Moscow, in memoriam Elena M., 1960–2006

Comăneci Nadia, the number 50 on the back of her V-necked leotard, strides towards the beam. Pushes back into the shadows the fairies and those old tales of frightened little girls who have to be led so that they don’t get lost, victims of their own thoughtlessness. She gives in her notice to childhood and rewrites space with her slender hands, darts like a silken thread and traces a big backwards giant with her foot, inviting bewitchment from their camera flashes, she, the untouchable one. At one moment when she is on the beam there is no music in the hall, she is performing in silence. And it is such a calm expanse, she signs the air in a flourish with her sinuous arms, her hands fly backwards blindly, backwards salto, then a reverse turn. And just as she is preparing her dismount, that thing appears, the thing she mustn’t ever think of, in case she is bewitched, kidnapped by the image of the back of a neck crashing into the wood, head first against the bar. Elena’s absence merges with it. Elena the orphan, whom her coaches saw as a substitute and who won everything at Strasbourg, Elena who fell a few days before the opening of the games, during a training session. Rumour has it she was forced to get back too soon, before the bone had knit again. Nothing is known about the accident, apart from this: the Thomas salto, her speciality, which she always performed warily (crossing herself in secret behind her coach’s back). One day I’m going to break my neck, Coach. No, Elena, girls like you don’t break their neck. Girls like you don’t end up in a wheelchair in a bedroom, neck completely fucking snapped, paralysed from head to toe after a Super-E, and it will take a year and then two, ten and then another ten before she croaks on Christmas Eve from the ‘consequences of an accident’.

Nadia plunges, her leg tracing an arabesque behind her, a long sigh drawn with a paintbrush. Then, right foot pointing to the front, she turns from all the dead, the beaten, the fractured girls’ tears and slowly, deliberately lays out – flip, flap – the bad-luck cards she has defied yet again, she salutes them, they are on their feet, madly in love, overwhelmed at having tasted the terrible smell of warded-off misfortune.