Winterland: A Novel

Katerina smoothed back her hair, tucking in a dark strand that had come loose from her bun. The tips of her fingers were cold and leached of color. This had happened when she was pregnant with Anya, and now here it was, returned, as if her blood had retreated to the center of her body.

She had let her Ballet III girls out a few minutes early, and she was alone in the studio, the steady tic tic of dripping icicles in the sun outside the window. She rested her right hand lightly on the barre and rounded her left arm above her head into fourth, her body still, back straight. She pushed into the earth with her standing leg and, hips square, brushed the toes of her working leg against the floor, extending, lifting her leg high, up into a grand battement. She lowered her leg in a controlled sweep, cleanly through tendu into fifth.

What was she doing? She was stalling, she was late. She held her fingertips in her fists for a moment to try to warm them before she pulled a skirt and sweater over her leotard and tights. She cinched the belt of her old red Moscow coat, its fox-fur collar soft against her face.

In the dance institute office, Galina crunched on sushki, a messy pile of bread rings right on her desk.

I have an appointment, Katerina said.

Galina flicked her eyes up and sniffed.

She has probably talked to them already, Katerina thought. Galina would volunteer information; she would not have to be prodded. Katerina had asked Vera how the camps could have happened, and here was her answer: lumpy, pale, petty, ordinary Galina.

You have a lesson with Inna, Galina said, brushing crumbs from her lap, her brown skirt in strained folds over her hips. In an hour.

I will be back, Katerina said. But would she?

Gather yourself together, she told herself. She thought of her Anya, that dark and blazing little creature. Your whole body breathes when you dance, she’d told her. You expand and then come back to the center. Anya was only five, but she understood, nodding with seriousness.

Spin me, Mama.

It was spring, but still freezing. Sun shot through the heavy, polluted sky. Dirty snowdrifts three meters high edged the street. At least the snow disguised the rubbish and rubble underneath. Katerina walked with her chin tucked in, the piercing cries of gulls circling overhead. A man walked behind her, the flaps of his ushanka tied up above his ears. Large square glasses, vodka blooms across his cheeks. She pulled her coat tighter and tried to coax blood into her fingers, her hands shoved in her pockets as she walked. A mud-crusted Moskvitch sputtered past, a plume of exhaust in her face. She crossed the street. The man followed.

The District Office was an immense pale-green building repainted every summer. The longer daylight showed its cracked façade, the gray snow line, patches of mildew like continents on a strange map. Yuri attended Committee meetings here; she had never been inside. But she had been summoned.

What would they say? We have heard things. You have complaints, comrade?

She couldn’t feel her fingers, but she could feel her fear in her tight inhales. She stood in front of the massive wooden door, her heart knocking against her ribs. The man leaned against a lamppost, took off his gloves, and lit a cigarette.

She could run. But what then? Even if she got away from the man, they would not let her go.

Katerina looked up from the valley to the hills on the edge of the city. There was so much beauty out on the steppe, she could lose herself in the boundless tundra. Thousands of unforgiving kilometers. A place that existed long before humans, wild and brutal and empty. They wouldn’t find her there. To spin and spin in all that nothingness.

The man was waiting to see that she went in. She looked back at the door and then turned and kept walking.

PART I

NORILSK, 1973

CHAPTER 1

"Wake up, Dochka."

Anya’s father brushed the hair from her face. His breath was warm on her ear, and she smelled the faint bitter herbs from his morning tea. She rolled over under the weight of a thousand blankets, or so it felt, quilt upon quilt to keep out the relentless chill. It was night dark. The sun would not rise today. Her father pulled the chain of the small brass lamp next to her narrow bed.

You don’t want to be late.

Anya sat up with a start, remembering what day it was, immune, suddenly, to the cold.

Breakfast is on the table, he said.

She cartwheeled across the small bedroom they shared, her heart leaping ahead of her, and flung open the door to the amber light of the kitchen. Her skin was as pale as milk, a thin shroud over the blue lattice of her veins. Her hair, as dark and sleek as mink, hung halfway down her back. Like her mother’s. They will make you cut it, he had told her.

The table was set with tea and bread and cheese, and in the middle of her plate, one perfect orange.

Papa!

She held the orange to her face and breathed it in. The rarest of indulgences in Norilsk. She closed her eyes and let the extravagant smell transport her, for the briefest moment, to somewhere warm and bright.

