Free Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay

mind she still hears the line—it comes from a poem—everyone knows: better to return with an empty sleeve / than with an empty soul .
    They arrive at a handsome gray stone building (none of the usual peeling paint or sagging roofs) and soon are in a changing room yet again, pulling on silk tights and stiff tutus, stuffing thick butcher paper down into the toes of their pointe shoes, where the fabric is worn out. They will be performing variations from Swan Lake . Just a year ago Nina’s top roles were the dance of the six swans or of the four cygnets—but already this year she has danced one of the lead swans, and the act 1 pas de trois, and the Hungarian Bride in the third act. Still, she dreams of no longer being among the crush of girls in feathered headbands, the cramped queue starting at the front stage right corner and curling all the way backstage….
    Tonight’s stage is a vast, twinkling ballroom, the rough wooden dance floor laid atop a marble one shiny as ice. Nina’s heart pounds so intensely surely everyone, seated at tables all around, can hear it. Her mouth has gone dry, her hands cold and clammy. She glimpses plates heaped with food, and circles of men in dark suits: people with official posts, executive powers. Her heart seems to be right between her ears. There are even a few women here, wives in long gowns. But now the pianist has begun to play, and the guests become a blur as Nina, her body moving as of its own will, begins to dance.
    Not until Polina’s variation, while Nina catches her breath, does she note the ballroom’s high vaulted ceilings, the vast buffet, the many candles, lanterns, and flowers. As if the barrenness of these past years, the fatigue, the hunger, no longer exists. And to think that this is someone’s home . Clatter of cutlery, of dishes being refilled, even as Polina dances. Watching, the guests smoke cigarettes, and fill their mouths, and chew and swallow, and clink their glasses.
    Nina feels her legs already beginning to cool down; there is a baddraft from somewhere. But now it is her turn again, adrenaline rushing as she tries not to stumble on the seams of the gritty makeshift floor. Chink-chink of dishes, the chewing mouths. Already it is over, Nina and Polina taking their carefully choreographed curtsies before being shooed back to the changing room.
    “Did you see the food?” Polina whispers, already untying her shoe ribbons, her tights smudged with dirt from the dance floor.
    Nina nods, and her stomach gives a twinge; she hasn’t eaten for hours. Now that she acknowledges it, she feels immediately famished.
    “I recognized some of them,” Polina adds, stepping out of her costume. Her legs and arms are splotched pink with cold.
    Nina too recognized some faces: the deputy foreign minister with his winged white hair, and the chairman of the Arts Commission. But they were eating, some of them barely looking, gulping and masticating while she danced….
    “They’ve seen both of us now, up close,” Polina says excitedly, and Nina wonders why she herself doesn’t feel that way. She has never been interested in politics, her enthusiasm for such matters limited to the watching of parades and air shows. She attends as few Komsomol meetings as possible; as a young girl her only interest in the Pioneers was for the folk dancing and the neat red scarves. Even now she has to force herself to sit through the mandatory Marxist lectures, and rarely sings along to the Party songs with the rest of the troupe on the touring bus. Because what does any of that have to do with dance?
    She has just finished dressing when a servant taps on their door: Nina and Polina have been invited to the table of the deputy minister of foreign affairs.
    Polina’s eyes open wide, while Nina quickly takes up her small pocketbook and drapes the white fur around her neck. Her heart gallops all over again as they are led back out to the great ballroom. The twinkling lights of the chandelier make