“This is your last chance,” Anna Glebovna growled. Some of the parents were still talking. The children, however, were quiet. They knew that no matter how much they’d practiced, Dima’s fate could befall them all.
“You are embarrassing Magadan’s entire musical community, Ushakov,” she continued. “Your so-called gifted program as well as my music school. This is unacceptable. Any fool with half a mind can play this march. Don’t play it well. Just play to the end, for God’s sake. I don’t know how else to tell you.”
“Are we ready?” the producer said. He had taken off his corduroy jacket. His face was red, his mustache twitchy. “Last take, then we’re moving on to the next participant. Audience, return your chairs to their original places and be ready for the camera. Pleasant faces, content faces. Art is the beauty of life, et cetera. Crew, stand by.”
He walked toward the monitors in the back, tugging on the collar of his turtleneck. “Silence in the studio!”
The microphone lowered above Dima’s head like a bomb on a string. The light panel seemed to have lit up even brighter. Suddenly, he felt a heavy presence behind him. Sandalwood perfume. Faina Grigorievna. He turned around to face her. Her green eyes were unreadable, like windows in an ancient abandoned house.
She bent toward his ear. At the same time that she said “Play,” Dima felt a sharp pain on the top of his left thigh. He looked at his lap: there was a small tear in the fabric of his pants. The spot around it was growing wet with something sticky. Blood. He looked up at Faina Grigorievna, but she was already gone.
“Silence in the studio!” the producer yelled again. He hadn’t noticed anything. Nobody had noticed that he’d been wounded. “Cameras rolling. And action!”
Dima began to play the march. His heart thumped in the gash.
— TaTaTatitati TaTa Tatitati Ta Ta Ta Ta Tatitatita tititata.
The soldiers marched and marched. He felt the pain bury deeper into his leg, spread to the rest of his thigh, then his calf and foot.
— TaTaTatitati TaTa Tatitati Ta Ta Ta Ta Tatitatita tititata.
He picked up and kicked out his fingers, pushing forward. He was losing blood. He had to finish before it began to drip on the cloverleaf floor.
— TuTuTurururu TuTu Turururu Tu Tu Tu Tu Tutututu Tu BAbaBA.
His hands marched on across the black-and-white desert, tired and weary, bleeding. He wanted to crawl to safety, key by key.
— TaTaTatitati TaTa Tatitati Ta Ta Ta Ta Tatitatita tititata.
— TaTaTatitati TaTa Tatitati Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta-tita-TITA.
Applause …
He was done.
“And cut!” the producer hollered from his corner. “Cut, oh saintly father, Lenin and Cheburashka!”
The clock read 12:14.
Dima stood up and walked to his seat in the first row. The applause died down. Did he do well? He was afraid to look at his mother or Faina Grigorievna. He pulled on the fabric of his pants. It hurt. The material had stuck to the cut. He had forgotten to bow.
“Next up is my Rita Larina and after her — Sonya Kovalchuk. Gather your brains while you have a chance, Sonya and all the rest of you, so we aren’t here till evening,” Anna Glebovna said.
Sonya was another one of Faina Grigorievna’s surviving students, and she was good.
“Silence in the studio,” the producer said. “One second, one second. Ushakov, be so kind and leave. We’ve had enough of you for today.”
Dima looked at the producer’s red face. He almost pitied this simple man, with his simple life. Sonya, who sat next to Dima, grimaced sympathetically and offered him a handkerchief.
He didn’t take it. He bolted from the studio, overturning his chair, and ran down the hallway. His mother caught up with him by the exit.
“Dimochka, your coat.” An unsteady smile swung across her face like an out-of-control dancer, bumping into her nose and ears.
They were outside now. Dima squinted at the fuzzy air and the pink sun. He wiped his flooding nose. Pink and yellow dilapidated buildings. Gray and white peeling khrushchyovkas. Everything was bathed in touchable light.
“You played so well, Dimochka,” his mother said and rubbed her eyes.
“Did you see that she stabbed me? She stabbed me with her nail file or maybe a knife!” His voice came out high and squeaky.
“Faina Grigorievna?” His mother was trying to get him to put on his coat.
Dima pushed her and took off. It was snowing, snowing in May! He ran half-mad, half-happy, delirious. The snow smelled like freshly cut cucumbers, like summer at Grandpa’s. At once he remembered that more than anything in the world he wanted a bike, one that had a tire-patching kit with the special glue. He bumped into passersby on the streets and shoved those who didn’t get out of his way. He overturned a trash can with glee, ran across the intersection in front of the honking traffic. If he had a bike, he would fly on it through Grandpa’s village in a cloud of dust.
He was running to burn last year’s yellow grass in the courtyard, before the snow and Genka got to it. He’d get the matches the Uncatchable Avengers had hidden at their secret headquarters the other day. He kicked a stone toward a stray dog. The dog barked and chased after him. As he ran, he thought of the inquisitive cows at the village and the uppity goats, the earthy carrots, the cold river with tickly blue fish, and the gang of dirty-footed kids his age who smoked cigarettes and could catch a goose with their bare hands.
Rumba, 1996
Roman Ivanovich Chepurin first noticed her dollish hips during rumba at the spring competition. On the four-to-one and twist. The triangle of her panties, hugged by a slitted lime skirt, flashed then disappeared. Two, three, four — and twist. Away from him.
He had been standing at the back of the stage with the other judges, squinting under the lights. Headache, his cranky mistress, fluffed pillows behind his left ear, spurred on by three minutes of the same Latin music played over and over as the new dance pairs took the stage. Identical save for the colors of the girls’ dresses, they walked through their identical elementary routines. Roman Ivanovich was bored.
He didn’t know many of the children. He trained the junior and senior groups, while his teaching assistants waded through the endlessly replenishing pool of dancers under twelve. After twenty years of experience he knew what to expect. Some, for the life of them, wouldn’t flex their joints. They walked around like compasses, arms windmilling all over. Others twitched their shoulders as though trying to shake off a parrot, or wiggled their behinds like Papuans high on sun and coconut milk. Some couples stubbornly stepped between the beats.
Roman Ivanovich was long past the point where the efforts of these awkward, mostly talentless children endeared him. He and Nata, his wife and former dance partner, had coached only one pair to any kind of stardom. Lyuba and Pavlik now competed in quarterfinals in central Russia and Europe and returned to Magadan once a year to teach a master class at the Chepurin Ballroom Studio and Chess Club. Roman Ivanovich clutched his scoring clipboard to the sweat spot between his breasts and his belly, willing the competition to be over so he could go home and surrender his mind to the custody of the TV.