Leninsky Prospekt

October 9. Nina slipped into the Bolshoi through the stage door in Petrovka Street. The guard was a woman, stocky, formidable. As she lurched forward on her stool, studying Nina’s face, her neat, expensive suit, her Russian-language paperwork, her photograph and her name, then strained over the list of foreigners, outsiders, Nina felt from her a deep familiar chemistry: resentment reacting with benevolence. There on the threshold, the custodial instinct to keep Nina out was mingling with and giving way to a motherly instinct to take Nina in. Nina was moved so powerfully by this chemistry that she nearly spoke up with the truth, Yes, you’re right. You do know me. You watched over my other, girlish life, my years of training. I was one of the cosseted brood, a dancing bird in Cinderella, the Breadcrumb Fairy in Sleeping Beauty, a stick-legged hopeful at the yearly graduation show.

But the fact is, Nina realized, my American identity works like a disguise, a mask. The guard could never recognize me now, in my American Embassy role, not without a great deal of persuading and explaining. And Nina didn’t ask for it, the recognition which she knew might feel warm if it were simple and wholehearted but which might feel painful if it were uncertain or even angry. Anyway, her name was on the list; she was expected.

As she climbed the tiled stairs, sooty diamonds of red set with black and yellow, she thought she could hear piano music from the ballet room, a leaping yowl, all tempo and cowboy boot heels – ‘Red River Valley’, ‘Goodnight Ladies’ – starting, stopping. She crept up the half-flight and looked around the door, catching sight of attitudes at the barre: stretched, scattered bodies layered with wraps of wool at the ankle, below the hip; a curve of lower back exposed in the mottled shine of the wide, heavily framed mirror, studied, straightened; and one slender wreath of arms carried in front like an enormous platter of air, delicate, steel-bound, nowhere to put it down on the pale, rippling floorboards.

An urgent, slim, black-clad woman pressed by her with a clipboard, approached a splay-footed girl who sat on a broken chair cracking away at the soles of her silky shoes. An old fear darted at Nina, that she herself would not be called. Silly, she thought, turning away.

All along the pipe-slung hallways, there was a pressure of hurry and focus, brusque commands, hushed intensity. The atmosphere encased her like a uniform; she knew this discipline, felt beckoned, pulled in.

Nobody noticed her as she emerged under the stairs to the prop room at the back of the enormous set-strewn stage. She crept past the lighting control board and the prompter’s station towards the dim revelation of the auditorium. She could just see the rows of polished dark wooden armchairs and the rising circles of creamy, gold-embossed boxes facing her, shabby-looking without their occupants, the red velvet seats worn and unevenly faded. Five or six people were sitting in the front row on the far side of the stage. Press, thought Nina.

Near her, she heard a piping complaint. ‘The thing is Danny, it makes me feel like I’m going to land right on my face.’ Nina didn’t look around.

Then came a low, reassuring reply. ‘What you need to realize is how well it makes you work. From the minute you come onstage, nothing is neutral. Even when you stand still on this raked floor, you’re in motion because you’re working against gravity all the time. It won’t let you be dead; it won’t let you give no energy. It’s very exciting. That practice stage upstairs has the same rake, you know. And you were fine. Take it slower for now. Think about footwork, but don’t overcompensate because at a certain point you have to just throw yourself into it. You’ll get so used to it, you won’t be able to land or take off on the flat stage when we get home, I promise you. Watch the boys jump. We all love it, because the rake launches us so high.’

Still the needy whine continued, ‘I know it’s just confidence. But, God, when I have to go upstage, I’m completely exhausted.’

‘Yeah. Upstage is hard work. It’s because – well, upstage is up. But Mr B. will make all your big moves go downstage for you. Just wait.’ Then, ‘Look – he wants you back now. Go on.’

And the small troubled figure swung herself around into the light, strode hip through hip across the stage, toe shoes knocking the steep wooden pitch with hollow defiance, head bowed to receive guidance. Nina realized it was Alice.

