No Ballet Shoes In Syria

by Catherine Bruton

  For Evie

  And for the 11.5 million refugee children around the globe who have been forced from their homes and are currently seeking safe haven.

  C.B.

  Chapter 1

  Aya could hear the music floating through the walls. And the woman’s voice: “One, two … port de bras … lift those arms, girls … three, four … straighter – yes! … five, six … eeeee-longate…” The notes of the piano seemed to trickle down through Aya’s limbs, and her fingertips moved involuntarily towards the tune that tinkled through the stuffy air.

  The music stopped. Aya wiggled her toes and glanced around. The community centre was crowded – a jumble-sale collection of people, talking in a bustle of different languages. Hot sun spilled through dusty windows and the room smelled of soup and unwashed clothing. And sadness, Aya thought. She sighed and shifted in her seat.

  The music started again and Aya glanced upwards. The piano notes were coming from somewhere close by. Upstairs? If she closed her eyes really tight and focused hard enough she could almost – almost – imagine herself back home, in the dance studio in Aleppo. With the heat on her limbs, the white-hot sun falling through the skylight, and the aromas of the city trickling through the windows – dusty streets, car fumes, incense. She smiled as she remembered standing at the barre, tracing her pointed toe through a series of rond de jambes, recalling the dust that sometimes trickled across the floor and that drove Madam Belova mad.

  Anyone looking at Aya at that moment would have seen a small girl who looked much younger than her eleven years, holding a sleeping toddler in her arms. She had her eyes closed, and a curious expression danced over her face as her small foot traced circles on the grubby floorboards. A headscarf covered her black hair, and the clothes she was wearing were too big for her – leggings sagged over her skinny limbs and an old dress, which might perhaps have once been her mother’s, hung limply off her tiny frame. And yet there was something about the way she sat – the bird-like tilt of her pinched face – that made her seem as if she belonged somewhere different.

  The sounds of music stopped once more and Aya wriggled on the hard plastic seat. She was hungry and Moosa was heavy in her arms. The music made her feel fidgety and restless, and something else she couldn’t find a word for. She shook her head determinedly and sat up straight – she needed to be focused today. To help Mumma.

  “How long do you think it will it be?” she asked the woman next to her, who just shrugged. Aya wasn’t sure if she’d even understood.

  She glanced around again. They’d been waiting for three hours to talk to the caseworker – a young man with a beard and tired-looking eyes who sat behind a makeshift desk, papers and files piled up around him. Right now he was talking to Mr and Mrs Massoud – the old couple from the hostel who had told Aya that they came from Damascus. Aya heard the words: “Application for asylum … appeal … lawyers … undocumented … hearing.”

  “Same old story,” she muttered to Moosa. “Right, Moos! Over and over – wherever we go.”

  Moosa shifted in his sleep, making the funny little sucking noises that made Aya want to squeeze him tight. “You sound like a baby rabbit, Moos!” she muttered, planting a kiss on her brother’s grubby, tear-stained face. His hair was damp with sweat, his fingers clasped tightly round Aya’s thumb. She remembered the first time she had held him, the wave of love she had felt then. The feeling she’d had that she would never let anything happen to him – ever.

  “Don’t worry, Moosie!” she whispered into his damp cheeks. “Aya’s here. Aya is going to sort it all out. Promise.”

  Mumma was sitting next to her. She looked tired and faraway. “It won’t be long now, Mumma,” Aya said.

  But Mumma did not reply. She just kept staring up at the dusty windows – as if she could see something through them that Aya could not.

  “You OK, Mumma?” Aya asked. “You hungry? I can get you some food? There is soup today.”

  But Mumma said nothing.

  Just then the door to the community centre swung open and the music spilled into the room, louder now. A quicker piece was playing and Aya found her toes tapping out the beat on the floor.

  “One, two, three… Squeeze, two, three… To the barre, two, three… and – photograph! Loooovely, ladies!”

  Aya held her breath for a second. “Photograph!” she muttered, half to herself and half to Moosa.

