The Leningrad Dancers
When the talented Mrs. Lubikov was killed by a shell burst while digging through the frozen mounds behind the empty city stables for food, her death brought the number of members of the Leningrad Dancers killed while digging through garbage to an even four; three others had been picked off by snipers; eleven picked off by the passing winter; a baker’s dozen killed by disease; one by a falling wall; and two women had the stunningly good fortune to die of old age. This was nothing compared to the number of members of the Leningrad Singers killed since the siege began some eight months earlier—the once mighty Singers were now lucky to scrape up enough members for a weak quartet in the ruins of the Mariinsky Theater—but the decline in Dancers was painful enough at the casting call for Sleeping Beauty.
Tchaikovsky would spin in his grave,” Mrs. Yesenin cried out as she counted the dancers lined up in front of her, “if someone hadn’t dug him up and burned his coffin last month.”
She counted eight dancers. Some were dressed in clothes stuffed with wallpaper and looked like wasp nests, others in rags and bed sheets, the luckiest in the various pets’ furs. None had slippers or tights.
“The generals are right to say ‘War is hell on ballet.’”
Despite the killing wind of early spring coming off of Lake Lodoga to the north, Mrs. Yesenin was wearing a leotard she had fashioned from several pillow cases; her tights were the sleeves of her dead husband’s dinner jacket lengthened with a few feet of the sheer curtains from her parlor. Her feet stuck out of the wrist cuffs, so that if you looked quickly enough it appeared to be walking on her hands. Her only acknowledgement to the cold were the boots on her feet, the cap on her head, and the wool blanket she wore as both a shawl and overshirt.
She felt ballerina beautiful. As the director and choreographer, she felt she had to lead by example.
They were standing in a bomb crater on the leeward side of the gutted Imperial Theater. The building was too unsteady now for any serious prancing. A collapsing wall had ruined Mrs. Yesenin’s first recital back in November, sending the few remaining patrons of the arts running into the pockmarked street, and killing off the only dancer left in the city comfort- able on point in toe shoes. Mrs. Yesenin consoled herself with the soothing thought that the city’s last art critic had been run over by a tank in the September counterattack, sparing her from a blistering review. Now as she looked at the shivering remnants of her troupe, she wondered what else could go wrong. Her assistant, Sasha Andropov, answered her thought.
“The Emergency Philharmonic is finished,” Sasha whispered. “The Home Guard melted down Pasha’s trumpet for shell casings. Is no matter now, Pasha was sent to the front for the spring offensive. The defense of the Rodina requires much sacrifice.”
Mrs. Yesenin shoved her hands in her armpits for warmth and sighed at the news. “Yes, the motherland needs all of our efforts now. I am sure the brave men and boys on the lines need ballet now more than ever. We’ve much work to do. I need to choreograph something new, something to lift morale, and with no music and only eight dancers…”
The women dropped to the ground as a whistling filled the air. Seconds later a tremendous explosion shook the earth. Dirt and bricks rained into the crater: the Wehrmacht guns across the Neva River had started up for the day. Mrs. Yesenin rose to her feet, dusting herself off, and counted in a weary manner of a woman familiar with painful subtractions.
“With no music and only…seven dancers, then.”
She dismissed the remaining ladies for the day and hurried home through the debris-littered streets, alternating between grand and demi-jete`s and a few pas de chas to discourage any bored sniper who might shoot an old ballerina through the spine to stay sharp.
Practice makes perfect, she always told her dancers, and she assumed snipers were no different. So she pirouetted around the rubble of Serdobolskaya Street, working on tightening her spin, and tried to think of herself as a whirling dervish and not worry about the tapping foot of a German sharpshooter as he timed the target that was flashing in his sights: stomach, back, stomach, back, stomach, back. With a final flourish of dizzying fouttes, she safely made her way home.
Mrs. Yesenin pushed again, this time shaking with the effort, and finally closed her front door. The metal filing cabinet weighed close to a hundred pounds and blocked the wind almost as well as the original wooden door she had burned for warmth in December. Opening and closing it was a problem, but only a minor one. At least she had a door.
Most of the wood in Leningrad had been burned months ago when the Red Army retreated across the steppes and the Germans surrounded the city. Even as the world burned, Leningrad froze. Everything flamable was fair game as the cold blew in from the Baltic and the city contracted into individuals and their struggles for warmth. The deaf couple across the avenue from Mrs. Yesenin had taken down their roof timbers in late autumn for fuel, confident the siege would be broken before winter. They now sat gesturing obscenities to each other, occasionally pulling down their pants to make a salient point. The older battle-scarred veterans of the earlier Great War and Revolution had burned their wooden legs during the coldest nights; and now as the spring weather crept up the coast, there was a charming parade of old men hopping around on one leg through puddles of melting snow, all to the delight of the children who clapped as they passed, as if the misery of the grownups was nothing more than a poorly anticipated parade of folly.
