Isadora

by Amelia Gray

  In Darmstadt, Max enjoys an opportunity to resent a gift

  Max had been weaned from teat to tea and was never permitted any other beverage. As an adult, he collected tea and cultivated an exclusive interest in its finest delicate details, practicing its intricate methods with leaves sourced from premium importers.

  Every pot of tea was a ritual, one his mother taught him long ago. He primed the cup with warm water and washed the leaves in their wire basket, pouring the first silty brew down the drain and viciously excavating his fingernails with a letter opener as the water came to a second boil. He monitored the steeping time, which varied based on the type of tea, and for most varieties placed a sugar cube at the bottom of the cup. When it was ready, he poured it slowly, steam fogging his glasses. Once the cup was nearly full, he topped it with a finger of fine chilled cream. The proper method would create a strata of sugar, tea, and cream, meant to convey a natural symbology: the cloud-soaked sky above spiced or subtle water above a sugar shoal.

  He kept his teas in a series of airtight glass jars. Each of them had its own personality: the malty Assam, thin floral Darjeeling, white teas as crisp as a pressed shirt. And though his mother had been gone for years, a perfect cup brought her back, if only for a moment.

  He tried not to think of his lovely delicate teas as he was presented with the coffee Elizabeth brought him as a souvenir from her trip to Greece. She prepared it for him in the kitchen reserved for instructors, muttering complaints to herself as she went: the water was too cold, the beans ground too fine. When she served it, he couldn’t figure out what exactly had gone wrong, only that the result was very bad. Perhaps there was an unknown additional step required to prime a new filter; the Melitta had just come out of its box and still seemed unaccustomed to resting among the other dishes, let alone performing its strange function humped over one mug and then the other to produce this bitter result. Max was wary that she had brought it from a land not known for its coffee, but she insisted she had developed a taste for it there.

  The instructors’ kitchen had been added haphazardly beside one of the larger rehearsal rooms long after the school was constructed and they realized that there was no place for the five instructors to take their meals in private. If it were up to Elizabeth, they would eat in their rooms and never otherwise meet, but she relented after Max insisted, retrofitting a coat closet with a sink and counter and a small table. The only access to the kitchen was through the largest rehearsal room, where at that moment Frau Lang had a group of young ladies briskly trotting the perimeter in bare feet.

  Elizabeth watched him across the table, fingering the rim of the new filter and wiping her hand on a pleat running the length of her dress. He hated gifted souvenirs, the act of imposing one’s own sentiment onto another’s life. And though he had put in his years grimacing through plenty of espressos in Vienna, this new gift came as a particular disappointment; he thought he had outgrown his distaste. He had gotten his hopes up when the fresh-ground beans smelled of earth and cherry, but the end result tasted blackened and was far more bitter than what he had found in the short cups of his youth, a thickly jarring interruption to the senses. He pictured cowboys in the American West supping the stuff around a dying fire, slicks of animal fat and ash floating in their shared pan.

  The girls in the rehearsal room were still running as a group. By the sound of their footfalls, they had evened out, the faster girls taking the lead. Max made a note to ask the fraulein for a report of the best runners and for a list of the girls who had chosen to fool around.

  “I believe it has been burned,” he said.

  She leaned forward, sniffing. “It’s not good?”

  “Something isn’t right.” He thought of the peppermint tea he could be enjoying at that moment, a sweet cup of earthly pleasure, plucked from a field of tender shoots. The coffee tasted as if it had been scraped from a plot of arid land farmed to the brink of function.

  “Miss Venneberg informs me you have been altering her lessons,” she said.

  Elizabeth had put on some weight in her time away, he saw. There was a softness to her jowl and the curve of flesh over the puckered skin of her elbow seemed more expansive than before. He grimaced at the blank wall, precisely where a window would have been cut had he been invited to advise the construction crew. He imagined six men puzzling over an architectural plan drawn in dust.

