Derek Lambert - The Red Dove

It was while they were walking through the centre of the city, a route intricately plotted by Talin to embrace the theatre, cinemas and best shops, that Sonya mentioned discord at the Bolshoi. The trouble, he gathered, was divided into two categories; the first he vaguely appreciated with the indulgence of the layman peering into the artistic temperament; the second he understood utterly.

A lot of the dancers, apparently, were disenchanted with the artistic director, Boris Pudovkin. He was pigheaded and he had favourites.

When Talin pointed out that she was one of the favourites she replied with spirit: ‘That’s not the point. Favouritism has no part in either our society or its artistic expression.’

The pig-headedness, she told him, was evident in his choice of new ballets. Surely not in the space ballet The Red Dove? No, that was acceptable. But some of his ideas were, well, degenerate. Not only that but he seemed unable to distinguish between traditional and modern ballet. ‘He has done dreadful things to Romeo and Juliet,’ Sonya said, tucking her arm into Talin’s.

He stopped and kissed her cold cheek. Her face framed in mink looked lovely. They walked past a cinema showing Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky’s Siberiada. He would like to see it, Talin decided: it was the story of a village in Siberia.

The complaint about the Bolshoi that he really understood was a clamp-down on foreign tours and increased KGB surveillance.

Hurrying her past two particularly ugly barrack-block apartments, Talin asked: ‘Why have they done that?’

She looked at him in surprise. ‘Don’t you know? Because of the defections on the last tours of Britain and the United States, of course.’

Talin’s interest quickened. ‘How would I know? Such things aren’t reported in our newspapers.’

‘Why should they be? We aren’t proud of them.’

Today he didn’t want argument so he contented himself with: ‘Why did they defect?’

‘The usual pathetic reasons. The freedom of life in the West. Artistic liberty, all that hypocritical nonsense.’

‘But I thought—’ Talin stopped himself.

‘Thought that I was complaining about loss of liberty in the Bolshoi? You misunderstood, Nicolay. I was merely telling you how others felt.’ She withdrew her hand from his arm.

‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful,’ he said, hailing a taxi to whisk them past a monstrous hotel, ‘if we could solve this equation in our lifetime.’ They climbed into a taxi. ‘The rival merits of Communism and Capitalism, that is.’

‘Impossible,’ she said, as the taxi accelerated in the direction of Talin’s house, ‘because there is no such equation.’

The equation, or lack of it, made several more appearances during the day, in between love-making, eating, planning and dancing. It augured well for their marriage, they agreed, that they could argue without rancour.

When they made love for the second time that day it was more leisurely – to begin with at any rate – and experimental. Every time there was something new, every time Sonya shed a veil of reserve. He, too, amazed himself. He found that lying beneath her was just as pleasurable as dominating on top; it was more comfortable, he could fondle her breasts and, more importantly, they could see each other. Tell an old Russian goat that and he would assume you were a cripple.

He tried to make their orgasms synchronise. But, biting him, she said it didn’t matter a damn when it happened as long as it happened, crying out and digging her fingernails into his back.

Later while she was searching for a needle and cotton to sew a button on her blouse she introduced defitsitny, shortages, into the day’s debates. You couldn’t buy a needle or cotton in Leninsk for love nor money, Talin told her.

Defensively, she said: ‘So, you can’t buy a needle and cotton but you can buy food and for that we should be grateful.’

Such an illogical response startled Talin. Until he realised that, without comprehending it, she was embarking on the stock defence of defitsitny drilled into her since childhood. The defence had one great merit: it was true. Until the Revolution the peasants had lived on their wits, during the last war too. Even Talin could remember existing on potatoes, buckwheat and fish plucked silver-bright from holes in the ice. The flaw in the defence was that it didn’t attempt to explain why defitsitny existed at all nearly forty years after the war.

‘And an apartment only cost a fraction of the rental in the United States,’ she said, taking the next step in the defence and by doing so brandishing aloft Russia’s inferiority complex about the West.

Wishing fervently that Sonya had found a needle and cotton, Talin said: ‘True. But a Russian worker only earns a fraction of his American counterpart.’

So there it was, the equation. A vacation could cost an American a fortune: a Russian could have a month by the sea for a song. A tiny Soviet car was twice the price of an American compact: a visit to the dentist could cost a New Yorker an arm and a leg whereas a Muscovite had his teeth fixed for nothing.

What we lack is freedom. He didn’t voice the thought. Sedov had taught him well. Perhaps when he and Sonya were married…

When she began: ‘Sometimes you seem to admire the West more than—’ he took her arm and said: ‘Come on, let’s go and buy you another blouse.’

They had dinner in a hot little restaurant with misted windows and lots of shiny-leaved plants that gave it the feel of an aquarium. There, over coffee, it was the American boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games back in 1980 that surfaced.

Followed by Afghanistan and then, of course, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

And space? Again the thought passed unspoken.

Overjoyed at their capacity for friendly debate, they strode gaily from the restaurant and crossed the street to the city’s only disco, a dark concrete cave thumping with bold music. A rash of light-spots spun round the walls and the floor was crowded with young people dancing. The records were three or four years old but who cared? It was rock ’n’ roll and the skirts swirled and the blue jeans swayed.

Sonya danced with uninhibited inspiration, he with strength and agility. They were given the floor. When they returned to their table they were applauded.

They drank beer. Briefly, following up a remark that, a few years ago such exhibitionism would never have been allowed, they touched on decadence and hooliganism. All right, Sonya agreed, the crime rate, especially among young people, was alarming but it was nothing compared with crime in the States.

Always the comparison. The ever-brooding complex that had so much to do with Soviet aggression.

‘Let’s just blame vodka,’ he said, smiling. ‘It’s the scapegoat for most of our evils.’ He took her hand. ‘I thought we should get married soon.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Two weeks?’

She leaned across the table and kissed him. ‘Two weeks. Did you discuss this with Sedov?’

‘No,’ he lied.

‘This man Massey?’

He looked at her in astonishment. ‘Why should I discuss it with him?’

‘No reason. I just wondered. It just struck me as odd that he should ask you to get him a ticket to the ballet.’

‘I’ve only discussed space with him,’ Talin said.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, tracing the outline of his cheek with her fingers, ‘I think of you in space when I’m dancing.’

‘And how does it affect your performance?’

‘I feel as though I’m going to fall. You can’t know what it feels like – to know that the man you love is… severed from the earth.’ She looked into his eyes. ‘How many more times, Nicolay?’