“They always said it was important, but no one ever really liked it,” Evgenia mused lightly in recollection. She listens to Julien speak, letting the cadence and rhythm of words float over her, taking small sips from her water bottle all the while. Not enough to drain it by any visible measure though- practically nothing if she was actually looking at it. A distraction of sorts. “Perhaps I have. If I did, I don’t quite remember.”
“Was that what your teachers told you?” There is a quiet, curious lilt to her voice that faintly implies disbelief. Because mine never did. All they ever told us was that we had to be perfect because if we weren’t perfect we were nothing. “They must be lovely people if that was what they said.” People she never truly had the fortune of encountering. Her teachers probably shoved all of them past the breaking point, if only to mold the shattered pieces into a better form. Plier. Étendre. Relever. Glisser. Sauter. Élancer. Tourner. Ballet is half the reason she knows French well, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to her grasp of German. For that, Evgenia has someone else to thank and blame. Sharp beats of German sliding back into Russian and back again, an endless cycle practically a quasi-language of their own-
There is a long moment of silence, and Evgenia swallows, mentally debating how much she should say. There is a singular cosmetics pouch in her bag, elastics and hair pins, and tucked in a side pouch is a thin slip of a USB- too much. Too little time- and the expression on Julien’s face. She’s no psychiatrist, but there’s a faint slip that is enough to give her some ideas, none of them good. “It’s alright,” another quiet pause, “-you don’t have to say anything.”
By this point, she knows she is wading onto dangerously thin ice, but there’s already no clear way back- gone too far out to find her way back, and yet still nowhere close to the true depths of where it all lies. “You used to dance with the Bolshoi, yes?” She frames it like a question, but it is not a question, merely an interrogative of a question she already knows the answer too. The timelines match up fairly well, although one would have been leaving as the other was just arriving. A light, sideways tilt of her head. “Did you know anyone-” There is a clear list of names she can think of, Lermentova, Alianova, Nikiforov, Breznik, Esterházy, St. Clair-Étienne, Rossini, Karimov, Abernathy, Reims-Clarington, Verschueren- half of them were her former classmates and rivals, and yet there is one name that perhaps Julien will know- the one that does nothing but rise within the ballet world and the Bolshoi. Louis Friedrich Von Clary und Aldringen. “-around my age?”
“Yeah but surely everyone was happy to not have pulled a muscle during practice, no?” He says and it should be light but any mention of an injury feels like a knife to his own gut so his laughter feels awkward coming out of his mouth. It’s stilted and then it feels like rocks in his mouth. “Yeah, a lot of stuff is easily forgettable.” Some others, not as much, he thinks but doesn’t have the guts to say. He doesn’t feel entirely too comfortable discussing all of this with someone who is his student but he sees a lot of himself in Evgenia. He hopes her wounds are not as deep as his own.
“God, no,” he laughs and this too is an uncomfortable laugh. His teachers had told them perfection was everything. The words were beaten and branded into his skin so often that now he’s sure you can find them on every inch of his body. “I don’t think I’ve heard the word fun even uttered in any of my classes or practices. I don’t know a single ballerina who thinks of the craft as fun. Perfection is what we all strive for, no?” And it’s a question he knows the answer to without even having to ask but it still comes out anyway. “But it’s what I have to tell the children I teach. Because—“ he pauses, takes a deep breath and lets years of pain drift away for even a second. “Because it should be fun. I don’t want to be like the teachers I had, no matter how amazing they were in their craft.” I don’t want to be like my mother is what hangs on the tip of his tongue.
It’s a long time before Evgenia speaks and though the silence should be uncomfortable, it’s not. It just feels like they’re reminiscing on the past and though that can be painful, he thinks doing it with someone else who understands can be comforting in its own way. When she speaks again he looks up, an eyebrow-raising curiously. “Yes, for about a year. I trained more than I actually danced with them though. Moscow was—,” he stops, unsure of the word he’s looking for to describe his time there. “Interesting to say the least.”
He’s sure not that the girl is asking for a specific reason and he wonders if he has the answer she’s looking for. “There were a lot of younger kids there if I’m being honest,” he says, trying to recall the most prominent ones. There a lot of them Julien remembers being envious of, something that he wasn’t entirely too proud of. But when you see someone so much younger than you doing something you can’t help but become green with envy at knowing that soon enough those people will surpass you in skills. “A lot of them were really amazing dancers. A lot of Russian names, most of them blend in together. There were a few French boys I remember talking to as well; they’d come to me asking for help once they found out I spoke French,” he hums, smiling at those particular memories. “There was this Austrian guy too. Or maybe he was Hungarian? Von something. He was absolutely amazing.”
