Snow in May: Stories (16 page)

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.

When he came out of the office after the break, he saw that among the couples ready to resume practice Sasha stood alone.

“Where is she?” Roman Ivanovich yelled.

Sasha shrugged and looked toward the exit. As Roman Ivanovich crossed the dance floor, twenty-nine pairs of eyes followed him, vulturelike.

He walked into the hallway and knocked on the girls’ bathroom door. No answer. He barged in. No one. The acrid smell of tiled walls, the floor toilets, and the flimsy wooden partitions was laced with cigarettes. The girls smoked, too? He felt betrayed. Three faucets dripped in echoey discord.

He found her in the boys’ bathroom. Asik was pushing a scrawny chess boy against the dirty wall. Him? Couldn’t she find someone better? It took a second to recall his name. Gleb. Released, he sprang away from her. Asik wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked defiantly at Roman Ivanovich. His face grew hot, as though he was the one who’d been caught.

The spin of his world slowed. He heard from the studio the
tak-chwoot-tak-chwoot
of the heels and suede soles of the ballroom shoes shuffling on the parquet, and the hollow thumps of the chess pieces landing on their felt feet.

“Please, don’t kick me out,” Gleb squeaked. “She made me do it.”

“Get out of here,” Roman Ivanovich said. The boy scuttled out.

Roman Ivanovich stared at a picture of a horse in a jacket and tie that someone had drawn with a black marker on the wall.

“I know it’s against the rules,” Asik said. She looked him straight in the eye, then hung her head. “But he loves me. I don’t love him, but he loves me. What can you do in such a situation?” She sniffled.

The boy
does. She was lying. Or not. What did either of them know about love? The claw-grip of anger loosened on his neck, and he felt a twinge of forgiveness and generosity toward the children, toward all of them.

“Please don’t kick him out, Roman Ivanovich. It’s not his fault.” She was flat-chested, the front and elbows of her purple sweater covered with fuzz balls. The beauty marks on her gangly, pale thighs showed through her mesh tights. Little fishes caught in a net. “And please don’t kick me out. I’ll kill myself, I swear.”

He came closer. She stood slumped, looking to the side, her eyes teary. She wiped them with the back of her hand, leaving black smears on her face. Makeup was against the rules, he thought wearily. He wanted to squat down and clutch her legs, to comfort her.

“So you won’t? Roman—”

“Shhh.” He looked at her without blinking until her image trembled like a reflection thrown upon water. He was struck by the whiteness of the razor-thin part in her sable hair. He couldn’t resist drawing his finger down the length of the part, her forehead, the ski jump of her nose. Her skin was hot and smooth. Asik smiled brightly, as if she’d won a small prize.

He pulled some tissue out of his pocket and gave it to her, then walked out.

“Attention, dancers!” Roman Ivanovich roared back in the studio. The children started, like electrocuted mice, and quickly paired up. Asik took her place by Sasha. Her gaze hovered low.

“Aren’t you going to kick her out?” Olesya said. They all looked at him expectantly. Gleb must’ve told.

“What did you say?”

“The rules. She broke all of them. Even the worst one.” Olesya’s tone was shaky but with a righteous core.

“I didn’t want to,” Gleb said. He stood in no-man’s-land between the studio space and the chess tables. The chess boys pretended not to be interested in the scene.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’ve made a decision. A while back,” Roman Ivanovich said, inhaling and exhaling in the wrong places. “I am canceling the no-dating rule. You are not children anymore. Feelings should inform your dancing—as long as you’re not distracted. It’s not a secret that I met my wife in a class like this one. Love … Good, beautiful feelings deserve respect.”

The children gaped.

“What? I can’t anymore, like this. I quit,” Olesya muttered and ran into the changing room. Asik threw her palms over her face and bent forward. Roman Ivanovich caught peripheral sight of himself in the mirror—a gray, blurry lump.

*   *   *

At the final run-through on Friday Asik danced the way he had dreamt of since he’d first seen her on stage in the spring, in that little winking lime skirt. On Sunday she would be discovered, no longer his secret.

He stalled her after practice.

“You made me proud tonight,” he said. “If you don’t lose anything before Sunday, the first place is yours.”

Asik smiled. Her teeth were small and crowded.

“Why would I lose anything?” she said. Her confidence annoyed him.

“It’s important to keep moving, to keep dancing in your head tomorrow.”

“I know.” She lazily collected her face into a serious expression. “I’ll dance in my head through my sister’s piano banging and my mother yelling.”

“The studio floor will be open.”

“And packed with seniors and all those girls who hate me.” She looked around to see who was passing by.

“Maybe it would benefit you and Sasha to have one last private lesson. You were wobbly on that dismount in rumba.”

