My Sergei (23 page)

When we flew back to Moscow the next week, I was scared even to hold Daria in my arms, because I thought she would cry right
away. But she was fine. We discussed with my mom whether they should come along on the tour next year, but then I had a bad
dream. I dreamed I left Daria in a hotel room, and when I got back the housekeeper was yelling at me: “You can’t leave babies
alone for such a long time!” Very scary. I took that as a sign not to travel with Daria.

We were like gypsies, always living out of hotels and suitcases. Stars on Ice had a Christmas break, and Sergei and I went
down to Florida to stay in Brian Orser’s parents’ condominium in Saint Petersburg. We didn’t have anywhere to practice. We
were just enjoying the weather. Everywhere else it was winter, and here it was summer.

It was still romantic to be with Sergei, and at this condominium I could buy food, cook him dinner, light candles—all the
things we couldn’t do in a hotel. We’d been thinking about buying a house somewhere. If we had a house in the States, my mom
could stay there with Daria, and we could at least go visit them when there was a break in the tour. Somewhere closer than
Moscow.

Lynn Plage had given us the name of a real estate agent in Tampa, and since we didn’t have anything else to do, we started
to look at some homes. He started by showing us some very bad places that were cheap. Then he took us to a community in Tampa
with a gate and a little lake. There were two day-care centers in this community, and there was a skating rink just twenty
minutes away. He showed us a model house that had a girl’s room all made up, painted pink, with ballet tutus on the bed. Everything
beautiful. And we were thinking it was just perfect for Daria.

The house had three bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, a backyard, and a screened-in pool. All of it tasteful and perfectly
arranged. It looked so cute, and we kept saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if Daria and Mom were here?” I wanted all my relatives
to move into this house. So we asked the man, “Can we have
this
house?”

He said no, that it was the model. But then he said they could build us the exact same house on another lot, and even move
the furniture out of the model house and into our new one. The way this real estate agent talked, he just made you buy the
house. You had no choice. “Just come tomorrow,” he said, “and we’ll have the contract for you.” So we came the next day, which
happened to be Christmas Eve, and signed the contract.

As we were driving away, we both were wondering if what we just did was such a good idea.

But we were so young, and it really didn’t feel like a big decision. And we thought we had to buy another car, because this
house had a two-car garage. The house was finished in April, just as they said it would be, and Sergei and I came back and
lived in it for two or three days. No more. We had to go up to Ottawa and begin working with Marina on our Olympic program.
We never moved into this house, and Daria, whom we bought it for, has seen it only once. Like I said, Sergei and I never really
planned anything. We seemed to live one day to the next.

W
e missed Daria’s first Christmas. With sadness and
resignation, we sent toys and clothes home to her in Moscow, and we spent New Year’s 1993 by ourselves in Dallas, the third
straight year we’d been away from home.

I said to Sergei, “Let’s do surprises for each other this year. Don’t tell me what you’re going to get me, and I won’t say
what I’m going to get you.” He agreed to try, although I knew he disliked shopping for me alone.

We went to a mall and picked a spot to meet back at in three hours. I bought some things for him, had them all wrapped, and
came back to the appointed place. He was waiting. “All set, Serioche?”

He wasn’t all set at all. He asked me to come with him. He wanted to show me what he was thinking of buying, but he didn’t
know the size, and he wasn’t sure if I would like it. Sergei never understood that the surprise was as important as the gift,
that his picking something out for me alone, without help, was the best guarantee I would like it. But there was nothing I
could do except follow him. It was a warm-up suit from Polo, and he made me try it on before he bought it. So it wasn’t a
surprise again.

Back in the hotel we waited until midnight to celebrate the New Year. It was just the two of us, and when the time came, we
drank champagne and cognac. The hotel had given us a can of Texas black beans that we were supposed to open for luck, which
we did. But it was a little sad, because none of our close friends or family were around us. Paul Theofanous had lent me a
book of poems by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, beautiful love poems, and reading about life in Moscow and Saint Petersburg,
knowing that Daria was back there with my mother and father, made me cry.

