Leninsky Prospekt

‘Have to clear the smoke out,’ she said brightly. She went back to the stove, checked again under all the lids, then walked to the table and perched on John’s lap, laying her head on his chest with her ear beside his mouth.

He plucked at her wet hair without saying anything until she rolled her head around and looked him in the eye.

‘You’re making me burn the beets.’

He laughed, just a sniffing laugh, and murmured very quietly, ‘Oh, sweetheart – letters, teletypes. We meet, we talk, we translate, we explain. God knows if anyone hears or even listens. Khrushchev never stops thinking about how to get our troops out of West Berlin, and the president is never going to abandon the West Germans. It’s much more interesting here at home, since you are so pretty and, at present, so vulnerably déshabillée.’ He twitched the lapel of her bathrobe, as if to look inside, and she trapped his hand and pressed it flat, helpless, against her breast.

John leaned closer, sealed his lips against Nina’s ear to say something more, then instead took the curling top edge of her ear between his teeth and bit it so that she suddenly sat up. They both laughed.

She gathered her robe around her, stood up with exaggerated, mocking caution, kissed his forehead crisply and said, ‘I’m going to give you supper straight from the stove. Do you mind? No serving dishes?’

‘Of course I don’t mind.’ He picked up his glass of Scotch and drained it.

As she lifted the meat onto the plates, ladled the sauce, fished for beets, John muttered, ‘The thing about democracy is of course that everything gets dropped for these damned mid-term elections.’ Then suddenly, he spoke up loudly, lifting his chin, and called out tauntingly to the walls and to the ceiling, ‘You hear that? It’s not such a perfect system, Western democracy.’

Nina put his plate in front of him, amused, stepping back to let him rant. But he wrapped a long arm around her light, bundled torso, pulled her close, and went on in a loud whisper, ‘A few pretty loud-mouthed Republicans have been sounding off about how the president should be more aggressive on Cuba. Nobody likes the fact that the Russians have been shipping military equipment in there all summer, but the Cubans are entitled to defend themselves. And the president’s so busy dealing with that kind of criticism that he really doesn’t listen to anything else. All his time and energy just now is aimed at making sure his side stays in power; forget foreign relations.’

Nina leaned down and whispered back, ‘It can’t be any different in this country, my dearest. Just because there are no elections doesn’t mean people don’t have to fight and compromise to hold onto power. Everyone struggles to stay in power.’

‘You are so damned smart, Nina. Yup. So maybe that explains why our Russian friends are being so sympathetic to the president’s plight. They’ve promised, on the quiet, to just lay off until after the November elections, especially on Berlin.’ He shrugged a little, in mild surprise. ‘The president will give them another summit if they don’t stir things up.’

Nina took a step towards the stove, reached for her plate, and brought it around opposite him. ‘Sympathetic – just to be nice?’ It made no sense to her at all, a sympathetic Russian leader. She raised her eyebrows cynically. ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’

There was a pause, and then she leaned right across the table, her thick bathrobe almost touching the food on her plate. With a babyish pout, her lips pushed out as if to be kissed, she crooned very low, ‘Don’t let your fetching American sense of fairplay and your boyish idealism blind you to the Soviet character – or to human nature, for that matter. If the Soviets think the president is seriously preoccupied, they’ll find some way to take advantage of it. And by the way, I’m not any smarter than you are, dearest. I’m just far less of a gentleman.’

John started to smile, but then looked startled, thoughtful. Silently he lifted a forkful of food to his mouth. For a few moments the only sounds in the room were the strains of a crackling, turgid symphony barely audible over the radio, the water running into the sink, and the tinkling knocks of their cutlery against the china. They glanced at each other from time to time as they chewed, then down at their plates, cutting, spearing. Suddenly, the window banged closed.

They both jumped with alarm, chastened by the frankness of their conversation. They knew they shouldn’t talk in the apartment about anything political. The trouble was that Nina loved it so much, and was so hungry for conversation of real substance, that John couldn’t bear to keep things from her. And she was astute in such unexpected, convincing ways that he couldn’t resist finding out her opinions. He felt that whatever views she had, belonged to him, that he ought to know them all, that they were a valuable resource, that they shouldn’t go to waste. He hardly realized the extent to which he was continuously at work trying to master and make use of her Russianness.

