laughing. Dad loved it. Especially when Masha was allowed back from the Bolshoi school with me, and we took turns showing off, pretending we didn’t feel smug with the praise, telling them all they were too easy to please, that they had no idea how our teachers would have scorned such foolishness, sent us back to the barre, given us eight of this, sixteen of that. We boasted of how strict school was, its huge demands, which we loved.

Fair, wiry Masha. She was entirely the colour of a raw almond, her skin, her hair, pale white-yellow all over. And from inside the perfect eggshell of her face, her eyes glowed out like uncanny lights, startling blue, serene. Nothing fazed her; she was never tired, never worried. And she looked exactly as she was, unblemished, innocent. Dad liked to call her my best friend, because he wanted me to have a friend like that. She and I would never have voiced such an embarrassing thing. We hardly spoke to each other at all.

Masha was accepted into the class for girls of ten when she was only nine; I was only eight, but she never knew that she was the older one. 1947 – everything so disorganized after the war that they were glad to have any strong bodies at all. We were too young to sweat even, had no smell to one another, might as well have been kittens, with limbs like air, of lightness, deftness, covered in feathery invisible hairs. Our friendship was all about holding hands. Always partners, always the same height; from year to year we must have grown at the same rate. Wordless, intense, upright, inseparable.

Where is Masha now? Nina wondered. Why haven’t I noticed her at the Bolshoi? Not even in the corps? She must have given up, too, in the end.

Amidst these recollections, Nina knew perfectly well that really she was polishing the taps because she had nothing else to do. In her few months back in Moscow, she had committed herself as vigorously as possible to the smallest domestic chores just in order to make the minutes pass. She hated to be still, hated to wait, had never seen the point of leisure. Last week, she had spent a whole morning hanging four Chagall lithographs above the blue living-room sofa. She had bought them in Paris with guilty sums of her mother’s money, paid for the simple frames, justified the purchase as making up part of her wardrobe in some other sense, the wardrobe of a diplomat’s apartment, where he might entertain.

These are images which matter to me, she had thought, taking them from their cardboard wrappings in Leninsky Prospekt, methodically polishing the glass. Not Old Masters. These show something of what I longed for when I sometimes used to long for Russia. There was the angel-faced, clown-trousered artist, carrying his village house in one hand, his palette in the other, as if he could recreate his forsaken beginnings, the babushka crying out for him on the doorstep, a peasant self perched out of her sight on the warm chimney pot. They aren’t real, these images, Nina had observed to herself. They don’t exist. But they are true. And I recognize them. An émigré’s daydream, his fantasy. An idyll because it is lost.

There were the lovers, big-eyed and blessed like icons, beside the sacred, fabulous tree, flush with leaves, with songbirds. There the maiden offering her bouquet, the best of herself, to the courtly, horned violinist, beseeching his beastly self-absorption as he dances his gay dance. There the poet at peace on the bowered breast of his uneasy beloved, the intense red sun so strong, so close.

Hesitantly, with two of the prints hung and two still leaning against the sofa, she had sidled off to the shelves where her books were stacked side by side with John’s, mingled casually, indiscriminately. From among the Russian-language ones, she had taken down a thin brown volume, desiccated, alarmingly creased, powdered with dust, saying to herself, ‘It’s only a book.’ She hadn’t opened it in five years. Was it dangerous to have it here in Moscow? she wondered. Camouflaged among the rows of other books?

On the loose endpapers, there was no printed title, no list of contents, only the name of the author, Viktor Derzhavin, and at the bottom of another page, Moscow, 1954. But Viktor had written in his dense, emphatic hand, ‘Sylvan Philosophies. For dearest Nina. 23 October 1956. V.N.D.’

They were short lyric poems, twenty of them, about the woods and the changing seasons – chopping up a dead tree, finding a path through the snow, fetching water from a stream, damming the stream to make a pool for bathing, building a fire of fallen leaves, sparrows scattering and rising when a raven drops among them, a spring that arrives unbearably late. At the start of each poem, Viktor had written the revealing, satirical titles which had eventually gotten him into so much trouble: ‘Revolution’, ‘Pioneer’, ‘Virgin Lands’, ‘KGB’, ‘Ghosts’, ‘Thaw’.

