Leninsky Prospekt

Nina Davenport stood waiting with the representatives of the US State Department. Now it was her turn to be introduced, not to Balanchine himself, but to a clutch of young women dancers trailing along at the rear of the group.

‘I’d make a friend of Mrs Davenport if I were you, ladies, and I’m sure you won’t find it hard to do, either.’ Fred Wentz, the newly arrived Special Officer representing the International Cultural Exchange Program of the US Government, had his large hand on Nina’s small back, offering her up. His deep, Alabaman voice was honeyed with official enthusiasm. ‘She is just what you need in this town, a native Muscovite. She really knows what goes on. She can answer all your questions’, he lowered his voice, flirtatious, taunting, ‘and tell you what not to ask.’ Then more soberly, ‘The official Soviet interpreters can be a little – formal. So Mrs Davenport has generously offered to spend as much time with you as you like. I understand she loves what you do. And, in my humble opinion,’ grinning again, ‘she’s pretty enough to dance with you, too.’ He ducked his head down to one side, casting a playful look at the ballerinas’ legs, then at Nina’s legs, equally slim, almost as shapely. ‘I’m sure I’m going to love what you do, myself. Anything at all.’

There was a silence as his voice died. The ballerinas all dropped their eyes demurely to the floor and Nina felt herself blushing in irritation at the Special Cultural Officer. She forced a smile.

‘I danced when I was a girl,’ she admitted in her fluty, changeable voice. She cleared her throat, started again on a lower note, nodding benevolently, ‘But I didn’t have the stamina for a professional career – let alone the talent. And I don’t think, Mr Wentz, that you can tell a lot about a dancer just by looking at her legs.’ She tried not to sound prim; she made it more of a sportsmanlike sally. But even so, she felt the bulldog will of her mother rise in her inexplicably, along with her mother’s upstate New York reluctance to move the lips when talking, so that her voice came out all through her nose, awkward, ugly, somehow dismissive, not what she intended.

Wentz was a big man, solid. Underneath his loose-flapping, grey plaid suit, he held his shoulders wide, his chest expanded, so that his whole body seemed to be smiling, inviting attention. His gold hair curled just a little, as if with mischief. He continued to play up, crinkle-eyed, ‘Well, I can certainly tell that I might like to look over my schedule and see how much time I can free up for tour-guiding and hand-holding over the next few weeks.’

There was a splurge of giggles from a bowed head in the depths of the bevy, and then giggles all around.

They are so young, Nina thought. Babies, some of them. The girls began to look up, prattling, smiling, rosy, and she took their hands one by one to shake them, ‘Dobro pozhalovat'. Welcome,’ she said again and again, feeling the weightless, dry poise of their fingers in hers, their shy friendliness. And she said the Russian words with her tongue and her teeth, tasting them like morsels of food, like a whole meal she was hungry for.

At the back of the little group she saw one or two older faces, and she recognized in the features and the names as they were introduced that several of the girls had their mothers with them, chaperoning. That’s dedication, she thought. But she felt nothing good about the mothers. A chaperone’s role is to prevent, to restrain. Nina disliked restraint. A young girl wants to make up her own mind, she reflected. Why shouldn’t she? How late she stays up, what she eats, how she fixes her hair, how loudly she laughs if there are boys nearby. The mothers looked tired, frowning, impossibly dumpy beside their glowing offspring; they were dressed to inspire hesitation in bulky, dark wool coats, one colour, one size, no shape.

Nina glanced at Wentz, wondering if the mothers were necessary. If mothers were ever necessary. Then suddenly she felt confused about her own role. A made-up job, she thought, to keep me busy, shepherding the younger women dancers. She felt overwhelmed with embarrassment. What do they need me for? Why am I here? All dressed up in a bright blue dress and jacket ensemble from Balenciaga, mink pillbox hat, brown gloves. This is – fake. I’m really not old enough to look after anyone, to stand alongside mothers. She wondered whether John had pressured somebody at the embassy to let her join in so that she could pretend to have something to do. It seemed that the professional embassy staff, the ballet company itself, and the Russians, had already provided enough chaperones and interpreters.

