photo albums, books left wide open like birds spreading their wings, perched on the edge of a table or the arm of a chair. Nina owned a somewhat disconcerting mix of rare objects and worthless bibelots. Gorgeous antique engravings were hung next to cheap color prints. An orange plastic ashtray had as much claim to the mantelpiece as a silver candelabrum. She seemed to accept these objects the way she accepted people: as they were, without valuing one over the other.
Most of the time, Quentin would find Nina at home, unless she was out giving her dance lessons. He quickly learned to ignore the doorman’s daughter, who spent her days sitting in a corner behind the coatrack. She would wrap herself in whatever clothing was hung there, bury her head in it, and sit perfectly still. Quentin gave a start the first time he came upon her draped in the folds of some sequined thing that was always glittering there in that dark corner.
The courtyard looked better if you didn’t see it in broad daylight. In the evening, everything seemed cleaner, quieter. There were also fewer children. These were the off-peak hours of the day, for Nina’s visitors. A pot-bellied samovar shone in a corner of the room, as if to recall her Russian origins, but she always made tea in the kitchen, because she didn’t have any embers to use. Two or three cups of tea, talk of this or that, and the evening’s first visitors would be arriving. Quentin would sometimes stay, but that was the exception. More often, he would try to get home early while the stores were still open, doing some shopping on the way back.
One day, she suggested he come see the little studio where she gave her dance lessons. As parents would never have consented to send their little girls to the quarter where she lived, she’d had to rent an apartment on the Ring. It was a small, two-room flat where, every afternoon from three to five, she taught the basics of classical ballet to the little daughters of the foreign colony, children of diplomats for the most part.
He returned several times, then every day at four to watch the second lesson of the day, attended by girls aged seven to nine. He would sit in a corner, waiting for the class to finish, after which he would walk Nina back to her place.
He greatly enjoyed watching the little girls dance. It didn’t take him long to single out the gifted ones from among those who were less so. Nina often put him in charge of the music. Compliant and happy, he would change cassettes, rewind, and fast-forward as instructed. During her classes, Nina wore a stern expression, and liked to remind her charges that she did things the traditional way. If they didn’t like it, they knew where the door was. “One, two, three . . . And one and two and three . . . One, two, three . . .” And so the children, in a momentary return to seriousness, resumed their exercises, together this time. Their limp tutus reminded Quentin of the crinkled pink petals of godetia flowers. As the tape recorder roared out the accompaniment, he found himself wishing there were a real piano on which an old spinster would relentlessly pound out the same polkas over and over.
This innocent pleasure was soon brought to a painful and entirely unexpected end. The mothers showed up one day at the studio—fortunately for Quentin at the start of the first lesson, which spared him the embarrassment of meeting them face-to-face. Imagine their surprise and indignation when they found out that a man had been coming every day to watch the little girls dance—a man in his forties, a bachelor, who had no reason for being there but might well be motivated by the most unspeakable intentions. How could you be so complacent, they asked, with the obsessions of such an unsavory individual, you of all people, Madame Praskine, the dance instructor to whom the best families entrust their children?
They demanded a guarantee that henceforth no man would be admitted to her classes, unless it be a father or uncle of one of the pupils.
When he arrived that day, Nina took him aside, into the former kitchen, now a changing room, and told him what had transpired with the emissaries she had just received. He blushed in shame at being taken for the criminal he was not. All around them hung tutus, satin slippers, children’s underclothes, little tights all twisted. His gaze fell upon a grass-stained sock, which he found particularly moving. Where in all of Tahas was there enough grass to stain socks? Nina attempted to downplay the issue, and pretended to laugh it off, but it was an unpleasant matter for her as well.
He left immediately. In order to exit, he had to walk through the dance room. The little girls, strangely silent, watched him as he went, and he had the feeling their sly gazes betrayed both hostility and curiosity.
From that day on, he saw Nina only at her place, later in the day, after the dance lessons.
One evening, he found the courtyard in a state of unusual agitation. Men were in discussion, talking all at once, and women were keening.
Nina was at home, going busily through some papers, eyeglasses perched on her nose. She seemed upset.
“What’s going on?”
“Libella has drowned. They’ve just fished her out of the water. Yes, you do know her, you know the one, the doorman’s daughter that was always here, by the coatrack. Last night she went missing. Makki came looking for her, since it was very late and her father was furious that she hadn’t come home yet, but she was already gone. I didn’t see her leave. It was only after Makki had left that I noticed she had taken that big sequined cape that she was always wrapped in. That seemed odd to me. Last night, everyone in the neighborhood was out looking for her. She never used to set foot outside the courtyard. I don’t think she’d ever been outside, not since she was born. You’ve seen her, she couldn’t even cross a street alone! A boatman discovered her this afternoon. He saw something shiny behind his boat, which was docked at the time. The body must have been carried along by the current, and the cape got caught in his propeller. How in the world did that poor girl, who never seemed capable of nursing the least desire, who had never even seen the Ovir, how is it she suddenly left the house and crossed so many streets to go throw herself into the river? And why in my cape? What can I say . . . ? I feel somehow that it’s my fault: she was in my house, she took my cape, and she went straight to the Ovir and drowned herself.”
Quentin was unable to calm her down. She continued to search feverishly for something in her desk, then in a shoebox full of papers, talking all the while, repeating that she must surely share some responsibility, that it was such a horrible thing, that she should have taken better care of the girl. That cape was the sign that she, Nina, had been the unwitting instrument of Libella’s fate.
Her hands were shaking, still searching through other drawers and an old cardboard suitcase full of papers. Her cheek constantly quivering from nervous tics was painful to watch. The room was turning into quite a mess.
“What exactly are you looking for, in all this?”
“I’ve misplaced a notebook. My little notebook, where I write down all my . . .”
She trailed off and continued her insanely obstinate search. She finally found it in a pile of old magazines, a place she’d already looked. She let out an ah! holding up the blue notebook for which she’d searched so long and hard, then fell into a chair amid all the scattered papers and began to weep.
“Please, could you leave me now? You’re such a dear, but do go home, I need to be alone. Don’t be angry, Quentin, just understand me, and let me be by myself now.”
He had never seen her in such a state. He wished he could do something for her, but he had to face it: he would do better to let her be. So he left for home, worried, helpless to console her. While in the courtyard, things had settled down.
By the next day, he found Nina had recovered her composure. She had put away all the papers and magazines that she’d strewn around the room, and had clearly seized the opportunity to do some heavy housecleaning. She would say no more of the previous day’s distressing incident; when he alluded to the subject, she brushed
