On a Friday, on a cheap street near the Neva, on an unmade bed in a colorless communal apartment, a very young woman rocked in pain. The midwife, sitting in the corner with her chin in her hand, waited to catch the babies—two babies, with the Germans knocking on the door of the city. The midwife had lived through the loss of two husbands and five children and had already witnessed two wars. She’d delivered babies in ditches and whorehouses and prisons. And yet she could not imagine a worse entry into motherhood than this particular day, in this particular room, and she pitied the little blond woman writhing on the bed, whose name was Elizaveta.
Elizaveta was a dancer, and she was no stranger to pain. Once, while performing with the Kirov Ballet, she’d sprained a ligament near her right ankle and still finished her solo, and Stalin himself gave her a standing ovation as she hobbled off the stage. But it seemed to the midwife that the closer Elizaveta got to bringing her children into the world, the more she faded from it. She bucked and strained as if she wanted to fly out of her body and leave everything—and everyone—behind. Her eyes darted from one wall to the other. She looked as though she’d lost her very soul somewhere in the room and it would be hers again, if she could only find it. Her faded blue nightgown, borrowed from a sympathetic neighbor down the hall when Elizaveta’s belly swelled too much to wear her own, was too big and hung off one shoulder.
Just as the midwife commanded Elizaveta to push, a tank rumbled down the street and shook the bed. The men and women of Leningrad, who’d spent the summer digging ditches and building fortifications around the city, had been warned two days before to prepare to fight or flee. While Elizaveta labored, everyone else in the city was packing or preparing or running at full steam between the two. The air smelled of hot ash and panic.
And this is why no one congratulated Elizaveta when the last pangs came and her daughters were delivered into the midwife’s bony hands. They were beautiful babies—good and strong, with loud, lusty cries, the kinds of babies who could weather anything. The midwife had seen enough bad births to know to be thankful for the good ones, but she had no well-wishes to offer. She glanced at the red-faced new mother and again felt pity for her, stuck with two babies, and alone, with an invasion breathing down their necks. She laid the babies in their mother’s arms and tried to think of something suitable to say. But when the afterbirth was delivered and the midwife bent to cut the babies’ cords, an old injury in her back began to twinge, and the sharpness of this sensation flattened her pity into annoyance. She muttered only that now the linens needed washing, and where was she supposed to find soap in a time like this?
Elizaveta’s neighbors, who heard the entire birth through the thin walls of the communal apartment, weren’t much better. They all shook their heads at Elizaveta’s fate. To have one child in these times was a misfortune; to have two felt like negligence. The building supervisor, an old man in the apartment three doors down, had a soft spot in his heart for the little dancer. When he heard the babies’ first cries, he went to cross himself in response, but a plane buzzed low overhead and his fingers froze over his collarbone and he dove under his bed in fear—and that was the closest thing Elizaveta got to a blessing that day.
The midwife, anxious for her own family and eager to get away from Elizaveta's
hollow eyes, packed up her things in a hurry. Later, when she unpacked at home, she would realize that she’d left a sharp pair of scissors behind. The babies still lay where the midwife had placed them, rooting around for their first meal, and Elizaveta made no motion to help them. She stared straight ahead as if the birth had made her blind. The midwife stood to go, and just before she closed the door, Elizaveta gave her a look that curdled her stomach.
The midwife should have stayed longer. It wasn’t good to leave new mothers alone; you never knew what they would do. She should have offered some comfort. But what comfort can be offered to a woman on the eve of war? The midwife knew no happy fate awaited this mother or her children, and she wanted to stay and help, but her own family waited at home. To give herself the strength to leave, she hardened her heart and said, “If only you’d kept out of trouble,” and then turned and slammed the door.
Elizaveta was nineteen years old, and she had no family. Her parents, like so many, had been killed in the Year of ’37, dragged off to the Gulag under false accusations of inciting insurrection; her grandparents were lost to stray gunfire during the Revolution. She was an only child, and now she was alone, with two children of her own.
The closest thing she had to siblings were her fellow dancers at the Kirov Ballet, and even these substitutes were absent. That morning, at the company’s first class of the day, it had been announced that the entire company—dancers, seamstresses, orchestra, and all—would be evacuated to Molotov that evening, along with all the students and teachers at the Vaganova Ballet Academy, the Kirov’s school of ballet. As Elizaveta’s daughters cried in concert with the sirens outside, all of her fellow dancers stuffed the essentials of their lives into duffel bags and suitcases and prepared for the evacuation, along with all the government officials the state had deemed too important to die.