  Madam Belova liked to say that too. “Photograph!” It meant a moment of stillness, a pause, catching hold of the music and waiting with it. The notes and the dancer suspended in time – hovering in the air – just for a second.

  Suddenly Aya couldn’t sit still a moment longer. She glanced at the queue of people in front of them. It would be ages before they were called. She could slip out – just for a moment – to go and look.

  “Mumma, I’m just going out. I won’t be long. I promise I’ll be back to help. And I’ll get you some soup – and bread. You need to eat, OK?”

  Mumma turned and nodded, but she seemed to have only half heard. I will make sure she eats properly today, Aya said to herself. And rub her temples the way Dad used to do when she got one of her headaches. And I’ll talk to the caseworker and get everything sorted out. Then Mumma will be able to relax – get better. Be herself again.

  Aya carefully uncurled her little brothers’ fingers from her own and laid him down gently in the battered pushchair that Sally – the nice young volunteer who ran the centre – had found for them. Then she stood up and did a little spin on the spot, which – just for a moment – made old Mr Abdul sitting opposite think of a curling autumn leaf, falling through the air.

  But Aya was unaware of being leaf-like as she made her way over to the doorway.

  She just needed to shake off the fidgety feeling that the music had sent trickling through her limbs. Before she burst!

  Chapter 2

  It was a relief to be out of there. Away from the smell of old clothes, boiled vegetables, and that other smell, which Aya had decided was sadness. Once upon a time she’d have said that sadness didn’t have a smell. Now it was more familiar than the fast-fading scents of home. Worse than the smell of Moosa’s stinky nappies, worse than Dad’s smelly socks, worse than the boys’ changing room at school – though she wouldn’t have thought that was possible a year ago!

  Aya stretched her arms high above her head and looked around the lobby. Manchester Welcomes Refugees was housed in a community centre in a run-down area of the city, where crumbling red-brick terraces crouched in the shadows of dying and derelict tower blocks. So different from the tree-lined streets and sunlit avenues of Aleppo – before the war, that is.

  There were posters on the notice board advertising all the other things that went on here. Aya ran her eyes over the confusing words: “Latin and Ballroom Club – All Ages Welcome” … “Hor-ti-cul-tur-al Society” (she sounded out the syllables) … “Zumba Gold” (what was Zumba, anyway?) … “Pilates for Mindfulness” (she had no idea what that meant either!).

  Aya remembered sitting at the kitchen table with Dad teaching her English, laughing at the strange-sounding syllables. She could still see Dad’s smiling face – the dark almond eyes, the hint of grey in the stubble on his chin, the small scar on his cheek from when he’d had chicken pox as a child. She pushed the thought away quickly. She couldn’t think about Dad. Not if she was going to keep it together.

  The music was much clearer out here and Aya could hear the woman’s voice – speaking English with a slight foreign lilt to it. “Ladies, are we swans on the lake or the ugly ducklings? Let me see grace. Let me see elegance. LOV-ER-LY!”

  The music, the voice, the soft thud of feet moving in time seemed to tug at some
thing inside Aya. Like the strings on a tightly bound package, loosening memories she normally buried deep, deep inside.

  “Arms, ladies, arms … and fiiiingers! Feel it in every sinew – right to the tips of your pinkie fingers!”

  Aya couldn’t help it – she just wanted to look.

  She made her way to the staircase and up to the little upstairs lobby. There were benches all around, scattered with a collection of bags and coats and items of clothing. One door seemed to lead to a small office, another led out on to a fire escape. Then there was a pair of white doors with little windows on the top, through which the music was coming. Aya hesitated. It had been so long since she had danced … a whole lifetime ago … another life, almost.

  Standing on tiptoe, she could make out a rather battered-looking dance studio, mirrors along one wall and a barre stretching the whole way round. A group of girls were lined up, dressed in black leotards with pink socks and satin shoes. Each girl had her hair pulled back in a bun, though some were neater than others, Aya noticed, as she watched their legs and arms moving in time to the music.

