Chapter 10
Alisa had always dreamed of coming to the USA, ever since childhood, since those geography lessons in the third or fourth grade, when they studied the landmarks of America and Alisa saw, in faded textbook photographs, how beautiful the country seemed.
Of course, those had only been pictures, and over so many years everything could have changed beyond recognition, but Alisa flew to America anyway, carrying with her the feeling she had preserved since childhood.
Before that there had been four more national championships. Alisa and Lev had skated well at all of them, well enough to be selected to continue, and at every championship they competed against Tora and Loke.
And almost every time these Norwegians won.
Naturally, each defeat chipped away at Alisa in some small, painful way, but after every loss she ended up in Tora’s arms, being comforted by her or told with softness that the medals were not what actually mattered, that what mattered were the performances themselves and the certainty that they would still be chosen for the Olympic qualifiers.
And every night with Tora dissolved into emptiness by morning, because by daylight they had to behave as if nothing had happened, as if they knew each other no more deeply than rivals on the ice. It upset Alisa, but there was nothing to be done. Too much was at stake.
And those rare meetings, one night here and there during those few competitions, could hardly even be called friends with benefits?
Rivals with benefits? They were only a release for both of them and nothing more, or at least that was what Alisa kept telling herself.
Even though it hurt her, neither of them took another step closer to each other.
They rarely wrote to each other. In Russia the internet had begun to disappear little by little, to break apart, and every day it became harder to access the global network. Finding a VPN that still worked had turned into a real challenge.
So they communicated through SMS sometimes when messengers were not working, as if they had somehow slipped backward into the distant, prehistoric years of the 2000s…
And that frightened Alisa.
All of this politics exhausted her and filled her with a helpless kind of stress, because it kept intruding into her life every day, while she herself could do absolutely nothing about it.
She was only one person.
Apparently everything frightened her, or perhaps the tension before the Olympic qualifying competition had become too great for her to bear.
There was tension everywhere. Hopes had gathered around the athletes from all over the country, because it was important, desperately important, to win enough quotas for the Olympic Games.
After the previous World Championships, a lot of people had suddenly subscribed to Alisa’s Instagram.
At first she had thought that maybe people simply liked her skating.
But then the comments began to appear…
“Russians should not compete internationally at all.”
“Do not let them go anywhere.”
“They do not deserve to skate on the world stage.”
And much worse than that. There was always something worse. Those comments disappointed her more than she wanted to admit. In the end she almost stopped posting anything at all. Her social media became nearly empty.
And yet sometimes, late at night, she still watched Tora’s stories.
Tora spoke there with that same bright enthusiasm, smiling into the camera, talking about ordinary figure skaters’ things, about training, about her life as a skater, about how they were preparing for the Olympic qualifiers and how many people supported them.
Under Tora’s posts there was no hatred. No one wrote that she should not skate. No one told them they did not belong. And for some reason that hurt Alisa too.
So even before Alisa boarded the plane, after several months of waiting for an American visa, they applied six months ago anyway as a reserved pair, but now they were among the main ones, and after impossibly exhausting training, she already felt utterly drained. The flight was going to be very long.
And even before that, they had crossed half the world just to get onto the plane to America.
There were no direct flights from St. Petersburg anymore.
So first they flew through Finland, then to France, to Paris to be precise, and only from there boarded their third flight of the day, the one that would take them to America, so far away, enormous and beyond the ocean, so incomprehensible and obscure, and yet still inviting, though no longer because of simple tourist curiosity.
They, or rather Alisa and Lev, had come to fight for Olympic quotas for their country, even if officially they would compete under a neutral flag, for the organization of independent athletes, because Russia had been banned everywhere.
But that did not really change anything. Well it did, but… fuck…
The pressure remained exactly the same, whether they performed with a flag or without one. The whole world still understood where they came from, who they were, and what they wanted.
“Russian figure skaters do not give up.” That was what was written across their fleece sweatshirts, along with the symbols of Russia. At these competitions they were still allowed to wear them, but not anywhere officially. Not while being on cameras.
Alisa stared out the window, feeling the crushing weight of the previous two flights. Her head buzzed and seemed ready to burst, like an old tin can swollen from being left too long somewhere forgotten, but she did not care.
Outside the window Paris was drowning in rain.
The plane gathered speed, and droplets slid quickly down the glass before being caught by the wind and thrown upward again, scattering into the air.
As they climbed higher, she watched the lights of the night city below.
She had been to Paris once before, a long time ago, as a child, when she had come here for a summer figure skating camp.
It had been an unforgettable, strange, and wonderful experience, although the French had stubbornly refused to speak English with her, and she herself knew almost no French, so she had not managed to make friends with anyone except the other foreigners, the same unfortunate children who could not speak French at all.
But after the camp ended, of course, they had never seen each other again.
There was another pair of skaters on the plane with them, and besides them three girls who competed in singles, all of them strong enough to fight for quotas too. For the entire country there could only be three quotas at most, and that was exactly what everyone was chasing.
Which meant the pressure on all of them was unbearable.
Five coaches were flying with them as well, so this small corner of the plane was crowded with skaters. Everyone seemed occupied with something of their own. Someone was probably already rewatching performances on a laptop, someone else discussing training sessions, jumps, mistakes, combinations.
But Alisa did not want to talk about any of it. She was so tired after four months of hellish training that she wanted only one thing: to sleep.
To sleep and sleep.
So after the quotas were decided, she dreamed of disappearing somewhere far away into the forest and sleeping there for a week or two, alone and untouched, although even that felt like a luxury she could not afford.
The pair flying with them to compete for the quotas was older than they were, more experienced, more confident — Ilya and Maria. They were twenty-seven and twenty-nine, had skated together for years, and had already won Olympic gold twice, first in 2014 and then again in 2018.
Next to them, Alisa and Lev felt like they had been sent here simply as fresh meat.
At least that was how Alisa thought of it.
Even now she still could not believe that out of all the pairs in the country, they had been the ones chosen to represent it and fight for the Olympic quotas.
The thought still seemed unreal, almost absurd, because it was too important.
The responsibility on their shoulders had no limit.
And they had to win.
At any cost.
* * *
Boston was an interesting city. As they approached it, the skyline unfolded beneath the airplane window in a forest of high-rise buildings that looked like small skyscrapers, although there was something oddly uniform about them, everything square and broad and heavy, as though the whole city had been assembled from enormous blocks and laid out with deliberate precision.
Even the air seemed different here, sweeter somehow, and Alisa could not understand why until someone mentioned that it was the ocean, that faint trace of salt in the wind lending Boston a strange charm.
At first glance, at least from the airport, it was beautiful.
They arrived in the evening, and because of the time difference Alisa had the uncomfortable feeling that the day had been stretched far beyond its natural limits, as though it had no intention of ending at all.
She wanted nothing more than to collapse into a bed and sleep for twenty-four hours.
The moment they climbed into a taxi, she leaned against the Lev’s shoulder.
He was asleep too, his head tilted awkwardly against the window, while the Pike remained alert and in charge of everything else, shepherding them through the rest of the journey like a mother keeping watch over two exhausted children.
The next thing Alisa knew, the Pike was shaking her gently by the shoulder and telling her it was time to wake up because they had arrived.
Outside, it was already fully dark. Somehow she managed to stumble through the hotel lobby, into the elevator, down the corridor, and finally into room 1515 on the fifteenth floor.
After a shower, she fell into bed without even glancing at the view of the city beyond the window, too tired to care what Boston looked like at night. She did not even check her phone.
There were messages from Tora.