A special occasion, her father said. He crossed one arm over his chest and rubbed his fiery beard with his free hand. His eyes glinted green in the lamplight. We’ll celebrate tonight.

She didn’t ask, What if I am not chosen? It was what they had worked for.

"Irina’s made vatrushki," he said.

Irina lived on the first floor of their building. She came over sometimes and sat at the kitchen table and drank vodka with Anya’s father, and they would sing Komsomol songs and hug each other.

Anya peeled the orange with ritualistic concentration, pulling off the white membrane string by string. She held the soft puckered orb in all ten fingertips and then laid the little half-moons in a ring on her plate like petals.

Norilsk was north of the Arctic Circle, three thousand kilometers from Moscow. A Siberian town reachable only by plane or ship ramming through cracks in the frozen Arctic Sea. The home of some of the largest deposits of nickel and copper on earth. Anya was born here and had never been anywhere else. The rain burned her skin, the fog made her throat itch, and the air made her cough. The snow blew gray and sharp like tiny nails. The Daldykan ran red from the sludge of copper smelting. During the polar winter, the sun didn’t rise for two months. But Norilsk Nickel employees each received a Yunost’ black-and-white TV, and the state store shelves were stocked with sweetened milk, while everyone else scrabbled for a block of margarine. The wages were almost twice what workers made on the mainland, the rest of the Soviet territory that wasn’t their inaccessible outpost.

Anya lived for summer to arrive, that brief chapel of light, from late May to late July, when the sun never set, and a manic joy infused even the drunk old men who left their chess games and traipsed along the tundra hills. Herds of deer emerged from the taiga and came north, galloping right through town. The melted snow revealed a glittering landscape of scrap metal and unfinished train tracks warped from the cold. She and her father would shiver into Dolgoye Lake near where the town’s heating pipes passed through. Afterwards they would sun themselves on the rocks like seals. They would fill baskets with bittersweet golden cloudberries under a vast, translucent sky, the heat like balm.

There were the bones, of course, that rose up and washed ashore each June, reminders of the camp closed fifteen years before. No one spoke of the labor camp, Norillag. The kerchiefed babushki collected the femurs and ulnas and skulls and buried them next to the gardens they tended like children, lovingly caring for every plant that dared to grow in that brief reprieve.

Sometimes you need cruelty to appreciate beauty, her father told her after he and Irina had started in on the vodka.

Anya glanced out the dark window at a row of streetlights that would stay lit all day. It was a long time until spring. Her father packed cold sausages in his lunch pail to take to the copper plant. At least he didn’t go in the mines, she thought, down into the depths of the earth in blackness so complete it could rob your mind. It frightened her to imagine him there. Her classmate Viktor told her he’d gotten to ride the elevator down the mineshaft once with his father. When the door had opened back at the top, a voice over the speaker said, We bid you farewell. May your life be filled with much good news.

Anya placed the last section of orange on her tongue and held it there before crushing it with her teeth.

They had to have a plan before they went outside. No dawdling. The air felt like shards of glass in Anya’s lungs. Her father wrapped her in wool scarves and her fur-flap hat until all that was exposed was her nose. She was barely able to see through slits where the edges of the scarves met. The school had declared aktirovka two days last week, but the wind had died down enough to reopen, despite the snow and temperatures that dipped to forty degrees below zero.

Go to Vera’s after school, Yuri said. I will fetch you there.

Their neighbor was older than the domovoi, but she had a bowl of little chocolates wrapped in silver foil. She had looked after Anya since she was five, when her mother went missing.

They paused at the door. Their building was painted soft pink so it could be found in the blinding monochrome winter, grouped with three other buildings around an enclosed courtyard to save them, for a few moments, from the wind.

When will he come? Anya asked.

Her father pulled her scarf down so he could hear her.

"I don’t know. The director just said today. Do your best, Dochka."

She always did. She was a serious child. Not prone to laughing or playing around like others her age. You carry around your own storm cloud, her friend Sveta teased. You can’t change yourself, Anya knew. You are who you are.

Her scarf made her neck itch.

Did you hear about the naturalist? she asked.

Who, Ledorsky?

The eccentric professor lived on the fourth floor and subsisted on kasha and fermented milk, which he claimed protected him against the toxic air.

He took in a polar bear cub. An orphan. In his apartment.

Sometimes I forget you’re only eight, her father said.

I’ll ask Vera about it today.