They went on eyeing each other dubiously, anxiously, as they cleaned their plates. Finally, they broke out in grim laughter.

Nina said, slowly, quietly, ‘Our guys were in here sweeping for bugs again just yesterday. I know they miss things, but maybe …’ She puckered her lips, twitched them about like a rabbit’s quick nose, nervous, as if she might smell a listening device or do away with it by magic.

‘We didn’t say anything we shouldn’t have.’ Even if they had, they couldn’t take it back now. They had to brazen it out.

‘So tell me about George Balanchine,’ John finally said with a shrug.

Nina got up, latched the window, turned off the water.

‘Well,’ she began, with a lilt of self-deprecation, hands plunged in her pockets as she stood in the middle of the floor, ‘I didn’t get to meet him personally. Not yet anyway. A real scene at the airport. A lot of press and – all the usual onlookers.’ She said this with sarcastic emphasis, not mentioning the KGB or any elements of the State propaganda machine. ‘And he was interviewed in very pointed fashion, to elicit certain – newsworthy answers. But after all, he’s a Russian. They want to look upon him as one of their own, and from what I could see, he knew exactly what he was doing. One of the reporters called out, “Welcome to the home of classical ballet,” and he said, “America is now the home of classical ballet.” Incredibly bold, as if it all belonged to him, the whole tradition, and he had just taken it all with him when he left. I think his work will make the Bolshoi stuff look fat and dull, romantic, old-fashioned. The Russians’ll be stunned.’ She paused, her eyes sparkling. ‘You remember when you went with me in New York?’

‘Not in the way you remember, Nines. It was beautiful, but I had no idea why.’

‘Well, it’s the speed, the decisiveness, the musicality, and the – the inventiveness. It’s so original, so complex.’ She was breathless with it, springing a little on the balls of her feet. ‘Even I was gagging with boredom the last time we went to the Bolshoi; there are only so many times you can watch a swan die.’

John grinned with pleasure at her knowledge, at her relish, at her untrickableness.

Nina rushed on, confident he was appreciating that she could dish it out. ‘He understands the music as a musician, you see, so it’s almost as if he – I don’t know – plays the dancers instead of playing the keys on a piano or the instruments in the orchestra. There’s usually not much story or acting out. And it moves fast fast fast. It’s unbelievably demanding for the ballerinas – who are the centre of everything. The men are just there to hold them up, to show them off. Balanchine’s crazy about ballerinas. You’ll see.’

‘But it was the Kirov, eh, where Nureyev danced?’ Half lazily, John shifted ground to the one thing he thought he understood about ballet dancers: their wish to leave the Soviet Union if they could.

‘Nureyev went straight to Balanchine when he defected to the West. But that’s what I mean about men. Nureyev’s too much of a star. In Balanchine’s troop, everyone is supposed to be the same, all on equal footing. He doesn’t want stars, especially not men – not men like Nureyev anyway.’

‘Sounds pretty communist to me,’ John remarked diffidently.

Nina nodded. ‘I know. But it’s something pre- all that, some older ideal. It’s certainly Russian just as much as it’s American. Maybe more. He’s very religious, Balanchine, Russian Orthodox. And how he is about ballerinas is – well – mystical.’

She fell quiet for a moment, a little self-conscious about her high-flown talk; then, shaking herself, she began to clear the table. When she had all the dishes in the sink, she crept a quick, questioning look around at John, checking to see whether he’d had enough of her obsession with ballet, whether he was just humouring her. There was no one else she could talk to as she could talk to him, and she didn’t want to use him up.

But he smiled at her warmly, so she started afresh, in a gossipy, confidential tone, making it juicy for him. ‘Balanchine has an incredibly interesting personal life, you know. He marries his ballerinas, at shocking ages, really young, one after another.’ She took a breath, slowed down a little. ‘But the one he’s married to now caught polio, and so she’s paralysed from the waist down. Can you imagine anything worse, for a ballerina? And she was a star. Or she was going to be. He left her in New York in a wheelchair.’

‘That’s rough. God.’ John yawned, linked his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair just enough to lift the two front legs off the floor. His loosened tie forked haphazardly over the white cotton expanse of his chest; his shirtsleeves hung deep and loose under his long skinny arms.

