No Ballet Shoes In Syria

by Catherine Bruton

  “Mumma was sick,” Aya said.

  “I know. Mrs Massoud was telling me. She’s had no news about her son, by the way. Oh, and the food-bank ladies said they miss Moosa! It’s been too quiet without him, they said! Although they did say that I cause more trouble than he does!”

  Aya smiled at the thought of Dotty hanging out at the centre, befriending the Massouds and playing chess with Mr Abdul – but she wasn’t sure Bronte Buchanan would approve. Wouldn’t it be a distraction? Shouldn’t Dotty be practising?

  “And we’ve started a singing group,” Dotty went on. “It was sort of my idea – and the food-bank ladies are in a choir at church so they’ve been helping. So people come along with songs from the country they came from and we all try and learn them. It’s fun, though I have no idea what we’re singing about half the time!”

  “That sounds nice,” said Aya. She thought of the songs she had heard along the way – floating through the camp at Kilis, in the hostel at night, Dad singing to her when the bombs fell. Songs of home, and happiness and heartache. Songs that helped ease the weight of feelings somehow, as dancing did for her.

  “But now you’re back it’s going to be way more fun!” said Dotty, dragging her into class. “Ballet has been super, super boring without you. And there is, like, no time left to get you ready for this audition, you know!”

  After warm-up, Aya showed Miss Helena the objects she had brought. The elderly lady looked them over, then nodded thoughtfully. Dotty also had her bag of what she referred to as “bits and bobs”, including a fluffy unicorn, a pair of red sparkly shoes, a cushion in the shape of a poo emoji and a picture of her mum dancing in Swan Lake at Covent Garden.

  “She said they were supposed to reflect who we are!” said Dotty with a grin and a shrug.

  Ciara hadn’t bought anything. “My father is going to hire a choreographer,” she announced. “A professional. To devise a proper dance for me.”

  “If you wish.” Miss Helena did not look surprised. “Then today you will help Aya.”

  “But this is supposed to be our class – me and Dotty!” Ciara protested. “Our parents are paying. And she didn’t even do the prelims!”

  “In dance we can always learn from one another,” Miss Helena said, waving her hand to dismiss Ciara’s objections. “By watching another’s process, hearing the stories others have to tell and seeing how they tell them. Aya, let us begin.”

  Miss Helena’s way of working was different from anything Aya had done before. She had brought different pieces of music for them to listen to. She asked Aya to lay her objects out across the studio floor, then sit down in the middle and look at them as she played each piece of music.

  “If you want to move, then move,” was all she said.

  Aya glanced nervously at Dotty, who was sitting by the door. Ciara sat by the barre, tapping her foot crossly.

  “But what should I … do?”

  “The time I saw you dancing in the yard, the movements came from within – am I right?”

  “Yes, but…”

  Aya recalled how unhappy she had felt then. How angry. How she had felt that the dance might break her into small pieces. She didn’t feel like that now. She just felt really self-conscious and awkward.

  “So listen to the music, think about your objects – and let the dance come from within.”

  Aya tried. But she couldn’t seem to connect the music with the things across the room. She just felt tired, and confused … and stupid.

  “I can’t…” she said after a few minutes.

  Miss Helena sat down next to her. Sometimes Aya could not believe how easily this little old lady moved. She picked up the lump of rock. “From your home?” she asked.

  Aya nodded. She felt close to tears. She didn’t know what Miss Helena wanted her to do. And Ciara’s words were echoing in her ears. “We are paying for this class … she didn’t even get through prelims…”

  Miss Helena turned it over in her hands. “Your home was bombed?”

  “Not my building – but others on our street,” Aya said quietly.

  “And that is why you had to leave?”

  Aya nodded.

  “I left my home when I was younger than you are now,” Miss Helena said, turning the piece of rock over in her hand. “After the Germans invaded Prague. I left my parents and my whole family.”

  Aya looked at her in surprise. “You came alone?”

