Читать книгу Leninsky Prospekt - Katherine Bucknell - Страница 6

October 6,1962. The New York City Ballet arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport like a glamour bomb, an explosion of self-confident, long-limbed physical beauty, spreading and undulating past the green-clad border guards towards the truck-mounted floodlights, official photographers, grim-faced journalists, and ubiquitous, grey-suited, hummingbird-eyed officers of the KGB.

Sixty-odd pairs of perfectly muscled legs sauntered and flickered with restrained braggadocio over the colourless airport floors and past the drab bureaucratic demands of official paperwork, washed hair coiffed and swishing, perfectly fitting suits barely aeroplane creased, eyes glowing under false lashes, pastel-coloured vanity cases professionally gripped.

In the vanguard, George Balanchine, fifty-eight years old, slim, hawk-faced, spruce in cowboy shirt and string tie, stepped warily upon the Russian soil he had last trod when he was only twenty. He had been master for many years of his own ballet company, and his bearing consummately revealed that he felt himself master, too, of his own destiny. This tour to the Soviet Union was not, for him, a homecoming. He flaunted his American passport in his hand; he inflated his chest inside his Wild West costume. He would not easily submit to any nonsense of Soviet political choreography.

The dancers were greeted with nearly rampant curiosity tempered by puritanical suspicion and self-defensive disdain. Above the chatter and shouting in Russian and in English, Balanchine heard, ‘Welcome to the home of classical ballet, Mr Balanchine!’

Coolly, he threw back, ‘America is now the home of the classical ballet.’

The exchange with the press revealed nothing especially personal, nothing to suggest how Balanchine felt about his hurried, unremarked departure for Berlin on July 4, 1924, about his further emigration to America a decade later, about the deaths during his absence of his bon vivant composer father, his pretty, uncomplaining mother, his mild older sister who had not been gifted enough to become a ballerina. He had not seen them since 1918, the year in which he had turned fourteen. Instead the interview established that the tour of eight weeks would proceed from Moscow to the Kirov in Leningrad – where Balanchine himself had trained as a dancer – to Kiev, to Tbilisi – his boyhood home in Georgia – then finally to Baku; that a group of dancers from the Bolshoi, the twin element in this great cosmopolitan moment of cultural openness, had already taken to the stage in New York throughout the month of September and had been received with ecstatic acclaim.

From the mêlée burst Balanchine’s younger, shorter, only brother, also a composer, Andrei Balanchivadze.

Balanchine cried out, ‘Andryusha, it’s you!’ embracing him warmly. The official Soviet cameras flashed and popped. Then Balanchine somehow interposed his American passport and the cameras stopped.

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.

After she drained the bath, Nina made herself clean it, dry it, polish the chrome fittings with a soft cloth. Yelena Petrovna won’t even know I’ve taken a bath, she grunted to herself, rubbing. Fine. It satisfied Nina to flummox the maid, to cover her tracks. Why supply any clues at all? Nina wondered. We always used to clean the bath for Professor Szabo and his wife. She cringed, recollecting their forced crepuscular intimacy – Madame Szabo’s grey-shadowed, diabetic skin, Professor Szabo’s broad, flapping bottom. And she felt as though she could hear her father’s tired, persistent assertion, ‘They compactified others much more harshly than us. With us they’ve been generous.’ But housing two invalids at the top of a long, narrow flight of stairs? Where was the generosity in that? Dad needed help just to climb in and out of the bath tub.

Nina couldn’t recall a time when they hadn’t shared that apartment; Mother used to say, ‘Two rooms were perfectly OK without a baby.’ So – the Szabos must have known exactly how old I was, and they never told anyone. Why were they made to share an apartment anyway, a professor at Stalin’s Industrial Academy? Though it must have been the biggest one in the building – high ceilings, the bathroom.

They were witty, the Szabos. And they spoke English with us. That should have won Mother over. Dad would have had no one at all to keep him company, nor would Madame Szabo in her dim, semi-blind world. Madame Szabo took trouble over Dad, 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 five first cousins in tailcoats and striped morning trousers, all tall, all dark, their 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 Wellesley graduate on top of all that? They leaped at the chance.’

