Читать книгу Leninsky Prospekt - Katherine Bucknell - Страница 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Nina said was, ‘Not yet.’

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

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

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

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

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

Again they giggled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She couldn’t face vodka, champagne. She took a glass of ice water, and nodded, keeping her eyes down until he was gone.

You’re completely pathetic, she told herself, sipping it. Then she made herself get up from her chair and put the glass on the table. She smoothed the stiff green silk zibeline of her sleeveless Givenchy cocktail dress and went on into the bland modern ballroom.

The rows of tables draped in heavy white cloth were stacked with crested blue and gold-rimmed plates and lined with bowlegged silver frames waiting for chafing dishes to be set in them. Beside a row of napkins folded like bishops’ mitres, cutlery protruding from inside, Nina found baskets of bread already set out. She helped herself.

The first soft, white American roll made her feel famished; she looked around her, took another furtively, then swung full-circle and leaned boldly against the table as she chewed.

She felt better after the second roll and ventured back towards the party.

The rooms were filling up, throbbing and swaying. The crowd swelled around the ambassador in slow bunches whenever someone important arrived, the Soviet minister for culture, the Soviet foreign minister, the British ambassador, and Nina watched a few familiar visitors slipping by without shaking the ambassador’s hand. They made off quickly around the corners to the music room and the small green dining room where they couldn’t easily be seen. She admired their daring; at a party like this, a Russian could lose his watchful companions and mingle freely, privately, for a few precious moments. Some had concerns which might be regarded as professional; others were seriously interested in the food. But everyone knew that the opportunities were brief, chancy.

When Balanchine came in, the receiving line broke down in chaos. Guests who had been glad-handed through now surged back against the flow to congratulate and praise him. But he moved deftly forward, leaving plenty of their attention to the ancient Bolshoi ballerina Elizaveta Pavlovna Gerdt who was escorting him. He was soon surrounded by American and Soviet press in a space he instinctively created for himself in the middle of the main salon. One of the aides standing near the ambassador to mouth names in his ear broke away to join Balanchine’s group, making it somehow official.

Nina sensed a hearty, authentic excitement in the air. A few of the ballerinas came in still holding armfuls of bouquets. Had someone advised them to do this charming, inconvenient thing? she wondered. Or had they been offered nowhere to leave the flowers, no vases, no water? She felt the energy of their upright, strong-footed beauty filling the room, and she went to help them, as if she were now joining in with a performance. She signalled to a waiter, and together they made great show of relieving the girls of their flattering burdens, raising the flowers high in the air, bearing them off to a basement pantry to be kept fresh in cold water until the end of the evening.

When Nina came back she was smiling happily and went in search of a drink from the bar set up on a table in the music room.

‘It was a terrific success, though,’ Fred Wentz was saying to a tall, imposing man with a monumental, cadaverous face and close-cropped dark hair. ‘If you think the applause was reticent, you have to bear in mind it was mostly official Moscow in the audience tonight. They are bureaucrats, civil servants, heads of various unions and labour organizations. They are not the ballet lovers. They attend because it’s a great state occasion and the tickets are given to them as a reward, a form of recognition.’ He dropped his voice. ‘The point is, they have to attend, whether they want to or not.’

‘No reaction at all for Serenade,’ the man grunted. His voice was Yankee, cultured, clipped.

‘Have you met Nina Davenport?’ Wentz asked, half turning towards her, pulling her into the conversation as she stepped back from the bar with her icy Scotch tilting in her hands.

The tall man nodded at her with faint recognition, his tan eyes electric, watchful behind horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

She said, ‘I was hanging around the theatre, trying to help find the sets.’

‘Oh, yes. Thank God,’ he replied, with a tone of dry impatience that conveyed Olympian disdain for the amateur uselessness of the personnel in charge of costumes and sets.

It struck Nina as comical, but she restrained a burbling laugh.

Then he held out his gigantic hand, and hers was lost in its bone-cracking grip. ‘Lincoln Kirstein.’

Her eyes widened in excitement. ‘Oh! Mr Balanchine’s – partner. What an honour.’

He pressed his lips together and stared at her solemnly.

So Nina continued, ‘But it’s true, you know, what Mr Wentz was just saying. The party officials and workers who were there tonight are a stolid bunch. There’s a mania here for ballet, for art generally. Very articulate and informed. The Soviet audience will have no trouble at all appreciating the New York City Ballet and Mr Balanchine’s work. Really. They are primed for it – starved, even.’