And just at that moment, as if to prove it, one of the official Soviet interpreters, a woman, approached to be introduced, with a cat-like smile which silently asserted, Nina thought, I know what you all would like to do, and I know how I will stop you. I know how I will make you do what I want you to do. Highly trained, ambitious, in her single-breasted charcoal suit, her single-minded composure, the official interpreter would guide the dancers around Moscow, would engage and control them, would mark their every word and their every movement, their every passing interest. She would look after them perfectly. And she would report on them in full detail every day.

Nina stepped back. She did not want to be noticed, to be observed, not even in an official public place. She had been followed almost constantly since she and John had arrived in August. It felt odd to be thrown, now, into competition with someone reporting to the KGB. Some of the Americans at the embassy laughed off their minders, but Nina knew how minders could squeeze the soul, shut it down, just by watching, just by telling. She felt more and more impatient to leave the airport, this place of coming and going, passports, papers, entry and exit. It created in her a burning anxiety.

As they made their way to the buses waiting in the dark outside, Nina, head down, abashed, fell into step with a silent, brown-haired girl.

‘Can I help with that stuff?’

The girl was tiny. She had a monster fur coat slung over one arm, a big square make-up case hanging from her hand, and an enormous sack-like handbag over her other shoulder. She grimaced and tilted her head, friendly. ‘Thanks. It’s OK.’

But Nina thought she could see the childlike forearm trembling with strain in its thin camel cardigan sleeve.

‘Oh, come on. Please let me,’ she said casually, and she took the make-up case in both hands, pausing for the girl to unclench and unstick her fingers from the handle. It must weigh thirty or forty pounds, Nina thought, hefting it up before her in both arms as they followed the meandering line through the airport doors and collected on the pavement beside three smoke-belching buses.

‘You’re Alice, is that right?’

‘Uh-hm.’ Alice nodded, accepting Nina’s attention reservedly. She was pale, pretty enough, but without much contrast in her colouring, as if someone had wiped away any drama along with her stage make-up. And she kept her eyes hidden.

They climbed aboard the second bus and pushed towards the back, piling their laps high like everyone else’s.

After a few minutes, Alice said quietly, ‘I was all ready for them to search my stuff at the airport. They didn’t even open my suitcase.’

Nina glanced around, then leaned near. ‘They’ll do it later, at the hotel,’ she said, ‘when you’re out.’

‘What?’ Alice was startled, hugged her things closer.

‘You probably won’t even be able to tell. They won’t take anything. Unless you brought cigarettes or stockings to give away and you leave some right on top for them.’

After another silence, in which she seemed to be considering this, Alice asked, ‘So how can you be a native Muscovite, or whatever he said?’

‘I know.’ Nina nodded sympathetically.

Alice glanced at her sideways, brown-grey eyebrows raised in question.

‘My parents were both American. They brought me here as a tiny child.’

‘To – the embassy – or something?’

‘Well, no.’ Nina gathered her strength for the explanation. ‘My father wasn’t in the embassy. Actually, he gave up his American citizenship. So anything to do with the embassy – wouldn’t have been –’ she felt constrained, picking her words, ‘– possible.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘People don’t,’ Nina said, ‘Americans don’t.’ Again, she glanced around. There was nobody especially near them who wasn’t already talking, fully engaged. Black, massed trees flashed past the windows. ‘My father was pretty radical for America.’ She lowered her voice. ‘A communist, is what I mean. We came here because this is where he wanted to live, what he believed in. He wasn’t comfortable in America. He was – involved – in – the labour movement. I mean he wrote articles, gave speeches, explaining to workers where their interests really lay, encouraging them to stick up for themselves, band together, whatever. It was all before I was born. Or you for that matter. The world is a different place now. And America is different.’

She waved a hand as if she could rub it out, the past. Then she went on positively, bouncing the words out like a list of points, like an argument for her father’s beliefs, ‘The Soviet Union was his dream; he came here as royalty – not an approved Soviet word, but, still, in the beginning that’s what he was. He was an engineer, which they needed here. He helped build the Metro – the Moscow subway system. You’ll ride on it, maybe. And he talked my mother into – joining him. We lived just off Gorky Street, in Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lane.

There was a silence. Alice unwrapped her arms from her belongings, leaned back a little, and said, ‘Good grief. You sound so American. I mean – you must have been there? The government must have let you in?’

Nina laughed, ‘What? America? Of course they let me in – and my mother. Getting out of here was the hard part. But we were allowed to go –’ Her voice let her down. She swallowed the word, tried again, ‘– home, a few years after my father died. So I went to college in America and then worked in New York for a while. All my friends are over there. Who knows why the Soviets have let me come back again.’

