Junior friendship cup

May 1972

All six little girls from Oneşti climb onto the podium in second place, silver medals round each of their necks. In the photo, the Czech, East German and Soviet gymnasts weigh on average twenty kilos more than the Romanians, these orchid-soldiers whose hair Béla has adorned with big red ribbons, the sweet little vertebrae plainly visible beneath their sky-blue leotards. Ludmilla Tourischeva, the Soviet champion, is eighteen. The Russian press talks of a ‘polemic surrounding the age of the competitors’; under a photograph of Béla, the caption reads that ‘the Romanian’ had no idea the other competitors would be young adults.

A few days after their return to Romania, Béla and Márta call Nadia into their office over the gym. Béla is occasionally worried that she is ill, that silent pallor of hers, that fixed stare contrasting so strongly with the determination of the tiny body to unpick the difficulties of an exercise until she has completely digested them. She is an anaconda, voracious for risk. They can never feed her enough.

Márta and he have seen more than enough girls who lap up everything they’re shown without so much as drawing breath, allowing their limbs to recite the difficulties. The same ones who, a few weeks later, expect their hair to be stroked, to be showered with compliments, or at the end of the training session have their future of national glory outlined for their parents. Márta knows that there’s nothing to be gained from this sentimental rubbish. It would take too much attention, too much encouragement, too much coaxing to achieve what they are after, spending time on these ‘sensitive’ girls – the word she writes in pencil in her notebook next to a name underlined in red: sensitive, the definitive judgement. But Nadia doesn’t even blink when they raise their voices. She is never heard. She is never noticed. It’s as if she is absent in the unmoving hours.

Nadia is making progress. You didn’t fall, two gold medals is good, sweetheart. And yet. This progress is fragile, you have to work harder than the others.

At night over supper, she pushes her plate away and asks her mother if she can go to bed. Stretched out on her back, her tears trickle down to the pillow, a silent punctuation of the words she whispers, ‘Parachute jump, pa-ra-chu-te’, before she falls asleep thinking of this image Béla has given her of how to approach the dismounts she is still wary of.

During my first year at the school, Márta told me one evening: Close your eyes, imagine your legs are paint brushes, and draw a single line, above all making sure you don’t make any mistakes! The next morning I was very anxious, and told her, ‘Madame, I fell in my dream last night.’ And Márta congratulated me: Fall, sweetheart, and get it over with, we won’t mention it again. Could you include that in your chapter, please?