“Oh. For me it was okay.”

“I have time tomorrow late evening. A lot to do before Sunday.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

“Will your mother worry?”

“She doesn’t care.”

Asik’s orange lip gloss failed to conceal how chapped her lips were. She could’ve been beautiful, if her nose was a bit smaller. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

“She’ll care if I win the stupid competition.” She caught herself. “I mean, I’m just nervous. We’ve worked so hard.”

“Come at nine, then. Tell Sasha,” Roman Ivanovich said, then went into his office and locked the door. He sat alone for a long time before the shrine to Lyuba and Pavlik.

*   *   *

The next day, as Roman Ivanovich took care of the final arrangements for Sunday’s competition, a reel of Asik dancing looped in the back of his mind. He had visualized her routines so many times it seemed she’d already danced all of them flawlessly and won first place. He wondered what dresses she would wear. He hadn’t asked Nata which costumes of the ones she’d been working on were Asik’s, so as not to spoil the surprise. He’d spotted a black Latina dress with long sleeves and a low-cut back that he particularly liked.

When he had a free minute in his office, he took the new pair of dance sandals out of the box and inspected them. They were made of smooth gold leather, with rhinestones on the front strap. He’d ordered them for Asik especially for the competition, but they arrived too late for her to break them in. There was a danger of blisters now; plus, the heels were much higher than what she was used to. He turned the shoes over, contemplating whether to give them to her anyway: they were so beautiful. He touched the virgin suede soles, still soft and creamy. The size was printed in gold on the shaft: 35. The same as Nata’s, he realized. He still remembered the moment when that number had become significant to him. Minutes after they were paired up, Roman Ivanovich dared Nata to follow him through an improvised choreography. He appreciated her smooth movement, her lack of extra limbs. Girls usually grew at least one additional set of legs with the purpose of sticking them in the way of a new partner. He threw her into a dip, nearly folding her spine in two. She gasped but obeyed pliantly. Before his eyes lay the valley of her chest and the shadowy, aromatic hollow at the base of her neck, in which a silver wishbone pendant sparked. Farther down was the underside of her jaw with a faint trail of a vein, her blond ponytail juxtaposed against the black satin heel, the suede sole with the number 35, and her little toe sticking out from between the straps, the nail painted purple. He was impressed with the elegant way she’d responded to the dip. He pulled her up and appraised her with a smirk.

“
Nu,
you think you can handle me?” he said.

There was something of a young Catherine Deneuve about her, he thought.

“I almost peed myself,” she said.

Nata always seemed older when they danced, more serious, and he was often surprised at the silly things she said after practices—when she would turn back into a girl.

*   *   *

At nine o’clock Roman Ivanovich came out of the office. The chess boys had set up curtained partitions to accommodate the upcoming costume-changing frenzy of over a hundred dancers, aged six to twenty-one. The darkened studio resembled a military camp, still and quiet before battle. Asik and Sasha sat on the windowsill. Asik was dressed in all black.

They winged through the five standard dances with few mistakes. During the Viennese waltz, they shipwrecked one of the changing tents.

“Don’t bend back as much, Asya, head at a forty-five-degree angle between his ear and the tip of his shoulder,” he shouted over the music because he couldn’t be silent. “Sasha, straighten your fingers, hand no lower than her shoulder blade.”

The first two Latin dances—flawless. Then rumba. Roman Ivanovich had arranged for his favorite rumba song, “Loco,” to be played during Asik and Sasha’s turn on the stage. He turned it on now—though to the other dancers their competition songs would be a complete surprise—and sat down to watch.

At first Asik stands alone, dancing with just hips and arms. The man walks around her as she watches coyly. Sasha couldn’t yet master the right seductive look. He circled her like a predator. On the first couplet of Loco, he takes her hand and gives her a light push, initiating the classic Hockey Stick figure. For several counts they dance Alemanas, Cucarachas, Chase Peek-a-Boos, Serpientes. She dances a little carelessly—a tease to his attention. Nothing more.

On the third Loco, she twists into another Hockey Stick, reaching out away from Sasha with her hand. She is ready to leave, but the man doesn’t let go. He lowers her within a hair’s breadth of the floor. She dares him to drop her. Then, she puts one foot on his high shoulder and he drags her across, her other foot slicing the parquet like a blade.

On the sixth Loco he spins her away from him, and she bends like a bow. This time she comes back to him herself. She holds his face as he dips her. Could she have changed her mind about wanting to leave? After a few counts he lifts her and turns with her. Then she rolls off his shoulder, down his side, and between his legs. He gives her a hard whirl and she swivels on her backside, away from him. On the floor, right leg pulled up, she arches back. She never surrenders.