My Sergei-A Love Story

In grades nine and ten, we wore a pin on our shirts in the shape of a red flag that had a portrait of old Lenin on it. That meant we were members of the Komosol, which is for strong young people who would help our country grow up. After that we graduated, and it was everyone’s hope to some day be invited to become members of the Communists, which was a great honor. My parents were in this organization. To be a Communist, in Soviet society, was considered the highest level of good citizenship.
       
Classes went from September till May, and until I was ten years old, we had the summers off from skating. My favorite thing to do for vacation was to go to our dacha—a summer home an hour north of Moscow. We shared it with another family, and our part of the house had a living room, a small kitchen, and three bedrooms. It was in a village near the forest, and three miles from the dacha was a river where my father could swim. In most places this river was so shallow I could wade in it.
       
I loved being outside all day long. The train line between Moscow and Leningrad—now Saint Petersburg—was only a mile away, and five times a day the train roared through. We’d play on the tracks, or would sit on the nearby hillside and throw stones at the trains as they passed. The best game we played was War, where we built a camouflaged hut, and I played the nurse waiting for the soldiers to come back wounded. I’d bandage them up and send them back to the front. My father wanted me to spend this time stretching or running to improve my conditioning, but I just wanted to play. As I said, my father was a very serious man in those days.

I liked painting and coloring and crafts and playing with dolls. Very normal things. I used to choreograph shows for my sister at the dacha, creating little dramas to which we gave grand names like The Last Concert or Borahtino, the last of which is a Russian fairy tale similar to Pinocchio. Then we’d invite the neighbors to come watch our production.
       
I’m afraid I was very tough on my sister when directing these shows, much as my father was tough on me. Maria was a cute and quiet girl who had very blonde hair as a child. She had round cheeks, pale skin, and wore her hair in bangs, so she looked a little bit like a boy. I would expect her to do certain ballet moves in the productions, even though she was four years younger than me and had never studied ballet. “So, you can’t do this?” I would say haughtily, showing her a pirouette. I was domineering and very demanding.
       
But my favorite thing to do at the dacha was to pick wild mushrooms with my grandfather. He loved the forest, and had names for all the different places where we hunted for mushrooms. There was the Forest Across the River, or the Big Forest, or the Dog’s Road. They all had different kinds of mushrooms that grew at different times of the year. One was a pine forest, where white mushrooms grew. One was a birch forest, where orange mushrooms grew. September and October were good months for picking, but in June the biggest mushrooms came up, bigger than the biggest tomato.

Diaka would come in and wake me up at 6:00 A.M. My parents would still be asleep, because they came to the dacha for relaxation, and the last thing they wanted to do was get up early to pick mushrooms. Sometimes they slept till noon. My grandfather told me it was better to go early so the other mushroom pickers didn’t get there before you. It’s a very popular activity in Russia. But if we were late some days, he told me not to worry; our mushrooms would hide from the other hunters until we came. And he was right, because we always found them
       
Russian people have long looked at mushrooms as being mystical. There is a very old belief that says that once a mushroom comes under the gaze of a human eye, it ceases to grow. Diaka wouldn’t let me carry a basket when we went hunting, because if the mushrooms saw you carrying a basket, they’d know what you intended and would hide in the grass and not show their faces until you had passed. And we never carried a knife. Imagine what you would look like to a mushroom, creeping through the forest with a basket and terrible knife. Very scary.
       
So Diaka would hide a plastic bag in the leg of my pants, and another in his pocket, and then the mushrooms would let us come near. We’d go far into the birch forest, and I’d try very hard to keep up with his long stride so the next time he would let me come, too.

When we had filled our bags and returned home, everyone would get excited, because Babushka would make nice dishes with our mushrooms. We cleaned them very carefully, washing them twice with a brush. Then my grandmother would begin to cook. In one dish, she would cut them up, blend them with onions, eggs, and spices, then make them into patties that she fried in butter. Or she would make a mushroom soup. Or she pickled them. I liked them pickled, and my grandmother would sometimes pickle a whole jar of only the smallest ones for me, because I, too, was the smallest. Unfortunately I hated mushroom soup. I preferred picking mushrooms with my grandfather to eating them.
       
