Snow in May: Stories (15 page)

“I took your adult beginner class last year,” she said. “I liked it a lot, but I had to partner with another girl.” She smiled shyly. Perhaps he could get her on his side.

“Inna’s busy with something more useful. She’s a piano student at the arts college,” the mother said. Asik rolled her eyes.

“A talent like this must be nurtured,” Roman Ivanovich addressed the sister. “We have a duty before the art—”

“Is there money involved, in Moscow?” the mother said. “If she could earn something—”

“At top places. Depending on the type of the competition. In the beginning it would be to cover the entry fees, costumes, plane tickets.” He looked from one girl to the other. “If only I had such talented daughters. I’ll even lower the tuition for Asya. Private lessons—half off. It’s a unique opportunity.”

“She’s on the verge of failing several classes at school,” the mother said. “Instead of shaking her half-naked ass around here like it’s some Africa or Brazil, she should be locked up studying.”

“Are you deaf?” Asik cried out in that wild, harsh falsetto young girls use in desperate moments. Her sister looked down. “He said I have a rare talent, too. It’s not just your precious Inna.”

Over the years, Roman Ivanovich had seen all strains of sibling rivalry. This one, he could already tell, was particularly toxic. The mother favored the older daughter. But Inna seemed too nice to exploit such emotional ammunition, thus withholding from Asik permission to fully throw herself into the rebellion she so craved.

Asik looked at him as if he were about to give away the last ticket to the Ark. He put his hand on her crown—her hair was coarse and sticky, like a cub’s—and ever so slightly she buckled into the eave of his shoulder.

“I promise to study hard, I promise.” Asik spoke only to him. “Honestly. Please take me.”

“Fine, get her off my hands,” the mother said. “One more bad mark at school, and she’ll be too bruised to wear those skimpy dresses. Seriously, Roman Ivanovich, we can’t pay.”

“Deal,” he said, matching her haggling stare. “She’ll attend free of charge.”

Eight minutes later they disappeared into the gates of summer. His headache had gone, too.

*   *   *

All summer Roman Ivanovich swung and turned his stocky but not yet hopeless physique around their small living room. Nata, rosy from working on the vegetable patch, sometimes joined him, testing the steps Asik would have to learn in the fall. Her blue eyes lit up with memories of a life well danced. She could still follow his lead effortlessly, although there was more flesh between them now. Her short, once-sporty figure reminded him of a hen’s: ample bust and backside, drumstick legs. Those small feet that used to excite him.

He didn’t ask for Nata’s help with rumba, which he’d originally dreamed up for Lyuba and Pavlik but had never dared to stage. He feared the routine was too tantalizing for the Soviet standard. Besides, Nata was too heavy for all the lifts and dismounts.

“Are you sure she’s ready for this?” Nata said one pale day, after Roman Ivanovich almost knocked a crystal vase off the shelf while practicing an imaginary lift. “Don’t you think it would be more appropriate for a senior couple?”

She was right. “Asik can handle it,” he said with irritation. Nata knew that her role at the studio ended at costumes and keeping the books.

“I’m glad someone’s finally come along,” she added. “You were beginning to waste away. And she has at least Lyuba’s potential. At least. You’re absolutely right about that.”

*   *   *

Roman Ivanovich steadied himself against the mirror in his office. The first class with Asik in his junior group would begin in fifteen minutes. Time was a brilliant caricaturist, indeed. Over the years, his small gray eyes had become smaller. The bulb of his nose had ripened from overexposure to frost and vodka. His jowls drooped. His hair, once the wheat silk envy of even the girls, had deserted him clump by clump. He forced a smile: at least he still had his shallow dimples.

One of the chess boys barged into the office.

“How many times have I told you to knock before entering?” Roman Ivanovich yelled. Was this one Gleb?

“I just needed you to approve the player matchups.” The boy pulled his thin neck into his shoulders. His trembling arm held out a piece of paper. Roman Ivanovich glanced over the sheet, made some marks, and handed it back.

“Tell everyone to be quiet at the tables.”

The boy slinked out. Roman Ivanovich turned to the corner plastered with photographs of Lyuba and Pavlik in poses or holding up trophies. He made the sign of the cross, then tightened his belt and walked out into the studio.

