Leninsky Prospekt. Katherine Bucknell
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