No Ballet Shoes In Syria

by Catherine Bruton

  “And these are for you.” Miss Helena held in her hands a pair of ballet shoes. Clean pink leather, unworn, elastics carefully sewn in place.

  Aya held Miss Helena’s eye for a second, then stretched out her scarred leg, seeing the livid white lines reflected in the mirror, telling tales that she would have preferred to keep hidden.

  “OK,” said Miss Sylvie, as Aya pulled the new shoes on to her feet. “Let us begin.”

  Aleppo, Syria

  There had been a lot of bombs in Aleppo after that first bombardment. By Aya’s ninth birthday the rebels and the government were locked in a constant battle, fighting for control of the city. The government used jets and helicopters to strike the rebel-held eastern quarter where Aya and her family lived, while the insurgents shelled the government stronghold in the western half of the city. And then the Russians started bombing them too. At some point Islamic State joined the war; Aya wasn’t sure whose side they were on. Sometimes American jets flew over. Dad tried to explain it all to her – whose side everyone was on – but it was too complicated to understand.

  Her friend Samia reckoned she could tell the difference between a government bomb and a Russian one just from the sound of the explosion – but Samia said lots of things, especially since her brother Rami had been arrested. She reckoned she was going to be the first female Syrian astronaut in space – and that her hamster contained the spirit of Elvis Presley – and that she was going to mount a covert rescue operation to spring Rami from wherever he was being held. So who knew with Samia!

  Mumma was pregnant with Moosa by then. If she hadn’t been, they would have left the city sooner. Then Aya wouldn’t have been playing out in the street that day and everything would have been different.

  Samia was there. And Kimi had brought her little sister, Ifima, who had just started in the baby ballet class at Madam Belova’s. The little girl sat on the pavement, playing with a new Barbie doll while the older kids fought over the ball in the dust. It was the usually quiet Kimi who had bet the boys that the girls could beat them at football – only it turned out they were better at pirouettes than penalties!

  Aya was about to take a shot on goal when the bombardment happened. Kimi and Samia were shouting encouragement. And then their voices were blown up in a fury of noise.

  She remembered being thrown to the ground and feeling rubble raining down like snow. She remembered the sound that felt as if it would burst her eardrums. She remembered the pain.

  Then nothing. Suddenly nothing.

  When she looked up, the neighbourhood kids looked like pale white ghosts, walking through a fog of dust. She could hear screaming and shouting. And her leg didn’t seem to work any more. It was covered in white dust and red blood. She couldn’t feel anything.

  Then she saw.

  Another piece of shrapnel had hit Kimi’s little sister, Ifima, and killed her instantly. Her Barbie doll fallen in the dust beside her. Kimi was a white ghost crouched beside her, cradling her – her voice a high-pitched wail of anguish. Samia had her arms wrapped round her and both were pale as clouds.

  Miss Helena had said that you should wear your scars with pride. Because they showed you had survived.

  But Aya knew they were also a reminder of those who had not.

  Chapter 14

  “So would it be weird to ask what happened to your leg?” asked Dotty.

  The other girls had left quickly at the end of the class.

  “You were amazing today,” said Grace shyly.

  “Yeah, well done,” added Lilli-Ella with an awkward blush. “Especially, you know with…” She glanced down at Aya’s leg.

  But then Ciara grabbed Lilli-Ella by the arm and whispered something as they headed off down the stairs, Grace and Blue in tow, and suddenly they were all giggling, leaving Aya standing at the top of the stairs. Ciara glanced back with a smirk and then she and the others were gone.

  Dotty and Aya were staying to help with the younger class, and Dotty had insisted on sharing her packed lunch while they waited.

  “I mean, don’t tell me what happened if you don’t want to,” said Dotty, munching on a peanut butter and apple sandwich. “It’s none of my business and I’m basically being nosy, so if I’m putting my giant foot in it or saying the wrong thing just tell me to shut up. Everyone else does – I really don’t mind.”

  “There was a bomb,” Aya said quietly. “I was playing in the street with my friends and it – it went off.”