  “Straight up like a chocolate finger, la-dies… And no wiggle-waggling as you close!” the teacher was saying. “Now you can all take your hands off the barre – except Miss Dotty, who is seeming to be drunk today, I think.”

  Aya watched as the girl at the front of the line – who had skin like melted chocolate, a lopsided bun and a mischievous twinkle in her eye – wobbled even more precariously. The girl (who must be Dotty?) put her hand on the barre to steady herself, biting her lip as if to stop giggling.

  “Now, squee-eeze in those bottoms and make your necks very long – like the giraffes…” the teacher was saying, walking down the row of girls.

  “Very nice, Ciara!” she said to a slender blonde dancer with limbs like snowy branches.

  “No see-sawing, Lilli-Ella,” to a small girl with mousey hair.

  “Don’t be making the examiner feel seasick, Grace.” This was to a tall girl with sloping shoulders and glasses perched on her nose.

  There was no sand on the floor, and the sky through the windows was English blue, not Syrian gold, but otherwise Aya could have been back in Aleppo. Back at home – before the war – before … everything. And it could have been her own classmates lined up at the barre: Samia, Kimi, and Nadiya and Nooda – the twins who always did everything – everything – together, even going to the toilet.

  What had happened to the twins?

  The teacher turned and Aya could see her properly now. She was old – very old – and tiny, with a snowy-white head of hair pulled into a bun, and a face round and bright like a wrinkled apple. In a flowing black dress with shiny red character shoes on her tiny feet, she looked each girl up and down with her bright violet-blue eyes, lifting an arm here, touching a head there, just as Madam Belova always used to do.

  “Make sure you are speaking with your hands, your toes, your eyes, my dancers!” she was saying. “But, Dotty, do tell your eyes to mind their Ps and Qs!”

  Just then the girl called Dotty glanced towards the door and caught sight of Aya. A quizzical expression flitted over her face as she held Aya’s glance. She smiled and just for a second it looked as if she was going to laugh.

  The final notes of the music tinkled out and the barre exercise came to an end. The girls relaxed into easy chatter, reaching for water bottles, sorting out hair and pulling up socks as they made their way to the middle of the floor.

  Only the girl called Dotty kept her gaze trained on Aya. And as she took a glug of water she winked and grinned.

  Aya smiled back. For the first time in months she didn’t feel invisible.

  Aleppo, Syria

  Aya barely remembered how the war had begun. She must have been small – six or seven maybe. She had a memory of Dad watching the demonstrations on the TV one evening. He had some of his friends from the hospital over and they were talking, arguing about recent events – the protests on the streets of the capital, the arrests, the fighting… They didn’t seem to agree about what was going on. She heard words like “political reforms … civil rights … the release of prisoners … arrests.” Words she didn’t really understand, but that had ugly shapes to them.

  “They are angry at the president,” Mumma had explained. Aya wasn’t sure if she was talking about the crowds of protestors, or about Dad’s friends.

  Over the next few days she stared at the images on the news. Fighting in the streets of the capital, Damascus. Protestors waving banners, clashing with police. Shots fired, blood on the streets.

  “Why are they so angry, Dadda?” she asked.

  “They want to make Syria a better country, habibti,” said Dad, rubbing the grey stubble on his chin thoughtfully.

  “So why are the police hurting them?”

  Dad sighed. “Perhaps people have different versions of better.”

  She had looked hard at him then. His almond-shaped eyes looked troubled and he was not smiling. Dad always smiled. Even when he came home exhausted from a long shift at the hospital. He always had a smile for his Aya. For his little dancing girl.

  “Will the fighting come here?” she asked. “To Aleppo?”

  “I hope not, habibti,” he said. “I hope not. But if it does, I will keep you and Mumma safe. I promise.”