Balanchine was like sparks popping at the dancers, gesture and flash, chin up, thin as a wraith, a few disjointed words, and then a conflagration of silent, hot scrutiny, his eyes energizing them. Even where she stood in the shadows at the side of the stage, Nina could feel his concentration wax when he fell silent, and she could feel the desire of the dancers to be seen by him, to be watched. She knew, as if by telepathy, that they moved only to elucidate some idea he wanted to convey through them, and she could tell by their hypnotized eyes, their somnolent obedience, that they moved in the way that he told them to move even if they didn’t understand what the idea was. She thought to herself, They just believe his idea will come to them through their bodies once their bodies have mastered it. And they let that happen, accept they are a vehicle. She wanted to make fun of it, itched at this informal exposure of such seriousness, but she couldn’t. She thought their willingness was sublime.

She crept a little further downstage, and suddenly she was looking into the orchestra pit, another world of activity: slouching, slack-haired Soviet musicians leafing through scores, marking, counting bars, questioning the American conductors by means of interpreters, tapping on this or that passage with articulate fingers, heavy-nailed, nicotine-stained, emphatic. And Nina thought, What can they possibly make of it all, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, ‘On Top of Old Smokey’? She wanted them to like it, then felt her want to be absurd; they were professionals, after all. They would play it regardless. Nevertheless, she wondered.

Now there was an uproar behind her, offstage. Nina heard Russian and English being shouted back and forth, with no resolution and, she sensed, no comprehension. Something beyond impatience had overtaken the stage workers; she detected defensive anger, loutish panic, Russians cursing one another, ‘Khvatit! Idit’e k chortu!’ That’s enough! Now you’ve really gotten to me! Go to hell! It was not their fault. They had no idea where the trucks were, it was not their job to know. Some higher authority was to blame. Nothing could be done now; it should not have been expected of them to begin with; they would take no responsibility. It was far too late.

And an American voice, a woman, hoarse, definite, outrageous. ‘They’re deliberately sabotaging the tour. How could this happen by mistake? Everyone knows why we’re here! And we open tonight. They don’t want us? Fine. Who do they think we are doing this for? We never treated the Bolshoi like this in New York. This is crap.’

Oh, great, Nina thought. And she glanced across at the little clutch of reporters from Izvestia, Literaturnaya Gazeta, the illustrated magazine Ogonyok, Radio Moscow, and even The New York Times. Their faces were turned towards the argument, but she couldn’t tell if they could hear.

Someone grabbed her elbow, saying, ‘You’re the embassy person, can’t you find out where the damn scenery and costumes are? How can they lose truckloads of stuff? Sets, props, everything. One of our own stage managers is lost with it, too! We’re running out of goddamn time.’

Nina spun around, certain there must be someone else here who should take charge of such a matter, the Special Officer for the Cultural Exchange Program, some big-voiced man. But she soon found herself inside a ring of burly, dirty Soviet stage hands, persuading a livid deputy stage manager to telephone the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin, where the ballet was to move after the opening performances.

‘Maybe the trucks went there by mistake,’ she urged. ‘It’s perfectly understandable. And if they aren’t there, you better place a call to Vienna and find out how long ago they left after the last performance there. Or if you want, I’ll telephone the operator at the American Embassy,’ Nina sounded sweet-voiced, pliant, ‘and ask her to make the call to Austria.’

The stage manager was visibly pricked by Nina’s resourcefulness. He looked around at his crew; they were silent now, arms folded or linked behind their necks, with blank stares or eyes on the floor. He repeated Nina’s own remark that the mistake was perfectly understandable. He was no longer shouting, but he carefully refused to let her take charge. If the crisis was not entirely his responsibility, then maybe he could help to resolve it after all. He would go to the telephone. He raised both hands, wrists bent back, palms horizontal, signalling patience, and announced that the trucks would be found and that everyone should calm down.

As he turned to leave, a costume mistress demanded, ‘So what did he say? What have they done with it all?’

‘He’ll find out,’ Nina sighed, putting her hand on the woman’s plump, insistent forearm. ‘He will. The staff here is a little nervous.’ She half smiled, half grimaced, trying to explain. ‘They’re not sure what to expect, any more than any of you. Obviously, everyone is – excited – about tonight, but being excited isn’t a sensation they can necessarily enjoy. It’s – probably pretty scary. They have to be – suspicious. It’s habitual. They can’t help it. I wouldn’t assume anyone has lost things on purpose. Nobody would risk such a thing.’ She lowered her voice a little, hoping for sympathy. ‘The trouble is that even though he doesn’t speak English, he sensed he was being accused of that – of deliberate provocation – if you can forgive me for being so frank.’

