We didn’t understand why Galina had been kept from us until our third year of primary school. We left for lunch after reciting our multiplication tables — no difficult task, for we excelled at memorization and recitation. Galina tripped over a loose shoelace and lurched, her books sailing through the air as she tumbled under them. We’d never seen a shoelace cause such a commotion before.
“Not quite living up to your grandmother’s reputation,” our teacher said. We laughed with the spite of those without legacies to honor.
“What do you mean?” Galina asked. She didn’t know. We couldn’t believe it. We gushed, speaking over one another, telling her about the ballet ensemble, the evil camp director, the remarkable fate of Galina’s grandmother. She shook her head with confusion, incredulity, and, eventually, pride.
At home that evening, she demanded ballet lessons.
“Ballet?” her father asked, his voice a sore-throated rasp of nickel dust. He would die at the age of fifty-two, exceeding the life expectancy of a miner by three years. “You’ll join Young Pioneers this year. You’ll be busy with learning leadership and team-building skills.”
But Galina was adamant. “I want to dance ballet like my grandmother.”
Her father sighed and ran his hands through the scalding beam emitted from a reflector space heater. Over the years he had questioned why he and his wife had concealed the family celebrity, but the answer was simple: They were faithful communists, children of the labor camp, with a daughter who looked like her grandmother. Galina’s father knew her best hope for prosperity would come from dulling all that made her exceptional until the plural voice accepted her as one of its own. No doubt he had heard Lenin’s famous reaction to Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23: It is wonderful, ethereal music. But I am unable to listen to it. It moves me to stroke the heads of my fellow beings for being able to produce such beautiful things in spite of the abominable hell they are living in. It is necessary to smash those heads, smash them without mercy.
But ever since his wife had passed, he had grown indulgent and rather fatalistic. “Of course, Galya,” he said. The next day she told us all about it.
Gorbachev came to power the year Galina began ballet training, and brought with him glasnost, perestroika, and demokratizatsiya. Our mothers whispered a little louder, and, as we passed from early to late adolescence, we found our voices. We started softly and we were wise to be wary; the city party boss was every bit as cruel as the camp director had been, and like new pop songs, political reforms reached us long after they were first broadcast in Moscow. In the winter, when the sun disappeared beneath the three-month night, we gathered in parks and deserted lots, under the rusted metal limbs of White Forest, warmed ourselves in deserted apartment blocks and cafeterias where we passed around tattered samizdat pages of Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, danced to the Queen LPs someone’s second cousin’s violin instructor brought back from Europe, and wore black-market Levi’s that always looked better than they actually fit. We traded old ryobra—rib records, bone music, skeleton songs — banned fifties and sixties rock and roll inscribed by phonograph onto exposed X-rays that could be played on gramophones at hushed volumes. Radiographs of broken ribs, dislocated shoulders, malignant tumors, compacted vertebrae had been cut into vague circles, the music etched into the X-ray surface, the center hole punctured with a cigarette ember, and it was glorious to know that these images of human pain could hide in their grooves a sound as pure and joyful as Brian Wilson’s voice. Our parents called the music capitalist pollution, as if the cancerous masses on the X-rays had been caused by a song recorded on the other side of the world, rather than by the pollution that flowed from the smokestacks just outside our windows, free for us all.
In the summertime, the devastation of the earth permeated the clouds. Yellow fog enshrouded the city like a varnish aged upon the air. Sulfur dioxide rose from the Twelve Apostles, the dozen nickel smelters ringing a lake of industrial waste. Rain burned our skin. The pollution congealed into a dense ceiling blocking the starlight. The moon belonged to the past our grandmothers spoke of. We made the most of our summers: days without school, nights without darkness. First dates, first kisses. We were so awkward, morning pimples in the mirror, hair where we never wanted it, and we thought of the lung cancer X-ray that was the album art for Surfin’ Safari, considered the ways a body betrays its soul, and wondered if growing up was its own kind of pathology. We fell in and out of love with fevered frequency. We constantly became people we would later regret having been.
On clear days we trudged through White Forest, a man-made woods of metal trees and plastic leaves constructed in the boon years of Brezhnev when the party boss’s wife had grown nostalgic for the birches of her youth. By the time we trudged beneath them, however, the years had ravaged both the forest and the party boss’s wife, and the plastic leaves above were as sagging and liver-spotted as her face. We went on. The mud was a mustard we plodded through. On the forest’s far side we looked across the expanse of sulfurous waste stretching to the horizon. We shouted. We proclaimed. We didn’t need to whisper out here. For a few short weeks in July, red wildflowers pushed through the oxidized waste and the whole earth simmered with apocalyptic beauty.
But the only color belowground was a silvery metallic luster. Our fathers blasted the ore in the most productive nickel mine in the world in twelve-hour shifts. Mine shafts ran a kilometer and a half into the ground below us, and at the bottom the air was so sticky that even in January they stripped to undershirts, and hours later when they came home they’d stumble toward the shower, shedding their overcoats, sweaters, shirts, trousers, and the nickel dust that had dried onto their chests, their backs, their legs, and for a few moments before they showered our fathers were indestructible, men of metal, men who gleamed.
Other metals were mined — gold, copper, palladium, platinum — but northern nickel was our lifeblood. The Twelve Apostles burned it from the ore in two-thousand-degree heat and the falling snow was tinged with color depending on what had been in the furnaces the previous day: the red of iron, the blue of cobalt, the eggy yellow of nickel. We measured economic prosperity by the spread of rashes on our exposed skin. Even those who had never lit a cigarette had a smoker’s cough. But the mining combine took care of us: vacations at mineral spas, citywide festivals on International Workers’ Day, and the highest municipal wages of any city in the six time zones. When our fathers fell ill, the combine provided hospital beds. When they died, the combine provided coffins.
Through it all, Galina disappointed our expectations faster than we could lower them. The ballet instructor’s initial excitement at seeing her name on the class list turned to dismay. Despite inheriting her grandmother’s beautiful figure, Galina danced with the subtlety of a spooked ostrich. Basic barre exercises upended her. During performances, she was, thank goodness, relegated to the most minor ensemble role. But we really shouldn’t be so harsh: If she were anyone else’s granddaughter, we wouldn’t think twice about her dancing like the victim of an inner ear disorder. Besides, we’re free from the burden of expectation — no one has ever predicted that we would distinguish ourselves in any way — therefore we can’t understand what it’s like to fail where one might seem destined to succeed. So stop prodding us. We really do want to be kind.