PETROUCHKA

By Marissa Mazek

Barnard College

 

I am a student at the Vaganova Ballet Academy. I do not graduate for another year, but I know that I will not enter the Kirov Ballet. I do not have the body, but still they let me in. At the entrance examination several years ago, it was obvious that my feet were too flat, my extension somewhat lacking, even then, before I had any training. My shoulders still stick out, “angel wings,” Madame K. calls them, but perhaps the auditioners hoped they could force them down.

 

***

 

Walking to class, I lean backwards, much like I do during stretches, and stare at the spires scattered throughout my city. Every morning, I walk along the Neva and beneath the Catherine Palace, turning until I reach Rossi Street. The roads are more crowded now, with a mixture of once-awaited Ladas, new SUVs and foreign tour buses. Most mornings, in my first year, the spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral was less blinding; the top of St. Isaac’s dingier than today’s gleam. But while the tourist attractions have become more luminescent, the rest of Petersburg has broken down. Her more recent, lesser glories are not so apparent anymore, but some things remain the same, like my school. The audience has changed, though, since the fall, when competition leapt from behind the curtain, impossible to catch, like perfection.

 

***

 

Some mornings, as I place my right leg on the top rail of the barre and bend towards it, I wonder how I can improve. If I can fix one thing, even if it’s as small as tucking my torso forward so I can hold a pirouette well, then I have accomplished something. Anything not to fall. It is rare that a student here falls, especially those who, like me, are good jumpers, but when I see the evenly spaced, rosin-smelling wooden floorboards at eye level, it makes me think that perhaps apathy is pulling me into the Neva. Apathy is like gravity; it pulls you down while effort, talent and flexibility let you fly. If you’ve ever looked up at your foot while it is extended near your head, then you know the difference. That’s why I keep dancing, why I haven’t decided to enter a technical school and learn a marketable trade for the new world economy. Why be held down awaiting something that may never happen?

 

In Russia, we want to touch the sun.  Even the women standing Babel-like on top of the Hermitage try to gain an advantage over the others. They compete with Peter and his horse, each glancing over at the competition, trying to leap higher and farther than the other. The ballerina in Swan Lake developpés to the side, with her head back and arms tickling the scenery, looking like a sunbather under the stagelights. She has to take over the stage as a person must do with his territory; make it hers or the spotlight-man will be bored and will follow a step behind. The audience only watches when the ballerina’s leg is up to her ear, ending in a perfectly pointed foot. Only then do they care.

 

Critics and the audience live far from the tourist area. Their apartments are like the dancers with ninety-degree extensions; average, but hidden from the visitors’ photographs, just like me. Whenever someone films our classes to inspire Western students, I am sent to Peterhof or Pushkin. These palaces are like aging ballerinas during their last season or two; still beautiful, but aged and irrelevant. They should not be playing young girls in love anymore.

 

***

 

I fell today. I tried to turn and travel at the same time, which works well during single turns but is wrong for doubles. My ankle hurts and I limp as I cross the bridge to Vasilevsky Island, where I live. The always-uniformed Maritime and Science students smile in a way that would be charming if I, like a dumb girl from another place, did not know that, while their mouths and eyes smile, their teeth gnash.

 

Summer is almost here, and the White Nights are beginning. In winter, my way is lit only by the dim streetlights, the ones that work. I am not afraid, even though I am young and pretty and alone, because I know all of the backstreets and safe places where I could run. But I have never had to run. Americans are loudly afraid to go anywhere without a tour guide and minibus, but they are only in danger because they are afraid of becoming Russian. The small-camaraed and big-stomached have a way out of here, as do I. Tomorrow, they film my class for the Kirov director, to decide our placement in a company. Some say it is decided only after the graduation performance, but they lie; our jobs are determined a year before we graduate. Tomorrow.

 

***

 

Like a child who is looking forward to his birthday because it will bring a present from a store on Nevsky Prospect or a day out of school, I have been counting down to this. My mother has already left to clean rooms in the Hotel Astoria, so I am alone as I drink my morning tea and put on my most flattering leotard. I jab my head with pins and shake it to make sure that my bun is in tightly enough. There are too many hairpins, but at least it will stay.

The roads are crowded and I have to jump onto the steps of a building as a Lada goes down the sidewalk. A normal occurrence. It is faster to walk in this city, for even the trams are inefficient. Everything is these days, adults say; things stopped working when Communism did. Flashes come from a bus behind me and I think that the visitors are photographing me, but in front of them is the Hermitage. It stands in my way as Katya always does, blocking the view of the shabby present. I am always on the periphery of photographs; never the focus but there nonetheless. Soon, I will be shown to people I will never see. They will be my audience, witnesses to my art.

 

***

 

We begin. My demi-pliés are deep and soothing and I feel like a rubber band, the way we are supposed to feel. My legs are perfectly straight and I feel strong. I am sharp during beats, hitting the spot between my ankle and my Achilles – I am neither a hero nor a villain, nor will I be a victim – with the same force with which a thrown rock hits, but does not break, a window. I am infinite, and it shows in my grande battements, which reach the sky and pervert gravity, coming down slowly but just with the beat. The camera is on me and so are the glares. Katya’s basic positions (her weakness) are sloppy. I am Odile, emerging not from Odette but from a powerless swan, third from the left in the last row of the corps. It is an old trick, used until the real ballerina can come onstage, and I am using it now.

The Aurora awakens to fire again, through my leg extensions. It is the glorious moment when the gun is out but before the tsar is shot and before the Cossacks arrest and murder the revolutionary – it is the moment when everything seems well. For this moment, I will be in the Kirov. But then, a blue-shirted man says to a woman in high heels, “The thing wasn’t in right – I didn’t get any of that.” And then I know that I will forever be the girl who did well once, but had strange placement and bad line nonetheless.

 

***

 

So I practice the variations I will never get to dance, even if I am accepted into Perm, Moisiev, or something American. But I am on the Neva Embankment now. The sun is setting, because it is not yet summer, after all. The White Nights were a sham. But I am doing all the big jumps that I love so much, as the sun, warmer than the stage lights, singes my shoulders. So I jump more, pretending that Madame K. is screaming, “Higher, higher!” from somewhere behind me when now she must be below.  Even the granite horseman and marble maids cannot keep up with me. 

 

And I go on jumping, almost poking myself on the spire of Peter and Paul, which I am more golden than. I am more golden than everything and the rainbow is all around me – flashbulbs are louder than the honks of horns that belong to cars that should have stopped running years ago. For once, the visitors’ cameras are trained on me, just as I am trained to please them. And so I shall. I double back and over the Academy, where the crowd inside is confused – “Where did she go?” And they look up and see me, flying, flying, flying.