At moments like these, when she was unfocused, alone, memories batted at her like moths, slight, powder-winged, urgent. In America she had made it her habit to brush them away, swat them down with resolve, even crush them; but as the days passed in Moscow, growing shorter and darker into the autumn, there were little memories, twilight-coloured, grey or brown, mere sensations once put to sleep, with which she felt she might be safe enough. In her solitary, undisciplined existence, they even offered a kind of companionship, and she felt inclined to accommodate them, to hold up the light of her attention so as to draw them to her, lure them into the palm of her hand where she might study them. They came in no apparent order, yet Nina sensed there was some way to assemble them, to pin them down, which might help her to be more at ease with herself in her new circumstances.
Now, for instance, as she lay in the miraculous convenience of her bath, she tentatively recalled that her father’s apartment in Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lane had never seemed to have any hot water at all when she was growing up. It had never seemed warm, either – an old house, stucco, badly insulated. The heat bled out at the windows and probably through the roof – the wind-rattled, iron-sheeted roof which leaked rust down the outside walls when the snow melted, when it rained. From these practical considerations, her thoughts crept cautiously on to others more vivid, more enveloping: how sometimes the whole house had seemed to sag with wet, the splintered, tilting staircase, soft under your tread as you climbed, smelling of darkness, rot. How winter had always felt like a cruel tonic, abrasive, reassuring, the dank walls going hard and clean with the shock of ice in the air, the shock right inside your chest.
Then came one of the pinpricks of insight – sharp, conclusive – that, really, Nina was after, that fixed something in place: Mother made the cold her excuse not to be home, Nina thought. She never complained, but she used to say it was warmer at the school where she worked, or at the library, a museum, a lecture, even at a film if there was money. At least, Nina nodded to herself, I don’t remember any complaining. Mother just went out. But waiting for her to button her coat was – oh, God. Dad and I held our breaths or something. She buttoned it like murder.
Nina plunged her hair back under the bath water, holding her breath even now, remembering. She felt her ribcage expand; she floated and bobbed, half-submerged. I’m not going to struggle with that rubber hose, she thought, stroking the red-brown weed of her hair free of suds under the water. She immersed herself a little deeper; she didn’t struggle back towards the present.
Whenever she was going to take me with her, Mother breathed snorts while we hunted for my mittens. Accusing me. We racketed up and down the echoing, wood-floored hall, slipped our hands inside felt boots, under cushions, folded back the musty corners of rugs, searching. That must have been when I was pretty small. I can still feel the anger up around her head, around her heart, like a dark halo, an aura. Did I lose my mittens every time? Or did Mother forget how young I really was, forget that she had taken away two years of my childhood so that we could pretend I was born in America?
Somehow I know that Mother thought Dad could have gotten them to turn up the heat in the apartment if he had made more of a big deal about being a registered invalid. Maybe turn up lots of other things, too. Dad wasn’t like that, and Mother was perfectly aware that he wasn’t. I never heard her say anything out loud; at least if I did hear, I can’t remember the words. But she left Dad alone. Maybe that was worse than complaining.
Nina sighed with the pleasure of her bath. She could make the comparison; she could see how lucky she was. It must have been a nightmare. Devastating. At first, Mother might have been able to believe that whatever Moscow was like, it would get better. Because people do believe things like that. And maybe it was comfortable enough. Maybe in the beginning they were warm. Before I was born.
Twenty years though, she mused. No money. No way to get out. Christ.
She considered how many trips her mother had made to the dentist lately, in Buffalo, in Manhattan. It was because of Russia, those trips to the dentist. How it ravaged your teeth, your very bones.
Obviously Mother had lost interest years and years ago in anything she couldn’t actually see. She stopped believing in love, marriage, babies, any of it. That’s why she tried to scare the hell out of me. What does she live for now? Every morning she gets out of her lace-canopied bed, dresses with meticulous care, sees to the house, her cook, her plans. She doesn’t need to work, not for money. But she has such a challenge before her, such a task; she has to gather to herself everything she is entitled to. She has to wear her clothes, use her wealth, feel the existence, the benefit, of all her possessions; she has to reassure herself that everything is there, that she controls it, that nobody will try to stop her. It’s an obsession, an illness. Like a child with too many toys, exhausted by his own greedy rota, his obligation to use each one. Where’s the freedom in that? wondered Nina. What’s the point? Trying to have her childhood back, play for ever with no consequences.
Like a bright, black movement inside Nina’s head, somewhere behind her closed eyes as she lay supine, almost afloat, the crude, long-ago elevator dropped to the floor of the rough-walled shaft. Freighted with consequences. She imagined the maiming, heavy smack reverberating. Then silence, clods of earth skittering. As if her father were dead, gone. No cry, no groan in the cavernous tunnel.
Oh God, Mother’s bitterness. Somehow, silently, blaming everyone around her for the ruin of her life, the smell of darkness on the stairs, the house rancid with disappointment, with sorrow.
At least Dad didn’t have to fight in the war. We were never separated. That can’t have been official sympathy, the State letting us care for him?
It wasn’t just Dad’s accident. It was everything. The whole dream, the whole idea. And it’s still going on, and I still don’t understand it. Nina thought with bewilderment, with intense frustration, about the city that lay eight floors below her – a remote, impenetrable scene. I might as well be a prisoner in a tower, not allowed down because I’m an American. Then the image reversed itself, height becoming depth, towers becoming shafts, so that she felt the metropolis soar and sink to stupendous distances, and its vast constructed, mechanized features seemed to have no reality at their centre, no human fleshly life. Yes, she thought, sometimes I felt as if Dad had left me underground, in the dark, in the maze of unfinished tunnels – here and there a station I recognized, a ray of light, even parts that looked beautiful. But so much that Dad believed he was building, taking part in, he just never explained to me. The socialist state. I needed a map, a blueprint. I don’t even know exactly where he was when the accident happened; I only know vaguely when – 1940. What was he trying for? Where was it all supposed to lead? He seemed – content.
After she drained the bath, Nina made herself clean it, dry it, polish the chrome fittings with a soft cloth. Yelena Petrovna won’t even know I’ve taken a bath, she grunted to herself, rubbing. Fine. It satisfied Nina to flummox the maid, to cover her tracks. Why supply any clues at all? Nina wondered. We always used to clean the bath for Professor Szabo and his wife. She cringed, recollecting their forced crepuscular intimacy – Madame Szabo’s grey-shadowed, diabetic skin, Professor Szabo’s broad, flapping bottom. And she felt as though she could hear her father’s tired, persistent assertion, ‘They compactified others much more harshly than us. With us they’ve been generous.’ But housing two invalids at the top of a long, narrow flight of stairs? Where was the generosity in that? Dad needed help just to climb in and out of the bath tub.
Nina couldn’t recall a time when they hadn’t shared that apartment; Mother used to say, ‘Two rooms were perfectly OK without a baby.’ So – the Szabos must have known exactly how old I was, and they never told anyone. Why were they made to share an apartment anyway, a professor at Stalin’s Industrial Academy? Though it must have been the biggest one in the building – high ceilings, the bathroom.
They were witty, the Szabos. And they spoke English with us. That should have won Mother over. Dad would have had no one at all to