  “You might recall that the course instructions came directly from Isadora. She wants them to know Nietzsche’s dance songs.”

  “They had been failing simple tests.”

  The girls next door were laughing, a sound that always seemed to make Elizabeth uncomfortable. “You had barbells delivered to the arbor,” she hissed. “I saw the crates. Were you trying to hide them from me? I left a dance studio and returned to a gymnastic center.”

  “The students’ vitality is of real importance,” he insisted. “These activities do more than some exercises in movement. They cultivate their instincts and develop their will. They promote good character and ethical development.”

  “You’re saying they’ll be strong enough to lift a car off a baby carriage?”

  “You yourself have said you are most interested in the future of these young ladies as they bloom into womanhood.”

  Next door, one of the girls skidded and fell into a heap, making a sound that drew the rest of them over. Elizabeth and Max had to continue in whispers to keep from being heard.

  “In altering the instruction,” she said, “you’re altering the result we promised their parents.”

  “We promised them grace without qualification, and grace is what they will receive. That grace will simply be laid with a foundation of physical strength and mental power.” He thought often of the cost of outfitting the girls in uniforms, something that gave them a greater sense of duty. He had hoped to broach the subject with Elizabeth on her return, but now, clearly, would be a bad time.

  “Darling,” he said, placing his hand over hers.

  She frowned at their hands. “I should check on them.”

  “When I first agreed to teach at this school, you were pleased to read my supplemental matter on training. Strong girls can dance through the day with fewer injuries. They will be able to extend their practice. They will be happier, their skin will be bright and smooth. You can’t know the benefits of something you haven’t tried. Remember when you chose to trust me?” Max hoped she would remember the day he first arrived at the school, how desperately she had been searching for a curriculum master to bring them beyond dancing, how readily she had agreed to take him on.

  She took their cups and rinsed them, not mentioning how he had barely touched his coffee. She tapped the filter over the bin, then laid a towel on the counter and lined everything up to dry. He appreciated the care she took with the dishes, as if she held some empathy for them. If she could find some of that empathy for people, they might be onto something.

  25 July 1913

  Teatro della Pergola

  Ted Craig, La superbia viene davanti alla rovina

  Ancora non sappiamo l’italiano, Firenze

  Ted,

  Hullo from Constantinople. My sister-in-law would like to stay all week in our hotel and soak her feet in milk, and I have nearly lost my mind trying to be rid of her. Please consider Niobe’s story staged over the course of a charming afternoon:

  ACT ONE. The curtain lifts on Niobe doling out the laurels. This is Thebes, the city square, where the mother sings the song of her children, singing of their strength and beauty. The children are grown, the youngest just now leaving home, but she’s brought all fourteen to the square to show them to the assembled crowd. The citizens watch her and feel nothing, nothing!

  Niobe wraps her arms around her friend Latona, who stands tense and unyielding through the verse about a full and happy home, a kingdom you have made yourself. All a harmless mother’s pleasure, but it’s the thought that counts with the gods, and these thoughts number fourteen damning piece
s of pride in tailored robes.

  Latona weeps to think of the babies she’s buried, love’s stillborn end, the handfuls of sand she ate in hopes that the same alchemy which allowed her two youngest to survive will somehow return the rest. They may not have been gods but they were hers all the same.

  From the edge of the ceremonial square, the wall’s old stones crumble at the touch of Latona’s last living hope: Artemis and Apollo, her moon and sun, have an instinct their mother did not give them, a sense of justice which compels them.

  They draw their weapons and go to work, drawing gore in a wash, a bloody gouache, painting the fall of pride. The lesson is written in the world’s most durable ink.

  The citizens look about with empty eyes. Those were better days, when the gods did the punishing for you and you weren’t required to find the lesson on your own. They take all of this in, noting their own prideful acts, their displays of meat and grain. A woman crouches to rub mud into her sandals. End of ACT ONE.

