No Ballet Shoes In Syria

by Catherine Bruton

  The waves had been choppy when they set off, heaving the tiny boat up and down on the swell so that Aya had thought she might be sick. But Dad had held her tight and told her a story – of a princess who went on a quest to a magical land, to escape from the dragon that had engulfed her home.

  “She danced her way across the waves,” he told her. “She danced over the mountains. Through the valleys. She danced till her slippers were rags…”

  The winds picked up when they were out on open water. And then the boat seemed like a cat’s plaything, being tossed about on the swell. People threw up. Aya recalled the sharp tang of vomit, the sting of sea salt in her eyes, Moosa’s low terrified whimpers.

  The man at the helm was yelling but Aya was too cold, too wet to hear what he was saying. She was shivering so hard and Dad was holding her so tight that her limbs hurt.

  And then someone was in the water and there was screaming and people frantically trying to pull them back in. Then another wave hit and she was ripped from Dad’s arms. There was blackness and confusion and she was in the water, gasping, rasping for breath calling out, “Dad! Dad!”

  A flash of a blue life jacket and she could see Mumma but the boat was upturned and gone.

  And there was no sign of Dad anywhere.

  Chapter 31

  “Aya! Aya! Are you OK?”

  She didn’t know how long she’d been standing there, staring. Somehow she was by the edge of the pool, outside, hot sun beating down on her. Blue tiling rippling in front of her eyes. Her body had gone into convulsive shivers. Dotty was wrapping a towel round her.

  “Come on. Sit down. You’re white as a sheet. Are you OK?”

  Dotty was helping her to a sunlounger. “You’re freezing cold,” said Dotty. “What is it?”

  “The water…” Aya managed to say. “The sea…”

  Dotty sat down beside her. Though the hot sun was beating down, Aya shivered in the towel. Both girls sat staring at the turquoise-blue tiles, the patterns of the sun on the water, as Aya tried to find words.

  “Were you on one of those boats? Like on the news. The migrant boats? My dad told me about them.”

  Aya nodded. “There was a storm … but my dad … He was in the water. We don’t know…”

  That was all she managed but Dotty seemed to understand. Both girls sat in silence for a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” said Dotty eventually. “I had no idea… I should have realised… I should have thought…”

  Aya remembered the girl she had once been – dancing at Madam Belova’s, walking hand in hand with Samia to school, even the girl who had watched the bombs fall over her home city. That girl would not have known of a world in which you leave your father out in the dark sea and never see him again. She would not have believed it possible.

  “I mean, maybe your dad made it,” said Dotty. “Maybe he got washed up somewhere. Or picked up by a boat, or…”

  Dotty didn’t finish. Aya shivered again. Sometimes the hope hurt so much it was worse than the grief. “Maybe,” she said quickly.

  “I read somewhere about the Red Cross and Amnesty – tracing missing people…” Dotty went on. “Maybe they can find him!”

  “Maybe,” Aya said again.

  “All this stuff,” Dotty said. “I’m sorry I haven’t really got it before now.”

  Aya stared down at the slats on the wooden sunlounger, casting striped patterns on the tiling. “How could you?”

  “But if you ever want to talk about it,” said Dotty. “I mean, I know it’s not easy to get a word in edgeways with me but, you know, I do know how to shut up – if I try really, really hard.”

  “It is hard to talk,” said Aya, looking down at her bare feet on the slatted blue tiles. “Hard even to think some things.”

  “I get it,” said Dotty. “I mean, I’m trying to, if that counts for anything.”

  “Thank you,” said Aya. “Yes. It does.”

  That was when Bronte Buchanan reappeared. Wearing a crumpled old T-shirt over dusty leggings and a tattered pair of ballet shoes, she looked quite different to the elegant, aloof figure Aya had become used to seeing. She held a telephone in her hand. And she was smiling.

  “Aya,” she said. “That was Miss Helena on the phone. She has found you a home!”