The girls stood in clusters, twisting their feet on high silver heels. Some boys were observing the chess games. More loud voices came from the boys’ changing room. Someone must’ve brought in the latest comic book or a Game Boy. What were those boys interested in? Certainly not the girls, not yet. The junior girls still belonged to him.

Asik sat on the windowsill, which Roman Ivanovich forbade, banging the expensive satin shoes he’d ordered for her from Moscow against the rusty radiator. Both her short bob and her outfit—a long-sleeved ballet shirt and jeans—violated the studio rules. He wondered whether the junior instructors had really forgotten to drill in the studio regulations.

He clapped three times, and the boys began appearing on the dance floor. Asik jumped down. She was thinner, darker, and at least two centimeters taller than in the spring. The chess section turned to watch.

“Girls, a dress code reminder. Tight skirts no longer than halfway down the thigh,” Roman Ivanovich began in an impartial tone. “Black tights, no leg warmers. I need to see the lines of your body clearly. Hair no shorter than one-third down the upper arm, in a bun or a ponytail. If your other instructors didn’t require it before, fine. These are the rules for the junior group,” he added for Asik’s benefit but didn’t look her way.

“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you about the no-dating policy. No boyfriends or girlfriends, no little love associations. Not the dancers, not the chess players. You will be expelled. Now, I’ll be making some partner switches based on May’s results. This is not up for discussion, so please spare me the whining. Igor,” he addressed Asik’s partner, “you will dance with Olesya.” He was tall enough now.

The ballroom mothers (Olesya’s mother the most involved among them) lobbied fiercely for the few talented tall boys. They invited the boys’ mothers for dinner, bought the boys dance shoes and gifts, and bribed the poorer families. Roman Ivanovich, however, still had the final—often paid for—word in the matchmaking process.

“And Sasha will dance with Asya.”

The room gasped. The boys moved obediently, like chess pieces. Asik looked up at handsome Sasha, then looked down, chewing a smile. Sasha’s main merits were his height, a solid sense of coordination, and a tolerance for being bossed around, which Olesya had exploited with impressive results at the competitions.

“But Roman Ivanovich,” Olesya began, her voice tripping over swells of injustice, “it’s—”

“No discussions. Now, everyone, let’s start with the basic samba walk to remind your lazy butts what it means to dance. And no sitting on the windowsills!”

The children formed a circle. Roman Ivanovich noticed Olesya creeping toward the exit.

“That’ll have to wait till the bathroom break,” he said. He couldn’t stand tears.

He walked to the CD player, nailing his heels into the parquet, and turned on the music. And they were rusty, his little pupils, oh, they were rusty after the summer rains. Sonya, who had once been his pet, seemed to have completely forgotten how to use her feet. Unable to delay it any longer, he found Asik in the bouncing roundelay. Her hips were indescribable—two distinct entities, each containing a delayed-action spring. When the right hip moved, the left hip lingered, teasing, then snapped to catch up. She walked swinging and swaying. For several counts she looked straight ahead, and then she looked at him and smiled.

*   *   *

As the fall term progressed, Roman Ivanovich submerged himself in the Asik project. For a month, she was a dream. She personalized every detail he pointed out on the competition tapes—syncopated click of the knee, degree tilt of the hips, pecking nod versus ladling bow. Even her ribbon lips danced, shaping words the true meaning of which she couldn’t possibly understand, in languages she couldn’t know.

Although she was a perfect china doll in the waltzes, fox-trots, and quicksteps, her hips were too impatient for the standard set. Latin dances were her forte. She danced paso doble like the daughter of Bizet’s proud Carmen, little Carmenochka. A scarlet costume flower she insisted on wearing at practices gleamed against her bluish-black hair. Her samba was pure and easy, as though she’d shaken her backside in Rio de Janeiro’s carnivals since she could walk. Her rumba was transfused with imaginary love and heartbreak. Whenever Nata passed through the studio, she stopped to watch Asik. Sometimes Olesya would run up to Nata and plead to be switched back to her old partner, but Nata only nodded and glanced toward Roman Ivanovich with blind faith.

For a month, he was happy. Everything was justified: the lost income, the unpleasant phone conversations with Olesya’s mother, the gossip he knew was being chewed like cud behind the changing-room curtains and at the dinner tables.

