Leninsky Prospekt. Katherine Bucknell
and then all those documents were confiscated over there. Naturally, our parents destroyed everything to do with my sister, they were so distressed. They’re dead now, and that house has been sold, and Dr Ainsworth is dead, too, and his office closed years ago.’
Thus, it had been established firmly, once and for all. But Mother knew, Aunt Josephine knew, Nina knew, John knew. And at a small, sequestered bank in upstate New York, there had been an enormous pile of money building up quietly during the years Mother was away. Nina’s grandparents hadn’t wished to expunge their daughter from memory at all. On the contrary, they had left her a fortune in hopes of luring her home.
Eventually, Nina’s mother had stopped trying to persuade Nina to wait out John’s Moscow tour in Buffalo or in New York.
‘I can’t go back and sit in that gallery on Madison Avenue all day, Mother. It never meant anything to me, no matter how much I love paintings, drawings. Where could it lead? I want to be with my husband. I need to be.’
She and her mother had silently begun to pretend that Moscow would be Europe: parties, museums, opera and ballet, a desirable post for a young American wife. A post that called for a spectacular wardrobe, because that seemed to be the only preparation they could make.
The trunks and suitcases had already been jammed when the Davenports left Washington; the cartons of books, linen, kitchen and cleaning supplies, toilet paper, were sealed. So in Paris, between fittings and pilgrimages to the Opéra, the Louvre, the Sainte Chapelle, Nina bought another trunk from Louis Vuitton and began to fill its sleek emptiness with the finest personal items she could find, make-up and stockings and belts and scarves and gloves and shoes and fly-away silk nightgowns and chemises and armour-weight girdles that she believed could stop a bullet at close range. Last of all she had packed the beautifully hand-sewn clothes when they were ready. It had seemed like a lifetime’s trousseau, assembled as if she might never be able to visit such shops and such craftsmen again. Some of it she had never even worn, and already the lifetime was running out. Hers and the world’s, ticking away in the agitated, overcast, windy October twilight. Soon, unexpectedly soon.
The tears burned inside her straight, broad nose and around the rims of her wide, blue, ruined eyes. She felt the nuclear panic again, like a black wave rising, smoking at her, and the exhausted sensation of trying to quell it. She straightened her neck from the top of her spine as she had so often watched the dancers do lately, squinted hard at the stage. She considered that there was probably no one in the Bolshoi tonight who remained unaware that the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States had finally reached a cosmic stare-down over the missiles which Khrushchev had positioned in Cuba during September and early October. In some half-conscious, continually patrolling corner of her mind, Nina pictured him wherever he might be – closeted with the Presidium, pacing his dining-room floor, on his way to watch a travelling Bulgarian show – shaking his cruelly belittled fist, scowling pugnaciously at President Kennedy, his accidental nemesis. Both sides were now spitting into the abyss, she thought, the whistling nothingness beyond Armageddon.
It’s worse, being in the audience, she decided. The dancers can at least dance. Being forced to stand by, to take it, whatever comes – you almost wish it would just goddamn happen and be over with. Khrushchev goes on giving orders, writing letters; the president holds meetings, makes speeches. As if they’ve narrowed down the whole universe to just the two of them. And they can’t even talk to each other. Don’t speak each other’s language. Still she couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t conceive of it.
She longed pathetically for the fear-free ebullience of the New York City Ballet’s opening night at the Bolshoi two and a half weeks ago. And she remembered from the opening programme the ballet called Agon. Contest. Struggle. It sums up everything, she thought; it might as well have been a prophecy. She stared at Scotch Symphony but what she saw now was the endless blue-lit set of Agon, without floor, without walls, the plain modern leotards and tights. It had begun with wit, with saucy, twisting shoulders and hips – sophisticated, playful; but then a darkness, an undertow of mistiming, anxious syncopations had set in, bodies moving perfectly out of time, on top of the beat, before it, beside it, with deliberate mismatched precision; the swing of a leg kicking off the swing of some other leg, catapulting it further, so that the energy escalated, towards the limit of control. In the pas de deux, the guarded pride of the rooted, muscular black dancer, the haughty energy of the ballerina. The tension that had built between them was more than sex, more than race; it was every tension, every conflict epitomized, acted out. They and the others, gladiators, had issued challenge upon reckless challenge, dare upon bodily dare, raising the ante to impossible heights of technical virtuosity, chancing the edge of doom. Even now, Nina heard Stravinsky’s bright, hectic music above Mendelssohn’s; even now she saw those dancers and that dance.
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.