The Second Mark

Berezhnaya's first winter in Moscow, the winter of 1991—1992, was the hardest the city had known in forty-five years, a winter of bread lines winding around the block and empty shelves in the markets. "My mother, kind soul, used to send me boxes from Nevinnomyssk to Moscow by train, passing things to the conductor with a few rubles, and then I would meet the train," Berezhnaya remembers. "And poor Sasha had to drag all my parcels from the train station back to the place where we were staying. Once she sent a box that weighed nearly fifty pounds. I remember how we dragged that box. It was raining, and the box expanded in the rain and broke open—right when we were almost at the doorstep. Tomatoes and carrots and potatoes spilled in the streets of Moscow, and we were picking them up." Berezhnaya shakes her head at the memory. "Can you imagine," she says. "My mother even used to send me potatoes. She didn't know that even in the worst times, we in Moscow had potatoes, even if we had nothing else."

While the Soviet Union fell to pieces around her, Berezhnaya's small world remained mostly intact. Tanks rolled up to the Russian White House, but Berezhnaya went to the same rink, did the same practices, attended the same middle school. Rubles lost their value overnight, people sold their furniture on the sidewalk and began stockpiling potatoes for a famine—and somehow, somewhere, a bureaucrat had managed to open a new dormitory for Red Army Club sportsmen, and Berezhnaya was living better than she had ever lived in her life. "They fed us very well, and it was totally free of charge," she recalls. "We lived like kings there."
Despite the harsh atmosphere at the Red Army Club, Berezhnaya was improving rapidly, and others were starting to notice. "She was not that student who walks in off the street and blows you away with her talent," Zakharov says. "Oh, no. Now, after I developed her, a lot of people came to me and said, 'Oh, what a girl!' But I can tell you, we worked a lot before people started saying that." Zakharov used to tell Berezhnaya's mother that in Moscow they were turning the ugly duckling from Nevinnomyssk into a swan. That didn't play too well back in Nevinnomyssk, but in Moscow, Berezhnaya rather enjoyed being regarded as an emerging swan.

In the spring and summer of 1992 Berezhnaya was briefly happy in Moscow. At her new dormitory she was the darling of the boys' soccer team, and the soccer players used to escort her back and forth to school under the linden trees. Between the school and the dorm there was a large and lovely park, and stepping out of the park the teenagers would pass through the impressive gates of the Ministry of Defense Central Red Army Sports Club Dormitory. The building itself was a well-proportioned four-story brick house. In its former life it had been a boarding house for children of Stalin's diplomats and spies. Berezhnaya shared a small room with another girl. It had high ceilings, pale blue walls, and large windows overlooking the greenery of the park. Berezhnaya, who was alert to beauty, would sometimes stand at her easel by the window and paint the scene before her, while the sounds of the boys' soccer game drifted up from the yard below.

The teenagers ate their meals together in the dining room, and after homework they would all gather around the one television set to watch a movie. Berezhnaya had always liked to be with the other kids, and this arrangement made her happy: "It was like one family. Good times." The main problem of this period, as she saw it, was that Sasha Ruchkin was all wrong for her, and as long as she was stuck with him she would never progress in pairs. But even this was soon addressed, because Zakharov gave up on Sasha Ruchkin and dismissed him from the school. Sasha, her last link with Nevinnomyssk, got on a train, and Berezhnaya remained in Moscow, more alone than ever. A few months later the coaches assigned her a new partner: Oleg Shlyakhov. The Bolsheviks called ballet a "hothouse flower." You had to lavish resources upon it to coax it into bloom

Berezhnaya, who had skated for ten years without being able to see clearly, didn't utter a word. She just followed Shlyakhov off the ice and on to Riga. "In two days they came back," Drey recalls. "She wore contacts. She was happy."

