I nursed that hope as I disembarked at Bois du Vincennes and struck out across the park, my hip aching. I walked and walked, wending my way past the ghostly serpentine to the skeleton of the Ferris wheel. Half its yellow seats had been stripped away and chestnut trees twined around its frame. I wrapped my hand around the metal. It chilled my hand through my glove.
“I know you’re here,” I shouted. “Where are you?”
On the other side of the Ferris wheel, light fluttered. Velvet whispered.
I don’t know if you’ve ever stood outside under a canopy of trees searching the night around you for someone who you once loved. I don’t know if you stared until the planes of the night resolved into a person, or if you gave up and returned to your empty house. But that night, as I stared, the shadows beneath the ripped yellow seat became a girl. Wings stuck jagged out of her back and their silvery glow illuminated a black velvet cape, a line of moles on a gaunt cheekbone.
I faced her, from the other side of the Ferris wheel. I whispered her name, her real name: Juliette.
“Andrei’s sick,” I said. “He’s sick and dying, and if you ever cared about him at all, you’ll come with me now to Rue Marseilles and help him.”
The lights from her wings shifted over the packed dirt between us.
Then she turned and ran.
I wobbled beneath the ruined Ferris wheel. I had seen her. I had told her. I had dreamed of this moment for ten years. She knew everything now.
And she had run away. Victoire had been right. All these years, she had stayed away because she hated us.
The worst had happened, I thought, and I walked home hours later with a very different poison spreading through me, a black cloud of the cold disappointment that comes from believing in someone, and having them let you down.
But the worst had not happened yet, because by the time I returned to Rue Marseilles, as you might have already guessed, Andrei was dead.
* * *
I sat by the window in my shabby black dress after the public cemetery funeral. I tried to eat a chestnut that I had purchased from a vendor but it tasted ashy, rotten.
Do you know what it is to attend your brother’s funeral alone? To read his obituary detailing his role in a cruel experiment that ruined so many lives? To sit by the window knowing you will never again hear him—or anyone—sing the cow told the chicken, you’ll never fly.
At first, I thought she was an apparition on the street beneath my window. I had imagined the moment when she would appear there so many times, so many different ways, that when she walked down Rue Marseilles in her black velvet cape, her wings glowing behind her, milkmen and ladies alike shrinking away from her…I turned away from the window and bent to sort the stack of books on the floor.
But then the front door jiggled, and she stepped into the flat.
I stood up slowly, clutching a stack of books to my chest.
Crow's feet creased the space around her eyes. Her hips had widened and her face had resolved into something older, harder. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent. The moles looked angry and black, and thin hairs grew out of each of them.
“An old man let me in.” Her voice had grown thicker and throatier, too. “I suppose Monsieur Jacques doesn’t live here anymore?”
I didn’t speak.
At last she said, “It’s good to see you, Katie.”
* * *
My cup of coffee shook in my hands; hers stayed untouched on the wooden folding table between us.
“You’ve been in the papers,” she said.
“We were,” I replied. “But that was years ago.” What do you say to someone when so much time has passed, so many years filled with so much triumph and pain? I told her that, and she twisted a smile.
“I feel the same.”
“So why? Why did you leave when you did? And Andrei…if you had come back earlier, he…” I think I truly did despise her in that moment, just as I despised Gustav, and all the pious people of this city—you perhaps—who turned against us. After all, if she had emerged from under the Ferris wheel that night, she could have saved Andrei.
But how could I despise her when behind the crow’s feet, the girl from the Bois de Vincennes still glimmered?
“I didn’t want to see you, after everything,” she said. “But I’m so sorry that Andrei…you know how much I loved—”
“Then why didn’t you—”
“Don’t interrupt me.” She pursed her lips. “I’m here now.”
She was. She had come back. She would heal me and stay with me and I told her as much, told her that we would set everything right back on track, but she shook her head.
“I’m not staying.”
“What?”
