My Sergei-A Love Story

我发现这个论坛有许多朋友都很喜欢Gordeeva&Grinkov.
我超级喜欢G&G。通过她的书My Sergei-A Love Story对他们更加了解。这本书好象不太好买，我有一本是英文版的。我type了一小部分，和大家分享。如果有喜欢看的，我可以继续打。这本书很长，讲述的事情非常详细，如果想更加了解G/G，这是最好的一本书。

希望大家喜欢。

不不，千万别那么说，多少不重要，能有的看已经很幸福了，十分感谢。

                                      My Sergei

                                    A Love Story
                     Ekaterina Gordeeva with E.M. Swift                        

                                       Prologue

  For me, a new life is coming, a different life from that which I knew. I felt it for the first time when I was back in Moscow, two weeks after my beloved Sergei’s funeral. In my grief, I feared I had lost myself. To find myself again I did the only thing I could think of, the thing I knew best, the thing I’d been trained to do since I was four years old. I skated. I went onto the ice, which was always so dear to Sergei and me, and there, in the faces of young skaters training with their coaches, I recognized their bright dreams and hopes for the future. The new life is coming, I thought.

   A little later, New Year’s night, 1996, I was reminded of it again, this time in the sound of the laughter of my twenty-year-old sister, Maria, and that of her friends, and in my own laughter from being around them. How wonderful it felt to laugh, if only for a short time.

   And always, especially, I feel stirrings of a new life whenever my daughter, Daria, is near. No matter how I am feeling, no matter where my mind is wandering in time, I have to smile back at her, because she is always smiling for me.

[此贴子已经被作者于2003-2-27 18:06:03编辑过]

太谢谢了，我只有中文翻译本，很希望看到原版的。
如果你有扫描仪和文字识别的软件就方便多了。

可惜我没有scanner。
我每次只能打一点。有许多图片就不能和大家分享了。
alexes, 不知道你那本有没有图片？

  I have a picture of her father long before he became Sergei Mikhailovich Grinkov, two-time Olympic pairs skating champion. I seldom called him Sergei to his face. It was Serioque, which is softer, or Seriozha, softer yet, and more romantic, a name to be saved for special times. This picture was taken when Sergei was nine years old. He is skating on the ice where we trained as children. His face in the picture is Daria’s face. She is four years old now, and has her father’s shocking blue eyes, and the blonde hair he had as a child. She has Sergei’s wide and ready smile, so beautiful to me. Sergei was the one who brought laughter into our house. He brought the sun into my life. He taught me, who was always so serious, how to have fun. He took care of me without ever telling me that’s what he was doing. Even now that he’s gone gone, he’s managed to look after me by leaving me Daria, who is so much a part of him.
  
  I want Sergei to know I will always take good care of her. She’ll be the happiest girl ever. I’ll make sure that she knows the kind of man her father was, the kind of heart he had. That’s one of the reasons I’m writing this memoir now, before his lovely echo fades, as it inevitably will, with time.

[此贴子已经被作者于2003-2-27 18:12:40编辑过]

我那本有图片，但大多数不大，质量好一些的在封面封底和中心插图里，还有一部分图片是在文章中的，黑白的图片，印刷质量不太好。

[此贴子已经被alexes于2003-2-24 21:21:16编辑过]

    Not long ago I heard someone ask a friend, If you had to live your life over again, what would you do differently? I’ve thought about this, and for me, I’d like to live my life over again backward. I’d like to live in a world where tomorrow would be yesterday, the day after tomorrow two days ago, and so on, because now I have little interest in the future. It’s probably unhealthy for me to think this way, because of Daria, because I should be looking to the future for her. But it’s true that any day I’m living now, I would exchange for any day in the past. I hope this will change with time. But I know that, for me, to find the kind of happiness I had with Sergei isn’t possible. It’s not unbelievably hard. It’s impossible, like trying to find the comet that was in the night sky last spring, which passes Earth once in seventeen thousand years. No matter what lies ahead, the best years of my life will have been with my Seriozha, and those years are now laid to rest.

    So I step into the future, as bravely as I’m able, with my heart longing for a time I’ll never see again. With Sergei and me, everything was natural, almost inevitable. First we were skating partners. Then we were friends. Then we were close friends. Then we were lovers. Then husband and wife. Then parents. I lived in a world in which I always had my favorite thing to do, which was to skate. I had my favorite man around me all the time. I had my beautiful parents, Elena Levovna and Alexander Alexeyevich Gordeev, who wished for me only happiness. I never heard angry words from people, ever experienced unkindness, because the one person I cares about loved me. I never looked closely at the world around me and examined it for flaws. I only paid attention to Sergei.

[此贴子已经被作者于2003-2-25 22:36:33编辑过]

  Then God took him away at the age of twenty-eight. Sergei died without warning of a heart attack on November 20, 1995, during a routine training session in Lake Placid. I lost my husband and best friend, the father of my daughter. I lost my favorite thing to do, because now I had no skating partner. The only thing God left me with was Daria. It was like He was sending me a message: Start your life over again, Ekaterina. Open your eyes to the world around you. Experience what it’s like not to be so blessed. And this I now do. I am learning the disappointments of life.

