Location: Outside Terrace
Time: 11:20PM
Status: open
THE SHAWL feels warmer than the coat, cashmere warmer than wool as she absentmindedly flicks ash off of the end of her cigarette. Still, the liquor coursing through her veins is warmer than either, the flush of her cheeks that matches the rosy moue of her lipstick stained mouth betrays her more relaxed person while the icy air provides a tantalizingly welcome contrast. If you could call the amused curve of her mouth a smile, Alina’s smiling as she surveys the Hellebores Garden below before her dark gaze lifts instead towards the night sky.
She’s so severe while she works, then practically nonexistent to others once they’ve left the theatre. And though she’s not left tonight’s festivities entirely, the way she looks at the half-moon mark her Daphne, pleading for Peneus to have her disappear from the scene around her, to return to the place she belongs, untouchable— the home of the ballet. When she realises she is no longer alone, she takes a drag from her cigarette, and reflexively pops open the silver cigarette case she holds in her left hand to offer one to the other.
“Smoke? It chases the cold away better than liquor, I think.”
Viktor takes the offering in silence, deft fingers managing to pluck a single cigarette from the case despite their stiffness and the cold. It is likely unwise for Viktor to be out without gloves, but he’d left them in his coat pocket at the start of the evening and is in no mood to argue with attendant on paying twice to retrieve them. Besides, the swift chill is a small blessing; there’s warmth high on Viktor’s cheeks and down to his neck, mostly from drink, partly from dance – in the ballroom or otherwise.
"Have a light to go with it?” Viktor’s tone is light, but his eyes cast over Alina in a slow sweep. He’s not entirely a stranger to who she is outside of the rehearsal studio, nor she him, but the evening has been so wholly strange and disarming that he finds himself waiting – though for what he couldn’t quite say.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Viktor watched the dance floor fill silently from against the far wall, hands shoved deep in his pockets. They’d misbehaved at dinner and Viktor nearly dropped his fork with a sharp clatter – an embarrassment that even now still colored high on his cheeks. Nursing his pride, he was content to watch from afar, until of course his eyes landed on Zin. Alone; a rare and precious thing.
He crossed to her in less than a dozen paces, swiping two glasses of something clear and thick – vodka, presumably, and thank fuck for it. Without so much as a word of introduction, he extended one in her direction, his own tilted towards some Americans gathered in the corner.
“I don’t suppose we ought to show them how to have fun the right way.” Viktor lifted the glass to his mouth with a smirk and took a long pull.
PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING Eugene has come to learn is this: never speak ill of others unless you intend for them to hear it. Such is the reason why, leaning against a brick wall and dressed in a pressed navy suit, a seasoned journalist for the New York Times was doing just that.
“ It appears to me that some of you, ” he looks at the boy with blond hair with a pointed glance, “ exaggerated the abilities of our dear pianist a bit too carelessly. ”
“ How could you hear him play and still say that? ”
“ How could you not? ”
Eugene had arrived thirty minutes before practice in order to plant himself by the door in hopes of catching a certain someone. Viktor arriving at the same time he was talking ill of him was just a happy coincidence.
If Viktor had been a betting man, he might’ve put some good money on Eugene sowing discord. As it were, Viktor’s expression was flat, if edging on pleasant, as he approached the small group, hands in his pockets and shoulders drawn wide. A casual stance – as casual as he could muster, facing his favorite American Journalist. Favored insofar as Viktor had taken a liking a target in his backyard as a child.
“Eugene.” At the least, Viktor managed not to butcher his name too much this time. He flashed a quick, tight smile. “I hope you are not distracting my dancers. If you are bored, I hear Alina is on the search for someone to – what is the term you use? Verbal punchbag?”
I’ll admit my surprise to see your name on this envelope. Although, perhaps given your message, I shouldn’t be. He always favored you, whether or not either of us were willing to acknowledge it. I suppose I can say that now – can write it, at the least. I won’t have to see your face when I do.
I can only assume you’ve chosen to write to me in this way to spare me the decision. Should I thank you? Will it matter?
If it requires saying, I will not be attending the funeral. In my stead, I’ve attached some money and if you need more, my father kept a box in the third stair from the top, and another in the shed hidden as a toolbox. Take if you like, I have no use for it. Consider it compensation for the task you’re doing in my stead. If you don’t know already, there’s a plot for him beside my mother, though by the time this reaches you you’ve likely already made a decision. Whatever it is, I do trust you with these things.
