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windows, and as the light grows, she sees him. Her lover, her Yulian and her Romeo.
He is lying on the floor. He has taken up the pose of the final scene.
For in their choreographed death, the lovers are to sink into the shape of a heart. Their feet
come together in the bottommost point, their bodies arch out to form the curves, their hands strain
down towards each other to make the final indention at the top. The perfect symmetry of the shape is
not visible to anyone watching from the level of the floor. Only those in the balcony, looking down,
can catch the full effect of the pose. Much of dance is like that, Katya thinks, pausing as she at last
reaches the bottom of the staircase, waiting there to allow her eyes a few more moments to adapt.
Even the waltzes require bizarre and tortured shapes from the women – leaning away from their
partners, arching their backs and raising their chins. The very unnaturalness of the position is
designed so that they might show their faces to the royalty sitting above them on the balconies. It is
not enough to be pretty. One must be pretty when one is looked down upon, when one is under the
consideration of her superiors, those gazing upon her from an exalted height. The idea of the lovers
dying in the shape of a heart is contrived, overly sentimental, but Katya’s dance master claims that the
Romanovs like such things. They do not require realism. In fact, they disdain it. They are not in the
least troubled by the fact that even the most devoted lovers do not customarily die in the shape of a
heart.
And it is here, on the last step of the grand staircase, that Katya sees the man.
Not her lover. Yulian lies before her, curved on the floor. He is but a boy, after all, and his
youth is clearest when he is immobile, his chin unshaven and his ribs as insubstantial as those of a
pheasant on a plate.
No, she sees the other man. The bad one, the dark one, the man that all girls know somewhere
exists.
As the truth of the situation sinks into her, a British girl might scream, or a French one, an
American or German, even a princess of the far east. They might struggle, bite, or kick, but Ekaterina
Gorbunkoya, known as Katya to her family and friends, possesses a fatalism so profound that it does
not occur to her to fight. She looks around her and considers her limited options. This theater, she
knows, has been designed to contain sound, not release it. They are in the performance wing of the
palace, which is deserted at night. There is likely no one with a hundred rooms of this place. An egg
is much like a coffin, she reflects, a container that can transport one between life and death and back
again. There is nothing surprising in any of this. A forbidden affair has come to a predictable end.
Yulian has only briefly preceded her to the place where we all must someday go.