Before he started coaching the pair, Drey had been worried about the girl, because Zakharov had once said to him in passing, "You know, she never skates a free program without falling down at least five times." And it was true, the girl did take a lot of falls. But if you asked Drey, it was hard to say whether she fell because she had bad technique or because she was terrified of her partner, who was a complete monster. As far as Drey was concerned, Shlyakhov was a worthless human being. "I used to tell him," Drey recalls, " 'I hope you realize, you're going to end up somewhere behind a fence. But this girl is going to be great.' "
Whenever there was a blowup on the ice, Drey would take the opportunity to send Shlyakhov "back to his mother in Riga" and work with Berezhnaya alone. For weeks at a time, Drey worked one-on-one with Berezhnaya, remolding her technique, teaching her stability. By the time the 1994 Olympics arrived she was much improved. They were eighth at the Olympics, a very good result for such a young pair, and seventh at the World Championships a month later. After such promising results the Latvian federation agreed to send the pair to London, where Drey was relocating to coach at a new training center. It turned out to be the beginning of a very bad time for Berezhnaya.

Their money did not go far in London, and there were times when Berezhnaya and Shlyakhov shared a single meal, eating from the same plate. To economize, they moved into a tiny apartment—together. Shlyakhov has called this period the beginning of their romantic relationship, but Berezhnaya has never called it that. For her, the situation was a nightmare. Before, they had always lived in the dorms, chaperoned. Now she could never get away from him, and at night, she faced him behind closed doors.

The situation at the ice rink was horrible. "The minute I turned my back to put on music or attend to another pair, Shlyakhov would kick her or slap her across the face," Drey recalls. The situation was out of control. The British parents who came to watch their kids practice were constantly threatening to call the police and have Shlyakhov arrested. Berezhnaya withdrew into herself, silent and watchful. At times she looked up at Drey with enormous, frightened eyes. He pitied her, but he didn't try to find her another partner.

"Lena never came up to me to say, 'He kicked me,' " Drey recalls. "She never said a word, because she considered herself to be dependent on him. Remember, no one needed her in Russia. She was let go from everywhere in Russia, so she felt that she was dependent on Shlyakhov, on Latvia." Drey sighs. "She was only sixteen," he says. "She was not aware of the greatness of her skating; she did not know at the time that she would become a champion one day. I used to tell her, when she was sad, 'Lenochka, don't worry. Really, you will become great.' " But his words meant little to Berezhnaya. She was in a fog.

At the 1995 World Championships, Berezhnaya and Shlyakhov finished seventh—exactly the same place as the previous year. Shlyakhov was smart enough to know what was wrong. They had the skills, they had the talent, but to the judges, they still looked too—well, Latvian. They had synthesizer music, and they wore cheap costumes that made them look like they were working the pirate ride at an amusement park. The judges weren't going to put them on the podium. What they needed, he felt, was "a kind of pretty packaging that could be presented to the whole world." They needed to arrive perfectly coiffed and costumed, skating to elegant music with delicate choreography. Then the judges would be able to see them not as "the Latvians" but as a classic Russian pair. For this, Shlyakhov insisted, they needed a new coach.
Moscow was out of the question, so Shlyakhov looked to St. Petersburg.

Moskvina's enthusiasm is the gasoline that makes every engine in the rink run. It must be exhausting to fuel so many people's endeavors, but she doesn't show the strain. Moskvina would have made a great big band singer, getting up the energy for the performance three hundred nights a year, belting it out every single time. For thirty years she has begun every practice with a cheery greeting for everyone—good morning to each skater, privyet to the other coaches, privyet to the Zamboni driver. Every one of her former students remembers the trill of her voice floating across a seven o'clock practice session: "Good morning, boys and girls!" "It was enough," says one, "to make you want to shake her." Yet if you look at Moskvina as if you want to shake her, she will meet your look with her merry one. She might show off her single Axel jump, just because she can still do it. Often she will play the clown. When that music you have heard a thousand times comes on, she will yell, "Russian restaurant music!" and improvise a silly dance until you have to laugh with her. Or, if you are tired of these tricks, as most of her older students are, she will just wait out your bad temper and speak to you in purely technical terms, so that it's all very professional. Sooner or later, she wears everyone down.

Over the years, many a coach has stood by the boards and called out instructions to a skater, willing the skater to take by osmosis the coach's own positive energy. Moskvina jumped right over the barrier and got in her students' faces. Her pupils had no choice but to respond to her—she was nipping at their heels. During a practice Moskvina is constantly nagging, trying to extract that extra ounce of energy that makes the skater bother to point a toe or stretch a limb another inch. These are the details that make the difference at the top level, and with Moskvina hot on your trail you will probably do them. If she stood behind the boards at seven A.M., chances are you would not.