He laughed. Let me know what you find out.

When they saw the headlights of the bus, they pushed into the darkness and steeled themselves against the biting air. You couldn’t wait at the bus stop or you might die from exposure. You couldn’t smile or the saliva would freeze in your mouth, and the pain in your teeth would make your eyes water, and then they would freeze shut. Anya couldn’t see the looming smokestacks in the dark, but even the cold couldn’t take away the smell of sulfur. They hurried down Leninskiy Prospekt as the bus stopped in front of the stone Lenin, a foot of snow on top of his head.

They fell into seats on the warm bus.

"Vsegda gotova," she said. Always ready.

"Vsegda gotova," he said.

He had taught her the Young Pioneers motto when she was two.

The class sang May There Always Be Sunshine to start the day. Anya never sang the third stanza, "May there always be Mama, but came back strong for May there always be me."

It’s today, Sveta whispered. Her pale hair was pulled tight in a bun. He’s coming today.

I know, Anya said.

Svetlana Nikolaevna Alexandrova! the teacher snapped.

When the bell rang, the children stripped down to their underpants and laid their clothes on their chairs, sliding their slippers underneath. Boots were lined up outside the door; they never bothered with shoes. Viktor passed out the dark goggles. They filed into the small windowless room and made a circle around the quartz lamp for their daily UV light bath. Sveta bounced on her toes, up in relevé, down, up, down. Anya pointed one toe out in front of her, then the other.

There’s a man in our building who has a polar bear cub, Anya said.

Sveta’s eyes flashed wide, and she grabbed Anya’s wrist.

What’s its name?

Aika.

Have you seen it?

Not yet.

I tried on my mother’s lipstick last night, Sveta said, dropping her voice. Pink. But she caught me, and I got in trouble.

To Anya, lipstick was more exotic than a polar bear cub. Makeup was a way to stand out when you were supposed to look like everyone else. It was irresistible, of course.

How did it look?

Gorgeous.

Anya had a memory of her mother, a flash of an image, skin powdered and lips red, her hair piled high on her head. What had she been doing? Where had she been going? She’d looked ghostly, unreachable, like a character in a fable, the pretty one being watched by a wolf. Or maybe it wasn’t her mother at all. Maybe just a picture she had seen.

After the light session, the children put on their physical culture uniforms. But before they could line up for the gym, their instructor walked in followed by a barrel-chested man in an ill-fitting suit, his shirttail hanging down below his jacket in the back. The man tapped out a Laika and lit it, holding it in the corner of his mouth. He looked them over with an imposing, heavy brow, his eyes squinting through the smoke.

Sveta shot her eyes to Anya. But she already knew.

CHAPTER 2

Yuri had met Katerina on the Arbat in 1954. In those heady days in Moscow after Stalin was dead, people started smiling again, and the wide pedestrian street hummed like a beehive in the sun. At seventeen Yuri believed he was living through history, a part of something great. All of them Young Pioneers and now Komsomol, all of them believers. Their fathers had defeated the Germans in the Great Patriotic War. They would build a just and modern nation. But it wasn’t the Motherland on Yuri’s mind that May afternoon, the smell of balsam poplar buds in the air, when it was warm enough to hold his jacket over his shoulder, taking in the market stalls, the mushrooms and cabbages and goat milk, the sketch artists who would pencil your likeness for a few kopeks, the old blind accordion player. The only thing on his mind was sex. He blamed the springtime. And his virginity.

Yuri found himself walking behind a trio of teenage girls with tight buns and turned-out feet. The little one in the middle with the darkest hair. Her ears were velvety pink, and he wanted to roll them in his fingers. She turned around and narrowed her eyes at him.

Buy a ticket, she said.

Yuri laughed, blushed. You are a dancer.

You’re smart.

The other two girls giggled and pulled away as Katerina moved in step with him. She was as small as a child—her head didn’t reach his shoulder. Her eyes were almost black, with a cavernous depth. She stirred something in him, and not just because he wanted to kiss those rose-petal lips.

You walk like a duck, he said.

Quack, she said.

Yuri felt like he had lived a century since then. He sat in the windowless cement room outside the Hades-like potroom of the smelter and drank cold tea from his thermos. He had been a pyrometallurgist at Norilsk Nickel for fifteen years. A red-and-yellow poster was pasted to the wall opposite: COPPER IS THE BACKBONE OF OUR ELECTRICAL AGE! He knew the gritty and fearless workers were the true builders of Communism. Work was work, but he liked the predictability of it; he liked doing his part.