‘Really?’ At last Nina got a look at Alice’s eyes – brown, amazed, unguarded.

‘I’m just kidding.’ She tapped Alice’s forearm with two fingertips, ever so lightly, smiling. ‘I mean, I know why. It’s because of my husband. He is at the embassy. It figures, doesn’t it, that I would marry someone obsessed with Russia, the Russian language, the Soviet Union? So they let me come back in with him. American diplomats are privileged privileged privileged. Anyway it’s only for a few years this time.’ Nina’s voice was joking, offhand, but suddenly she found she couldn’t hold Alice’s simple, curious gaze, and she had to look away.

From across the aisle, a tall, bony girl dropped her bag on the floor beside them. It made a loud, slapping thud.

‘God, I’m sick of that thing.’ She lifted her shoulders in her tightly fitting, light blue and white plaid wool suit jacket, circled them, stretched her arms delicately, beautifully, touched the smooth French twist of her hair, as if adjusting a pin, then looked around under her thatch of waved blonde bangs to check who was watching her. She smiled at Nina. Nina smiled back.

‘Hi, Patrice,’ said Alice, wagging her head familiarly. And then to Nina, ‘Patrice and I room together, unless my husband comes.’

‘You’re married? You seem –’

‘Young?’ asked Alice.

Nina shrugged, conceding.

‘I’m twenty-one. Plus, I have a baby boy at home.’

‘Wow,’ Nina said, her voice lifting in surprise. ‘A baby?’

‘Nearly killed me to leave him,’ Alice whispered. ‘Mr B. can’t stand it – babies and ballerinas.’ Now it was Alice who looked around to see who was listening. ‘But I’m not a nun, you know. I’m as strong as ever, stronger. Everyone’s different, that’s all. A ballet career doesn’t last, no matter what you give up for it. So, who knows?’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m not the only one; look at Allegra Kent. She dances with even more guts now than before, and Mr B. knows nothing scares her, not him, not her body. She gives off heat like a bonfire.’ Alice blushed ever so slightly.

Nina was silenced, ruminating on the toughness that could dance professionally, talk so boldly, and yet needed a baby. Was a baby something you could leave thousands of miles away? she wondered. Alice didn’t match any picture Nina had of a ballerina. Nor did she match anything Nina had come across at Wellesley, where the girls had been generally brainy and genteel, voluptuous, lazy, strong, and nice-smelling. Amateurs – willing, well-trained, eager to please. Both of these young American dancers, with their crisp, maidenly manners, their spindly, self-conscious physical aplomb, their seemingly reckless commitment to their vocation, made her sting with uncertainty. A sense of something she had forgotten – or misunderstood. They affected her almost like some kind of personal rebuke.

Nina had spent hours watching ballet during the last six years. In New York, even when she was at Wellesley, she got hold of tickets, dragged her mother, dragged John, went alone. She used to explain to them that ballet was, for her, the most immediate, the only way to think about life, to understand all that had happened to her, to make sense of who she had been and what she was becoming – Russian, American. But she knew that the hours in darkened auditoriums had also been an anaesthetic, a form of hypnosis. The ballet carried her back to something purely physical, impersonal: joy she knew she had felt in girlhood – music, movement, the excitement of wordless grace. She didn’t think about the dancers onstage as real people; she lost herself in the full, concrete experience – what they did, what they made. Sometimes she watched in staring blankness, thoughtless, content.

When she and John became engaged to get married, she went less and less – not much at all after the wedding, until Paris and Moscow. Now, talking to Alice and Patrice, she began to think for the first time in years of what she had known about dancers when she had been a student at the Bolshoi training school. All at once, unexpectedly aching with it, she remembered edgy, single-minded devotion to teachers, ferocious, permanent silence, determination cloaked in meekness and hardened by constant work. Of course, they had been much younger, she and her classmates at the Bolshoi, and they had not had – any will of their own. They hadn’t needed it. Everything was decided for them. Nina had been taught that ballerinas needed no will. She had even come to believe it could only be a danger to them. But Alice clearly possessed plenty, and probably Patrice, too.