   Marina Zueva, who was Sergei’s and my choreographer from the beginning, told me something after his death that I don’t understand. Or maybe I understand it but cannot believe it. She told me she’s not sorry for me.
  
  Maybe she said this because I had such a beautiful life, and no one can expect such a beautiful life as I had with Sergei to last. Maybe because she’s sure that I’ll be okay. I don’t know. I do know that I never thought that humans could handle so much. I never imagined people could be so strong, so resilient. Humans can handle any pain. Words, however, can cut the heart to the quick. Words can make the pain that never goes away. It’s so true. And they can also make happiness that lasts forever.

[此贴子已经被作者于2003-2-27 18:13:09编辑过]

我不会align这些文字，所以很多词被拆成两半。最好copy&paste到Word Document上看。

[此贴子已经被作者于2003-2-27 17:58:18编辑过]

I always felt Sergei was on a higher level than me, that he was stronger and smarter and more stable than me, and that he would always protect me. Now that he’s gone, I feel vulnerable, unsafe in ways I never felt before. I’m scared to trust people. I’m afraid to say things, afraid that I may hurt people’s feelings, or that people may say things that will hurt me. I never had any of these worries befire. I find that I’m unsure of people’s motives.
  
  I never thought before I wasn’t brave. I was always the first to jump from the heights into the water. Now it’s like I’m out of my home for the first time in twenty-five years. It’s like I was living in a fairy tale before, and now I’ve been abandoned in a wild forest.
  
  That is what life was like with Sergei: a fairy tale. He was so honest and calm and solid. Sergei was a man first and then a skater. Not like me, who was a skater first, then a woman, then a mother. I wish I wasn’t that way. I wish I’d saved more of my strength and power for Sergei and my daughter. I’m trying to learn to be more like Sergei, who was such a good father and gentle husband, strong and yet tender. I leave, and always did, too much of myself, too many of my feelings, on the ice.

I can’t explain why, but I’ve started to make a list of things that Sergei wanted to do.

  He wanted Daria to learn karate.
       
  He wanted to skate in the Nagano Olympics in 1998. he had made one small mistake in Lillehammer, where we won our second gold medal. It was the only mistake that he ever made in a competition. The only one. He was so dependable, and he only missed this one time because he was worrying about me. So he wanted to compete again, to erase that single blemish from his thoughts. He kept this wish inside him for over a year before mentioning it to me. A third Olympic bid. I didn’t think I could handle the pressure of another Olympics, but I couldn’t say no, because I saw the hope in his eyes.

  Sergei wanted to get a big globe of the world for our home. He loved to look at places we’d been, to study geography, and he wanted to be able to show these places to Daria.

He wanted his sister, Natalia, to visit us, and he wanted Natalia’s daughter, Svetlana, to learn English. It was Sergei’s great regret not to speak English, although he understood it very well. He was a perfectionist, and was too shy to speak until he could do it without any mistakes. Tutors in Moscow are expensive, about five hundred dollars a month, but Sergei said he’d pay for Svetlana’s tutoring no matter the cost. She’s thirteen, which he thought was a good age to learn.
       
  He wanted to someday move to Idaho. To Sun Valley. We’d skated there a few times and both liked it very much. Sergei liked to ski. I loved the mountains. We loved the nature there, the forests, the beautiful night sky brilliant with stars. The wildlife and the great open spaces. This was a place for a family to dream.
       
  He wanted to drive me through Europe. Or perhaps he would have taken me on the best train. He wanted to stop in all the cities, to visit the cathedrals and museums. He wanted to eat at the sidewalk cafes, to have wine with our lunches, and long naps in the afternoon when we were tired. He wanted to walk the boulevards while holding hands, to have no schedule to keep, or exhibitions to skate in, or competitions to train for, as we’d had for so much of our lives. No more rushing around without seeing. We talked of this trip many times.
       
  I’m going to keep this list and add to it as I think of other things. Sergei wanted to do so much, so many different things besides skate.

我太欢迎看了！！我支持你，可是怕你太辛苦，因为打实在是很累的。如果可以当然是继续这项工程了。

Childhood
       
As I look back, I see that everything went too smoothly for me. I had no experience with the sadness of life. Even before I met Sergei, I was a happy child, innocent and naïve, blessed with good health and much love.
       
My father, Alexander Alexeyevich Gordeev, was a dancer for the famous Moiseev Dance Company, a folk dancing troupe that performed throughout the world. He had strong legs and a long neck like a ballet dancer, and a stomach that was absolutely flat. Everything he did, he did fast, and he always moved quickly around the house. I can remember my father jumping over swords when he danced, bringing his legs up to his chin as the knifelike blades flashed beneath him, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen times in a row. Or he’d kneel down and kick, left and right, left and right, in the athletic manner of the folk dancers of Russia.
       
My father wanted me to be a ballet dancer. That was his big dream. He was disappointed that I became a skater. He had gray-blue eyes, the same color as mine, and a kind face, but he was also strict and serious, as if his kind face didn’t quite match the words that came out of his mouth.