A Feather on the Breath of God

by Sigrid Nunez

  But I am always happy in a nice house. I am in awe of those who know how to make things homey. Comfortable chairs in rooms with sun, flowers in a vase, clean sheets, home cooking—no one could be more appreciative of such comforts than 1.

  The trouble I have traveling goes beyond the shyness and vulnerability felt by most people when taken out of their familiar world. What I feel is something closer to bereavement. This feeling is associated with the memory of two fictional scenes that have haunted me since childhood, one from a book, the other from a movie. Which book, which movie, I cannot now say, but both scenes are set somewhere in Europe, in train stations, during wartime.

  In the scene from the book, a man puts a little girl—his daughter——on a train. He is sending her off to safety somewhere. Father and daughter wave to each other as the train leaves the station. The man watches the train until it is out of sight: “And in his heart he knew that he would never see her again.”

  In the movie, which I saw on television, a man is seeing a woman off He is wearing a soldier’s uniform and he is on crutches—he has only one leg. The man and the woman wave to each other as the train leaves the station. As the train picks up speed, the man hobbles along the platform, faster and faster, until he stumbles and falls.

  Since that trip to Germany I have been back to Europe, but not to Germany. I have never been to China.

  So not everyone lives as if a sword were hanging over his or her head! The discovery came with growing up, with going out into the world and meeting people to whom no harm had ever come and who lived, to my endless astonishment, as if no harm would ever come. I didn’t know what to make of such types (I am thinking now mainly of people I met once I got to college). They seemed to me to be lacking something, which I often mistakenly thought was intelligence. Many of them came from reasonably happy, prosperous families and from a kind of order that my mother, for all her passion for order, could never achieve. Over my childhood hangs the memory of perpetual violence: quarrels, fits, punishments. Threats and curses rang through those years. It was imperative to escape.

  Once, struck by a slamming door, I lost consciousness briefly, and when I came to I saw something I was sure I hadn’t seen before: the face of maternal anxiety. In that moment I remember surprise and joy at this undeniable proof that she cared.

  Long after that first day of kindergarten, I would still think about it. I never could figure out how my mother managed to disappear so fast when my head was turned. It was as if she had vanished into thin air.

  Fear of impurities, love of obedience, preference of animals to men. Like my father, my mother also seemed at times bent on conforming to stereotype. She got a dog, a Doberman pinscher, and she named him Woden.

  It was on one of her visits back to Germany that she learned that Rudolf, who would have turned sixty that year, had died of a heart attack. She reported this months later, in passing, with a simple shake of her head. It was no big thing to her.

  When my mother and my father appeared together in public, which was very seldom, people stared.

  No wedding photographs in the family albums.

  But this: from the same box that contained the picture of my grandmother’s cousin Albrecht, a picture of my parents, taken just before they left Germany for America. A candid shot, catching both of them with their mouths open. They have linked arms and they are leaning into each other, as if for support—so hard are they laughing. Arm in arm, laughing. No, I would never have imagined my parents like that. But even more incredible: One of my sisters insists that she remembers a time when she came upon them kissing and kissing. (Of course one’s memories of one’s early life are not reliable. It is possible that I have got innumerable things wrong. It is not impossible that one day I will have to write my parents’ story all over again.)

  That sister would in time find herself trying to persuade my mother to get a divorce. The marriage had been a mistake—who could deny it? No one was happy—why let it go on? My sister believed that my mother owed herself another chance; it was not too late for her to find happiness with someone else. My mother said that even though she wanted to she could not leave my father; she said her conscience would always bother her if she did. As for someone else, again: “One husband was enough!”

  Secretly, I imagined that she had lovers.

  She could laugh at herself. She often did laugh at herself—sometimes even through tears. Wiping her face with the back of her hand, crying, calling herself a fool, laughing, making jokes about her own stupidity.

  One wants a way of looking back without anger or bitterness or shame.

  Resemblances between her face and mine became more obvious with the years. I have her voice and her handwriting.

  Sometimes, when I am tired, say, or upset, or drunk, I may start to speak with a slight accent. My first year in college an English professor asked, “Why does your writing read like something translated from the European?”

  I don’t believe there is much Chang in me.

  That first day of kindergarten, after she vanished, I did not go through the door that my mother had pointed out to me. I just stood there in the hall, breathless, trembling, staring at the door, until at last it opened and a pretty young black woman who would find a place in my heart forever as Miss Lord appeared. Smiling, bending forward from the waist, holding out both hands to me.

  Now that I recall, in those dreams, it was always a woman or a child needing to be rescued, never a man.

  There are times when I seem to remember my mother as though she were a landscape rather than a person. Those blue eyes filled the entire sky of my childhood.

  I think I know what Heimweh means.