For Nina, October 23 had not been about the start of an uprising in Hungary, but about visiting Viktor on Granovsky Street, in one of the massive old reddish stone buildings there. His father’s big, warm apartment had honey-coloured parquet floors, brocade-draped windows, heavy, pale wood furniture tinkling with crystal-hung candelabra and glowing with shaded brass lamps. There in Viktor’s room – strewn with open books, heavily marked papers, heaped ashtrays, up a step at the end of a long, book-lined corridor – he had read the little book to her, pausing as he came to the end of each poem to write out its title, ceremoniously, in silence. Hardly any words passed between them that day apart from the words of the poems. He had been excited, intense, grey eyes alight, urging the verses on her, and she had felt a crystalline energy of attention between them, the sensation of being drawn up out of her body into the excitement of the images, the little explosions of sound.

Yet his unmade bed had waited behind her all the time, and she had listened rigid with the certainty that soon he would touch her, touch her face, her hair, any part of her at all. By the time he did, they had to hurry. Viktor’s father would be returning; she was expected at home. And it had seemed to her like something fumbled, something that created an appetite rather than slaked it.

Leaning against the bookcase in Leninsky Prospekt, studying the slight, brown book spread open in the palm of her hand, Nina thought, I felt he had written each poem for me, to transport me to the woods; I felt transported. And then the prick of clarity, Of course, he must have written them all before he even met me; they were just what he had to offer that day. She stared at the stately Cyrillic script, the cheap paper, and heard Viktor announcing in his triumphant way, from deep in his throat, as if with his heart and soul and even some part of his guts, that he would recite the titles out loud the next time he read the poems publicly: ‘You inspire me to this.’ She shut the book, finished hanging the Chagalls.

On another long, lonely morning, Nina had tacked black and white photographs to the wall in the kitchenette. The wedding party. Her two roommates from Wellesley – Jean and Barbara – and John’s little sister in tightly sashed, full-skirted, watered silk dresses with close-fitting, scoop-neck bodices and little cap sleeves. Christmas wreathes on their hair, of stephanotis, holly with berries, ivy. The dresses had been soft crimson, the sashes apple green. Not quite Christmas, Mother had suggested, the colours should be more subtle than that. John’s brother and Nina’s five first cousins in tailcoats and striped morning trousers, all tall, all dark, their faces soft-fleshed, smiling in the winter sunshine. The girls had been too cold for pictures outdoors, but the boys had stood it with shouts, horseplay, frosty breath in front of the rugged grey stone walls of the Episcopal church.

The wedding had sealed Nina’s American identity. And there it was, on the wall in front of her eyes, a second life that also now seemed to have slipped just out of her reach, under glass – the family she had longed for in childhood, the much confided-in girlfriends she would once have feared to tell things to, the holes in her education filled by American history, French philosophy, twentieth-century avant-garde culture, by freedom, by long hours of hard work. It was a strange flip-flop of fate: falling in love with John, she had ceased to think much about Russia. She had been entirely certain that she could settle down with John anywhere. And yet, studying the photographs while she had arranged them on the wall last week, it had crossed her mind that, from the very beginning, she had somehow expected John to bring her back to Moscow. She had resigned herself to it long before they had talked of marriage – an unavoidable destiny; she loved him no matter what he asked of her, no matter where he wanted to take her.

Wasn’t that partly why I felt so absolutely sure about him? Because I knew he cared about Russia? I must have known it was a journey we would have to make. Not so soon, though; I did that for John. And she thought, Chagall shows that – about love. How it makes such a display of perfection, how it wants to disregard darkness, difficulty, even guilt. Her eye fell again on the girl in the print, alone in her wakefulness, startled.

Nina had told herself, as she laboriously tapped in the pin-like brass nails with the heel of her loafer, that she ought to go and buy a hammer because she would probably need one again for something else anyway and that it would make her little home seem real, seem permanent – having a hammer. The errand could use up a whole morning. But no sane American would stand in an interminable line to buy a tenth-rate Russian hammer anyway. She could manage fine with the heel of the loafer. With this logic, she had pretended to disguise her true feelings from herself: that something in her was not settling down to this Russian sojourn, was already packing up and preparing to leave. After all, if she didn’t want to buy a hammer, she could easily have borrowed one, from the General Services Office at the embassy or, even better, from a neighbour. But if she had borrowed a hammer, she would have had to spend a few minutes chatting. And there would have been the next visit, when she returned the hammer, offered an invitation to come for coffee, try out her cake. That was how it should have begun, her life as an embassy wife, cultivating a niche in the small, involving, warm-hearted expatriate community.