Nina felt Kirstein’s eyes leave hers and rove over her shoulder; her earnestness felt superfluous, embarrassing. His lips in repose had the shape of a sneer, of doubt; he wasn’t listening. She stopped talking as the rotund figure of a powerful Soviet ballet critic inserted himself into their group just beside her, nodding, sweating a little, gripping a tiny glass of vodka in his fist.

But now Kirstein asked her in a stentorian voice, ‘Starved?’

Nina shrugged, reluctant to explain herself in front of the critic. She said demurely, awkwardly, ‘It will be interesting to see how a broader Russian audience responds – to – to – so many new combinations, such an unfamiliar choreographic vocabulary. I think they’ll see right away that there is meaning even in Balanchine’s “plotless” ballets. The Russian audience is – very special.’

Kirstein’s eyes flickered from her face to the critic’s and back again until Wentz bestirred himself to make introductions all around.

The critic preened and smoothed back his thick, oily hair. Then he remarked in sonorous, archly cultivated English, ‘I understand Mr Balanchine chooses to ignore the Soviet request to remove Prodigal Son from upcoming programmes. May we suppose he clings to this old-fashioned and narrow-minded religious narrative because it reveals something of personal importance about how he feels on returning to his own fatherland?’

Nina was struck by the suggestiveness of this question, but it was offered with numbing pomposity, and the agenda she recognized behind it warned her not to respond.

There was a silence.

At last, Kirstein, with a formal little bow of his head, a large, precise finger adjusting his eyeglasses, slowly said, ‘Fascinating question. I wouldn’t care to reply for Mr Balanchine. It’s a good ballet. Overly ingenious in places; deeply moving – the vulnerability of the son at the end, his shame finally covered by the father’s cloak. The father implacable. I’ve always felt pleased Mr Balanchine agreed to revive it. At one time he didn’t believe in reviving anything, only in moving forward. The past doesn’t appear to interest him; now is what interests him, now and what is still to come. The language of ballet is a breath, a memory, and soon looks out of fashion. There’s Prokofiev’s music, of course – a Russian who did return.’

This produced another silence. Nina bit her lip, sensing that Kirstein meant them all to reflect on Prokofiev’s artistic dehydration, his death, exhausted by official disapproval, on the exact same day as Stalin’s.

Kirstein added under his breath, almost as if turning it over in his mind, ‘One would have thought music and dance less susceptible to state control than literature, but perhaps not.’

Wentz, with uncharacteristic nervousness, ventured, ‘You’re a poet, aren’t you, sir?’

‘Not an important one,’ growled Kirstein, dismissing himself, ‘but I admire poetry. If I could read Russian, I’d like to read Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Derzhavin – do you recommend others?’

Nina felt moisture springing on her forehead, underneath her arms; she tried desperately to concentrate on what should come next in such a conversation. Who else belonged on this list? But none of the group seemed to find Kirstein’s remarks at all normal. Nobody answered him.

The critic gave a weird half smile, then said caustically, as if nobody had mentioned poetry at all, ‘The ballet seems to have a story, at least.’

Wentz burst out noisily, ‘Spectacular jumps, too, doesn’t it? That’s what I’ve heard.’

They all laughed with relief.

Kirstein indulged Wentz’s boyish enthusiasm. ‘Yes, in the beginning there are a few.’

The critic, sly-eyed, avoiding Nina’s gaze, remarked to Wentz under his breath, ‘Wait until you see the pas de deux with the Siren. Licensed carnality, staggering.’

Wentz winked at Nina. ‘So who’s the Siren? Is she here tonight?’ he asked and looked around optimistically.

Following his eyes, Nina caught sight of all their vivacious backs moving and trembling in the huge gilded mirror on the wall behind Wentz. For a moment, she watched their sparring, their sniffing, their strained mutual effort to please and be pleased, and then she saw that the mirror also reflected another mirror hanging on the wall immediately behind her. Their little group was endlessly repeated in smaller and smaller panes of glass as if through a crystal tunnel or a kaleidoscope. She could even see the entrance to the state dining room behind her to her left; if he looked, Wentz could probably see the entrance to the grand salon from the front hall, behind him and around the corner to his right.

