Margot has been using the same stationery for the entire fifty-five years of their correspondence, so her letters, some six hundred in all, form remarkably uniform stacks in the antique roll-top desk next to his bed. The handwriting on the oldest among them, written shortly after a traumatic and unplanned meeting in 1947—their first in nearly a decade—was almost identical to the last, though the later letters retain the scent of soap and candles he has come to associate with his sister.
These three neat stacks of identical sheets of paper are the first thing Teo notices each morning, and they comfort him, evidence of his longest relationship. He and his sister write to one another about their everyday existence, and he craves the keen and precise observations Margot makes of her quiet, contained world. He is certain he would recognize Sister Beatrice by her triple chins, Sister Agnes by her winking left eye, Sister Anne by the way her ears turn red when she is angry. And the convent cats, as quiet and contained as their surroundings. And the caretakers, first Josep and then Josep Junior, one family of Polish peasants maintaining the convent for nearly seventy years. How little that world has changed from year to year, from season to season.
There was once a break in the letters, a rupture swallowed up by time, by the envelopes that began to reach him again sometime later. He looks for the gap in the orderly piles of letters, guesses it must be somewhere in the second stack, but of course there is no evidence. It came after a brief reunion in Warsaw in the early 1980s. Both Teo and Margot were out of their element, the elegant hotel at which they met felt natural to neither of them, and their conversation was awkward and distant. Without ever mentioning it, each resolved never to meet again, preferring instead their glorious epistolary relationship. Several times Teo has mentioned the possibility of publishing their correspondence, that scholars and even the general public would find their letters engaging and perhaps important on several levels, but his sister, in her calm, powerful manner, much like a subtle force of nature—a persistent wind that bends trees, rushing water that carves holes in rocks—was adamant about this: not now, not after their deaths, not ever; it would be unseemly and improper, and it was the one thing that could cause her, with enormous sadness and regret, to refrain from communicating with him ever again. So since neither of them could bear this possibility, the idea has always, after being mentioned, been dropped immediately.
Teo keeps copies of his own side of their correspondence in satchels bound with ribbon stashed on a high shelf in his bedroom. They are less accessible to him than Margot’s letters, but he feels the need to revisit them far less often. Still, lately he has been drawn more and more to both sides of their correspondence, their combined half century of letters: to the elegant, prewar Polish by which they stand loyally, to the chunk of history to which they give witness, to the sheer volume of it all; and to their ability, so lost in the world now, to suggest so much, to tuck meanings into words, to crouch emotions behind mellifluous phrasing, to crunch a mountain of feelings into a mound of pure gold, without ever using an explicit, naked word. They are masters of inference, experts of the long, sly wink.
There were letters from his side, he remembers, that described and detailed the dances he was creating better than he had done anywhere else, letters from which choreographers and dancers alike would profit greatly. There were letters from her side on the role of the convent in modern life that would serve the Church and its adherents brilliantly, if only one Church scholar were given permission to read them. World events march through their letters as if their correspondence were an immense stage in a theater with only two seats. Teo and Margot observe, they comment. Sometimes they rage, sometimes they weep; occasionally they disagree, but always courteously. On the rare occasion they are in open conflict, both are miserable and seek to resolve their differences quickly.
More than anything, they are respectful of one another. Although they held forth on theological issues in the mid–1950s and again thirty-five years later, Teo has never questioned Margot’s abandonment of Judaism in favor of Catholicism and life in a convent. Margot has never asked her brother about the war. She has noted, with wry amusement, that their collective contribution to populating the world has been abysmal, “and we should both be chided for that,” but nothing more. In the late 1950s, when it seemed that a virulent strain of anti-Semitism was about to swallow Poland whole, they argued about the Polish national character. On the other hand, they mostly agree about Israel’s two periods of intifada and the need for territorial compromise, though Teo surprised even himself with a few comments that bordered on national pride.
He picks up the uncomfortable pen again and wraps his hand around it.
I have been thinking lately about Mother. I have been wondering if she wanted to marry Father or whether she felt obligated, when her sister Anna died in childbirth and left him so bereft. Was it her family who decided she should marry Oskar, or was it her own decision? She always seemed headstrong to me, soft but stubborn—much like you! She had a way of getting Father to agree to her every whim without ever raising her voice or crying or pleading. I remember her almost as a pampered daughter to Father, do you, too? After all she was quite a bit younger, and of course gay and frivolous compared to his serious nature.