Nina was finding it difficult to face the central challenge of her new life, being an American embassy wife. The other wives were so friendly, so inquisitive. They asked all about where she had lived as a child; they wanted her to take them shopping in some authentic Muscovite market away from the central places, or drive out of town together to hunt for mushrooms, boletuses with their white legs and brown caps, growing on moss pads in the woods since late August. Nina couldn’t bring herself to do it. It had seemed easy sometimes to reveal to Jean, even to Barbara, this or that about her old Moscow life; her Wellesley friends had never pressed her. But now that she was here, there seemed to be so much more of her past, so much she was unsure of, and the embassy wives seemed too interested, pushy almost. How could any one of them – resourceful, cheerful Americans – possibly understand who she was, what she was? She had found she couldn’t explain herself to anyone just now. It was practically illegal to try. Sometimes even John didn’t seem to understand her all that well. And everything that she tried to make herself do felt somehow artificial. No matter where she went in Moscow, she was almost all imposter. What if she came across someone she recognized? If that were to happen, she needed to be alone. Everyone at the embassy knew how dangerous it could be for Russians to be seen meeting with foreigners. She hardly knew whether she would feel able to signal some acknowledgement, whether she would say little, or nothing at all. But she dreaded giving the impression of flaunting new American friends, of preferring them.

So she hid from the other wives, went out only when she knew she wouldn’t meet them, and she felt painfully cut off. She found it hard to think realistically about what she wanted, what she had expected. Something that didn’t exist any more, or that she could never really get at, the scenes in Chagall’s prints, an old shattered life. Without really admitting it to herself, she was biding her time, going through the motions of embassy wife, waiting. Maybe she would be herself again only in America. The thought made her feel impatient, fretful. Sometimes it felt like an almost unbearable tension.

As she tied her quilted, raspberry silk bathrobe around her waist, she heard the front door open.

‘Nina?’ he boomed with friendly urgency. ‘Sorry I’m so late. Did you eat already?’ His voice was big, sweet, civil, rolling low and strong from his chest.

She felt herself soften inwardly with relief. It eased everything, John coming home. It was completely dependable. He lit up the apartment with life and purpose, made the straitened hours seem balmy, enchanted, rich. Now she wished she had braised the veal chops already and left them warm for him on the edge of the stove.

She opened the bathroom door, smiling, swathed in warm wet air on the threshold, and he put his stiff, cold raincoat arms around her, kissed her, took off his dripping fedora so that, closing her eyes, she felt first the thin hard hat brim knock against her forehead, then the light brightening around them both as he dropped the hat on the floor, then his grip so muscular that it seemed at odds with his office clothing, his professional demeanour.

How weird, she thought, as she swayed towards him with her contented heart, that he carries a briefcase, knows how to read. And she had often thought this before about John, that the accessories of modern life were beside the point with him, that he was a roving magnetic field, hot energy, barely contained by his lanky physique; that the uniform of adult duty and conventional public tasks couldn’t conceal the natural boy, mostly coursing blood and febrile enthusiasms, on the brink of running wild. His gift with languages, for instance, didn’t seem to be the result of bookish inclination. It had nothing to do with all those years at Dartmouth, at Columbia. It was just an expression of his instinctive chemistry with all mankind. He seemed to feel someone else’s speech from underneath his skin, to sense what was trying to pass back and forth in the words; he learned the book side afterwards, as if to check whether his gut was right, his articulate gut. Nina thought that language was really a sport for him, something that he had picked up through natural athletic gifts, observing it, getting it, joining in the game.

‘Yum,’ he smacked his lips at her. ‘There’s a tender morsel to warm a working man’s belly. Or tender damsel is maybe more the phrase. You smell like a newly washed pullover. You’re not drowning yourself in there in that bath, Nina? Slashing your wrists over my protracted absence?’ He turned her wrists over and held them up to the light from the bathroom door, lightly mocking, then kissed them by turns. ‘Survived another day of Soviet solitude?’ She felt the rough of his upper lip against the blue veins of her wrist; his bleached hazel eyes glowed under their shaggy, slanted brows, filled the doorway, warmed her chest.

‘I’m OK, John,’ Nina laughed. ‘Thanks for asking. The ballet dancers arrived today, you know. So that was fun. Well – interesting anyway. Certainly took up plenty of time, waiting at the airport, going to the hotel with them. Though who knows what help they really need from me. And the airport kind of gives me the creeps – getting in, getting out, the frontier thing.’

She freed one of her hands and reached down to pick up his hat, then pulled him back along the hall towards the kitchenette. John dragged playfully against her weight, then gave in and followed, shrugging off his coat to hook it over one of the pegs on the wall as they passed. It dripped a little on the linoleum floor.

