When We Danced on Water Read Online Free Page B

your life.
    We are underoccupied here, or at least I am underoccupied so causing our Nelly to work harder than ever. I still spend several days a week in the studio—in fact, my time there has been unusually productive lately, as the Tel Aviv municipality has commissioned a restaging of one of my ballets and I am serving as an advisor—but this “extra” work causes Nelly to worry about me incessantly, can you imagine? Turning eighty-five is not something I am looking forward to, in spite of all your exhortations to the contrary, but I suppose the alternative is still worse …
    His hand aches too much to continue. With difficulty he caps the pen and places it next to the paper, planning to finish the letter in the late afternoon or perhaps even tomorrow. What does it matter? His news will not change, Margot will still be where she is another day and then another after that and so on until she dies; so what is the hurry?
    His mind flits and wanders. To a snippet of ballet, an appointment later in the week, his mother’s face. There is no longer any logic to the meanderings of his mind’s eye. It crosses decades and continents without pause. Still, he is surprised when it settles on the girl from the coffee shop. Vivi: this name he can recall. That look on her face—the shock, the dismay, the mortification—comes to him in intimate detail. What had possessed him to speak so frankly and upset her?
    There they are again, the first two chords of his solo. He is dancing it in the old Bournonville studio at the top of the Royal Theater, oblivious to the noise of the busy square below him. The half-moon windows near the floor remind him of the jellied candies covered with sugar that he and his mother would buy from a street vendor just outside the Saski Park in Warsaw. The bust of Auguste Bournonville looks down at him as he poses to begin: tendu croisé, arms in third position.
    They are dancing the pas d’ecole. A Danish boy, Niels, has finished partnering the andante maestoso and first allegretto with that half-Austrian girl—what is her name?—who is now dancing a short andante solo. Teo will dance the second allegretto with her, moving her deftly to the corps de ballet posed along the back wall in preparation for his own solo, the moderato and final allegretto.
    The music is fast and frilly. His dancing, too, is frilly, but still it sparkles. If only he had danced it thus, in Berlin. Pirouette, pirouette, chassé, grand jeté. Repeat to the left. A series of grand jetés to the back of the stage, where he brushes up against clusters of his fellow dancers, knocking into them if he overshoots. A skipping run so fast he can feel the breeze he is making. High, turning leaps ending in arabesques. A masculine dance full of height and sharp lines, the role that of a student at the Paris Conservatory dancing to impress his teachers.
    And impress them he does, far beyond what is prudent.

Chapter 7
    â€œI ’m wondering,” Vivi says one morning as she places his water and coffee in front of him, more careful than usual not to spill on his pile of paperwork, “if you could let me come and watch you teach sometime.”
    At once, Teo frowns, feeling put upon, and so does she, angry with herself for expecting a favor from this man. “You see, I’m doing this glassblowing workshop—”
    â€œYes, glassblowing, I remember,” he says, interrupting her. “I’d been thinking you’d given it up since you’re often mooning around here with a camera.”
    â€œYou know me,” she says. “A little of everything.” She breathes in sharply to steady herself, then says, with clarity, her voice a bit louder now and defiant, “I’m doing this glassblowing workshop, and I’d like to watch your dancers. To try and capture their movement in glass.”
    His gaze floats out toward the shopping arcade but lands on nothing. When