and gold curtain parted, and on the stage American ballet dancers, dressed in kilts and tartan socks, skipped before the whirlwind, bar by measured bar, step by springing step, jaunty, death-defying. Ballet was their mother tongue, and everyone in the Bolshoi that night understood the music, the dance, the ritual of artist and audience.
The performance wrung tears of nostalgia and of rage from Nina Davenport, who bowed her teased and sprayed chestnut flip over her fists, dashed with blanched knuckles at the hollows underneath her mascaraed eyes. It seemed easy, beautiful, obvious – the years of mental and physical devotion flowering in lively complexity on this foreign stage.
Nina sat alone in the eighth row, one seat left of the left side aisle. Beside her was the only empty seat in the house; John Davenport was at the American Embassy. She cried for John, too, for his absence, for their newly married heartache of impatience, misunderstanding, lapse of conviction. She cried for unfinished mysteries, for the slow pulse of love smashed by anonymous brutality. And she cried for the pale, undying sylph on the stage, circled by the men of the corps de ballet so that, for a yearning instant, her lover couldn’t reach her.
Nina tried to keep the wet of her tears off the wisps of paper crushed in her hands. As she dragged her eyes back to the stage, she dropped the papers onto her lap. They were the same colour as her white wool skirt but more fragile, wrinkled, translucent. The skirt was robust with workmanship, a thickly woven bouclé, soft as a cloud to touch, taut across her pressed-together caramel nylon knees. She felt hot in the matching short jacket, which she wore as she had been told to, with its three saucer-like gold buttons done all the way up to the stiff, stand-away collar. The beige silk lining whispered and slid against her skin as she fretted in her red velvet chair, smoothing the patch pockets of the skirt with the heels of her hands, with her pearl-pink painted fingernails.
She had ordered the suit in Paris the day she and John got off the boat from New York. ‘There’s nothing to wear in Moscow,’ her mother had said fiercely, in her husky, smoke-abused voice, ‘but that doesn’t mean you won’t need things.’ She had given Nina twenty thousand dollars in cash.
‘Start at Balenciaga, darling.’ Mother’s tone had been resigned, then she had sighed, indulgent, conspiratorial, ‘Cristóbal has absolutely perfect taste. He’ll get your eye in. And that way you’ll be recognized for what you are by anyone who can tell. Nobody else matters. A diplomat’s wife ought to be chic, especially in Europe. He has flair, a touch of flamenco, but he’s never vulgar – he’s a Roman Catholic, you see. And you’ll like the colours he uses. From Goya’s paintings, or maybe from an olive grove he remembers in the Spanish countryside. I know you don’t give a damn about clothes, but you owe it to John, dear.’
Nina had felt impressed but not surprised by how much her mother had learned about such things in six years of restless, unaccompanied circling from Paris to New York, Buffalo to Palm Beach, while Nina struggled through Wellesley, languished behind the reception desk of a well-established, little-frequented Old Masters gallery on Madison Avenue, sat numb at a ballet, fell passionately in love. She had accepted the money in order to soothe her mother’s distress over the fact that she was moving with John back to Russia. And maybe to soothe her own. As if clothes or even money could somehow protect Nina from whatever awesome, difficult experiences Russia was bound to offer her.
‘I understand how you feel about John,’ Nina’s mother had said in another, earlier, conversation. ‘Think how crazy I was about your poor father to follow him there when I was your age. My parents did everything to stop me. I didn’t listen to them; naturally I thought my husband was far more exciting and important than Buffalo, New York or a sewing machine fortune that he had persuaded me no individual deserved to have or inherit when people everywhere were hungry. But I didn’t know anything about Russia, or about life, for that matter. I had been totally spoiled by my upbringing. I had no idea what I was giving up. And then you came along.’
Mother had bitten her tongue on this, stopped short. ‘Not you, dear. I don’t mean you.’ But somehow it had seemed as if she did mean Nina; she so often struck these clumsy, inadvertent blows, then tried to take them back. She had softened her voice, almost pleading, ‘Nina, dear, after everything we’ve been through, I just can’t understand why you and John want to do this. I can’t believe the two of you think it’s safe. I like John; at least I thought I liked John. But what kind of a man is he, that he would take you to Moscow, knowing everything about you as he does? Why is the State Department even allowing it, for God’s sake? That’s what I don’t understand.’
Nina had been firm, confident, justified. ‘Don’t start on the what-kind-of-a-man thing, Mother. It’s my decision. I’m perfectly happy to go back. John has told you he would give it up if I asked him to; you and I both know he means it. His job has absolutely nothing to do with what happened to you and Dad.’
But it had given her another fit of inward trembling. All the while, she had known what her mother was remembering, what her mother had hoped in America to forget once and for all: the ZAGS office near Gorky Street hit by a German incendiary bomb in 1943, every single document in the building burned to cinders, buckets of sand poured on the flames to no avail by the nighttime fire brigades, rain transforming official records into sodden mounds of indecipherable, tar-coloured debris – births, deaths, marriages obliterated. On Nina’s new registration, her mother had written: Born 1937, Buffalo, New York. Afterwards, she had taken Nina straight to the park and begun teaching her to say she was six years old, not four.
Her parents had fought bitterly over her. Their rage still bellowed at Nina down the years.
‘It’s her only chance. You can’t do anything for us now.’
‘Are you crazy? You’ve put her in inconceivable danger – all of us! She’s a true Soviet, why put this mark against her? How could I even be her father if she was born in 1937? You were still in Greenwich Village most of 1937, and I hadn’t seen you for at least a year! Besides that, how the hell will you explain how tiny she is?’
‘Nobody left in Moscow has enough to eat. All the children have stopped growing.’
‘What about the doctor?’
‘I’ll find a new doctor. Lots of people go privately. I can get the money. I have plenty of translating work at the Foreign Ministry.’
‘If she’s six, she needs to start school next year.’
‘She can do it. She’s a smart little girl. I know how to get her ready; I’m a teacher now, after all. Everything around us is in complete chaos anyway. The children who were evacuated have been coming back in mobs. Who will notice?’
And so they had chanced it, on the basis of chaos, counting on bureaucratic inefficiency, gnawing their fingernails to blood when each new year, each new challenge in Nina’s childish life brought a new set of anxieties.
When Nina and her mother had arrived in the USA on Soviet passports in 1956, the US passport office in Washington, DC, had been eager to accept whatever statements they offered. Why would they want to undermine Nina’s right to be an American citizen, her right to hold an American passport? Her father had been dead for three years, but both her parents were American; nobody doubted that. There was already a cable in Nina’s file about her interview at the embassy in Moscow; it was necessary only to confirm certain details. No record of Nina’s birth could be traced, so Aunt Josephine came from Buffalo to swear to it, a rambling, engaging, cunning swear.
‘The weather was so appalling that winter, and Dr Ainsworth was getting old. He must have been way past retirement age. A home birth, in the middle of the night, and then getting out in the snow to file papers? He just wasn’t very professional that way. He was really more of a family friend. And the truth is,’ here, as Aunt Josephine had later told it to Nina, to Mother, she came over all trusting, confidential, ‘you see, the truth is, my sister wasn’t married. My hunch is that Dr Ainsworth was making some old-fashioned attempt to spare embarrassment – leaving the details to the discretion of the family. We were prominent locally, after all. Not that anyone was trying to pretend it had never happened, but maybe just – fudging things a little. My sister left for Russia as soon as