She interrupted him, embarrassed, trying to be light-hearted, ‘Russian is really not my mother tongue, John. You know you’re exaggerating. Mother would do anything to avoid speaking Russian, and there weren’t even many Russians living in our building.’

But John went on with his flattery, courting her with his eyes, ‘To me, you seem most yourself when you speak Russian. Enchanting, passionate, bracingly coherent.’

She wagged a blushing finger at his nonsense, and he grinned.

‘Nina, you just don’t realize how over-awing this town can be. You’ve never had to do it as a real outsider, a stranger. What they know how to do is dance. They aren’t supposed to be linguists or diplomats. They’ll be able to relax and have a little fun with you along to show them around and explain things. Just be a friend. Frankly, we all have a lot on our minds at the office right now, and I know the ambassador feels reassured having you with that group. It’s a serious business, this tour. A showcase. And you should speak up, too, if anything doesn’t seem right.’

He stopped suddenly, looked around warily, as if there were presences floating above them on the ceiling, listeners. ‘What am I saying? This isn’t the office.’

Nina laughed. ‘You’re still OK, I’d say – just. But wait. I’m about to start banging a few pots and pans. I couldn’t bring myself to cook supper without you.’

And she set to, clanging a black cast-iron frying pan, a shiny aluminium saucepan, a lid. She chopped an onion, sizzled it in butter, opened a can of chicken broth from Stockman’s in Finland, ran cold water over a small bunch of beets and rolled up her soft pink sleeves to scrub the dirt from the voluptuous red-purple curves.

‘Aren’t these gorgeous?’ she said as she tossed the beets into the saucepan to steam them. ‘I got them from a babushka outside the Metro. Everything else is already starting to look shrivelled. It’s going to be a long winter. Just you wait.’

Then she smiled at John because she knew these bitter little comments of hers worried him. She knew he wondered every single day what he had done bringing his new wife back to the USSR, wondered whether she would make it. She gave him a loopy, lips-together grin and clowned for him a little, shuffling her feet, waving her wooden spoon gaily like a flag, tipping her head coquettishly from side to side. ‘I promise to do something about my hair right after supper, John,’ she said sweetly, pulling the wet, heavy strands away from her face. ‘I must look like a madwoman.’

Now John laughed, just a little. ‘Do you want some Scotch?’ He was reaching for the bottle on the wooden shelves above the table.

‘Love some.’

He poured them each a drink, and they clinked their glasses, just barely, almost stealthily, near the rim, as if they were sharing a secret. They had reached a moment which they reached most evenings alone together when they felt a confident harmony with one another and with their nearly year-old marriage, a harmony which drowned out everything else. They both knew perfectly well how it had come about that they were here together in Russia, of all difficult places; they knew they belonged together, that they had no choice. They had talked about it often, the fact that the love sensation was still bigger than any other sensation either one of them could lay claim to ever having felt. Everything else had to fall in line with that. They would say things to each other like, A whole lifetime isn’t enough time to spend with you. And they understood the meaning of what they were saying, meant it. The newness, the feeling of desperation, was still kindling between them; they were happy, but they were not yet satisfied; married, but still trying somehow to catch hold of each other entirely. When they were alone together, they forgot about everything else. They were building a private world for themselves.

John took off his dark grey suit jacket, loosened his dull blue, paisley tie, settled his long bony frame awkwardly at the little wooden table. ‘Your hair’s fine all mangled,’ he said. ‘I love it however.’ Then he put his fingers in his own close-cut, light brown hair and rubbed it hard, grinning. ‘See mine? Madwoman’s spouse. Let’s just have a nice supper and go to bed. You can fix your hair tomorrow.’

Nina lifted her glass, toasting his appearance. ‘Very attractive.’ And she smiled down at him, sipping, stirring, lifting lids, peering under them. ‘What’s keeping you at that office so much, anyway?’

But John held a finger in the air, alert, reminding her to take care what she said.

She turned on the radio, then the water in the sink, and threw open the window above it, letting the wind and rain blow in along with the faint blare of street noises from far below.

‘Have to clear the smoke out,’ she said brightly. She went back to the stove, checked again under all the lids, then walked to the table and perched on John’s lap, laying her head on his chest with her ear beside his mouth.