‘How’d you get them to include me, John?’ There was tension in her voice, and she tried to conceal it with busyness. He watched her rummage through a basket of clean laundry for a dish towel, press the folded towel carefully against the wet felt of his hat, then walk back to the hall to dry the floor under his coat.

At last, looking around the doorframe, he said, ‘Don’t be silly, Nina. What American embassy wife speaks mother-tongue Russian, trained at the Bolshoi, and is a Wellesley graduate on top of all that? They leaped at the chance.’

She interrupted him, embarrassed, trying to be light-hearted, ‘Russian is really not my mother tongue, John. You know you’re exaggerating. Mother would do anything to avoid speaking Russian, and there weren’t even many Russians living in our building.’

But John went on with his flattery, courting her with his eyes, ‘To me, you seem most yourself when you speak Russian. Enchanting, passionate, bracingly coherent.’

She wagged a blushing finger at his nonsense, and he grinned.

‘Nina, you just don’t realize how over-awing this town can be. You’ve never had to do it as a real outsider, a stranger. What they know how to do is dance. They aren’t supposed to be linguists or diplomats. They’ll be able to relax and have a little fun with you along to show them around and explain things. Just be a friend. Frankly, we all have a lot on our minds at the office right now, and I know the ambassador feels reassured having you with that group. It’s a serious business, this tour. A showcase. And you should speak up, too, if anything doesn’t seem right.’

He stopped suddenly, looked around warily, as if there were presences floating above them on the ceiling, listeners. ‘What am I saying? This isn’t the office.’

Nina laughed. ‘You’re still OK, I’d say – just. But wait. I’m about to start banging a few pots and pans. I couldn’t bring myself to cook supper without you.’

And she set to, clanging a black cast-iron frying pan, a shiny aluminium saucepan, a lid. She chopped an onion, sizzled it in butter, opened a can of chicken broth from Stockman’s in Finland, ran cold water over a small bunch of beets and rolled up her soft pink sleeves to scrub the dirt from the voluptuous red-purple curves.

‘Aren’t these gorgeous?’ she said as she tossed the beets into the saucepan to steam them. ‘I got them from a babushka outside the Metro. Everything else is already starting to look shrivelled. It’s going to be a long winter. Just you wait.’

Then she smiled at John because she knew these bitter little comments of hers worried him. She knew he wondered every single day what he had done bringing his new wife back to the USSR, wondered whether she would make it. She gave him a loopy, lips-together grin and clowned for him a little, shuffling her feet, waving her wooden spoon gaily like a flag, tipping her head coquettishly from side to side. ‘I promise to do something about my hair right after supper, John,’ she said sweetly, pulling the wet, heavy strands away from her face. ‘I must look like a madwoman.’

Now John laughed, just a little. ‘Do you want some Scotch?’ He was reaching for the bottle on the wooden shelves above the table.

‘Love some.’

He poured them each a drink, and they clinked their glasses, just barely, almost stealthily, near the rim, as if they were sharing a secret. They had reached a moment which they reached most evenings alone together when they felt a confident harmony with one another and with their nearly year-old marriage, a harmony which drowned out everything else. They both knew perfectly well how it had come about that they were here together in Russia, of all difficult places; they knew they belonged together, that they had no choice. They had talked about it often, the fact that the love sensation was still bigger than any other sensation either one of them could lay claim to ever having felt. Everything else had to fall in line with that. They would say things to each other like, A whole lifetime isn’t enough time to spend with you. And they understood the meaning of what they were saying, meant it. The newness, the feeling of desperation, was still kindling between them; they were happy, but they were not yet satisfied; married, but still trying somehow to catch hold of each other entirely. When they were alone together, they forgot about everything else. They were building a private world for themselves.

John took off his dark grey suit jacket, loosened his dull blue, paisley tie, settled his long bony frame awkwardly at the little wooden table. ‘Your hair’s fine all mangled,’ he said. ‘I love it however.’ Then he put his fingers in his own close-cut, light brown hair and rubbed it hard, grinning. ‘See mine? Madwoman’s spouse. Let’s just have a nice supper and go to bed. You can fix your hair tomorrow.’

Nina lifted her glass, toasting his appearance. ‘Very attractive.’ And she smiled down at him, sipping, stirring, lifting lids, peering under them. ‘What’s keeping you at that office so much, anyway?’

But John held a finger in the air, alert, reminding her to take care what she said.

She turned on the radio, then the water in the sink, and threw open the window above it, letting the wind and rain blow in along with the faint blare of street noises from far below.