  “Many years ago now,” she said in a quiet voice. “And this is your father’s?” Miss Helena picked up the handkerchief.

  Aya managed another brief nod.

  “I missed my parents a very great deal when I came to England,” said Miss Helena. “You miss your father too, I think.”

  Aya was silent. It felt wrong to talk of him here. Like she had been cut open and someone was reaching in and touching her beating heart.

  Miss Helena seemed to understand this. “It is difficult – even painful – but sometimes we must try to dance from the places that lie closest to our hearts.” She replaced the handkerchief with care.

  “But – how…?”

  “Listen to the music and let it help you feel … feel even the most difficult things.”

  The notes started up again – a new piece that Aya didn’t recognise, but which reminded her in an odd way of the call to prayer. Summer evenings on the rooftops. She wrapped her arms round her legs and tried to focus on the ballet shoes, Moosa’s sock…

  She still didn’t know what she was supposed to be doing but she had to do something. She arranged her arms into the gesture for baby, then adopted the classical mime for sleep. She tried to move like Moosa did, unsteady on his feet, toddling then falling. She lifted him up and held him close to her. For a second the music caught her and she thought of kissing his fat little feet, holding him during the blackout when Dad was at the hospital. She could almost smell him in her arms… just for a second – then the self-conscious feeling returned. What now?

  She saw the piece of rock and wracked her brains for memories of home. The elegant sitting room that Mumma always kept so smart, the warm smells of manoushi bread in the kitchen, the roof terrace where she had seen the first bombs falling on her birthday. She felt herself turn, her body moving involuntarily into the dance she had done for Dad. “Dance for us, habibti…”

  She stopped in front of Dad’s handkerchief on the floor. She wanted to remember his giant sneezes, the smell of him, his almond eyes laughing … but for some reason all she could think of was the dust in the back of the lorry, arriving at the camp, the rows of containers…

  And then she looked at the shell and other thoughts started to leak out of the places where she had tightly packed them away. Thoughts of the beach, the boat, in the water…

  “I’m sorry, I – I cannot…”

  Miss Helena turned the music off. “A good start,” she said.

  Aya’s head was light and her breath came heavily.

  “I think we’ve done enough for tonight,” she could hear Miss Helena saying. But Aya felt far away, as though she was at the bottom of an ocean, the memories swilling around her, keeping her under.

  “I will leave you girls to warm down. And perhaps, Dotty, you can show Aya your dance?”

  Aya turned to her friend, who was still sitting by the door. She looked far away too.

  “What about me?” said Ciara.

  “You can decide whether you feel there is anything here for you to learn,” said Miss Helena.

  Chapter 23

  “Do you want to see it?”

  Aya was sitting cross-legged in the corner of the room. Ciara had gone out to get changed, saying she didn’t need lessons from Dotty Buchanan, and so it was just the two of them left in the darkening studio.

  “Yes! That is, if you don’t mind.”

  “I worked on it while you were away,” said Dotty. “I hated doing it at first but then I kind of got into it. I decided to see it as a sort of acting, rather than dancing,” she said. “An
d it doesn’t have to be pure ballet so I could be a bit more free – include some of the stuff Mr Abdul showed me. And Mrs Massoud’s ballroom stuff too.” Then she grinned shyly. “Actually, do you mind if I turn the lights out? It kind of helps.”

  “Of course.” Aya went to switch off the light and the studio fell into a blue and grey gloom. She still felt weirdly disconnected – half her mind still in the sea of memories, the other here in the dance studio.

  “It’s a bit weird!” Dotty was saying. “Don’t judge, OK!”

  Dotty pressed play on the CD then ran to position herself in the middle of the floor as the first notes of the piece came on.

  The opening of the piece was light-hearted, and Aya saw the clowning Dotty she knew well – leaps and spins designed to entertain; a flicker of a tap dance; old-fashioned somehow – then a moment when she lurched into vibrant hip-hop. And then came a crashing change in tempo and Dotty turned as if there was someone else in the room. Someone whom she wished to please very much. Dotty danced around the invisible person as if this were a ballroom, reaching out, as if pleading to be noticed – a few waltz steps; a tango; an angry paso doble. She was bright-eyed, first loving, then pleading, then angry and defiant.

