Free Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay Page A

the room seem warmerthan it is, softening everyone’s skin, so that no one looks quite so sallow. At a table with a small group of others, the deputy foreign minister, red-faced and jolly, introduces Nina and Polina to the guests of honor. They are from Holland, the wife in a dress of a style Nina has never seen before. Its fabric, when the woman stands to shake her hand, rustles like aspen leaves. “This is Nina Timofeyevna Revskaya. Our Butterfly.”
    He must have read the newspaper article—the review that called her that, just last week. “N. Revskaya’s buoyancy, her seeming weightlessness, the boundlessness of her leaps, make her look, at times, caught in the air. Her every movement contains a wholeness that is not simply physical but also emotional, of the mind as well as the body.”
    The guests say something that the translator, a flustered-looking gray-haired woman, turns into a compliment about Nina’s dancing. The very sounds of this strange language make Nina anxious; normally even the briefest chat with foreigners could mean a trip to the secret police. At the same time, Nina cannot stop staring. These are the first Westerners she has seen close up. The only foreign cities she has been to—with the ballet—are Budapest, Warsaw, and Prague.
    “For you,” the deputy foreign minister says boisterously, as he offers them goblets of red champagne. His wife, a stocky woman with a fox fur around her neck, emits a smell—something unpleasant yet familiar. Could it be perfume? Nina’s own scent, Crimean Violet, always evaporates as soon as she puts it on.
    Now everyone at the table is raising their glasses: “To peace.” Nina clinks her glass with the others, but there is no food in her stomach to soak up the red champagne. It is with relief that she and Polina are ushered over to the buffet. Polina exclaims at the cold meats and salads, and smoked sturgeon, and black and white bread, and blinis with caviar and sour cream…Baked apples, too, and in the middle of it all, an enormous half-eaten salmon. Nina’s stomachgrowls, though she is used to hunger. Only this month was the complicated rationing system terminated. Mother still stretches milk with water and brews carrot peels in place of tea, and returns from the markets having struggled over a few rotting potatoes and a wizened parsnip or two. Yet now, here, all this…Their escort has stepped away, no one is watching as they fill their plates. Breathing the distinct aroma of coffee, Nina arranges the delicate chain strap of her purse over her shoulder so that she can help herself to bread that she spreads with real butter. Even the cutlery—gleaming forks and knives and serving spoons—is stunning. Nina spreads the butter thickly, eagerly, so hungry, her hands shake. The knife slips from her grasp.
    “Lucky you,” Polina says when it lands on the floor. “A man is coming to call.” She ascribes to numerous superstitions. “And I’m going to meet my Prince Charming tonight. I feel it in my bones.”
    Nina bends down for the knife. “How do you know it’s not the flu?”
    “Ha! I have a good sense for these things. I can smell it in the air.” Polina is always falling in love; for it not to be in the air, she would have to not breathe. “You might meet yours, too,” she adds, in a tone that makes it clear she doesn’t really think so. She knows that the only kissing Nina has ever done has been in ballets, her brightly painted lips pressed dryly against her partner’s. And although as a dancer Nina is used to being touched by men, guided, lifted, tossed high in the air, she has rarely felt physical attraction toward them, with their wrestlers’ bodies—thick thighs from so many squats for the prisiadka , bulging pectorals from all the acrobatic lifts. Andrei, her adagio partner, has legs like mutton drumsticks. He sometimes flexes the muscles of his buttocks just to make her laugh.
    “Do you see anyone?” Nina asks, though of course the