The Turning, Page 2

  Once the Russians were expelled back to Russia, like the returning Soviet soldiers, there was no housing for them and no jobs. In Lithuania Aidan had been a well-known pianist. Her husband had been a leader in the Communist party. Here in Russia, at forty years old, Aidan could not find concert work and earned only a few rubles for playing for our practice sessions. She was bitter toward the Lithuanians. “I never asked to go to their miserable country,” she said. “It was my grandparents who were sent by the Soviet government. Now the government will do nothing for us.” But she was even more bitter toward Gorbachev. “If he were a proper Communist, he would have seen that the Russians remained in Lithuania. He would have sent more soldiers. What we need is a stronger Communist party.”

  I was sorry for Aidan, but I was all for the Lithuanians. After years of being trampled on by the Soviet Union, the Lithuanians wanted to be free of Russians. Only a week ago Russian tanks had lumbered into Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Fourteen Lithuanians fighting for their freedom from Russia had been killed and many more crushed under the tanks. Vera and I had seen pictures on The Fifth Wheel, the Leningrad TV show, of Russian soldiers crushing the Lithuanians. I didn’t understand how Aidan could see such pictures and still think the Russians should rule Lithuania.

  “Aidan, there are more dumplings than we can eat,” I said. “Here is a bit of greased paper. Wrap them up and take them home for your husband.” Aidan’s husband had no job. Some days Aidan came to practice with red eyes and sometimes—it broke our hearts to see it—with bruises. We guessed that her husband in his misery got hold of vodka, which brought out a cruel streak.

  The heat from our bodies and the dumplings in my belly made me sleepy, but one word from Madame and I was wide-awake, and at my chassés, my battements, my pirouettes. Soon I was nothing but a streak of energy existing only for movement’s sake. From the corner of my eye I saw Marina watching me. If I did fifty battements, she did sixty. If I did a dozen pirouettes, she did two dozen. Her jealousy set her on fire. Finally Madame called, “Marina, it is not how many, but how well. Don’t just do, think of what you are doing.” After that, even more of Marina’s dark looks were sent my way.

  CHAPTER 2

  POLITICS

  When rehearsal ended, it was four in the afternoon and already quite dark. In winter, daylight in Leningrad was as rare as darkness was in the summer. I threw on my jacket, pulled a knit cap over my hair, and ran out the door. If I hurried, I just had time to get to Vasilievsky Island and the Academy of Arts, where Sasha’s classes would be ending. I couldn’t wait to show him the magazine. The streetlights were on, and in their glow the fine snow that was sifting down turned golden. When I started across the bridge, the wind all but picked me up and nearly blew me down onto the icy Neva River. I hung on to the railing, feeling the cold of the iron through my mittens. The backs of the ancient stone sphinxes that crouched on either side of the academy were covered in snow, a strange sight on statues that had come from the deserts of Egypt. Students poured out of the Arts Academy, brushing past me, eager to get home to warmth and dinner. At last I saw Sasha.

  He was eighteen, two years older than I was. His face was long and thin, with high cheekbones and dark eyes that turned down at the corners. When he thought to wash his hair, it was very nice and curled at his shoulders. He was like a birch sapling, thin as a whip and birch-bark white because he never got out of doors. He was either in class at the academy or in the corner of his grandmother’s room, working on his paintings or on the icons he sold to tourists. Icons are paintings of sacred people—saints and angels and the holy family. The old icons are said to have special powers of protection and healing and have been handed down from generation to generation. Sadly, many of the ancient icons were destroyed when the Communists ordered the churches closed and emptied.

  Sasha’s icons were popular, for it was illegal to sell the old icons and Sasha had learned what kind of paint and gilt to use to give his copies an ancient look. Money from the sale of the icons helped to keep his grandmother in medicine. Sasha’s parents had died when he was a baby, and his grandmother had raised him. He never talked of his parents. Many families in the Soviet Union had been broken up by arrests and disappearances, my own family among them. It was best not to ask too many questions. One of the most imposing buildings in the city of Leningrad was at 4 Liteyny Prospekt, the home of the KGB, the secret police. Thousands and thousands had entered those doors and disappeared, the lucky ones to exile in Siberia.