  Chapter 3

  That night, back in the hostel, Aya could not sleep. The bed she shared with Mumma and Moosa was lumpy, the springs collapsed in one section. The walls were so paper-thin that they could hear everything that was going on in every other room. The family next door were arguing loudly in a language Aya did not understand – the husband shouting, the wife crying. In the room above, a baby wailed, and from somewhere down the corridor she could hear the sound of old Mrs Massoud crying. Poor Mrs Massoud was always crying – for her son who had been taken by government troops in Damascus, and for her daughter, who had been killed by the bombs shortly after. She told Aya that a mother’s fountain of tears flows forever.

  But tonight there was also music coming from somewhere down the hall – a man’s voice singing a song in a language that Aya didn’t understand. It made her think of the girls in the dance class. The girl called Dotty who had grinned at her like she was just a normal kid. And Ciara, with the blonde hair and the haughty expression, and the mousey-haired girl – Lilli-Ella – who stuck her tongue out when she was concentrating. Aya’s limbs itched as she remembered. Just thinking about it made her want to dance.

  “Not really enough room for that kind of thing in here, eh, Moos!” she whispered to her little brother, who lay like a starfish next to her, his tiny fist clamped tightly round her finger, breathing snottily in his sleep.

  She glanced at Mumma, asleep on a chair in the corner, her face creased into its usual anxious frown. Then she pulled a blanket over Moosa and climbed out of bed, reaching as quietly as she could for her rucksack.

  They hadn’t been able to bring much when they left Syria. They had fled in a hurry with only the clothes they were wearing and one bag each. Sometimes Aya thought of her room at home and all the treasures she liked to collect: the posters of ballerinas on her wall, the glass animals on her mantelpiece, the pile of cuddly toys on the rocking chair, the tiny snow globe with a dancer frozen in arabesque that Dad had found in the old market … all the things she’d left behind. In comparison, this room – with its single lightbulb, bare walls, ripped curtains and the damp patch on the ceiling – felt more like a prison cell than a home.

  “It doesn’t have to be for long,” she had said to Mumma when the lady from the centre first showed them in. “And after the appeal we’ll find somewhere better. Make a proper home – I promise!”

  Another promise.

  Aya reached to the bottom of the rucksack, where she had packed the ballet shoes. They were wrapped in a couple of plastic bags to keep them dry, and as she unfolded them she could feel the soft satin under her fingers. She hadn’t looked at them or touched them for months, but holding them
now made her smile. Dad had bought them for her, just a few weeks before they left. Her first pair of pointe shoes – the most beautiful things she had ever owned. She had no idea where he’d managed to get them from. But Dad was like that. He could do stuff other dads couldn’t.

  She remembered dancing in them for the very first time, in the kitchen at home. Patterned linoleum underfoot; Dad sitting at the table with Moosa in his arms; Mumma standing by the sink, hands wet, clapping with delight and laughing about her beautiful ballerina. “Dance for us, Aya!” Dad had said.

  Mumma sat up, alert suddenly – the frightened look in her eyes – panting with fear. “Aya? What is wrong?”

  Aya quickly shoved the shoes back into her rucksack. “Nothing. It’s OK, Mumma,” she said.

  “Has something happened? Has someone come for us?”

  “No, Mumma, everything’s good. Go back to sleep. You need to rest.”

  The sound of the man singing continued to float along the hallway, as Aya carefully tucked the shoes back into the bottom of her bag – along with the dreams they had briefly set dancing through the cramped little room. Then she climbed back into bed.

  Chapter 4

  She couldn’t help going back the next day. Even though Mumma’s headache was worse and Moosa was restless. Even though she needed to talk to the food-bank lady about nappies for Moosa. And ask Sally about trying to get a doctor for Mumma. Even though they still hadn’t seen their new caseworker about the appeal. Even though all of that was her responsibility now…

  It was the music. The tinkling tune of a piano that had danced through her head all night, and trilled through her fingers all morning. It was school holidays here, so there were dance classes going on all morning, and Aya sat on a hard plastic chair, swinging her legs in time to the music, dancing patterns on the chair leg with her fingers until she felt like she would burst if she didn’t go up for another look.