The ads are mostly in English. Is the Russian language becoming disposable too? Their ubiquity worries me; English will go the way of all fads. And then what will break our fall?
She’s not dancing at any rate. I’d seen to that.
Sharing dank subways with Okhotny Ryad, Metro Teatralnaya’s platform coruscates with crystal lamps in bronze. Overhead is an ethnic tapestry, gold and cream porcelain singers and dancers in rhombic caissons, male and female, each representing the republics of Armenia, Byelorussia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Repeated four times, fifty six figures in all, tends to homogeneity.
The Armenian dancer, robes flaring behind, beating the double-headed davul hand drum, catches an enraptured pose. I peer closer. She is the very incarnation of Anna’s mother Tatiana, at any rate a distillation of the three wedding photographs Anna showed me, taken six months before her grisly death.
My watch nudges ten. I cross Theatre Square to the Bolshoi, set apart, eight pillars accentuating its classical heft and permanence. So why desecrate it with a Marxist hammer and sickle on top? For our last wedding anniversary my father procured two tickets to Swan Lake, payment in kind from his telecommunications corporate partners – and not just the standard production, but choreographer Yury Grigorovich’s re-interpretation, hailed as bold and heretical even in these times of cultural foment. I pass a fountain switched off for winter. The evening of the performance, deep into May, it had juggled spurts from one tap to another sudsy pool briefly reflecting young sophisticated Muscovites stepping out. Our tickets glowed in Anna’s purse. An army of female commuters strode free of their husbands. I took pride that Anna and I still held hands. Resplendent in svelte dublenki with collar ruffs, gossamer fox pelts the colour of stripped elm, they outdazzled the drunks skulking behind the food stands or toppled over in the doorways. In the mix-and-match outfit Anna had borrowed from my mother – woollen leggings, pleated maroon skirt slitted below the knee, snug blouse and navy sweater with shoulder pads, calf-high kid boots concealing unbecoming square treads (safety grafted to elegance) – she was every inch the glamorous moskvichka.
We emerged three hours later, applause reverberating in our ears. The performance had been everything we could have wished for. Alla Mikhalchenko and Yury Vasuchenko danced for their lives. The stalls crimson velvet, stupendous gold curtains. Champagne at interval.
Soviet children imbibed with their pancakes and milk the sanitised version of Tchaikovsky’s ballet. Princess Odette, a swan by day, eludes her wicked stepmother the Queen Mother and the dastardly sorcerer Von Rothbart with the aid of a magic crown. Handsome, besotted Prince Siegfried seizes the crown, leaving Odette at her stepmother’s mercy. The lovers fling themselves into the engulfing waters of a lake and ascend to the afterlife.
In the version Anna and I saw that night, hand in hand with Odette, evil inveigles through heaven’s gate. By assigning Vasuchenko the dual roles of Prince Siegfried and Von Rothbart, Grigorovich jettisoned that happy-ever-after orthodoxy. For this subversion Grigorovich stepped onto stage for a triple ovation – gratitude for being treated like adults at last.
The following evening, still in high spirits from the performance, Anna bounced up the stairs to our floor. The door was open and Maria was on her way out.
‘Good evening, Maria Alexandrovna,’ she sang. Anna reciprocated the old woman’s measured disdain. Maria never gouged payments from Anna, assessing her husband a softer target. The one and only time I overheard Maria trying, the crone came away empty-handed, muttering ‘Gold-digger!’
Maria having just relieved me of a large portion of this month’s hard-currency salary, I did not greet Anna at the door as I usually did, but stayed seated in the kitchen. I gave her a baleful look. ‘Why did you have to go and bait her?’
Anna handed me a notice, handwritten in elegant Russian. A private dance academy, specialising in late starters. Graduates qualified to teach beginners. Affordable fees. Certificates guaranteed upon completion. She appraised the clutter of our living room aloud. ‘Move the chest onto the balcony. Fouetté turns… here, balancing against the cupboard.’
‘Where did you find that?’
‘Outside the Bolshoi. Well, in that vicinity anyway.’ The twitching corner of her mouth betrayed a lie. Or quarter truth.
‘I know what you’re thinking. Forget it. Teaching English is a steady wage. Dancers, or dance instructors, get tips. A third-string dance troupe – that’s if you get that far – is no career option for families. If your mother was here she’d say the same.’
‘Leave her out of it. Actually you haven’t a clue what I’m thinking. I just want to put some joy in little hearts. Why would you be against that? A second income wouldn’t hurt either. Real money for real work. That’d make a nice change, eh?’
‘Same difference. The more we make, the more Maria Alexandrovna creams off. How much do you think my father pays to keep us here? Yes, you heard right, pays not paid. Think of it as an instalment plan, a one-way obligation with no expiry date. She’s like any parasite, doesn’t want to kill her host right away. So, say you go ahead with this scheme. When she’s bled us dry she’ll report us for operating unregistered enterprises and we’ll be out in the street selling jeans with the other saps.’
I strode to the window, parted the curtains, pointed towards the garages. A gleaming black Volga aimed its blunt snout forty-five degrees to Boris’s right headlamp, point-blank range. Volgas, Mafia kingpins’ cars, prowled the city’s newly notorious precincts. ‘Watch where our rent’s gone.’
Trolley first, Maria Alexandrovna emerged from the ground floor entrance. The goon at the interview, whom I took, or mistook to be her son, helped her into the Volga. ‘Now you know why she doesn’t walk to the market anymore.’
Odette incarnate, Tchaikovsky’s chariot, I explode from the wings. Jeté, pirouette en pointe, plié, reel off the sequence. The cast retreats, cedes space. Spent, I stagger towards the applause, silvery, sustained. Garlands land at my feet. In the front row my husband clapping maniacally, parents-in-law either side. A smaller figure standing beside Teresa, also dark – can it be her? It is, trembling with maternal pride.
This, Anna murmured last night in her sleep, tingling from Alla Mikhalchenko’s virtuosity.
What a lovely dream I’d murdered. Her dead father nodding furious agreement, I had bludgeoned it with common sense.
Common sense? Or plain meanness?
Too enticing to be true though it was, no name or physical address on the notice, academy registration codes also missing, she could still inculcate a love of movement, her dainty brand of subversion. Children on loan, moral and financial compensation for our traipsing in and out of clinics, all our trying and trying again. For her abridged childhood. She could briefly nurture and enjoy them as she never has, hand them back to Mum and Dad when she’d had her fill. Skating, swimming, none of it need be wasted, she had foundations for each, enough to teach little beginners poise, balance. Starting with my father’s clients’ children. Ballet year-round staple, the others seasonal. And, who knows, her reputation flourishing, a last-minute call-up to replace a sick chorus member. She was still only twenty-three.
I hadn’t noticed at the time, but the fork in the road I’d hustled her along was marked: Scientist. Wife. Mother. Two thirds of the way, a roadblock.
That night, kneeling before her other shrine to a life never lived, to which the silverfish paid unwarranted homage, she packed the leotard and slippers at the bottom of the chest where she kept her mother’s photographs and other effects in reverence as if kissing an altar. This time she didn’t bother with token concealment. I was meant to watch. Her hurt look said You win, Vasya. We lose.