It’s like a dance studio, Nina thought, perfect for watching and being watched. Two dancers loped past behind her, a man and a woman, like upright gazelles, exotic in colourful party clothes, their long hair decorative as plumes, their bodies musical, moody. They were talking excitedly, full of the brilliance of opening night. Nina studied the back of her own dress, its wide straps interlacing as a bow between her shoulder blades, emerald green in the underbrush of dark suits and drab Soviet evening wear; she opened her shoulders a little, loosened her arms, faced the critic, faced Kirstein, as they finally ceased to shake with willed pseudo-mirth.

Then she nervily started in, ‘Balanchine’s father died years ago, didn’t he? He must feel a little guilty about that. Or sad anyway.’

She felt eyes lock onto her, and went on defiantly, ‘After all, he never had a chance to say goodbye, did he? That leaves a wound that never really heals. But if he included Prodigal Son as a gesture to his fatherland – well, it’s only an act of courtesy. He doesn’t mean to apologize for anything he’s done. You can tell that simply by watching the way he walks. In his own life story, it’s the father who is ruined anyway, not the son. And it’s not as if he plans to stay here, is it? It would be sheer sentimentality to imagine otherwise.’ Her voice was clear, ringing, steady.

There was another silence before the critic remarked appraisingly, ‘You are a psychologist, Mrs Davenport.’

Nina decided to accept this as a compliment despite feeling it was not intended to be one. ‘Thank you,’ she smiled.

‘As a young dancer, at the Maryinsky, Mr Balanchine enrolled at the Conservatory of Music just across the street from the theatre. So he studied piano and composing, too,’ said Kirstein, catching each of their eyes by turn and smoothly shifting the direction of the conversation, just as if he were a conductor bringing in the first violins, then the seconds, with a new, more predictable, more soothing theme. ‘What really intrigues him is the music,’ Kirstein continued, ‘that’s what Mr Balanchine’s trying to express.’

But Wentz bounded along in yet another direction. ‘Speaking of music, I guess you all know that Stravinsky is in Russia now, too? Chairman Khrushchev will receive him later this week to congratulate him on his eightieth birthday.’

And then Wentz abruptly reached between Nina and the critic, grabbing another grey-suited American, pulling him with his companions into their circle. ‘Tom, say hello. I’ve just been telling our friends that Stravinsky is here this week, too. It’s an incredible time for our two nations. Friendly, exciting. Don’t you think?’

Nina was smiling so hard that her cheeks were starting to ache, and she nodded and smiled some more as they were all now once again introduced.

Tom Phipps had arrived not long before the Davenports to help prepare for the September visit of the US Secretary of Agriculture. He was still here, working alongside the young assistant agricultural attaché at the embassy, Rodney Carlson. Carlson was dark, floppy-haired, skinny, and wore eyeglasses with frames so black and heavy that they threw his eyes into shadow.

With Phipps and Carlson was an upright, red-haired Russian, grey at the temples, balding, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. Penkovsky said in good enough English that he was a member of the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research Work.

The greetings were formal, superficial; Nina’s eyes drifted to the mirror again, and she had the half-conscious sense that someone else’s eyes flickered away. She scanned the reflected crowd, and for a moment she couldn’t help but see herself as the centre of something, her green dress washed like a bit of seaweed or like a splinter of bright broken glass by the rolling surge of partygoers. Her little circle seemed to spread and mingle indistinguishably with the next circle as a body leaned this way or that, talking, listening, in an endless shifting chain of energy, social appetite, interconnections all around the room. Then her eyes did meet someone else’s, pale, rimless, in a fleshy blur of face. She turned around, summoning a smile out of courtesy, but still she saw only broad backs behind her.

It made her feel wobbly, hot, once again desperate to sit down. And as she swayed a little on her stiletto heels, she noticed John all the way across the room, looking straight at her from his height, like a beacon, familiar, unobscured. She couldn’t read his expression, he was too far away. Nevertheless, she felt reassured, as if he had telegraphed encouragement, concern. He’s the one who’s entitled to have an eye on me, she thought.

John pressed towards her through the shifting, roaring rooms thinking, Nina’s in the thick of it, jeez. Surrounded by goddamned spooks. I’m positive Carlson’s one, attaching himself to that Russian technocrat, Penkovsky, pretending he’s not trying to. A pretty woman offers them such an easy excuse to congregate; why don’t they use somebody else’s wife for that, or a ballerina even.

Nearby he noticed Alex Davison, the fair-haired, full-lipped young air force attaché in his thick round eyeglasses framed with translucent flesh-pink plastic; he was chatting earnestly to two stalwart Russian bureaucrats, clean-shaven, arctic-eyed, featureless. Davison gestured enthusiastically towards the dining room and ballroom, inviting his Russian acquaintances to eat; he put an encouraging hand on a strapping back. How could the Russians resist? John wondered. But one of them shook his head, smiling, wagging two fingers towards the floor where he stood, as if to say, Meet me here.