“We can never go back to that first summer. The innocence...” She shook her head.
“No. It can be—”
“Katie. I don’t think you understand what you and Andrei did to me.”
“Yes, but you abandoned—”
“Will you listen?” She had never shouted at me before.
“You grafted wings onto my back, permanently. You turned me into a monster, a not-human. Do you know how I’ve lived these past ten years? Financially?”
“No,” I whispered.
“My family has paid me to stay away from them. Katie…you and Andrei destroyed me.”
You destroyed me. I bowed my head and allowed myself to acknowledge for the first time that she was right, that we had broken the girl I loved. Yes, she had left me, but only after I had ripped her apart.
At that moment, I wished she hadn’t returned just to glow in my living room, just to remind me that she still existed and had stayed away for all those years, just to tell me that I had no one to blame but myself.
“I know,” I whispered, bowing my head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. I should never, ever have done it. It’s…I know you can never forgive me, but…”
When I looked up, she loomed close to me. She extended her wings so they scraped against the ceiling and dragged against the floor, just as they had at the exposition. She clamped her arms around me and her wings ensconced both of us. The linen touched cool against the back of my neck, the metallic smell of rondelium filled my nose, and the warts on my arms burned.
I closed my eyes and pressed my head against her shoulder. My skin tingled and the poison drained away and in that moment, so did the past ten years, the years of gray hairs and sickness, of loneliness and disappointment. I held that spring and summer in my hands, that day in the Bois de Vincennes, those nights whispering with her on the roof. I cupped it and blew on it as though it were a candle that would shimmer forever.
At some point, the pressure of the arms and wings left me, and I sank to the floor.
When I opened my eyes again, the flat no longer glowed soft silver. She was gone.
That was last autumn. I haven’t seen or heard from her since. My warts have come back, crawling over my arms, and my hair clogs the drain when I wash it in the sink.
But she came for me once, listened to my apology, restored my faith.
And what else do I have?
So I wait at my window every night, rubbing salve on my arms. Any day now, she’ll cross the cobblestones. She’ll wave at me, and I’ll throw her the keys, and she’ll wrap me in her wings and my skin will become smooth again. Maybe we won’t ever fly, but we’ll climb to the roof and her wings will flutter in the wind, and we’ll stand with our toes over the edge of the roof and hold hands and feel as though we’re soaring.
She will bring me chestnuts, and this time, they won't taste like ash on my tongue.
NOT THE GRAND DUKE'S DANCER
I’m teaching earthworms how to dance ballet when the Grand Duke comes to steal me from Petrograd.
Earthworms are slow learners, but we speak the same slippery languages. I’m instructing them on how to pas de deux when stone scrapes on stone and the lid lifts off my new home. The Grand Duke’s long eyelashes and thin lips
appear above me—thin lips I last saw telling me I couldn’t dance Swan Lake, saying he preferred to see his dancer in a comic ballet like Coppélia.
He scoops me out of my crushed velvet, clasps me against his chest as though I am a religious icon he has searched for his whole life. The brass buttons on his uniform stab into my ribs.
Then he spirits me through the Petrograd streets to Fin-land Station. I cringe at the touch of fragile summer light on parts of my body that have never before felt the sun. He installs me in his private train car and I watch the pearly sky over Lake Lagoda as the train steams west.
“Where, precisely, are you taking me?” I say. “I was starting an earthworm dance company. I was settling into my new home. I don’t want to be your dancer anymore, Sergei. I want...”
His eyelashes brush his cheeks as he blinks at me, studying my femurs and the spread of my scapula.
And I realize he can’t hear me, because I no longer speak French or Russian, and he has yet to learn my language.
Although he rarely heard me even when I still spoke the languages of the living.
* * *
I didn’t always dance for the Grand Duke. Ballet was once my own, the burning light in my chest when I was a girl living among the smokestacks and tenements on the northern edge of Petrograd. In those years, I danced through dirty snow, pirouetting over pigeon-bones and practicing first through fifth position. I imagined I was twirling on the stage of Mariinsky Theatre, that pastel-green puff of a building on the bank of a canal only a few miles away, but in another, glittering world.