He plucked at her wet hair without saying anything until she rolled her head around and looked him in the eye.

‘You’re making me burn the beets.’

He laughed, just a sniffing laugh, and murmured very quietly, ‘Oh, sweetheart – letters, teletypes. We meet, we talk, we translate, we explain. God knows if anyone hears or even listens. Khrushchev never stops thinking about how to get our troops out of West Berlin, and the president is never going to abandon the West Germans. It’s much more interesting here at home, since you are so pretty and, at present, so vulnerably déshabillée.’ He twitched the lapel of her bathrobe, as if to look inside, and she trapped his hand and pressed it flat, helpless, against her breast.

John leaned closer, sealed his lips against Nina’s ear to say something more, then instead took the curling top edge of her ear between his teeth and bit it so that she suddenly sat up. They both laughed.

She gathered her robe around her, stood up with exaggerated, mocking caution, kissed his forehead crisply and said, ‘I’m going to give you supper straight from the stove. Do you mind? No serving dishes?’

‘Of course I don’t mind.’ He picked up his glass of Scotch and drained it.

As she lifted the meat onto the plates, ladled the sauce, fished for beets, John muttered, ‘The thing about democracy is of course that everything gets dropped for these damned mid-term elections.’ Then suddenly, he spoke up loudly, lifting his chin, and called out tauntingly to the walls and to the ceiling, ‘You hear that? It’s not such a perfect system, Western democracy.’

Nina put his plate in front of him, amused, stepping back to let him rant. But he wrapped a long arm around her light, bundled torso, pulled her close, and went on in a loud whisper, ‘A few pretty loud-mouthed Republicans have been sounding off about how the president should be more aggressive on Cuba. Nobody likes the fact that the Russians have been shipping military equipment in there all summer, but the Cubans are entitled to defend themselves. And the president’s so busy dealing with that kind of criticism that he really doesn’t listen to anything else. All his time and energy just now is aimed at making sure his side stays in power; forget foreign relations.’

Nina leaned down and whispered back, ‘It can’t be any different in this country, my dearest. Just because there are no elections doesn’t mean people don’t have to fight and compromise to hold onto power. Everyone struggles to stay in power.’

‘You are so damned smart, Nina. Yup. So maybe that explains why our Russian friends are being so sympathetic to the president’s plight. They’ve promised, on the quiet, to just lay off until after the November elections, especially on Berlin.’ He shrugged a little, in mild surprise. ‘The president will give them another summit if they don’t stir things up.’

Nina took a step towards the stove, reached for her plate, and brought it around opposite him. ‘Sympathetic – just to be nice?’ It made no sense to her at all, a sympathetic Russian leader. She raised her eyebrows cynically. ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’

There was a pause, and then she leaned right across the table, her thick bathrobe almost touching the food on her plate. With a babyish pout, her lips pushed out as if to be kissed, she crooned very low, ‘Don’t let your fetching American sense of fairplay and your boyish idealism blind you to the Soviet character – or to human nature, for that matter. If the Soviets think the president is seriously preoccupied, they’ll find some way to take advantage of it. And by the way, I’m not any smarter than you are, dearest. I’m just far less of a gentleman.’

John started to smile, but then looked startled, thoughtful. Silently he lifted a forkful of food to his mouth. For a few moments the only sounds in the room were the strains of a crackling, turgid symphony barely audible over the radio, the water running into the sink, and the tinkling knocks of their cutlery against the china. They glanced at each other from time to time as they chewed, then down at their plates, cutting, spearing. Suddenly, the window banged closed.

They both jumped with alarm, chastened by the frankness of their conversation. They knew they shouldn’t talk in the apartment about anything political. The trouble was that Nina loved it so much, and was so hungry for conversation of real substance, that John couldn’t bear to keep things from her. And she was astute in such unexpected, convincing ways that he couldn’t resist finding out her opinions. He felt that whatever views she had, belonged to him, that he ought to know them all, that they were a valuable resource, that they shouldn’t go to waste. He hardly realized the extent to which he was continuously at work trying to master and make use of her Russianness.

They went on eyeing each other dubiously, anxiously, as they cleaned their plates. Finally, they broke out in grim laughter.