  ACT TWO. Curtain lifts to a scene of indiscriminate dead. Niobe wanders across the slaughter in silence. She turns to avoid a half-quiver of arrows fatally lodged in her oldest son, as though touching them might compound their grievous harm. The gods, of course, are gone.

  She holds her own body as if she could lift herself from the scene. She slaps her own face, makes a fist and strikes herself. She tries to lift her oldest son, but he is too large. He slips from her hands, falling the kind of fall she feared from the day she first held him. She tries again, lifting one arm then the other, taking her boy up and dragging him away. She braids her oldest daughter’s hair together with her own and drags her upstage.

  This is the price of pride, the balance paid by love. Niobe continues like this for some time and has moved half of the bodies almost entirely off the stage by the time the audience takes pity and checks her into a sanitarium.

  In Constantinople, an early-morning ride into the old city and a meeting with the mysterious woman, made less mysterious by daylight

  The man we hired to take us to Stamboul loaded us up in his vegetable cart before Penelope could find the words to insist that despite all appearances, she actually wasn’t a particularly pale variety of eggplant.

  She sat up beside him on the bench, claiming that she could better direct us to our destination, which meant I had to brace myself in the splintered cartbed, hanging on to the cart’s slim sides so I wouldn’t fly out onto the road. He got us going at a good clip out of Frengistan, and the tourist ladies stepped out to promenade with their little dogs just in time to see us jolting by in the vegetable cart, curled reams of onion skin fluttering behind us like a comet’s tail.

  Our driver tips his hat at the ladies, muttering about the suffrage question in America and how he finds it relates to the concept of women traveling alone. Penelope only briefly attempts to translate, leaning back to add her own little notes, for example that I should not repeat Frengistan, the name I heard him use for the Pera district, because it’s an ugly word that means “foreigner land” and implies a rather dim sentiment for the shops and hotels full of people who would prefer room service over fresh home cooking. Our driver goes on and on, not seeming to notice when Penelope falls warily silent, offering only the occasional half grunt, as if she were considering rejoinders but decided against all of them and then forgot the question. The pavement changes to broken stone when we cross to the southern side of the Horn, and we have to slow to the point that foot traffic overtakes us. Children run past the cart, slapping the mule and screaming. Penelope points out a patch of grass running alongside the road where a mother watches her baby outpacing us at a crawl. We might have made the trip faster on our hands and knees, but it would have deprived us of this view of the mule’s asshole, bobbing perfectly at eye level.

  Penelope heaves a sigh and leans back, holding the rail with one hand and her belly with the other. Her armpits have soaked through her thin dress, and sweat beads the downy hair between her shoulder blades, catching in her hammocked collar. Pregnant women have a look about them that suggests they’ve suddenly realized the world is too dangerous going on the way it is and it’s up to them to stop it from spinning. I would pity her, but the ride is even worse in the back. Years from now, one of the springs will snap and toss the man’s load into the street, bringing down his mule, and his first thought will not be of the years he spent neglecting the cart or the rust coming off the axle in chunks, but rather of the morning he offered two foreign women a ride. In his mind it will have been my weight on these springs that threw the whole thing off, and I will feel his mortal curse, if I am not already dead.

  Six months ago this shuddering landscape folding out onto a staccato horizon might have laid in my mind the first foundations of a dance. Not to be defeated by this blankness, I set to considering such a movement: there comes a low running across the stage, shoulders lifting at beats incongruous with the music. Or perhaps there should be no music, only fleeting bars of organized street sounds, the orchestra hauling in a load of broken glass and pallets, buttons in metal jars calling across the pit about the price of sugar. The percussionist lights a fire in the bowl of his timpani and skewers meat from a plate to roast it as a horn player punches the oboist and surrounding members of the wind section are pulled into the brawl; the dancer must find sense in the action and follow it, crouching to rise at odds with her own body, thrusting her arms wide to gather herself up.