‘What would you do if that happened to me?’

‘If – what?’ The chair legs snapped down onto the linoleum.

‘If I became paralysed?’ She was staring into the plate she was rinsing, her hair down around her face like a rough russet curtain.

‘That’s an awful question. I don’t even want to think about it.’

‘But what would you do?’ Now she turned towards him, drying the plate, shaking her hair back, then dipping her face down towards his so that he couldn’t avoid her eyes.

‘Nina, you are not paralysed. I have no idea what I would do.’ John spread his arms high up in the air, bewildered, smiling.

‘Would you stay with me?’ Her eyes bore into him with their unsmirched, unrelenting blueness.

‘Of course I’d stay with you, but …’ he stopped himself. What was this all about, he wondered, this sudden whimsical comparison with a ballerina he had never even heard of before? ‘Are you serious, Nina? It’s a huge question. I don’t have an answer ready. I’ve never had to think about this.’

‘But what about, “In sickness and in health”?’

‘Nina, why crank things up in such a crazy way? Of course I’ve promised you that. You’ve promised me the same thing. But let’s give ourselves some time before we start in on ultimate tests. I like to think that I’d pass the test, but I don’t want to wallow in imaginary problems ahead of time.’ As he spoke, he reached for the knot of his tie, pried it loose with a long decisive index finger, snapped it off his neck, and hung it over the back of his chair. All the while, he held her look, quizzing, concerned.

She turned back to the sink. ‘Leaving someone you love, when they can’t move, can’t go with you. It’s completely awful.’ Her voice was flat, empty.

‘Jeez. You are having a bad time, aren’t you, sweetheart? I am so sorry. Is this about your father?’

‘Oh, God. I don’t know.’

He got up and put his arms around her from behind, and she started to scrub at the frying pan.

‘Can’t you wash the dishes tomorrow morning?’ he said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

‘The dishes and also my hair?’

‘But you have all day. That’s what you always tell me.’

‘Actually, though, I don’t.’ Her voice was impatient. ‘I’m a chaperone and guide, now. Remember? You’ve got me a so-called job.’ There was a sour edge, too, but John ignored it.

He pulled her around away from the sink, leaning down to her mouth. ‘You are a beautiful chaperone and a beautiful guide and I can’t resist you.’

She pulled free after one long, swooning kiss.

‘Nina, come on. It’s not as if the KGB’s going to come in and check to see whether you’ve washed the dishes. We can do as we like.’

She scowled at him. ‘You know I don’t care about the dishes, John. Why can’t you understand me, listen to me, humour me? If you really love me, don’t do this to me. Just leave me alone.’ And she shoved him backwards, away from the sink, away from her.

‘Do what to you, Nina? What’s going on? Now I can’t even touch you?’

She didn’t answer.

John scratched his head, irritated, mystified. Then he said, slowly and carefully, ‘You know, all day long, I concentrate just as hard as I can on finding some common ground between these two monumentally complex nations. I agonize over all the finer points of the Soviet Union, Mother Russia – how to understand her, interpret her, translate her, how to explain to her the needs and the views of the government of the United States. It’s pretty formal, pretty high stakes, pretty unpredictable. And what gets me through is you. Honestly.’

She seemed to pay no attention at all as he spoke, and he became impatient, and raised his voice a little. ‘Sometimes lately you have seemed just as enigmatic, just as opaque, just as unyielding as this whole damn country. What I think is that you are right and that it is going to be a very long winter – where you are, the ice is already on the ponds. How can you be so cold? So unreasonably cold.’

Now Nina turned her back altogether; they both knew she felt wounded. ‘I am not cold,’ she muttered without conviction. ‘I don’t feel cold at all towards you. You know that. I adore you. I wait all day for you with unbearable anticipation. I feel faint when I finally see you.’ Still she kept her eyes down, eking her words out with girlish shyness, halting but determined, as if she had planned her speech. ‘But I know you’ll get me into that bedroom and start on the baby thing again. And I don’t want a baby. It kills me to tell you. It makes me angry with us both. And I’m saying it now before you get me weak at the knees and make me think differently. I cannot have a baby here, John. I can’t bear the thought of it. You have got to take my side, you have got to sympathize with me about this.’

