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I had started to investigate the adjoining building, a crumbling, abandoned church, when feeble echoes of an old piano playing ballet exercises escaped from the warehouse and crept across the snow. The old babushka instantly broke into the wail of a tragic peasant ballad - which did not, however, quite drown out the piano. She sang at the top of her voice while contemplating me from the comer of her eyes, unmistakably supplicating for my disappearance. I hurried back to her.

When I approached the gate again, she was crossing herself furiously and bowing, as if I were a Cossack with a knout. They re just having some games in there, Comrade Inspector. Children playing. I m innocent, God in his mercy knows it. You’re from the police?’

Not immediately — for the old woman required considerable calming - she led me to a side door and into the build-ing. A glance disclosed that this was no ordinary warehouse. It was an agitprop depository for some of the mammoth stockpile of decorations which bedizen the city on May Day and the Anniversary of the October Revolution. Red flags, red banners, red posters, banners with Lenin, banners with slogans, Presidium portraits, Party icons, photographs of Lenin, mosaics of Lenin, tinted paintings of Lenin - the whole panoply of Party propaganda aids for pranking the streets was there. It was all stacked helter-skelter from floor to ceiling as if abandoned prior to an evacuation of the city. In one comer lay a thousand-odd portraits of Smiling Khruschev. They were roped off and labelled with handwritten signs: ‘SUPERSEDED^! DO NOT USE!!’

The old woman clumped down a rotten stairway near the back of the building into a deep frozen basement. Signs, posters, banners, portraits of Lenin, socialist slogans, parts of Glory-to-Communism floats - again the paraphernalia reached to the ceiling. At last Grandma stopped and pointed. The ‘Institute of Academic Dance’ was a clearing of concrete, surrounded by giant portraits of Suslov and Brezhnev.

Oktyabrina was in the centre of the space and in dusty leotards, attempting an arabesque. She suspended it when she saw me and affected a sweeping curtain-call curtsey. The smirk on her face was enigmatic; was she actually stage-proud — there ? She risked the arabesque again, teetered, then held it precariously, biting her lip. Her trembling could have been caused by her effort, or simply by the cold.

‘ Ochen khroshow ,’ wheezed a man who was evidently the teacher. ‘Very good. Excellent!’ He ran his cane up Oktyabrina’s leg to her bottom and thrust it gently in. Oktyabrina removed it just as gently, smiling with an indulgence that did not quite disguise embarrassment. The teacher was a wizened creature, certainly over eighty, in a threadbare overcoat, bespattered ascot and over-large beret. Goateed, nicotined, hunched apparently by arthritis, he stood no more than a head taller than his cane.

A second pupil labored behind Oktyabrina: a tubby, pre-pubescent girl who chewed her fingers during the exercises. And in a dark comer under a papier-mache sickle hovered a fat mother-hen of a woman, presumably her mother. The exercise bar was the frame of a lurid ‘FORWARD TO THE VICTORY OF COMMUNISM!’ poster. The music was not in fact produced by a piano but by a pre-revolutionary victrola. The sound horn was ruptured.

The teacher cranked the handle, maneuvered his feet into a loose compromise between first and third positions and fixed his gaze on Oktyabrina’s tiny breasts. From time to time he pronounced, ‘very good, excellent’, and hummed a

measure or two of the music in a wheezing voice. This comprised the better part of his instruction. Several times he reminded the little fat girl to point her toes, and once explained to Oktyabrina that The meaning of this movement is expressed through the position of the pate'. There were elements - to be fair, more than trappings - of authentic instruction in his unlikely classroom. But even if the old man were once a genuine teacher, he no longer had the physical or mental powers to watch a class competently, not to speak of conducting one. Soon after I came he suffered a sharp diminution of energy. He alternated between striking a pose when announcing an exercise and drifting into a quasi-trance during its execution. Back hunched, eyes misted over, he failed to notice the steady souring of the music as the victrola’s power ran down.

Reassured that I was neither detective nor government inspector, Grandma bragged about her part in the underground school. For her work as the Institute's lookout - ‘to keep the meddlers and art-lovers out' - the ‘professor' paid her a ruble for every class. Life was hard, she sighed: God was in heaven, but on earth a body had to put some fat on its bones - and what's wrong with a little private enterprise, after all? Only quacks call it a cancer in the socialist system. Socialism is the salvation of the common people, but you can't bake bread without a little yeast.

She returned to her post, and I concentrated on Oktyabrina’s efforts. After the initial embarrassment, her dancing no longer seemed awkward, but simply unformed. She was serious, industrious, zealous - but woefully untrained. As her meager limbs flailed, the flush of severe exertion never left her face, as if she were Pinocchio learning to walk. It was an unhappy demonstration that natural grace - which Oktyabrina did not lack - has little to do with the language of classical ballet.

The class lasted a full hour after I'd arrived. A series of simple exercises was climaxed by a brief solo by both pupils. The fat girl's effort was calamitous, but Oktyabrina ran 36

through some elementary steps to a Chopin waltz and was nearly steady throughout. Evidently it was her show piece.

As Oktyabrina approached the "finale’ of her performance, the teacher revived. He approached me, twirling the knob of his cane between his hands and beaming.

"You came to observe our little Oktyabrina, I presume? I have the pleasure to report her progress is very gratifying/ His voice was unctuous, but suggested a measure of selfamusement. "We’re very hopeful for her; she’s our very best pupil. . . . You don’t, I suppose, have a filter cigarette?’

The fat girl’s mother smothered her in kisses and bundled her away, slipping several bills into the teacher’s deft hand as she passed. Oktyabrina unwrapped the ribbons of her shoes with a delight-in-exhaustion expression. When she had combed her hair, donned her layers of clothing and curtsied to the teacher - who was relacing his tattered spats with a length of old string - we made our way out of the warehouse and walked towards the metro together.

Sustaining a soft humming as we walked, Oktyabrina packed and repacked the ballet-shoes in her bag. She was obviously waiting for a comment from me, but I could think of nothing encouraging.

"I still have more work to do,’ she declared at last. "On my hands. Hands are very important nowadays in places like Sadler’s Wells.’

Finally her patience ran out. "Don’t be bashful. How much did you appreciate my work?’

My silence was uncomfortable. At last I thought of an escape.

"It was rather cold in there, wasn’t it? The Institute seems to save substantially on heating bills.’

"Stiffness is indeed a major problem,’ she said seriously. ‘Go on.’

‘That teacher of yours is quite a character. Seems to like poking people with his stick/

"Is that all you have to say? I’m very sorry for you. Mister Narrow-Mind. It turns out you’re a little man.

'Oktyabrina dear, I’m not a critic. I only know it’s a long hard road to become a ballerina. And if you have extra . . . well, inconveniences like that fellow and that place, all those Politburo types, you’ll be worn out before you start. I think you’re very .. . courageous.’

7 think condescension is unbearable. Snideness too, but neither even graze me. Because no one gets anywhere without obstacles. Mature people learn to make sacrifices for their art.’

'Art? The old man’s certainly artful. But I wonder what he knows about art.’ This was too strong; I regretted the words as soon as they emerged.