Nina begins to clear the glasses and empty punch jug off of the table, going in to the kitchen as many times as she can justify, in order to avoid Serge. At last she hears Viktor’s and Polina’s voices
coming up the hill, Polina jabbering happily about all the special things available for guests at the sanatorium where she and Serge stayed. Quickly Serge takes Vera by the arm and says that though Polina needs to be in Moscow, perhaps he might return and visit again. He lets go of her arm before she can reply, and jumps up to greet Polina. “It’s time we were off.” Not until they have pulled away in Serge’s dusty car does Nina breathe a sigh of relief.
That night the nightingale returns, quite late.
Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-trillll
…Steady and clear as taps on a piano keyboard. Haunting as it sounds, Nina is grateful for the song, for its insistence, its persistence, as it sings throughout the night.
T
HE NEXT DAY,
Nina and Vera sit together in the
banya
. It is a small wooden room just behind the dacha, not far from the river, so that they can easily go back and forth. Dark walls and in the corner a big stove with river stones piled up around the pipe. Steam rises in billows each time Nina ladles water onto the hot stones. Lying down on the wooden step, she feels the hot air envelope her, the heat extreme, nearly painful, filled with the scent of birch leaves. On the step across from her, Vera lies on her back, propped up by her elbows.
“Why do you put up with him?” Nina feels the heat touch her mouth when she speaks.
“Who?”
“Serge. He’s positively lecherous with you.”
Vera is briefly silent. “Maybe he can help us. Gersh, I mean. Serge knows people. Maybe he has some sort of pull.”
Nina considers this. “But why would he want to do anything to help
Gersh
?”
“Because I’ll ask him to. He likes me.”
His shyly lewd tone, his eager eyes…
“There might even be a way to have the charges erased.” Then
Vera’s voice becomes nearly tearful. “I can’t stop worrying about him. Gersh, I mean. What do you think they’re doing to him there?”
Poisoning his mind, probably—but Nina bites her tongue. “He’s strong, Verochka.”
Vera gives an odd, achy-sounding laugh. “So many men have offered themselves to me. Cried over me. Made all kinds of promises. Yet I love this strange one with a funny name and a crossed eye, and who wouldn’t even marry me.”
Nina tries to make light of it. “Think of it this way: it spared you a mother-in-law.”
A long, sad sigh from Vera. “I know you don’t get on with yours. But she’s been kind to me.”
“Well, you’ve seen how she manipulates Viktor,” Nina says. “And how she talks to me. I’m déclassé, you know. She has to keep reminding me I married ‘good stock.’ It’s the only way she can convince herself her grandchildren won’t be tainted.”
Vera seems to be considering this. “Will you give them to her?”
“Grandchildren?” Nina sighs loudly. “Ugh, Vera. I’m pregnant again.”
Vera says nothing.
“I guess today is the first day I’m admitting it.”
“Again,” Vera says, slowly, and then, “Don’t you douche?”
“Every time, with vinegar, it doesn’t work! And that sponge thing from Budapest is useless.” Nina lies still for a minute, suddenly hotter from her outburst. Well, it is the price paid, she supposed, for the tyrannical power of the attraction she still feels for Viktor—the electricity that still arcs between them. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll make an appointment as soon as we get home.”
Vera says, “Do you want children, ever?”
Children. As always, the word itself warms her, brings with it the aura of childhood: such pureness, the one innocent time in life. To grasp again that purity, to love, again, in that uncomplicated
way, laughing in the courtyard, Vera’s hand in hers at the Bolshoi audition…
“Children, yes. But pregnancy, childbirth?” Nina wishes it were less complicated. “You know what Alla told me, about when she was in labor? There she was, screaming in pain, and what did the doctor say? ‘Relax.’”
Vera laughs.
“Alla told her it was impossible to relax when she was having a hole drilled through her spine. So you know what she told her to do? ‘Recite Pushkin to yourself.’”
Vera says, “I remember one of the dancers in Leningrad telling me her labor went on for so long, the doctor threw himself on top of her, to try to push the baby out.”
“Ugh!”
“She didn’t even want a baby. But she didn’t realize she was pregnant until six months.”