Moskvina has never been satisfied with any pair, though she has coached several Olympic champions. When she looks at one of her pairs she always sees something else to fix. An arm should be two inches higher here; the unison there is off by a split second. She would like to trim pounds from a girl's frame, curls from the back of her neck, inches from the skirt of a costume, until reality might match the image in her mind's eye. Moskvina is so obsessed with making skaters better that they can begin to feel that she gives them no credit at all for being good, and she might be intolerable if she did not apply the same relentless perfectionism to herself. "I am dieting and exercising like crazy," says Moskvina in one of the many oft-repeated stories about her, "and still my butt is getting bigger!" One of the boys in the locker room calls out, "That's because you are riding so much in the car!" Moskvina mulls this over. A light goes on. "Do you think," she asks, "we can take the driver's seat out of the car?"

For thirty years Moskvina has always had her group at Yubileiny— two, three, or even four pairs that she coached simultaneously. After all, she likes to do three or four things at once. The group approach was not Moskvina's invention; it has been a cornerstone of the Soviet system for decades. The idea was simple: The younger athletes learned from the older ones, preparing to replace them on the podium after they retired; meanwhile the older athletes gained the teaching experience that would help them in their next careers as coaches. A top coach like Moskvina could be shared with maybe four pairs at a maximum, with an assistant coach doing some of the detail work. Over time the group became something like your graduating class—you may not have liked all of them, but you'd known them for years and had been through a lot together.

In Soviet times Moskvina's group was the liveliest and hardest working in Russia. Moskvina could be a stern taskmaster, but there was also something inherently comical about her. "She was so short and funny, always runnin

Moskvina's English is excellent, and she has all the words she needs to go into the details if she wanted to. She doesn't want to. If you ask her how exactly her brother died in kindergarten, or what explanation the military officials gave for her father's death, she will say, insistently, "This we don't know." She is not resigned to not knowing; she is still angry— but she is not about to try and find out. To an American, it would be unthinkable that a toddler would die in kindergarten and the parents would not demand an explanation, but this was the Soviet Union, where there was not the same concept of having a right to information. If the authorities wished to tell you the truth, they would, but quite possibly you would never know the truth. And in Moskvina's childhood, when so many millions had died, there was even something unseemly in making too much of your own particular tragedy. So many others had the same grief—or worse.

If Moskvina's family had some good luck it was that her father came home from two wars. He survived World War II and Korea, and in 1948 he brought the family back to Leningrad, where he resumed his studies at the air force academy. There were five of them now, the parents and three little girls, and they all lived in one room in a dormitory for married students on Prospekt Obukhovskoy Oborony. There was a housing shortage in the Soviet cities, and like many families they were stuck with a so-called communal apartment: one of eighteen rooms on a long corridor, with a single toilet at the end that all the families shared. There was a basin in the room for washing, and a kerosene burner for cooking.

The only good thing about the communal apartment was that it was right on the Zhdanavka River, and when the river froze Moskvina's father would take the girls skating. On Sundays their father would walk them over to the Kirov Stadium, where in winter the infield served as a makeshift ice rink. "And that" Moskvina declares, "was so good, because it was with the father, it was in the cold winter, it was wind, it was sunshine. So that was great, great feeling."
In one early snapshot Moskvina, only ten years old, leaps above the ice at Kirov Stadium. She is wearing a blue wool skating dress that her mother stitched together from her father's old air force uniforms. Decades later, she scrawled her own caption underneath the picture: "The Masterpiece." "In my group," she explains, "when some small thing is done absolutely perfect, we say it's the masterpiece. This was my first." In the photograph she is wonderfully defiant. As she got better at skating she started trudging over to Kirov Stadium by herself, and not just on Sundays. She hadn't made the team yet and wasn't allowed in the dressing rooms, so she made up her mind to walk to the stadium on the toe picks of her skates. People passing by marveled at this short, determined little girl tiptoeing over two bridges, the railroad tracks, and another bridge before finally reaching the stadium. "Can you imagine that?" she says triumphantly, then answers her own question. "No!" Before long Moskvina made it into the dressing rooms—not because of her middling talent, but because she was the hardest worker in Leningrad.

