Ballerina

by Edward Stewart

  ‘Act One—number twelve,’ Tamarova said. ‘Aurora’s pas de deux rêvé. By Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.’

  Holding the yellowed pages, scanning the small, neat musical notation, Volmar felt a rush of desire to press the manuscript to his lips. He had completed a journey that had begun a half century ago: the quest of his life. He trembled and began to weep silently.

  For a long time he sat staring down at his treasure. Then, slowly, he began to read, putting the orchestra parts together. When he touched the first page to turn it his thumb left a faint crescent slightly lighter than the rest of the paper. The music surged in his head.

  ‘Pas de deux,’ Tamarova said. ‘Pas de deux. Not pas seul. Doesn’t anyone speak French any more? Doesn’t anyone know ballet?’

  ‘Maybe with this we can help them remember.’

  ‘God grant,’ she said.

  ‘May I have it?’

  She didn’t answer. Just stared at him with those great silent eyes. Impatience flared in him.

  ‘You didn’t show me this just to torture me. Or to correct my French.’

  ‘To me, those pages are sacred. They are Tchaikovsky; Petipa; my mother. They are what dance—could have been. How badly do you want them?’

  ‘How much are you asking?’

  ‘Money? I have my pension, I have my school. I’m not interested in that.’

  ‘Then what do you want?’

  ‘Something you could give far more easily than I can part with those pages.’

  She paced three steps, turned, paced back and faced him. Her eyes were like the window of a cash register awaiting a figure to be rung. Volmar’s impatience foamed up into anger.

  ‘Tell me the price then.’

  Tamarova moved quietly and quickly across the room. There was a set of double doors that Volmar supposed led to the bedroom. She flung them open. A sudden brightness came crashing in. Volmar had to squint.

  A tall male figure stood silhouetted against the light, motionless.

  ‘He is the price.’

  He seemed to have been waiting a long time. He seemed willing to wait longer.

  ‘Marius, this is Aleksandr Fedorovich Bunin. Sasha—Marius Volmar.’

  The stranger came to life, stepping into the room with a swinging stride. Now Volmar could see him. Brown hair, brown eyes; strong facial bones; a handsome beard that unraveled at the top to reveal smiling teeth. He wore a red knit sweater and blue jeans. He could have been a sailor.

  With a sudden surrendering movement he bowed his head, as if to an executioner—or an audience. ‘I am honoured,’ he said.

  ‘Sasha comes to us from Leningrad.’

  ‘I have long admired your work, Citizen Volmar.’

  ‘Sasha—Mr Volmar, not “Citizen.”’

  ‘Forgive me. I have long admired your work—Mr Volmar.’

  Volmar could not help smiling. So thorough was Soviet conditioning that even anti-Communists had difficulty mouthing the forbidden word gospodin. They ranted against Marx and Lenin but they called you grazhdanin—‘citizen.’

  ‘You’ve seen my work then?’ Volmar asked coldly.

  ‘When you toured my country, three years ago.’

  ‘A most uncomfortable tour.’

  ‘Even if we haven’t enough money to repair our shoes, we Russians will spend eight, ten rubles for a ticket to the ballet. You cannot imagine what ballet means to us. It is our sole link to the nobility of the past, the one thing in Russia the Communists have not ruined.’

  ‘I am not political,’ Volmar said. ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘Nor am I, Mr Volmar. Not in the least.’

  ‘Ah—then you’re a dancer?’

  Gravely, the young man nodded. Volmar knew the type. They had the skin of princes, the marrow of peasants. Lacking wit and grace, they got by on shrewdness and strength.

  ‘And for many years it has been my highest ambition to dance one of your roles.’

  And by pushiness. Volmar turned to Tamarova. In English, ‘Another of your defectors? I hadn’t heard about this one.’

  ‘This one they are keeping secret.’

  ‘Kirov?’

  ‘But of course. Look how he stands. That they haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘Bunin. I don’t recall that name.’ Then, in Russian, to the young man: ‘You couldn’t have been a principal.’

  ‘I would have been if I had chosen to stay. But I could not tolerate the dictatorship—’

  ‘Nor the constant intervention in artistic affairs,’ Volmar sighed. The same line they all parroted when they realized they’d never make a success at home. ‘In other words, you were tired of the corps.’