Nina said, slowly, quietly, ‘Our guys were in here sweeping for bugs again just yesterday. I know they miss things, but maybe …’ She puckered her lips, twitched them about like a rabbit’s quick nose, nervous, as if she might smell a listening device or do away with it by magic.

‘We didn’t say anything we shouldn’t have.’ Even if they had, they couldn’t take it back now. They had to brazen it out.

‘So tell me about George Balanchine,’ John finally said with a shrug.

Nina got up, latched the window, turned off the water.

‘Well,’ she began, with a lilt of self-deprecation, hands plunged in her pockets as she stood in the middle of the floor, ‘I didn’t get to meet him personally. Not yet anyway. A real scene at the airport. A lot of press and – all the usual onlookers.’ She said this with sarcastic emphasis, not mentioning the KGB or any elements of the State propaganda machine. ‘And he was interviewed in very pointed fashion, to elicit certain – newsworthy answers. But after all, he’s a Russian. They want to look upon him as one of their own, and from what I could see, he knew exactly what he was doing. One of the reporters called out, “Welcome to the home of classical ballet,” and he said, “America is now the home of classical ballet.” Incredibly bold, as if it all belonged to him, the whole tradition, and he had just taken it all with him when he left. I think his work will make the Bolshoi stuff look fat and dull, romantic, old-fashioned. The Russians’ll be stunned.’ She paused, her eyes sparkling. ‘You remember when you went with me in New York?’

‘Not in the way you remember, Nines. It was beautiful, but I had no idea why.’

‘Well, it’s the speed, the decisiveness, the musicality, and the – the inventiveness. It’s so original, so complex.’ She was breathless with it, springing a little on the balls of her feet. ‘Even I was gagging with boredom the last time we went to the Bolshoi; there are only so many times you can watch a swan die.’

John grinned with pleasure at her knowledge, at her relish, at her untrickableness.

Nina rushed on, confident he was appreciating that she could dish it out. ‘He understands the music as a musician, you see, so it’s almost as if he – I don’t know – plays the dancers instead of playing the keys on a piano or the instruments in the orchestra. There’s usually not much story or acting out. And it moves fast fast fast. It’s unbelievably demanding for the ballerinas – who are the centre of everything. The men are just there to hold them up, to show them off. Balanchine’s crazy about ballerinas. You’ll see.’

‘But it was the Kirov, eh, where Nureyev danced?’ Half lazily, John shifted ground to the one thing he thought he understood about ballet dancers: their wish to leave the Soviet Union if they could.

‘Nureyev went straight to Balanchine when he defected to the West. But that’s what I mean about men. Nureyev’s too much of a star. In Balanchine’s troop, everyone is supposed to be the same, all on equal footing. He doesn’t want stars, especially not men – not men like Nureyev anyway.’

‘Sounds pretty communist to me,’ John remarked diffidently.

Nina nodded. ‘I know. But it’s something pre- all that, some older ideal. It’s certainly Russian just as much as it’s American. Maybe more. He’s very religious, Balanchine, Russian Orthodox. And how he is about ballerinas is – well – mystical.’

She fell quiet for a moment, a little self-conscious about her high-flown talk; then, shaking herself, she began to clear the table. When she had all the dishes in the sink, she crept a quick, questioning look around at John, checking to see whether he’d had enough of her obsession with ballet, whether he was just humouring her. There was no one else she could talk to as she could talk to him, and she didn’t want to use him up.

But he smiled at her warmly, so she started afresh, in a gossipy, confidential tone, making it juicy for him. ‘Balanchine has an incredibly interesting personal life, you know. He marries his ballerinas, at shocking ages, really young, one after another.’ She took a breath, slowed down a little. ‘But the one he’s married to now caught polio, and so she’s paralysed from the waist down. Can you imagine anything worse, for a ballerina? And she was a star. Or she was going to be. He left her in New York in a wheelchair.’

‘That’s rough. God.’ John yawned, linked his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair just enough to lift the two front legs off the floor. His loosened tie forked haphazardly over the white cotton expanse of his chest; his shirtsleeves hung deep and loose under his long skinny arms.

‘What would you do if that happened to me?’

‘If – what?’ The chair legs snapped down onto the linoleum.

