pool for bathing, building a fire of fallen leaves, sparrows scattering and rising when a raven drops among them, a spring that arrives unbearably late. At the start of each poem, Viktor had written the revealing, satirical titles which had eventually gotten him into so much trouble: ‘Revolution’, ‘Pioneer’, ‘Virgin Lands’, ‘KGB’, ‘Ghosts’, ‘Thaw’.
For Nina, October 23 had not been about the start of an uprising in Hungary, but about visiting Viktor on Granovsky Street, in one of the massive old reddish stone buildings there. His father’s big, warm apartment had honey-coloured parquet floors, brocade-draped windows, heavy, pale wood furniture tinkling with crystal-hung candelabra and glowing with shaded brass lamps. There in Viktor’s room – strewn with open books, heavily marked papers, heaped ashtrays, up a step at the end of a long, book-lined corridor – he had read the little book to her, pausing as he came to the end of each poem to write out its title, ceremoniously, in silence. Hardly any words passed between them that day apart from the words of the poems. He had been excited, intense, grey eyes alight, urging the verses on her, and she had felt a crystalline energy of attention between them, the sensation of being drawn up out of her body into the excitement of the images, the little explosions of sound.
Yet his unmade bed had waited behind her all the time, and she had listened rigid with the certainty that soon he would touch her, touch her face, her hair, any part of her at all. By the time he did, they had to hurry. Viktor’s father would be returning; she was expected at home. And it had seemed to her like something fumbled, something that created an appetite rather than slaked it.
Leaning against the bookcase in Leninsky Prospekt, studying the slight, brown book spread open in the palm of her hand, Nina thought, I felt he had written each poem for me, to transport me to the woods; I felt transported. And then the prick of clarity, Of course, he must have written them all before he even met me; they were just what he had to offer that day. She stared at the stately Cyrillic script, the cheap paper, and heard Viktor announcing in his triumphant way, from deep in his throat, as if with his heart and soul and even some part of his guts, that he would recite the titles out loud the next time he read the poems publicly: ‘You inspire me to this.’ She shut the book, finished hanging the Chagalls.
On another long, lonely morning, Nina had tacked black and white photographs to the wall in the kitchenette. The wedding party. Her two roommates from Wellesley – Jean and Barbara – and John’s little sister in tightly sashed, full-skirted, watered silk dresses with close-fitting, scoop-neck bodices and little cap sleeves. Christmas wreathes on their hair, of stephanotis, holly with berries, ivy. The dresses had been soft crimson, the sashes apple green. Not quite Christmas, Mother had suggested, the colours should be more subtle than that. John’s brother and Nina’s five first cousins in tailcoats and striped morning trousers, all tall, all dark, their faces soft-fleshed, smiling in the winter sunshine. The girls had been too cold for pictures outdoors, but the boys had stood it with shouts, horseplay, frosty breath in front of the rugged grey stone walls of the Episcopal church.
The wedding had sealed Nina’s American identity. And there it was, on the wall in front of her eyes, a second life that also now seemed to have slipped just out of her reach, under glass – the family she had longed for in childhood, the much confided-in girlfriends she would once have feared to tell things to, the holes in her education filled by American history, French philosophy, twentieth-century avant-garde culture, by freedom, by long hours of hard work. It was a strange flip-flop of fate: falling in love with John, she had ceased to think much about Russia. She had been entirely certain that she could settle down with John anywhere. And yet, studying the photographs while she had arranged them on the wall last week, it had crossed her mind that, from the very beginning, she had somehow expected John to bring her back to Moscow. She had resigned herself to it long before they had talked of marriage – an unavoidable destiny; she loved him no matter what he asked of her, no matter where he wanted to take her.
Wasn’t that partly why I felt so absolutely sure about him? Because I knew he cared about Russia? I must have known it was a journey we would have to make. Not so soon, though; I did that for John. And she thought, Chagall shows that – about love. How it makes such a display of perfection, how it wants to disregard darkness, difficulty, even guilt. Her eye fell again on the girl in the print, alone in her wakefulness, startled.
Nina had told herself, as she laboriously tapped in the pin-like brass nails with the heel of her loafer, that she ought to go and buy a hammer because she would probably need one again for something else anyway and that it would make her little home seem real, seem permanent – having a hammer. The errand could use up a whole morning. But no sane American would stand in an interminable line to buy a tenth-rate Russian hammer anyway. She could manage fine with the heel of the loafer. With this logic, she had pretended to disguise her true feelings from herself: that something in her was not settling down to this Russian sojourn, was already packing up and preparing to leave. After all, if she didn’t want to buy a hammer, she could easily have borrowed one, from the General Services Office at the embassy or, even better, from a neighbour. But if she had borrowed a hammer, she would have had to spend a few minutes chatting. And there would have been the next visit, when she returned the hammer, offered an invitation to come for coffee, try out her cake. That was how it should have begun, her life as an embassy wife, cultivating a niche in the small, involving, warm-hearted expatriate community.
Nina was finding it difficult to face the central challenge of her new life, being an American embassy wife. The other wives were so friendly, so inquisitive. They asked all about where she had lived as a child; they wanted her to take them shopping in some authentic Muscovite market away from the central places, or drive out of town together to hunt for mushrooms, boletuses with their white legs and brown caps, growing on moss pads in the woods since late August. Nina couldn’t bring herself to do it. It had seemed easy sometimes to reveal to Jean, even to Barbara, this or that about her old Moscow life; her Wellesley friends had never pressed her. But now that she was here, there seemed to be so much more of her past, so much she was unsure of, and the embassy wives seemed too interested, pushy almost. How could any one of them – resourceful, cheerful Americans – possibly understand who she was, what she was? She had found she couldn’t explain herself to anyone just now. It was practically illegal to try. Sometimes even John didn’t seem to understand her all that well. And everything that she tried to make herself do felt somehow artificial. No matter where she went in Moscow, she was almost all imposter. What if she came across someone she recognized? If that were to happen, she needed to be alone. Everyone at the embassy knew how dangerous it could be for Russians to be seen meeting with foreigners. She hardly knew whether she would feel able to signal some acknowledgement, whether she would say little, or nothing at all. But she dreaded giving the impression of flaunting new American friends, of preferring them.
So she hid from the other wives, went out only when she knew she wouldn’t meet them, and she felt painfully cut off. She found it hard to think realistically about what she wanted, what she had expected. Something that didn’t exist any more, or that she could never really get at, the scenes in Chagall’s prints, an old shattered life. Without really admitting it to herself, she was biding her time, going through the motions of embassy wife, waiting. Maybe she would be herself again only in America. The thought made her feel impatient, fretful. Sometimes it felt like an almost unbearable tension.
As she tied her quilted, raspberry silk bathrobe around her waist, she heard the front door open.
‘Nina?’ he boomed with friendly urgency. ‘Sorry I’m so late. Did you eat already?’ His voice was big, sweet, civil, rolling low and strong from his chest.
She felt herself soften inwardly with relief. It eased everything, John coming home. It was completely dependable. He lit up the apartment with life and purpose, made the straitened hours seem balmy, enchanted, rich. Now she wished she had braised the veal chops already and left them warm for him on the edge of the stove.
She opened the bathroom door, smiling, swathed in warm wet air