  ‘Sasha was a soloist,’ Tamarova said. ‘He’s been in Copenhagen since the last tour. And they’d take him back in an instant. I think he could even negotiate and become a principal. They want him very badly.’

  The beard was probably a disguise to make him look less a dancer. It made him look less a youth, too. Volmar subtracted five years from his first impression. He put Citizen Sasha Fedorovich’s age at twenty-four. The Kirov’s superstars generally bloomed into principals a little earlier than that. Obviously there was practicality to the boy’s defection.

  ‘I will never go back there,’ Bunin said. ‘They crush the human spirit.’

  Volmar lit another of Tamarova’s cigarettes. ‘Everything crushes the human spirit. Governments, landlords, taxes, pollution.’

  ‘The Soviets have been very careful about Sasha’s departure,’ Tamarova said. ‘There has been no publicity.’

  ‘They publicize the principals,’ Volmar said. ‘Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Makarova make headlines. When it comes to a soloist like Citizen Bunin....’ He shrugged.

  ‘He is more valuable to them than Nureyev or Baryshnikov or Makarova.’ Tamarova paused as though preparing for a triple turn in the air. ‘His father is Minister of Agriculture!’

  ‘Then his father is in trouble.’

  ‘My father and I are not friends.’

  ‘Certainly not now,’ Volmar said.

  ‘I want to go to America, where dancers are free. I want to dance modern roles. Balanchine, Tudor, MacMillan—Volmar.’

  ‘Dancers are not free anywhere,’ Volmar said. ‘Not in Russia, not in America, not in this room. Dance is a tyranny of the old over the young, the ugly over the beautiful, those who no longer can over those who can.’

  ‘Sasha needs an American visa and working papers,’ Tamarova said. ‘The consul will give them to him if you’ll promise him a place in your company.’

  Volmar was strongly tempted. In the balance of his mind he weighed the manuscript against the boy. There would be problems if he let a Soviet fox into his sheepfold. On the other hand Tchaikovsky was worth a problem or two.

  He decided to make one last attempt at negotiation. ‘We’re not that sort of company. With all due respect to Citizen Bunin and the Kirov, we are not a showcase for Soviet sensations. Why don’t you try American Ballet Theater or the Canadians?’

  ‘I have seen Sasha perform,’ Tamarova said. ‘He is good.’

  Volmar could not explain the stubbornness that flashed over him. He was a man who knew his prejudices and was rarely blinded by them. Yet every instinct in him shouted No to Citizen Aleksandr Fedorovich Bunin.

  ‘We don’t do Spartacus,’ Volmar said. ‘We don’t do class-conscious Giselles and happy-ending Swan Lakes.’

  ‘He is good at everything.’ Tamarova said.

  ‘We have nothing for him. There are no solos available.’

  ‘Marius, let us be frank. Your company is the best. Sasha must go to the best. He is willing to join the corps.’

  Volmar saw she was serious. He almost had to laugh. A Kirov soloist in an American corps? The other boys would look like morons and sissies. Absolutely impossible.

  ‘Yes,’ Bunin said. ‘To go to America, to go to Volmar, I will go backward.’

  Volmar maintained a silence, hoping to chip away at Tamarova. Her hardness
strained. And held.

  ‘Take Sasha,’ she said, ‘and the Tchaikovsky is yours. Refuse him, and....’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Volmar said.

  ‘Why do I do anything? Why do I bother to stay alive when I am old and tired? For dance. Only for dance. You’ll let me know in twenty-four hours, Marius?’ She gave him her hand to kiss. ‘Otherwise Sasha goes to the Paris ballet.’

  ‘And he takes the Tchaikovsky with him?’

  ‘Of course. It’s his safe-conduct.’

  thirty-one

  The plane was forty-five minutes late taking off. Rumours buzzed. Volmar was not on board; Volmar was sick, missing, had been in an accident, had decided to stay behind in his native Copenhagen.

  By now, the dancers didn’t care. They had been worn out by currency exchange and passport formality, worn out by stages that sloped and stages that weren’t deep enough and rain-mushy outdoor stages that held onto your feet like mud. They were tired of hunting down Band-Aids and Woolite in five different languages, tired of tiny hotel rooms with musty mattresses, tired of one another.

