by Polly Tuckett
Gold on a Darkened Background
Leaving early to avoid any encounter with a remembered face, she took Afanasy's arm, tiptoeing carefully over the brittle mantle of snow and ice that draped the city like a dustsheet, as though recollecting a sequence of long forgotten dance steps. All those years of being one of Saint Petersburg's main attractions and here she was finally doing a bit of Sightseeing herself. But this morning all the gilding and the grandeur were giving her a headache. Pale as primroses, the feeble winter sun, washed over the spires and cupolas of beaten gold working its magic, making the rooftops godly and impossible to look upon. Gold was such a brash, conventional metal, only attractive when sprinkled sparingly on a darkened background. You could certainly have too much of a good thing.
The rest of her day she would spend as she did every other, inside her hotel room. Perhaps rather than the view of Nevsky Prospekt, she should have requested a suite overlooking Arts Square, with its dreary statue of Pushkin and its majestic trees, stripped for the spiteful glitter of frost. But she liked to let her gaze wander lazily up and down the broad sweep of the street below, and to pace her activity around the midday gunfire from the Admiralty. Upon arrival, she'd asked Afanasy to move the desk over to the window. The desk always had to be by the window, whether the view was of the Piazza San Marco, the Champs Elysees or Wenceslas Square. Until 3pm she did her scrapbooks, pasting in the jaundiced columns of newsprint, ancient previews and performance reviews trapped in the limbo of a filing drawer for so many years. She snipped the press cuttings out using a pair of dressmaker's scissors, which cut in a wavy line, like the edging on old photographs. The spatula often shook between her fingers and sometimes she suffered from neck-ache, the almond smelling glue webbed and sticky in the creases between her fingers, needing to be peeled off. The fun of an art project soon evaporated in a bout of ill temper. She was all sun and cloud with the quick, intense moods of a child. Sometimes she even knocked the books and paper, the saucer of glue and the scissors to the floor. Why keep the cuttings? What posterity - for whom? If you must cut out and preserve a part of yourself, why not keep a little box full of toenail clippings, snippings of your hair instead? She was petulant and indulged. Afanasy would clear the things away, put a shawl around her shoulders, bring tea.
Homeostasis, an ugly word, but quite fitting. She was like one of those higher organisms that managed to regulate their environment - always somewhere different, ever more of the same. Her only visitors were the birds, and even they were mostly unwelcome. For this reason, the spud gun accompanied her on all her travels. One morning in Budapest a pair of seagulls had spoiled her breakfast with their squawking rooftop argument so she'd asked Afanasy to prop open the window. Leaning over the tray, she'd taken squinting aim at one of them. The outrage on its face had been comical, if a little frightening. It had fixed her with its ancient eye.
Controlling, neurotic, agoraphobic … Inventing what her detractors might say about her, she had to concede that there was some truth to their criticisms. She was indeed bitter and there was a sort of thwarted vanity behind this, her final tour. And yes, she had refused to age with grace, in both looks and manners. She was capricious and exacting, a diva still, although the applause had long since petered out. Afanasy would agree, if he weren't so loyal. She spent money on expensive face creams that promised to turn back the years and stood for hours before the mirror in a dim light trying on hats and veils and evening gloves, and all for a dinner that she would eat alone with Afanasy in the bedroom. She was certainly no model for a dignified decline. But eccentric? No. Eccentrics were almost always self-consciously so. A person cultivated their eccentricity the way they might the twisted branches of a bonsai tree or the waxed nibs on a handlebar moustache. There was something very male about it. To be a true eccentric, you had to adopt a role and be observed playing it. It involved reducing yourself, in all your vexed complexity to a set of crude brushstrokes, a character.
Afanasy, silent at her side, steered her over the Lion Bridge. This was the city of a hundred and one islands. It compared favourably with Venice, being far more beautiful in her opinion. There was the stench of a Venetian summer for one thing, and no green either, no repose for the eye. Venice indeed. Its waterways with their little curlicued bridges like the ones on violins – sickly sweet. In fact the whole place with its glut of high art, its blown glass baubles and painted masks made her feel claustrophobic, and this despite having spent most of her old age confined to a hotel room.
She stopped to look over the edge of the bridge at the frozen canal below. Snow had fallen overnight, concealing the scarred surface of the ice. She remembered secret skating parties on the Neva after classes, although it had been strictly forbidden by the teachers and the choreographer.
The palace on the other side of the Fotanka Canal was at its best at this time of morning. The sun warmed the rose coloured brickwork and lit its hundred windows from without. They kept walking till they reached the little square. Escorting her to a bench, Afanasy said he'd be back in a minute. She shrank into her coat, letting the sun warm her eyelids.