So they’re not letting Penkovsky out of their sight anyway. None of them, John concluded.

He considered Wentz; he considered Phipps. Latching on to Balanchine’s impresario, as if they were actually interested in ballet. Lincoln Kirstein, thought John, there is one deep guy. Maybe too deep to plumb. Could he be one?

But Nina’s for real; she’s there for the beauty. He smiled with pleasure. She’ll be giving them all a load of her candour, including that Russian ballet know-it-all. If only we could all read Nina in Pravda tomorrow. I don’t want to miss this conversation, he thought. And she deserves to be rescued by now.

But as he set out across the floor, someone grabbed his elbow, pulled him back towards the ambassador.

Nina saw John stoop, turn away, move off. I’m handling it fine on my own, she told herself. Another hour or so. All I really need to do is hold up this dress. The dress can practically do it without me. But she longed to be near John.

Wentz drawled to Kirstein, ‘You’ll have to forgive these philistines. Rodney’s expertise is in fertilizers and corn production.’ Wentz’s accent seemed to Nina to grow more southern when he mentioned farming. ‘I may be the only one who’s done any homework. I know all about Stravinsky, our other Russian exile – who wrote the music for your third ballet tonight, Agon, hey? But you have to admit, it was pretty hard to make sense of that.’ And he gave a belly laugh, elbowing the Soviet critic in the ribs, acting the hillbilly.

This elicited a round of pedagogy from Kirstein, which was delivered with a thin pretence of caring whether it was understood. ‘I’m sure you know that Mr Stravinsky composed Agon partly by what’s called serial method – using a sequence of twelve tones – a new technique for him. And the choreography is also organized around the idea of twelve – twelve dancers, twelve movements, dividing into twos and threes and fours, duos, trios and quartets. The timings are exactly projected in minutes and seconds. It’s exquisitely made. Spare, undecorated.’

Wentz seemed positively buoyant at the news. ‘Well, isn’t that something! It sounds like rocket science on stage!’

Again, naïve enthusiasm won the day, and there was much laughter and more ribbing.

The Russian critic remarked, half-smirking, competitive, ‘We have our own Soviet ballet of the space age. Konstantin Sergeyev, of the Kirov, has made Distant Planet in honour of our hero Gagarin’s flight – and with Gagarin we truly were first, long before John Glenn. But, you see, our ballerinas are not trained to count bars in the way of the West – ours dance with the soul, with the spirit. Dance is not a science for us, mechanistic, nuclear; it is an art. It transcends the physical, from within, even.’

Nina thought that Penkovsky, with his fine, bulbous nose, the soft cleft in his chin, his pouting mouth, looked tense. Why couldn’t he, too, find rocket science amusing? His eyes were gentle, heavy-browed, hooded, but there seemed to be something the matter with them, some watering and redness, scum he kept wiping at, and for a moment Nina wondered if he was actually weeping. Really, Nina thought, Penkovksy seemed hardly able to stand still, as if his clothes itched, as if he might be in pain. He constantly glanced at Carlson, then glanced away, swivelling his whole head, even his shoulders, around behind his gaze, as if it were hard for him to see anything unless he looked directly at it.

A waiter passed and Wentz whirled around, lifting glasses from the tray. ‘Who can hold another vodka?’ Only the ballet critic accepted one, so Wentz drank the other himself, crying, ‘Vashe zdorovye!’ and lifting his glass.

With his eye resting coldly on the critic, Kirstein continued, ‘I believe Agon was inspired by some French Baroque dances. In fact, the dances are named on the score. So, as well as the ballistic feeling you have noted,’ he tipped his massive head towards Wentz, ‘there is also something from the Renaissance, and you can hear it perfectly clearly, a sound of clarions. Or sometimes you can almost imagine there is a lute playing. Picture a courtly tournament, with dancing rather than fighting. The dancers are the knights – competing, showing off. They have no regard for risk. They pretend it’s easy, daring each other into one-upmanship, brinksmanship.’

Wentz smiled bashfully. ‘You lost me there, sir. My goodness.’ Then he turned to Nina, who unexpectedly found his look rather too direct, fresh even, so that she dropped her eyes. ‘Maybe you understand that, Mrs Davenport, being a dancer yourself?’

