Dancing on Thorns

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Once a year, in the spring, Nadia Petrovna cleared her desk. She scooped the piles of unpaid invoices and tax demands into drawers with a long sigh of relief and escaped London for a fortnight to revisit the beloved Europe of her youth. This year, as always, Paris laid out the red carpet for her. At the airport she was met by the Minister for the Arts, and stopped on the pavement beside his black limousine to beam at the select band of press photographers who showered her with affectionate greetings. The Minister's secretary presented her with a bouquet of spring flowers and her wrinkled face lit up in delight. "How lovely!" she said, more delighted by the daffodils than all the other combined attention. "They're absolutely my favorite." Nadia Petrovna adored Paris. She went out to lunch with the director of the Opera and then attended a gala performance on the arm of a great dancer who had taken his first classical steps under her tuitionand who had now, in his turn, retired to become one of France's foremost choreographers. At the Academie Francaise de la Danse, a little girl in pink tulle and satin slippers presented the dowager etoile with a bunch of pink roses, curtsying deeply as she had been instructed by the junior ballet teacher. Every year it was exactly the same; Nadia Petrovna Sekova had been making these visits for so long they had become part of the tradition of the dance world. Only the faces of the children changed; little girls who had once presented that annual pink bouquet were now dancing in the company, or had become teachers in their own right, or were married and had children. "Nadia Petrovna," said her old friend Henri, taking her hand. Like everyone in the ballet world, he addressed her in the old-fashioned Russian style, adding the feminine form of her father's Christian name to hers. "You look younger every time I see you." The ancient woman smiled in reply and shook her head. They both knew she couldn't go on making these trips forever. Already she relied heavily on her walking stick and this year, for the first time, she had taken a taxi to the Academie from her hotel instead of walking. Even the journeys to and from the airport exhausted her now. "Paris always makes me feel young," she said with a courageous sparkle in her old eyes. Madame de Sancerre, the school's director, accompanied Nadia Petrovna on her traditional tour of the classes, pointing out favorite young dancers with her long fingers. The atmosphere in every studio they entered prickled with nervous unease. Whenever Madame walked into a room it was as though an icy wind swept in with her through the open door. One by one, they went into each of the studios, sitting on wooden chairs at the front of the class while the anxious students performed their rond de jambe exercises, adages and allegros for the great dowager prima ballerina of the Diaghilev era. Nadia Petrovna sat upright on her chairalert and attentivewith her knotted, arthritic hands folded over the handle of her walking stick. "That tall boy at the back," she said, picking out one of the students at the barre in a large class of boys. "Why does his teacher not correct his position? Here . . ." She indicated on her own body a line between her shoulder and her hip. "Here, this is all wrong." Madeleine de Sancerre glanced sharply at the boy and turned to her guest with a gesture of irritated dismissal. "There's no point correcting him. He won't be taught. It's not his teach