His arms tensed along her sides. There welled a heartbeat of stillness.
“Take what?” the boy’s voice said into her neck.
Her hands shook as she fought the clasps. The shadows leapt about, straining through the wetness in her eyelashes. “These,” she said, her palm open. A sudden cold draft swept at her exposed knees. “These, see?”
His eyes glinted.
“They’re real diamonds,” she pleaded. “Please.”
His hand swooped over hers, scooped hers out. As though from some vantage point above it all, she watched the moonlight fill hollow pockets of radiance between the boy’s fingers. In the next moment, the fingers clenched, the radiance drowned, the weight lifted. For a breathless minute she was afraid to move. Then, incredulously, she sat up, pulled the dress down over her knees, stared into the darkness. The darkness contained nothing now but the receding friction of shoes on gravel, a splash of reflected light in the wine rocking at her feet, a rustle of feathers—a pigeon dreaming, she guessed dully.
After a while, she stood up. Her stockings were torn, and her right heel had snapped when he had first slammed her toward the bench, but she was otherwise unhurt. She loosened the straps of her shoes, peeled off and discarded the stockings, and, barefoot and barelegged, her shoes in her hands, the night freely lapping at her thighs, ran home, numbly sidestepping smashed shards of bottles glistening here and there on the sidewalks. The kiosk by the tram stop was now shuttered, the roses gone; in the half-hour since she had passed here, late August had finally forced the summer out, and autumn rang in the air, clear and sharp and bright like a piece of cold glass. A passerby gave her a shocked look, and a dark stretch of the city later, she saw, in the mirror of her hallway, what he had seen: a pale aging face with hair plastered damply over the forehead, drops of dried pain congealed in one earlobe, temples blue and shining with smeared paint, lips bleeding crimson onto the chin, eyes blank with desolation.
For a long while she gazed at herself, her hands pressed to her cheeks, then, turning away from the mirror, knocked on her mother’s door, and walked in.
The light was on, the bed unruffled, the stuffy air tinted rosy brown, and darkly scented, and thick with silence, as it always was; time never moved here. She thought the room empty until the chair by the desk creaked around. Within its niche of shadow sat her mother, drowned in her ancient satin nightgown the color of moth wings, the color of fading memories, so small her feet barely touched the ground.
“I borrowed your earrings,” Anna said in a still voice, “but I was mugged, and I lost them. I’m sorry, I know how much they—how much you—”
Her mother’s eyes were dark and startled, a pair of beads. Anna’s words felt powdery in her throat, insubstantial and meaningless, blown on her breath, scattering into silence. She stood without moving, then turned, and stumbled to her room, and fell onto the bed, as she was, in her beautiful borrowed dress, her legs splattered with mud and leaves, the soles of her feet black with the dirt of the entire summer in the city. Lying facedown on the bed, she felt her chest at last heaving open with sobs; but as she pressed herself into the tight, close darkness that smelled of warmth and sleep and loneliness, she sensed a presence hovering about her, a hand brushing her back, light as a bird’s feather, a voice, which she scarcely recognized, her mother’s voice, repeating into her hair, “Don’t be upset, don’t be upset, my dear, it’s only things, and it serves me right, I haven’t taught you properly—diamonds should never be worn in the summer—don’t be upset, this isn’t what matters…” And somehow, as the hand continued to stroke her back, she felt calmer, and heavier, and smaller, until there she was again, a little girl curled up under a comforter of down, cradled in the hollow of the night, weighty with dreams, absolved from the grown-up complexities of existence, free to close her eyes, and listen to her mother’s fairy tales, and drift, weaving bright, magic fabrics from the patterns of words, from the texture of her mother’s even voice, secure in the knowledge that things would be easier, better, happier, upon awakening.
And as Anna allowed herself to fall asleep, she could not tell whether the hand continuing to brush her back was real or part of the night, whether the voice was there or in a dream, whether, at some nebulous junction in time, she had truly opened her eyes to find Sergei kneeling by the bed, grief deepening the lines of his swiftly aging face, or whether his face too was sewn from the shimmering predawn essence, along with the grand boulevards she traveled in silver heels, and the rivers passing slowly under medieval gargoyles, and the dream voice reaching through her sleep, gently tiptoeing up some narrow steps, depositing her in a cool, stony, whispery place with stained-glass windows that stretched floor to ceiling. It was a church in the heart of a foreign city, that place, an ancient church whose windows shone with many solemn colors—the blue birth of the world, the purple procession of prophets who had guessed at some purpose in mankind’s future, the proud red of martyrs who had taken that purpose on faith, the glowing green of the world’s lucid, liquid end—all etched in beauty, all unearthly.
I came here often on summer afternoons, after rehearsals, the dream voice said, to let perspiration turn to chill on my shoulder blades, to hear my steps echo under the vaults, to pass, again and again, through the wedges of the luminous colors.
I came here that day in August, I remember.
I was not feeling well that day, had not felt well for some weeks, some months. I would often succumb to queasy spells in the midst of pirouettes, and my body had grown unfamiliar in varied ways, some subtle, some rather less so; yet still I continued to dance. I would not hear of visiting a physician.
We were preparing his third ballet. The second one had been a great success, the toast of the previous season; there had been evening gatherings in salons exquisite as gilded teacups, and leisurely carriage rides through falling leaves, and late-night bouquets of roses delivered to our dressing rooms, jeweled bracelets snaking artfully about the glossy thorns. He too had money now. One night in autumn, as I was leaving after a performance, he waited for me on the steps, a shadow against a wall. He refused to tell me where we were going, but I recognized the streets shivering in the gaslights through the curtains on the carriage windows. When we stopped, the hour was close to midnight, but the pavement outside the shop was bright with the squares of illumination. Inside, two elegant flutes of champagne stood bubbling, just for us, and two or three young men slid by noiselessly with velvet trays of glitter in their manicured gloves, and a plump little proprietor with a glass protuberance grotesquely attached to his eye swept his cuff-linked hand over the displays, gushing respectfully: “Mademoiselle, mademoiselle—”