  The joke was “What is the tallest building in Leningrad?”

  “The KGB building. You can see Siberia from its basement.”

  I waved the magazine in front of Sasha, and we huddled together, sheltering the magazine from the snow, while Sasha read the article. “Ah, Tanya,” he said, “now you will be so conceited you won’t want to look at a poor peasant like me.”

  I poked him in the ribs. “Don’t tease me, Sasha. I’m afraid the article means trouble for me. Marina looked daggers at me today.”

  “That old lady. You can dance circles around her.”

  Sasha saw the ballet whenever he had a few extra rubles. Many of his paintings were of dancers. I had met him when he came to our rehearsal room and sweet-talked Madame into letting him draw the dancers while they practiced. She was indignant and tried to throw him out, but while she was shouting at him he drew her and then showed her the drawing with her mouth open and her fist raised. At first she was furious, then she began to laugh. “Ah, you are a clever fellow. Very well. You may stay for an hour, but no longer, and you are not to talk to the dancers. Not one word. If you disturb their work, you are out on your bottom.”

  He had not said a word but he had managed to pass me a note that said “I’m going to spend my life drawing you.”

  Before he left Madame demanded to see his work. “Well, you are a perceptive fellow. You have a talent for capturing the grace of dancers. It almost reminds me of Degas’s sketches, but don’t let that go to your head. You are a long way from the master.”

  After that she allowed him to return, and each week, on his day off from the academy, he sat quietly in the corner sketching us. One afternoon he walked home with me. After that we began to see each other, spending hours in the pyshechnayas, the doughnut shops, over a cup of coffee. I told myself we were just good friends, but the truth was Sasha was becoming more and more important to me. When something happened, it didn’t seem real until I told Sasha about it. It was a terrible effort to keep secret from Sasha the idea that I might defect, but Vera had sworn me to secrecy. I wanted to share everything with Sasha. When I saw the article in the magazine, I thought at once of him.

  “I’ll treat you to the metro,” I said, and the two of us ducked into the entrance of the underground station to escape the snow and raw wind. At the bottom of the stairway, the station was like a grand ballroom with marble walls and crystal chandeliers, but no one behaved like they were in a ballroom. Everyone pushed and shoved for a place in one of the cars. Sasha hung on to me, taking the excuse of the crowding to hug me close, causing one woman to frown and another to smile. Sasha kissed the top of my head, winking impertinently at the first woman and grinning at the second.

  It was only a short distance to our stop, but the line ran beneath the frozen Neva River. It was always amazing to me to have the river over my head, as if I were a mermaid in some magic kingdom under the sea. We emerged from the metro stairway onto the Nevsky Prospekt. The headlights of the cars illuminated the curtain of falling snow, and along the Prospekt the streetlamps washed the buildings with light. With Sasha clasping my arm, everything seemed bright and cheerful. I glanced up at Sasha to see if he was as happy as I, and was taken aback to see a worried expression on his face.

  “Sasha, what is it?” I asked.

  “It’s my grandmother, Tanya. The only place I can find the medicine she needs is on the black market, and the cost there is more than we can afford. I am painting on both sides of my canvases to save
money.”

  “Sasha, what can you do?”

  His face became tighter, more closed in. “Never mind. I’ll find a way. Go home and show your family how famous you are.” He gave me a hug and was soon lost in the crowds.

  I tucked the magazine inside my coat to keep it dry. For the thousandth time I thought of the escape Vera and I were planning. It would be hard to leave Sasha. Where would I find someone who understood me so well, someone who knew what I was thinking before I knew it myself? Then I thought of Sasha’s struggles to take care of his grandmother. What kind of life could Sasha and I have together? If I escaped, I would leave behind me all the sad stories, all the miseries of people like Sasha’s grandmother and Aidan and her husband and Vitaly. My grandfather Georgi kept saying that a new day would come for Russia, but how could I believe him? If I wanted happiness, I would have to risk the danger of finding it in another country. I would have to dance my way to it.

