Читать книгу A Reunion of Ghosts - Judith Mitchell Claire - Страница 18

From the article “Appropriate Dress for Dancing the New Knickerbocker” by Alan Dodsworth, Dancemaster:

Many ladies are wearing the instep skirt for the evening dance, while others still cling to the long sinewy train. But those who wear the train for round dancing are advised to hold it up … for to drag a train around the ballroom endangers the life of the gown, not to mention the lives of the other dancers.

Death by ball gown. Iris Emanuel wants no part of it. Anyway, you just have to look at her to know she’s an instep skirt kind of girl. The abbreviated hemline, the show of her boot. It makes her look a little taller, a little bit slimmer. Not that she cares about that sort of thing. What she cares about is that the short skirts allow her to peek at her feet while she’s trying to master a new step at Frau Geist’s. She also enjoys the new fashion’s ability to offend the type of woman who clings to the train—Frau Geist, for instance.

“Charmingly! Delicately!” Frau Geist, elderly now and fatter than ever, still wears her garish yellows. She bangs the floor with a cane. “Daintily, daintily! And here comes the glide!”

“And here comes the groom,” whispers Iris’s dance partner, her sister Lily.

Iris looks to the door. There stands Lenz Alter in his Prussian blue reservist uniform, chest out, shoulders squared, head held high. Iris lets go of Lily’s waist so she can wave to him. She hasn’t seen him since he left for university three years before. After completing gymnasium, he’d gone to work in the dye factory, just as he’d told her when they were children, where he’d implemented some sort of clever innovation that caused some sort of unmitigated disaster that resulted in the loss of a full day’s production of synthetic crystal violet. His father had fired him and sent him to Berlin, which was where he’d wanted to go in the first place. There he studied chemistry, but only for a single semester. Next he’d gone to Heidelberg, where he lasted a mere summer. Now he’s finally making something of a go of it at the Technical College of Charlottenburg.

Even before he left Breslau, Iris had run into him only rarely. At parties or concerts they flirted in the parlors of mutual acquaintances or in the lobbies of theaters, leaning against walls softened with velvet damask. They discussed politics and the sciences. He liked to talk Goethe—she had outgrown Goethe long before—but she’d been happy to listen, to ask the occasional question. Eventually, though, he would bow (exaggeratedly, facetiously), kiss her hand, and return to whomever he’d come with, a different girl every time, but always a girl prettier than Iris and simmering with jealousy in a corner.

He’s here on his own now, and only Lily’s simmering. Lily holds on to Iris firmly, twirling her overenthusiastically. Focusing on keeping her balance prevents Iris from breaking away and heading to Lenz at once. When the music stops, Lily takes Iris’s arm and escorts her to him, an attempt to control her sister’s pace. But there’s only so much Lily can do. “Unteroffizier Alter,” Lily says, nodding at him, setting an example, but Iris cries, “Lenz!” and that’s it for propriety and restraint.

He beams at her. He kisses her cheeks. He’s taller than she remembers, though he remains a short man. Still, she’s now the one who raises her chin to meet his eyes, which are deep brown with golden spokes, pretty enough to help her overlook his less felicitous features: the light brown hair already thinning and receding, but what’s left of it so densely curly it grows upward like a shrub; the bridge of the nose so broad, so prominent, so Jewish, that his pince-nez seem a size too small, ready any second to lose their grip and spring into the air.

She doesn’t mind his plain looks, though. She’s charmed by his enthusiasm, by how glad he is to see her. “This is the last place I thought I’d run into you,” he says. “I thought you were banned from dancing years ago. Just like a Catholic on Good Friday.”

“It wasn’t dancing our father minded,” Lily says. “He just didn’t like her coming home talking of marriage at the age of six.”

“I was seven,” Iris says before turning to Lenz. “You didn’t expect to see me here?” she says. “Imagine how I feel. I thought you were at Charlottenburg.”

Yes, he says, turning from Lily, focusing on Iris. Yes, his studies. He’s finding Charlottenburg quite stimulating, both intellectually and socially. Of course his earlier work at Heidelberg with Bunsen was even more exhilarating. Thrilling to work with the old man himself. And now he’s taken a year off from school to complete his military service. The same reserve unit Bismarck once belonged to, as a matter of fact. It’s been a wonderful experience, the reserves. Travel, opera, the theater. An amazing country, Germany. No other like it.

“Quelle chance,” Lily says, “that we all happened to be born in it.”

He’s in Breslau for a few weeks now, he says. He thought he’d come to Geist’s, pick up the latest steps, bring them back to Berlin.

“Really?” Iris says. “You think this is where all the new dances originate?” He smiles. She blushes. “Oh. You’re teasing.”

“Well, in any event,” he says, “here we both are again.”

“Quelle coincidence,” Lily says. She turns away, takes a seat along the wall, folds her arms across her chest, does the unthinkable because she’s not really thinking: she crosses her legs.

“Don’t mind her,” Iris says. “She was hoping to learn the New Knickerbocker, but she knows I’d rather dance with you.”

“Are you sure?” he says. “I don’t even know the old Knickerbocker.”

This turns out to be untrue.

Lenz Alter, age twenty-one, puts his hand on the waist of nineteen-year-old Iris Emanuel. For the rest of the evening they revolve and rotate around the aged and bloated sun that is Frau Geist, occasionally glimpsing the cold distant planet that is Lily, her petulance increasing their pleasure by making them feel as if they’re misbehaving.

Older now, Lenz has learned patience. This time he waits a week to propose.

Tears and torment! She’s in love with him, she tells Lily. He’s so charming, so funny. They have so much in common. Two nearsighted, secular, and, of course, intellectual Jews from Breslau with a passion for the sciences and a sum total of four left feet. But the timing’s all wrong.

“Bien sûr,” says Lily. “You’ve known him for only seven days.”

“I’ve known him all my life.”

“You’ve glimpsed him on the street all your life. Every now and then you’ve spoken to him for ten minutes or so, at which point he returned to a girl he preferred. But you don’t know him at all. And now he’s come back, showing off about Bunsen. If he’s so intimate with Bunsen, why did he leave Heidelberg? Because he’s not as smart as he’d have you believe. Also, did you notice he’s already losing his hair? Take my advice. A girl like you should marry a brilliant man with a full head of hair.”

She does turn him down, but not because of anything Lily has said. “You’ve still got another year before you earn your doctorate,” she says as they walk along the river. “You shouldn’t marry until you have it in hand. And certainly I’m not going to marry anyone until I have mine. I couldn’t live with myself.”

“Given that women can’t attend university at all,” he says, “am I to assume this is your polite way of saying you won’t marry me unless hell freezes over?” As if by way of illustration, the Oder itself is concealed under a thick layer of scarred ice.

She shakes her head. She declares herself an optimist and a reformer. “The hell that’s the current university system is going to freeze and crack any day now. You’ll see.” He looks skeptical. She frowns. “Aren’t you still liberal on this matter?”

“I never really was,” he says, “but I am still German, and as such I’m sufficiently confident in my own worth to have no fear of educated women.” Without a moment’s hesitation he stops walking and recites, “Ladies heed this pithy sermon / Ne’er will you best a manly German,” and she asks if he’s just made that up on the spot, and he admits that indeed he has, right that moment off the top of his head, that it’s a little hobby of his, the extemporaneous heroic couplet, and she laughs and has to bite the inside of her cheek until the urge to throw herself at him, to press herself against him, to insist he take her somewhere for immediate, immoral, impassioned gratification, subsides.

She’s embarrassed to admit it, but the truth is that even when it comes to sex and the amount of time she spends thinking about it, wanting it, needing it, she’s more like a boy than a girl.