Otherwise We are Lost

“You have the piano?” Sergei asked as he tickled the keys of the grand piano that was much too big and expensive to be in my tiny living room.

“Mama said I was the only one that could actually play it. She wanted me to have it so she had it sent up here. Ridiculous really, I don’t really have time to play it,” I murmured as I finished up making the potato pancakes. “Do you still play?”

“God no. I stopped once mother stopped making me.”

“Do you-” I paused, he said no more secrets right? “Do you still talk with her? Your mother, I mean.”

“Sometimes. I stay with her sometimes in Kiev, but I’d rather not have a relationship with her right now. I told her not to come here to see me dance.”

I looked at him and took him in. He sat on the piano bench, his shoulders hunched and his head down. Far from the perfect ballet posture that had been instilled in him as a child. This could be the only feasible time for his mother to come watch him dance. She wouldn’t need a visa and as much as she disliked me, she would have a place to stay.

“You don’t dance anymore?” Sergei asked as he went to sit at the nook. “Not even just for fun?”

Do you? I wanted to respond sarcastically. Bitterly. He had all the talent in the world but none of the passion. Instead I shook my head, “No,” I pressed my lips into fine line as I set down the plate of potato pancakes and set out sour cream and apple sauce.

“I never saw anyone more passionate than you, when it came to ballet, you know. Not when I was in London, not when I was in Kiev, and I’m sure not here in Moscow,” He paused as he heaped applesauce onto his place. “It’s a shame really that you don’t dance anymore.”

“Well, we can’t all be as lucky to have perfect legs, supple muscles, light bones,” I paused, “I could dance all my life, if I could. I would do it every night and then some. It’s like- like a religion and maybe it’s for the best. People don’t want to see that on stage and I guess one doesn't really care to see one's religion practiced in an atmosphere like that.”

He gave me a wry smile, “I don’t know any more either. I want to do movies, you know? Like how Baryshnikov did. I want to be in movies and not just dance. The Royal Ballet said they would find ways for me to do movies but they never did and the season was too long.”

I took a bite of potato pancake, “Then why did you come here? When the Moscow season is over, you go to Novosibirsk, there’s almost no rest or time for you to do movies, here. ABT has shorter seasons, you could have danced with them and done movies in the summer.”

“ABT didn’t have the money. The Bolshoi was scared of me. Scared that I would go crazy again.”

“Will you?” I paused as I pushed the bits of potato pancaked around my plate. “Will you go crazy again?”

He looked away, unsure, “I hope not. I don’t want to.”

“I don’t want you to, either,” I smiled and in that instant he took my hand in his and it felt right, his fingers intertwined with mine. “I won’t let you,” I added in a hushed whisper.



We sat side by side on the tiny piano bench, where we played a few small pieces. Beethoven’s Für Elise and the Moonlight Sonata and of course, the Cutlet Polka, or as Sergei told me it was called in London, Chopsticks. Simple, beginner pieces that were more fun than anything strenuous.

“Play me Clair de Lune,” He said, “Everyone loves that one.”

I grimaced. I hated Clair de Lune. It was basically ear candy; there was no substance to it, just beautiful sound that has somehow been heralded as the pinnacle of beauty and romance in music. “Do you?” I asked incredulously.

“Play it for me.”

I took a deep breath and I let my fingers roam the keys and then I began.

“Slowly, slower,” He whispered, his breath warm on my neck. He was behind me and when I looked up, he was dancing like really dancing. He danced around my sparse living room, wearing a gray Henley and a pair of jeans and black socks. Leaps, pirouettes, tours. It was amazing how he felt the music. How he melted into the music.

It didn't seem real. Yesterday, it didn't seem possible that we would be in the same room, let alone in my apartment, with it's terrible wood floors and harsh fluorescent light. But somehow it seemed different with him here, the moonlight streaming in through the windows, bathed us and framed us in a silverly, luminescent light, the lack of furniture didn't seem so empty anymore, he filled the space with his dancing. It didn't seem so lonely. So gray.

And at that moment, I became acutely aware of how I would never be able to dance like that. To instinctually know where the music wants to take you, to become an extension of the music. I would never be able to pirouette effortlessly and as quickly on the smooth studio floors as he did in socks on my shoddy wood flooring. I would never appear to hover above the ground in my leaps like he did.

It all didn’t seem fair at all. Here was a self-proclaimed ballet God dancing in my Khruschev-era apartment, who would rather do movies or anything other than dance. Here I was playing piano for him, when I would give anything to have a modicum of his talent, his raw ability.

Yet somehow the magic of his dancing didn't lie in the speed of his pirouettes, the height of his jumps, the elegance of his arabesque but it was in his ability to make the audience believe that he wasn't playing a character but that he is that character. So perhaps what struck me the most now as he danced for me and only me was that maybe he wasn't playing a character. He was merely himself.

And then he was behind me.

Just as I approached the last bar of music, he rested his forehead between my shoulder blades, his arms went to frame mine as we played the last bar together.