Page 16 of The Dangerous Dance

"Don't push it."

She smiles into her coffee. It is the most normal thing that has happened to me in two weeks, and I hold onto it for the rest of the morning.

CHAPTER 7

Nadia

The thing about ballet that people who haven't done it seriously don't understand is that it is not graceful.

The grace is the final product, and the final product is built on something that is decidedly not graceful. It is repetition past the point of comfort and well into tedium, the specific pain of a body being asked to hold positions it was not designed to hold, the relationship between a dancer and a mirror that is less aesthetic appreciation than clinical fault-finding. You stand at the barre and you repeat the same sequence until it stops being something you do and starts being something you are, and the moment it becomes the latter is not satisfying in the way people who watch ballet imagine. It is just the new floor. The new place from which to begin finding faults.

Petya runs her studio the way my first teacher ran hers in Moscow — without sentiment, with a specific contempt for anything that prioritizes appearance over foundation. She is sixty-something, compact, with grey hair pulled back so severely it appears to be a structural decision, and she watched me for forty minutes on my first day before saying a single word. What she said was: your left hip is compensating for something and you've let it go too long. Then she turned away and let me work on it, which was more useful than anything elaborate she might have said.

I like her.

Dara comes to the studio three days a week, which is less than me but still substantial. She danced seriously until she was seventeen, when a knee injury made the path she was on no longer viable, and she's maintained enough of it to be a convincing cover and to be, on her good days, genuinely beautiful to watch. Today she is having a good day, which I can tell because she's stopped monitoring herself in the mirror and is just moving.

I watch her for a moment and think about what it means to stop monitoring yourself. To trust the body to do the thing it knows how to do without the mind inserting itself every four counts to audit the result.

I have not figured out how to do that. In ballet or in anything else.

We work for two hours. Petya corrects my hip three times and on the fourth instance simply stands behind me and places her hands on the joint without speaking, adjusting the angle with the pressure of her palms, and I feel what she's been telling me in a way I couldn't quite access through verbal instruction.

Afterward, Dara and I sit on the studio floor with our backs against the mirror and our water bottles between us and the particular quiet of physical exhaustion, which is one of the cleanest kinds of quiet I know.

"You're somewhere else today," Dara says.

"I'm here."

"Your body is here." She drinks her water. "Where's the rest."

I press the cold bottle against the back of my neck. "I have a meeting tonight."

She doesn't ask with whom. We have developed, over six years, a finely calibrated system of what to ask and what to leave alone. "How long."

"Shouldn't be more than two hours. It's the secondary warehouse on the north side." I keep my voice neutral. "Different from last week."

"Different how."

"Different location. Different approach. The objective this time is to leave something rather than start something." I watch a piece of rosin dust move across the studio floor in a draft from under the door. "A listening device. Calibrated to pick up any conversation within forty feet."

Dara says nothing for a moment. "And your handler wants this done."

"My handler wants this done by the end of the week."

"That's not what I asked."

I look at her. Her expression is the careful one, the one she uses when she's distinguishing between supporting me and agreeing with me, which she has always been precise enough to keep separate. "Viktor wants faster results," I say. "He's called twice this week. The tone is — not relaxed."

"Viktor's tone is never relaxed."

"It's less relaxed than usual." I stand, because sitting on a cold studio floor for too long is one of the things that costs you later. "He reminded me what my father built. What his reputation was. What I represent in terms of that legacy." I roll my left shoulder. "The implication being that my father would not have been caught at a warehouse by the target of the operation."

Dara looks up at me. "Your father was killed at forty-four," she says, with a precision that isn't cruelty but is absolutely not softness either. "His methods produced a specific outcome. Viktor invoking his legacy is Viktor managing you, not honouring him."

I absorb this. I don't respond directly, which Dara knows means I'm filing it somewhere to be examined later. "I'll get the device placed tonight. Viktor gets his results, the timeline moves forward, we move on to the next phase." I pick up my bag. "It's fine."

"You keep saying that."