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At first it was a shock, the unfamiliar touch on her bare arms—the night wind, only the night wind! and far above the night sky, stretching away into infinity—and then as Natasha stepped into the circle of light spilling out of the opera house, it seemed to become the caress of many eyes suddenly turning toward her. It sent a thrill through her blood, made her want to raise her chin a little higher; to touch her own throat, the pendant lying blood-warm against her chest.
She’d never seen—never been seen by—so many people before in her life. The weight of their gaze was like a physical presence on her skin, nothing at all like the dead silence of home, an oppressive weight bearing down from above, broken only by the occasional visitor who came and then went again too soon.
Sonya whispered something in her ear and gave her a tug, and though she was a little reluctant to let go of this perfect moment, she obediently followed her aunt inside.
Inside there were even more people. Natasha held her head high, looking not directly at them but rather their reflections in the enormous mirrors that lined the hall, and was almost—was quite certain they were looking, not at the three of them, not at Sonya and not at her godmother, but only at her, flushed and glowing, almost unrecognizably grown up.
Somehow, stopping every few steps for someone new to greet her godmother and exclaim over Natasha and Sonya, the three of them made their way down that long hall of mirrors and through an enormous set of double doors into another corridor; a footman bowed them into their box.
They’d had a theater back home too: two levels down, on the same cold concrete hall as the squash court that no one used, with two rows of plush seats gone rather musty and a projector that was prone to flickering if used for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Natasha had never been very fond of it, but she knew that the best place to find Sonya was tucked away in the corner furthest from the door, inevitably with a book Natasha knew perfectly well Sonya had already read a dozen times or more.
Now, leaning out over the edge of the box, Natasha could see the rows and rows of boxes just like theirs ringing the cavernous space, every last one of them full, and more people sitting elbow-to-elbow down below, their epaulettes and jewels catching the light like a glittering sea.
The lights went down; the curtain began to rise.
What it revealed was a stage crowned with a chandelier, casting its eerie light down upon actors, dressed in outlandish costumes, faces obscured by masks in an unnaturally vivid yellow. Natasha froze, mouth open, as they began to chant something eerie and incomprehensible.
And yet everyone else in the audience seemed quite engrossed. At the end of a song in which Natasha could only pick out a few words here and there, there was a burst of applause; she glanced to the side, hoping to meet with an understanding look from Sonya, and found her cousin with hands tightly clasped together in her lap, eyes intent on the stage.
Natasha began to feel strange.
In the hall outside she’d been too distracted to feel it. Now, sitting here in the warm darkness, suddenly she was violently aware of how many people were here crowded together: enough to heat the air with the warmth of their bodies, enough to feel their breathing pulsing in low counterpoint to the bizarre scenes playing out on stage.
It was too much. She felt herself growing faint and wanted to giggle, to rise to her feet and join the actors in their unholy cacophony, to seize each and every member of the audience by the shoulders and give them a shake, to do something that would—that would—
A sudden light and a cold gust of air running over her cheek, her arms, sending a shiver down her back.
Her head jerked around without her conscious volition to see a tall man silhouetted in the open theater doors. He paused there for a moment, as if surveying the scene before him, and then strode down the center aisle, the jangle of his spurs crystal clear even over the impassioned voices of the actors.
He raised his head and looked directly at her.
In the instant their eyes met Natasha felt the ground drop away beneath her, the same sense of vertigo as when the elevator doors opened to show her the surface for the very first time, as if she might fall upward into the endless sky; and then in the next instant he had turned away again and was receding down the aisle.
On one side of her, Sonya, all unaware, still entranced by the opera; on the other side, her godmother, giving a faint contemptuous huff of air through her nose; and between them, Natasha, awash in the realization that every moment in her life up to now—
—a childhood spent underground, with a grandfather who never tired of repeating the same story in his tremulous old voice: how when he was very small, someone had come to his school and whisked him away to his father’s private jet, and he’d seen the mushroom clouds from above before the bunker’s hangar doors opened for the jet and then closed again for the last time in years, and he’d never seen any of his friends from school again after that; half the time he couldn’t remember who Natasha was but he still remembered their names;
a father who only left on business he deemed unavoidable and a mother who never left at all, both of them forever telling her that it was better for her to grow up here, safe from the radiation outside and promising her everything once she was old enough for her coming out;
falling in love (oh, childish! she understood now) with Andrey, the only man much younger than her father who ever came to visit, bringing with him stories of the world outside;
coming up in the elevator that first time, clutching at Sonya’s hand and feeling Sonya squeezing back, into a world even more dazzling than she could have imagined;
tonight, one bewildering giddy glorious moment after another—
—all of it narrowing down with perfect inexorability to this single incandescent point in time.
Even from the corner of her eye it took no effort at all to find the red and gold of his jacket in the front row. Heart pounding, Natasha finally turned her head to look at him again.
He was looking right back at her. On the stage someone was murmuring, low, the words suddenly clear: I bring you love, love triumphant, love, captivating love, here, have a taste…
Yes. Yes. Natasha wanted it, wanted it all, wanted everything this wide wide world had to offer.
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