Prologue 2
Anya
The first thing I feel is the hard asphalt against my body. Not the pain, strangely.
No.
The pain comes later.
I know what it’s like to live with it. Being a ballerina means constant pain.
A swollen bunion, a loose nail, thigh muscles tearing during the final three hours of a rehearsal that should have lasted only two.
This kind of suffering has been part of my repertoire for as long as I can remember.
It comes with the job. But the pain hitting me now is different.
The cold, hard, gravelly asphalt is merciless against me. It smells like rain and garbage, but that doesn’t worry me—not when my cheek is pressed against it and my mouth fills with a warm, metallic liquid.
Blood.
My mind can’t process what’s happening until a sound catches my attention. A car engine—accelerating, not braking. Years of training and the methodical observation ballet demands tell me the driver isn’t panicking the way anyone who’d just hit someone would. He’s cold, fleeing like a professional.
I turn my head half a centimeter—it’s all I can manage. My hip doesn’t respond when I try to get up, and neither does my right leg, which stays in place but not exactly where it should be. This is information I still can’t quite process.
I turn my attention to the car driving away.
It’s a black sedan with tinted windows, nothing remarkable. It’s at the end of the street, already turning the corner to the right. K-7-9 and something else I couldn’t make out. My head starts to hurt, and something below my waist has that numb, tingling feeling.
K-7-9.
K-7-9.
I repeat it mentally, knowing it’s important to remember.
Then the pain hits me all at once. It’s horrible.
It reminds me of when I tore my groin ligament at seventeen and kept dancing anyway.
At the end of the performance, I rushed offstage to vomit in the wings, then passed out from the pain.
Distant voices echo and hurried footsteps approach.
“Call an ambulance. She’s been hit!”
The woman screams, but she’s not talking to me. She must not be talking to me—maybe she’s talking about me, but not to me. I close my eyes and repeat one more time before losing consciousness.
K-7-9.
Hospital.
It’s incredible how they all smell the same, anywhere in the world.
I’ve been in plenty. Always because of dance.
Twisted ankle, broken wrist, cracked rib…
Ballet is more brutal than people imagine.
I think I was nineteen when I needed an MRI that revealed premature cartilage wear in my knee.
Anyway, it’s always this same smell: alcohol, IV plastic, bad unsalted food, and antiseptic.
I wake up surrounded by this smell and a light bright enough to blind anyone.
It’s stupid to have such a harsh white light positioned so high.
Whose idea was this? Light like this is terrible for ballerinas—it flattens the body’s form, kills any definition, and doesn’t bring that drama we love. But wait. Why am I thinking about this?
Then I remember.
I was leaving rehearsal when a car jumped the curb and hit me.
Run over.
Black sedan.
I search for the button beside the bed to call the nurse, then gather the courage to look down.
My right leg is completely immobilized, from hip to ankle.
There’s a metal frame over the cast, and pins hold it in place at knee height.
There look to be three, but there might be more.
Cold embraces me. My heart races while simultaneously feeling like it’s being sucked into a vacuum.
Breathe, Anya. Don’t panic, just breathe.
Part of ballet training is learning to breathe correctly: slow, nasal, controlled. We can’t cry onstage, be afraid of it, or go pale and freeze. No. You just breathe deeply and continue, even through pain and fear. I’ve been doing this for sixteen years.
When the doctor finally enters the room, I’m already sitting up, or as close to it as I could manage given my condition. I wait in silence for him to start speaking, keeping the fear, apprehension, and panic locked tight inside me. I need to be professional now.
“Miss Voronova.”
“Yes.”
“I’m Dr. Mirinov. I handled your case and performed your surgery last night. You’ve been awake for about…” he checks his wristwatch, “minutes, correct? Did you follow all the nurse’s instructions?”
I nod, but it’s a lie. The short, stocky woman talked about IV fluids, medications, rest schedule, and visiting hours. I just nodded in response to everything. I don’t want to know any of that. I want to know about my leg.
“How is my leg?”
“Do you want me to be direct, or would you prefer to start with the better news?”