The worst part of the long winter, it seemed to Mrs. Yesenin, was that in the middle of the screaming explosions and the silence of freezing to death, no one ever thought about dancing anymore. She thought about dancing. What else was there to think about?, she wondered at night as she jammed scraps of flannel to block out the sounds of the hungry dogs and their dying owners that filled the cold air. With a little imagination, what came through sounded to her like stringed instruments and most nights she would fall asleep with the sweet thought of being serenaded by thousands of anonymous violinists.
The hours bracketing the dawn were as quiet as a heavy snowfall. The birds, perhaps understanding how wrenching and foreign their sweet songs must be in a time such as this, remained silent on their perches. The people of the city were quiet as well. Those who were so loudly dying in the middle of the night were now muted in death; and the sick and injured suffered in silence, perhaps aware that they were next in line for the nightly serenade of the tired dancer.
As she sat watching the potato fires dying in the strengthening light, with the rumblings and the bumblings of the slumbering armies off to the southwest, Mrs. Yesenin felt a pressing debt to those anonymous violinists who played for her throughout the long Russian night.
The next morning was Spam Wednesday, the day that some supplies were snuck in from the south-east, and Mrs. Yesenin dined with her hungry dancers on the bomb crater on the delicious meat and some spoiled turnips. She waited until the loaf of black bread had been passed around before she spoke.
“The hoarder Yuri told me that our army is massing at Malaya Vishera and prepared to enter the city soon.” She chewed on her bread while no one cheered the news. Rumors of liberation had stunk up the air since September, with various reports placing the Red Army in Pushkin, Gathchina, and even west in Lomonosov. Every day the rumors came in promising relief. And every day a new way to die was discovered.
There were now only six dancers left. Sonya Andropov, sister of Sasha, had died in the night from food poisoning after improperly cooking an animal she had found dead near the river, this despite the city-wide campaign to inform residents of the need to cook all suspect meat well-done. Her children, recovering in a makeshift hospital, would only say that it was like a badger but tastier: siege speak for wharf rat.
“So,” Mrs. Yesenin continued. “I have a wonderful idea for our spring recital. Let us perform for our troops as they make their way up from Vishera. I heard it helped in Stalingrad.
“You heard that from Mikail the Liar,” said the widow Velikodvorski. “The old lech, he will say anything to sleep with a Dancer. He told me last month that the peasants of Minsk beat back the Germans with rocks and deep plies. Then he groped the babushka Raisa until she kicked him in the shin.
Baba Raisa nodded in agreement. “He’s mad for us since his wife Anna the Fornicator went to the barracks to join with the Home Guard. I hear their morale is raised often.”
The women smiled to the extent that they still could. Laughter had fled the city long ago and they were left with the hurt smiles of women so far removed from happiness that the very thought of laughter was just another cause for sighs and tears. So the Dancers finished their bread and started to stretch in preparation for today’s dance. Necks and knees and elbows cracked like rifle shots as the women warmed up.
Soon they spread out in the center of the crater and began to spin. Weary arms were raised up against the gray sky as the Dancers went through their individual port de bras arm routines. Before long the crater looked as if it were filled with wrinkled wheat writhing in the wind.
They began to twirl faster, slipping on peebles and loose concrete but never lowering their arms; and the siege was lifted, if only for this moment. Thoughts returned to the faces of the dead or missing husbands and sons long pushed aside in the numbing daily routine of not eating and not dying. Tears mixed with sweat and the crater steamed with hurt and desire. They continued to spin.
Mrs. Yesenin felt that her own arms would gloriously separate form her shoulders as she grabbed ever higher for the sweets of yesterday. She thought about her husband, Rudolph, killed on the second day of the assault and left out on the wide plains outside of the city with so many other men when the panzers roared in and the daylight moaned in witness. She thought of the way he used to kiss her in the mornings on his way to the foundry, holding in his bitter coffee breath because he knew it would wake her; and the way he sang songs in a loud falsetto as the two of them sat drinking on their balcony that overlooked Znamensky Square, risking the gulag to see her smile: “Tak prokhodit mirskaya slave! We want bread! Death to the tyrants” he squeaked like a drunken mouse as she rolled on the floor with laughter.
A barking sound escaped her now as she danced, and then another, and another. Only after the third noise left her did she recognize it as her own laughter, so long had it been since there was any reason to laugh. She was shocked and then thrilled that she could still do so, and quickly the laughter flowed like the swollen Neva. Nothing could stop it and she momentarily she would be emptied of her past pleasures and happiness, with nothing to ever replace it. And still she laughed. The other women, startled by the sound but still spinning, joined in one by one, and soon their laughter rolled down empty boulevards like bouncing thistle. And still they danced.
The Leningrad Dancers spun faster and faster now, kicking up dust like smoke from a signal fire: “So many are dead but we, for now, for today, for this dance, are alive.” The message was lifted by the twilight breeze and carried over various armies gathering for yet another battle and unaware that perhaps a larger battle had just been won deep inside the barricades.
Ignoring the shadows that filled the bomb crater like cold soup, the laughing women danced on, while the night, which in this sad land seemed always just seconds from falling regardless of sunshine, entered the quiet city of Leningrad as a sigh.
Originally printed in The North Atlantic Review 2000/2001, copyright by pm skinner