After I graduated from Vaganova Academy on scholarship and stepped onto the theatre’s stage for the first time, I discovered nothing could make me happier than leaping across a resin-covered floor through hot lights.
But when I drew my last breath in the sanitarium, I found the dead no longer have the urge to dance, that as ropy muscle disintegrates and leaves only bone, we are quite content to lie in the quiet earth and instruct earthworms in the art of pas de deux.That is my only desire now, to return to that hushed world, and as our train snakes west away from Petrograd, I resolve: I will take a different path this time. I won’t let the Grand Duke own me again.
I will find a way to tell him: Return to your world and let me return to mine.
* * *
In late July we arrive in London, city of brick tenements and prim parks. The Grand Duke drags me to a townhouse that stands across a lane from a cemetery of yew trees and cracked headstones and small white flowers. In the house, a medium presides over a gold and silver Ouija board.
The Grand Duke lays me on a chaise-lounge and begins to pace the Oriental carpet.
“I want her back,” he says. “I’ll pay you any sum to resurrect her.”
“My lord, I am but a medium. I can speak to the lady, perhaps, but—”
“She wasn’t a lady. She was my dancer.” He clenches his tapered fingers around my footbone. “She died this winter while I was on a tour of the Orient. You can imagine how Petrograd winters are. But I need her back. I can’t have seen her dance for the last time.”
The medium croons, pats the Grand Duke’s hand, then closes her eyes and chants, her silver moon-studded planchette hovering over the Ouija board.
I do not know if this medium is a fraud or if she can truly communicate with the dead, but I must try. I lift from my skeleton, peeling myself off my ribs and sternum and femurs, and I curl around the planchette.
“Tell him to leave me alone.” Dragging the planchette from letter to raised gilded letter is excruciating. As I move I feel as though pieces of myself are flaking off, like dried skin peeling from the feet of a ballet dancer. “Tell him I don’t want to dance for him anymore. I’m dead now. He must let me go.”
“She says she misses you and loves you.” The medium smiles around the lie.
I shake the planchette as quickly and furiously as I can, but the Grand Duke’s face spreads in fragile hope and his fingers clench tighter around my footbone. “You’re speaking to her? Truly?”
“She longs to pirouette across the stage for you,” the medium intones.
I slam the planchette on the word no and the board vibrates beneath the medium’s hands. A teacup on the table rattles off its saucer and thunks onto the carpet.
“I do not want to pirouette across the stage for him, ever again,” I shout, as the medium smiles nervously at the spilled tea staining the carpet.
“So she’s here, she’s still here.” The Grand Duke paces the stuffy parlor, stepping over the teacup as though it doesn’t exist. “I wondered, you see, because spiritualism is so very new, but now I know...scientific advances all over the continent.
I’ll have her back yet. I will.” The Grand Duke kisses the medium’s hands, drops a sheaf of pounds onto her Ouija board, and that night he drags me to a ship bound for Stockholm.
* * *
I loved the Grand Duke, once. After I caught his eye during my first season dancing at Mariinsky Theatre, he paid for my suite on Nevsky Prospect, for my gowns and gilded fans and ballet shoes in gold and mauve and turquoise. He kissed me backstage over an armload of white roses, and yes, he spent those short summer nights in my suite, until the sun paled the eastern horizon and he would slip from my bed, squeezing my callused foot before he left.
That first summer, I waited eagerly for the roses, for the feel of his hand on my foot, but then winter descended on the city and by the next summer I no longer wanted to plié or brisé for him as he leaned forward in his gilded box at the theatre.
We quarreled, but he never listened. Before he was posted to the Orient—he was an officer, and duty called—he told my ballet master to cast me only in comic French operas, nothing Russian, nothing dark.