Life at home had completely changed since our childhood. When the Soviet Union broke up, it was weird, but not a big change
for me and Sergei, since we spent so much time traveling in other countries. But for my parents and for Sergei’s mother and
sister, the change was radical and touched them every day.

Moscow had become crowded with refugees from the warring republics in the south. These people would be huddled in the subway
stations, drinking, and smoking marijuana, sometimes begging, sometimes stealing, things we’d never seen when we were young.
There was no sense of nostalgia for the old days, but there was a great deal of stress and unrest, which was new.

Moscow was now very wild and open, with Mafia types demanding payment from everyone who opened a business. It was like America
when the Mafia ruled during Prohibition. Give the Russians time. All we need is another sixty or seventy years to catch up.
Businessman
was now a word in Russian:
beez-neez-man.
But the rules … what rules? It was bizarre. Ladies would go into a store, buy ten bottles of perfume, or five pairs of shoes,
then walk out and try to sell these wares on the street for a small markup. Prices were soaring from inflation, making it
very difficult for pensioners like Sergei’s mother.

In the old days everything was quiet and safe, but there was no progress, no improvement in people’s lives. Everyone lived
on the same level, but there was no freedom. I personally never felt this lack of freedom, but Sergei did—very much so —
because he read more, because he was older, and because he understood more. He knew a lot about Stalin, and he described him
to me as someone who wasn’t a person, who was unbelievable, so terrible, so wicked. He hated Stalin very much. And although
we seldom talked about such things, he also felt badly toward Gorbachev. He didn’t hate him, but one time his name came up
on television, and Sergei said simply, “He’s not a good person. He destroyed Russia, made a good life for himself. He made
changes too fast.”

It surprised me to hear him say this, because under Gorbachev, our lives—Sergei’s and mine—improved, and we could easily
go to America to become professional skaters. But Sergei saw it from the eyes of his parents, who couldn’t understand this
new world with all these new ideas. My grandfather hated Gorbachev, too. That entire generation had spent their lives always
listening to their leaders telling them to go straight, go straight, go straight. And now all of a sudden Gorbachev tells
them to turn right. He’d be on TV all day long talking about changes, and it made old people angry because they were too old
to benefit from these changes, and now they’d be left behind. They worked all their lives for one thing, and now, suddenly,
they are told that that thing was wrong. Even if it’s better for the young people, it’s worse for the old. So Sergei was upset
about his parents, who were closer to the old regime than my parents, since they worked for the police. It was like after
an entire lifetime of hard work and sacrifice, someone had said to them, “Your revolution, the past seventy years, was worthless.”

I don’t believe there’s a big difference between the Russian people and the American people. Not deep down. Only that Americans
know how to work, and Russians are just learning this. In Russia, for many, many years—for many generations, in fact—it
wasn’t possible to improve your lot in life by working harder. This was true both under the Communists and under the czars.
But now this has changed, and in a short time people are learning that to take two jobs is something to be admired. That anyone
with energy and brains and a special talent can succeed. They’re starting to become workaholics. But they’re also starting
to find a better life.

Sergei did not quite think this way. He was Russian to his soul, and was only comfortable there. He came to America to work,
and he returned to Russia to find peace of mind. He thought the fundamental difference between Americans and Russians was
that the Russian culture was so rich, so old, that the people had a very deeply rooted mentality. There was a stolidness,
a steadfastness, a stoicism, and a respect for tradition that was uniquely Russian. Americans have a very young culture by
comparison. Americans see something that’s new, and they love it right away, they use it right away, and they throw it right
away, because there’s always something coming along to replace it.

• • •

We hadn’t definitely decided whether to compete in the 1994 Olympics yet, but just in case, we were working on our double
axels every day, using our practice time to our best advantage. If we decided we wanted to compete, we had to write a letter
to the International Skating Union by February 10, asking for amateur reinstatement. Finally we decided to do this.