After the war, figure skating started from scratch in Leningrad. When Moskvina's coach, Igor Moskvin, began skating on a pond in a public garden in 1945, there were exactly five serious skaters in the whole city. Moskvina was of the next generation, but still, Soviet skating—and Soviet sport generally—wasn't even close to being competitive with the West. It was in the postwar years that the Soviet Union began designing a sport system specifically to produce champions. One of the cornerstones of the State Sports Committee's strategy was to send Soviet athletes abroad only if they were judged to have a good chance of winning a medal. Moskvina won the Soviet national title five times, but she was one of those whom the bureaucrats held back for fear that she would embarrass the USSR on the world stage. Four times she was denied the cha

"And yet," she says, "there is this feeling: Every stick has two ends." In her own life, communism had made the difference. She had known skaters from the West, and she knew what their parents paid for them to skate. "So I'm thinking, if my family lived in the United States, did I have the chance to become a skater, a successful skater? A coach, a successful coach? Probably not. Because let's say, military person like my father, can he afford to have three children educated like university education, then figure skating lessons, music lessons for children? I don't think so. And that's why I'm very happy that I was born in the Soviet Union."

In Moskvina's day the national team often toured the Soviet Union, performing in small towns and attending special meetings with workers. These trips affected her profoundly—not as demonstrations of the valor of the worker-hero but as "a very good source of information about life."

The skaters went to factories, farms, and even coal mines, where "they gave us clothes that they put on miners. They installed on our heads those special lamps. Then we went in the very deep mine, how they usually go. We went in the part where they dig the coal with the special electrical equipment. And it was real work. So for example my first thoughts were: It was very hard there, they were perspiring, and they were covered with this black dust and coal. It was very, uh, not nice atmosphere. What is our life as skaters compared with that? No comparison! We are in very nice atmosphere, with the music, warm ice rink, costume. People applaud us, we travel all around the world. So I need to take my skating more serious, like pay more attention and give more effort. And it gave me the importance of my career, as I'm skating and producing the enjoyment for these people who work hard, who take our competition program as an entertainment."

Even in private Moskvina was a model Soviet citizen. Working with dancers and musicians she must have had ample opportunity to explore the Soviet underground scene, but if you inquire, she will say, "What underground? What? We had no time." She "didn't have time" for reading banned books in samizdat editions, either. She eventually joined the Party "because I thought, Okay, I am a good citizen, and I would like to do everything possible for my country to be good, to develop. So that was honest opinion. And," she continues insistently, "even if I was not member of the Party I would still be champion of Russia, I would still go to international competition. This didn't depend on my decision to join the Party. I got no advantages from it."

Plenty of skaters and coaches never joined the Party, and there were not a few who considered such an action tantamount to making a deal with the devil, but Moskvina was the type who always worked within the system, whatever system it was. Skating mattered more. She has said that "you can be happy in every system. The feeling of this happiness depends on you, on your philosophy." When the Party was in charge, she might have had her quarrels with it, but she joined. When the Party came to an end, she worked within the new system. She started arranging personal meetings with the mayor of St. Petersburg, where she would take a few Olympic champions along with her and beg for free ice at Yubileiny. It worked.

Under perestroika, Moskvina was one of the first people in the Soviet Union to apply for a small-business permit; she used it to sign contracts with her skaters that would guarantee her a percentage of their prize money and professional earnings when they went West, which they all did. When capitalism came she was the first Soviet coach out of the blocks. She had e-mail in 1995 in Russia. In the first years of free enterprise Moskvina started a small business producing figure skating tchotchkes— black lacquer boxes painted with figure skating scenes, fake Faberge eggs, matryoshka dolls. When she stayed in foreign hotels, she would lay velvet cloths over the furniture and the bed and spread out her wares. Then she would invite

