Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Wings

Roza Musayevna Bakhtiyarova did not return to the capital after she was released from Stalin’s camps. The ex-ballerina moved in with some distant relatives in the Tatar community and established a dance school under the auspices of the Bearings factory. She passed on quietly in 1995 and was buried in St. Christopher’s Graveyard.

After Roza Musayevna’s death, the dance troupe faded and eventually dissolved – without her genius, everything seemed pointless. Stargorod had become her fate; the school was the vocation of her ruined – as it seemed, once and for all – life. At one of her interrogations, right in front of her, the investigator had snapped in two the training wings gifted her (and passed through an English diplomat) by a half-crazed Nizhinsky.

She was strict and would sharply dismiss any of her girls’ dazzling dreams of making it to the Bolshoi: “This is where you were born, and this is where you will be put to use.”

Aigul Sarayev, the pride of our nation, the great flying ballerina, was her student. Her father, Rifat Sarayev, had wanted his daughter to master the art of gold embroidery, just like his wife, who had died young. Dance, he said, is not a profession; it is utter misfortune.

The girl worshipped her father, cried bitterly, but could not give up dancing. When, in her final year of high school, she fell in love with Vasya Peryshkin, her father, who had dreamed of wedding her to a Tatar, stopped talking to her altogether. Vasya was drafted into the army. He died in Grozny, during the first Chechen Campaign.

Spring arrived, and the birds sang their mating songs. Aigul fled the wake and wandered into the stall of old Kambiz, who since time immemorial had been trading all sorts of junk and antiques near the kremlin’s entry tower. The Persian resembled a tower himself: ponderous and unscathed, he perched on a massive stool. His legs were like pillars; his wildly brilliant eyes like two searchlights.

The girl went inside; Kambiz blinked his eyes in greeting. Alongside the Pioneer bugles and the carved distaffs Aigul spotted a set of small wings mounted in a leather harness. Self-conscious in front of the old Persian, she tried them on before a mirror. The wings fit perfectly: they didn’t restrict her movement, nor did they rub on her shoulder blades.

“Not afraid?” the old man asked.

“What’s there to be afraid of anymore?” Aigul replied.

The stall owner took her small bill and brushed it on the shelves loaded with goods, as if sealing a deal with Fate.

The wings, fashioned to a one-eighth scale by some unknown craftsman in some unknown town, begat a new Aigul Sarayev. She staged the ballet Eurydice. Naked and wildly sensual, as flexible as a lash, she exploded the aura of tragedy, flying across the stage full of life – but landing as a sorrowful, discarded shadow from the Kingdom of the Dead. Aigul outlined her slanted eyes with make-up in a way that allowed her face to express something languid and bestial, just as the great Nizhinsky had done in The Afternoon of a Faun. Some imbecile lashed out at her innovative dance in an article in the Stargorod Herald titled “Sex on Stage,” and she ran off to Petersburg, and then to Paris, and soon became famous the world over.

I watched Night Flight, which had made Aigul famous, with Roza Musayevna, on the government TV channel. The old ballerina was ill and I had stopped in to see her. Aigul flew across the stage in large, webbed wings crafted by a hereditary wing-maker in Verona, the last of his kind.

“The little bird flew away. No use for her here,” the old teacher said of the performance.

A week later, Bakhtiyarova died. A month later, the shoemaker Rifat passed on. Aigul did not return to bury either of them, something the yellow press slobbered over for quite a while. Aigul doesn’t give interviews, and basically talks to no one, always giving the impression that she lives on another planet, and thus she is often reproached for arrogance and haughtiness. The journalists have nicknamed Sarayev “the doleful diva” because she always performs tragic roles.

Not long ago I ran into Volokitin, the head of the Department of Culture, and chatted with him about the monument the city had promised to erect at the gravesite of Roza Musayevna.

“Now is not the time. National projects are the priority, and all money is going to teachers and doctors.”

Out of sorts, I walked to the cemetery. A large Rolls Royce with darkened windows pulled out of the gate. Not the sort of car you see in Stargorod.

I brushed off last year’s leaves from Bakhtiyarova’s grave and suddenly I noticed, lying on the cement gravestone, a set of small, worn-out wings on a threadbare harness. I picked them up, and as I was looking at them, a girl of about fifteen popped up from behind me – I think I had seen her break-dancing in the park, near the monument to Kirov, where the kids hang out.

“May I?”

She snatched the wings from me and put them on. They fit her as if she was born for them. In the face of such impudence I lost my power of speech. The girl smiled lightly, leapt up, and soared into the air. Fragile, almost weightless, she flew above the gravestones and disappeared through the branches of the cemetery’s linden trees.