Eighty Days Amber (2 page)

There were two here tonight who caught my attention. One of only a handful of couples. Different from the rest. The other women with their husbands or lovers looked bored, they’d seen it all before and more, or they looked discomfited, jealous, fearful of what their man might want them to do at home after they had seen me on stage, self-conscious of the way that their bodies moved when they undressed, the way their breasts hung, affected by the inevitable weight of time and gravity, the softness of their thighs.

But the redhead with the black dress had eyes like fire, full of heat. Her body was taut and her arm outstretched,
gripping her man’s thigh like a vice as she followed every studied movement of my limbs. And he wasn’t watching me, he was watching her watching me, his gaze fixed, focused, like a lion that has just spotted a gazelle alone on an open plain. He had thick dark hair, broad shoulders, a compact, neat torso and a confident air about him, self-assured but not cocky. Like Chey.

I pirouetted a little to face them, though still appearing to be unaware of my audience. That was always Madame Denoux’ advice, though few of the girls followed it. Dance like no one’s watching. The audience, they want to feel like voyeurs, like they’re intruding on a private moment, as though they’re taking something intimate and forbidden from the dancer. Otherwise, you’re just a girl taking her clothes off for money, nothing special.

There was something about her, the girl that watched with her handsome man. She reminded me of me. The way she appreciated my body. The way she devoured the theatricality of it all. She was seeing herself on the stage, wondering what it would be like to have all of these people watching her instead of me. And Madame Denoux hadn’t missed it. I’d seen her circling, could imagine her thoughts adding together, ever calculating, never missing an opportunity to wring a man’s pockets or find a new girl for her collection, like she’d found me.

Was it the redhead’s facial expression, or the man who reminded me of Chey, or the way a note led the melody into a subtle variation, even though I knew the music inside out? There was no telling.

Sometimes, memories rushed back, unbidden, unwelcome. Shards of my past unfolding against a backlit screen, images racing by like a drug trip. Vivid. Painful.

The faces of my parents the last time I saw them alive. Waving to me as their car faded into the distance down the dirt road that led away from the agricultural institute where they lived and worked. I was five years old. My father ran the institute and my mother worked in the laboratories and experimental gardens as a researcher. That was how they had initially met and fallen in love. Or at least that was what I was told later by relatives.

He had been an engineer from St Petersburg, she was a local girl from the Donbass region. He had been posted to Donetsk on a temporary secondment, which became permanent once he married and they had their first child. Their only child. Me.

I know I was wanted and loved, and now it hurts like hell that my memories of my early years and of my parents are fading to oblivion as the past recedes. I think I remember a vegetable garden, some of the toys I played with, but what escapes me is the sound of their voices, the soothing lullabies my mother would sing to help me fall asleep.
Lubachka
, I think she called me. But now those memories, those songs, are buried far and deep and I can no longer retrieve them, nor can I picture the smile on her face or the severe, professorial demeanour of my father.

I don’t even know the colours of my parents’ eyes. And the false memories created by the few photographs I retain of them are all in black and white.

I was told that the driver of the lorry who hit their car on the Moscow Highway was drunk. The articulated lorry he lost control of was carrying a cargo of building materials. It was no consolation to hear he also died in the collision, crushed in his cockpit by massive blocks of concrete that
had cut loose from the back of his vehicle. All three died instantly. It was the middle of the night.

I was taken in by my aunt, my mother’s sister. She was divorced and childless, and also lived close to Donetsk. Once she had wanted to be a ballet dancer and she made it her life’s work to see that I followed in that path, encouraging my dancing and sacrificing much in the way of money and leisure time so that I might realise her ambition and be successful where she hadn’t been.

I was enrolled in the local dance academy, and attended classes after school three times a week and then again at the weekend. In order to pay for my lessons, my aunt was obliged to give piano lessons every Saturday in our apartment, which meant on those days I had to make my own way on foot to the academy buildings over three miles from where we lived, through heavy snow, sunshine or under the rain, whatever the weather. I had to make this journey increasingly regularly, after school, as her old used car was beginning to fall apart and she was unable to pick me up.