Moskvina began to think that she might envision a couple and then go find the skaters to play the parts, for there was a pair in her imagination she had not yet made. It was a couple in the image of Gordeyeva and Grinkov—beautiful long lines, perfect bodies for pair skating, the girl short but small boned and long limbed. They would move gloriously, and they would be beautifully fast. Moskvina would marry the speed of Moscow with the music of St. Petersburg. They would skate the pas de deux, always ballet, always classical, a romantic style. "People," she sighed, "are nostalgic for such a style." She would present them always as a gentleman and his lady, and he should treat her in such a way that "all of the women sitting in the audience would like to be treated by the gentleman, as if they are watching the program and thinking, 'Oh! I wish I will be in her place!' "

She had made two dozen pairs before she came to this one, and she knew now what to look for. She found the girl somewhere in Russia, at a competition. Moskvina, who had some couples in the event, was standing at the boards, watching a practice. There were four or five couples on the ice at once, but suddenly every trained eye in the rink was on Yelena Berezhnaya. This effect will happen now and again—the people who know skating feel it right away, and it's as if the rest of the skaters on the ice are out of focus and the only distinct figure on the rink is one girl, light, light on her feet, and perfectly small, as if her body had been made limb by slender limb for pair skating. So there she was, and by now the people were saying to Zakharov, "Oh, what a girl!" Later, at an international competition in 1994, Moskvina was at the boards again to watch Berezhnaya practice with Shlyakhov. Berezhnaya landed a throw jump, and her free leg rose behind her back, high and beautiful. It was a simple thing, but it was everything. Everything the girl did was stretched and turned out and done with such amplitude that it was glorious to behold. Moskvina turned to the person standing beside her and said, "That's her. That's the girl I want." It was not, however, the boy she wanted.

By the time he was eighteen Anton Sikharulidze was known around Yubileiny as a hotheaded kid with a lot of promise who was basically pissing it all away. He'd been blessed with a perfect build for skating, and he'd had the extraordinary good fortune of being brought up in the Leningrad system from the age of five, which meant that he had marvelous technique. He had an extremely talented partner, a sweet girl named Masha Petrova, and together they had twice won the Junior World Championships. What's more, they had just finished sixth at the 1995 World Championships. These were the kind of results that could lead in a few years' time to the Olympic gold medal; however, it was unlikely that Sikharulidze was going to get there, since currently all of his energies were directed at destroying his team. He spent the better part of his practices shouting at Masha and his coach, Lyudmila Velikova. Sometimes he cursed, sometimes he walked out in the middle of practice.

Of this period, Sikharulidze has said: "Sometimes I lost control. I was acting rashly at times, which I regret now." He has also said, "When I was eighteen years old, why would I want to go to the ice rink? Figure skating is for ladies. My friends were practicing guitar, playing in a band. Why would I go to practice? What for? To see girls?" He thought he might be able to put up with skating if he were in Moskvina's group, but when he asked his partner to go with him she refused, and anyway Moskvina, who was coaching her pairs at the same training sessions where Sikharulidze skated, was wary. "Truthfully speaking, he had examples of bad behavior with his former partner," she says bluntly. "And then, he is little bit egotistical person."

Sikharulidze had "never liked skating, never" and had endured it for two reasons: "because I'm very scared to disappoint my father" and because he enjoyed the attention people paid to him becau

Berezhnaya's situation troubled Sikharulidze deeply. He had a sympathetic imagination and could fill in the details—how she must be treated at home, why she looked so stricken. "At first it was only this feeling of disappointment and pity, because you couldn't help seeing how they did everything, how they lived, how they skated. It was very crude, and I felt sorry. Very sorry." He watched her on the sly at practices, carefully, because Shlyakhov became furious when other men looked at her. She was attractive, of course, but to Sikharulidze the very idea of being attracted to her seemed "not proper," for the girl "was very modest, very shy" and at the same time "very downtrodden and oppressed by her partner. It was a girl who was afraid to contradict. And I would even say a certain female essence was killed in her. It's because she followed him completely, stepped in his footprints." When she first arrived at Yubileiny, Berezhnaya was afraid to say more than two words in a row. "She was too scared to even tell us good-bye when she was leaving. She used to turn her back to him and wave at us quickly with her hand."