  They had spent their money, their patience, their strength. All they wanted now was to go home and sleep.

  At nine-thirty a black car with two American flags on the hood came ploughing across the runway. Marius Volmar and a stranger stepped out and hurried to the boarding ramp. With a thump, the stewardess pushed the door open. There was a grey splash of daylight and Marius Volmar and his companion stepped on board.

  The stranger’s gaze swept the cabin, methodically, neutrally. A stewardess handed Volmar a telephone. His voice came crackling over the public address. ‘Boys and girls, I should like to present to you Aleksandr Fedorovich Bunin. Sasha for short.’ There was a groundswell of whispering. ‘Mr Bunin will be joining the company. Since he does not speak very much English, any helpfulness you can show him will be appreciated.’

  Volmar handed the telephone to the stranger. The bearded face shaded with anxiety. And then, with a heavy Russian l forced up from the back of the throat, ‘Hello.’

  The stranger smiled. The dancers broke into applause. Heads turned row by row, like leaves flipped over in a sudden breeze. Rumour silted back through the chartered jet: He’s a defector. ... Got to be Kirov.... Looks Bolshoi to me.... Who wants Bolshoi? What we need is a Rudy or a Misha!

  Steph and Chris had taken seats near the rear of the cabin. Magazines and hand luggage were piled on the empty place between them. Chris leaned toward Steph to whisper, ‘God, he’s handsome!’

  ‘How can you tell? He’s all beard.’

  ‘Those eyes....’

  ‘Russian blue. So are Brezhnev’s.’ Steph opened yesterday’s Paris Herald to the Royal Ballet review.

  ‘Brown,’ Chris said. ‘Very pale brown.’

  Steph glanced at her friend. ‘Watch it. For all we know, he’s gay. We’re not going through that again.’

  Chris was shaking her head. ‘He couldn’t be gay.’

  Steph sighed. ‘Why don’t we leave that question to the experts?’

  Chris didn’t answer. She was too busy staring.

  The newcomer made his way slowly down the aisle. Silence rippled out around him. Gossip stopped. Eyes stared. He had the smile of a little boy in a toy shop—a gaze so openly eager, so harmlessly greedy, that every face it touched had to smile back.

  Volmar stood apart, at the front of the cabin, watching. What he saw disturbed him. The girls’ eyes moved with Aleksandr Fedorovich Bunin as if they’d been caught on fishhooks. Though the boys’ eyes were more skilled at deception, Volmar could still read the signs: longing in the gay boys, a bristling defensiveness in the straights. Trouble. Most definitely trouble.

  ‘Please?’ The Russian nodded at the seat.

  Chris threw a glance at the empty place beside her, began scooping magazines and packages into her lap.

  ‘Thank you much.’ He squeezed past Chris’s angled knees and dropped into the seat. He smiled first at one girl, then the other. ‘I am Sasha.’

  ‘I’m Chris.’

  ‘Steph. Hi.’

  He offered his hand, gravely, to each of them. They shook it, gravely.

  ‘Is great pleasure.’ He adjusted his seat belt and shut his eyes and fell into the instant easy sleep of a cat.

  Steph was uneasily aware of the male next to her.

  His fingers, resting on his knees, had the long taper of a concert pianist’s. The dark nicotine stain on the third finger of the right hand must have been years in the making. She saw that he chewed his nails. For some reason that made him likable. No rings. Even more likable. His jeans fit snugly and even in relaxation she could follow the definition of the thigh muscle. What she could infer through the sweater was more of the same, strength without bulk.

  She tried to tell herself she was evaluating him as a partner, nothing more. Her eye roamed up to his profile. A partner didn’t need a profile, but....

  He had a high forehead, pale and smooth, and an oddly pleasant upturned nose. A very full lower lip pouted through the beard. She suspected his chin would be strong, and she prayed it didn’t have a dimple.

  Chris’s eyes had followed exactly the same path and were fixed on the sleeping face. Steph looked quickly away and concentrated on the whine of the jets. She felt the plane lift off. The bright patchwork of Denmark faded gradually to pastels. The horizon tilted. She braced herself against the sideways pull, the sudden bite of the safety belt.

  Chris huddled forward in her seat, face rigid and white. A choking sound was coming from her mouth. Good God, Steph wondered, does she think we’re going to crash?