It afforded me much time for daydreaming.

Of course, like most little girls in the USSR, let alone the Ukraine, I dreamed of making it as a prima ballerina and I was repeatedly told that I had the necessary natural talent. But did I have the discipline, the ambition?

The answer to that was less evident.

I was lazy and unwilling to learn the classical steps, hated their rigour, preferred to lose myself in the music and improvise movements that just came naturally and were not part of any of the choreography our stern teachers were trying to drum into our small skulls.

‘Lubov Shevshenko,’ they would shout at me time and
time again, ‘you are incorrigible. What are we going to make of you?’

I think I was eleven by then, and I managed to pass the final set of exams and was invited to move to St Petersburg, my father’s place of birth, to attend the prestigious School of Art and Dance. I had no known relatives living there any longer and, as an orphan, was granted a menial bursary to cover my living expenses, although I had no choice in the matter and would have to live in a dormitory for other provincials similarly adrift in the city – an old secret police building that had been converted into a school for the disadvantaged.

The prospect of living on my own wasn’t daunting, as life with my aunt had over the years become a series of silences and misunderstandings. She had, since the day she took me in, treated me as an adult, when I still wanted to be a child.

Being thrown in at the deep end and having to share in close proximity an eight-bed dormitory with other kids, most of whom were a few years older than me, was something of a traumatic experience. They hailed from Siberia, Tajikistan, a couple were also from the Ukraine and others from the Baltic States, with their perfect complexions, high cheekbones and rotten teeth. I quickly realised I had little in common with most of them. Only two of us attended the same school, while the others were scattered across a variety of different institutes, none of which had artistic aspirations, so we stood out like a pair of sore thumbs, Zosia and I.

I couldn’t even pretend we became close friends. At best, from the advantage of her sixteen months seniority and the fact her breasts were already growing, she tolerated
me, found my presence convenient as a messenger, factotum and facilitator. Luba, junior assistant when it came to anything illegal or forbidden, like smuggling cigarettes into the dormitory or concealing other’s banned make-up under her mattress – that was me. My early training in criminality . . .

A few years into my time in St Petersburg, Zosia fell pregnant. She was seeing a boy from the physics institute, and I would, of course, cover for her absence on the occasion of her forbidden assignments. She was only sixteen at the time. When she was found out, the process was decisive. One day she was here, and the next day she wasn’t. Thrown out of the school and shipped back like a dirty parcel to her family near Vilnius. We were told that there had been a grave illness in her family necessitating her return home, but we knew better, we knew the truth.

Almost two years later, in my final year at the School of Art and Dance, just as I was thinking that when I graduated I would take up a place in the corps de ballet in one of the city’s lesser dancing troupes, I received a brief letter from Zosia out of the blue. She’d had a little boy, named Ivan, and was now also married to an older man who worked in the local state council. She said she was happy and enclosed a photograph of her family. It had been taken in a garden where the trees looked like skeletons and even the grass was sickly green. Zosia by then was approaching nineteen, but to me she already looked like an older woman, at least years older than she actually was, eyes sunk, hair dull, the sparkle of her youth gone for ever.

That was the day I swore to myself that I would neither marry nor have children.

During those years, we had our normal classes in the morning: Russian grammar, Russian literature (my favourite), arithmetic and later mathematics and geometry, history, geography, civic duties and others I daydreamed through with arduous distraction. Our afternoons saw us learning, rehearsing, practising and dancing at the school. We each had three dancing outfits, one to be used only for actual performances, when the ballet piece we had been working on for months was finally allowed to see the light of day at a gala performance. I was never given a solo and it looked as though I would always be a baby swan in the fluttering ensemble of the corps de ballet. Though I felt more like a flouncing duck. Oh, how I hated Tchaikovsky!