Sikharulidze and the other skaters in his group talked it over, and they decided they would befriend the poor girl. At team parties, the girls would huddle around Berezhnaya so she could be free of Shlyakhov for at least a few hours. Shlyakhov "wouldn't allow her to have any contacts with her girlfriends, to say nothing of men," Sikharulidze recalls, "so we had to be clever." On days off, in the fine summer weather, Berezhnaya's new friends would contrive to sneak her away for an afternoon in the countryside. Sikharulidze watched her solemn little face test out a smile and felt his heart leap. "She started to blossom," he says. "The sparkle appeared in her eyes, a sparkle in her movement, and she started speaking more forcefully. Because now she had all of us around her."

One Saturday, Sikharulidze and two friends stopped by to see what Berezhnaya and Shlyakhov were doing and found Berezhnaya locked inside their second-story apartment. She confessed that Shlyakhov was in the habit of locking her in when he went away for the weekend. So Sikharulidze and his friends climbed up and carried her out through the window. "Next door was the police department," Sikharulidze says. "And the police came over to us and said, 'Hey, what are you guys doing here?' I said, 'Listen, we don't want to steal anything from this apartment. We just want to take the girl out. Because her stupid boyfriend locked her in the apartment and went somewhere for two days.' "

Moskvina had brought Shlyakhov to Yubileiny on the assumption that she could reform him. "I knew," she admits, "that he had treated the girl very badly, but I thought of myself as a very strong person in psychological influence. I thought, Oh, this will be like great challenge for me, and I could use all my knowledge, all my experience to teach him to work in, as I say, cultural way. Not emotionally, but nicely. And I thought I can do this." She took Shlyakhov to a psychiatrist, counseled him herself, and enlisted her husband and the ballet masters in Shlyakhov's extensive reeducation. For a time it seemed to be working. "At the beginning, as usual when you come to the new coach, he behaved nice," Moskvina says. "But then he started to behave as usual. He could kick her, he could shout at her, even hit, hit after her, for no reason. Well, there was reason. Let's say, she fell. Or she was a bit slow. For me it was no reason to hit the girl who was much weaker than him, much younger than him, and well... I was shocked. In our school in St. Petersburg nobody hit the girl, nobody shouted. There were some pairs in Russia that we heard that the boys didn't treat girls well, but it was not in our school."

But now there was violence in Moskvina's school, and she didn't know how to stop it. Shlyakhov dominated Berezhnaya in practice. "If I missed a jump, he used to say, 'Do it again, do it again.' And I kept doing it until I was completely crushed," Berezhnaya remembers

So Berezhnaya was to go to Riga, but she was not to compete at the National Championships under any circumstances. She would come down with the flu—any excuse would do. But she would not compete. Because if she did skate at the Latvian Championships, according to the rules she couldn't skate for Russia the following season. And if Moskvina's plan worked, Berezhnaya was soon going to skate for Russia.

After the Latvian Championships, Berezhnaya was to go to the European Championships, and there the Latvian federation would hand over her passport so she could carry it around for identification. Immediately after the competition, Berezhnaya was to walk out the arena doors, hail a taxi to the airport, and fly directly to St. Petersburg, and that would be the end of Latvia. Moskvina would arrange the plane ticket, and when Berezhnaya reached St. Petersburg, Moskvina would provide the rest—a place to stay and a partner, Anton.
On her last night in St. Petersburg, Berezhnaya stayed up all night talking to Sikharulidze. "I didn't want to leave," she says simply. "I had this strange feeling that something was over—and that something new was just beginning." She would go to Riga, she would follow Moskvina's plan, and when she had her passport in her hands she would go to the airport without looking back. "I would skate with him until the European Championships. I told myself, I will skate there, and then that's it—that's the end."

"She said a lot of things that night," Sikharulidze recalls. "It seems to me now that if I had told her to stay with confidence, she would have stayed, because she was afraid to leave. And besides, she had gotten used to being here; she had gotten used to me, to our group, and she felt she was no longer a stranger here. She wasn't an outsider here like she had been in Riga, where she felt that nobody needed her, and she felt lonely." But still, he didn't ask her to stay. "You see, as she was going anyways, I was trying not to think about bad things that might happen," he says. "But subconsciously I felt that things would be even worse in Riga, because here Tamara and I were near her, and we could help her. But there would be nobody near her in Riga. I felt in my bones that something bad would happen there. But I didn't think it would be that bad."