“Luckily I at least don’t have that problem,” Nina tells her. “One girl I knew, before you came here, didn’t know at all until one day she had a miscarriage. Turned out she was already at five months.”
Vera asks, “But you can tell?”
“I get this heavy feeling in my abdomen. And then my breasts hurt. After the first time, now I know what to look out for.” She shakes her head. “But I can’t bear to tell Viktor again. He was so happy the first time. He thought I wanted to keep it. The next time I didn’t even tell him. And I told him we could try this summer. I feel horrible.”
The steam is settling again, so she stands up to ladle on some more water, and is briefly dizzy. “Of course not having children is one more thing his mother holds against me. You know what she told me? That all my jumping around onstage was what was keeping me from getting pregnant.”
After a moment, Vera says, “She puts vodka in the tea.”
“Viktor’s mother?” Nina sits back down on the bench. “Really?” Lying down again, she says, “I can’t believe it,” although of course it makes perfect sense. Always feeling “flu-ish”…
“I can’t believe you didn’t notice.”
An edge to her voice. For a moment Nina thinks she must have misheard. She looks over to Vera—still reclining passively, as if she has said nothing of note.
“I’ve been busy working hard for almost two years straight,” Nina says, trying to remain calm. “I don’t have time to notice every detail of other people’s lives.” But already her adrenaline has surged. “I dance nonstop. I don’t take ‘leave’ here and there. I don’t have Uncle Feliks write me a note every time a tendon hurts.” It’s the truth. Nina dances on sprained ankles and jammed kneecaps. The last show of the season she performed with a broken toe—froze it with chlorethyl and wrapped it tight, and then danced a four-act ballet flawlessly.
Vera’s posture has changed, stiffening as she props herself up. But Nina cannot stop herself. “I have work to do. I don’t have time to always…push myself into other people’s business. Prostitute myself with whichever man offers himself to me.”
“I’m not prostituting myself!”
“What do you call it, then?” Nina sits up, too quickly; her head rushes.
“Caring! Trying to help someone! Thinking about someone other than myself!”
“I think about people other than myself!” The two of them shouting, like anyone, no better than the awful apartment neighbors at home…
“Do you?” Vera’s voice changes. “Do you really?” Her tone flat, she says, “But you’re a ballerina, a star. How can you possibly have time to worry about other people? You’re so busy all the time. So busy you haven’t even noticed that your mother is…dying.”
Wincing in the burning air. “What are you talking about?”
A slow, concerned exhale. “She’s ill, Nina. The doctor came just before I left.” Vera waits a moment, seems to be thinking. “It’s probably just a matter of months.”
“Months?” Nina feels faint, damp with sweat. “Were you ever going to tell me?” And then, as if it is Vera’s fault that her mother is ill, “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I assumed you would have noticed how sick she was. I thought you would have noticed the great change in her. But you’ve been running around so much, and resting up so much, and thinking about yourself so much, you’ve barely had time to check in on her. Even when you do, you don’t really
see
her.”
Nina has begun trembling. Because it’s all true. She barely sees her anymore, Mother in her skirt full of flowers…. “Yes, I’m a bad daughter. You’re the good one.” She stands up and swoons from the heat. “I have to go.”
Vera says, “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just—”
The air stings as Nina pushes toward the door.
Outside she quickly wraps herself in a rough, stiff towel. The river below looks green, the droopy willow dipping its reflection as a troop of ducks drifts passively along. Nina feels how bright red her skin must be—with shame, she thinks, hurrying back to the house. “Viktor!”
“What’s wrong?”
“I need to go home. Right away. I’m sorry. I’ll take the train back, if you’ll take me to the station.” A fresh sheath of sweat has surfaced, and she wipes it away with the towel, too roughly, scraping the skin on her arms.
“Nina, stop that, you’ll rub your skin off. What’s going on?”
“I need to help Mother. She’s ill. You can stay on, I’ll know more soon. But I have to go.”
T
HOUGH SHE TRIED
to read through the page proofs with care, Drew had to stop repeatedly, to refocus, each time she became distracted by the odd turn of her heart. Sometimes she even found herself shaking her head, as if that might clear it of those other thoughts. Leaning into him, the weight of him. At certain moments it seemed impossible that she had really done that, leaned into his body, stepped up to him like that. And then she would recall how good it had felt to do what she so rarely allowed herself—to act on her feelings.