  “Whoa – was anyone … killed?” Dotty pulled a face. “Or is that weird of me to ask?”

  Aya just nodded, thinking of little Ifima, proud as punch in a powder-blue leotard at her first dance lesson. Dotty’s expression changed.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,” said Dotty. “It’s just – your life makes mine seem really boring. I mean, school – ballet – school – eat – sleep – homework – more ballet.”

  Aya didn’t look at her. “That sounds … nice.”

  “Of course, you’re completely right.” Dotty sighed theatrically. “Compared to what you’ve been through my life is safe, and all that.” But as she said it she sighed again, and bit mournfully into her sandwich.

  They both sat in silence for a bit. The tick of the clock and the humming of the pipes sounded loud and insistent. Dotty shared a packet of raisins and they both sat munching the sweet sticky fruit.

  “So – um, where do you go to school?” Dotty asked eventually. “I mean, I know it’s summer holidays right now, but when term starts…”

  “Nowhere,” said Aya.

  “Seriously? I thought everyone had to go to school.”

  “If we are allowed to stay in the UK, maybe then I can find a school,” said Aya. “And a nursery for Moosa.”

  “That’s your little brother, right?”

  Aya nodded.

  “I’ve always wished I had a sibling,” Dotty said with a grin. “Someone to share the crushing weight of parental expectations!”

  Aya glanced at her curiously. Dotty was smiling, but her expression had none of its usual sparkle. In an instant she lit up again. “So did Miss Helena give you the whole ‘I have always relied on the kindness of strangers thing’?”

  As she said it, Dotty adopted a pose uncannily like Miss Helena: chin up, head tilted, beady eyes flashing, with a slight Eastern European twang in her voice. Then she tottered across the floor, her movements exactly mirroring those of the dance teacher, declaiming, “I came to this country with nothing but the shoes on my feet and the desire to dance.”

  Aya couldn’t help smiling as Dotty flopped back into her own self again. “You know, Miss Helena was a great dancer in her time.” Dotty nodded up to a framed picture on the wall.

  “That’s Miss Helena?” Aya stood up to take a closer look at the faded black-and-white print of a dancer in a gorgeous snowy-white tutu. She was holding an arabesque like a bird in flight.

  “Oh yeah. You must’ve heard of Helena Rosenberg? She danced all over the world.”

  The name was familiar from her ballet books. Aya tipped her head to one side and tried to trace the older woman’s expression in the young dancer’s face.

  “She came to England during the war,” Dotty went on. “Not your war. The one that was like a million years ago. With Hitler and everything.”

  Aya kept staring at the photograph. Miss Helena was an émigré from war – just like her.

  “Yeah, she was a Jewish refugee,” said Dotty. “At least, I think that’s what my mum said.”

  Dotty sighed heavily again – a sigh Aya couldn’t quite figure out. Aya wanted to ask her more – about Miss Helena, about Dotty’s family – but at that moment the first of the little girls came stomping up the stairs and the opportunity was lost.

  Maybe Aya wasn’t the only one with a story to tell.

  Chapter 15

  The rule at the dance school, as Dotty told her, was that parents were to drop off and pick up only. Even the smallest dancers had to put on thei
r own shoes and take care of their own belongings.

  “Miss Helena reckons it makes us self-sufficient,” Dotty explained. “But I think it’s mainly to stop the whole pushy parent ‘dance mums’ thing. Which totally works for me!”

  Dotty grinned before turning to the little ones who were clustering round her – little dancers of five and six, with round tummies and soft limbs in little pink leotards, who gazed at the older girls as if they were prima ballerinas. Aya remembered looking at the big girls like that when she had first started at Madam Belova’s.

  She remembered little Ifima looking at her like that once upon a time too.

  “Who is your friend, Dotty?” asked a tiny girl with small round blue glasses perched on her freckly nose.

  “This is Aya. She’s going to be a helper too, Colette!”

  “Can she dance as nicely as you, Dotty?”

