Russian Winter Read Free

ballerinas on the stage in the park, their gauzy skirts rippling out like waterfalls, and imagines her own hair in a tight little crown on her head, and the ribbons of pointe shoes wrapped around her ankles.
    Now, with a whole troop of girls, she and Vera are taken to a large room where a row of men and women sit behind a very long table. A slip of paper with a number written on it has been pinned to each girl’s dress; when their numbers are called—in small groups, by the thin, strict-looking man seated at the very end of the table—the girls must step into the center of the room. The wooden floor slopes down toward a wall lined with tall, framed mirrors.
    Already, without having danced at all, some of the girls are being dismissed. But Nina and Vera are in the group that is ushered to one corner of the room, where the strict-looking man explains that they are to walk, one after the other, across the floor so that their footsteps match the music. That is the only instruction they are given, and now, seated at a shiny piano, a woman with her hair piled high on her head begins to play—something pretty but also somehow sad, the tinkling of the piano keys like drops of rain splattering. One byone the girls make their way across the room. But at her turn Vera remains still, eyes wide, and Nina, waiting behind her, begins to worry. “Come on.” Nina grabs Vera’s hand, and the two of them move forward together, until Nina feels the tension in Vera’s fingers relax. When Nina lets go, Vera continues ahead, airy and at ease, while Nina returns to her slot behind her.
    Now that everyone has reached the other corner of the room, they are asked to go across once more—this time with one large step and two small ones, over and over. The music has changed to something faster and very grand. Hearing it, moving along with it, Nina feels herself shifting into a new being.
    Back outside afterward, the air carries the scent of lilacs. Warm sun through the cotton of their dresses. Ice cream scoops from a street vendor. For a short while Vera, too, seemed happy about the dance exam, aware that, like Nina, she performed well in the end. But now she is oddly quiet, and Mother’s thoughts are clearly elsewhere, so that Nina feels it creeping back, the dark nighttime feeling—so unlike the visible lightness around them, the sunny June freedom, everyone outdoors without a coat or hat. She tries to will the feeling away, thinks about the ballet school, about the man who came to her at the end to yank her leg up, this way and that, and examine the soles of her feet, asking her to point and flex her toes, and was pleased with what he saw. Vera too, unlike most of the other girls, was inspected from head to toe with approval.
    When they pass the grand hotel at the corner, the sidewalk café is open, the first time since the long winter. “Look!” Vera says, pausing. A woman is exiting the hotel, ushered through a wide glass revolving door—the only revolving door in the city, pushed round by two dour-faced men in long jackets.
    The woman is unlike any Nina has ever seen, wearing a dress suit of a fine pale gray-blue color, with a small hat at a slant on her head, and on her hands short clean white gloves. Gloves in springtime!And the delicacy of that grayish blue shade…Nina knows only a few fabrics, the same dark plum colors in winter and cheerily ugly patterns in summer, nothing in between.
    And then Nina sees the most remarkable thing: the woman has jewels in her ears. Diamonds, small yet twinkling mightily. For a moment Nina is almost breathless. The only earrings she has seen are big dull beads that hang down from clips: pearls, heavy-looking, or glassy lumps of brown or marbled green stone. And so these tiny glittering diamonds are startling. And they are in her ears!
    Nina’s mother looks away as the woman passes, but Vera asks, “Who is she?”
    “American, I suppose.” Mother reaches her hand out to Nina to show that it is