DANCER IN THE WINDOW PANE

I still enjoy writing letters.  Retiring from all the noise, closing the bedroom door, and lighting the lamp on the small white table.  It is always night. And I always find my way to the table in the darkness even though it is not real darkness.  The window looks out on one of  those narrow courtyards, squeezed in between whimsical protuberances of  inner staircases, small balconies, and bedrooms. As if it had no bottom, that abyss of a courtyard ending at the wavy blue roof of the garage.  But the strangers’ windows screened with light fabric shine at night… The space imprisoned by the rear walls of the houses is larger than it seems at first: the faces in the windows across from mine are too far away to be recognizable anyway…

Maybe these letters are boring, and maybe that friend of mine was right when —  toward the end of our not particularly close friendship —  she asked  me for permission to destroy them, because they were in the way in her drawers and she certainly wasn’t going to read them again.  I don’t  describe many events in them, and those  I do talk about are stretched out across time to the point of losing the character of an “event”… I  never write letters during times of high  excitement, and maybe here,  sitting in the circle of the small bedroom light, I am looking for something else: some special time that has slowed down, or a reflection of myself… I write slowly, with many interruptions, and then — the table being next to the window — the unchanging picture of the courtyard keeps invading my consciousness:

Three vaulted windows placed diagonally, I believe there is a staircase behind them, a well-lit staircase, so it seems… The four balconies belong to the other building: their exterior lights are never lit, nobody ever passes through their doors, and their closets of different sizes seem to be sealed, enclosing their unfathomable courtyard-legacy.

Part of the facade is in bad condition and bricks peer through the mortar… Two narrow twin windows have greyish frames, it is through them that I recognize the shadow that sometimes slips by the curtains as an old woman…

On the other side there is a set of wide three-winged windows that may belong to the same apartments as the balconies.  I never watch them during the day but I can recall their nocturnal light patterns whenever I close my eyes.

In the third wide three-winged window — the third counting from below,  counting the way you count the lines in musical scores — the dancer appears.  She turns on the light, pulls the curtain aside and her figure is outlined in the three-winged frame, not big but clear, in a black leotard.  Of course it is not possible to hear the music.  It is not possible to foresee whether the dancer will appear or when she will finally appear… In an attempt at some big all-encompassing recollection, or in a dream, or if I could read those letters scattered all around and now out of reach,  I could perhaps remember exactly — I think I really could — how many times I have seen her.  Fifteen?… Twenty?… Twenty-three?… Sometimes several evenings in a row, then a pause of several years…  Sometimes for many weeks in an almost settled rhythm — Thursdays or Saturdays? — but as soon as the expectation starts to solidify in a foreboding of certainty, she disappears, for a long time.  Maybe there has been some mistake in counting…  Still, is it possible to believe that my life has only lasted a few evenings?

During those evenings there is always a moment when someone approaches my bedroom door — my mother? my husband? the children? my children’s children? — stopping as if they were about to enter but then going on, through the small corridor, toward the kitchen, or through the big corridor toward the other rooms or the exit…  None of them has ever noticed the dancer, her body dressed in black that always looks the same… But the dance changes somewhat.

If I were to think of describing her in one of my letters — but to whom would that letter be addressed, whom could I write to about the dancer? — it would be difficult for me to find the words to describe the diversity of her dancing movements… They are seldom quick and yet sometimes so sudden…  In the first scenes, I remember — if I remember correctly — they were gentle and brisk,   melodious, full of turns, and with some bizarre pirouettes that suddenly broke off and changed into something else… She didn’t seem to be following a regular rhythm… Several evenings, again and again, she danced perhaps the very same dance bending backward in a bow in some unexpected way, toward the end always stretching, on her toes, her arms up…  Still, the end itself  came with no warning. She would suddenly stop in front of the three-winged window panes and, with both hands, pull the light and then the dark curtains…

Later, much later — and in the meantime she would seldom appear  — when she seemed to be coming at regular intervals, her dance acquired gymnastic features, as if it had somehow become open to the public, as if she wanted to tell those who might suddenly burst into the room: just watch, I am not doing anything strange, any doctor would recommend a few minutes  of evening exercise…  And yet, in the mechanical repetition of simple movements softer gestures shone through, hands pleasantly folded above her head.

Now she shows up again almost every night and my family is puzzled and asks me to whom I am writing all those letters, and I answer that it is all the same long letter I don’t manage to finish… Imprevisibility, which had always been present, has never been so obvious: when the lights in her window are turned on she is already standing  there in a bent, painful position that she suddenly abandons for a series of regular, classical movements which, for some reason — but  why? because of a hint of fragility? or a precision  that hides her total surrender to desire? — provoke tears.  Her body in black hasn’t lost the least bit of its perfect flexibility but it is as if her dance  were in a dilemma, continuously falling into bitter tragic gestures and short bursts of  ballet school  exercises…

And now, while I am trying to write a letter to the person whom — unless there is really an  error in the calculation of time — I haven’t seen for several decades, I think: it would be good if this time it could last.  It would be good if she could leave her three-winged window, the third one from the top, and appear in the other ones until she filled them all up…  Perhaps other frames — the vaulted one or the one with the grey cross pieces — could give her other rhythms… and then her dance,  more constant than my letters and my longings, would never come to an end.

(a story from the book Wien Fantastic, translated by Agata Schwartz and Luise von Flotow, published in  the anthology The Third Shore; Women’s Fiction from East Central Europe)