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