I look at him and quickly realize he’s not a man for theatrics, despite offering me the gentler path. This is good. It’s exactly what I need.
“Be direct, please.” He nods, almost as if grateful.
“The right patella was destroyed, and you also lost a significant portion of the fibula.
The anterior cruciate ligament ruptured completely, and the posterior was partially compromised.
We reconstructed it as best we could. Under the circumstances, you'll be able to return to a relatively normal life, which, considering the extent of the injury, is excellent news.
Your joints, however, won't function as they did before. You should expect chronic pain.”
I take a deep breath and lift my chin, waiting for him to continue.
“Your career at the Bolshoi…”
“There's no career anymore.”
The doctor stops mid-sentence and raises his eyebrows half a millimeter. I think that's the most expressive display this man has made since he walked in here.
“You already knew?”
“Have you ever danced with a destroyed patella, Doctor?”
He pauses, unsure how to respond.
“If it's already difficult with it intact and requires years of dedication, discipline, practice, and military-level rigor… Well, you understand. I won't be dancing anymore,” I say dryly, despite the bitterness of the words. “You may continue.”
He watches me carefully. I search for pity in that look, but after a few seconds, I conclude there isn't any.
It's the look of an experienced professional recalibrating his approach to the patient.
I imagine he expected hysteria—someone who would cry, scream, or go into denial.
But no. He was wrong about me, like most people.
“Rehabilitation will take between nine and eighteen months. You'll be able to walk without crutches within six months and will be cleared for moderate physical activity in a year. But the knee will probably give out on you. Cold days, stress, and overexertion will be your enemies.”
“Okay.”
“Over time, you'll learn to read the signs and know what to expect.” I nod. “Any other questions?”
Who was the son of a bitch driving that car?
I don't ask, though. Dr. Mirinov doesn't have the answer to that question, so there's no point wasting it on him.
“No, Doctor. Thank you very much.”
He nods and turns to leave. But he stops by the door and casts one last look over his shoulder.
“I saw you dance once. I took my wife to see The Nutcracker last year.”
“It's a beautiful piece.”
I say simply. He nods and leaves shortly after. I'm left alone in that room that's too white, too cold, and too empty. And all that's left for me is to think. Think and consider my next steps, with all the irony that expression might carry in this case.
The next five years pass in a blur.
In the blink of an eye, I'm twenty-six years old and it feels like my life simply happened without me.
The savings I'd built up from my salary at the Bolshoi are gone in four months.
I had no idea private physical rehabilitation cost as much as a small apartment each month, and by this point, the Theater had already paid out the minimum insurance and dismissed me with a fruit basket and a card signed by the artistic director.
It was the same protocol they used when a close relative of a company member died.
They gave me the damn condolence basket, as if I had died.
Pathetic.
I didn't die. Just my career and life as I knew it.
The day I handed over the keys to my small one-bedroom apartment in downtown Moscow and moved back in with my parents, it was as if something really had died inside me.
Vysotsk is a dead little town on the Baltic coast, three and a half hours from St. Petersburg on roads in terrible condition.
It has two supermarkets, a bar, and a bankrupt dance school, where I ended up looking for work the day after I moved in.
In the first year, still struggling not to limp, I heard my father ask for money three times to pay off a debt he swore would be the last. I gave in the first two times; the third, I didn't. He called me an ungrateful whore, and my mother shouted from the kitchen that he was right.
It was the first of so many times that I've lost count.
My mother has been drinking cheap vodka for as long as I can remember, but in recent years, she lost control and drowned in it, looking decades older than she really is.
For Galina Voronova, I'm the reason her life is in ruins.
Everything is my fault—my body, my accident, the money I supposedly owe her for paying for my ballet classes since I was five.
She accuses me of hiding money, and I can't make her understand that I only have two hundred rubles[5] to get through the month.
I don't waste time trying to convince her.
She's only interested in being right, never in understanding.
I work at the dance school from nine to one, and in the afternoon, I give private lessons to three little girls. At the end of the day, when the school closes, I keep the keys and come back to try.
Try to dance.
Try to be myself again.