Then, at the beginning of November, Asik became unpredictable and moody, an ungrateful little caterpillar. Some days she switched herself off. Her hip springs creaked. She yelled at Sasha and threw around her sharp-heeled sandals, the satin of which was already filthy from improper care. Sasha endured her moods with a calm that baffled Roman Ivanovich.

He could tell she was making mistakes on purpose. His usual tactic was to roar and spank the applicable backsides. But with her, he held back. During private lessons, he coolly drew loops and turns with her hips, feeling her sharp, small bones slide under his fingers. At group practices, he first ignored her tantrums, then broke down and asked Sasha to step aside. With him, she quickly corrected her errors and danced so tastily one could bite one’s fingers off.

Asik kept breaking studio rules. She’d come in late, walk through the studio in slush-caked boots, slack off during warm-ups, wear baggy sweaters, and go to the bathroom whenever she pleased. He’d had to assign a special chess boy to mop up the street slush after her. Some days he could almost see the other girls bristling in her presence.

More and more Asik was becoming just another rude girl of twelve, with stooped shoulders and a messy ponytail, angry at the cold wind for chapping her lips and stripping her summer tan. He’d always considered that handling cranky girls was a part of his profession. But with her, he was stumped. To punish her was to admit he’d made a mistake.

*   *   *

“You should be careful with that Nemirovskaya girl, Roma,” Nata said to him one evening at the end of November. With less than a month to go until the winter competition, she was buried under a mountain of fluorescent satin and tulle, sewing new dresses for the rich girls and tailoring rentals for the others. “I know she’s not just another one of your dancey girls. But you’re alienating everyone else, and they pay. We’ve got plenty of couples who work hard, and who may yet hatch when they move up.”

Stupid, naive, comfortable Nata. The senior girls were lost to him. Those who stood a chance of scholarships to universities in Moscow or St. Petersburg studied maniacally. The ones stuck in Magadan worked their assets on the local potato oligarchs in hopes of securing a warm, well-fed life.

“I know what I’m doing, Nata.”

Behind gold-rimmed sewing glasses, her blue eyes were moist and vulnerable. In ten years or less she could’ve been a grandmother, if they had had any children. He’d never liked the haircut she’d settled into years ago, which concealed the lovely line of her nape. Or maybe it wasn’t lovely anymore. Maybe now it was loose and wattley like her neck.

Their relationship began just as their ballroom careers got serious, when they were partnered as teenagers. On the dance floor, it was crucial that he led and she followed. She seemed content to follow him outside the studio, too. He often told himself that they were one of those couples who understood each other implicitly. But, as time went on, he became afraid to ask whether she was happy. He, unlike her, applied his love selectively. It wasn’t that he loved one thing about her and didn’t quite love another. That was natural enough. Rather, he stopped loving her entirely when a hint of coarse independence manifested itself: when she questioned him, when she told him he was wrong. This unlove persisted until the episode lived itself out and sedimented in memory. Only then, like a harbor cleared of the night’s fog, the qualities that made his life bearable, her comfortable qualities, became visible again, and he slid back into his way of appreciation. Because—who was he kidding—it was not love, it was not love.

“Do as you know, Roma,” Nata said and went back to her sewing.

He began to pace around the living room.

“We need eggs,” she said. And within minutes he was out the door, embarrassed and thankful for her knowledge of him.

On his way back from the grocery store he lingered in a small park with a worn-out bust of Berzin, the first director of the Dalstroy trust and forced-labor camps in Kolyma. Naked trees stuck out of the tall banks of hardened snow. Theatrically-fat snowflakes streamed from the black sky. It was quiet. The cold air smelled of burning garbage—his childhood’s scent of freedom and adventure, when he and his gang of ruffians would run through courtyards and set trash containers on fire to the grief of hungry seagulls. Before his mother bound his feet in dance shoes and shackled him to a girl.

He had a sudden craving for fried eggs with a particular Polish brand of cured ham, sold at a private shop in the town’s center. It was his one evening off work; he figured he deserved a small indulgence.

He walked up Lenin Street. Its preholiday luminescence was even more radiant this year, more drunkenly optimistic. White lights lay tangled in trees. A shimmering canopy of pink garlands hung across the roadway. Up ahead, the dystrophic A of the TV tower, the Eiffel Tower’s long-lost illegitimate child, shyly illumed its red and white stripes. The town clock, lit up in green, read half past eight. By now the junior group would be halfway through their weekly ballet class.