If you’ve read to this point, I suppose this is the place where I should begin my apologies. That’s what polite company would do, wouldn’t it? You were always more . . . knowledgeable in the pesky details of etiquette. Tell me, Valya, is that what you would like from me? If not, then what? It’s the only thing I can imagine – why you’ve wrote to me rather than pass off the responsibility of a phone call to the funeral home, or my father’s superiors. Since no one has shown on my doorstep, I can only assume your choice of difficult, drawn-out communication is purposeful.
Once again, I must disappoint you.
If you need anything more from me on the matters of my father’s unfortunate passing, please do not hesitate to call the next time. If you ever find yourself in Moscow, perhaps you will not find my presence so unsavory. It would be nice to see you.
Viktor waited for the liquor to warm him throughout before he approached the bench. It was the only way he felt just brave enough short of stupid to lift the cover, dance his fingers over the keys. They were still so stiff – his fingers. He’d warmed them and cooled them, made fists and extended them fully, and they still wouldn’t always act on command. A smarter man, with more of a spine, might have blamed his father. He was, after all, the one who put the bottle through Viktor’s hand – no matter what the fever dreams and self-hatred said in the late, or early hours. No, Viktor had fashioned the resentment into an albatross of his own, hanging limp and heavy from his neck.
His fingers ghosted over the keys, soft and hesitant, like meeting a lover after so many months apart. And that’s what this was – wasn’t it? His first love: music, the piano, story through song. A whole world in percussion, the soft tap against taut string. Viktor loved women – and men, when he was feeling bold – but nothing so much as he loved the piano. Carefully, his fingers formed chords over the keys, but he withheld from pressing down. Silence could be many things: dangerous, suffocating. Tonight it was precious, a precipice Viktor stepped towards and curled his toes over. He had not touched a piano in months – more months than the space when his mother died. Nothing scared him more than the thought of sitting here, sheet music opened, unable to even run a scale.
With tender, aching hands, Viktor began to play.
Trigger warnings for: implied suicide, car accidents, violence and drug abuse
Viktor is born at the edge of the world. That is to say, he’s born in the last few breaths of the year, on the eastern most fingertip of the Soviet Union’s outstretched hand. He’s born screaming, and largely stays that way, a fussy child from the early hours onward. He hasn’t yet learned what that means for him, the son of a military man and school teacher. What it means to grow sideways, bent like a houseplant, in a home of strict rules and steady voices.
It’s not all quiet and somber silence, though it often feels that way. In the dark hours, when Viktor is tucked into bed and his door firmly shut, his mother indulges. In music, mostly – operas and concertos, Soviet and Western. Often in these moments she will rifle through her books, read herself to sleep. Viktor, for his part, is lulled near nightly by the gentle whispers of instruments he doesn’t yet know the name for.
He asks one evening, when his father is away and his mother has dusted off the record player in the last few minutes of waning daylight. He peers over her shoulder as she rifles through the records, musing softly to herself. When the music is playing, a glass of something dark and forbidden is in his mother’s hand, Viktor grows brave and asks what the music is. Where it came from, who wrote it, what it means. In the hours of indulgence, Viktor’s mother gives him this, too: music and theater and opera, symphony and art and stories. Very late one night, she cracks open the ancient upright sagging in the corner, brings her son’s small hands to the ivory keys, and neither acknowledge the way Viktor’s father huffs from the smokey kitchen.
When Vitkor is 12, the music cuts short. A car accident, the authorities say on the snowy doorstep, Viktor once again peeking over his father’s broad shoulders. Dangerous conditions, nothing to be done. Later, Viktor will wonder if driving down a road his mother had come through a thousand times could be an accident, if the way she kissed him in the morning, held him a beat too long, could be anything except goodbye. The funeral is a somber, silent affair. The upright gets older, untouched; the records packed away, the player sold.
Viktor pulls his first trigger not four months later, behind the house facing the dense wood. His fingers are shaking of cold and hunger and mostly nerves, but his face is cool and impassive as his father’s. He misses every can, bowl, and bottle, and stays out past dark, until he finally he hears the first, victorious ding.