She bestirred herself. ‘If you two are rooming together, you might want to bear in mind that it’s wise to –’

Both girls leaned towards her with such alertness that Nina abruptly stopped talking, bridled uncomfortably. She deliberately didn’t look around her; she dropped her eyes to Alice’s green vanity case and her own gloved hands still gripping the strap on it. This wasn’t the place, she was thinking, to be giving out advice about conducting private conversations. But where was the place? She didn’t want to act as though it was some big drama.

So she went on in a low voice, eyes down, ‘I guess you’ve already been advised to just keep it kind of bland when you’re talking in your hotel room. Don’t mention specific names of anyone you meet. I mean names of – Russians. If you’re even allowed to meet any.’

She turned her head a little towards Alice, and then the other way, towards Patrice; the girls’ eyes were wide, intent. They wanted to know; they’d been waiting to hear. And yet Nina could feel her own face flushing. She cursed her lack of subtlety, her heavy feeling of alarm. How was this done, she wondered, the duenna role, the gracious, light-handed introduction to local customs?

But then she wondered, What’s gracious about electronic eavesdropping? There’s no good way to introduce that, she thought. It has no charm whatsoever. And how could you tell such open, unaccustomed faces these sinister truths? It seemed impossible, looking at their dimpled attentiveness, that anyone would need or want to monitor the private conversations of Alice and Patrice anyway. But innocence could be such a danger; maybe not to them, but to someone. And Nina saw in their solemn anticipation, in Alice’s deep-pulling brown gaze, in Patrice’s menthol stare, the little tongues of fear flickering, the restless adrenaline that liquefies the eye, and she heard in their throats the tiny inbreaths of excitement. She was familiar with these signs.

After all, there must be plenty of infighting and backstabbing in the company, she reassured herself. They didn’t get this far by being ninnies, by being kind.

‘It’s not a big deal,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it.’ She wanted them to cope with Moscow, to like it. But the girls fell quiet. Were they taking her advice to heart? Or were they struck dumb with anxiety? Give them something lighter, Nina thought to herself, give them a titbit of pleasure now.

She looked past Alice, out the window into the populous, electrified Moscow night. ‘Look, there’s the river. We’re nearly at the hotel. Wait till you see it!’

Suddenly it loomed up over them, the Ukraina, Stalin’s pale, uncanny skyscraper, a tower of raw-hewn geometry poised on the river bank, its lower floors like colossal insect legs elbowing the dropping sweep of lawn and ringed by listless, flood-lit Ukrainian poplars.

John was late coming home that night, so Nina left the uncooked veal chops out on the wooden drop-leaf table in the kitchenette and washed her hair. What was the point of another supper getting cold? The charmless, roomy apartment on the eighth floor of the staring modern block on Leninsky Prospekt seemed to have an endless supply of hot water. She just about filled the narrow bath and lolled in it, wetting and soaping her hair.

At moments like these, when she was unfocused, alone, memories batted at her like moths, slight, powder-winged, urgent. In America she had made it her habit to brush them away, swat them down with resolve, even crush them; but as the days passed in Moscow, growing shorter and darker into the autumn, there were little memories, twilight-coloured, grey or brown, mere sensations once put to sleep, with which she felt she might be safe enough. In her solitary, undisciplined existence, they even offered a kind of companionship, and she felt inclined to accommodate them, to hold up the light of her attention so as to draw them to her, lure them into the palm of her hand where she might study them. They came in no apparent order, yet Nina sensed there was some way to assemble them, to pin them down, which might help her to be more at ease with herself in her new circumstances.

Now, for instance, as she lay in the miraculous convenience of her bath, she tentatively recalled that her father’s apartment in Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lane had never seemed to have any hot water at all when she was growing up. It had never seemed warm, either – an old house, stucco, badly insulated. The heat bled out at the windows and probably through the roof – the wind-rattled, iron-sheeted roof which leaked rust down the outside walls when the snow melted, when it rained. From these practical considerations, her thoughts crept cautiously on to others more vivid, more enveloping: how sometimes the whole house had seemed to sag with wet, the splintered, tilting staircase, soft under your tread as you climbed, smelling of darkness, rot. How winter had always felt like a cruel tonic, abrasive, reassuring, the dank walls going hard and clean with the shock of ice in the air, the shock right inside your chest.

Then came one of the pinpricks of insight – sharp, conclusive – that, really, Nina was after, that fixed something in place: Mother made the cold her excuse not to be home, Nina thought. She never complained, but she used to say it was warmer at the school where she worked, or at the library, a museum, a lecture, even at a film if there was money. At least, Nina nodded to herself, I don’t remember any complaining. Mother just went out. But waiting for her to button her coat was – oh, God. Dad and I held our breaths or something. She buttoned it like murder.