The Kirov was the pride of the Soviets, the premier ballet company in the world, and Elizaveta had once been its most promising dancer. While even talented ballerinas excel in a single specialty—some bodies are built for leaping, or for quick pirouettes, or for long, sinuous arabesques—Elizaveta, who had sacrificed her childhood at the Vaganova, seemed poised to take them all. The speed of her allegro was as breathtaking as the majesty of her adagio, both underlined by a magnetism that was impossible to define or ignore. She seduced entire audiences with a single glance.
But when she became pregnant, Elizaveta’s body, which she’d known so well, became foreign to her. Her spins slowed, her attack softened, and her balance—thrown off by her stomach, which, in the eyes of the other dancers, grew much faster than a pregnant stomach should—ebbed away by the week. Her name appeared on the company’s casting lists less and less and then disappeared altogether. During Elizaveta’s fifth month,
the company physician took her aside and warned her to stop attending classes—not because he thought she was in danger but because the ballet master, who preferred absolute uniformity in his dancers’ appearances, instructed him to do so. “You don’t want to hurt yourself,” the physician said. “Or your child.” Elizaveta said nothing in response, and she did not come to class again—and because of this, she did not hear the announcement that the company was being evacuated.
Katusha, Elizaveta’s closest friend, realized this an hour before the train was supposed to leave for Molotov. She arrived at Elizaveta’s door at four that afternoon. In one hand, she carried a suitcase containing everything she owned; with the other, she carried a basket of food, an assortment that took her all day to find in the few unshuttered shops across town.
She was too late. Katusha heard the babies crying, knocked hard, called Elizaveta’s name and knocked harder. No voice came in reply. The building supervisor, who had gone out in search of some sort of present for the babies and came up empty, arrived at that moment and, hearing the babies’ wail and seeing the alarm on Katusha’s face, pulled his keys out of his pocket and hurried to the door without being asked.
The door swung open and rattled on its hinges. Katusha and the building manager rushed in and, seeing Elizaveta, stopped short. The little dancer, the one for whom Stalin applauded, the one for whom everyone had such hopes, the one who, until nine months ago, was poised to become the prima of the Kirov and perhaps all Russia, perhaps the entire world, lay with slit wrists on the bed, the sun streaming into her open eyes. Even in death, she was graceful: her arms were splayed out as if in a final port de bras, her hands open, her feet wide apart. She was naked, and her body bore both the marks of her pregnancy and the art to which she’d dedicated her life: her toes were gnarled and calloused, her limbs winnowed away to nothing but muscle and bone, and the great flap of her belly lay empty. In her first and only act of love as a mother, she had taken off her faded blue nightgown and wrapped her daughters in it. Her daughters, pink and wailing, lay between her feet on the bed.
If Katusha had come an hour earlier, if she had not spent the afternoon searching shop after shop for bread and sausage and sweets to tempt her friend’s waning appetite, if the invasion had started a week later, if Hitler had not grown greedy for the wide reaches of Russian land and the ripe wheat fields of Ukraine, if Elizaveta’s lover had not made false promises and then abandoned her, if the ballet master had not taken offense at the variations of the female form, Elizaveta might have lived. If she had lived, she would have been evacuated with
her babies to a safe haven on the sea, and the babies might have grown up as ordinary sisters living ordinary lives.
But that is not the story that there is to tell.
The world turns by hands as selfless as Katusha’s. The oldest of a family of seven, she’d nursed her family through illnesses that claimed several of her siblings and cared for an infant sister after her mother died in childbirth. She was a very practical person, one who knew when and how to put herself aside, to do what needed to be done.
But it wasn’t a sense of duty that made Katusha step toward Elizaveta’s cooling body. Oh, how she had longed to fold that body into her own, to kiss her hair, to give her the love and care she’d needed and deserved. Katusha had stood by for years and watched Elizaveta hung out to dry by a chain of thoughtless lovers, had listened to her weep over them, had consoled her however little she could. None of these men saw Elizaveta as Katusha did: the kind of woman you could spend a lifetime loving, the kind of woman worthy of devotion. The kind of woman whose love could move you to give everything away. Katusha had never told Elizaveta of her love, and now death had carried her too far away to hear.