  This is only an idea of movement, a theory out of practice. It is a fantasy of movement, and even thinking about it is enough for me to want to throw movement out entirely and replace it with sensation or idea or even song—scratch that, considering my singing—but anything, anything outside this fraudulent idea of dance. Choreography these days is wishful work.

  We come to a rocking halt before a painted yellow door, the man turning to look over his shoulder before saying something to Penelope. She draws a few coins from her purse, but he leans over to touch her hands, which seems to shock her well enough that she allows him to push the money away. Now it’s really time to leave, the most dangerous moment of any situation being when a stranger is owed.

  Clambering out, I thank the man. He scowls at the onion peels stuck to my tunic, as if he has caught me stealing them, and stays stubbornly watching us even after I’ve helped Penelope out.

  Despite a fresh-looking coat of paint, the squat door at the address we’ve been given looks like an afterthought in the old stone wall, as if the men who built the place realized only after they completed their work that they were trapped inside.

  Penelope knocks on the doorframe, checking her knuckles. She looks back at the man watching us from the street. After a while she knocks again.

  “Maybe she’s out,” she says.

  “Or else perhaps we are unwitting subjects in a cruel trick.”

  She never looks at me when she speaks. “Let’s just wait a moment.”

  “A mystery with no real conclusion, asking the audience to sit with their disappointment and enter into it, to imbibe it, and in doing so, creating the least popular exhibit of art to ever exist—”

  “All right, Isadora—”

  At that moment Madame Candemir opens the little door. She is not a tall woman, but the doorframe is so short it obscures her face entirely. “Thank you for coming,” she says, ducking down to greet us. She frowns when she sees the man on the cart, and lifts her hand to cover her mouth.

  Seeming satisfied by her discomfort, the man continues up the hill, looking back at us as he goes.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, lowering her hand after the man turns the corner. “Won’t you please come in?”

  Travel allows the most indulgent narcissism. The little goat on the shore reminded me of California, the hotel skylights like a pair I’d seen in Moscow. This strange door is like nothing I’ve ever known, and so it becomes all of Constantinople to me, all of Turkey, and experience only serves to further flatten the world. It’s a shameful practice but most tourist
s do it, making the world relate to them instead of the other way around, and avoiding the trouble of fitting themselves to anything new at all.

  She takes us through a narrow hallway made narrower by thin tables laden with an estate’s worth of teacups and leaded crystal, a pile of folded linens uniformly browned by a weeping stain, wineglasses full of buttons, a shoe box full of matchbooks, and thick jars of preserved fruits. Next to one of the tables, a waist-high stack of windowpanes shifts uneasily as we pass.

  The sitting room is more of the same: baskets of scrap fabric, photographs spilling from hatboxes, hats lining the windows, piles of mending. The chairs are covered in old newspapers, their pages seeming to have been soaked and dried many times, making a kind of shell for each seat. Every inch of wall space is occupied by heavy-framed paintings of famous rivers. I recognize the Arno and the Danube, and the Seine of course, and the Yamuna from the Taj Mahal rising at its bend, and many others I cannot identify. Even the dull and lesser streams and what looks like a few examples of ambitious paddock runoff are framed in ornate carved gold, each whorl cupping pocks of dust. In one corner sits an empty birdcage, large enough to hold Madame Candemir if she was so moved, a few framed canals stacked behind it. All this makes me think of my single trunk with its costumes, my sandals puckering at their mended points tucked by the door. I have known the false-familiar feeling of hundreds of rented rooms, their clean floors and impartial shade, and I envy a well-cluttered home.

  Our hostess walks a thin path through the clutter and takes a seat. “I’m working on a project,” she says, gesturing at the pile, and though it is unclear what sort of project she is talking about or which of the assembled she might employ in its creation, I appreciate her optimism and like her more for it. She asks us to call her Ilgın. After we sit, a girl brings in a tray of tea and salted biscuits, balancing it on a stack of books. The room is south facing, but the open windows allow in the morning’s hot breeze, giving every object a resonant heat, like the air an inch off the forehead of a fevered child.