Diaka would also take me fishing. He made a special pole for me, not too big, a very small one, and a bigger pole for him. Then we went to dirty places looking for worms. It’s gross, of course, and maybe something I wouldn’t do now, but when I was ten or eleven, I loved to put the worms on the hook. Red ones, ugly things, the bigger the better. We used them to catch carp. My father, too, sometimes went fishing for eels. He went at night to a place where he would shine a light into the water and then spear the eels as they swam toward it. Then he’d bring the eels home, and I’d help him smoke them in alder. Very, very delicious.

So, you see, it was a good childhood, filed with happy memories. I was skating singles then—the club did not put pairs together until the girls were at least eleven—and I was proud that my parents never came to my practices to watch. Many of the parents did that, and I always felt sorry for these skaters. You saw these kids later in their careers, and the first thing they did when they finished a program was look to their coach, then look up to their parents.
       
But my father always asked me about my practice. Every day. Which was why I always wanted to do well. I couldn’t lie to him. If I did badly that day, I told him I did badly, and he would speak to me disapprovingly. That’s why I used to hope that my Babushka would come to get me after practice, not my father. She knew I preferred it, and even though it meant she had to take two buses and the subway, she always tried to come get me. But often my father picked me up in the car, and if I told him it was just a normal day of practice, that was very bad. Definitely the wrong answer to give. If I said practice went okay, he’d say, “Explain to me how it was okay.” He wanted to know every jump I tried and why I thought I missed it. Every night I had an exam.

If a young army club skater failed to show sufficient improvement during the year, he or she was not promoted to the next grade in the sports school. To give you some idea of how difficult it was, when I first started skating there were about forty kids in my class who skated at CSKA. By the time I graduated, just five boys and five girls remained.

The club always had a year-end competition that was like a final examination. My jumps were not strong, which is why I could never have successfully competed as a singles skater. The highest I ever finished in these competitions was third; the lowest was probably sixth. When I was nine, my father came to one of these competitions, which was held at seven in the morning. I was very nervous because my father was there, and when I was putting on my costume, I somehow zipped my hair in my dress. I started to skate, but I couldn’t move my head. My ponytail was stuck in the zipper, lashing my head in place. Finally I stopped the program and went to the judge, and he let me unzip my hair and start over. Afterward my father had a very long face and big frown, and he didn’t come to any of my competitions again until I was skating pairs.
       
My father’s dream was still for me to become a ballet dancer, so when I was ten years old he asked me to try out at the central ballet school in Moscow. I did it only because he wanted me to. That’s how obedient I was. However, I cannot truthfully say I tried my best. I went with a friend, Oksana Koval, who was also a skater and was a head taller than me. She passed, and I did not, because I was too short. Oksana is now a ballerina, but if she had not passed this test, it might have been she who skated with Sergei. Such is destiny.
       
My father was very disappointed in me when I failed the test, very upset, but my mother was a little relieved. She knew how hard it was to be a good ballerina, and how easy it would have been to fail after being selected. As for me, I wasn’t at all concerned, because one of my skating coaches had told me, “Don’t worry about this exam. You’re going to be a great pairs skater.” He had a talk with my father, too, and assured him that they would find a nice partner for me, and that I had a good future in skating. Still, my father wasn’t happy. I was never quite good enough to please him. Maybe in the Olympic Games I was okay.

Sergei

       
The spring I turned eleven, my friend Oksana Koval and I were invited to skate on the large ice rink where the pairs and older boys practiced. Sergei was in this group. The coaches had told us to come and skate, it’s no big deal, but my friend and I knew it was more than that and were proud that we were the only two selected. As we circled the ice, we gathered from the conversations of the other skaters that it was Sergei for whom they were seeking a partner.
       
That summer Oksana Koval joined the ballet school, and when I returned to the ice the next season, the pairs coach, Vladimir Zaharov, told me to come early to practice. He had chosen a partner for me. I was very excited because I knew it was going to be Sergei.
       
