More and more Asik was becoming just another rude girl of twelve, with stooped shoulders and a messy ponytail, angry at the cold wind for chapping her lips and stripping her summer tan. He’d always considered that handling cranky girls was a part of his profession. But with her, he was stumped. To punish her was to admit he’d made a mistake.
* * *
“You should be careful with that Nemirovskaya girl, Roma,” Nata said to him one evening at the end of November. With less than a month to go until the winter competition, she was buried under a mountain of fluorescent satin and tulle, sewing new dresses for the rich girls and tailoring rentals for the others. “I know she’s not just another one of your dancey girls. But you’re alienating everyone else, and they pay. We’ve got plenty of couples who work hard, and who may yet hatch when they move up.”
Stupid, naive, comfortable Nata. The senior girls were lost to him. Those who stood a chance of scholarships to universities in Moscow or St. Petersburg studied maniacally. The ones stuck in Magadan worked their assets on the local potato oligarchs in hopes of securing a warm, well-fed life.
“I know what I’m doing, Nata.”
Behind gold-rimmed sewing glasses, her blue eyes were moist and vulnerable. In ten years or less she could’ve been a grandmother, if they had had any children. He’d never liked the haircut she’d settled into years ago, which concealed the lovely line of her nape. Or maybe it wasn’t lovely anymore. Maybe now it was loose and wattley like her neck.
Their relationship began just as their ballroom careers got serious, when they were partnered as teenagers. On the dance floor, it was crucial that he led and she followed. She seemed content to follow him outside the studio, too. He often told himself that they were one of those couples who understood each other implicitly. But, as time went on, he became afraid to ask whether she was happy. He, unlike her, applied his love selectively. It wasn’t that he loved one thing about her and didn’t quite love another. That was natural enough. Rather, he stopped loving her entirely when a hint of coarse independence manifested itself: when she questioned him, when she told him he was wrong. This unlove persisted until the episode lived itself out and sedimented in memory. Only then, like a harbor cleared of the night’s fog, the qualities that made his life bearable, her comfortable qualities, became visible again, and he slid back into his way of appreciation. Because — who was he kidding — it was not love, it was not love.
“Do as you know, Roma,” Nata said and went back to her sewing.
He began to pace around the living room.
“We need eggs,” she said. And within minutes he was out the door, embarrassed and thankful for her knowledge of him.
On his way back from the grocery store he lingered in a small park with a worn-out bust of Berzin, the first director of the Dalstroy trust and forced-labor camps in Kolyma. Naked trees stuck out of the tall banks of hardened snow. Theatrically-fat snowflakes streamed from the black sky. It was quiet. The cold air smelled of burning garbage — his childhood’s scent of freedom and adventure, when he and his gang of ruffians would run through courtyards and set trash containers on fire to the grief of hungry seagulls. Before his mother bound his feet in dance shoes and shackled him to a girl.
He had a sudden craving for fried eggs with a particular Polish brand of cured ham, sold at a private shop in the town’s center. It was his one evening off work; he figured he deserved a small indulgence.
He walked up Lenin Street. Its preholiday luminescence was even more radiant this year, more drunkenly optimistic. White lights lay tangled in trees. A shimmering canopy of pink garlands hung across the roadway. Up ahead, the dystrophic A of the TV tower, the Eiffel Tower’s long-lost illegitimate child, shyly illumed its red and white stripes. The town clock, lit up in green, read half past eight. By now the junior group would be halfway through their weekly ballet class.
These classes weren’t mandatory, but Roman Ivanovich had made it clear that no dancer should dream of correct posture without paying their dues at the barre. He considered the instructor, Gennady Samuilovich, too lenient, though, and preferred not to imagine the likely chaos of his practices.
The wind had picked up. He bought the Polish ham and walked, out of habit, to the Palace of ProfUnions. He crept around the back and hid in the shadow of a copse.
Through a single window Roman Ivanovich could see the ballet class. The vision, suspended in the darkness, seemed to him all the more brilliant and distant. Against his expectations, most of the junior group was at the barre by the mirrored wall, diligently knocking out petits battements. Gennady Samuilovich strode back and forth, whipping the air with his wrists. His white tights showcased the anatomy of his legs in excessive detail.
Pale Asik, dressed in a black leotard, with her hair up in a tidy bun, was merely adequate. Her butt kept sliding out of alignment, and she wobbled as her leg swung. But she was trying the hardest of them all. Roman Ivanovich was in shock. Who would she be now? Not his Carmenochka, not his fiery little gypsy. He watched her till the end of class. She was that hardworking average student he liked to praise to the parents. Effort over results. He breathed easier.
Gennady Samuilovich dismissed the class. Before wandering off, several girls — Olesya among them — trapped Asik in choreographed parentheses. They were saying something to her, something unpleasant, judging from Asik’s pinched mouth. She crossed her arms and threw her weight to one hip. After they left, Asik was alone in the room. She turned to the mirror and performed an ironic half plié, half curtsey to her reflection. Then she put her elbows on the barre and worked her face through a series of smiles in different tonalities. A laughable sinner-seductress. Pierrot at a party. Piranha. She stomped — sloppily, neurotically — pitched forward and folded herself at the waist over the barre (against the rules! The barre wasn’t made to sustain such weight), her leotarded backside the shape of a black heart. She closed her eyes and just hung there, like a piece of laundry forgotten in the courtyard.
Roman Ivanovich imagined the fragile basket of her hip bones rubbing painfully against the barre, all her little organs squished. He looked down. The snow was mildewing over a pile of cigarette butts and a green balloon scrap still attached to a string. She was nothing more than a body that danced.
* * *
“Remember, dancers,” Roman Ivanovich said at the last group practice before the all-studio run-through. Less than a week remained before the winter competition. “Although in the junior group we call rumba the dance of friendship, in the professional world it’s the dance of love.”
Shivery giggles. The heat was off all winter, the town’s clever way of rationing coal. Despite the chess boys’ valiant efforts to bandage the windows, the studio was still an icebox.
“As I’ve told you all before,” he continued, “rumba originated among the African slaves in Cuba. In the sugarcane fields, the barefooted slaves first stepped lightly, without bringing their full weight down, until they were sure there weren’t any sharp pieces of cane on the ground. Once you make the commitment, make the step deliberate, like squashing a cockroach.” More giggles. “Keep your shoulders and head still; the slaves had to carry heavy weights perfectly balanced on their heads. And try to show some passion. If not for each other, then at least for dancing. Controlled passion! Tension is in the promise.”
He put on the music and sat back to watch his flock. The dancers grimaced and jerked their gawky bodies. Asik made a soap opera of her routine, complete with eyelash flapping, hair pulling, and clutching of poor Sasha’s shirt. At every twist, she fished for Roman Ivanovich’s eyes. It took the last of his willpower not to walk over and slap her.