  “Is she as funny as you, Dotty?”

  “Oh, she’s a loads better dancer than me, Ainka!” Dotty laughed. “Just you wait and see!”

  “When are you going to leave us and go to the Royal Northern, Dotty?” This was a little blonde girl with neat French plaits and her knickers sticking out of her leotard.

  “I have to get through the final audition first, remember, Margot?

  Aya glanced curiously at Dotty, who looked at her and shrugged.

  “What’s an audition, Dotty?” asked the first girl, her glasses slipping off her nose as she spoke.

  “It’s like a spelling test or a ballet exam,” said Dotty. “Only much more scary!”

  “But you told us you wanted to be an actress, Dotty,” said Colette with a small frown. “A singing and dancing one!”

  “Yes, I did, didn’t I!” said Dotty, the shadow flittering across her face again. “And maybe if I don’t get in, I still can be. One can but dream!”

  Aya looked at Dotty curiously again, but still said nothing.

  “Are you going to go too, Aya?” This was the little girl Dotty had addressed as Ainka – small with ebony skin and eyes as bright as two marbles. She had slipped her hand into Aya’s and did not let go.

  “No… I’m…”

  “She should,” said Dotty. “She’s so good. She does the most beautiful pirouettes I’ve ever seen.”

  “Is that the spinny-round one?” asked Margot, eyes bright as she looked at Aya. “I wish I could do that!”

  Aya remembered her struggles to acquire the tricky move. Madam Belova telling her to fix her eyes on a spot on the wall, keeping her chin level. “Delay the turn of the head a little,” she said. “Then quickly bring it round in advance of your body. That way you won’t get dizzy. Nice. Hold your shoulders level and your hips square. That’s it! Lovely!” She remembered practising over and over on the roof terrace at home. Fixing her eyes on the minaret of the Maysaloon Mosque as the sun set over the rooftops, feeling the dust under her feet, hearing the sounds of the city – the call to prayer, the traffic far below, the faint tinkle of Mumma’s radio. Spinning, spinning.

  “I couldn’t do it for a long time,” she told the little girls.

  “And you should see her now!” grinned Dotty. “She’s like a Syrian spinning sensation!”

  Miss Helena had a very different style with the younger class. Gentler somehow, while still pushing them to be the best they could be.

  “Tummy buttons to the front, my little ladies,” she said, crouching down to look at their feet as they practised “good toes” and “naughty toes”, straightening their arms, gently pushing in their little tummies.

  She glanced up at Dotty and touched her very lightly as she went past. “Raise your chin just a tiny bit more, Dotty. See how that makes her look even more like a princess if she lifts her chin, girls?”

  Colette had a dreamy expression and her glasses kept slipping off her nose as she danced; Margot looked like a baby meerkat, wobbling in her développements, while little Ainka thudded like a baby elephant on flat feet.

  But Miss Helena treated them all like prima ballerinas.

  “When I was a little girl – a very long, long time ago in a city far, far away from here – I would spend time in the playground or queuing for the shops just standing on one leg, like a – how is it called – a flamingo!” she told them, adopting a flamingo pose that made the little ones giggle.

  “My maminka would say, ‘What are you doing, little one?’ and I would say, ‘Nothing, Maminka!’ but I would keep standing like that, every day. And that is how I get my balance so nice!”

  The little ones stared at her, round-eyed, trying to imagine this old lady as a little girl in a land far away. Aya tried to imagine it too. The old lady … the beautiful dancer in the picture … the long-ago little girl who had grown up in a war-torn country just like Aya herself had. Where did Dotty say she had come from?

  “Then one day, we were not able to go to school, my sister Elsa and I,” said Miss Helena, still holding the retiré position, without the slightest wobble.

  “Why weren’t you able to go to school?” asked Ainka.

