#2 ‘PointeLess’
ELEMENTARY
2.
’PointeLess’
There was no other place I wanted to be at as a toddler. Disciplined synchronised movements reflecting in mirrors. The sound of the pointe shoes lifting the angelic beings of ethereal beauty into the air seemed to me like a sound of my destiny. It didn’t matter that I had no shoes to stand on, I stood on my toes anyhow… I learned every step of the 'Swan Lake'. Odil and her mesmerising 32 fouettés were the toughest but the most satisfying.
My parents usually took me to the opera studio or the stage to watch the rehearsals of the productions. Countless times I relived the drama of every opera and ballet, from every angle and place in front or at the sides of the heavy red curtain. It was only a logical step to have the first ballet lesson that would finally put me into the army of supernatural beings. Angels, swans, sleeping beauties…
I would also be able to win over gravity and use my body in the ways that only the chosen and the dedicated ones could. My body will be in my total control and therefore I will reach for the ultimate satisfaction I could possibly imagine. One day I would squeeze my bleeding toes into the most beautiful object made by man…the satin, light pink shiny pointe shoes and become the Goddess of painful elegance. I would enjoy the discipline that would ensure glory. There was no other calling worth spending my life on.
It is one of the cruellest jobs my father thought, also I was already showing my future length. I would be too tall to be one of the gracious employees of any ballet house… Yes, I should get my ballet lessons, but then somehow it should be stopped on time, before it is too late to put the real priority, the violin, into my hands!
Somehow, unexpectedly as accidents do, that happened already shortly after the first lesson.
Five o’clock. It was time for the afternoon coffee. The coffee that announces the waking up from an afternoons’s rest of the hardworking people in our flat building and makes possible to go on with the sounds of resumed activities of the day, according to the house rules. Point, heal, one, two, point, heal, one, two…the drum in the hands of the teacher playing the steady rhythm… A pink little till tulle skirt my father sewed for me… Dreaming away and reliving the feeling of the order. Me, a little grown-up, happily went to show my competence in the kitchen and finish cooking the five o’clock coffee for my parents. Two teaspoons of the finely ground coffee into the boiling water in the special coffee pot. The coffee pot was a bit broken and it’s handle turned the way it shouldn’t. As I took it off from the cooker for the third time raising the deliciously smelling foam of boiling dark liquid, standing on a little chair, the handle turned and the boiling coffee poured all over my both legs…
I didn’t feel much, I mostly got scared that I did something wrong. I must have screamed because everyone was suddenly in the kitchen. Panic and a desperate look on my mother’s face. She did the best she could think of, tore the white leggings off my legs. In slow motion and muffled silence, I saw that with those leggings went also some of my skin and there was blood… it was probably too painful to feel it but was clear to me that something very special was happening… wrapped up in a blanket, hospital, a kind doctor, mother in tears, I was just fine. They cleaned up and treated my second-degree burns, put my both legs into a thick cast and we returned home safely in our orange Skoda to lie down on the sofa not to be able to move for a couple of months…. Every time they changed my bandages, of course, they would rip off, again and again, a little bit of my flesh, but, if I could watch I could handle it… while my mother was fainting next to me… I found that very interesting and amusing…
Well, that put an end to my dancing career. Missing too many lessons, was an explanation I had to believe. With my burned little legs I could not become a dancer they said… Now I can focus on the violin.
After my skin healed, there were scars of course. I loved them very much. Putting special cream on them became a ritual and I liked that. As I was growing, they were changing and fading, but every summer as the sun would kiss them they would show.
It is one of my favourite moments of the year. The blue sea, the blue sky, the heat of the salty air, the sound of the waves and the appearance of the leaf shape on my thigh… the mark of destiny.
