He is standing at the window watching Nelly down in the garden pulling weeds that sprouted after a recent cloudburst. She spends hours there every day, planting flowers or harvesting the vegetables they dine on. He marvels at her patience. Of all the Hebrew she has learned in her twenty-odd years in Israel, he figures the overwhelming majority has to do with food and gardening.
A bird flutters at the window, hovers there as if asking to enter, and Teo raises his face to watch. His left arm rises, too, as he imitates the bird; his upper arm is all grace and elegance, a long fluid motion, while his hand down to the fingertips quivers in tiny, rapid jerks. Teo’s eyes fall shut as his right arm rises, too, his back extends and his neck climbs higher and higher. He is floating now, beating his wings, lifting himself, strong and unimpeded, high above this building, this neighborhood, this city. He extends a hand to a partner just a short reach away and pulls her close, only to discover Vivi suddenly in his arms. They move in perfect silent unison until a large truck, bouncing noisily through the neighborhood, causes Teo’s eyes to flutter open and his arms to drop to his sides.
When the telephone first rings he makes no move to answer it. He has never enjoyed speaking on the phone, does not own a mobile, and often simply refuses to pick up when it rings. But it is Saturday morning, an odd time for a call, and he is mildly intrigued. When the caller speaks to him in Danish, he knows who it is at once.
“Sofie, darling,” he says. “What a pleasure!” They speak only rarely anymore, but he is always happy to hear her raspy voice. It is only after they hang up that he feels a deep sadness, a malaise of missed opportunity and loss.
“Happy birthday!” she enthuses.
“Oh dear Sofie, plus ça change …”
“What? Have I missed again this year?”
“Only by a month or so.”
“But isn’t your birthday the twenty-second?”
“Yes. Of February. So I am still officially only eighty-four and would ask that you not rush me.”
Sofie laughs her deep smoker’s laugh until she coughs. He worries about making her laugh, which she loves to do, simply because it always nearly brings her to asphyxiation. “Did I have the date right last year?” she asks between spasms.
“Last year you forgot entirely, then wrote me a card in May or June. It is still on top of the piano.”
“So I’d better send something really special for your eighty-fifth.”
“Good health is all I really need.”
“Yes, that makes two of us. I seem to be the only unhealthy Sonnenfeld, you know. My brothers are the picture of health, not a single thing wrong with either of them. This lung business makes me the black sheep.”
“You always did have to be different.”
“Hmmm. Teo, I don’t know if you heard, but your old ballet partner, Kirsten, passed away last month.”
“Kirsten? Oh, Kirsten!” He is at first grateful to recover the name, then sad to lose her so quickly. “Oh. Oh dear.”
“Sorry, Teo.”
“Lovely Kirsten.” He can hear the allegretto music from their duet in The Konservatoriet. “Was she ill?”
“No, not at all. She was leading some master classes in Stockholm and didn’t come down to breakfast one morning. They found her in her hotel bed, she simply never woke up. That’s perfect, don’t you think? She was still so elegant and good-looking. Anyway, I attended the funeral—I find funerals are wonderful for catching up with people you’d never see otherwise—and I met the young man who’s now the artistic director at the ballet. Oh bother, I’ve forgotten his name again. Well, he knows that you and I keep in touch and he asked me to tell you that he’ll be contacting you soon about permissions because the Royal Danish Ballet wants to perform several of your ballets in the coming seasons. Don’t ask me which ones or when, I can barely remember my twin brother’s name anymore. But I thought you’d like to know.”
“Yes, thank you. I would love more than anything to see them danced well.”
“So that means you’ll come over here?”
He looks out the window. Nelly is lugging a large bundle of weeds to the garbage bin. “I doubt it,” he sighs.
They both fall silent.
“Not likely I’d be here to greet you, anyway,” she says, and they fall silent again. He thinks she may be weeping.
“Come, Sofie, let’s not be morose. We’ve tried to live full and productive lives, haven’t we? We’ve stuck around longer than most, too.”
“I’ve done little more than having and raising two children who, I might brag, turned out to be rather wonderful. But you’ve done enough for ten people.”
“Nonsense,” he says, and then again, angrily: “Nonsense! I was meant to be a dancer but wound up on a small stage in a country that despises ballet. I’ve taught several generations of middling dancers, choreographed a few decent ballets, even collected a prize or two. It all means nothing, though. Do you believe me, Sofie? Nothing. I should have married, had children.”
“What? Teo, what are you talking about? You’re one of the best choreographers of the century. And you were only thwarted in your dancing career by the bloody Second World War! Anyway, since when have you wanted a wife and children? That’s news to me.”
“It’s been on my mind lately. Do you never think about what we leave behind, eventually? Our legacy?”
“Not really. I’m content with thinking about how I’ve lived, what people have meant to me and what I’ve meant to them.”
“Even worse,” he says, “never to have felt that. I have been a dance teacher to hundreds but I’ve never meant to any of them what you mean to your small circle of family and friends.”
Sofie sighs deeply into the phone. “Do you really regret it all, Teo?”
Teo feels as if something is pressing down on him, his arms like anchors. He can barely hold the telephone anymore. “I just, well, I’ve missed a few things, Sofie. A few important things.”