But love is as strong as death. Katusha understood what she must do. She closed Elizaveta’s eyes and took Elizaveta’s daughters in her arms, and they became hers from that moment.
There was no time for a funeral. The first evacuation train was leaving at six, and there was no guarantee that the second would make it past the Germans. Katusha wrapped the infants in sheets from their mother’s deathbed and left Elizaveta with the building manager, who promised to have the undertaker carry her away. In the end, he would bury her with his own hands, just a day before the blockade began in earnest, and three weeks before he died himself, the building’s first victim of starvation.
Katusha made it to the train station just as the conductor gave the call to board. Several hundred people crowded the platform—dancers, set painters, musicians, teachers, propmen, choreographers, seamstresses, husbands, children, wives, along with several dozen government officials and their families. As they boarded the train, everyone told themselves that they were leaving only for a day or two, that this trip would be like every other trip they’d taken to the country. In truth, they would return three years later, after Leningrad had been shelled and starved to its very limits.
But the dancers did not yet know any of this, and they settled first in Molotov and then Tashkent, performing for bands of weary soldiers, and heard very little of what went on at the front. Every now and again there would be a letter telling them that another part of the Kirov had been destroyed by artillery fire. But for months, and then a year, there was silence, and only the knowledge that everyone they knew back home was suffering more than could be understood, that Leningrad was filled with things too horrific to be spoken. The Germans cut off all food supply to the city, in hopes of starving the entire city to death, and waited for it to fall.
Yet the city did not fall. The siege kept on, and the city population dwindled from two million to one million, and still, it did not fall. Shostakovich penned his hymn to Leningrad, and all the musicians of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra who had not starved were called to assemble. In August 1942, a year after the siege began, on the same day that Hitler had planned to have a victory banquet at the Leningrad Astoria, the orchestra—skeletons in baggy tuxedos—performed Shostakovich’s symphony in the Grand Philharmonia. Loudspeakers, flown in by helicopter, broadcast the symphony out over the entire city, over the living and the dead, and over the Germans, who had been shelled that morning to ensure their silence, and who, hearing the symphony, began to despair of finding victory.
As the dancers waited for the war to end, they lived in dachas in Tashkent and did their best to keep up their strength. They shivered through classes in a drafty warehouse. Though far better fed than those left behind, they, too, struggled to find food. They performed Swan Lake in flimsy costumes that hung like rags from their bodies, for crowds of people in quilted hats and jackets who’d driven for hours to see them, and everyone dreamed of the day when they would return home and perform at the Kirov again.
And there, by the bright blue ribbon of the Tashkent Sea, Katusha raised her babies. The Kirov ballet master, who felt somewhat culpable for Elizaveta’s death, gave Katusha a paid leave of absence from the company and fought for her to have a little room of her own in the settlement, while most of the dancers were packed six or seven to a bedroom. The accompanist, who missed her nieces and nephews back in Leningrad—all of whom, she would later discover, had died—borrowed a crib from someone in the village and placed it next to her piano in the rehearsal room so Katusha could still come to company class if she wanted, a kindness for which Katusha was very grateful. She named the babies Maya and Natasha.
The men and women of the company, in need of distraction both from the suffering back home and the austerity of their own lives, adopted Maya and Natasha as their own. Everyone wondered if they would grow up to be great dancers. How could they not, as Elizaveta’s daughters? (Nobody knew who their father was, not even Katusha—though some had their theories—and this didn’t seem to matter much one way or the other.) Between rehearsals, the dancers amused themselves by staging tiny races between Maya and Natasha and seeing who would toddle over to them first. As the girls grew, everyone began to notice differences between them—many differences, as if their existence was an exercise in opposites. Maya was shy, Natasha was outgoing. Maya had brown eyes, Natasha, blue. Maya was slow and contemplative, Natasha quick and impulsive. And the dancers
loved both equally.
In 1944, word came that the siege had ended and the Kirov had been repaired, and the company boarded the train in June at the same station where they’d arrived three years prior. Everyone held their breath, prepared for the worst—after all, Moscow had once burned to the ground, and hadn’t it risen again?—and wept when the train pulled into the station. There it was, the ancient city they had loved and left—pockmarked and shelled and scarred, but free, and theirs again.
