Red Sparrow

At twenty, Dominika was selected prima ballerina of the First Troupe. Her evaluations uniformly were outstanding and her athletic ability prompted her ballet master to compare her to “a young Galina Ulanova” the prima ballerina assoluta of the Bolshoi after the war. Now, when she danced, the colors she saw no longer were elemental shapes and hues, but sophisticated waves of variegated lights, rolling and pulsing and carrying her aloft. The sepia tones surrounding her dancing partners let her more perfectly combine with them. She was hot to the touch, precise, strong in back and leg, exquisite and tall on her toes. The ballet master insisted it was time she began preparing for the yearly audition to join the Bolshoi troupe.

As she grew stronger and more supple, there was something else coming alive within Dominika’s body, an extension of the rigors of dance, an awareness of her own body. It was not lasciviousness, for she carried her sexuality within her. It was a private awakening, and she tested her corporeal boundaries without a thought of shame. As far as she could determine, neither of her parents was this way, so perhaps a long-forgotten relative had been a libertine.

In her darkened bedroom, when her body called her, she explored her sensations, explored them as intently as she practiced at the barre, her breathing deep red behind her eyelids, and she shuddered as she discovered how she was wired. It was not a fetish, nor an addiction, but rather a secret self that grew more aware as she grew older. She enjoyed her secret self. It was not all nature-child innocence, however. She occasionally felt the need for something edgy, forbidden, and she closed her eyes tight, on a night of a colossal thunderstorm outside her window, amazed at herself, as she held the swan-necked handle of Prababushka’s brush in her long fingers, timing the lightning flashes to match her own rhythms. Wanting more and more, amazed still, she trailed the humid point lower and held her breath and felt the even sweeter surge of the handle suddenly pinning her like a beetle in a display case. Thank God she had now taken to combing her own hair in the evenings after ballet school.

Though she had casual friends, Dominika was not friendly with her classmates. For all that, she was class leader, concerned and consumed with nothing but the troupe’s progress, its record of excellence, the triumphs in competitions with other schools, especially those from Saint Petersburg, the spiritual center of Russian ballet of the imperial style. Dominika lectured her weary fellow dancers about the Moscow School’s purity, its essential Russian nature. They all called her klikusha, the demoniac, behind her back, the New Russian Woman, the gladiator, the star, the devoted, the true believer. Oh, shut up, they thought.

At twenty-two, Sonya Moroyeva probably had one final year to move up from the academy to the Bolshoi, but with Egorova in the running that year, her chances were not good. She had been dancing all her life, was the daughter of a full member of the Duma, and was at the core a spoiled and vain young woman. She was, frankly, desperate. She had been recklessly sleeping with a boy in the troupe, blond, lynx-eyed Konstantin, an incredibly risky activity that if discovered by the instructors would have guaranteed their instant dismissal from the school. But after fifteen years in the academy she knew the quiet times, and when the sauna room was deserted, and how long they had for their sweaty sessions, with her supple legs bent over her head, and she whispered in Konstantin’s ear for a week, and told him she loved him, and ground her hips up at him, licking the sweat from his face, and begged him to save her career, her life.

Experienced ballet students know as much about anatomy and joints and injuries as a doctor. Konstantin, rabbit-mad in his gluttony for Sonya’s pizda, waited until he was paired with Dominika. Practicing a pas de deux on a crowded floor, he stepped hard on her heel when she was en pointe, forcing her foot forward, and the colors bled and her world went swirling black, and she buckled to searing pain and total collapse. They carried her to the infirmary, her classmates frozen and pale along the barre, Sonya palest of all. Dominika had looked at her then, had seen her guilty expression, the gray miasma swirling unseen around her head, and knew. On the infirmary table her foot was turning black and eggplant-purple, the worst, and the pain radiated up her leg. The doctor muttered, “Lisfranc fracture of the midfoot,” and after a series of orthopedic examinations and surgery, and a cast on her foot to the ankle, Dominika was dropped from the academy; her dancing career, her life for ten years, was over. It was that fast, that final. All the honeyed phrases about her being the next Ulanova evaporated. The masters, the coaches, the trainers wouldn’t look at her.