  Chapter 32

  Miss Helena and Miss Sylvie lived in a large Victorian villa. It was just a short walk from the community centre but felt as if it was in a different world. A world of tree-lined avenues, bay windows, glass extensions and double garages. Not that their house seemed to have been modernised – in fact, it didn’t look as if it had been touched in over a hundred years. Red-brick and imposing, with a wildly overgrown garden and little turrets rising up over the grey-slate roof, surrounded by ancient beech trees, it reminded Aya for some reason of the story of the Sleeping Beauty in her forest-covered castle.

  But when Miss Helena opened the door, Aya was met with the sweet smell of honey cake and pot-pourri. The hallway was dark, decorated in old-fashioned floral wallpaper, with a wooden staircase, black-and-white tiling on the floor, and a stained-glass gaslight above the doorway that cast multicolours on to the walls and floor below. The house seemed to be frozen in time, but it had a warm, lived-in feel to it that felt more like home than anywhere Aya had been for months.

  Miss Helena, it turned out, had offered to take them in as soon as she met Aya. But there had been paperwork, and safeguarding measures, and more paperwork. Sally had been making phone calls for days to try to fast-track it. But these things took time. Only now here they were. Aya was still trying to take it all in. To be offered a home. A place to stay … by people who still barely knew them.

  “Let me show you to your room,” said Miss Helena to Mumma, who was looking nervous and wary, hovering on the threshold. She took Mumma’s arm and led her gently inside.

  Miss Sylvie turned to Aya. “We thought you might like your own room. I hope that was right?”

  Dotty – who had tagged along – replied for her. “Of course she would!”

  “Thank you,” said Aya again. She had lost count of how many times she had said it that day. The word had started to sound strange and unfamiliar on her own lips.

  “Don’t thank me till you see it,” said Miss Sylvie with a wry smile. “It may not be to your taste!”

  The room Aya was shown to looked as if it had once belonged to a little girl. There was a patchwork counterpane on the bed; wallpaper with roses fading on the walls; an ancient doll sitting on the dresser; a teddy bear with jointed limbs and a curious face staring at her from the bed. There were pictures on the wall too, black and white photos. One featured a medieval-looking bridge, with a castle towering behind it. The other was of a family, stiffly smiling, in clothes from a long-ago era.

  “This was my mother’s room when she was younger,” said Miss Sylvie. “She thought you might like it.”

  Aya just nodded. It was hard to imagine having a bed all to herself. Space to call her own. Beautiful, interesting things to look at.

  “Then I will leave you to settle in,” said Miss Sylvie, who was always much more businesslike than her mother. “Dotty, you can come and help me make some tea.”

  Aya sat down on the bed. She could hear Miss Helena and Mumma laughing in the room next door. It seemed like such a long time since she last heard her mother laugh.

  She looked at the photo of the family on the wall. Her eyes traced the serious faces of the parents, then took in the older girl with long plaits who stood with her arm protectively round a little girl, whose eyes twinkled just like Miss Helena’s.

  Miss Helena never had told her what had happened to her family.

  Chapter 33

  “Maybe there have always been wars – always been refugees.”

  That night, after supper, Miss Helena told them her story. She sat in an old-fashioned armchair with a lace antimacassar on the back of it. Her usually bright eyes were clouded as she spoke, as if she were staring into the di
stance.

  “Before the war my family lived in Prague, in what was then Czechoslovakia,” she said. “We were prosperous. My father owned a store selling leather goods and my mother taught the piano. My sister Elsa and I went to a very nice school.”

  Aya thought of the older girl in the picture, with the serious face and long brown plaits. Elsa.

  “This was the nineteen thirties and there had been much hardship but my family were well off,” Miss Helena went on. Aya translated Miss Helena’s words for her mother, who sat on the sofa with Moosa fast asleep in her lap. She had had a bath and her hair was clean and fluffy. She looked relaxed – tired, but relaxed.

