Chapter 13
Anya
His side of the bed is cold when I wake up. Again. It’s the third night in a row.
Maksim comes to bed after I’m already asleep and leaves before I wake up. I haven’t seen him since that night. The night of the “almost,” as I’ve come to call it in my head.
I almost gave in. Almost begged. Almost lost myself.
The memory of his mouth on my neck sends shivers through me. It’s as if he’s still here, his body hot and heavy on mine, his rough beard scratching a path to my ear.
The sound of his grunts.
I shake my head, pushing the memories away. I climb out of bed and rush to the shower, desperate to wash away this heat. Maksim vanished after that day, for whatever reason, and I refuse to sit here reliving that night like some lovesick teenager, waiting for him to come back.
I have better things to do.
Olga stands with her back to me, stirring a pot that smells of butter and onions. She doesn’t turn around when I come in, much less when I pull out one of the tall stools at the kitchen island and sit down.
“Good morning.”
“Mm.” Her usual response.
She ignores me for two full minutes, and I don’t mind.
In the time I’ve been living here, I’ve noticed she’s not the most talkative person in the world, but she’s attentive.
Especially when it comes to food. Olga offers food to everyone all the time.
Including me. If she really hated me, she wouldn’t make me eat five meals a day.
When she turns around, she’s holding a wooden spoon pointed at me, one eyebrow raised. I hold back a smile.
“Are you going to sit there staring at me all day?”
“Maybe.” I shrug and grab an apple from the fruit bowl.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
By way of answer, I already have my phone in my hand.
“Ballet is rarely quiet,” I say, checking my emails, eager to see if I’ve gotten any responses. “There’s always music, a teacher banging their stick and shouting, sometimes a few pianists.” I shrug again. “I got used to working with noise. Silence bothers me.”
Olga looks at me a second longer than necessary. Maybe she wants to know why I’m really here, what I’m after by telling her these things. I don’t know either. And she doesn’t push, just slides a bowl of potatoes toward me.
“Then start peeling.”
I check my phone one more time. Nothing.
I sent emails to three community programs here in St. Petersburg, offering to teach and prepare new dancers to perform professionally. None of them have responded, but I still have hope.
I take the knife Olga offered me and start helping her.
We stay there for a while, working in silence while the house hums along around us.
It’s relatively calm here most days, but lately I’ve noticed more activity: men walking around the yard, cars coming and going, low voices, doors slamming, and Maksim’s phone buzzing on the nightstand in the early hours, forcing him to get up.
“Something happened,” I comment.
“There’s always something happening around here.”
“He hasn’t been sleeping.”
“Maksim never slept well.” She stops stirring for a moment, frowning as if remembering something unpleasant.
“You talk like you’re his mother,” I say quietly.
The truth is, I don’t know much about him, or about these people who are part of my life now. Maksim introduced Olga as the housekeeper, not his mother, but she seems like much more than a mere employee to me.
“I’ve taken care of him since he was eight years old, since his mother passed away. God rest her soul.” She tastes a bit of the sauce. “I know that boy inside and out, and I know he’s different.”
I don’t ask what she means by that, as much as I want to. I don’t want her to know how much I crave information about him.
Damn, I don’t want to admit even to myself how interested I am in Maksim.
Instead, I change the subject. It’s not as revealing as asking about my husband, but it still makes me uncomfortable to bring up.
I’ve never had anyone to share things with, at least not someone who wasn’t competing with me.
Even my colleagues at the Bolshoi—at the end of the day, we were all competitors. My mother, don’t even get me started.
“I applied to work at a community program,” I say, a bit more shyly than usual. “I want to teach classes to kids who’ve never set foot on a stage. Help prepare them to become professional dancers.”
Instead of trying to talk me out of it, Olga goes in the opposite direction.
“A community program? Why don’t you open your own school?”
“My own school?”
“Look around, girl. You married money, you should make good use of it.”
She’s right. I know she is. But I also have my reasons. I fiddle with the knife in my hands while watching her pour the freshly peeled and cut potatoes into a pot of hot water.
“Setting up a school takes time, and I don’t know how long I’ll be here.” She raises her eyes to me, her expression inscrutable. “It’s too big a gamble.”
That's the truth, isn't it? Even though Maksim spelled out that our marriage is real, what guarantee do I have that it'll stay that way?
Everything started off wrong, through shady dealings.
There are too many variables that could change overnight.
I would never open a school, give hope to children and parents who dream of it, only to have to take it away from them later.
“You're smart,” Olga finally responds, turning back to her pots. “But you lack life experience. Man proposes, God disposes.”
I don't push back. Not just because I have no response to her proverb, but also because I don't want to argue with her. Olga is wrong. I have experience. Plenty of it.
Suddenly, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I sense I'm being watched. I look around and notice Yuri leaning against the pantry door, a pack of gummy candies in his hands, as if he'd been part of our conversation the whole time.
“That junk is going to make you sick,” Olga grumbles.
“And yet you keep buying it.”
The housekeeper just grumbles something unintelligible while stirring her pots. Yuri moves away from the door silently, just as he arrived. As he leaves the kitchen, his eyes meet mine briefly, and once again, I feel a chill. He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't need to—his eyes say it all.
I make a mental note: never underestimate this kid.