I had never spoken to him. I remembered seeing him on the ice with the older boys, and also in school, and he was slender and narrow and handsome. But Sergei was so much older than me—four years, which at that age seems like a lifetime—that I’d never thought it possible that we’d someday be paired together. At school Sergei had caught my eye because he sometimes didn’t wear the mandatory blue uniform like the other boys. He wasn’t sloppy, though. He might wear a nice pair of slacks, a jacket, and maybe a skinny black leather tie that was in fashion then. He didn’t carry a shoulder bag for his books like everyone else but preferred to carry a briefcase. It was very stylish and made him stand out from the rest.
       
He was a good singles skater—he’d been skating at the army club since he was five years old—but he wasn’t a very strong jumper, which is why they asked him to try pairs. There was some question as to whether he had enough upper-body strength. Zaharov wasn’t sure. Sergei’s arms were tiny when we first started, so it helped that I was small. But once he began lifting weights, he quickly matured. I have some pictures of him in the place where we trained in the summer, called Isikool, and he was so beautiful. His upper body had already developed. But I was blind in those days and didn’t notice. I only thought of him as a coworker.

He was always very quiet and shy, and didn’t like to tell stories about himself. Last summer, a few months before he died, I said to him, “Serioque? I must be getting older. You know how old people are always thinking about their childhood? I’m thinking more and more about my childhood.”
       
He told me, “Don’t worry, Katuuh. Me too. Let me tell you a couple of stories about myself.” Katuuh was the name he called me in casual conversation. Katia he only used when he was serious: Katia, we have to do the taxes today.” And when he wanted to call me his lovely, romantic wife, then he called me Katoosha, very soft.
       
He had seldom talked about his childhood before. Of course I knew that both his parents—Anna Filipovna and Mikhail Kondrateyevich Grinkov—worked as policemen in Moscow. It may seem strange that the son of policemen with no artistic background would become a figure skater, but in the 1970s figure skating was very popular in Moscow. It was a young and growing sport, new to most people but shown so frequently on television that a lot of kids wanted to try. And parents definitely encouraged their kids to get involved in sports—any sports.
       
The Grinkovs were originally from the city of Lipetsk, which is eight hours away by train. So Sergei had no grandparents at home to take care of him. Consequently his mother and father would bring him to day care when he was a young boy—six, seven, eight years old—to a place where the children stayed all day and night. They’d drop him off on Monday and pick him up after work on Friday. Sometimes his parents told him, “Don’t worry, Sergei, we’ll be back to pick you up early, maybe on Wednesday or Thursday.” He’d wait and wait, his little face peering out the window at the street, and when they didn’t keep their word, he’d cry.

The other story he told me was that in the winter his parents sent him to some sort of camp where the children took their naps outdoors in hammocks—outdoors in winter. It must have been freezing. But the sun was so bright as it reflected off the snow that Sergei and the other children had to shut their eyes against it. Then they quickly fell asleep. If you slept well and didn’t cry, afterward you’d get a piece of chocolate.
       
After he told me these two stories, he observed that he’d come out of it all right, so we needn’t feel guilty about sending Daria to American day care where we picked her up each day at noon.
       
Anna, Sergei’s mother, has told me that she couldn’t keep Sergei’s clothes clean as a child. She’d change him for school, warn him not to get dirty and the next thing she knew, Sergei would have fallen into a tub of water. I can’t imagine that she took such a thing in stride. He never complained about his mother, but Anna is quite a serious woman, severe even, as some would expect of a Soviet policewoman. Nor was Sergei a model citizen at school. It wasn’t that he was particularly naughty, or disrespectful, but Sergei hated conformity. And he despised hypocrisy even more. He didn’t see why he should smile at someone he didn’t like. He never understood why I tried to be nice to people, to everyone, even if they had done something to hurt me. We were very different in this way.
       
He lived on the very border of Moscow, in an apartment beside the Moscow River. It was the last street before it became another town, and you could actually swim in the river there. It was clean, and there was a little beach. Sergei liked the sea and swimming, which he always preferred to hiking. He liked to play all sports—tennis, soccer, hockey—and like most boys, he liked to play with toy soldiers. Anna told me he could sit in the bath for two hours with these soldiers.

