The house perched just high enough over a rapid stretch of the Oka River to withstand April snowmelt and the once-a-decade flood that left it a metre or so nearer to landslip. As the ice receded, the Oka deposited its churn of chocolate topsoil, and driftwood herringboned the high water mark downstream. Floes, dashed and splintered, woke Anna with groans or a sharp tap as though someone was trapped under the floorboards.
Sometimes in the small hours, her father, not otherwise aesthetically inclined, played Swan Lake on the turntable. Sinuous soundtrack to Anna’s childhood.
Every May holidays he left her with neighbours and journeyed to a Crimean sanatorium that treated multiple ailments – bad heart, ulcer, others less tangible – returning invigorated for a week or so. A succession of women took her mother’s place, never for long. He brought home harvest surplus from the sovkhoz – pickled cucumbers, eggs and sour cream, carrots. She took delight in their mutant corkscrewing roots. She ate for two while he spent evenings at his institute, and taught herself to make borscht that he sipped and put aside. The gaunter he grew, the harder she strove to conjure up fare superior to the sum of its base ingredients.
To his badgering ten year old he let slip that her mother had been a dancer and bit-part actress, permanent understudy. She’d been in a folk troupe that toured all fifteen Soviet republics five months of each year, much to his chagrin delaying children beyond her reproductive peak. All the while Tatiana dreamed of playing Odette, Tchaikovsky’s dying swan, at the Bolshoi. The tuberculosis she contracted in the Urals slowed and eventually ended her stage career and she was misdiagnosed as infertile.
‘A vagabond profession,’ he growled at Anna, thumping the table. ‘They all come to a bad end. Don’t follow in her footsteps.’ Resembling Tatiana as she did, he enjoined Anna never to broach the subject again. When she was ready he would walk her through the layered contents of the wooden chest at the foot of the stairs. She acquiesced until the morning of her fourteenth birthday. A wicker basket in each hand, newspaper placed at the bottom of each to smooth corrugations, picnic rug covering bathing suit and towel in one, protective hat, anti-mosquito lotion, retractable penknife, water bottle and Anna Karenina in the other, she was off to the swimming hole, then mushrooming – defying his expectation that she spend the long August days harvesting the plot, especially now the Moscow Olympics were over.
The Games cracked open their secluded world. Hitherto, television consisted of harvest reports, tractor displays, space expeditions, bubble-headed cosmonauts, and Five-Year Plans fulfilled to the letter. Suited drones, leaders she knew she ought but mostly failed to recognise, gave out Hero of Labour medals for record production. Celebrating a seventh assembly line for the Voronezh winter boot factory, reflecting overwhelming global demand for quality, including the fraternal states of Africa and Cuba. She wouldn’t have associated Cuba with severe winters, but there you are. Smiling families in far north Murmansk moving into free, spacious apartments. According to the lugubrious commentary regurgitated on radio and the copies of Pravda her father brought home, the very fact the 1980 Games went ahead, constituted the real triumph over the American-led boycott in response to the Afghan war.
When on his return from Crimea that May they went shopping at Peace Square, they saw busloads of children from the capital arriving for Young Pioneer camps, or to be billeted with local relatives for the duration of the Games, safe from foreigners. Viewed through grimy windows they jiggled with excitement. Ahead lay a golden summer of sailing, canoeing, swimming, hiking, hijinks, singing round bonfires, friendships cemented. Anatoly opined that harvest brigades awaited orphans and other misfits, adding he had pulled strings to exempt her due to his ill-health.
Other shabbier buses brought in adults. 'Dissidents', muttered her father. Malcontents, journalists and people of that ilk who should count themselves lucky they were not facing a longer stay in a colder place much further east. As it was they were being sent down river to Tarusa, where a loose community of artists and writers in varying degrees of disfavour lived in benign internal exile.
Soviet Central Television broadcast the opening ceremony, much taken up with Shostakovian fanfare, human pyramids, children astride hobby horses, and ubiquitous Misha the dancing smiling bear cub. Wistfully Anna recalled her one and only rag doll, Dashenka, who she loved to bits. Giddy from touchdown, cosmonauts Ryumin and Popov beamed well wishes from Mission Soyuz 35 via a giant screen above the podium. The outgoing Olympic President, Englishman Lord Killanin praised the athletes for their independence, putting sport above politics. Brezhnev doddered to the microphone and in a firm voice declared the Games open.
Anna watched dashes from A to B, aquatic or on land. Apoplectic basketball commentary. Equestrian pomp. A brawl between the Soviet and Hungarian water polo teams. Her father’s laconic explanation; ‘We put down a rebellion there in 1956. Not all the locals were happy.’
It all left Anna cold.
Enter Nadia Comaneci on a balance beam. Eighteen, a Montreal 1976 veteran, she of the perfect ten, Nadia’s name alluded to the Russian word for hope. Her mother Stefania confided on television that she had thought of the name while seven months pregnant and watching a tearjerker adaptation of Yevgeniy Onegin. Nadia was again a medal magnet. When it came to counting gold, borders proved elastic. Romanian Nadia was one of us, with the diplomatic nous to run second in the individual tally behind Yelena Davydova. The USSR dominated the overall medals count with one hundred and ninety five gold.
After the lachrymose closing ceremony – thousands of red Misha balloons released – Soviet Central Television showed a two-hour performance of Swan Lake by the Kirov Ballet. Anatoly harrumphed and went upstairs. Anna was transfixed. Sport had nothing on ballet. Corps de ballet deliquesced, squares into circles into rectangles into ellipses. Not one mistake.
Gymnasts washed up at twenty. But she might yet make a dancer. First she had to master movement on all surfaces and in all weathers. Anna dropped broad hints that skates were her dream birthday present. Their tacit bargain was that Anatoly always met her requests within reason, but she forfeited cake and other fripperies beyond his domestic competence. And, it went without saying, anything that might evoke the shadow anniversary.
A peep an hour or two early couldn’t hurt – she heard him stow something in the chest the evening before. She flipped open the hasps, guided the lid upwards, its hinge elbows straining towards the underside of the stairs. She had to be quick. Any moment he would descend for his Sunday morning tea and wafer.
There they were, silver flanges protruding from wax paper. She lifted them up, exposing a wedding certificate alongside a triptych of photographs, the middle and largest her parents’ wedding at Kaluga ZAGS, the registry of births, deaths, marriages and divorce. Framed in squeaky birch, its corner joins were slipping where the resin had flaked off. 15/2/1966 scratched into the bottom right corner. Six months and thirteen days before their joint birthday/bereavement, 28 August 1966. Aha. So she was not so much unplanned as planned against, illegitimacy literally papered over by the certificate lying flat in its sleeve. It confirmed she was born in Kaluga. Tatiana hailed from Kazan.