‘If I became paralysed?’ She was staring into the plate she was rinsing, her hair down around her face like a rough russet curtain.

‘That’s an awful question. I don’t even want to think about it.’

‘But what would you do?’ Now she turned towards him, drying the plate, shaking her hair back, then dipping her face down towards his so that he couldn’t avoid her eyes.

‘Nina, you are not paralysed. I have no idea what I would do.’ John spread his arms high up in the air, bewildered, smiling.

‘Would you stay with me?’ Her eyes bore into him with their unsmirched, unrelenting blueness.

‘Of course I’d stay with you, but …’ he stopped himself. What was this all about, he wondered, this sudden whimsical comparison with a ballerina he had never even heard of before? ‘Are you serious, Nina? It’s a huge question. I don’t have an answer ready. I’ve never had to think about this.’

‘But what about, “In sickness and in health”?’

‘Nina, why crank things up in such a crazy way? Of course I’ve promised you that. You’ve promised me the same thing. But let’s give ourselves some time before we start in on ultimate tests. I like to think that I’d pass the test, but I don’t want to wallow in imaginary problems ahead of time.’ As he spoke, he reached for the knot of his tie, pried it loose with a long decisive index finger, snapped it off his neck, and hung it over the back of his chair. All the while, he held her look, quizzing, concerned.

She turned back to the sink. ‘Leaving someone you love, when they can’t move, can’t go with you. It’s completely awful.’ Her voice was flat, empty.

‘Jeez. You are having a bad time, aren’t you, sweetheart? I am so sorry. Is this about your father?’

‘Oh, God. I don’t know.’

He got up and put his arms around her from behind, and she started to scrub at the frying pan.

‘Can’t you wash the dishes tomorrow morning?’ he said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

‘The dishes and also my hair?’

‘But you have all day. That’s what you always tell me.’

‘Actually, though, I don’t.’ Her voice was impatient. ‘I’m a chaperone and guide, now. Remember? You’ve got me a so-called job.’ There was a sour edge, too, but John ignored it.

He pulled her around away from the sink, leaning down to her mouth. ‘You are a beautiful chaperone and a beautiful guide and I can’t resist you.’

She pulled free after one long, swooning kiss.

‘Nina, come on. It’s not as if the KGB’s going to come in and check to see whether you’ve washed the dishes. We can do as we like.’

She scowled at him. ‘You know I don’t care about the dishes, John. Why can’t you understand me, listen to me, humour me? If you really love me, don’t do this to me. Just leave me alone.’ And she shoved him backwards, away from the sink, away from her.

‘Do what to you, Nina? What’s going on? Now I can’t even touch you?’

She didn’t answer.

John scratched his head, irritated, mystified. Then he said, slowly and carefully, ‘You know, all day long, I concentrate just as hard as I can on finding some common ground between these two monumentally complex nations. I agonize over all the finer points of the Soviet Union, Mother Russia – how to understand her, interpret her, translate her, how to explain to her the needs and the views of the government of the United States. It’s pretty formal, pretty high stakes, pretty unpredictable. And what gets me through is you. Honestly.’

She seemed to pay no attention at all as he spoke, and he became impatient, and raised his voice a little. ‘Sometimes lately you have seemed just as enigmatic, just as opaque, just as unyielding as this whole damn country. What I think is that you are right and that it is going to be a very long winter – where you are, the ice is already on the ponds. How can you be so cold? So unreasonably cold.’

Now Nina turned her back altogether; they both knew she felt wounded. ‘I am not cold,’ she muttered without conviction. ‘I don’t feel cold at all towards you. You know that. I adore you. I wait all day for you with unbearable anticipation. I feel faint when I finally see you.’ Still she kept her eyes down, eking her words out with girlish shyness, halting but determined, as if she had planned her speech. ‘But I know you’ll get me into that bedroom and start on the baby thing again. And I don’t want a baby. It kills me to tell you. It makes me angry with us both. And I’m saying it now before you get me weak at the knees and make me think differently. I cannot have a baby here, John. I can’t bear the thought of it. You have got to take my side, you have got to sympathize with me about this.’

‘Sympathize? What – just to be nice?’