Nina plunged her hair back under the bath water, holding her breath even now, remembering. She felt her ribcage expand; she floated and bobbed, half-submerged. I’m not going to struggle with that rubber hose, she thought, stroking the red-brown weed of her hair free of suds under the water. She immersed herself a little deeper; she didn’t struggle back towards the present.

Whenever she was going to take me with her, Mother breathed snorts while we hunted for my mittens. Accusing me. We racketed up and down the echoing, wood-floored hall, slipped our hands inside felt boots, under cushions, folded back the musty corners of rugs, searching. That must have been when I was pretty small. I can still feel the anger up around her head, around her heart, like a dark halo, an aura. Did I lose my mittens every time? Or did Mother forget how young I really was, forget that she had taken away two years of my childhood so that we could pretend I was born in America?

Somehow I know that Mother thought Dad could have gotten them to turn up the heat in the apartment if he had made more of a big deal about being a registered invalid. Maybe turn up lots of other things, too. Dad wasn’t like that, and Mother was perfectly aware that he wasn’t. I never heard her say anything out loud; at least if I did hear, I can’t remember the words. But she left Dad alone. Maybe that was worse than complaining.

Nina sighed with the pleasure of her bath. She could make the comparison; she could see how lucky she was. It must have been a nightmare. Devastating. At first, Mother might have been able to believe that whatever Moscow was like, it would get better. Because people do believe things like that. And maybe it was comfortable enough. Maybe in the beginning they were warm. Before I was born.

Twenty years though, she mused. No money. No way to get out. Christ.

She considered how many trips her mother had made to the dentist lately, in Buffalo, in Manhattan. It was because of Russia, those trips to the dentist. How it ravaged your teeth, your very bones.

Obviously Mother had lost interest years and years ago in anything she couldn’t actually see. She stopped believing in love, marriage, babies, any of it. That’s why she tried to scare the hell out of me. What does she live for now? Every morning she gets out of her lace-canopied bed, dresses with meticulous care, sees to the house, her cook, her plans. She doesn’t need to work, not for money. But she has such a challenge before her, such a task; she has to gather to herself everything she is entitled to. She has to wear her clothes, use her wealth, feel the existence, the benefit, of all her possessions; she has to reassure herself that everything is there, that she controls it, that nobody will try to stop her. It’s an obsession, an illness. Like a child with too many toys, exhausted by his own greedy rota, his obligation to use each one. Where’s the freedom in that? wondered Nina. What’s the point? Trying to have her childhood back, play for ever with no consequences.

Like a bright, black movement inside Nina’s head, somewhere behind her closed eyes as she lay supine, almost afloat, the crude, long-ago elevator dropped to the floor of the rough-walled shaft. Freighted with consequences. She imagined the maiming, heavy smack reverberating. Then silence, clods of earth skittering. As if her father were dead, gone. No cry, no groan in the cavernous tunnel.

Oh God, Mother’s bitterness. Somehow, silently, blaming everyone around her for the ruin of her life, the smell of darkness on the stairs, the house rancid with disappointment, with sorrow.

At least Dad didn’t have to fight in the war. We were never separated. That can’t have been official sympathy, the State letting us care for him?

It wasn’t just Dad’s accident. It was everything. The whole dream, the whole idea. And it’s still going on, and I still don’t understand it. Nina thought with bewilderment, with intense frustration, about the city that lay eight floors below her – a remote, impenetrable scene. I might as well be a prisoner in a tower, not allowed down because I’m an American. Then the image reversed itself, height becoming depth, towers becoming shafts, so that she felt the metropolis soar and sink to stupendous distances, and its vast constructed, mechanized features seemed to have no reality at their centre, no human fleshly life. Yes, she thought, sometimes I felt as if Dad had left me underground, in the dark, in the maze of unfinished tunnels – here and there a station I recognized, a ray of light, even parts that looked beautiful. But so much that Dad believed he was building, taking part in, he just never explained to me. The socialist state. I needed a map, a blueprint. I don’t even know exactly where he was when the accident happened; I only know vaguely when – 1940. What was he trying for? Where was it all supposed to lead? He seemed – content.