Letters from Yelena Read online

  Legend Press Ltd, 2 London Wall Buildings,

  London EC2M 5UU

  [email protected]

  www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © Guy Mankowski 2012

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Print ISBN 978-1-9090391-0-0

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-9090391-1-7

  Set in Times. Printed by CPI Books, United Kingdom

  Cover design by Gudrun Jobst www.yotedesign.com

  Author photo © Mark Savage

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  PRAISE FOR GUY MANKOWSKI

  *The Intimates – one of the recommended titles in New Writing North’s Read Regional 2011 Campaign*

  ‘a clever conceit and a compelling narrative’

  Edward Stourton, BBC Radio 4

  ‘An intricately wrought and enchanting first novel... a measured, literary piece of work as hauntingly evocative of its setting and characters as Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer prize winner Housekeeping.’

  Abigail Tarttellin, Author of Flick

  ‘[Guy’s] ability to construct and develop his characters is formidable and the execution of this skill certainly added to the compelling nature of the book.’

  The View from Here

  ‘the book is unusually stylised for contemporary fiction, set in a glamourous, affluent world that seems to be decaying from within... [Guy’s] background in psychology has a strong influence on his writing, which is rich with thoughtful, self-analysing dialogue... ’

  Culture Magazine

  ‘Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts, and by no means just the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing’

  Franz Kafka, Briefe An Milena

  CONTENTS

  Dear Margaret,

  Dear Natalya,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Noah,

  Dear Margaret,

  Dear Margaret,

  It must have been strange to hear that you’re the last hope I have of getting to know my mother. I suppose this is especially strange given that you never met her.

  I know I became a little emotional when we met and I’m sorry about that. But I felt I needed to explain the lengths I have gone to, to try and find out about the mother I barely knew. The fact that I have even visited places she once mentioned in off-the-cuff remarks, in the vain hope that I would find some trace of her there, I know may seem quite ridiculous. It’s been a journey that has taken many years. Recounting all this led me to feel a little overwhelmed by it all, so I am writing now to apologise and to give you some of the necessary details I neglected to mention that day. Perhaps also to explain why owning my mother’s letters would be so important to me. I have been searching for my mother for many years, and it seems that the letters we discussed are my last chance of finding her.

  Some people never feel like they truly know their parents. And just because a child comes from you, it does not necessarily mean you know them either. They are distinct. Never was this more true than with my mother. She always seemed far away from me. Even in her old age she remained a mystery. I never got to know what made her tick; what led her to lead such an unusual and extraordinary life. And exactly why she endured such difficulty. I would have done anything to hear the truth from her directly, but she was never a great talker, always too formal, too reserved. You would think a mother who’d been a Principal ballerina would have had many stories she’d be only too ready to tell her daughter. Not my mother.

  It was only during her final days that she admitted how little she’d ever opened up to me. I presumed that her pain had imbued her with silence. It was too late for me to ask why together we had not felt able to overcome that silence, but she did at least offer me some hope. She told me she had only ever opened up to one man. A writer called Noah, who she had written to during her career as a ballerina. After her death, I came to realise I could only make peace with her if I found a way to get to know her, a way to understand her. I contacted the few names that existed in her address book, but the people who did offer to meet me had little to share about her. They depicted a closed, cautious woman, a woman full of contradictions and secrets. A woman who seemingly came alive only when she was dancing. Her ambitions, her desires and her sufferings had always remained completely her own. Except, that is, when it came to Noah.

  I don’t know what happened to the letters my mother received from this Noah. I suspect that she lived and died wanting to keep the contents of them completely to herself. But then one day, three years after her death, I found amongst her belongings a single postcard signed by him. The contents of the postcard offered me little, but at least it gave me his surname. It required the services of a detective over the course of two years before I was able to finally track him down.

  He was now a reclusive and very elderly writer of some repute, living in a large house on the south coast. I wrote to him, and his reply suggested that he felt intrigued by the woman who was so desperate to meet him.

  When we met he gave his memories of my mother, even to me, with some reluctance. I got the sense that their exchange had somehow been sacred, and that he wanted to keep it that way. When I mentioned the letters she had sent him though, his eyes lit up. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your mother revealed herself completely in those letters. It was as though she finally made sense.’ He then confirmed that he had in his ownership a small box of letters that my mother had sent him during her lifetime. Towards the end of our conversation he admitted that he had become an ‘almost totemic’ figure to my mother during her life, for reasons he still could not quite fathom.

  Feeling so close to the prize, I asked with some trepidation if he would allow me to read the letters. But unsurprisingly, he expressed reluctance to do so, saying they were often very intimate. When I explained that these letters were my last hope of ever getting to know her, he finally admitted that he had made a promise to protect her letters for all his life, and he simply couldn’t break it. I tried reasoning with him and imploring him and eventually, just as I was leaving, he said that he would leave the letters for me when he died. It seemed there was light at the end of the tunnel. Even if I would only reach it with the passing of this frail but considerate man.