  It was Nietzsche’s idea that when one has not had a good father one must create one. But of course he was thinking only about men.

  Time and again I discover that I have not completely let go of the notion that salvation will come to me in the form of a man.

  Once, when I was driving with my mother, another car skidded and came hurtling toward us, missing us by a hair. At the moment when it looked as if we would die, she said, “Mama.”

  What is love? In yoga, there is an exercise in which you close your eyes and try to imagine a bright white shining light, then to think of someone and to send that light to him or her and imagine it pouring down, surrounding and protecting that person. I have never been able to do this exercise without my eyes filling with tears.

  One wants a way of looking back without anger or bitterness or shame. One wants to be able to tell everything without blaming or apologizing.

  Message on my answering machine: Mom fainted again today. Please call.

  Freud says the most important event in a man’s life is the death of his father.

  Oh, Mother.

  PART THREE

  A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD

  The dream of being a ballerina begins with the dream of being beautiful.

  It wasn’t my mother who decided I should take lessons. I made that decision myself, swept away not by any performance but by a series of photographs in Look magazine. I was almost twelve then. Much time would be wasted later wondering what my life might have been had I come upon those photographs sooner.

  I have not been inside a ballet studio for many years. Going back, I am led by that most powerful organ of memory, the nose. Sweat, rosin, and Jean Naté, the freshener many dancers used to splash on after class. The sweat-soaked wooden floors had their own pungent odor. The beloved reek of the studio. For me, a holy smell, signifying work, sacrifice, and ardor. (I have been in classes full of people sweating hard at aerobics, but the sweat of ballet must be different; it is not the same smell at all.) It was in the studio that I learned for the first time that some people work out of love. Dancers were paid pennies in those days, but you never heard anyone complain; you never heard the word money at all.

  I had never met anyone who had taken ballet and I didn’t know what to expect. Because of my age I was placed in a class not wit
h raw beginners but with girls who had been studying for about a year. I was told to watch one particular tall blond girl and to follow her; if I was “clever” I’d be allowed to stay. That girl was a natural who later became a principal dancer of the company. Years after my feet had stopped, my heart was still following her.

  Our teacher was a Kirovian fury. Down the years I can hear her. That voice: If you could have held it in your hand, you could have cut glass with it. Oh, Madame could cut. I don’t think she had more than fifty words of English, but it was enough. To drive home a point she would turn in her toes, stick out her rear, and loll her tongue. “Like this you are looking. Yes! Is you. Pretty, eh?”

  The accent, the cuttingness, the mimicry: Whom did she remind me of? But she was old enough to be my grandmother.

  That first day, I gripped the barre to keep from fainting with fear. But I went home from that class on air. Everything about the world of ballet responds to the young girl looking to escape real life. An aura of other-worldliness about dancers like that of nuns. Those who are drawn to ballet are looking for order and discipline. The struggling ballerina believes in perfection. And to see a fine dancer execute a pure arabesque is to believe that the body, at least, is capable of perfection.

  Balance, symmetry, motion, shape—in a word: art—it was all there, that first day in the studio. The classic positions of ballet seemed to me as beautiful as anything in nature. Not that I had seen much of nature. Up to then, I had not seen much of anything outside the projects. But one thing I could say for sure about ballet: It was at the opposite end of the world from the projects.

  Black leotard, pink tights, pink shoes—no other clothing allowed. Ribbons worn round the ankles, knees, or waist must also be pink. Hair must be kept long and worn up for class. Hairpins must hold. (Pretty but unwelcome sight: the whirling dancer’s hair flying out from her head.) No lateness, no talking, no sitting, no leaning, no slouching, no gum-chewing. If your feet hurt, if you were exhausted, you were unwise to show it. I loved it all—the rules, the rituals, the intolerance of any slackness or leniency. Authoritarianism was, of course, in keeping with my upbringing; but now all the rules had a purpose. Ballet meant finally being taken seriously; meant being allowed to take yourself seriously. It gave me back some of the dignity that I felt was constantly being undermined elsewhere in my life. The tough public schools I went to were famous for discipline problems. In ballet class no one was ever disobedient or disrespectful. At the end of every class came the reverence: Each girl made a curtsy to the teacher. This custom struck me as weird and even a little ridiculous the first time I saw it, but I came to cherish it as I did everything else about ballet.

  In class, everything was straightforward. As usual my mother was right. There was only one way to do anything, and that way was never easy. There were these steps; you were told which ones to do and how and when, and you did them. Everything was as clear and as inflexible as glass. In spite of the pain and the tedium (“Repetition,” say the Russians, “is the mother of learning,” and class meant repeating the same exercises until it hurt to do them), I was never bored. I might be disappointed in myself, in my own lack of talent or progress, but ballet itself could not possibly disappoint.

  Work as hard as you can. Make it beautiful. How can you argue with rules as pure and as simple as that?