In September, the company performed at the Kirov for the first time since the siege—Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty—and when this performance was announced, so many people swarmed around the outside of the theater, eager for tickets, that the dancers barely made it inside for rehearsals. Many of the performers pitched in with last-minute repairs to the theater: prima ballerinas swirled around with mops instead of partners, and the men climbed high on rickety ladders and washed windows.
Katusha, who left the company and joined its costume shop in order to raise the girls, brought Maya and Natasha to opening night, though they were still too little to sit through an entire ballet. She took the twins by the hand and marched them up Glinka Street, past demolished houses whose original shapes she still remembered and past palaces reduced to rubble. Despite all the destruction, the city retained much of its beauty. The palace of Catherine the Great gleamed as brightly as it had when royals ascended its stairs. Nevsky Prospect stretched long and wide and proud as in the days of Gogol. And the Kirov Theatre was restored to its former glory.
Ah, the Kirov, the Kirov, the richest and grandest venue in Russia, every surface covered with gilding and scrollwork and crests. An enormous chandelier hung from the ceiling, big enough to squash four men flat if it fell. Four tiers, dotted with candelabras, encircled the stage like diamond bracelets on a woman’s wrist. Katusha winced when she saw the great stage. Elizaveta had wanted nothing more from life than to dance on that stage until she died.
Perhaps Elizaveta haunted it still. Perhaps she watched Katusha and Maya and Natasha take their seats in the very top ring, just against the lip of the balcony. Maya, who had become a quiet and pensive little girl, started when the orchestra began to play. The swell of music held her in awe, and she listened with rapt attention, so pleased that it frightened her. Natasha, eager as ever, sat with one hand gripping the balcony, leaning toward the stage as if she wanted to fly into it. Though they were too little to have such thoughts, both of them would look back on that evening as the moment when they found what they wanted from this life.
And who wouldn’t want it, when being a professional dancer meant you were a cut above, meant that you were given better food and
warmer clothing, maybe even a more beautiful apartment—that when you or your family were sick, you went to the special hospital for Party members, the one with private rooms, instead of the filthy public hospitals that packed fifty patients to a ward? And maybe, as long as you kept your wits about you and didn’t go out of your way to be stupid, you wouldn’t be arrested, and you would be spared the random interrogations and knocking on doors and cartings-away in the dead of night that had haunted everybody for as long as they could remember.
Years later, when the girls grew and Katusha told them the story of their rescue, she did not cast herself as the hero; she told them that the state itself had saved them, that it had whisked them away to shelter with the other artists and dancers and Party officials and their families. Katusha’s words sank into their marrow. Like a mother, the state had nurtured and cared for them since the day of their birth, and someday, it would be their duty to give back in kind.
And this, in those postwar days, when the United States was emerging as an enemy, was what the state wanted for a gift: it wanted ballerinas—ballerinas it could send out all over the world as proof of the superiority of its people. Male dancers were impressive—they communicated the muscle and the determination of the Soviet people, strong calves and arms a fleshly shorthand for artillery and armaments—but ballerinas even more so. The ballerina, with her sweetness and her secret strength, could convey all that had to be said to the West and the rest of the world. You could fall in love with her and not know you were falling in love with Russia; you could appreciate the graceful reach of her port de bras and not know that you were appreciating the distillation of a thousand years of history into a single sweep of the arms. You could admire the sculptured elegance of her body as a work of art, not considering what it really was—the work of an athlete who had trained for her entire life in Soviet gyms, supported by the Soviet state, fed on Soviet crops, and dressed in fabrics made by Soviet factories. A male dancer could impress, but a ballerina could dance out and disarm the world, could leave the audience asking what sort of philosophy had produced something so beautiful.
That first night at the Kirov, Maya and Natasha were too young to understand all this. They fussed after the first intermission and fell asleep during the prince and princess’s pas de deux, which even Katusha felt dragged on. But when the curtain first rose from the stage and their eyes were still dazzled by the grandeur of the dancers, by the precise placement of their feet and hands, by their jeweled tiaras and painted eyes, both girls were so awed that they reached for each other’s hands in the dark. ...
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