  “Oh, some bad men said that we could no longer learn with the other children,” said Miss Helena with a wave of her hand, as though this was not the important part of the story. “But Elsa and I, we did not mind. We spent all that day – and the next day – and many days after that, learning our lessons at home. But instead of doing it sitting on our bottoms, we would do it standing just on the one leg – so!” She extended her foot gracefully into a battement fondu, her arm and her leg arriving in second position together, the whole movement smooth and effortless.

  “What happened then, Miss Helena?” said little Colette.

  “We got very good at standing on one leg!” said Miss Helena with a smile. “But not so good at mathematics!” She laughed and brought her leg down, and her feet snapped sharply back into fifth.

  “Now, let’s tuck those little bottoms in, my angels. We want flamingos, not the ugly ducklings. You too, Aya. And your leg can be a weensy and teensy bit straighter. Nice! Look, now she has legs like pencils. This is what we want.”

  Only little Margot had asked about the scar on Aya’s leg, and then only so she could show her the scabs on her own knees. “Where I felled down in the playground. Did you fall down too, Aya?”

  Aya just nodded and smiled. “Yes. I fell down too.”

  She loved the way the little ones saw her as just another dancer. Not a refugee. A nuisance. A victim. Just a big girl in a leotard who could do a pirouette. She wished the older girls could do the same.

  “Now I’m going to tell you a story,” said Miss Helena, as the little ones gathered round her to learn their new dance. “About a little girl who is carried away on Christmas Eve to the land of the dolls. Do you know that story perhaps?”

  Some of the little ones nodded. Others looked wide-eyed with anticipation. Aya smiled. Her father had taken her to see Ahmad Joudeh dance in The Nutcracker at the Institute for Dramatic Arts in Damascus as part of the dance festival. It was for her sixth birthday. Before any of the fighting had started. When she had only just started ballet herself. She remembered the long, dark drive home, half sleeping, half dreaming of the dancers on the stage. The headlights dancing on the road. Her father’s warm arms carrying her to bed, humming the music. But mostly she remembered the spinning figures on the stage – the way they spun the music into magic, like candyfloss.

  “So this is the moment where the little girl – Clara – is carried away to a new land, far away,” Miss Helena explained. “Listen carefully and see if you can hear her story. It must have been very frightening to be taken far from her home – so?”

  The notes from The Nutcracker started to spill across the room and Aya felt the flutter of butterfly wings in her stomach. The music was the same here as it had been that night so long ago. At the theatre, sitting beside Dad, in a new pink dress, watching the story unfold like magic.

  Ahmad Joudeh, the wonderful dancer who had played the role of the Nutcracker Prince, had later da
nced in the ruins of the bombed Palmyra Theatre before fleeing Syria. She had read somewhere that he now danced in Holland. His story had a happy ending of sorts.

  “Listen for the story,” Miss Helena told the little ones. “You must always try to tell a story as you dance.”

  “How do we tell stories with no words, Miss Helena?” said Ainka.

  “With your fingers, with your toes, with the shapes of your body, with your eyes,” said Miss Helena. “The technique, the steps, the precision – all of that is important, but allowing yourself to feel, telling the story with your dance – this is what matters most of all.”

  Aleppo, Syria

  It was after Aya had recovered from the shrapnel wound – when she had started dancing again – that Dad began making plans to leave Syria.

  Everyone was talking about leaving by then; so many families had already gone. The city where Aya had lived all her life no longer felt safe. They were being shelled all the time. There were roadside bombs and shootings in the streets, the threat of incursions from Isis forces. Madam Belova’s dance studio had been hit and she’d had to move to the basement of the community centre, where they used chairs instead of barres, and where there were no mirrors, sometimes no electricity – just dingy candlelight and a CD player whose batteries ran down, leaving Madam Belova to hum the familiar tunes.

  But still Aya did not want to leave.

  “After the baby is born and Mumma is well enough, then we will go,” Dad told Aya at breakfast one morning after a particularly bad bombing raid.

  “But what about my dancing?” All Aya could think about in those days was ballet. The war, the bombs, none of that seemed as important as dancing – and she couldn’t bear to leave Madam Belova’s. Not when her leg was only just better. She’d already lost so much time.