  I once read an interview with a musician who said he considered himself one of the luckiest men alive. “Imagine that it’s your job to play Mozart!” I never met a dancer who didn’t feel that dancing was its own reward. Nothing else in my life would ever live up to it.

  I don’t believe there was a single day that I did not look forward to class. Changing my clothes in the cramped, shabby dressing room (it may be different now, but back then the study of that most gorgeous of arts apparently could be undertaken only in drafty old buildings, amid bad plumbing and peeling walls), I would suffer the needles of anxiety: Every class was like a little performance. But once at the barre, with the first plié, everything fell into place. For the next hour and a half I would know who I was and what I was doing and why, and that was not at all the way I felt most of the time. I would be fully present, as I rarely was outside of class. It was a new and empowering feeling. On good days there were moments when I felt as if I were dancing in a shaft of light.

  But above all else, ballet meant escape. Instead of going home after school, I could go to class. In class, concentrating on my tendus, I could forget all about my hopeless parents. And there was the excitement of traveling into the city, which I loved, and which I promised myself would one day be my permanent home (about this, at least, I would turn out to be right). Now, of course, I can say precisely what it was that was happening to me: I had discovered the miraculous possibility that art holds out to us: to be a part of the world and to be removed from the world at the same time.

  Commuting into the city on my own made me feel grown-up and important, and I was sharply aware that my carriage, my turned-out walk, and my pinned-up hair attracted attention. “Are you a dancer?” To my joy, people would ask me that. Once, at a Swan Lake matinee, a woman sitting in the row behind me asked for my autograph, “just in case you make it.” I would never have admitted how much this pleased me, for we students disdained, or thought we were supposed to disdain, those drooling outsiders, balletomanes. I think in fact we were afraid of them. Balletomanes tend to be critical, their hates are as strong as their loves, and at intermission, listen: You’re as likely to hear them tearing a dancer down as praising her. (“God, Giselle must be getting her period tonight.”) It was hard to hear people who had never danced (and who never would, and who never ever could) criticize any dancer’s performance. In other ways too, balletomanes struck us as perverse. That unmistakable whiff of lust you got off them. In those days I would not allow that there was any erotic aspect to ballet, and I was offended whenever I heard anyone use the word sexy to describe it. (Even today I can’t help cringing when I see sexy in a ballet review.) I knew, of course, that there was a world of men and women out there who were turned on by dancers. But to my mind ballerinas were chaste; it was gross to pant after them.

  Of course, most people I knew in those days were neither turned on nor turned off by ballet. Dance had not yet become a popular spectacle, and although everyone knew a little girl or two who’d gone to the local dance school, it was not common for a teenager to be studying ballet. Only dancers and athletes and a few oddballs exercised passionately. If you went to Capezio, all the shoppers you saw there would be dancers. Ordinary people had no use for leotards and tights. Back then, I don’t think any dancer dressing for class would have believed that one day her leg warmers would be the latest thing in street clothes, worn by women of every size and shape.

  That was another important thing about ballet: It was a woman’s world. A world where women not only outnumbered but bested the men. It was not just a question of feminine grace and flexibility. Women were better dancers period. And it was not just for adagio. Women could execute smaller movements faster and with greater precision than men too. The only thing men could do better than women was jump a little higher. So here was that rare thing: reason to be grateful to have been born female. It seemed to me that male dancers must often have wished they had been born female, though I never heard any of them say this. But if ballet dancing was your passion, how could it be otherwise? Men ran the school, men ran the company, men did the choreography—men called the shots, as they always do. But who cared? Men didn’t get to go on point. And what is ballet without point?

  It took me almost two hours to get home from dance class. The only time I had to do my homework was on the subway and bus. On weekdays, I was usually home twelve hours after I had left the house in the morning. (Saturday was the best day of the week, because I could take two or three classes. Sunday—no classes—was a waste; I was always miserable on Sundays.) I would have a quick, wordless meal with my father, wash out one of my only two pairs of tights, and go to
bed. During this time I felt a great distance from my family, even more so than I would when I went away to college. I withdrew from school life as well. My grades went down, but I didn’t care. I wished I could go to Professional Children’s School, like some of my ballet classmates.

  “If I had a dime for every time you get on that scale …” (My mother.)

  We owe the greatest ballets ever made to one man’s obsession with Woman. For him, the ballerina was ultrawoman, the feminine ideal. That her body should be one long curveless line, fleshless, all muscle and bone—a body, let it be said, more boy than woman—was one of the crazy and crazy-making paradoxes of ballet.

  “You have to get to the point where the very thought of eating makes you gag a little.” It is the tall blond star of our class who is speaking. “You can train yourself, you can talk yourself into it,” she says, patting the sunken space under her ribs.