Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Igor Sakhnovsky

her smell, and not just in town. And those that didn’t, still noticed her refined, sensuous face, her half-disrobed figure on the advertising posters of inhuman dimension, in the dog-eared pages of glossy magazines. She was drooled over and possessed by all, as much as an inaccessible, glamorous image might allow itself to be possessed: a near-sighted goddess garbed in smoky lacey stockings, right above the stoplights, amidst the traffic jam, shedding a pair of pointy-toed mules, at that time of year when the opaque shoulders exposed beneath the streetlights were powdered with a glittering February hoarfrost. And only he, our 15-year-old lover boy, was permitted to observe her at home, shivering in her silk pajamas, frolicking with her before the mirror-covered wall of the huge, open-planned studio until he was senseless, watching how she, sticking out the tip of her tongue, shaves her legs, how she gets dressed, sprays herself with eau de toilette, knowing all the while that she has a stomach ache, that she adores the strictly forbidden Siberian dumplings: “Can I steal just two of yours?” She made him a gift of simple words that would make any man happy, not to speak of an unruly youngster. She said: never had she been happier with anyone than she was with him. And she will wait for him, that is, she will patiently wait till he grows up. D. was often on the road – he always knew the precise date of her return, because they had agreed they

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