  Aya watched every move; her friend was a truly beautiful dancer. But – more than that – she was a wonderful actress. Aya found it impossible to take her eyes from her.

  And then – just for a second – Dotty lit up and became a ballerina, a sugar plum fairy, graceful, light. On the tips of her toes, dancing through a playful pas de chat and then into a beautiful ballonné.

  And then it was over and Dotty wilted, reached out for something that was gone – a few tango steps, an angry flicker of paso doble – then dropped and sparkled into the pretence of happiness for one final pirouette, before the piece came to an end.

  She thought of Dotty’s objects – the crazy unicorn, the emoji cushion, the red slippers, the picture of her mother. Dotty had told the story so well that Aya could see how each twisted through the dance, how each different style had been blended together to create a beautiful piece of story-telling by a girl who had the heart and soul of an actress.

  “What do you think?”

  Dotty was on her feet now, glancing at her nervously, breathless and bright-eyed.

  “It is … wonderful!” said Aya. “You tell the story so beautifully.”

  “Yeah, well, Mum says I’m a born show-off! Sometimes I think—” She stopped and shrugged. “Never mind.”

  It was getting late. The light was dying outside the windows and the community centre was quiet.

  “What?” asked Aya. “What do you think?”

  “Oh, it’s just I sometimes wonder if I actually told her that I’d rather be doing musical theatre – aiming for the West End rather than Covent Garden – maybe she’d understand. She followed her dream; perhaps she’d understand that this is mine.”

  “Maybe you should tell her,” said Aya.

  “Maybe.” Dotty sighed then grinned. “But you like the dance – that’s the main thing.”

  Aya wanted to ask her more but she wasn’t quite sure how. Sometimes she felt like she’d known Dotty forever and sometimes she realised she hardly knew her at all.

  Dotty glanced at her watch. It was later than either of them had realised. The community centre suddenly seemed eerily quiet. Aya could hear the water glugging through the pipes, the low buzz of the electric lights.

  “We should probably go,” said Dotty, jumping to her feet. “My mum will be here any minute!”

  But when she went to the door it wouldn’t open. She rattled the handle. “Oh no!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I think we’re locked in.”

  Chapter 24

  Aya felt a surge of panic. The studio was a small room with only the skylight for a window. Suddenly it seemed stiflingly close.

  She grabbed the door and rattled it, terror rising.

  “Don’t stress. I’ll call Miss Sylvie – oh!” Dotty lifted her hands in dismay. “My phone is in my ballet bag – outside!”

  Aya could feel terror beating in her chest. Her lungs felt tight, her head pounding, memories pouring in, clouding her. She slammed her hands against the door.

  “Aya, are you OK?”

  Dotty had grabbed her by the shoulder. But Aya couldn’t focus on her face. Couldn’t breathe. Her eyes tore around the room desperately. She could see her own reflection on every side. But memories were pushing in on her, making it hard to breathe.

  “I don’t like – I don’t like … closed spaces,” she said.

  “Sit down,” Dotty was saying, taking her by the shoulder. “Miss Helena will realise soon enough. We’ll be out in no time.”

  But the panic felt like drowning as Dotty led her to the corner, sat her down with her back to the mirror, wrapping a concerned arm round her.

  “If nobody comes in ten minutes then we’ll smash the glass in, I promise!” She said it jokingly but Aya was shivering now. She felt sick and dizzy.

  “You want to tell me about it?” said Dotty.

  Aya shook her head.

  “I can tell you what I’m most afraid of, if you like,” said Dotty. Her arm was round Aya and her voice was gentle. “Mostly I’m scared of letting my mum down. I guess that’s what my dance is about, really.”