"We were in Riga," Berezhnaya says. "We were there for the National Championships but we did not skate the long program, because I was sick. After a few days' rest we came to practice and we warmed up, and then we started rehearsing our short program." In perfect unison they glided into the side-by-side camel spins. Both skaters kept one foot on the ice and leaned forward in a spiral position, their back legs outstretched. Each time her head came around, Berezhnaya could briefly glimpse Shlyakhov's skate as it passed by. Then she felt the blow. "I thought: Oh. I guess he hit me in the head. But it wasn't too bad so I continued spinning. And then suddenly I felt that I couldn't stand up anymore. I felt something wet and dripping, and I fell down."

Shlyakhov knew at the moment of impact. "I felt a jolt, that I had hit her. My first thought was: Oh, God, oh, have I hit her eyes? She was lying on the ice. There wasn't any blood yet. I saw that her eyes were okay. From somewhere, there was a cry. I picked her up and carried her to the medical room at the rink, and they started first aid right away." It was then that he noticed the blood. There was a lot of it, all over his hands and clothes. "I saw the amount of blood. I understood that it was very serious."

Shlyakhov climbed into the back of the ambulance with two nurses. Berezhnaya felt so strange. The nurses were asking questions—her name, her address—"but for some reason," she says, "I was unable to talk. Everybody thought that I couldn't talk just because I was spooked. But I was thinking, I feel all right, I just don't know the answers to these questions." At the hospital they stitched her up and wheeled her to the lab for an X ray. "I was sitting there waiting for the X ray. And then I s

At first, Berezhnaya says, she "couldn't think about anything, because everything just hurt." When she felt a little better, she noticed that she could not feel her right arm, and she started poking at it with her good arm just to make sure it was still attached to her body. A doctor came in and said she would have to lie in bed for three weeks without moving, and she began to cry, because she could not imagine lying in that awful bed for so long. "All I wanted," she says, "was to go home and never skate with Oleg anymore." Berezhnaya communicated by writing notes to her mother and to Moskvina. One of her earliest notes said she would never skate with Shlyakhov again. It was Berezhnaya's mother who gave him the news. Moskvina had already gone back to St. Petersburg, and even after everything that had happened, Berezhnaya still couldn't tell him herself.

As her strength improved and she was better able to understand her situation, her spirits sank even lower. "You see," she says, "they didn't give me the mirror. So the first time I saw myself was in the newspaper. A local journalist came to my room in the hospital and took a photograph, and some kind soul brought me an issue of this newspaper. I took one look and
thought: Who is this, some kind of an embryo? And then later they removed the bandages around my head, and they did give me a mirror." She had tried so hard not to cry, but now she broke down and sobbed. "I fell into a deep depression."

During those endless hospital days, her mother led her gently through the alphabet, then through the simplest words, syllable by syllable. All day long, they did exercises to bring back the feeling on the right side of her body. Berezhnaya was good at training, and within two weeks much of the feeling had come back. But her fine-motor skills were still a problem, so her mother would set tasks before her, like knitting with a certain stitch, or separating a book of matches.

One afternoon Berezhnaya discovered that she could speak a little bit—slowly, painfully—and turned to her mother. "It was the first time she could talk," her mother says quietly. "She said to me, 'Mom, will I skate?' " Tatyana Berezhnaya shakes her head. "She was lying paralyzed, and the first question was: Can I skate? Will I be able to skate?" Tatyana Berezhnaya looked down at her daughter's body, connected to tubes and ravaged by angry scars. The emaciated body made almost no shape under the sheet. "What could I say?" she sighs. "I said, 'Yes. Of course you will.' "

Anton Sikharulidze was at a friend's house when Moskvina called him shortly after midnight. "Hold on to your chair," she told him. "So I sat down," he recalls, "and she said, 'Lena is in the hospital.' " Sikharulidze was enraged. "He told me I was stupid," Moskvina recalls. "I was stupid, I shouldn't have let her go. We all knew something would happen. I should have told her to stop skating with him, I should have told her not to go to Riga." Sikharulidze hung up the phone and stayed up all night, deciding what to do.