Nina grinned at his joke, swallowing her anger for a moment, caught out. ‘But you are a gentleman, John. Yes. Just to be nice.’

‘Nina, all I want is to come home to something easy, direct, immediate. And something – physical. I know you understand that. We don’t need diplomacy here. We don’t need to negotiate. Do we?’

She rinsed the frying pan and laid it on the draining board. ‘I’ll come to bed,’ she said guardedly, ‘if that’s what you want. But I don’t want a child, John. I don’t know how to make it any more clear to you. Not while we are living here in Moscow. It’s not a question of negotiating or pleading. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.’ She snapped out the last words like stamping her foot, but then she paused, lowered her voice, invited his concern with a tender look. ‘What if there was some problem about its American citizenship? What if we couldn’t get the baby out? Or what if suddenly I couldn’t get out? If you had to leave us? It scares me to death. I can hardly breathe when I think about it.’

‘Honey, you and I are both American citizens. And we both have diplomatic passports. You don’t have to worry about all this stuff. Anyway, if you got pregnant, you could leave. Other wives do. The baby could be born in Germany, or on US soil, in Buffalo. I’ll send you home to your mother.’

‘No!’ She was shocked by his suggestion. ‘No, no, no.’ She grabbed the ends of the belt on her bathrobe, cinched it tight, flounced away from him across the little room even as she proclaimed, ‘I want to be with you. You and only you. I am never going home to my mother. I won’t be separated from you. Never. It’s bad enough when you’re at the embassy all day. Besides, once the child was born, I’d have to come back here with it anyway. And I couldn’t do that, either. As long as we live in Russia, I need to be light on my feet, ready to move, able to fly at a moment’s notice. I can’t be burdened down with a child. It nearly killed my mother, John. And frankly, it nearly killed me: I was the child who was holding her back, who was keeping her here, exposing her to suffering, want, manipulation, fear, heartbreak. She could have left before the war if it hadn’t been for me. Because of me, she delayed and then it was too late.’

John was silent. Nina’s relationship with her mother was an unfathomable, tortured area, full of love, hate, generosity and selfishness in the most irrational welter. He accepted that maybe Nina could not go home to her mother ever again – why should a married woman want to do such a thing, anyway? He could see that it smacked of failure, loss of independence. And yet he felt swamped by the practical considerations; how could he take responsibility for the happiness, minute by minute, of this woman he loved and had taken away from her chosen homeland? How could he address her increasingly difficult state of mind, so unexpected? She didn’t seem to be the inspired, resilient woman he had married.

At the office, there was plenty of talk about adjustment, settling in, newlyweds, loneliness. He had been encouraged to treat it as a normal, temporary feature of his own job, handling Nina, being attentive to her moods, to her resistance. But he sensed that to Nina, Moscow was a metaphysical experience, swallowing her alive. And he knew the office vocabulary was useless to describe what was happening to her.

There was something inside Nina, something burning, some lit, primitive energy that he couldn’t understand. It wasn’t that she had fooled him; on the contrary, she sometimes treated him to breathtaking, even hurtful outbursts of honesty, stunning revelations. But there was a depth of passion in her that he had not yet plumbed. He could remember the first few times he had met her, the way she used to avert her eyes, as if she were too shy to look at him straight, and she would flex her feet, rising onto her toes, as if she might lift into the air. Her blue eyes were dark-flecked, pixelated, her small face square-cheeked, square-jawed, the fine bones seeming almost to show through the taut-stretched, white skin; later he discovered that if he ducked down and held her look, he could feel the flash and strength of her so intensely that he had to avert his own eyes. Her vitality dazzled him; it was irresistible, unpredictable. He had believed, still believed, that if he held her eyes, her arms, firmly enough, cradled her soul, steadied her, it would gradually come out, and he would be able to see it, engage with it – the ferment. But he knew that he had not yet gotten to the bottom of her. Her feverish, evanescent restlessness.

He didn’t agree with Nina about the baby. He wasn’t about to tell her now, but he himself had come to the conclusion that a baby would make them both happy. Certainly it was something they had wanted before the assignment to Moscow had come up. They had daydreamed aloud about it in the most sentimental terms. Still, who was he to force something on this woman, so brilliant, so beautiful, so sure of herself and yet so skittish, even if he did think it might stop her feeling lonely when he was at work?