  In her head, far away as if at a great distance, Aya could recall Dotty dancing, her arms reaching out to someone – her mum?

  “Probably a silly thing to be afraid of, but I just know how much she wants me to be a ballerina – to follow in her footsteps … only sometimes the idea of spending seven years at ballet school makes me feel like I can’t breathe.”

  There was a quietness in Dotty’s voice that lay still in the air between them. Aya closed her eyes and tried to breathe in and out, tried to focus on the glugging sound of water in the pipes, the humming of electric lights. After what felt like forever, she started to speak.

  “On the journey here,” she heard herself saying, her own words sounding distant. “We are smuggling … in a container.”

  “Like – on the back of a lorry?”

  Aya nodded. “There were many, many of us in there. More than thirty. It was the only way to get out of Syria. Because of the fighting – and the border guards…”

  “How long?” asked Dotty. Aya could see the two of them reflected in the mirror opposite. Dotty’s arm round her, holding her tight. Both faces pale as ghosts in the gloaming, like the faces of the other people in the container.

  “Three days, I think.”

  Aya remembered the dark inside the metal prison. No food, no water, barely enough air to breathe.

  “What about… I mean, what if you needed the toilet?”

  Aya’s eyes were still tightly closed. She could feel Dotty’s arm round her, could hear her breathing, and she tried to focus on those feelings.

  “They stopped sometimes and let us out, but not always. If there were border guards with guns we had to stay hidden.”

  “Wasn’t it … dangerous?”

  Aya said nothing for a moment. “There was an old lady. A grandma,” she started to say.

  The Container

  Aya remembered the old lady’s face – wrinkled like an almond, eyes watery blue, staring at her across the darkness inside the container.

  Aya sat with Moosa in her arms, cradling him tight in the darkness, hushing him when he cried. “Crying takes up more air, Moosie,” she whispered, although she felt like screaming out loud herself. Screaming and sobbing to be let out. Instead, she tried to slow her breathing, push away the panic that closed in on her in the dark. The darkness that stretched to fill hours and days, filled with sobs, fitful sleep and oxygen-deprived dreams. Aya had heard stories of people smugglers who sold refugees into slavery – of people dying in the back of containers… Those images danced through her dreams.

  And then the sound of dogs barking. The door slamming open. White light and cold salty air rus
hing in. Voices yelling, “Over here! Quick, we need a medic. There must be two dozen people in here.”

  Blinking in the light. No longer fully aware where she was, or how they had got there. A smell – worse than she’d ever smelled before. Then policemen were clambering inside, carrying people out. When an officer tried to take Moosa out of her arms she clung on tight and would not let them take him.

  “Nobody’s going to hurt you or your brother,” the officer was saying.

  “Oxygen – we need oxygen!” A medic was putting a mask over Mumma’s face and they were carrying her out.

  “Where are you taking her?” Aya’s voice came out croaky, broken.

  “We are going to look after her – and you too!”

  Then Aya allowed herself to be helped out. She could barely stand and she would not let go of Moosa.

  Outside, in a vast warehouse full of containers, Aya sat shivering, though they had wrapped her in a blanket made of what seemed like tinfoil. Still holding Moosa tight in her arms, refusing to let him go. She watched the medics helping people out. Some able to walk, some needing to be carried.

  So this was Turkey. They had made it. Only not all of them. When Aya looked around she could not see the old lady.

  Chapter 25

  They sat in the studio for what felt like an hour – but was perhaps only ten minutes – until eventually they heard the sound of voices outside and the door handle rattling. A jangle of keys. Miss Sylvie saying, “Why would you lock the door when the girls were still working in there?”

  Aya was on her feet in an instant, rushing to the open door, flinging herself out – out into the lobby, her head still spinning with memories of the container, the dark, the airless blackness. The old lady who hadn’t made it.

  “I had no idea, honestly!” Ciara was saying to Miss Sylvie. “I thought they had gone home.”

  “You didn’t think to, like, actually check?” said Dotty, who had appeared behind Aya now.