7

Ala and Lily are sitting on the wooden boards in front of a wall of mirrors. Both are filmed in sweat. Ala’s calves are aching. They compare their misshapen feet, stripped of another pair of ruined toe shoes. Then they discuss which male dancer has the most beautiful behind.

“Stefan wins for me,” says Ala, who, like Lily, has never kissed a boy.

“For me too. Why are behinds so attractive? They shouldn’t be when you think what they’re for.”

Ala watches herself mock grimace in the mirror.

“Do you think Madame is beautiful?”

Ala looks over at her teacher. As usual her long black hair is bound into a glistening knot pinned at the back of her head. She has a pursed wide mouth and high chiselled cheekbones. It’s only when she smiles that radiance blazes through the forbidding severity of her features. Ala tells Lily this. “It’s just a shame she doesn’t smile very often,” she adds.

Ala is still upset about the torrent of abuse she received from her teacher earlier. She wanted to explain why she was so distracted, but Madame’s icy presence forbids all personal intercourse. When Madame shouts at her – she shouts at every member of the class frequently – it’s like she inflicts on Ala a physical injury. It has occurred to Ala that both the two female mentors in her life are relentlessly critical of her, her mother and Madame. She rarely receives a word of praise from either of them. The difference is, she wants to learn everything Madame knows. She does everything Madame tells her. Her mother, on the other hand, is often a barometer for what she wants to avoid.

Ala danced clumsily today because her body carried the weight of what she witnessed on her way to the class. Two German soldiers ordered a passing Polish teenager to punch a bearded and robed elderly Jew in the face. The boy, no older than fourteen, was reluctant. A crowd gathered around the scene. Ala looked closely at the old Jewish man, standing with his hands clasped behind his stooped back as if carrying the weight of the world’s sorrow. His face was kind, his body frail. Sympathy for him welled up in her, as if he was an intimately loved member of her own family. Eventually, one of the German soldiers pointed his rifle at the boy and cocked the trigger. The boy wet himself and everyone laughed when the broadening stain on his crotch was pointed out. Then the boy threw a half-hearted punch at the kind old Jew. He was pushed out of the way by a Polish thug who knocked the old Jew to the ground with a full-blooded punch to the face. Although some people in the crowd appeared uncomfortable, others cheered. Ala reprimanded herself afterwards for not intervening. Even though she knew there was nothing she could have done to prevent the humiliation of the kind elderly Jew. She loathed how helpless she had been made to feel, how reduced in scale.

The task Madame has now set the class is to bend down and gather something up – first with longing, then with fear, next with amusement and finally with anger. More and more often Madame is introducing disciplines of theatre and mime into her dance classes. Madame rarely speaks of her years with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes except to say that without the Russian revolution she would be ignorant of much she now knows. She has mentioned Nijinsky and Balanchine. And that she became stifled by the dictates of classical ballet. That she wants to fuse theatre and dance, incorporate stylised everyday gestures into the vocabulary of dance. She has set herself the goal of extending the boundaries of classical ballet. Ala sees this as an opportunity to use some of the sign language her uncle has taught her. She has memorised ten or so sentences, none of which are appropriate, but no one will know that. And she wants to impress Madame. She lives to impress Madame.

When it’s Ala’s turn, she steps out onto the boards and fingersigns her favourite of the gestures Max taught her.

“Ala, what are you doing?”

Everyone laughs, as though Madame has given them licence.

Ala, slumping, thinks this is one of those days when it’s her turn to be a magnet for the world’s every discharge of poisonous energy.

“It’s sign language deaf people use to communicate.”

“And what were you saying to your imaginary deaf companion?”

There is more subdued sniggering.

“I understand there is sadness in beautiful things.”

“And how much of this language have you learned?”

“Not much.”

“Show me something else.”

Ala can see she has Madame’s interest.