What Disappears by Barbara Quick

Author:Barbara Quick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Paris

1909

The overture is long, the stage in darkness. Sonya looks down at Baila, not too distracted to notice that her youngest seems especially pretty tonight. They exchange a wide-eyed smile, both excited. The clash of the cymbals makes them start, looking away from each other toward the stage.

Sonya’s eyes can’t work fast enough to process all the movement of the dancers, twenty or so clouds of white tulle wafting through the altogether convincing illusion of a forest. Each fairy sports a pair of tiny wings just beneath the plunging back of the costume whose construction Sonya knows as intimately as the bodies of her children. She opens her eyes wider as she tries to pick out individual faces and features among the swiftly moving, identically costumed dancers balancing on tip-toe, rising and swaying like boughs in the wind.

Although she and Baila are seated in the last row of the orchestra section, Sonya recognizes Pavlova when she floats onstage from the wings, drifting over to her place center stage with the lightness and seeming spontaneity of a butterfly.

All the dancers of the corps de ballet look much the same—moving as if petals from a single flower buffeted by the wind, each sprite’s dark or blonde hair pulled back, encircled by an identical wreath of pink silk roses. They seem equally long-legged and lithe. Zaneta could be any one of them.

How did they move that way, running backwards on the very tips of their toes, as if weightless? Sonya’s eyes light on the male dancer, in a poet’s blouse and sporting long curling hair, dancing with Pavlova and, yes—there is Karsavina!

Both ballerinas seem equally glorious to her in the way they move, conveying volumes without uttering a single sound. They are both, in the story, in love with the poet, hungry to serve as his muse. And no wonder! He moves as if native to an atmosphere different than that breathed by other mortals—as if his veins and arteries were filled with something lighter than air. Sonya saw a helium balloon once, in Saint Petersburg, at a New Year’s Eve celebration. The dancer seems kin to that magical thing. He is somehow able to hover, weightlessly, mid-air. She knows his name is Nijinsky—and that people think he’s some kind of idiot genius. Regardless, a light seems to shine from inside him, glowing in the ghostly dimness of the stage.

Baila grips her hand. “There, Mama!” she points. “There she is! Oh, she looks so much like you!”

Someone shushes her.

Yes, Sonya thinks—that’s her. Zaneta—dancing in the corps, as beautiful and skillful as any of the other ballerinas.

Sonya’s other senses suddenly start working again: she hears the music—so wonderful! Chopin. His compositions were Sonya’s very favorites when Klara and Sonya’s nieces played the piano.

Did Zaneta have music lessons? Does she sing as well as dance? Does she charm everyone at parties with her brilliant conversation? What wealth of experience has Zaneta had that Sonya will forever lack?

She feels a twinge of envy again. Looking down, she sees that Baila is looking at her now, rather than at the dancers.

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