When they say good-bye he places the receiver lightly in its cradle and lifts his fingers to his nose, straining for just the tiniest whiff of her scent. It was early evening in August 1939, just one week before the ballet’s departure for Berlin. The long northern summer had trapped the sun high in the sky and the day gave no indication that it would ever capitulate. Teodor was alone in the studio; Sofie appeared in the doorway as he positioned himself before the mirrors for yet another go at his solo. He caught her reflection just as he raised his arms. Tall and fair in a soft flowery skirt. Teodor was happy to see her.
“Sofie, hullo, how long have you been standing there?” He let his arms drop but talked to her reflection in the mirror.
“Just got here,” she said, taking a few steps onto the wooden dance floor. “Mother sent me to call you home, she wants to get one good meal into you today.”
“She sent you all the way down here just for that?”
“Teodor, you’ve been working on this performance like a madman for weeks. I think she’s worried you’ll exhaust yourself.”
“I just want to get it right, that’s all. This is very, very important to me.”
“Of course it is. Come, show me a little.”
Teodor needed no further prompting. He turned to face her. “Well, you know, the scene takes place in the dance school of the Paris Conservatory. My role is that of a ballet student desperate for attention, out to prove himself. Well, that’s the way I see him, anyway.” He moved to the phonograph and lifted the needle, but did not place it on the record yet. “I do a few lifts with this girl Kirsten, really just a crossover from her solo to mine, in fact. Then I dance for three minutes on my own. My big solo,” he said, attempting to laugh it off.
He placed the needle carefully on the record and moved quickly to the center of the room. “I’ll do the end of our duet straight into my solo,” he told Sofie as she folded herself into a sitting position on the floor in the middle of the room, directly in front of him.
The music, scratchy on the phonograph, picked up in a few seconds. Teodor was aware of all the elements merging in him, he had control of all the pieces of this dance as he performed leaps and jumps, pirouettes and arabesques.
Sofie leaned back on the heels of her hands and spoke up the moment he finished dancing. “Your style has changed, my friend. You’re a real Danish dancer now, aren’t you, like all the other boys?”
Teodor frowned. “Do you really think I dance like all the others?”
She widened her eyes and turned up her palms in a look of calculated innocence. “Well, that was the point, wasn’t it? You were too much the Russian dancer when you came here. Now in less than two years they’ve got you dancing Danish. The real thing, Bournonville would have loved you.”
“It’s how I got the role, Sofie. And it is a Bournonville ballet.”
“Oh I’m sure, I’m sure it’s just the thing. Never mind. Why don’t you teach me the pas de deux. I still remember a thing or two about ballet.”
She rose to join Teodor. He dropped the needle to the gramophone, then approached Sofie, whom he turned around so that her back was to him. He placed his left hand on her left hip, and slid his right arm under hers into a long stretch. “It’s simple, really,” he said, “just two arabesques en l’air, one to the left and one to the right, then a set of glissades, and finally a pirouette. Then you twirl out of the way, upstage left, so that I can dance alone.”
Sofie felt different in his arms than Kirsten. She was taller, nearly as tall as he, and her limbs were longer, her arabesques rather low and lacking grace, but she was warm to his touch. When he lifted her he felt her thigh, softer than Kirsten’s hardened muscles, and he caught her scent, a mix of lavender and roses and something earthy and pungent, like forest mushrooms. Her skirt fluttered in his face and he breathed her in deeply. When he returned her to the floor he did not continue with the glissades; instead, he held her waist.
“What happens now?” she asked quietly.
He was uncertain. All he knew for sure was that it no longer had anything to do with dance. Her back was to him, and he slipped his arms around her and pulled her close so that she pressed into his body from shoulder to heel. They stood like that for a moment, breathing in rhythm. The needle skipped and the music evaporated.
He kissed her ear, soft and hesitant.
She tilted her head, exposing her long neck. His mouth moved downward while his hands roamed, first hovering then caressing. When his lips reached her shoulders he turned her around slowly to face him. A boy and a girl in their late teens in the center of a large, airy room filled with summery yellow light, their arms at their sides, their bodies leaning toward one another, their faces nearly touching. A lock of her fine hair fell loose over one eye; tiny freckles he had never noticed dotted her cheeks. They continued to breathe in rhythm. His body felt as though it were pulling toward her, as though gravity itself had shifted directions. He thought his heart might burst through bone and skin to fly to her. They watched one another in silence.
After a very long moment, Teodor held out his hands, palms up. “Dance with me,” he said, and she stepped into his arms. There was nothing to this ancient dance. No choreography. No flash and sparkle. No moves to learn. Just two bodies speaking to one another. The gramophone scratched out a tuneless love song.
She pressed her ear to his cheek. “We have to go,” she said without conviction.
He moved his head so that they both nodded.
After another moment he said, his voice gravelly with desire, “You shouldn’t have stopped dancing, you know. You could be really good. I wish we could dance together.”
She pulled her head away so that she could look into his face. “Don’t mind what I said before,” she told him. “Your dancing is tremendous. I can see how far you’ve come here. You’ll really be a dancer one day, won’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, “I will be a dancer one day.”
During the busy week that followed before the troupe left for Berlin, Teodor and Sofie had barely a moment alone together. Then, while Teodor spent the war languishing in Berlin, Sofie, along with her family and most of the Jewish community of Copenhagen, fled to neutral Sweden in 1943. After the war Teo found the Sonnenfelds back in Copenhagen, intact and healthy, cheerful even, and thrilled to see him. They were careful not to ask too many questions about his survival, and he volunteered little information. But he was devastated to learn that Sofie had stayed in Malmö, married to a Swede. She was expecting a baby.