Dirty. Stupefying. That herding camp stink—smoke, meat, mildew—had somehow followed her all the way down here.
At least she had Ruslan. The rest didn’t matter. Ksyusha passed her days waiting for his texts, drifted away from other students when classes were dismissed, looked forward to two-hour-long phone calls, and fell into bed thinking of him. Her look, her sound, her smell—he was used to it. No one else would love her like he did.
The troupe’s director, Margarita Anatolyevna, was a short Koryak woman who kept her hair pulled back with a scarf. The dances she taught were traditional ones, and she instructed the group as if they all led traditional lives; after she passed out leather straps to the boys for the herders’ dance, where they squatted and kicked and spun the straps in the air, she yelled over the music to be heard. “Higher! How do you lasso deer like that?” In the tundra, Ksyusha’s father, uncles, and grandfather stepped into a whirling herd of thousands, snared running bulls, and wrestled the animals to the ground. But some of these dancing boys had never lassoed anything. They let the leather go slack in their hands. City people, Ksyusha’s father would say if he saw.
Yet not all of them were that way. There was Alisa, and a couple of girls from settlements near Esso. A graduate student named Chander from Palana, far north, beside the Sea of Okhotsk—Ksyusha’s brother had met his current girlfriend in the fishing camps up there. One boy studying at the technical university came all the way from Achavayam. His face was flat and frown permanent. He hardly spoke enough for Ksyusha to hear his accent.
Being with the troupe was both engaging and awful. It was fun, for the first time since Ksyusha moved to the city, to tell Ruslan about something beyond her classes, even if that something had to do with a high school kid and a bunch of fake lassos. At practices, she took the spot behind Alisa and concentrated on matching her cousin’s movements. Legs together. Toes planted. Heels raised. Knees bent. The music, recordings of drums and buzzing mouth harps, was just a little too loud, and Margarita Anatolyevna yipped along to keep the beat. In her jeans and knit sweater, Ksyusha, dancing, sank out of her thoughts. Into her body. Her breath, her muscles, the throb of her blood. Ahead of her, Alisa’s sunny hair swished in time.
But the group also made things more complicated by swallowing her once predictable days. Margarita Anatolyevna had a no-distraction policy, so Ksyusha was forced to keep her phone in her bag through every practice. For the first couple weeks, Ksyusha kept coming back to a screen clogged with messages. What are you doing now? Important. If you don’t answer me…
Hard to miss Ruslan’s texts, hard not to check in with him, hard to let him pass out of her mind when the percussion started through the speakers and then let him back in when the music switched off. Hard to master the movements—Margarita Anatolyevna showed the girls how to fall to their knees, bend backward, arch their spines until their ponytails brushed their calves. The boys worked on making their drums thud in unison, and Margarita Anatolyevna shouted at them to work harder. In the evenings, Ksyusha and Alisa shimmied across their bedroom.
And hard to try to make friends. Alisa seemed as ever to manage fine, but Ksyusha couldn’t remember trying before. Everyone else in the world Ksyusha cared about had known her since she was a little girl.
She liked them, though, the other dancers. Despite the gaps in their knowledge—the fact that some of them had never been near a wild animal and others had enrolled in university before seeing a public bus—the group members felt more familiar than the other people she’d met over these years in Petropavlovsk. Understandable in a way the white kids were not. And she liked Margarita Anatolyevna, who encouraged them to chirp like baby birds calling for food. Out of anyone else’s mouth, that description might have sounded ludicrous, but Margarita Anatolyevna said these things without seeming silly. The dances had old names, pagan ones, about gods and nature, so Margarita Anatolyevna taught them how to move in pagan ways. This one requires that you all look like fish, she said, so push your arms back. Wriggle. Open your throat, wide, wide, and drink seawater down.
For the partner dances, Ksyusha was paired with Chander, the one from Palana. Of all the boys, he seemed the best. He was smart, earning his doctorate by writing a dissertation on Paleosiberian language families, and he paid attention when the director gave instructions. He was tall, he moved well. That first practice when Alisa pushed Ksyusha’s hand into everyone else’s, a few of the kids had tried to flirt: “Does every woman in your family look so good?” one had said. But Chander only asked where she was from and said the group was glad to have her.
Alisa, meanwhile, was paired with the student from Achavayam. They were an unlikely match, with him tense, taciturn, and Alisa so talkative she was studying German and English to give herself multiple languages to converse in. Sometimes she slipped steps from childhood into routines they were learning, and he noticed, and they argued, Alisa spilling out three defenses for his every critique. Alisa said she couldn’t stand him, though Ksyusha believed that wasn’t true. It probably flattered Alisa to have someone pay such chaste yet close attention.
Still, Ksyusha wouldn’t have wanted to dance across from Alisa’s partner, with his narrow-eyed focus and his disapproving mouth. Instead, Chander showed her the way. In one dance, the girls stood and the boys knelt before them. They bent into each other, the girls stroking the air to draw their partners closer to their waists. Through the minutes the music played, Chander kept the same easy look he’d had on the first day they met. His face, from smooth forehead to straight eyebrows to high lifted chin, was undisturbed. Once they went through the routine a few times, he got up, the knees of his jeans whitened from dust, and said, “You’re getting a lot better, Ksyusha.” She was practically panting from the movements. But she agreed.
“Tell me about today,” Ruslan said.
Ksyusha was under her sheets in the dark. The phone balanced against her cheek and her hands rested on the little hill of her stomach. Her cousin’s bed across the room was empty. “It was crazy,” she said. “Margarita Anatolyevna yelled at Alisa, and I thought for a second Alisa might yell back. She had that look.” The city around Ksyusha was filled with what was sure to provoke him: those two little girls disappearing by the shoreline weeks earlier, photocopies of their class pictures tacked to the university bulletin boards, civilian search parties climbing the hills, and policemen watching Ksyusha on the street like she was the dark-skinned villain responsible. Ksyusha wanted Ruslan to think of her protected. She wanted the same with her parents, her brother, so she kept any calls with them mild. Better not to speak of what might worry them. Stories of school and dance were all she offered.
The afternoon break between classes ending and practice beginning lasted an hour and a half. Alisa and some of the other group members used this time to go to a café, where they shared a slice of cake or a pot of black tea, but Ksyusha couldn’t afford that. Anyway, part of her understanding with Ruslan was that they informed the other person wherever they went. Visiting a café with others would lead to too many questions. So she came to the practice room early instead, and sat outside it doing homework until Margarita Anatolyevna arrived to unlock the door.
One October Wednesday, Chander also came early. Ksyusha saw two legs in athletic pants over her textbook and looked up to find him standing there. “What are you reading?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said.