You see, it's like this, and that's all.
Dusk and twilight are cousins who touch fingers over evening.
The time between them is voluptuous and welcoming like a cradle, the hammock between two poles of illumination. We can do anything in that time, without analyzing the why of it- for the world feels like a warm pearl in our palm.
Evening rolls dulcet between, like the Volga, like the Neva.
Like the Fontanka Canal, where the previous morning found my mother floating like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, pale and no longer alive.
The morning was too bright and high, even for winter.
And so it was the hour just after dusk that found me strolling the banks of the Neva, unable to think of anything but the Kirov House.
For there, within that House, had been the thing my mother had thrown her life at, deep in her own despair. Without thinking of her younger children- the thing that led her to drink herself into stonelike oblivion and abdicate her senses to the cold waters of the Ladoga.
Abdicate herself, and simply die.
Now and then the rain toyed with falling.
Leningrad was the one that never fell, but the rain always would.
When I could no longer bear avoiding the Kirov's beautiful old façade, I circled it three times, without looking up. When I could no longer bear to avert my eyes, I glanced at the piece of paper in my hand, and began climbing the wrought iron back stairs to the lighted windows above.
Once inside, the ambiance of the place threatened to hurt me- sweetly, somnolently, like a Chopin etude, building to a place of poignance that brings you to orgasmic tears, pain and pleasure and hot tension behind the eyes.
It was impossible not to inhale the century- the scent of old theatres is specific and sentimental. Old wood, and soft dust, dry warmth and rusted railings, worn walls and scuffed baseboards, and large empty spaces of silence with halos of suspended lights.
The Kirov House was empty, in the desert of night, but a few rooms glowed, flooded with the lambent old metal lamps. The halls were dimly lit. I was climbing an old, wide staircase, beneath a high shadowed ceiling. A deluge of rain poured down cold over the high windows, and ran in clear rivulets that softly spanked the glass, distorting the world beyond this oasis.
But it really was an oasis, not a mirage, and so I knew that the lithe body that I saw through the open door in the semi-lit top floor studio was also not a mirage-
It was him. Her lover, unaware in his element.
I have always been able to move quietly, when it's called for. There are times, of course, when you don't want to go quietly. When the sharp, even strike of a Militsiyja boot heel is the most efficacious sound in the world-
And there are times to walk softly and carry a massive truncheon.
I entered the studio, passed the threshold.
It was the strangest feeling- as if I were walking onstage in a play, and he was an actor who knew to expect me, knew his lines, and was only pretending oblivion.
He was stretching, one leg up on the bar, toes pushed to a pointe. Leaning down, holding fast, then rising once more.
His eyes were empty, distracted. He was utterly focused on his task. Lengthen, and perfect. Form and function.
I paused, watching.
His name was Merkurii Barshai. This, I knew. I knew from his file, I knew from the calls I'd made.
My jaw twitched, and as he bent forward over his extended leg once more, I spoke, my voice quietly resonant in the still, warm room.
"So you're the one."
The bowed head raised, and a dark green eye gazed out from beneath slips of loose shagged hair, light chestnut in tone.
"She said she had a husband," the dancer said, after a moment. He turned away, but not before I saw the suffering on his face.
"Look at me," I demanded, and he finally did, turning his smoothly squared jaw and regarding me with his cossack's eyes. Now I could see the sleepless circles beneath, the stain and flush of tears both shed and unshed. "I'm not her husband. I'm her son."
The dancer's posture shifted. I was amazed in that moment, at his mastery of his art, even unwittingly- that a mere body was capable of portraying actual emotion in its kinetic expression.
In that moment I could see why he should have been named a principal dancer- it was all there, honest and unconcealed- guilt, remorse, regret, chagrin, and over it all, a hanging patina of sorrow.
I read it all in his shoulders, his back, the slight give of his arms, the miniscule faltering in his grace, like the skip of a phonograph.
"...Her son."
He raised his heel slightly and lifted his leg from the barre. There was muscle flexion all along his powerful thigh, a masculine strength that up close bore no resemblance to Swan Lake.
He turned and faced me, dark-eyed and solemn.
He regarded me, silently, his expression cryptic.
I know what he saw.
My crisp grey uniform, from cap to coat to jodhpurs to tall, polished boots that clung menacingly over calf. Eyes that were light green grey like Siberian river ice, blond hair swept smoothly back from my brow.
Purposefully done, for it accentuated the sharpness of my face, and the lie of my generous lips.
"You're MVD," he said finally.
"Yes," I said. "Surely Avdotia told you that her husband is one of the Ministry Direktors."
"Avdotia?" he smiled bitterly. "I knew her as Evadna. Among all the others."
"The others?"
"Several Evadnes have come and gone, and made me their Apollo."
"Bedding the bored wives of Party men," I said, with an indistinct snort. "How bourgeois."
He paused.
"She was my favorite."
"She was my mother."
The straight tone of my voice seemed to draw him back to the topic at hand.
"And no. She never told me her husband was a MENT. Much less her son." His eyes seemed reluctant to seek my face, but he couldn't stop himself, taking me in across the empty space between us. "You look like her."
"Sometimes."
He nodded, slowly.
"You look like someone else as well."
"Him."
He shook his head, laying his palms against his brow.
"Yes, of course," he said, softly. "Of course you would."
"You're young," I said.
A dancer, of course- I knew that he would be young. But it was another matter to see him here in this open room, with his overlong shag and carefully sculpted form, scarcely older than I was.
"She told me her son was seven," he said, hesitantly. "A little boy."
I raised my eyebrows, feeling a fleeting, irrational pain, even though I knew it wasn't deliberate on her part, mentioning Andrei alone.
"She has two sons," I replied. "I'm the one she doesn't talk about to lovers."
I understood why. It was necessary for the illusion, for if she spoke of me, she would be forced to think of what she was doing, who she was, and who this young man was to her. If he was some twisted Oedipal proxy.
Inside, however, was the lingering ache of uncertainty, and the indelible memory of her own words to my father, the MVD Colonel, on the day he'd learned of the affair and driven her from the house- the day he'd driven her to die.
You've already poisoned Ilarion. Must you destroy Andrei as well?
The dancer titled his head, spilling layers of soft hair across his jaw.
His eyes seemed to trail over me like diving birds, not quite committed to the sky.
"Then you are not Andrushka," he said.
"No," I replied, with utter dispassion. "I am Ilarion Alexandrovich."
"Ilarion," he repeated. "Comes from the Greek you know. Hilario- it means joyful."
I hadn't known that. Nor had I expected to learn it from my dead mother's lover.
"I go by Lasha. And you?" I asked, even though I had read that name a hundred times since yesterday.