  I am so glad now that I taped that conversation with him. I could never have imagined the contents of the tape would be required as evidence. I only taped the conversation because I did not want to forget any scraps of my mother that he might offer up to me. When I saw his obituary in The Times a year later I began to try and trace the letters, which had automatically passed into my ownership. I soon learnt that all of his work, including the letters, ha
d become a part of his literary estate. An estate, which you yourself manage.

  It was disheartening to hear that he had not legally entrusted the letters to me before he passed away, though I can understand this. As a creative type he did not seem au fait with the legalities required in such a case. He probably thought I could just turn up and claim them back by asking nicely. Which is why I was so grateful when you agreed to meet with me and hear the contents of the tape, and even more grateful that you subsequently agreed to find a way to ensure that the letters are entrusted to me.

  I understand that the contents of the tape are currently being verified. I hope that the promise this man made to me will allow you, in time, to alleviate my desperation, and offer me the letters my mother once sent him. It is the only way I can foresee that I can make my peace with the mother I barely knew.

  I eagerly look forward your response.

  Yours sincerely,

  Natalya Christensen

  Dear Natalya,

  Please find enclosed in this package the letters sent from your mother to Noah Stepanov during their period of correspondence, which began just after she had graduated as a Principal ballerina. With the exception of a single handwritten note, which is referred to in the letters, I believe they do comprise everything she wrote to him.

  Given the financial and emotional effort you have invested in retrieving these, I hope you now feel satisfied that all the letters from Yelena Brodvich are in your possession. Due to the fact that Mr Stepanov gave very few verbal interviews in his lifetime, the authenticity of his promise to you on tape took some time to verify, but that process is now complete. It is possible that in due course some objections might be raised if these letters do not become archived property, as they do relate to Mr Stepanov’s literary estate. I trust that the two of us will remain in contact to negotiate that situation if and when it becomes salient.

  I am glad I was able to be of some service to you. I understand that this whole enterprise has been personally taxing and you have undergone many sacrifices to reach this point. I can only hope that these letters will allow you to make peace with your mother in the way that you described.

  With my very best wishes and regards to your family,

  Margaret

  LETTERS FROM YELENA

  BY GUY MANKOWSKI

  Dear Noah,

  I dreamt of you again, watching me rehearse for the ballet. In the dream I am standing three or four feet from the other dancers. The door to the courtyard is open, revealing that bright shaft of the city. It is summer, or early autumn. There is a certain sequence of chords that plays every time, and though there is a melody there it is distant and vague and I can’t recall it when I awake. I recognise it instantly though, every time I have the dream about when we first met.

  The melody is haunting and expanding, and it plays over and over again, that same refrain. The other dancers stretch, and I compose myself. I feel the heat of your gaze on the back of my neck. We haven’t spoken yet, but I already feel I know you so well, simply from your gaze. It seems to search for so much and find even more. I think I knew even then that eventually we would come together.

  No-one could have told you I feel sure of anything as I nervously try to find my first position. The maestro seats himself at the shining set of keys in the corner of the hall, and looks over at me. The corps de ballet watch me expectantly, waiting for inevitable errors. At the entrance, the hired hands pass amongst the sunlight. The girls conspire amongst themselves. I flex my muscles. I am alone, Noah, so painfully alone that I feel sure that I cannot dance. Least of all now. But I know I must, because you are watching. Because however inevitable our union feels at that point, I still must prove it to you right now.

  I return to a barren wilderness every time I begin to dance. I know I have told you before that no matter how many other ballerinas I’m dancing with, I feel sealed apart from them. They flit about me like excuses. Every one is a distraction from my movement, from my expression. They are all in competition with me; at least that is how it feels. At this point in the dream the feeling of loneliness becomes so acute that I always struggle to breathe. However much after the dance people tell me that I moved beautifully, I feel as if they are talking to me in a bubble and that I am completely insulated from how I felt at the time. The praise by then feels as if it belongs to someone else. Sometimes, in my dreams of dancing, I trip over and fall to the floor just as I begin. When this happens the other ballerinas simply dance over me, until my body becomes a bloody pulp twisting into the ground. My thin figure becomes bruised and damaged as their tiny, muscular feet pummel into me. I become as indistinguishable from the ground as sunlit dust is from the sky, while it quietly circles our movements.