Copper-rich ore was clawed out of the depths below Norilsk, smashed to powder in giant drums, which were then flooded with water, the copper sulfate floating to the top. This was where Yuri came in. He lowered canvas filters into the huge bins to skim the blue salts from the water. The roaster burned off the sulfur, and massive furnaces refined what remained into molten copper. Chunks of shiny black slag were hauled out and dumped in massive heaps along the edge of the city.

On his way out of the plant each day, Yuri liked to pass by the gleaming 225-kilogram ingots of copper. He still felt it, the call of duty to build a great Soviet Union, from each according to his ability, to each according to his work. If not that, then what? He had once held a position on the City Party Executive Committee but was dismissed without explanation, a typed note on yellow paper. Because of Katerina? He would never know; you didn’t get to ask why. He still had his Party membership, but he had lost favor.

Anya looked so much like her mother it was as if he’d had nothing to do with her making. Her single-mindedness should not have come as a surprise. He would not hold her back even though he knew it meant he might lose her. He would not make that mistake again.

The whistle blew. It was time for plant workers to do their midmorning calisthenics.

Anya felt her heart scamper and then catch up with a thud as the man from the sports school looked them over. He took the cigarette from his mouth and blew smoke to the ceiling.

Who wants to be a gymnast? he gruffed. Girls only.

Anya and five other girls raised their hands.

Stand up.

He shook his head at Sasha, the tallest girl in the class, and she sat down. He pinched the fat on Maria’s arm and frowned, but he didn’t dismiss her. He eyed the rest of them.

Follow me, he said.

They went to the school gymnasium. Instead of the balls and hoops and nets that usually littered the floor, the gym had been cleared out and outfitted with a thick rope to the ceiling, a freestanding metal bar, and some thin rubber mats. Anya and Sveta held hands, their bare feet white and bony against the floorboards.

Gymnastics is not for little birds, the man said. It’s for little Marina Chechnevas.

Chechneva was born in the north, a war pilot, a Soviet hero.

To Anya, gymnastics was the glittering key that would unlock a world that most people could never know. What it felt like to fly. Gymnastics would turn her into herself.

It’s fun, too, Sveta whispered. Maybe he doesn’t know that.

Sveta was the tiniest and best among them. She’d been flipping off chairs and bending her back in a full circle since she was four. But last year Sveta’s father, a mineworker, had gotten in trouble. He’d told a joke to a friend while sitting in the sauna at the banya: A portrait of Stalin hangs on the wall behind a speaker who reads a report on Stalin, the choir sings a song about Stalin, a poet reads a poem about Stalin. What’s the occasion? A night commemorating the anniversary of Pushkin’s death. Someone informed on him. He was interrogated at the district militia’s office for eighteen hours. Stalin had been dead for twenty years, Solzhenitsyn had been excerpted in Novy Mir, Stalingrad had been renamed Volgograd—and yet Stalin had won the War, and a neo-Stalinist headed the Party Committee in the north. Making jokes about Stalin, and really, a joke about the Soviet Union, was suspect. And hadn’t Sveta’s father been heard criticizing Brezhnev, himself a neo-Stalinist? The Thaw ushered in by Khrushchev had been long over. Sveta’s father emerged with a black eye—I fell, I fell, he said—and worse, he was stripped of his Party membership. A Russian expelled from the Party was a man in exile in his own country.

He was lucky, Yuri had told Anya. He’d landed his palms flat on the table as punctuation, and then turned up the radio in the kitchen in case someone was listening. There was a time he would’ve been sent away to Vorkuta to dig coal for ten years.

Sveta’s father was a small, wiry man with twinkling eyes and a quick laugh. Anya couldn’t imagine how he could be dangerous to anybody.

Sveta squeezed Anya’s hand for luck. The stout man led the girls around the gym, through drills and exercises. He didn’t want to see what they knew how to do. He wanted to see who was strong, flexible, tough.

Climb the rope. Faster. No feet! Legs out! he barked.

He held a stopwatch and marked things on the side of an envelope.

Little chubby one, he said to Maria. You are too slow.

He didn’t say anything to Anya, but she did not let up.

