Orphan, Agent, Prima, Pawn by Elizabeth Kiem

Author:Elizabeth Kiem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult Mystery
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2017-06-13T16:55:00+00:00

Thirteen

Bone music

The morning before our departure for Berlin, I was a bundle of cool, steely nerves. Anxious enough to jump out of my skin, my only defense was an unflappable calm. I moved slowly, underwater. My distress felt oxygen deprived. I yawned massively.

I sat alone in the canteen, forcing myself to eat a hard-boiled egg. I made slow progress, in tiny bites, until I reached the yolk. It was gray. I dropped it on my plate and studied my empty hand. It was shaking. I stared at it until it stopped.

I was about to attend my first class at the Bolshoi. And though there was nothing so predictable as a ballet class—pliés, tendues, frappés, and battements followed by an adagio and a grand allegro—I was still nervous. Because I was taking this class at the Bolshoi, which was to say with the Bolshoi, which was to say with all the dancers of the company traveling to Berlin. Which was to say: I was about to take a class in the company of the prima ballerina assoluta, Galina Ulanova.

The yolk was watching me. I took a gulp of tea and popped the vulgar thing in my mouth. I swallowed it down, hurried upstairs, and threw up. Then I brushed my teeth and got my things together for class.

Outside it was a perfect autumn morning. The hills behind the dormitory had burst into color overnight, a dazzling backdrop for the golden cupolas of an ancient monastery that had been left alone by the bulldozers of the Revolution.

I stepped onto the street, breathed the scent of wet leaves and fungus and fresh bread and gasoline. I whispered, pull yourself together, Sveta, and marched off for the Metro.

On the escalator I stood on the right-hand side, letting the tardy students pummel past me into the depths of the station. When I reached the bottom, I felt: waves of pain, memories of a physical trauma. Alarmed, I turned to the guard box. Of course my mother wasn’t there. She was in a hospital on the other side of the river. But the panic was heavy. And it was coming from the Metro worker. She was, an Asian woman—a Kazakh or a Buryat or some other Sovietized tribe from the east. She was leaning into the booth’s small microphone, shouting at someone midway up the escalator. Her voice was doing battle with the piped-in music, and I saw her urgency escalate with the volume of the symphony. Was it Tchaikovsky? I didn’t know, but I knew that I was in the middle of the Kazakh Metro-watcher’s childhood memory: the cows bottlenecking the gate of the corral, the stampede, her father injured as she looked on, helpless.

I turned away and the vision passed.

Stay away, I begged. Just for the next three hours, no visions or memories or evidence of that talent of mine that has nothing to do with ballet.

I needed to focus on my own body. My own mind.

Teatralnaya was only four stops down the line. I came out onto the square and stood before the Bolshoi Theatre.

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