  “My sister Elsa and I attended ballet classes at the local seminary. We dreamed only of being dancers,” Miss Helena said with a smile. “So we did not listen to the news on the radio, of the things that were happening across Europe. Hitler coming to power in Germany – the way that he was treating the Jews.”

  “You were Jewish?” asked Dotty, who was curled up on the sofa next to Aya, having persuaded her mum to let her stay for supper. She hadn’t spoken up till now. Aya wondered if it was the longest she had stayed quiet in her whole life.

  “I didn’t think of myself as religious,” said Miss Helena. “My family celebrated Yom Kippur and Chanukah but my parents were not Orthodox Jews. It was just a way of life. Tradition, I suppose.”

  Miss Sylvie sat in the chair next to her mother, darning the pointes of a pair of ballet shoes, and she looked up only occasionally as Miss Helena spoke. An old grandfather clock in the corner ticked loudly in the background.

  “There were rumours … of the Germans invading Czechoslovakia,” Miss Helena was saying. “My mother started to talk of leaving, trying to get papers to go to England, America, Australia. But my father said the English would never allow Hitler to march into Prague.” She paused. “It turned out he was wrong.”

  As she translated the old lady’s words as best she could, Aya thought how Miss Helena’s story echoed her own. How it echoed so many families’ stories in so many cities in so many different times, told in so many different languages.

  “In March 1939, the Nazis took Prague,” Miss Helena went on. The words were coming quicker now and she didn’t always stop for Aya to translate. “We saw them march across the Charles Bridge. I remember it well – the day Hitler spoke to his troops from the castle as if he were king of all the land.”

  Aya recalled the picture in her room. The bridge, the castle.

  “After the Germans came, then I knew I was a Jew,” Miss Helena said, nodding her head emphatically. “And I knew – young as I was – that it was a dangerous thing to be.”

  Aya stopped translating now and just allowed Miss Helena to speak. There would be time for explanations later. “My father’s business was taken away. My mother was no longer allowed to teach…”

  Her voice cracked and Miss Sylvie reached out and put her hand on her mother’s.

  “We were forced to wear yellow stars. My sister and I could no longer attend our school. Or go to our dance lessons.” She paused, eyes glimmering now in the soft lamplight.

  “There were many arrests, many taken away.” Miss Sylvie spoke now, taking up the story for her mother. “It was no longer safe for my mother’s family to stay.”

  “So you left?” Dotty asked.

  Miss Helena shook her head sadly. “It was too late by then for the whole family. But there was an organisation taking children – the Kindertransport, it was called…”

  Miss Helena’s voice cracked again and her daughter went on while the older woman closed her eyes and listened.

  “Many British families agreed to take in children,” Miss Sylvie explained. “They did not know how long for. Some thought that Hitler would be driven out quickly. Gone by Christmas. Nobody saw what he would actually do.”

  Aya remembered her father and his friends sitting in the kitchen, talking about the war in Syria. Some had said it would burn itself out in a few months. That the president would be toppled by Christmas and peace restored. Nobody had predicted how long it would last. How much would be lost.

  “So you and your sister…?” Aya looked at Miss Helena, whose eyes were open now, and very bright in the lamplight.

  “Just me,” said Miss Helena. The clock ticked on for second after second and nobody spoke.

  “I came here to this house in August 1939,” said Miss Helena eventually, her voice businesslike again. “I was younger than you are now – just six years old. Mr and Mrs Robertson were in their fifties. They had lost their only son to tuberculosis and they said they had room in their hearts for another child.”

  “My mother was very fortunate,” said Miss Sylvie. “Not every child who came had such a warm welcome. She was given a new family, a new start here.”

  Aya wanted to ask about her mother, her father … and Elsa.

  But Miss Helena looked tired and Miss Sylvie smiled and picked up the ballet shoe she had been darning. “My mother and I want you to know that you are welcome to stay as long as you wish.”

  Mumma seemed to understand this last bit. She thanked them with tears in her eyes and Aya translated her mother’s words for Miss Helena and Miss Sylvie, but all the time she was thinking of the little girl who had come here alone, all those years ago, leaving her family behind. The little girl who had slept in the room that was now hers.