He remembers how he and Mother would sit apart from the nannies and their charges at the park, how they went to puppet shows, the public library, the vegetable market, the train station, their favorite spot on a bank of the Vistula River—wherever young Teodor would be entertained, wherever he would find sights and sounds of interest. She sat by quietly as he hopped after a passing butterfly or rolled down a grassy hill. She spied as he imitated a trotting dog or a fat nanny chasing her charge, not in jest but as a way of learning their bodies, their movement. He was very nearly speechless, rarely asked questions, preferring to construct his own truth from his own kaleidoscopic imagination. Neither he nor his mother was ever, ever bored together and their daytime world was solid and complete.
On the very day that the American stock market plummeted, pulling the European bourses along for the ride, Rosa gave birth to a girl, Margot. Small and pinched, Margot did not elicit the nurses’ loving attention as her brother had seven and a half years earlier. She was red and unlovely compared to the other babies, and though tinier than the rest she could squeal and wail like the most robust.
Teodor had been expecting a playmate, a fan and a foil to keep him interested on long, dreary winter afternoons, and so he was profoundly disappointed when this wrinkled, good-for-nothing baby took up permanent residence in their house. She could neither walk nor talk, she knew no songs, and Nanny would not let him dress her up for skits or games. She was often rheumy, or feverish, or chilled, so Rosa would cancel their afternoon outings, condemning Teodor to the confines of the small apartment. Worst of all, baby Margot had a deformity that both frightened and intrigued him: one eyelid did not fully open, so she constantly gave the impression of peering out at the world from a secret hiding place.
When Margot was still an infant, even before her first birthday, she was hospitalized for several months with complications following ill-advised and unsuccessful surgery on her damaged eyelid. Rosa ran frantically back and forth to the hospital, leaving Teodor with the nanny for longer and longer stretches. Oskar tried to compensate, taking his son to the park and the puppet theater, but he lacked his wife’s gaiety and her infinite patience, and so father and son often returned from their excursions ill-tempered and offended with one another.
It was a sympathetic neighbor, Mrs. Zabrinski, who first suggested that the Levins enroll Teodor at the ballet school that stood just one block down on Szara Street. He could, she reasoned, reach the school on his own, or at the very least with the help of his nanny. He was naturally graceful and would certainly have no trouble executing any movement demanded of him. And, she gently hinted, ballet lessons would provide him with much needed discipline, respect for authority, and a framework for the strange leaps and twirls he was always performing as he walked down the street. Teodor was a boy who could never simply walk from one place to the next by placing one foot in front of the other, a trait Mrs. Zabrinski suggested would brand him as odd by the children in school, and cause him to suffer.
So subtle was her suggestion that Rosa almost missed it.
“He … he …” she stammered, “do you think he is really, I mean, do you think there’s something wrong with him?”
“No dear, not at all. He’s just high-spirited and very clever and full of energy.” Mrs. Zabrinski had brought four boys of her own to manhood and knew the pitfalls. “Take my word for it, ballet will do him a world of good.”
And so, in the spring of his eighth year, Teodor began to dance.
Those early years of dancing, Teodor recalls, were sweet years of discovery, years of blissfully losing himself to the beautiful world of movement. He found himself there, knew just who he was and what he wanted. At first it was the thrill of being better than everyone else, and so effortlessly, but after a while it became the thrill of pushing the limits of his body, the sheer physicality of stretching that much farther, reaching that much higher, turning that much faster. And feeling so strong and stuffed with muscles that seemed to burgeon under every inch of his skin.
But finally, ultimately, in the years that followed, the excitement of creativity surpassed all the other elements. Teodor was progressing rapidly beyond what he was being taught, inventing new steps and feeling the music course through him, shooting through his blood to every extremity like mercury, until his body had no choice but to move and move and move, always something new and completely his own. He began to feel as though his body were a comet; each time he danced he pushed past another planet, another star, another galaxy. He felt he brought light and color to where nothing had existed before, spinning faster, leaping higher, his body creating new hinges and pivots and axles. He had no patience for anything but dance, and searched wearily for someone who could understand; he wanted to find another human being who knew how it felt to have the stars cheer him on each time he stepped into ballet slippers, how the planets shook themselves out of their slumber and the galaxies flicked their sparkling tails and the sun shot great bolts of heat and light through the cold universe each time he pirouetted across the floor. He had moved beyond conceit and pride to the humility of a great and endless discovery, but found no one with whom to share it.
And he was only fourteen years old.