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‘If you’re trying to say I put up with certain peccadillos from my ballet master, you’re hardly revealing anything new. What you are doing is degrading yourself rather sadly. The first thing sensitive people learn is to make allowances for dedicated artists.’

‘He’s not an artist, Oktyabrina, and you know it. I hope you know it. I honestly wonder whether he knows a plie from a pirouette.’

‘Bravo - the dilettante has exhibited his two highborn words.’

‘Has he ever danced anywhere? Seen a proper ballet?’

‘Evgeny Ignatievich, for your information, was once the most promising young character dancer in the Mariinsky. In its heyday. When an enraptured world turned up to be thrilled and uplifted.’

‘What happened to his great promise? Why hasn’t anybody heard of him?’

‘Everybody who knows and loves the dance knows him perfectly well. It happens, however, that he was forced to leave the Mariinsky before he achieved supreme world acclaim.’

‘The plot thickens.’

‘His is a tragic story. I’m not going to tell it to a cynic. If you must know, when the Bolsheviks took over the Mariinsky Theater, they dismissed every male dancer with certain 38

instincts towards other men. Evgeny Ignatievich was the greatest loss/

From my memory of Soviet history, this was nonsense. If homosexuals had in fact been purged from the famous Imperial Company, it would have been only with Stalinism’s flowering in the mid-1980s, after St Petersburg had become Leningrad and the Mariinsky Theater was renamed the Kirov. And when Oktyabrina’s teacher would have been at least fifty.

Besides, his current behavior no more supported the story than Soviet history: he certainly didn’t use his cane like a homosexual. He was obviously an old confidence trickster, but it wasn’t clear whether Oktyabrina knew it. Her voice was hurt - but I thought I detected the faintest trace of irony too.

‘Then he was blackballed from ever dancing again on a public stage. He was humiliated, hounded - a martyr to his art. The body and soul of genius mangled and wasted. It’s an honest-to-God drama - a tragedy , do you understand?’

She ran out of breath. When she resumed, it was in a pleading tone.

‘We’re his only pupils, Natashinka and I. He doesn’t even get a pension - fives on I-don’t-know-what.’

‘How much does he charge for the lessons?’

‘Kopeks. It’s three rubles an hour, if I remember correctly; four for rehearsals. He won’t take more.’

‘I don’t believe it! Ulanova doesn’t make four rubles an hour.’

She gazed at me, shaking her head. ‘Please just don’t bother to come to rehearsals any more. And let’s not talk about this particular subject, all right? It’s extremely disappointing, you know - an American making a big fuss over small change/

She moved a demonstrative step away from me and we walked on in silence. Behind an old mill, we passed the driver of a cement truck fitting a tube from his fuel tank to that of a private car. It was the usual back-street barter: the

truck driver supplying a quantity of fuel tapped from the state in exchange for a bottle of vodka. Oktyabrina observed the operation in fascination. Then she snuggled to my side again and took my arm. ‘Listen/ she cooed, and by the time we’d reached the metro station, she had extracted a promise from me to supply Evgeny Ignatievich with my old clothes.

5

A few days later Oktyabrina took me to ‘her’ bench on a quiet part of old Gogol Boulevard. She picked her way through the slush and ice with exaggerated caution, as if encountering them for the first time - but managed to slip half a dozen times nevertheless. After each near fall, she tightened her sparrow’s grip on my arm and emitted a half-nervous, half-exhilarated giggle.

‘Honestly, darling. I don’t know how some women do it. I’m a mess when I have to walk somewhere without a strong man.’

It was a raw day but the wind had subsided. Oktyabrina and I had discussed kittens, camels, beards, veal goulash, and the correlation between fame and talent by the time we reached the boulevard. It is one of the finest in Moscow, with a touch of faded elegance, surrendering peacefully to inexorable decay. The strolling is done on a wide dirt path, a kind of old-fashioned promenade, with a strip of park on both sides. It’s called ‘gardens’ in Russian, but that suggests something far too formal for the place itself: a tangle of boot-beaten paths and tumbledown benches.

Alongside the promenade, a dozen chubby children wrapped in furs and scarves were hard at work making snow pies with brightly painted toy shovels. When Oktyabrina was spied a chorus of happy squeals sounded as they all swarmed to her side. She produced two handfuls of cheap candy from both pockets and distributed one to each 40

child. They clutched the tiny prizes in oversized mittens and shoved their little, fur-bordered circles of open face forward for a kiss.

‘Thank you, Aunty Oktyshka! Thank you, thank you -you brought the best kind! Come and see what were making today/

Oktyabrina broke into her curtain-call beam and petted the toddlers tugging at her skirt. One of the shrunken old grandmothers in charge of the children re-wrapped the black shawl aroimd her head and blessed her with the traditional Orthodox movement. ‘That’s Oktyabrina Vladimirovna/ she revealed to a somewhat less withered companion. ‘The lady from the theater/

Oktyabrina’s bench seemed to grow out of the trunk of a poplar on the edge of the promenade. She brushed the morning’s snow from its sagging slats and curled up in a comer. ‘Close your eyes and you can smell the snow,’ she said, squeezing her eyelids shut and sniffing loudly. ‘Plenty of snow, the crops will grow. It’s an old Russian saying/

An indescribable feeling of timelessness, boundlessness and peace pervades these places, as if you were somewhere on the steppe, far removed from a major city and the twentieth century. We watched the children playing, and I smoked several cigarettes. Oktyabrina began to chatter about herself in her usual way, and soon she was telling me the story of her first love. ‘Every girl should tell her admirers how she was first seduced - if it was magnificent, of course. It sets a standard for them to aspire to/

Oktyabrina’s first time was excruciatingly beautiful. It happened in Omsk when she was a child of sixteen in pigtails and a school uniform. One morning, a note fell at her feet while she was on her way to school. It was in a bold, stylized script; 7 have been watching you from my window. You are my muse, my dream. In the name of everything sacred in art , come to me this afternoon ... /

The note was signed simply ‘Dubnikov’. Fuller identification was unnecessary: Dubnikov was the leading man of the

local theater, tall and dark, with a mane of wavy black hair and a deliciously frightening reputation; a latter-day Eugene Onegin. When Oktyabrina entered his room after school, his dark eyes blazed. He stood up from his desk, uncovered a pistol from under his papers, and raised it to his temple.

‘I can remember his exact words to this very day. He said his love for me was slowly killing him and unless I accepted him, he was going to complete the process swiftly/

Oktyabrina was certain that the gun wasn’t loaded. Dubnikov fired a shot into the ceiling, causing a chunk of plaster to crash to the floor. An instant later, they raced for each other. The snow from Oktyabrina’s collar melted on Dubnikov’s bronzed face.

T allowed him to take me, of course. It was all absolutely perfect from the first minute. We had a short but very passionate and beautiful affair - once he ripped out the telephone with his bare hands because it rang at an inappropriate moment. Of course he couldn’t be seen with me publicly because of his position. But he dedicated stacks of poems to me and a story that can simply never be published. In the end, we were forced to terminate the liaison by mutual consent. It was absolutely destroying our concentration on our chosen careers/