  I want you to know how I felt at that moment, as I began to dance and tried to dismiss these fears from my mind. At that moment the isolation isn’t like it was when I first moved to St Petersburg from Ukraine. That isolation existed as a kind of hollow pain in the pit of my stomach. The soft thump of ballet pumps at the Vaganova Academy made for an aching and resonant sound, but they were washed with a kind of nauseous excitement, because I knew that I had finally escaped my stepmother. I knew that I had arrived at the point where I could begin doing something of worth, and so the pain was not unchecked. I had only ever felt fulfilled before that on the afternoons I’d volunteered at the children’s home, but that had felt different, that had been a more nourishing, steady fulfilment. That excitement had twisted into something new by the time I moved from St Petersburg to England, where you would finally watch me dance. At that point, a new thought had started to consume me, like a parasite – the thought that I could never truly be a dancer, that I lacked the nerve. And yet here I was, hundreds of miles from my childhood in Donetsk, struggling with this new language, amongst a troupe of women more talented than I, wondering if I was always doomed to failure. A failure that now could not be soothed by even the paltry comforts of home.

  I won’t remind you of how long it had been since I had felt a kinship with anyone. The wilderness stretched from the brittle terrain of friendship, through the chalky turf of professionalism. Isolation skewered through the sinewy paths of intimacy and had now settled into every second of my life. As I tensed into the first position, I was living in exile. And yet the heat of your gaze meant that at that moment all the loneliness was erased by the thought that I could yet be saved from it all. As it was the first time you watched me, so it is in the dream.

  This dance feels so different from any other, because you are there. Any beauty I manage to carve out in this barren place is not wasted because it is for you, and that is what I tell myself as the music starts. I sense you raise your chin, and I turn mine perpendicular to yours. The piano chords begin to roll, and their momentum soon overwhelms me as I start to move.

  I don’t look to you at any point in the dance and more than ever I dance as me. For once I do not feel removed from the dance. I give myself the room to indulge a little, a small emphasis here and there as I always imagined it should be, as I would never have permitted myself were the choreographer present. My attitudes are more elegant, my adage’s more pointed. But with you watching this is not only permitted, but expected. Finally, I am dancing for a purpose. Though you will not review my dance for a broadsheet paper, and though it will not be festooned with stars on an infinite number of cheaply printed sheets, this dance has more meaning than any. I am creating a piece of work that stands outside of time, a shard of self-expression that for once is not futile, and gradually, above all others, you are seduced by my movement. I feel the weight of pressure on me, the gorgeous weight of knowing that just this one time I must be incredible. That I must create movements whose meaning extends beyond the realms of the mundane. At first I feel your eyes possessively pore over my limbs as they extend and contract. You consider the white flesh of my clenched thigh as I plié, and the flashes of my body that my outfit reveals as I stretch and gambol. I am inevitably mapped out, a goo
d portion of me at least, for the duration of the dance.

  That is why I thought it apt to tell you of this dream in the first letter I’m sending you. At our reunion three days ago, in that beautiful rose garden, we agreed to be completely honest in these letters. Meeting one another made our lives extraordinary. Perhaps that is why we agreed in these letters, the first we have ever written to one another, to chart what has happened between us since we first met. In doing so, I hope to discover what caused the remarkable events that followed our introduction. But I have another, more personal hope for these letters. I hope that through them we can also work out exactly what we are to each other now. However pure our union first felt, we have, in all honesty, taken each other through dark places that no-one could have envisaged. Through these letters I hope to illuminate these sunless corners of our lives. To illuminate exactly who you and I are now, as a result of what we have done to each other.

  My letters to you, my darling Noah, will be maps, in which I hope I can be found. Like that time you once mentioned, when you saw a glimpse of me, naked in front of the mirror, through the open bathroom door. You said you had seen me, not composed, but unadorned. Physically and socially unadorned. And that is how I hope I will be in these letters and how I hope to find you in yours too. I have always struggled to be anything other than stiff and secretive, and even now I struggle to find the language to be open and intimate. But if I can at last do it with anyone – finally ventilate all the hidden compartments of myself – I believe it will be with you. I don’t believe we could ever write in such a way to anyone else. I hope we can do this. If we are to supply any remedy to one another, for the ills of fate and circumstance, then I feel sure that it will be through these letters.

  Towards the end of the dream the dance ends and I start to remember who you still are to me. Just a writer in a navy blue trilby, clutching a red notebook, who’s been reluctantly granted permission to sit in on our rehearsal while researching his next book. A voyeur, that is what you are – by your own volition. A voyeur is criticised for granting himself access to something which he is not privy to. And in that case, in that context, that is what you are. And yet it is not so simple. Because I made a decision at the moment the maestro seated himself: to play the role of a seductress. Therefore, although it is demonstrably me who is under scrutiny, you have been stripped of the power of your role. And from that moment on, the two of us were absented from usual life.