Pavlovsk Park is one of the largest, oldest parks in the world. It is a man-made wood, a gift from Catherine the Great to her young son Paul (Paul in Russian is Павел, from whence comes the name of the park and small adjoining town - Павловск). There are hints of it having been purposefully grown, rather than simply groomed from a wild forest. The paths are far too neat, the trees grow in lines too straight to be the pure product of nature.
I walked through the tall, dark trees in below-freezing temperatures with a friend, who had offered to be my guide for the day. We chatted as we walked, took photos, watched people feeding the resident squirrels. Often, we would lapse into long silences. There is a deep hush in the heart of that wood. As it forces itself over you through the cold air, suddenly, you find you have nothing left to say.
It has been a turbulent month. The recent election left us all stunned, and I found that being in Russia, far away from it all, only increased my distress. It felt like being shut in a closet, while in the adjoining room something bad is being done. I felt as though I had fallen out of the sky into a Kafkaesque nightmare, walking through the streets of St Petersburg feeling completely disconnected from my surroundings. I was a ghost, I was a tiny man stuck in a puppet theatre, the empty, unseeing doll eyes of passersby looking right through me as they swung back and forth on their twitching strings.
People kept coming up to me during the days following the election, asking me about the result, making snide references. Each ill-timed joke pierced me, filling me at once with pain and anger, only to be quickly stifled by a sense of guilt at my reaction. Each encounter left me confused and all the more distressed.
It's election day morning and one of my friends has her phone open by the window-sill during the morning ballet class. She keeps going over to check it between dancing combinations, refreshing the page displaying the live-stream of election results. What infuriates me is that it's clear she doesn't understand our voting system. Trump has won the swing states, is irreversibly in the lead, and she's still checking the results, as though there's any chance of a turn-around. The innocence of her ignorance makes me seethe. Or maybe it's that her ignorance is mirrored in my last shred of undying hope that there was still some small chance that we would pull through...
An ugly, clumsy baby stabs me with a pair of scissors, grinning a gap-toothed smile, and I scream, filled with rage and a sudden urge to strike back...but how can I? They don't know any better. They don't realise what they've done, the pain they've caused me. I know I can't hit them back. So I grit my teeth, swallow the pain until it's settled deep in my gut, and retreat.
"Are you okay?", our ballet teacher asks me, noticing something is wrong. I don't remember what I said, only that I burst into tears and ran out of the studio to the bathroom. After ten minutes locked in a stall, sobbing, I composed myself, and came back to class in time for adagio at the barre. They averted their eyes. Nobody said anything more.
"Sarina!", the pianist calls to me after our ballet class, mispronouncing my name as they all do. "You no-know who president? Your president? You no-know?" She cackles at me in her broken English, which she often uses with me despite my more than competent Russian, and which I find almost more patronising and offensive than her clear delight at Trump's victory. I say nothing, staring at her blankly. Then I turn, and walk away, my heart pounding, tears starting in my eyes again.
"Sarina!"
I keep walking, refusing to turn and give her the satisfaction.
"Sarina! You listen? You no-know who president?"
In the end, I got over it because I had to. There wasn't any time to let myself have more than one day to mourn, and I didn't have the energy to cry or pray. My exam was a week and a half after election day, and I dove into preparing with an intensity and desperation that I've never experienced before in my life.
I've always said that, as hard as life here in Russia can be, I always meet "angels" on my path. They come at the times when I need them the most, and often they are complete strangers, saving me just in the nick of time. Other times they are people from my circle of acquaintance that stand out from the crowd in a moment of need.
True friends are not the people that you've known since childhood, the ones you have a lot in common with, or the people you match up with according to profession or age. It's not something you can print out on paper, and you can't write an algorithm to find them on social media. But when your knees buckle under the weight of your burden, they appear at your side and shoulder some of the load. When you trip and fall, your face burning from shame as people gather, laughing down at you covered in mud, that's when the true friends appear, part the crowd, and offer forth a hand to help you up.