And at his feet, a cat struts by. Blue-gray with green eyes. It enters the kitchen as if it were the true owner of the house, ignoring all the mere mortals around it.
“Whose cat is that?”
“It's Vladimir's,” Olga responds while tasting the sauce. “Not even afraid of Ivan. A prince without a kingdom.”
“Prince?”
“Knyaz'[15] is his name.”
The cat blinks at me slowly, then gets up and leaves the kitchen as if his only purpose here was to evaluate me. The verdict: he wasn't impressed. Vladimir, the advisor who seems to have come from another century, has a cat named Prince.
Wow, I have so many questions I don't even know where to start.
“Do they live here? Vladimir and Yuri.”
“Vladimir, yes. Yuri moved in about two years ago.”
I want to ask so many other questions. Where exactly does he stay? Why have we never run into each other? What's the real reason he lives here? But even with all these doubts, I choose the most unlikely one.
“Who is Ivan?” I ask Olga.
“Ask your husband.”
She doesn't say anything more, and the subject dies there.
I mentally note that this is one more of the many things I don't know about this place and these people.
When I'm ready to leave, Olga turns to me, reaches into her apron pocket, and pulls something out.
She holds out her hand toward me, a key between her fingers.
“What is this?” I ask, staring at the outstretched key as if it might attack me.
“A gift.”
“Why?”
I ask again. I'm not used to receiving gifts. Actually, I'm not used to any kind of kindness. I find myself wondering how much this thing—whatever it is—will cost me, until Olga pulls me out of my spiral of distrust.
“Don't be ungrateful.” She takes my hand and puts the key in it. “He was measuring the walls in the middle of the night so everything would be perfect.”
I don't know what to say.
The idea of my mafioso husband, masked and dangerous, doing something so domestic for me takes my breath away. It doesn't seem to make sense, but I won't question it again. Olga is right. I won't be ungrateful. Not like my mother.
I squeeze the key in my hand, feeling the small teeth scratch my skin.
“Second floor, end of the east corridor. The last door.”
The door is exactly where she said it would be.
This house is so big that I still haven't had time, or reason, to explore it completely. The corridor is vast, with doors here and there suggesting the rooms behind them are quite large. Bedrooms, maybe.
An alarm goes off in my head. Did Maksim have another room set up for me?
That wouldn't make sense after his explanation about our real marriage and how we're going to sleep in the same room. But since that night—the night of the almost—we haven't spoken again. Maybe he changed his mind and decided that a sham marriage is best for both of us.
My heart tightens a little at the thought.
I stand there, key in hand, and realize I'm twirling the pearl earring between my fingers again. I force my hand down, fit the key into the lock, and turn.
The light hits me first. There's a floor-to-ceiling window facing the woods that lets brightness flood the entire room.
The floor gives slightly when I step on it.
Floating, cushioned, with the right linoleum[16] on top—matte, neither slippery nor sticky.
The kind of floor that doesn't destroy knees on landing.
The kind I haven't stepped on in five years.
He stayed up in the early hours measuring the walls to make sure everything was perfect.
I swallow hard, not knowing what this means.
I look up and there’s the mirror. It takes up an entire wall, floor to ceiling.
I approach cautiously and see myself reflected in it: a woman in sweats, hair barely tied back, fine lines and dark circles that weren’t there before. At least not five years ago.
That’s how long I’ve been avoiding mirrors this large.
During classes in Vysotsk, I always wore long pants or thick, opaque tights, even in summer.
I keep my gaze up. Even knowing I’m wearing pants, I don’t dare look at my right leg in the mirror.
It’s too painful to be reminded of the damage to my body, caused by some idiot in a black car.
K-7-9
I still remember. But I never did anything about it.
Maksim doesn’t know I avoid looking at myself.
That my accident didn’t take everything from me, but it killed a part of me.
That’s why I’m not angry about the wall-sized mirror forcing me to see every little detail, every flaw in my shattered knee.
He did his research. He knows mirrors are a ballerina’s tool, not vanity.
Ballerina.
Am I still one?
I look away toward a small table in the corner, near the window. On it sits a box with new satin pointe shoes, training shoes, demi-pointes, elastic—everything. The complete kit. I pick one up, feeling the weight of the shoe, and check.
It’s my size.
He never asked my shoe size. Maksim disappeared for three days, slept two hours a night, and in the middle of a fire and who knows how many other crises his criminal empire is facing, he measured a wall by hand and bought me new pointe shoes.
I go back to the door and close it slowly, without a sound. I sit on the floor, my head just below the barre. I feel my throat tightening as I press the pointe shoe against my chest.
I take a deep breath, slip on the pointe shoe, and rise en pointe. Even with my knee protesting and threatening to give out, I persist.
Finally, after five years, I let the tears fall without stopping them.
I move my body across the room, testing every inch of the new floor. Eyes closed, breath hitching with sobs. As I dance without method or purpose, I think of him, my husband. The man who asks me nothing and yet has given me everything.
Maksim once asked if I was afraid of him, and my answer was no. Today I am. He’s giving me the most dangerous thing I know, and that terrifies me.
Hope.
In this room, I felt like a ballerina again.
That nagging uncertainty returns. The fear of not knowing what comes next in this strange marriage. But I push it all away quickly, along with the wet trail of tears on my face.
I turn to face the mirror again and, after one last deep breath, I begin to dance.