Vasily’s assistant and I boarded the plane together. His name was Andrei, which is very common Russian name, and he had been with me since picking me up at my home in a black stretch limousine. (He called it a “stretchie.” Looking back, how innocent does a world seem where grown men use words like rollie and stretchie?) We sat in the very back of the car, but in the very front of the airplane. I only saw the face of our stretchie’s driver when he took our rollies and put them in the trunk, and when he opened the back doors for us. In the car, I focused on the refrigerator built into the seat, which was no less glamorous to me because it was empty, and the side or the back of Andrei’s massive neck as he looked at the streets and casinos and the clubs with the strippers—neon versions of naked women over their entrances—on the way to the Yerevan airport.
Andrei was not a big talker. But he was a big smoker. You can’t smoke inside the airport or on an Aeroflot jet, which he understood going in, but he was still not happy about it. He kept taking his Jackpot Golds out of his black suit pocket and fingering the box like it was an actual gold brick. Opening and closing the cardboard lid. He was thirty years old, with a shaved head and no mustache or beard. His shoulders seemed the size of a couch, his neck a pillar at the temple at Garni. He could barely fit into his airplane seat and complained lots. But I loved my seat. I had a window. I tilted the seat back almost like chair in my dentist’s office.
I figured I shouldn’t ask Andrei too many questions: this was a gift, after all, and you do not look a gift horse in the mouth. (I first heard that expression before going down on an American telecommunications executive in his hotel room in Moscow. He had expected a blonde, which I am not, and he was disappointed. I made sure he got over it. At the time, however, and for many months afterward, I believed the expression was this: you do not look a gift in the mouth because it will make you hoarse. I believed the expression was some old superstition about being grateful for all gifts. Speak bad of them, and maybe you’d lose your voice.) Besides, Andrei worked for a wealthy brandy factory president, so I figured he was important, too. Finally he fell asleep on the plane. I stayed awake all the way to Moscow, listening to the sounds of the engines and enjoying the colas and apple juice that the flight attendants kept bringing me. I read the book and the magazine I had carried with me. I watched other people watching movies on their computers or their tablets. This was the most glamorous thing I had ever done, except dance. (Dancing—real dancing on a real stage, not teasing men in my lingerie—will always be the most glamorous thing I ever did.) I felt like royalty.
Some girls asked me later why I was not suspicious. They wanted to know why I thought Vasily was spending all this money on me: airplane tickets, the chance to study dance in Moscow, a place to stay. One girl said I must have been a mountain-sized dope not to have known that something was up. Maybe. But I just thought Vasily was doing it for my mother. I thought he cared about her because she had been his secretary for so many years—and that meant he cared about me. I thought this was my break, my future.
I believed that. Really I did.
…
What did my dance teacher think? Even though her name was Seta, we always called her Madame as students. I will never know what she thought because she wasn’t at the studio when I went to share with her my good news and say good-bye. She had been told by some government official that there was a permit issue with her studio space—which meant that someone wanted a bribe—and she was trying to straighten out the problem with the bureaucrat at his office. Andrei and one more of Vasily’s bodyguards brought me there to tell her about my audition. But in Madame’s place at the studio was an assistant named Maria, who was kind of a dull knife. Still, she was happy for me. She was teaching one of the classes of little girls. She thought this was all very exciting and—because she always seemed to say the first thing that came into her head—told me how surprised she was that I was getting this opportunity and not Nayiri. She implied that Nayiri was a better dancer. (Nayiri was an excellent dancer, but I was better. As I said, I was the best in the class.) The bodyguards explained that Vasily wanted to do my mother a favor. They did not say, which is what I would have liked them to have said, that Vasily had seen me dance and I had earned this honor. But the truth was that Vasily had never, ever seen me dance, which—in front of Maria—made me uncomfortable. I wanted to say something to defend myself, but there really wasn’t anything I could say. I thought I looked nervous that moment in the long wall of studio mirrors. It felt odd to be there in pants instead of my leotard. Still, Maria wished me good luck and said that she would clap for me someday when I was on the stage at the opera house.
But it was disappointing for me that Madame was not there. I remember when I told my grandmother that she was gone my voice had broken—which I hadn’t expected when I had opened my mouth.
Later I would figure something out: Madame was not at the studio because Vasily did not want her at the studio. The guy had his grubby hands in everything. Everything! He had made sure that Madame was summoned to the government building when I was supposed to be at the studio to say good-bye. Madame knew way more about ballet and my prospects than Maria: she might have tried to stop me from going, even if it would have meant breaking the news to me that I was no Velvet Bird.
But you never know. How do you dim the light of promise? How do you wake someone from such a beautiful dream? How do you break a teenage girl’s heart?