With a week to go before our major dancing exam, my coach left to go on tour. I didn't feel remotely ready to dance in from of the jury of professors, and felt utterly abandoned. It was as though my parent had left me at the bus stop with a sock full of loose change, to pay my way, and a note pinned to my chest telling all literate bystanders my name, and where I was going. Nobody cared if I got where I was supposed to go. Good luck, be a good girl. See you next week.
One of my friends, whom we shall call "S.", a young woman in her late twenties who is a graduate of the famous ballet academy here in St Petersburg, stepped into the role of my coach. She rehearsed me every single day, often up to three hours at a time, preparing me and supporting me in the last week leading up to the exam. We would stay in the studio together after lessons until 10:30pm, and during the day, when the ballet studio was busy, she and I would rehearse in the cold corridors, attracting the curious stares of students and professors as I jumped, pirouetted, sweat, and groaned in frustration in the hallways.
S. would patiently insist on my repeating the same movement again, and again, and again, until I got it just right. Then we would move on to the next set of movements, and she would go on to fix every part of my body, down to the angle of my head, the direction of my gaze. She would grab my hand in hers and fix my fingers until the space between each one was what it should be. Working with S., I felt like a small child again, sitting at my easel with my mother holding my hand in hers, helping me guide a paintbrush across the white surface. I would smile, gasping as the figure of a cat appeared on the white paper, delighted by what my hand had done as it was guided by hers. She smiled, too, and praised me. "Look how beautiful! Now you do it again, this time by yourself. Go on. I'll watch."
My back ached, my legs were strapped with knotted muscles, I developed a horrible pain in my left foot from dancing up to six hours a day, many of them on the corridor floors, which are as cold and hard as cement. But I was thrilled by my progress. "Oh, if only I had thought to ask you for help from the very beginning!" I would often cry out in frustration to S., "Look at everything you've done in just a few days...Imagine what we could have done with a month." S. shrugged, and replied that everything happens in its own time, and as it should, and that she knew I would be ready for the exam, which was all that mattered now.
The day of the exam came. I was to dance a duet, a male solo (each student learns both male and female parts, as future teachers we need to know both male and female dancing technique), and three female solos. The opening number was the duet from the soviet ballet "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai", practically unknown in the west, but very dear to the Russians and a staple in the repertoire here. I danced it with a leading soloist of the Mariinsky Theatre, an intimidating hulk of a man. I've long admired him for his dancing, but this semester I have come to admire him even more for his kind, down-to-earth nature, gentleness, and humble desire to continually better himself.
I cannot remember a performance that I was more nervous about, or that I felt more privileged to dance, than that duet for the exam. It was, literally, a dream come true, to dance with this incredible partner. The pain, the months of nerves, the enormous amount of work that culminated in those few minutes were all worth it, and I let myself enjoy every moment of it, giddy with gratitude and no small amount of disbelief that I had been given such an opportunity.
After the exam was over, our pianist came out from the office where the discussion of our final marks had been taking place. She walked over to where S. and I were standing in the hallway, waiting to hear the results. The pianist told us that all the professors on the jury had awarded me full marks, that they had been shocked by the quality of my performance, and had praised me to no end. S. seized me in a bone-crushing hug. She couldn't speak, close to tears. Thanks to S. and the countless hours she spent with me, we had somehow managed, in just a week, to turn everything around, and to astound them. We had done it.
On the election day, when I didn't know where to turn or what to think, I called a friend (we'll call her N.) and spilled my fears to her. N. told me that as far as she could remember, nothing had ever been stable in Russia, and that they had never properly gotten out of one crisis before they began to enter the next.
"Grandma used to bake bread for us. We couldn't afford to buy it." N. said. Her mother and father had been forced to go out to the fields to grow potatoes to feed themselves. "If they hadn't," she continued, "We would have starved to death." She paused for a moment, and then said, finally, "So long as those who are near and dear to you are well, and still with you, you can get through anything. You'll support each other. Don't cry. Everything will be okay. In times of crisis, you only grow closer, stronger."
With Thanksgiving not that far behind us, and entering the holiday season as we are, I would like to give thanks for those who are near and dear to me. May they remain well, and may we, in times of crisis, only grow closer, stronger.