Passing through Southern European towns and villages, she'd seen widows in their black taffeta weeds flocking around communal benches just like this one, their dresses glossy as crow feathers in the afternoon sun. Black was a dignified colour for an old woman, and yet so unflattering. She rarely wore it, except when traveling, when she'd vanish gratefully inside the velvet cloak, its hood fringed with lustrous beads of jet. No, these days she dressed according to a muted palette - silks of dove grey and dusky pink, subtle and unremarkable, forgiving against her weathered skin. But once upon a time, black had been her favourite colour.
In the corner of the hotel room stood a precarious stack of hatboxes and packing cases, most of them garishly posted with shipping stickers, long triangular ones like the individual flags on a string of bunting. By night the pillar of luggage became a many-faced totem pole, dark and powerful. The box at the bottom of the pile was rarely opened, yet it contained her second most treasured possession. Wrapped in layers of crinkly pink tissue paper, the dress of the black swan, Odette's dress.
Between Nijinsky and Pavlova, it was predictably Nijinsky who'd taken posterity's wreath of greatness, strength triumphing over grace every time. But only another dancer could appreciate the strength that grace required. Poor Pavlova with her bleeding feet, her broken toes. The stigmata of women counted for little, it was expected. Her own feet, from years of pointing, were now ruins of collapsed arches, varicose veins and bunions. Few remembered the artistry, although the frocks might achieve immortality. Pavlova's main legacy, after all, was a complicated cake from Australia.
The dress had never really been hers to begin with, but no more had it belonged to Pavlova. Everything she loved had this in common. The dress was like a bridal gown, so layered and yet so bland in its significance. It was closed to all risk, to fresh interpretation, and it made an object of its wearer.
Her most treasured possession was not hidden from view. It stood on the bedside table, a framed photograph of the baby, her baby. The frame was a black lacquer one in the Deco style. Whatever sort of varnish had been used to seal it off sparkled richly with trapped flecks of gold. Like a snow globe, it made you want to climb inside.
In the picture, his expression is one of gormless fascination. He stares blankly into the camera lens. Mouth gaping, a bead of saliva shimmers on his bottom lip. His eyes are huge and black, fringed with delicately spiked lashes. His plump cheeks are brown with a bloom of warmth like a late summer peach, although in the photograph, all colours are only different intensities of sepia. His beauty grabs the heart, violently twists it. Before bed, she kisses him goodnight, pressing her lips to the glass.
His father was from Azerbaijan. The only pause in a numberless list of lovers, boringly infatuated lovers, who could afford to spoil her with meaningless presents, diamonds and dozens of gloomy, blood tinted roses that somehow flourished in mid-winter. Traktor Ilyich Aliyev, first violinist with the symphony orchestra and sometime agitator. This one she had loved back. Then one day he'd disappeared, whether by choice she had never discovered.
The bedside table was an altar. There were offerings too - candles, incense, a bowl of flowers, a small bear. She worshipped the baby. But the baby had perished, becoming first a truculent child, then an indifferent man - a businessman with brash opinions, scant regard for family and showy co-respondent shoes. He had recently undertaken a course of psychoanalysis, so much in vogue these days, and learned that the key to his tortured psyche was that his mother had been wrong about everything.
It must be nice to be so certain. In the photograph the baby is immortal, preserved under glass like Lenin, for so long the namesake of this city. They were all traveling under assumed names now though, even the hotel itself, which gloried in its Tsarist past, parading it before the foreign tourists, whilst disguising its more recent identities as an orphanage and a hospital. Guests could pay the concierge for a box at the Marinskii and the privilege of complimenting the prima ballerina after the show. Ridiculous! As one might pay a prostitute.
She might as well be dead already; a ghost now - cold, invisible, condemned to wander through a once familiar world, hung-over with nostalgia and with longing. She knew how it must appear. Nutty old fruit-bat, marooned in the past. And her ever-present detractors, always whispering in the recesses of her mind, assuming that she haunted the sites of her former zenith in the hope of being seen again. - the secret comeback, the grand tour. But they were wrong! She wanted to see without being seen. She wanted, simply, to know that it had happened, that this had been her life.
The cold was working its way up through her feet and her lower leg was gripped with cramp. Damned Afanasy, where had he got to? There he was emerging from under the canopy of a kiosk on the opposite side of the square. Dependable, lovely Afanasy. He shuffled over the cobblestones, nursing two Styrofoam cups of scalding hot chocolate, the best in Petersburg. Afanasy Aronovich Kats.
What was his motivation? He didn't have to stay, and yet he stayed. She bent over her leg as though taking a forward port-du-bras position, kneading uselessly at the cramp Afanasy had his own aches and pains to deal with, but never a word on the subject. Perhaps he was the invisible one. She sat up and there he stood above her, eclipsing the sun. And now he was at her feet, his grandfatherly profile remote as mountains. Taking her leg between his large, rough hands, he began gently, to rub the pain away.