The Dancer

Act VII

Yerevan, 1974

Papa is one of the few men in the entire city, aside from high-ranking members of the Communist Party, who owns a vehicle with pleated maroon-colored fabric shades on the rear windows. Papa's not one of them, but he has friends who are. No other household on our block has an unattached garage with a shiny black Volga parked inside. With polished silvery rims and hubcaps, the car has antennae—not one, but two.

On occasion, Papa comes home with a group of friends. Like Papa, they're well-groomed and have an air of authority about them that commands respect. The director of the network of gas stations has a bulbous red nose. He arrives with his wife, a dancer in the National Dance Troupe. The famous opera singer and his even more famous wife—I've seen more than once. The principal of the school my brother and I attend arrives with our art teacher and his posse. The manager of a department store, Papa's best friend, brings along the antique rug salesman and his group of friends.

Accompanied by their wives or mistresses, Papa’s friends eat and drink in our formal dining room reserved for important guests and occasions only. Meanwhile, Mama runs back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, delivering steaming dishes and refilling the appetizer plates.

I don't want to be rude and stare, but I study their every move from the corner of my eye.

Of all the visitors, I'm most enchanted by the dancer. She wears floor-length gowns, with her loosely braided auburn hair wrapped around her head like a crown. She doesn't walk; she glides. She doesn't just look; she sweet-glazes everything with her soft, green eyes fanned by extended, dark lashes. Her round face—a smooth canvas for her painted red rose-petal lips. Although she resembles Anahit, the heroine of an Armenian folktale, who weaves rugs and falls in love with a prince, I think of her as a princess from Russian fairy tales that I like to watch on TV.

I wanted to be like the dancer when I grew up, but understood that, unlike the world of Armenian folklore, I sense with every cell of my body, the mysterious in the Russian fairy world lured me. Their characters, the fairies and the princesses, lived in magical forests and possessed the power to transform themselves and those around them. I wished for the same.