Really, she reminded herself, there was no time for personal disruptions. Between coordinating with Miriam in Exhibitions and dealing with Public Relations and giving various small jobs to her new assistant, there wasn’t time for much else at all. If she could just sign off on the galley proof of the supplemental brochure, that would be one less thing to worry about. The printer would send back five hundred copies on good thick glossy paper for next week’s pre-auction dinner, where it would be perused in distracted boredom as attendees waited out various speeches and the clinking of glasses and whatever other activities had been planned. Then the folded programs, printed out on good, thick paper, would be tossed away with the rest of the garbage.
Funny, how none of it seemed to matter so much, now. Not the auction, or the jewelry, or proving anything to herself. What mattered was that she might be able to find something out for Grigori.
Just this morning Drew had contacted yet another “expert” whose name she had been given, and who might know something about where to find the jeweler’s archives. No matter that it was something of a pipe dream, or that there was little chance she would discover anything in time for the auction. Normally Drew would have looked forward, at this point, to putting the entire project behind her. Now, though, she wanted to keep trying, to find
something that might help Grigori figure out if what he thought about Nina Revskaya was correct.
A family relation of his…a family connection. Drew found her thoughts following that same well-traveled route, from Nina’s bracelet and earrings to Grigori’s pendant—all of which now lay sealed in unceremonial clear plastic baggies, awaiting next week’s preview. The pendant, Grigori Solodin’s pendant, and the spider with a pouch like a parachute underneath it…The letters Nina Revskaya said were not hers…
Drew’s heart sank all over again, recalling how she had caused Nina Revskaya to cry. Just by showing her those two photographs…In fact Drew herself had felt shaken, at the reality of those pictures, at their silent reminder: that the people we are closest to can disappear like that, even the people most rooted in our lives, the ones we think of as constant. Jen and Kate and Stephen; her mother, her father. They too, like Drew herself, would at some point exist merely in images—photographs, recollections.
At the thought, Drew pulled her shoulders back, shook her head again. Photographs—the supplemental, the final proofs. There were still blank spaces where the pictures would go. Drew turned to her computer to make a final check. First came a photograph of the young Nina Revskaya leaping, her legs a horizontal line in midair. Then a newspaper clipping announcing her defection, and then a glamour shot from a Van Cleef & Arpels photo shoot. Next Drew had added the image of Nina Revskaya and her husband, cropped from one of Grigori’s photographs.
For the final page of the brochure, on the back, Drew had selected a candid image: Nina Revskaya and three other Bolshoi dancers, leaning against the barre in a practice room. Drew had found it on the Web, where there were archives of such photographs, dancers in rows at rehearsal, or off to the side, watching a teacher’s demonstration. It was these unposed photographs, especially ones of the corps, that
Drew found most intriguing, the way they captured who these dancers were—just girls, most of them, with still-young bodies and youth in their eyes, the nameless girls no one remembered anymore. They really were nameless, some of them: every once in a while a photograph would list an “unidentified dancer,” so that Drew found herself pausing, wondering about these girls who, despite having been part of one of the world’s best ballet companies, had been excluded from historical record.
As she double-checked the image that she had selected for the back page, Drew noticed something. The woman to Nina Revskaya’s right. Something ethereal about her, and familiar. That dark look in her eyes. Drew thought for a moment, then turned back to the folder containing the items Grigori had lent her. She felt sad all over again as she found the photograph with the couple she had cropped out for the brochure. Yes, she was right: this was the same woman—the one Nina Revskaya had called her best friend. So she too was a dancer. According to the online archive, the woman’s name was Vera Borodina.
Clicking back through the computer windows, Drew returned to her cache of archival photographs. Indeed she was able to find two others of Vera Borodina, one of them particularly beautiful, a still from
Swan Lake
. So she too had been famous—or at least on her way to being famous. Behind her, in the dark background forest, were five other swan-girls, the nameless ones—wishing, Drew supposed, that they might one day play the lead swan.