The costume mistress bristled, but only slightly. ‘Well, we can’t dance without costumes. Maybe without scenery. There’s plenty of it around to borrow. But to come all this way – Mr B. will sew costumes himself if he has to. It won’t be the first time. But I can tell you, he has no time for that.’

‘Yes,’ Nina said. She couldn’t think of anything else to add. She understood both sides too well. Feebly she muttered, ‘Let’s hope the stage manager is efficient on the telephone. Time is obviously vital now.’

She thought of going to the embassy all the same, while they were waiting. But she pictured the chain of telephone calls that might result, and she decided it would only take longer if somebody had to field a diplomatic request; they wouldn’t be able to concentrate on finding the trucks. And of course, the fear ingredient would be increased, and then nobody would be able to concentrate at all. The whole system might seize up.

A man now broke in on her thoughts, gently haranguing, in a soft, nasal monotone that reminded Nina of the seen-it-all streets of Manhattan. ‘At least the kids have practice clothes. Half of the ballets, that’s about what they wear anyway. These bastards won’t even put up a black backdrop for me. Can you at least get them to do that?’

Nina held back another sigh. She looked him in the eye, saw tension and pleading there, pink-rimmed, overworked, with wrinkled dry skin around the edges. ‘I can try. But wait until the stage manager comes back. Give him a chance.’

And for this she got a friendly, silent tip-up of the chin. The man reached for a pack of cigarettes in his pocket. ‘I’ll take a break,’ he said, feeling the pack. ‘Don’t disappear on me.’

Nina wandered back to watch the dancers again. One of the ballerinas had a sore foot. Balanchine was waving his hands at her, scowling.

‘If that hurts, don’t do it. Like this.’

He stepped in close to the ballerina, assumed her posture, raised his eyebrows and half-closed his eyes in an expression of yearning nobility, then demonstrated a combination by which he seemed as if magically to glide backwards using only one foot. Afterwards, he looked at the ballerina, waiting, smouldering with the thrill of his solution. In the silence, she copied him.

‘So. Just so,’ he said, nodding fiercely. ‘It’s better for you. And first you rest.’

Then he clapped his hands three times, looked around the stage, and threw his eyes into the air, all the way to the back of the theatre. Behind him, dancers scurried, stood up, began to assemble. He rubbed his hands together, as if with appetite, and walked away.

The orchestra now began to play, and it seemed to Nina like a miracle that the dancers began to dance without Balanchine among them. She sensed him there, still, at the centre of their group.

For a while, she was lost, watching. Then, from nowhere, Alice was beside her whispering. ‘Luckily Mr B. can make it up as he goes along. Two of the kids got hit by a trolley car the day after we opened in Hamburg. Everything had to be changed.’

Nina looked around, stunned. ‘A trolley car?’

‘It was bad. But they’re going to be OK. Honestly. They both ache like hell.’ Then Alice ran her hands over her tightly smoothed-back dark hair and sighed. ‘It’s good for me, in a way, I’m getting lots of parts. I’ve never danced so much. But, God, I miss my little boy! He’s only one and a half. Have you got children?’

Nina felt intensely embarrassed by this question, not only because she had managed during her visits to the Bolshoi to forget at last the horrible scene she had had with John, but also because in her role of chaperone she felt she should be more experienced than the dancers. Clearly, she was not more experienced than Alice and she wasn’t much older.

All Nina said was, ‘Not yet.’

And Alice whispered on, friendly, ‘Children change everything, that’s the thing. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. See that girl?’ She leaned close in the shadows, her cheek brushing Nina’s so that Nina could feel the light sweat on it, smell the fragrant layer of cold cream surfacing with the heat of Alice’s skin.

Alice was pointing to a coltish ballerina, big-eyed, young, with hair swinging from a knot at the top of her head. The girl had one endless leg flung up onto the black iron stair rail beside one of the entrances to the back of the stage; she reached along it towards her arched foot, demi-pliéd, rose again.

