pretty communist to me,’ John remarked diffidently.
Nina nodded. ‘I know. But it’s something pre- all that, some older ideal. It’s certainly Russian just as much as it’s American. Maybe more. He’s very religious, Balanchine, Russian Orthodox. And how he is about ballerinas is – well – mystical.’
She fell quiet for a moment, a little self-conscious about her high-flown talk; then, shaking herself, she began to clear the table. When she had all the dishes in the sink, she crept a quick, questioning look around at John, checking to see whether he’d had enough of her obsession with ballet, whether he was just humouring her. There was no one else she could talk to as she could talk to him, and she didn’t want to use him up.
But he smiled at her warmly, so she started afresh, in a gossipy, confidential tone, making it juicy for him. ‘Balanchine has an incredibly interesting personal life, you know. He marries his ballerinas, at shocking ages, really young, one after another.’ She took a breath, slowed down a little. ‘But the one he’s married to now caught polio, and so she’s paralysed from the waist down. Can you imagine anything worse, for a ballerina? And she was a star. Or she was going to be. He left her in New York in a wheelchair.’
‘That’s rough. God.’ John yawned, linked his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair just enough to lift the two front legs off the floor. His loosened tie forked haphazardly over the white cotton expanse of his chest; his shirtsleeves hung deep and loose under his long skinny arms.
‘What would you do if that happened to me?’
‘If – what?’ The chair legs snapped down onto the linoleum.
‘If I became paralysed?’ She was staring into the plate she was rinsing, her hair down around her face like a rough russet curtain.
‘That’s an awful question. I don’t even want to think about it.’
‘But what would you do?’ Now she turned towards him, drying the plate, shaking her hair back, then dipping her face down towards his so that he couldn’t avoid her eyes.
‘Nina, you are not paralysed. I have no idea what I would do.’ John spread his arms high up in the air, bewildered, smiling.
‘Would you stay with me?’ Her eyes bore into him with their unsmirched, unrelenting blueness.
‘Of course I’d stay with you, but …’ he stopped himself. What was this all about, he wondered, this sudden whimsical comparison with a ballerina he had never even heard of before? ‘Are you serious, Nina? It’s a huge question. I don’t have an answer ready. I’ve never had to think about this.’
‘But what about, “In sickness and in health”?’
‘Nina, why crank things up in such a crazy way? Of course I’ve promised you that. You’ve promised me the same thing. But let’s give ourselves some time before we start in on ultimate tests. I like to think that I’d pass the test, but I don’t want to wallow in imaginary problems ahead of time.’ As he spoke, he reached for the knot of his tie, pried it loose with a long decisive index finger, snapped it off his neck, and hung it over the back of his chair. All the while, he held her look, quizzing, concerned.
She turned back to the sink. ‘Leaving someone you love, when they can’t move, can’t go with you. It’s completely awful.’ Her voice was flat, empty.
‘Jeez. You are having a bad time, aren’t you, sweetheart? I am so sorry. Is this about your father?’
‘Oh, God. I don’t know.’
He got up and put his arms around her from behind, and she started to scrub at the frying pan.
‘Can’t you wash the dishes tomorrow morning?’ he said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
‘The dishes and also my hair?’
‘But you have all day. That’s what you always tell me.’
‘Actually, though, I don’t.’ Her voice was impatient. ‘I’m a chaperone and guide, now. Remember? You’ve got me a so-called job.’ There was a sour edge, too, but John ignored it.
He pulled her around away from the sink, leaning down to her mouth. ‘You are a beautiful chaperone and a beautiful guide and I can’t resist you.’
She pulled free after one long, swooning kiss.
‘Nina, come on. It’s not as if the KGB’s going to come in and check to see whether you’ve washed the dishes. We can do as we like.’
She scowled at him. ‘You know I don’t care about the dishes, John. Why can’t you understand me, listen to me, humour me? If you really love me, don’t do this to me. Just leave me alone.’ And she shoved him backwards, away from the sink, away from her.
‘Do what to you, Nina? What’s going on? Now I can’t even touch you?’
She didn’t answer.
John scratched his head, irritated, mystified. Then he said, slowly and carefully, ‘You know, all day long, I concentrate just as hard as I can on finding some common ground between these two monumentally complex nations. I agonize over all the finer points of the Soviet Union, Mother Russia – how to understand her, interpret her, translate her, how to explain to her the needs and the views of the government of the United States. It’s pretty formal, pretty high stakes, pretty unpredictable. And what gets me through is you. Honestly.’
She seemed to pay no attention at all as he spoke, and he became impatient, and raised his voice a little. ‘Sometimes lately you have seemed just as enigmatic, just as opaque, just as unyielding as this whole damn country. What I think is that you are right and that it is going to be a very long winter – where you are, the ice is already on the ponds. How can you be so cold? So unreasonably cold.’
Now Nina turned her back altogether; they both knew she felt wounded. ‘I am not cold,’ she muttered without conviction. ‘I don’t feel cold at all towards you. You know that. I adore you. I wait all day for you with unbearable anticipation. I feel faint when I finally see you.’ Still she kept her eyes down, eking her words out with girlish shyness, halting but determined, as if she had planned her speech. ‘But I know you’ll get me into that bedroom and start on the baby thing again. And I don’t want a baby. It kills me to tell you. It makes me angry with us both. And I’m saying it now before you get me weak at the knees and make me think differently. I cannot have a baby here, John. I can’t bear the thought of it. You have got to take my side, you have got to sympathize with me about this.’
‘Sympathize? What – just to be nice?’
Nina grinned at his joke, swallowing her anger for a moment, caught out. ‘But you are a gentleman, John. Yes. Just to be nice.’
‘Nina, all I want is to come home to something easy, direct, immediate. And something – physical. I know you understand that. We don’t need diplomacy here. We don’t need to negotiate. Do we?’
She rinsed the frying pan and laid it on the draining board. ‘I’ll come to bed,’ she said guardedly, ‘if that’s what you want. But I don’t want a child, John. I don’t know how to make it any more clear to you. Not while we are living here in Moscow. It’s not a question of negotiating or pleading. I can’t do it. I won’t do