  The Russian’s eyes flicked open. His glance wandered over to Chris, seemed to stumble a moment at the neckline of her blouse. It was a good deal lower in her forward position than she probably realized.

  ‘Chris,’ he said gently, ‘okay?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Chris.’ He snapped his finger sharply, caught her eye. He pried her hand loose from its grip on her waist, tucked it between his two hands, patted it. He smiled. ‘Now okay?’

  She nodded. ‘Now okay.’

  The captain’s voice announced that they would land a half hour ahead of schedule. Damn, Volmar fretted, shifting in his seat. Every change in timetable meant more uncertainty and complication. The plan depended on the State Department’s men being at the airport to meet them. Pray God they have the sense to check arrival times.

  The Long Island shore came bursting through the fog. There were shouts and applause as the plane touched down. A stewardess’ voice urged everyone please to remain seated. Volmar could hear that no one was remaining seated. Coats were being reached for, packages collected, bodies were pushing for position in line, voices were laughing and calling.

  The stewardess brought Sasha forward ahead of the others, handed him over to Volmar like a parcel.

  ‘Kak proshla vasha poyezdka?’ Volmar asked. How was your trip? Russian was a good language: they had a formal pronoun. You could keep the Sashas of this world at a distance.

  ‘Where is the Statue of Liberty?’ Sasha asked. His tone left no doubt that he’d been cheated.

  ‘New York Harbour. You’ll have plenty of time to see it.’

  They left the plane directly behind the captain and the flight officer. The State Department had promised an escort but there was no one at immigration to meet them. Sasha’s papers were in order—no trouble there. But as they came into the baggage area Volmar was aware of a jibbering excitement on the other side of customs. He knew that sound.

  ‘Forget the bags.’ He pulled Sasha with him.

  ‘My guitar!’ Sasha whimpered.

  ‘We haven’t time.’

  The customs officer, surprised that they had nothing to declare, shrugged them through. As they hurried into the waiting area there was an explosion of shouts, the eye-stabbing shock of a hundred flash bulbs.

  ‘That’s him!’

  A barrier of potted palms went down and t
he flood of reporters was upon them, hungry-faced, ugly, trampling. Voices climbed on one another.

  ‘Which one’s Bunin—you?’

  ‘Not the old one, asshole!’

  Flash.

  ‘Why did you defect?’

  ‘What do you think of America?’

  Flash flash.

  ‘Do you like American ice cream as well as Russian?’

  ‘What does your dad think about this?’

  The State Department had promised no leaks. So much for promises. Sasha’s eyes darted in panic from one screaming reporter to another.

  A woman thrust a microphone into his face. ‘Do you like girls?’

  ‘Nye ponimayu,’ Sasha cried, ‘nye ponimayu!’

  Volmar squinted over the dipping, rising, whirlpooling tide of newsmen. His eye found the exit.

  ‘You—who are you—do you speak English?’

  The woman’s microphone waved insultingly in Volmar’s face. He knocked it aside.

  ‘You’re goddamned rude, whoever you are!’

  Gripping Sasha’s hand, Volmar threw all his weight into his shoulder, bulldozed a sideways opening, pressed forward, ignored shouts and flash bulbs, lunging arms and spittle-caked questions. His heart was battering like a kettle-drum and it was a miracle he reached the taxi alive.

  ‘Why don’t you just call him Sasha?’ Volmar spoke slowly, hiding his shortness of breath. He wanted to keep his heart trouble secret. Till the end, if possible.

  ‘Well, it’s certainly easier,’ Dorcas said. She smiled and Sasha returned her smile—with compound interest, it seemed to Volmar.

  They were standing in Dorcas’ living room. Sasha’s eyes took inventory. They did not simply sparkle. They were bonfires. From everything his gaze brushed he seemed to draw little increments of audacity, till finally he touched his finger to a brass lampstand, stared at the dustless fingertip, and whistled softly.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Dorcas, said, seeing Volmar about to chide. ‘Let him touch what he likes. He can look at those books—there’s some Pushkin in French—or he can play the piano or go stroll on the terrace.’

  Volmar translated Dorcas’ offer. The Russian smiled with a naïveté that could have projected to the top of the Metropolitan Opera House.