  Had she ever seen her parents – her sister – again?

  Chapter 34

  That night Aya lay in the narrow bed, listening to the sound of the rain on the windowpanes. It felt strange to be sleeping alone – without Moosa curled up next to her, his warm little body and snotty kisses and little fingers that curled themselves round hers in the night. In the gloom, Aya stared at the family picture on the wall. There they were – two young girls with their parents, laughing at the camera, the elder sister with her arm round the younger one. It was dated May 1938. A year before the war started.

  A few notes of music trickled through Aya’s mind. She imagined dancing a few steps, linking together movements that seemed to come to her unbidden – something to do with Miss Helena’s story, something of her own.

  She lay like that for a long time, dancing through the notes in her head, watching the shadows from the street lamp and the passing cars make patterns on the curtains. But still she could not sleep. It was hard not to think of Dad. Of the last time she had seen him. And of Mumma and Moosa asleep in the next room. The thoughts seemed to come together like a dance.

  The next morning when Miss Sylvie came to wake her, she found the bed empty. And when she looked in next door, she saw that Aya had tiptoed into her mother’s room and lay curled up with Moosa held tight in her arms.

  Chapter 35

  The temperatures soared over the next week and Aya started, little by little, to feel different – a little lighter, a little less anxious. Living with the two ballet mistresses, growing healthy on the good food they insisted on her eating, dancing every day, spending time at Dotty’s house, practising in her studio or going for long walks in the woods that surrounded the Buchanans’ home, playing with Moosa in the garden under the giant old beech trees… It was nice to be just a big sister. Nice not to feel always responsible for Mumma. To play. To laugh. She still woke up with the yawning ache in her stomach every morning when she thought about Dad, but the pulse of anxiety that had hammered in her head ever since that night in the ocean beat a little quieter, and sometimes – when she was dancing – she could forget about it altogether, just for a short while.

  And that difference started to creep into her dancing. As she worked on her audition dance, she felt a little more able to connect with the objects and open up the feelings they tugged at within her. She couldn’t let it all out – that still felt impossible somehow – but she could start to tell some of the story, some of her fear, some of her homesickness, some of the hopes and dreams. It still wasn’t right, but bits of it felt better somehow.

  “This
dance is starting to be beautiful,” said Miss Helena when Aya showed her what she had been working on. “Sad and lovely and hopeful, all at the same time. And, Dotty, your work is much improved too. There is more compassion in it, more warmth.”

  Dotty beamed. “I found myself thinking about Aya. And how I’m lucky to have both my parents around – even if they are super annoying at times.” She shrugged.

  Dotty had also been working on a plan of her own. She’d been talking to her dad and to Sally and she’d come up with the idea of putting on a gala show to raise money for the refugee centre.

  “Every single kid from the ballet school could perform,” she explained. “And Mum said she’d do a star turn. We’d sell tickets and do a raffle for charity. There’ll be cakes and all that other stuff that always raises loads of money!”

  “This is a wonderful thing!” said Aya.

  “We’ll be raising money for stuff the centre needs – and have great fun at the same time!”

  It wasn’t just ballet she had in mind either. “I thought Mr Abdul could do a tap number. Blue and Grace, you could accompany him – because you do tap, don’t you?” she said, when she was explaining the idea to the other girls.

  Blue and Grace looked at each other a little uncertainly. “Um – yes. I suppose we could.”

  “And Lilli-Ella, I thought you and me could do a bit of a ballroom mash-up with help from Mrs Massoud – maybe with a bit of hip-hop? What do you think?”

  Lilli-Ella grinned a little nervously. “You think that would work?”

  “Yes, and me and Aya are going to teach the little ones a number from Cats, and they can all wear little ears and tails,” Dotty went on excitedly. “And I thought we could all do a ballet piece. And me and Aya and Ciara can do our audition dances. Right, Ciara?”