Something inside him had snapped. The tension had been building for a long time—he had needed to change, but he had avoided it, and now this tragedy had happened. Well, for once he was going to do something. "I decided to leave my partner immediately," he says. "I thought I had to act somehow. I had to do it at that very moment. Besides, I couldn't just keep skating with my old partner and visit Lena in Riga at the same time. I was scheduled to take part in a competition in St. Petersburg a few days later." He called his partner and told her he was quitting. Then he started packing for Riga.

From Tatyana Berezhnaya, whom he called to check on Lena's progress, Sikharulidze heard that Shlyakhov might try to stop Yelena from leaving Latvia. Sikharulidze didn't care. "I was going to Riga," Sikharulidze says. "And I would never come back without her. To stop us he would have to kill me." But Sikharulidze didn't want any trouble, so he avoided his figure skating contacts and secretly obtained a visa through friends. W

She said, "Listen, this is a person who had that serious injury. So you should be ready that maybe your pair won't exist. Don't look at her as future partner. You are just trying to help her recover as a human being. If she will skate, then we will talk about the future. If she won't and she won't be healthy, then you just help her to become a little bit more alive and then your pair will not exist. Are you ready for it?" Sikharulidze was ready for it. His friend needed his help. He had been looking for a reason to go on skating. Well, here was a reason.

What must Tamara Moskvina have felt, the first time she saw Berezhnaya just gliding, simply putting one skate in front of the other—merely doing that simple motion she does better than anyone in the world, and holding Sikharulidze's hand for safety? Berezhnaya's body was still thin and malnourished. She looked like a cancer patient, with no hair sticking out from under her stocking cap. Her skull still had a place where it was sickeningly soft; if she touched it gently with her fingers, it would hold the impression. Would she become dizzy? Would she faint? If she fell, would her head hit the ice?

Was it still, at this moment, a question "against humanity" to ask if she would skate—or had it become somehow a question of restoring some of her humanity? For as Sikharulidze would say later on, to skate more was to confirm that she was fine, that she would be whole again; to skate less was to say that she was weak, that she would never be well.

"I was responsible for the life of a child," Moskvina says. "She was eighteen, still a child, and she lived far away from her mother, so I was like a little bit of a mother for her. And then I thought: Let's pretend she's my daughter. She had that injury. She had that operation. Will you teach her?" Moskvina pauses. "No."

But Berezhnaya's own mother had already answered that question, so the two friends stepped onto the ice. Later, after only a month of stroking around, Berezhnaya would astonish Moskvina by reeling off a double jump, and soon after, she would nonchalantly land a triple. Not long afterwards she would do her first spin, a maneuver that is enough to make anyone dizzy, and Moskvina would pray, pray that there would be no sudden cry, no abrupt collapse. There was none. Later still they would do "that dreadful element, the side-by-side spin," and Moskvina would race down the ice toward them, yelling at the top of her lungs: "Please! Stay away from each other! Stay far away \" And they would do the side-by-side spins far apart, with an eerie wide space between them.

In the summer, Sikharulidze would start to lift her above his head on the firm ground. When September came they would do lifts on the ice, and he would drop her too often and sometimes dramatically, and curse himself. And when she would fall Moskvina's heart would hurt, and she would demand of someone: "Why she's so unlucky, as if somehow everything which happens is like against her? I know that, for example, I am very lucky person. And she somehow, so unlucky." (Berezhnaya, still far too thin, in a heap on the ice, rubbing a bruise, and Sikharulidze in the corner, berating himself.) Moskvina would skate over and help her up, ask how she felt, force her to take a rest.

"So we teach her," Moskvina says. "No—not teach. We support her, Anton and I. We support her as people. And she recovers, she moves ... she fights, fights the unluck of her life."

(Berezhnaya up on her feet again, shaking the pain out of the bruised leg, and then beginning again, swaying gently to and fro as she builds speed.) "I think she is afraid, but she goes slowly up—tries, falls, does again. This is really the quality that I admire. I admire, but I don't tell her," Moskvina says. "Very deep in her heart, she must be extremely brave."

There came a time when Sikharulidze found himself afraid to say no to Berezhnaya when she wanted to attempt a dangerous element, for skating, which she had once loathed, now meant normal life. After practice, Berezhnaya went to a spee