Yuri had trained as a promising gymnast at Dynamo in Moscow until age eleven when he was sidelined by a torn rotator cuff, and Katerina had been a prominent dancer for the Bolshoi. When Anya was three years old, they had received a visit from a sports and culture administrator, a stocky woman in a navy-blue skirt and jacket who sat on the edge of the sofa, her knees pressed together.

Will it be ballet or gymnastics for the girl? she asked. She tapped her pen on a stack of papers she held in her lap.

Yuri was flattered. Katerina was wary; she knew what would be ahead for her daughter.

You don’t have to decide now, the woman said with a shrug. But it was clear a decision, if not made by them, would be made for them.

Later when Anya was asleep, Katerina spoke softly near his ear.

She will never be full, Yurka. Her body will never not hurt. Always clay for men’s fingers, she said.

Don’t you want to see her dance?

Not yet. Please. Let’s give her time to be a child.

So they waited.

And now, despite Yuri having lost his prominent status with the Executive Committee, Anya had already been deemed an asset to the Soviet Union. Two years ago, Yuri had enrolled her at the ballet school. Surely Katerina would have wanted this for Anya? Their girl was different! She was destined! But Anya chafed under the cold eye of Marina Korolya, herself having once danced for the Bolshoi. Again, Anya. Extend, Anya. Lighter, Anya. Why aren’t you more like your mother, Anya? Sveta, who had only ever wanted to be a gymnast, taught Anya how to cartwheel, how to stand on her hands. Anya found a joy she had never felt in ballet.

And then Anya and Yuri had watched the Olympic Games in Munich on the television. Everyone knew the Soviet gymnasts were the best in the world. Ludmilla Tourischeva had won everything for years—the USSR, European, and World Championships. She was pretty, like a film actress, her dark hair styled in a smooth sweep, her tall, curvy body graceful and dramatic. But it was the newcomer Olga Korbut who transfixed Anya. As she watched, something physical happened in her body; she felt her hands tingle, her hair stand up. Korbut was seventeen but looked ten, small and flat chested, with a lopsided smile and messy pigtails adorned with loopy yarn bows. Tourischeva was of the earth; Korbut defied it, whipping her body through the air, flitting with audacity.

The Soviets dominated, as always, winning the team gold. Korbut won gold on the floor and silver on the bars. But Tourischeva won the most coveted all-round gold.

People don’t like too much change at once, her father said. Korbut will have her day.

In the end the medals didn’t much matter to Anya. Anya recognized something in Korbut, and she wanted it. She knew that by not choosing ballet she was turning away from her mother. But Katerina was gone. Anya felt a new kind of want, a current turned on in her body.

Papa, she said.

He looked at her for a long time and then turned away.

I know that look, he said.

Yuri exhaled a big breath through puffed cheeks. The state system was unparalleled. It was an honor. It was brutal. But she would be taken care of, a job for which he felt ill equipped on his own. They had gotten by for three years, just the two of them, but life had felt perilous and unsettled. Sometimes when he looked at Anya, he was scared by all the things he felt, a bone-jarring love, but fear, too, that she depended only on him, and a reminder, always, of the wife he had lost.

They pick later this year, he said.

Sveta told me.

If you make it— He stopped.

She knew, even at her young age, that if she made it, if she kept going, she would have to leave him. She saw the sadness in him, but she saw something else too. Pride. A spark of excitement.

I will help you, he said.

He trained her in their apartment. Frog jumps and push-ups, back bends and hollow holds. He pressed on her back as she sat in a straddle until her body pancaked against the floor. He pushed her to stay on her hands against the wall for thirty seconds, a minute, two. She sweated and ached and cried and got up again. He fashioned a bar from a thick dowel across the bedroom doorway for pull-ups and leg lifts.

Anya’s focus never wavered, even when her legs noodled from exhaustion. It was more than a goal. It was a vision. A bright burning spot that eclipsed, for the time being, that ever-shifting feeling of unease she carried in her core.

"We’ll make your body and mind strong, Dochka," Yuri said.

The bristly rope was like stinging nettles on the ripped skin of her palms. Her stomach muscles quivered from leg lifts from the bar. Her inner thighs were sore from center oversplits, one foot held above the floor on a folded mat. Sveta, still full of energy, executed flawless back walkovers while waiting for her turn, a 180-degree split leap when they moved stations. The man with the cigarette did not seem to take notice.

I can do a front walkover, Sveta said. Would you like to see?

You were not asked, he said. He folded his arms across his broad chest and looked away. "Get back in