With the studio closed at ten at night, I finally strip off my pants to just my leggings and walk to the light switch, turning on only the corner lights.
Not because I prefer it that way, but because Yevgeni, the school's owner, is obsessed with saving money and counts every damn kilowatt spent here.
The dim light falls across the wooden floor in uneven, yellowed patches. The mirror opposite the barre reflects a version of myself I only half recognize: bun in place, shoulders back, chin where it should be. But from the waist down, I feel like a stranger.
I walk to the barre, rest my right hand on it, and take a deep breath.
Plié. It’s just a plié, Anya.
I bend my knees slowly, lowering my hips. My left leg obeys, but my right trembles halfway down—a tremor that starts in my destroyed knee and travels up my thigh like an electric wave. I freeze. Wait. Then rise again.
Now, tendu.
I extend my right leg forward, pointe shoe touching the floor.
The shoe is worn, but it’s still the most comfortable pair I have.
I slide it slowly across the wooden floor.
Slowly. More slowly than a five-year-old student would.
My shattered kneecap responds with a dry crack, like a rusty lock.
I swallow the pain and move my leg to the side, then back.
Okay, I did it. Now, rond de jambe.
I lift my leg, tracing a semicircle in the air and…
My leg fails. It doesn’t bend, doesn’t give, doesn’t even warn me.
It simply stops working for half a second.
As if my knee had vanished. As if someone had yanked the base piece from a towering Jenga stack.
My whole body wobbles, and the floor rushes up to meet me.
I hit my hip, then my elbow, and my forehead grazes the barre.
I lie there. Motionless for a while, accepting the reality that’s been with me for five years: the pain.
It’s not the stage pain I knew my whole life, or the honest burn of muscles after hours and hours of training. This pain is worse. Constant. It lives inside my bone and radiates through my entire leg. I hate to admit I know it better than anything else.
“Get up,” I order myself, refusing to stay on the floor.
I return to the barre and rest both hands on it, just enough to steady myself before trying again. I put weight on my bad leg and let go of the barre. I last only three seconds before it gives out and I’m back on the floor.
I get up again.
Instead of trying another movement, I just stand there in front of the mirror, both hands on the barre.
But I can’t trust my own knee anymore. When I feel steady enough, I walk slowly to the opposite wall and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor.
The woman in the mirror stares back at me—bun still in place, but makeup slightly smudged from the workday, shirt slipping off one shoulder, eyes defeated.
“Shit.”
I stop looking at her. I stretch out my good leg and carefully bend the other, waiting for the throbbing pain to pass. The water stain on the ceiling—strangely shaped like a map of Asia—is still there, just like every day since I started working in this tiny, failing studio.
I can’t do this anymore.
I’ve known this for a while, but it seems like only now is the realization actually hitting me. And it comes with such force that I don’t even feel afraid anymore. It’s just a fact. The same way I knew, on that first day in the hospital, that I would never dance again.
I can’t stay in this city anymore. I can’t keep working for pennies for a man who reeks of rotten cabbage and talks about kilowatts.
I can’t keep cooking for a woman who calls me a lying whore and a man who treats me like an ATM.
I can’t keep hearing my right knee creak when I get up in the middle of the night to tiptoe to the bathroom and call this a life.
There has to be a way out. Any way.
I think about the apartment in Moscow I had to give up after the accident.
About the friends from the corps de ballet who stopped returning my messages before I’d even been gone a year.
Then I think about my father, who always claims to know someone who’ll bring us a miraculous solution—and the following week, that same person shows up at the door to collect a debt. I think about my mother…
No, I don’t think about her. I don’t want to think.
I bring my hand to my left ear, playing with my grandmother’s antique pearl earring.
Ever since she gave it to me when I moved to the Bolshoi boarding school as a teenager, spinning the pearl between my thumb and forefinger has calmed me.
Aleksandra Voronova was the only person in this family who looked at me and saw me as a whole person.
She died when I was seventeen and never lived to see the broken person I’ve become.
“I need to get out of here,” I say, looking up at that ugly water stain. “Any way I can.”