After touring two months through the eastern United States and Canada, we went to Ottawa in early May to talk to Marina about
some ideas for Lillehammer. We decided on a flamenco number for the short program, and she played us Beethoven’s
Moonlight
Sonata for the long program, and we liked it right away. She told us she’d been saving this piece of music for us ever since
she’d left Russia. Sergei, particularly, liked this number. It was the first time he’d ever responded to a piece of music
so strongly.

Marina and Sergei had identical tastes. They were kindred spirits in ways that had always made me a little bit jealous. Maybe
more than a little bit, I admit. When Marina worked with us, I thought she became more beautiful, more creative. It was like
she was born for us, and we were born for her. She’d choreograph the movements she wanted us to do on the ice, and Sergei
would do them perfectly the first time. He knew exactly how she wanted us to move our arms, to hold our heads. Sergei and
Marina heard the music exactly the same. I had to learn these things. But I learned.

Marina loved Sergei, I think, which was difficult for me. I treasured working with her, but I was also uncomfortable around
her. I didn’t particularly like all the time the three of us spent together off the ice, interesting as it was, for Marina
was educated in music, ballet, dance history, and art. She was full of stories, and I couldn’t help feeling inadequate. At
the same time, I realized that Marina was like a gift of God for us, the only one who could create the kind of programs people
grew to expect of us, and that Sergei insisted on, because his was always the final word.

We returned to Moscow in mid-May, and once more we were reunited with Daria. One of the things we did in the month we were
home was take a complete physical exam from Dr. Viktor Anikanov, who was the speed-skating doctor who had taken care of Sergei
at the Calgary Olympics when he came down with a stomach flu. It was a very thorough exam. We got on stationary bicycles,
and they gave us each an EKG, where they put nodules on our chests and tested our hearts at rest and during and after strong
physical exertion. Dr. Anikanov gave us a clean bill of health. And we had another one of these physicals in the fall.

I think of this often, since two years later Sergei died of coronary heart disease. Two of the arteries to his heart were
completely blocked. I have talked to Dr. Anikanov since, and he told me that after Sergei’s funeral he went back and rechecked
all these tests to see if it were possible he’d missed something. He said there was nothing, not even a tiny clue there was
something amiss with Sergei’s heart, except that it was slightly enlarged, which is typical of an athlete. Now I’ve learned
that Sergei was born with a defective gene that was probably responsible for his heart attack.

On June 15 we returned to Ottawa to again work with Marina, this time bringing Mom and Daria. In addition to working on the
program, we did ballet classes and a conditioning program created by Marina’s husband, Alexei Chetverukhin, whose brother,
Sergei, had been a silver medalist in singles in the 1972 Olympics. Alexei was a conditioning expert. We skated about two
hours in the morning, then lifted weights and did running. Sprints one day—thirty meters, sixty meters, four hundred meters
—and the next day we’d do three laps fast, rest, then three laps fast, rest. That was the killer. Then we’d have another
hour of skating in the evening. Sometimes we had time to play tennis, too.

It was very difficult for us to both skate and do off-ice conditioning. Back in the days of the Soviet Union, we never had
dry-land training when we were skating. It was one or the other. But we felt we had to speed everything up because Lillehammer
was less than eight months away, and I’d missed six full months of training when I had Daria. All our muscles were sore, but
it was fun to come home exhausted and watch Daria growing up.

One day she suddenly appeared upstairs. “How did
you
get here, little one?” I said. She had learned to crawl.

Marina told us that since Daria’s birth, we had become more beautiful as pairs skaters, more professional, with a deeper understanding
of each other. She said we fit together better, that our lines were cleaner. Performing every night in the shows had taught
us how to express our feelings to the audience, to skate the program as a whole, rather than simply going from element to
element. “You’re doing everything I told you so perfectly. It’s almost like you were preparing your whole career for this
program,” she said one day.