“But take nothing else. The rest of your life? Has to stay right here.”
He saw the world was starting to lighten outside the eastern window, a thin, quavering band of bleached sky. He realized he was dreading the sunrise: it would illuminate just how much his world had changed since yesterday—and how damaged was the little bark that carried his soul, how far it was from the shore, and how menacing were the waves in between. No one, he knew, was ever going to look at him quite the same way again.
Alexandra
The day after my mother died, Vasily appeared at our apartment, this time with bouquets of flowers. And jars of honey for my grandmother. And traditional pomegranate wine. And less traditional but more modern Armenian red wine. And a necklace for me. And a Bible. And, surrounding him like marble columns and carrying all these presents, two hulking Russian dudes in black suits and shaved heads. You know the look. Gangster. Vasily called them his security. I had seen these guys or guys like them around him before. Vasily owned that brandy factory in Yerevan and another one in Volgograd. He was very big deal. Or at least he thought he was very big deal. Looking back, why would a brandy factory executive need security? I thought it was just vanity. I thought he just wanted to feel like even bigger shot than he was. Nope. It was because of his other businesses—mostly businesses involving girls like me—that he wanted thugs all around him. You probably don’t need bashers if all you do is make brandy.
My grandmother and I were both in shock those days. Those weeks. Those months. Neither of us was at our best or thinking straight. Maybe if my mother had not just died, we would have seen through Vasily’s bullshit.
He claimed that he knew people in the Moscow Ballet. He said they were important people. He told my grandmother this in a hushed voice, as if the truth was so great it could only be spoken in whispers. He added that he would tell my dance teacher this, too.
But maybe I would never have seen through his lies. Remember, I was a kid who loved ballerinas. It was just a few years earlier I had been playing with dolls.
…
My dance teacher was named Seta Nazarian and she had the most beautiful curly hair. Her eyes always were smiling. Her heart was big. But she was tough on her dancers, and I think she missed how orderly the world was when it was communist. Sometimes I worry she would have been in difficult position if she and Vasily had ever spoken. Looking back, I’m honestly not sure she believed I was so good it would have been worth a trip to Moscow for me to audition. Maybe she would have thought so. But maybe not. Would she have guessed what Vasily had in mind and protected me? Again, I’ll never know. But I don’t think she would have figured it out. She probably would have decided I was long shot for the company. But I was a good student and a good dancer. I really was the best in her class. I think she would have liked what it said about her if I had wound up in the ballet in Moscow. The old communist inside her would have been proud. So I had to try. I think she would have let me.
But we’ll never know. Maybe I’m just kidding myself.
Vasily said the plan was for me to train for the audition with a special coach he knew in Moscow. I would train for three months before the audition. He promised my grandmother that I would go to school, too. All the girls and boys in the company did. The dancers, he said, were all very good students. Most made it into the company, but the few (and he said it was very small number) who did not become dancers came home with very good educations. He said this was a detail that he knew would have been important to my mother, but he looked at me like this was not something I needed to worry about. His eyes said I would be a dancer for sure. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was setting and the big room that was the only room other than the kitchen and our two bedrooms was getting dark. I remember thinking that moment how much I missed my mother. I had been living alone with Grandmother since my mother had gone to hospital for the last time. My grandmother was sixty-two and had seemed to age many years in the last months of my mother’s life. It wasn’t just that her hair now was the gray of cigarette ash. Her eyes were red because she seemed to begin and end her day with tears, and she seemed always to have a cold. She seemed always to have sores on her arms. I worried that I was a burden, since obviously nurses do not make oligarch kinds of money. Besides, it was almost time for her to retire.
So, going with Vasily and his marble column bodyguards to Russia to become a ballet dancer was no-brainer. It really was. I went.