faces soft-fleshed, smiling in the winter sunshine. The girls had been too cold for pictures outdoors, but the boys had stood it with shouts, horseplay, frosty breath in front of the rugged grey stone walls of the Episcopal church.
The wedding had sealed Nina’s American identity. And there it was, on the wall in front of her eyes, a second life that also now seemed to have slipped just out of her reach, under glass – the family she had longed for in childhood, the much confided-in girlfriends she would once have feared to tell things to, the holes in her education filled by American history, French philosophy, twentieth-century avant-garde culture, by freedom, by long hours of hard work. It was a strange flip-flop of fate: falling in love with John, she had ceased to think much about Russia. She had been entirely certain that she could settle down with John anywhere. And yet, studying the photographs while she had arranged them on the wall last week, it had crossed her mind that, from the very beginning, she had somehow expected John to bring her back to Moscow. She had resigned herself to it long before they had talked of marriage – an unavoidable destiny; she loved him no matter what he asked of her, no matter where he wanted to take her.
Wasn’t that partly why I felt so absolutely sure about him? Because I knew he cared about Russia? I must have known it was a journey we would have to make. Not so soon, though; I did that for John. And she thought, Chagall shows that – about love. How it makes such a display of perfection, how it wants to disregard darkness, difficulty, even guilt. Her eye fell again on the girl in the print, alone in her wakefulness, startled.
Nina had told herself, as she laboriously tapped in the pin-like brass nails with the heel of her loafer, that she ought to go and buy a hammer because she would probably need one again for something else anyway and that it would make her little home seem real, seem permanent – having a hammer. The errand could use up a whole morning. But no sane American would stand in an interminable line to buy a tenth-rate Russian hammer anyway. She could manage fine with the heel of the loafer. With this logic, she had pretended to disguise her true feelings from herself: that something in her was not settling down to this Russian sojourn, was already packing up and preparing to leave. After all, if she didn’t want to buy a hammer, she could easily have borrowed one, from the General Services Office at the embassy or, even better, from a neighbour. But if she had borrowed a hammer, she would have had to spend a few minutes chatting. And there would have been the next visit, when she returned the hammer, offered an invitation to come for coffee, try out her cake. That was how it should have begun, her life as an embassy wife, cultivating a niche in the small, involving, warm-hearted expatriate community.
Nina was finding it difficult to face the central challenge of her new life, being an American embassy wife. The other wives were so friendly, so inquisitive. They asked all about where she had lived as a child; they wanted her to take them shopping in some authentic Muscovite market away from the central places, or drive out of town together to hunt for mushrooms, boletuses with their white legs and brown caps, growing on moss pads in the woods since late August. Nina couldn’t bring herself to do it. It had seemed easy sometimes to reveal to Jean, even to Barbara, this or that about her old Moscow life; her Wellesley friends had never pressed her. But now that she was here, there seemed to be so much more of her past, so much she was unsure of, and the embassy wives seemed too interested, pushy almost. How could any one of them – resourceful, cheerful Americans – possibly understand who she was, what she was? She had found she couldn’t explain herself to anyone just now. It was practically illegal to try. Sometimes even John didn’t seem to understand her all that well. And everything that she tried to make herself do felt somehow artificial. No matter where she went in Moscow, she was almost all imposter. What if she came across someone she recognized? If that were to happen, she needed to be alone. Everyone at the embassy knew how dangerous it could be for Russians to be seen meeting with foreigners. She hardly knew whether she would feel able to signal some acknowledgement, whether she would say little, or nothing at all. But she dreaded giving the impression of flaunting new American friends, of preferring them.
So she hid from the other wives, went out only when she knew she wouldn’t meet them, and she felt painfully cut off. She found it hard to think realistically about what she wanted, what she had expected. Something that didn’t exist any more, or that she could never really get at, the scenes in Chagall’s prints, an old shattered life. Without really admitting it to herself, she was biding her time, going through the motions of embassy wife, waiting. Maybe she would be herself again only in America. The thought made her feel impatient, fretful. Sometimes it felt like an almost unbearable tension.
As she tied her quilted, raspberry silk bathrobe around her waist, she heard the front door open.
‘Nina?’ he boomed with friendly urgency. ‘Sorry I’m so late. Did you eat already?’ His voice was big, sweet, civil, rolling low and strong from his chest.
She felt herself soften inwardly with relief. It eased everything, John coming home. It was completely dependable. He lit up the apartment with life and purpose, made the straitened hours seem balmy, enchanted, rich. Now she wished she had braised the veal chops already and left them warm for him on the edge of the stove.
She opened the bathroom door, smiling, swathed in warm wet air on the threshold, and he put his stiff, cold raincoat arms around her, kissed her, took off his dripping fedora so that, closing her eyes, she felt first the thin hard hat brim knock against her forehead, then the light brightening around them both as he dropped the hat on the floor, then his grip so muscular that it seemed at odds with his office clothing, his professional demeanour.
How weird, she thought, as she swayed towards him with her contented heart, that he carries a briefcase, knows how to read. And she had often thought this before about John, that the accessories of modern life were beside the point with him, that he was a roving magnetic field, hot energy, barely contained by his lanky physique; that the uniform of adult duty and conventional public tasks couldn’t conceal the natural boy, mostly coursing blood and febrile enthusiasms, on the brink of running wild. His gift with languages, for instance, didn’t seem to be the result of bookish inclination. It had nothing to do with all those years at Dartmouth, at Columbia. It was just an expression of his instinctive chemistry with all mankind. He seemed to feel someone else’s speech from underneath his skin, to sense what was trying to pass back and forth in the words; he learned the book side afterwards, as if to check whether his gut was right, his articulate gut. Nina thought that language was really a sport for him, something that he had picked up through natural athletic gifts, observing it, getting it, joining in the game.
‘Yum,’ he smacked his lips at her. ‘There’s a tender morsel to warm a working man’s belly. Or tender damsel is maybe more the phrase. You smell like a newly washed pullover. You’re not drowning yourself in there in that bath, Nina? Slashing your wrists over my protracted absence?’ He turned her wrists over and held them up to the light from the bathroom door, lightly mocking, then kissed them by turns. ‘Survived another day of Soviet solitude?’ She felt the rough of his upper lip against the blue veins of her wrist; his bleached hazel eyes glowed under their shaggy, slanted brows, filled the doorway, warmed her chest.
‘I’m OK, John,’ Nina laughed. ‘Thanks for asking. The ballet dancers arrived today, you know. So that was fun. Well – interesting anyway. Certainly took up plenty of time, waiting at the airport, going to the hotel with them. Though who knows what help they really need from me. And the airport kind of gives me the creeps – getting in, getting out, the frontier thing.’
She freed one of her hands and reached down to pick up his hat, then pulled him back along the hall towards the kitchenette. John dragged playfully against her weight, then gave in and followed, shrugging off his coat to hook it over one of the pegs on the wall as they passed. It dripped a little on the linoleum floor.
‘How’d you get them to include me, John?’ There was tension in her voice, and she tried to conceal it with busyness. He watched her rummage through a basket of clean laundry for a dish towel, press the folded towel carefully against the wet felt of his hat, then walk back to the hall to dry the floor under his coat.
At last, looking around the doorframe, he said, ‘Don’t be silly, Nina. What American embassy wife speaks mother-tongue Russian, trained at the Bolshoi, and is a