‘Sympathize? What – just to be nice?’

Nina grinned at his joke, swallowing her anger for a moment, caught out. ‘But you are a gentleman, John. Yes. Just to be nice.’

‘Nina, all I want is to come home to something easy, direct, immediate. And something – physical. I know you understand that. We don’t need diplomacy here. We don’t need to negotiate. Do we?’

She rinsed the frying pan and laid it on the draining board. ‘I’ll come to bed,’ she said guardedly, ‘if that’s what you want. But I don’t want a child, John. I don’t know how to make it any more clear to you. Not while we are living here in Moscow. It’s not a question of negotiating or pleading. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.’ She snapped out the last words like stamping her foot, but then she paused, lowered her voice, invited his concern with a tender look. ‘What if there was some problem about its American citizenship? What if we couldn’t get the baby out? Or what if suddenly I couldn’t get out? If you had to leave us? It scares me to death. I can hardly breathe when I think about it.’

‘Honey, you and I are both American citizens. And we both have diplomatic passports. You don’t have to worry about all this stuff. Anyway, if you got pregnant, you could leave. Other wives do. The baby could be born in Germany, or on US soil, in Buffalo. I’ll send you home to your mother.’

‘No!’ She was shocked by his suggestion. ‘No, no, no.’ She grabbed the ends of the belt on her bathrobe, cinched it tight, flounced away from him across the little room even as she proclaimed, ‘I want to be with you. You and only you. I am never going home to my mother. I won’t be separated from you. Never. It’s bad enough when you’re at the embassy all day. Besides, once the child was born, I’d have to come back here with it anyway. And I couldn’t do that, either. As long as we live in Russia, I need to be light on my feet, ready to move, able to fly at a moment’s notice. I can’t be burdened down with a child. It nearly killed my mother, John. And frankly, it nearly killed me: I was the child who was holding her back, who was keeping her here, exposing her to suffering, want, manipulation, fear, heartbreak. She could have left before the war if it hadn’t been for me. Because of me, she delayed and then it was too late.’

John was silent. Nina’s relationship with her mother was an unfathomable, tortured area, full of love, hate, generosity and selfishness in the most irrational welter. He accepted that maybe Nina could not go home to her mother ever again – why should a married woman want to do such a thing, anyway? He could see that it smacked of failure, loss of independence. And yet he felt swamped by the practical considerations; how could he take responsibility for the happiness, minute by minute, of this woman he loved and had taken away from her chosen homeland? How could he address her increasingly difficult state of mind, so unexpected? She didn’t seem to be the inspired, resilient woman he had married.

At the office, there was plenty of talk about adjustment, settling in, newlyweds, loneliness. He had been encouraged to treat it as a normal, temporary feature of his own job, handling Nina, being attentive to her moods, to her resistance. But he sensed that to Nina, Moscow was a metaphysical experience, swallowing her alive. And he knew the office vocabulary was useless to describe what was happening to her.

There was something inside Nina, something burning, some lit, primitive energy that he couldn’t understand. It wasn’t that she had fooled him; on the contrary, she sometimes treated him to breathtaking, even hurtful outbursts of honesty, stunning revelations. But there was a depth of passion in her that he had not yet plumbed. He could remember the first few times he had met her, the way she used to avert her eyes, as if she were too shy to look at him straight, and she would flex her feet, rising onto her toes, as if she might lift into the air. Her blue eyes were dark-flecked, pixelated, her small face square-cheeked, square-jawed, the fine bones seeming almost to show through the taut-stretched, white skin; later he discovered that if he ducked down and held her look, he could feel the flash and strength of her so intensely that he had to avert his own eyes. Her vitality dazzled him; it was irresistible, unpredictable. He had believed, still believed, that if he held her eyes, her arms, firmly enough, cradled her soul, steadied her, it would gradually come out, and he would be able to see it, engage with it – the ferment. But he knew that he had not yet gotten to the bottom of her. Her feverish, evanescent restlessness.

He didn’t agree with Nina about the baby. He wasn’t about to tell her now, but he himself had come to the conclusion that a baby would make them both happy. Certainly it was something they had wanted before the assignment to Moscow had come up. They had daydreamed aloud about it in the most sentimental terms. Still, who was he to force something on this woman, so brilliant, so beautiful, so sure of herself and yet so skittish, even if he did think it might stop her feeling lonely when he was at work?