Ballet classes extended to the Saturday, so the only free day we were granted was the Sunday, but then most Sunday mornings were occupied cleaning our clothes, ironing, darning and bringing the dormitory back to tidiness, which left only Sunday afternoon as truly our own. Mostly we attended the local cinema house and the nearby ice-cream parlour. And had the opportunity to meet boys, before our curfew: 8 p.m. for the under fifteens, 9.30 for the older girls. The curfew was strictly enforced, and any defiance or breaking of the rules was always punished by a loss of weekend privileges.

Boys . . .

How could I not become interested in them, living for years on end – and teenage years do feel as if they last for ever – with seven women, a world of sly confidences, tall stories, raging hormones and peer envy? We monitored each other with the fierceness of hawks, purring with curiosity, brewing jealousy as if there was no tomorrow. Who was the prettiest, the tallest, the one whose breasts developed faster?
Some concealed the onset of their first periods, while others proclaimed them loudly to all and sundry. I was no ugly duckling in their midst, the orphan from the Ukraine. I was not the tallest, the most opulent, or the first or last to bleed, but in my head I always knew I was special. Realised that, unlike my fellow students, I had ambitions to see the world while all they could think of was the immediate future, some form of academic success and the prospects of a good match. Everything in my surroundings whispered to me that there was more to life than this.

Sex . . .

Another popular topic of conversation during the dark nights in a girls’ dormitory. An endless chatter that extended to dressing rooms, rehearsal rooms, shower areas and the red-brick wall at the back of the building, which we knew none of the staff ever bothered patrolling in earnest and where all of us would take turns to smoke when, by hook or by crook, we got our hands on American cigarettes.

Being one of the youngest, I became a voyeur in the house of lust. During those years, all my dormitory companions flowered but, despite all the ballet classes and arduous exercises I was prescribed, I initially found it difficult to shed the puppy fat of my childhood. They would all say that I had a lovely face, but my body was slow in emerging from its cocoon. And so, in the communal showers, I stood like a spy, the water dripping down my body, endlessly watching, envying the other girls and the way their hips curved, their breasts hung, their arses spread, while I was still just a pack of bones surrounded by flabby skin, lacking definition and grace.

Oh, they talked a lot after the lights were out, about the boys they had met and the ones they would meet, and the
things they would do. Silently, I listened, trying to distinguish the truth from the lies, sometimes shocked to my core, at other times burning inside with every bit of taboo knowledge that filtered my way. Always confident that one day I would join their ranks. Become an adult, become a woman.

The ice-cream parlour on Lugansk Avenue was the place where we hung out, an old-fashioned relic from the Stalinist years. On nine visits out of ten, all they could offer was vanilla flavour, and even then it wasn’t natural and left a bitter chemical aftertaste in the mouth, but the two old babushkas who ran it, on behalf of the State of course, did not mind us girls lingering there for hours on end, exchanging scurrilous gossip, swapping make-up tips, meeting the guys from out of town who traded in nylons and often pressured the older girls into stolen kisses, not in lieu of payment – as that was always inescapable – but almost as a tip that guaranteed they would return another time and consent to sell us stockings that were unavailable outside the black market.

And then, as we got older, some of the girls began to boast of the fact they had granted the men more than just a kiss.

I couldn’t afford nylons anyway so the whole subject was academic, but from the time of my first period, every time I visited the ice-cream parlour on Lugansk, I think I blushed as a curious buzz raced through my lower stomach and my imagination ran wild. It also made the taste of the ersatz vanilla palatable.

The year after Zosia’s sudden departure, the girl occupying the nearest bed to mine was a girl from Georgia called Valentina.

Valya was a wild one, always getting into trouble, not so much out of any inherent sense of evil but mostly out of mischief and provocation. She was the one who instructed me in the art of giving blow jobs, which she insisted men liked and provided us girls with a direct path to their hearts or, as I discovered later, their loins. She kept on joking that I would never be a true Russian woman until I knew how to suck a man’s cock. She even stole bananas from the kitchens on the rare occasions our esteemed Cuban friends shipped boatfuls of bananas over to the motherland in exchange for the moral support we were providing them with, according to the newspapers and the Central Committee.