  By the time I reached our apartment building on the Prospekt, the snow was a sloppy porridge. The building, which stood across from Kazan Cathedral, was once known as the Zhukovsky mansion. It had started out life as the home of an aristocrat, and not just any aristocrat. My grandfather says it once belonged to my great-grandmother Katya’s family. When the revolution came, the family fled for their lives. Grandfather remembers how as a little boy his mother would take him and his sister, my great-aunt Marya, to see the mansion. His mother had told them stories of how her own mother had been a lady-in-waiting to Empress Alexandra. She had even shown him pictures of the four daughters of the empress and the tsar, pictures that had come from a locket given to her by the empress herself. When two small rooms in the mansion became available, Grandfather had pleaded with the family to move there. Grandfather said, “How my mother would have rejoiced to see us living in even one of the rooms in which she grew up.”

  The apartment stairway had an elegant sweep to it, but it smelled of cabbage and bathrooms. This evening, and not for the first time, I had to stumble over a man sleeping off too much vodka. The apartment itself, which looked out onto the Prospekt, was shabby and moldering, but you could still see bits and pieces of its past glory, like a woman whose shabby dress is trimmed with a bit of real lace. The floors of our small sitting room, where my grandparents slept, were of inlaid wood, and there was a ring of faded flowers painted around the wall. Besides the sitting room there was a bit of a kitchen and a tiny bedroom for my parents. I slept in what must once have been a closet. Sometimes the gowns and furs that had hung there long ago crept into my sleep, and I dreamed I was dressed in satin and jewels, whirling around the ballroom of a palace.

  Down the hall from our apartment was a bathroom we shared with several families. If you were not up at the crack of dawn, the hot water was gone. Still we were lucky. Aidan and her husband had to live in a communal shelter with not a thing to call their own.

  In our apartment we lacked for room, but we never lacked for liveliness. There were cries of delight and much excitement over the article in the magazine, which was passed from hand to hand. Grandmother Yelena, who was the most emotional one in the family, had tears in her eyes. Grandmother worked in the Leningrad library, but her life was writing poetry. For many years she had not been allowed to publish her work. The Soviet Union had stilled the voices of all its great poets. Anna Akhmatova had been silenced and Osip Mandelstam was sent off to a prison camp to die. Grandmother says, “It brings tears to my eyes when I look at the shelves in the library and imagine all the books that aren’t there. Somewhere there must be a ghostly library with the books of all those silenced writers.” Tonight her tears were happy tears. She kissed me on both cheeks and hugged me to her.

  “How proud your great-grandmother would be of you,” Grandfather said. “When she was a young girl, she saw all the great ballerinas dance. She sat in the royal box with the tsar and the empress and their daughters. In those days the ballerinas had grand dukes falling at their feet, sending them armfuls of roses and precious jewels.”

  I said, “I would gladly settle for a big cabbage or a fat chicken.”

  “I have a better reward than that for my famous daughter,” Mama said. She produced a package from the Hotel Europa, where she worked as a chambermaid. When she cleaned the rooms, she emptied the wastebaskets. The Americans and the Japanese had the best wastebaskets. Their baskets were full of treasure. There might be a pair of pantyhose with only a small run, a broken lipstick, or a can of hair spray that wasn’t quite empty. There were American magazines and even books. Mama once found a pair of jeans with the knees worn out that Grandmother spoiled by patching when they would have been perfect with the holes.

  There were some things Mama was forbidden to take. The little half-empty bottles of lotion and shampoo and the used bars of soap left behind by the tourists belonged to the head housekeeper, who sold them. If Mama took them, she would lose her job. She was not supposed to take toilet paper and Kleenex either, but every night she brought home a few sheets of each.