‘That girl,’ Alice confided, ‘learned a whole brand-new ballet overnight because the ballerina Mr B. choreographed it on got pregnant and her doctor suddenly ordered her to lie down. And now that girl will be a star. All of a sudden Mr B. has noticed her. And she is totally unpregnant, that girl. A maiden.’ Alice giggled. ‘If you know what I mean.’

Nina giggled, too; she couldn’t help it. Alice surprised her. The giggle didn’t feel malicious; it felt realistic, practical, accurate. To Nina, Alice seemed delightfully unfettered, brave.

And then Alice said, ‘A tour like this, with everyone on top of each other night and day, is pretty much nothing but love affairs. The windows of the bus were steaming up when we left Vienna.’

Again they giggled.

‘So why isn’t everyone pregnant?’ asked Nina.

‘Good question. Maybe they are?’ Then Alice abandoned her smart-alecky tone and said soberly, ‘But you know, sometimes I think ballerinas just aren’t that fertile. I mean, we miss our periods half the time anyway. Some girls are on the pill, but it makes you fat is the thing.’

‘Well, so does being pregnant.’ Nina laughed again, but she no longer felt light of heart. Suddenly, she felt afraid, assaulted by her obsessive private anxieties which she couldn’t share with Alice. It made her conscious that she was pretending to be friendly, trying – because she envied Alice’s candour about personal matters, her apparent freedom – for a girlish chumminess that she had never really been that good at.

Nina had thought constantly about the pill since arriving in Moscow, wishing she had asked her doctor for a lifetime’s supply before she left Washington. But in Washington, she hadn’t foreseen not wanting a baby. And since arriving in Moscow, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to inquire about the pill with the embassy doctor. It wasn’t that she feared he might disapprove. Although that was part of it. It was also that she didn’t want to risk the disappointment if he told her he couldn’t supply it, couldn’t lay hands on it. And above all, she feared the further loss of her privacy: the doctor knowing, the doctor judging, the doctor reporting to someone else about her most intimate life. It was natural to feel embarrassed, but she felt more than that; she felt as if wanting birth control might cast doubt on her character, as if it revealed something overly sophisticated, libertine, decadent in her appetites – wanting sex but not wanting a baby. Pleasure for its own sake.

She had considered going out to Finland to a doctor, but she thought a medical visit abroad would alarm John. Anyway, it was melodramatic. Everyone would ask why she needed to see a Finnish doctor. Her minders wouldn’t ask her directly, but they would ask someone, and they would probably find out.

So she had become paralysed about birth control, about sex. She felt the world intruding, watching, conferring, as she had often felt in her girlhood, teachers at the Bolshoi discussing her physique, medical officers examining her, her own mother puritanically accusing her about boys, loudly consulting the Szabos after her father’s death, reviling Nina’s lack of self-control, her vulgar appetites. What was it they all needed to know about her – the spies, the eavesdroppers? And she was trying to clutch a veil around her person, around her body, to hide something precious, her shyness, a sense of delicacy. Lately it had felt almost as if her married state had been taken away from her, society’s permission to embark on an adult relationship, to feel and do anything, everything, in complete privacy, without hesitation, without guilt.

In the silence that fell between her and Alice now, Nina sensed there was a possibility of nearer friendship. She chewed her lower lip; Alice watched the dancers onstage, silently critiquing, memorizing. Nina began to want to reach for the possibility. Alice’s easy banter was seductive. Could I launch myself like that, copy her? Find out? Her lip curled with self-disdain. Posing. Faking. And she thought, I’m just a middle-class housewife. She’s a dancer, an artist. There’s an allowance for however it is that Alice might misstep, surprise, even shock, as long as she’s not onstage. She’s supposed to be – bohemian. I’m supposed to get it all perfect. I’m not a debutante in Russia. What she ended up telling herself was that Alice would be leaving Moscow in just a few weeks anyway, so what was the point of becoming friends? Although she knew full well that Alice’s certain departure was the very reason she felt safe with her.

Just then the stage manager came up to Nina, pulled her back into the wings, spoke jovially in Russian.

‘Everything is found,’ he said, ‘you will be glad to know. The men are bringing up the trunks now, to the wardrobe. Go look in the elevator. You’ll see it’s completely full with big metal boxes. But you should help direct – boys’ side, girls’ side – if you don’t want to waste any more time. The writing is all English. Only one of these guys from the USA speaks Russian. It’s laughable for us.’