I only met his father two times before his death in 1990, but Mikhail Kondrateyevich was very quiet, like Sergei, and also big and calm. It was from his father that Sergei got his character. Sergei’s father was almost too huge to fit into his car, and the first thing Sergei did when he had money was to buy his father a bigger automobile.
       
Their apartment had two bedrooms, a living room, and a small kitchen. Sergei’s sister, Natalia, lived there as well. She was seven years older than Sergei and resembled him greatly—same eyes, same mouth, same shyness. He felt closer to Natalia than anyone else. With both parents working, Natalia was like a surrogate mother to Sergei, and they looked to each other for company. Natalia could always handle pain, which, to Sergei, was the most important trait a person could have. To not show your pain. He was a stoic. He told me once that when he was five or six years old, he slammed Natalia’s finger in the door by accident. They were playing some game, and she was chasing him. She grabbed her finger and ran into the bathroom to try to stop the bleeding, shutting the door behind her so Sergei wouldn’t see the blood. She didn’t want to scare him. It was quite a severe cut—she still has a nasty scar—but she never cried, and she never showed it to him until it had healed. He was still amazed at this years later, that she could be so strong. She’s needed to be. Natalia’s had a difficult life.
       
Like so many young Russians, she was married briefly and had a daughter, Svetlana, but the marriage ended in divorce. Divorce was very common in Russia in the 1980s, and one of the reasons for this was the lack of apartments. It wasn’t possible to just buy and apartment. You had to go to the government officials, tell them you were married and living with your parents, and that you needed an apartment. Then you had to wait until the government gave you one, they put you on a list, but no one knew how long it would take. In the meantime, you had no privacy, you were living with either one set of parents or the other, and there was a lot of stress that usually led to divorce. That’s what happened to Natalia.

Zaharov was a great coach for beginning pairs skaters. He had been a pairs skater himself, from Sverdlovsk, which was the home of many very good pairs skaters. He knew the best way to do all the elements, the easiest way. We have a saying in Russia: It’s stupid to reinvent the bicycle. I think that’s one of the problems that pairs skaters have in the United States and Canada: they try to learn all the elements their own way, as if it’s the first time it’s ever been done.
       
Zaharov was basically a calm man, nice and quiet, who was patient when he explained things at first. Only later did he begin to lose patience. He had olive-colored skin that became very tan in the summer, and also had blue, blue eyes. Zaharov was about forty years old, not very tall, but was strong and tough. I especially remember his powerful hands. He was so professional, and he could easily lift me off the ice to show Sergei the correct way to do the lifts. Sergei was just a teenager, and it wasn’t at all easy for him. Zaharov used to make him practice all the lifts with a heavy chair made of iron, because a chair is quite awkward to hold and so is a person.
       
As a pairs skater, you have to learn everything you learned as a singles skater over again. Even something so simple as a crossover is different, because now you are doing it with somebody else, and you have to align your body with theirs. We spent two hours a day on the ice for a week just learning crossovers. Poor Sergei, his legs were so much longer than mine that he was never able to take a full stride. His strokes were always shorter than was natural. We had to learn spins all over again, because now we had to do them in synchronization wit all the angles of our bodies—our “lines”—aligned identically with each other. The death spiral was a very difficult element to learn. Both partners have to find the correct tension in their arms. One time I would lean back to far, the next time Sergei would lean back too far; and each time we’d collapse in a heap before the first rotation. My entire body was sore from learning the death spiral, which looks so effortless when it’s properly done. But that’s an illusion. The girl’s abdominal muscles must be rigid the entire time.

We practiced the jumps endlessly. When you skate alone, you can jump whenever you’re ready. But with a partner, you must do it together, right now, exactly, ready or not. The lifts, like very other move, are all technique, with each one requiring a different way of holding the hands. My hands used to get very sore, and to strengthen them I used to hold a bar with a weight attached to it by a rope, and wind this weight up and down. Sergei had to learn special steps so he wouldn’t trip and fall when he carried me on these lifts. Zaharov taught us all these things.