He didn’t care that I wanted to dance Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky, to choreograph a ballet, to dance for the faceless crowds and for the beating of my own heart.
Just as he doesn’t care that I want to stay dead with my earthworms.
* * *
In a brick building near the shipbuilders’ mansions lining Stockholm Harbor, men of science buzz around telescopes and test tubes. Three men strap me into a brass machine, blue electricity thrumming between two glass orbs at its apex.
“It’s the finest, the newest technology,” the machine’s inventor says through his whiskers. “It will animate her again.
She’ll be dancing for you in no time.”
“No, I won’t,” I shout, but of course none of them hear or understand. I have no faith in these smug scientists and their brass-and-electric machine that they claim can reunite soul and skeleton. The machine looks like a life-sized child’s toy, and the scientists have named an exorbitant price.
They tighten the leather straps around my carpal bones and tibias. I avoid the Grand Duke’s gaze and concentrate on the window, where a cadre of hot air balloons, the color of circuses, drifts over the harbor.
The inventor snaps the lever. The machine whirs and electricity hums along the brass bars flanking me.
The Grand Duke drums his fingers.
And then my bones tingle as though millions of hatpins prick me, as though I still have pores and skin. A wave courses through my chest and my phalanges straighten and bend. My toes rake the air.
The Grand Duke shouts my name. The itch of desired movement flares in my thighs and shoulder blades: the heady desire to plié and brisé, to raise my arms en haut and flex my calves.
For the first time since my last breath, I want to be a ballet dancer again, to bloody my feet on a resin-covered stage.
The whirring fades, the electricity retreats and the scientists unstrap me. I fall forward, but my knees bend, and I extend my arms to catch myself.
He catches me before I hit the ground. The inventor and the scientists murmur and nod, and the Grand Duke searches my face.
“Why are you doing this?” I say.
I expect the words to come out in one of the many dialects of the dead. I don’t expect them to co
me out in the thick vowels of Russian.
The Grand Duke leans back, still clenching me. “You’re here.” He presses his thin lips against my cheekbone.
“I died, Sergei, and you’re still...” My feet itch against the floor. I want to run, to dance, to fly away from him.
“You’ve returned, you’re back. It worked.” He embraces me again, and I shove him.
“I’m dead. I’m not your dancer anymore.” Dead is a slippery language and the round Russian words chafe oddly in my mouth. “Why won’t you let me return to my crypt? I was teaching the earthworms...I had a dance company there, which is more than you would...”
But I know, with all my twitching bones, that I can’t return to my crypt, that now that I’ve remembered what it is to dance Tchaikovsky, I can’t lie still anymore.
“What is this nonsense?” the Grand Duke says.
“Sometimes they awake confused, sir. I’m sure it will wear off.” The inventor polishes his monocle.
“Can you restore her flesh to her?”
“I’m afraid not, sir, we haven’t yet—”
The Grand Duke sighs and drums his fingers. “I suppose there are other ways, another place I heard of from an influential courtier...I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but...”
“Why can’t you just let me go?”
The Grand Duke ignores me. He pays the scientists and grips my shoulders and drags me outside.
“I don’t want to be your dancer anymore,” I howl at him, and he shouts back at me to stop being a child, an echo of hundreds of quarrels we had about choreography and Coppélia on our short summer nights in Petrograd.
The Grand Duke tells me we’re going to Munich, where I’ll get my body back, and then home, where I can pirouette across the stage for him as I always did.
As he leads me up the gangplank onto the ship to Copenhagen, I wonder: should I give in, become his dancer again, take up residence in my suite and accept his white roses and jewels?
But no. I can escape him, and I can find a way to become a ballerina again, on my own terms.
He leaves me on the rose-patterned cushions of an upper deck chair when he goes to tend to our luggage. I stand and run my fingerbones along the cherrywood deck rail, watching the balloons drift over the harbor.
Speaking to Skull Kings Page 5