She looked at him, standing off, gripping the sash of her robe, when he wanted her beside him, as one with him. What did she expect of him? Could he actually provide it? Happiness? Were husbands supposed to be able to deliver that? He had wanted to give her everything her heart desired. It wasn’t working. I was insane to bring her here, and she was more insane to want to come. She was so certain, so positive that I could get her in. And that was all we focused on. It was what I wanted, so she made it her business to want the same thing.

John could remember the anxiety of getting Nina’s visa to enter the USSR, how he had anguished over giving up the assignment, made up his mind that she was worth any sacrifice, that if she couldn’t get in, there would be another job somewhere else. Too bad if he couldn’t use his Russian, he would wait. There had been day upon day of interviews for both of them. But the paperwork had gone through without a hitch. We let ourselves be tricked by that, he realized, by the official OK. All along, I was expecting someone to tell us we couldn’t go. Waiting to be told no, that the risk was absurd. But nobody tried to stop us, apart from Nina’s mother. Nobody interfered. Then again, we were the only ones who knew the truth about Nina’s place of birth; why would anyone else suggest it was an obstacle? When the papers came, we opened a bottle of champagne; we looked on it as a victory – getting away with it. After that, I never let myself pause to imagine what difficulties there might be once Nina was here. I just pictured how happily she would take to a familiar city, how it would be a lark for her.

Finally he said, solemn, reluctant, ‘OK. Well. No baby. I agree. All precautions in place, then.’

‘You’ve said that before, too, haven’t you?’ She was accusing him of something. He felt confused by her unexpectedly strident tone.

‘I want to trust you,’ she almost shouted. She was back at the sink, slapping at the dirty dishwater, whacking dishes with a cloth. ‘But it all gets so – impossible. Heated. You never are as careful as you say. Condoms, all this stuff, it’s so unbeautiful, so distracting. I know how you feel about it. I feel the same. It’s one thing we intended to be free of once we were married, isn’t it? And I am no good at resisting anything, at stopping you or even slowing you down. And they are listening to us, John. I can’t talk. I can’t tell you what I feel. What I want. They are in bed with us and I’m not sure you even care! Even that doesn’t stop you.’

John went deep painful red. And his voice came out tipped with rage. ‘We don’t have to discuss this any more, Nina. Not that I think the KGB bothers to listen to drunken domestic quarrels. Our guys wouldn’t. Who can afford the resources? We’re not teenagers. And I’m not such a cad. Don’t lay all the blame at my door. I don’t think that’s fair. You’re the one who’s shouting, if you’re so worried about being overheard. And you’ve got methods of contraception you haven’t even bothered to take out of the box. What about that diaphragm you’ve made so much fun of? All you’ve shown me is soul-destroying lingerie from Paris.’

Now she was crying, but she tried not to let him see. She knew it was true, that she was blaming him more than was fair. Ever since he had brought her to Moscow, she had tended to blame him more and more for everything. She had forgotten how to take responsibility for herself. There were no avenues for it; she had no choices. She felt boxed in, suspended.

‘They do listen!’ she said with a feeling of pathetic self-righteousness. ‘They think they know just when people will let their guard down. And anyway I’m sure they’re bored out of their minds, so it’s like – it’s like – pornography to them – which you can’t get here.’ Her voice trailed away querulously. ‘This is a – very – puritanical society. You know the joke – Khrushchev’s joke – everyone repeats – there IS no sex in the Soviet Union. The atmosphere here is not – natural. It affects people in the weirdest ways. It makes them – sick.’

‘Oh, Christ, Nina. You’re talking nuts. Where do you get this stuff? Just stop.’ There was disgust in his voice, and a kind of horror. She was right for all he knew, but he couldn’t let these ideas into his head. He didn’t want to start thinking like this. He was already afraid that what she had said might never leave him now; he felt it spreading in him, like a disease.

‘I don’t think tonight’s the night anyway, Nina,’ he growled as she stood there with her tears dropping into the sink, ignored. ‘Frankly, I feel chilled to the core. But maybe that’s what you’re trying for. You’ll be perfectly safe from sex and babymaking. I’ll sleep on the sofa.’