She looked at him, standing off, gripping the sash of her robe, when he wanted her beside him, as one with him. What did she expect of him? Could he actually provide it? Happiness? Were husbands supposed to be able to deliver that? He had wanted to give her everything her heart desired. It wasn’t working. I was insane to bring her here, and she was more insane to want to come. She was so certain, so positive that I could get her in. And that was all we focused on. It was what I wanted, so she made it her business to want the same thing.

John could remember the anxiety of getting Nina’s visa to enter the USSR, how he had anguished over giving up the assignment, made up his mind that she was worth any sacrifice, that if she couldn’t get in, there would be another job somewhere else. Too bad if he couldn’t use his Russian, he would wait. There had been day upon day of interviews for both of them. But the paperwork had gone through without a hitch. We let ourselves be tricked by that, he realized, by the official OK. All along, I was expecting someone to tell us we couldn’t go. Waiting to be told no, that the risk was absurd. But nobody tried to stop us, apart from Nina’s mother. Nobody interfered. Then again, we were the only ones who knew the truth about Nina’s place of birth; why would anyone else suggest it was an obstacle? When the papers came, we opened a bottle of champagne; we looked on it as a victory – getting away with it. After that, I never let myself pause to imagine what difficulties there might be once Nina was here. I just pictured how happily she would take to a familiar city, how it would be a lark for her.

Finally he said, solemn, reluctant, ‘OK. Well. No baby. I agree. All precautions in place, then.’

‘You’ve said that before, too, haven’t you?’ She was accusing him of something. He felt confused by her unexpectedly strident tone.

‘I want to trust you,’ she almost shouted. She was back at the sink, slapping at the dirty dishwater, whacking dishes with a cloth. ‘But it all gets so – impossible. Heated. You never are as careful as you say. Condoms, all this stuff, it’s so unbeautiful, so distracting. I know how you feel about it. I feel the same. It’s one thing we intended to be free of once we were married, isn’t it? And I am no good at resisting anything, at stopping you or even slowing you down. And they are listening to us, John. I can’t talk. I can’t tell you what I feel. What I want. They are in bed with us and I’m not sure you even care! Even that doesn’t stop you.’

John went deep painful red. And his voice came out tipped with rage. ‘We don’t have to discuss this any more, Nina. Not that I think the KGB bothers to listen to drunken domestic quarrels. Our guys wouldn’t. Who can afford the resources? We’re not teenagers. And I’m not such a cad. Don’t lay all the blame at my door. I don’t think that’s fair. You’re the one who’s shouting, if you’re so worried about being overheard. And you’ve got methods of contraception you haven’t even bothered to take out of the box. What about that diaphragm you’ve made so much fun of? All you’ve shown me is soul-destroying lingerie from Paris.’

Now she was crying, but she tried not to let him see. She knew it was true, that she was blaming him more than was fair. Ever since he had brought her to Moscow, she had tended to blame him more and more for everything. She had forgotten how to take responsibility for herself. There were no avenues for it; she had no choices. She felt boxed in, suspended.

‘They do listen!’ she said with a feeling of pathetic self-righteousness. ‘They think they know just when people will let their guard down. And anyway I’m sure they’re bored out of their minds, so it’s like – it’s like – pornography to them – which you can’t get here.’ Her voice trailed away querulously. ‘This is a – very – puritanical society. You know the joke – Khrushchev’s joke – everyone repeats – there IS no sex in the Soviet Union. The atmosphere here is not – natural. It affects people in the weirdest ways. It makes them – sick.’

‘Oh, Christ, Nina. You’re talking nuts. Where do you get this stuff? Just stop.’ There was disgust in his voice, and a kind of horror. She was right for all he knew, but he couldn’t let these ideas into his head. He didn’t want to start thinking like this. He was already afraid that what she had said might never leave him now; he felt it spreading in him, like a disease.

‘I don’t think tonight’s the night anyway, Nina,’ he growled as she stood there with her tears dropping into the sink, ignored. ‘Frankly, I feel chilled to the core. But maybe that’s what you’re trying for. You’ll be perfectly safe from sex and babymaking. I’ll sleep on the sofa.’