Before she could reply, Penkovsky intoned in a tired voice, ‘Come now, Mr Wentz. To anyone who follows the relations of our two governments, that interesting analysis should sound perfectly familiar.’

His voice gave Nina a chill, he seemed to speak from a depth of unhappiness, rage even, intense, suppressed. As she studied him, he looked away, perspiring, sweeping his head and shoulders all around the party as if he were searching for something, some hole in his existence, some gap through which he might slip.

Across the room, the American ambassador was at last circulating among his guests. John Davenport was still at his side.

‘Your wife’s a real pro, Davenport. She’s turned herself out very attractively, and just look at her making friends for us. Good for her. That’s what it’s all about.’

As they watched, Fred Wentz gave the Russian ballet critic a hearty slap on the back and pulled away from the group, gesturing in the air, one finger up, laughing, admonishing. John couldn’t hear anything but answering laughter. Then Wentz turned to Nina, leaned down close to her, whispered something. John saw him touch Nina’s bare shoulder casually, confidently, with his left hand before Wentz drifted off with Tom Phipps.

John pressed his lips together, the skin puckering out all around them in aggravation. Then he noticed that Phipps, thick-necked, muscular, almost immediately gravitated back towards Nina’s group. Phipps’s bullet-shaped skull showed pink-fleshed under his crew cut. He stood alone, his feet not quite flat on the floor, as if he might take another step, closer or further; his hands frisked his pockets, hunting for something, a pack of cigarettes.

What are they waiting for? John wondered. What are they expecting?

Phipps is definitely watching. And those two Russians are watching. And Davison, too.

He fell into step again with the ambassador who said, ‘I’ll go into supper with Balanchine and the director of the Bolshoi. Maybe you’d like to join your wife? Be sure she tells the dancers to eat all they can here where there’s plenty of food, would you?’

‘Fine, sir.’

As John turned back to look for Nina in the music room where he had just seen her, he nearly bumped into Wentz who remarked confidentially, ‘Your wife is certainly in possession of subtle opinions, isn’t she? How’d she get in with this whole ballet crowd?’

He found himself taken aback, not wanting to reply, but he said with grudging courtesy, ‘She danced herself. I thought you knew that. Had to quit when she was fifteen or so. Got injured. She loves the ballet scene, though, and I think – well – they can just tell she loves it, the dancers, that’s all.’

John wasn’t sure what he thought about Fred Wentz. At the office, he’d heard that Wentz had once been a career Foreign Service officer and had served a tour of duty in Russia towards the end of the 1950s. According to rumour, Wentz had been sent home for handing out copies of Dr Zhivago on the Moscow-Leningrad overnight train. Not that the Russians had ever found out or would even have complained much; it was supposedly Wentz’s own boasting that had gotten him into trouble. He was making Russian friends, talked openly and loudly of getting them other banned books, of how much he hated the interference with their right to know things. So he had left the State Department and gone to work in New York, for a big philanthropic foundation – Ford or Mellon or Rockefeller – handing out money instead of books, somebody else’s money, to the arts, culture, education. He had set up some programme to bring foreign students into the US, graduates, on the theory that they would take American ideals back abroad with them – if they ever went back.

It wasn’t entirely clear to John how Wentz had gotten himself picked to return to Moscow for the ballet tour. Nor how he’d snagged his apartment above the consular section in the embassy, an apartment which had stood empty all summer before he arrived, while longer-serving embassy staff who deserved to be comfortable there had been billeted in the bachelor quarters in America House on Kropotkinskaya Embankment. How could Wentz be CIA if he’d been sent home once already for showing poor judgement? Surely that would have blown any chance of advancement on the intelligence side? Maybe he traded on connections, Harvard, his southern pedigree. Kirstein was Harvard, too; maybe Kirstein had asked for Wentz. But resentment aside, John could see that Wentz had certain gifts – wit, urbanity, lightness of touch. He didn’t seem to be much of a typical southerner, his name, for instance, and the fact that he had settled in Manhattan. The flamboyance, the extravagant manners, the farmboy’s grinning awe hardly concealed Wentz’s intellect; but they made it gracious, bearable. Wentz clearly wasn’t surprised by much, and his Russian was still damn good.

‘I’m after an informal introduction to one of those pairs of legs.’ Wentz’s confession was accompanied by a disarming flush. ‘The greetings at the airport weren’t exactly intimate. Will Mrs Davenport do that for me, do you think? Even though I’m only an American?’