I was never scared of the lifts, because I always felt safe in Sergei’s arms. His whole career, even when he was just learning, he fell on these lifts maybe three times. But the throws were terrifying to me. When doing a throw, the girl jumps at the same time as the boy throws her like a rag doll, gripping her by the arm and waist. Triple salchow throws, double axel throws—these were the elements Sergei and I performed. Propelled by the boy, the girl flies much higher than when she jumps alone. She travels farther in the air. We used to practice it on thick mats while off the ice and when that was mastered, we’d move over to the rink. That was very, very scary. Zaharov would say something like, “Today we’ll work on the spiral, some lifts, the spins, and then the throw.” As soon as he said “the throw,” I was worried about it the entire session.
       
I fell repeatedly while trying to learn to land. I wasn’t rotating far enough, or was opening my arms too late, or I didn’t have my right leg bent and my left leg ready to reach out and point. It’s difficult to know where the ice is when you’re in the air after having been thrown. I kept falling and falling and falling. Sergei would say, “Don’t you think you should go unlace your skates for a while?” That’s what he used to do when he was tired: pretend there was something wrong with his boots. “Go sit a little bit,” he would tell me. “I can’t throw you anymore.” I’d answer, “Why do I have to go sit? I’ll just freeze and get more scared while I’m waiting. I’d rather do it ten more times and get it over with.
       
So Sergei would throw me some more, and I’d keep crashing. He’d keep making the sad faces at me, hiding his eyes like he could no longer watch because it was too painful. But he never got mad at me. Some partners got angry and screamed when the girl didn’t land the throws. Pairs skating can be very, very dangerous for girls. I’ve seen bys, exasperated to the point of cruelty, purposely throw their partners in a different direction than she expects, or throw her too high on purpose. This can be deadly. But Sergei was never like this.
       
I didn’t cry. Maybe just a little, but I don’t really remember. Stanislav Zhuk, who became our coach when we were a little bit older, used to tell Sergei, “You have to throw her as if she were a crystal vase.’ It may be true, but I wasn’t very happy about this analogy. Why a vase? Why not a person? I’m not a vase. But maybe it helped Sergei throw me a little more gently. All I know for certain is that whenever Zaharov said we’re going to practice the throw today, I got so nervous I wanted to be sick.

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The other skaters in the club used to call me [I]BabaKatia[/I], which meant “little grandmother.” I didn’t particularly like this nickname, but they gave it to me because I liked to needlepoint. Also, probably, because I was very serious, very meticulous. Whenever we traveled anywhere, I always carried a bag with me that my grandmother had packed that was full of everything a skater might need if something went wrong with a costume: safety pins, ribbons, rubber bands, scissors, thread. Also little sweet cookies and candies and snacks. My grandmother would tell me, “If you don’t want to eat it, Sergei will have it.” She loved Sergei, and used to make him pastries filled with meat or cottage cheese, called [I]pirochkis[/I].
       
At the beginning of our second year together, in September, Sergei missed a morning practice, and Zaharov lost his patience. Naturally, I was there. I never missed anything. If you told me to go to the moon, I’d have gone there, too. But Zaharov told me to go home and not come back for the rest of the day. He said, “You don’t have a future with Sergei, and I’m not going to coach him anymore. You, Katia, will keep skating as a singles skater, and we’ll look for another partner for you.”
       
I didn’t think it was fair. I was proud to be skating with Sergei. He made me feel safe. He seemed like an older brother to me, and I knew he didn’t miss any more practices than the other boys. From what I remember, he didn’t even miss more than Zaharov. Sergei was just a normal teenager who wasn’t totally committed yet to skating, wasn’t sure if her was going to keep skating or not. But Zaharov pushed him hard, and overreacted to Sergei’s mistakes.
       