Nina looked around for the costume mistress, saying, ‘I’ll get someone to come right away. Was it all at the Kremlin?’

‘Not at all. Don’t be silly. It came straight to the Bolshoi, just as it should. The drivers were held up at the Polish border and also at the Czech border. As if on purpose. How should I know why? Maybe the Poles and the Czechs want to wreck our relations. It wouldn’t surprise me. Anyway, the border guards look through everything for security. And these trucks are carrying a lot of things. Mountains.’

As Nina started through the door, he added smugly, with a broad smile, ‘By the way, I’ve requested extra ironers. More women are coming now. You Americans will be pleased how hard they work.’

By the time Nina arrived at the opening night party at the American ambassador’s residence, Spaso House, she felt winded with tiredness. She took John’s arm as they climbed the broad, shallow steps from the vestibule, and she leaned on it more and more heavily as people pressed and darted around them in the receiving line.

‘What did you think, dear?’ asked the ambassador’s wife, reaching for Nina’s hand, pulling her along with professional insistence to greet the ambassador, to keep the line moving through the soaring pillared entry into the main salon. ‘You’re our expert.’

Nina tried to smile. She ought to have a remark prepared; she was familiar with the instant of greeting at the second pillar. Ambassador Kohler and his wife, Phyllis, both small, unimposing, always received by the second pillar. And they were kind, these two childless Midwesterners, gentle and homey with the embassy staff.

Out tumbled, ‘Beautiful.’ That was all Nina could manage. She repeated it, hopelessly, ‘Beautiful.’ It didn’t begin to describe what she had seen that night at the Bolshoi, what she had felt, the tumult of awe, the ecstatic pleasure.

It didn’t even describe the ostentatious splendour of Spaso House on a night like tonight: the pre-revolutionary palace ablaze with light from countless sconces and hanging fixtures and from the stupendous crystal and gold chandelier festooned with gem-cut beads, orbited by candles, and suspended like a celestial apparition in the three-storey dome of the eighty-foot salon.

Nina let go of John’s arm to shake hands, and she drifted alone to the round, marble-topped table centred under the chandelier. She tried to collect herself. The carpet, with its rich circular pattern, red, black, blue, spun away on all sides towards the endless weave of the blond parquet, dizzying, and so she lifted her eyes to the turquoise-and-gold-embossed vault of the ceiling and the balconied loggia of the first floor beneath it. Still she felt bewildered, hurried. Her heart, or maybe it was her lungs, felt tight and dark, congested with a faint sense of alarm.

I’m just not used to so much company all day and so much talking and arguing, she told herself. Did I ever even sit down? Not until the performance; and by then I was so overexcited that it was more like anguish than joy. Tomorrow will be easier. Tomorrow I can relax a little.

I need something to eat, she thought, something to ballast myself. There was a bad taste in her mouth, nausea rising in her nose like a chemical odour.

On she floated to the dark-panelled state dining room. The light and the noise seemed to drop away in the distance. A little group strolled ahead of her, right through the dining room into the ballroom beyond as she came in, so that she was alone. The elaborate curtains hanging down around the open doors, the gleaming, wood-lined walls, the grandiose fireplace with its mantel upon mantel supported on great twisted columns of wood reaching higher than her head, seemed to hold the world at bay. She felt insulated, soothed.

The long dining table had been pulled to the end of the room in front of the fireplace and its flanking glass-doored display cabinets. There were three big vases of bronze chrysanthemums standing in a row on the table. Nina studied them ruefully. The good wives, the sociable ones, will have arranged those flowers, she thought. And I wasn’t here. Then she thought, But I was helping. Trying to help.

The chairs with their yellow satin seats and backs were lined up against the walls. Can I sit down now? she wondered, sinking wearily onto one.

A waiter rushed through with a tray of drinks, suddenly stopping when he saw her, bending to offer one.

‘By the way, madam,’ he said in soft, careful English, ‘you will have supper in the ballroom when the ballet arrives.’

Nina thanked him in Russian, ‘Spasibo.’ But when he smiled at her friendly gesture, she felt an inexplicable wrench of sorrow. It was the way he leaned down to her, the patience with which he paused. She had to look away from his warm, solicitous eyes, his obvious concern.