  Mama opened her package and, as if she were taking a rabbit out of a hat, proudly produced a pair of women’s shoes. The shoes were black patent leather. One of the heels was missing. Many of our streets are still made of cobblestones, so that was not the first pair of tourist shoes to be ruined. Peter the Great built St. Petersburg on swampy land where there were no stones, but when the city rose from that swamp, nearly three hundred years ago, Peter gave the order that every visitor to the city must bring three stones with him. People who wished to live in the city had to bring a hundred stones. From those stones Peter made our streets, and many of the stones are still there.

  “The shoes can easily be repaired, and they are your size, Tanya. The soles of your own shoes have holes.” Mama was so pleased with her gift. I tried to look grateful, but the truth was that they were old ladies’ shoes, and I knew I would just stick them under my bed and wear my worn ones.

  Father had been silent, as he always was when Mama brought things home. He hated to have her rummaging through wastebaskets. “Have you no pride, Svetlana?” he would say.

  “Ivan,” Mama would tell him, “if all you had to dress yourself with was pride, you couldn’t appear in public.”

  On this day Papa said nothing, for he had other things on his mind. Papa—who practiced medicine at the Erisman Hospital, where my great-grandmother Katya had once been a nurse—worried day and night about the state of health in the Soviet Union. The week before, he had submitted an article to the medical society. He had warned that the death rate was spiraling. The twin curses of tuberculosis and AIDS were killing thousands. He hoped the article would rouse the government into doing something. Now, from the expression on his face, we could see his article had been returned. “What is the point?” he asked. “The government doesn’t want to admit the truth. Our nurses must use dirty syringes because there is no money for new ones. The blood supply is contaminated. Our patients are sicker when they leave the hospital than when they enter.”

  Mama, whose answer to everything was food, began ladling out the soup. The tiny apartment was filled with the wonderful aroma of borscht. There were pieces of meat in the soup along with the cabbage and beets. There was even a spoonful of sour cream to go on top of each serving.

  “How can you complain, Ivan?” Grandfather said. “Here we are all together filling our bellies. None of us is in a prison camp, and our own Tanya is growing into a fine ballerina. You don’t know how lucky you are. You don’t know what real suffering is. In the Great Patriotic War we ate pine bark and glue.”

  “Georgi,” Grandmother said, “no one wants to hear about how bad things were in the old days.”

  “Well, then,” Grandfather said, “let them think about what is going on now. We are just a month away from the election, and who is paying attention?”

  I knew that we would not get through a meal without talk of politics. In our family everyone had an opinion and we kicked our opinions back and forth as if the kitchen table
were a soccer field. It was politics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If politics were food, we would all have been fat as pigs. For generations our family had risked their lives to argue politics. My great-grandparents had been exiled to Siberia for speaking out. My grandparents had once been sent away as well. Now, in one month, there was to be an election, and everyone in the family had an opinion. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were running for different positions, but really they were running against each other for control of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev wanted to take baby steps in the direction of a democratic government; Yeltsin wanted to plunge right in.

  Grandmother Yelena slapped her hand on the table. “I am paying attention. I’m voting for Gorbachev. He has given us perestroika, a new start, new thinking. He has relaxed censorship. Finally writers are seeing their work in print.” Only the month before, Grandmother had had a poem published in the magazine Literatura.

  Grandfather Georgi’s face became red. “Perestroika! Where is it? What have we had from your Gorbachev? Five miserable years of broken promises. Even if you have the money, anything you buy is shoddy and useless. The government is full of bribery and thieves, and Gorbachev is afraid to do anything about it. The coal miners are striking for a living wage and our factories are shutting down for lack of coal. There are people starving and our great leader Gorbachev wants to double prices on food. And where is your Gorbachev now when there is work to be done? He is off in the Crimea, like an imperial tsar, basking in the sun in his twenty-million-ruble palace, while half the population starves and the army and the KGB plot against him.”