Zaharov called our parents and asked them to come to a meeting at the club the next day. This, of course, was unusual, so my parents decided to meet that afternoon with Sergei’s parents to discuss the situation, before they saw Zaharov. It was the first time my parents went to Sergei’s house. My father said that he thought Sergei was a good skater, that his body was nice, maybe not strong, but fine for only sixteen. But he thought he had to be more serious about training. They all wanted Sergei to realize he had done something wrong by missing too many practices. So my parents waited at his house, and when Sergei got home, he was shocked to see them sitting there. The first words out of his mouth were “Where’s Katia?” because I’d stayed home from the evening training session. He still didn’t realize how upset Zaharov was at him.
       
My parents told Sergei to call me at home. He phoned, and he and I decided to meet the next day at the subway before practice and talk things out. That was the first time we’d ever met off the ice together, and I was very upset, crying, because I knew how angry Zaharov was. I knew that Zaharov wouldn’t coach Sergei any longer, and the idea of changing partners scared me. I’m not sure why, but I always believed Sergei was the only one who could skate with me. It had nothing to do with having romantic feelings toward him. I thought that he was a very attractive man, of course, but since I was so little, and he was so much older, I never thought he’d have special feelings for me. But I’d always imagined it would be fun to be around him.
       
Not that anyone asked my opinion. It’s only in America that they worry about how the skaters are feeling. For us, it was always, “Go ahead and skate. It’s too bad for you if you don’t like it.”
       
When he met with our parents later that morning, Zaharov spoke very bluntly. He said I could not skate with Sergei, because Sergei wasn’t very good as a partner. Sergei’s mother said, “Fine, we’ll leave CSKA and go to another sports club, and Sergei will become and ice dancer.” She always thought pairs skating was the hardest discipline because of all the lifting the man had to do. Also, in ice dancing there was no jumping. But my parents, who knew my feelings, told her I was not going to skate with anyone else. They thought the decision of whether we stayed together or

So Zaharov left us after coaching us one year. Our new coach became Nadezheda Shevalovskaya, a woman who also worked at CSKA. She had an old friend, a former ice dancer, who was studying to get a degree in choreography from the National Theatre Institute in Moscow, and Shevalovskaya asked this friend to create a couple of programs for Sergei and me. In this way, the incomparable Marina Zueva came into our lives.
       
We were young, she was young, and Sergei and I became Marina’s project. In order to graduate she had to present a finished program to a panel of her teachers, and we skated this program for her. It was done to music sung by a boy’s choir, very romantic and light, with no throws to worry about. Still, I was nervous the day her professors came to the rink to judge Marina’s choreography. But Marina told us then, and repeated it to us often over the years, “Don’t worry about the judges. They’re just people who want to enjoy your program. They’re happy they’re not going to the office, so try to help them enjoy it.”
       
When Marina first started working with us, she was skinny, with long black hair that hung straight down. Her fingernails were red, which I liked, and her fingers were long and slender. She touched you softly, and it felt good when she tried to help you fix some little movement. After she was with us a couple of years, she started to pay attention to fashion, and I was always amazed how she could change her look completely overnight to stay in style. She made many of her clothes herself, and they were always tasteful. She wore leggings and long sweaters in the mid-eighties, when they were they style elsewhere. But in Russia it was very radical for a woman not to wear a skirt. She cut her hair and dyed it red. She was a pioneer who wasn’t afraid of what people would say. In those years, if you stood out, people would talk about you. That’s all changed now, of course. Now the people in Russia can’t spend their money fast enough to keep up with the fashions. It’s crazy. But everything was different then.
       
As she created a program, she’d describe every movement for us. She’d tell us why we were holding our hands a certain way. Why she wanted it soft. Why it should be strong. She’d bring a picture of something onto the ice and would say, Do this pose for me. Copy this picture. Or she would say, How would you act out spring? Do flowers, birds, love, sun. Now show me winter. Or, Make this shape for me on the ice. Sergei would laugh sometimes at these exercises, because Marina always used unusual words. She might say, Go run across the ice like a little animal. And she worked with us a lot on our expressions. We would stand in front of the mirror and make faces at ourselves for hours after practice, sometimes from 7:30 to 9:30 in the evening. Marina would ask, How would you be funny? How would you be sad? And we would show her.