They strike a silent bargain, the remaining Vasylenkos: Viktor continues his shooting practice, and he may be permitted to learn music in school. The upright goes untouched, the home a memorial to music. But in the daylight, surrounded in cinderblock, Viktor learns to play. His fingers are clumsy and undisciplined – he is, after all, still a terrible shot. The music is not like his mother’s, not beautiful or wonderful; no story to it. Not yet.
You see, it’s a hard thing to shake Viktor from something he’s set his mind to. He is not so married to the military lifestyle, but it is a means to an end. And so as he graduates from minuets and sonatinas, advances towards concertos and preludes, so too does he drag his marksmanship behind him, like cans banging behind his bumper. Like water coming to a boil, Viktor bursts through concerts and competitions. His father remains unconvinced, even in the faces of awards and accomplishments, newspaper articles and photographers at the front door. It’s not an honorable career, the arts, not nearly so much as the military, so much as serving your country.
Viktor comes home late, one evening, smelling of celebration and liquor and women. He forgets, for a moment, how quiet the house is at night, and promptly shatters the silence. His father’s been drinking, too, see – and neither of them can quite keep their words to themselves. Tensions are rising with Japan, his father says, they’ll need new boots and guns in the coming months. Not again, sighs Viktor, haven’t they done this already? He has a real shot at a career, at leaving for Leningrad, making great music, making his mother proud.
He doesn’t quite remember how the bottle went through his hand. Perhaps his hand went through the bottle? He remembers the neck of it his father’s fist, knuckles white, and then the bloody mess on the floor, Viktor’s skin in ribbons, red on the tile.
There’s a finality to the quiet, now; less a blanket and more a death shroud. Viktor’s hand is shattered, and his prospects. Money grows thin in their pockets, food stale and scarce in the cupboards. It’s then, in the hazy hours of the night, sluggish from rage and pain, that Viktor hears the music. Not his own, the jagged unfinished compositions or imitations of others far greater than him. He hears his mother’s music, drifting up and under the cracks of his bedroom door. It’s impossible, of course. The records are gone, the upright salvaged for parts. Still, Viktor falls asleep to the smell of amber drink and the final notes of Winter in Four Seasons.
Except, the music never quite stops. It slows and quiets, or hastens and grows louder, but no, it never goes quiet again. Viktor was not one to believe in ghosts, and yet. More than once he’d come downstairs in the night, eyes clouded with sleep, expecting to see – well, not his mother, but the evidence of her. A glass on the end table, stained with lipstick. Her books, long gone, spread out on the floor.
It is certainly a strange type of haunting, one that follows Viktor through the months of painful healing. He doesn’t speak much, almost afraid of what might come out of him if he does. He must be mostly music now, if not half a ghost. With no way to let it out, Viktor has let it fill him up, let it threaten to swallow him whole. He goes mad his last night before he leaves for Leningrad – a position in the concert hall, not particularly glamorous, but promised by a pitying former colleague – turns his whole room on its head. It doesn’t help; nothing seems to.
The first days in Leningrad are filled with cleaning stages and instruments. It’s mindless, thankless work, but it lines his pockets. Practice, in the quiet hours, is slow and unsteady. Viktor’s fingers ache before an hour is through. Ice baths help, and the medicine helps more, but it will be months before he can play a full piece in one go.
It’s a close thing, surrender. Viktor has done it many times in his life – mostly to his father. It’s close again, as his hands fail him and his job cuts at him each day. Victories are small, but precious. A full sonatina. A spare conversation with the first violinist. Slowly, the path begins to right itself. Viktor has spent almost two year in Leningrad before he is once again seated at a piano before a crowd. He’s never had to audition for a job position, not in Vladivostok, and now he feels he might faint under the lights. Pianist, for the Bolshoi? How could he begin to think such a thing, let alone believe it.
The job is his, but not without consequences. He moves to Moscow. There’s constant pain following him like a second unwelcome ghost. The doctors write him prescriptions, more with each week, but it only seems to numb the rest of him, dull him to the simple ache of living but not the failures of his father’s affection – no matter how many Viktor swallows in one go. Beneath the pain, there is a flicker of something new and unfamiliar. Something uncomfortable, strange, but not entirely unwanted.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming