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The first bell had not yet rung, but the air had already thickened to the consistency of burnt fuel oil. The Vienna Opera House was breathing like a gigantic, living creature: the stalls and boxes were filling with the hum of voices, the rustle of programmes, the restrained, lacquered creak of seats. The velvet of the boxes, the colour of clotted blood, grew heavy under its own weight; the gilding of the mouldings glimmered dimly in the light of the crystal chandeliers, ready at any moment to crumble to dust if one looked too closely. It smelled of the heated dust of the heating pipes, of expensive tobacco, and of a strange, pungent cologne that overpowered the familiar scents of powder and rosin.
Backstage, that aroma, a viscous, sweetish-spicy scent of men's perfume, seeped even into the farthest nooks, mingling with the smell of heated bodies and the glue paint of the scenery.
Agott stood before the tall, human-sized mirror in the corner of the common dressing room, but she was not looking into it. Her gaze was fastened on her own hands, lying in her lap atop the snow-white tutu. Her fingers, usually so obedient, capable of portraying both the tremor of a wing and a death agony, now felt foreign. She was fingering the beads of a rosary hidden in the folds of her skirt, an old, almost forgotten habit from the ballet school in Lucerne. The white of Odette enveloped her, making her resemble an ivory statue, but inside, beneath the corset, everything was drawn taut, like a string ready to snap at any sharp sound. She could hear Tetia in the corridor, irrepressible, light as a cork on water, recounting the ballet's plot to someone for the twentieth time, swallowing the endings of her words from excitement. She could hear Olruggio, in a baritone bass that brooked no argument, giving his final orders to the stagehands.
Richeh was squatting in the darkest corner, her back pressed against the cold brickwork. The light of the oil lamp burning on the dressing table caught from the gloom only her profile, sharp, with her mouth slightly open. She was not rocking back and forth, as she was wont to do in moments of intense agitation, but only rhythmically stroking the back of her own hand with her thumb, again and again, as if trying to erase an invisible stain. Her costume of a little swan, thrown carelessly over her shoulders, seemed on her not a theatrical garment but a white burial shroud.
Coco, by contrast, could not keep still. She darted from the mirror to the costume rack, adjusting first one flounce, then another, though everything had long been ready. The role of Odile weighed on her with the heaviness of responsibility. Today, this juxtaposition seemed not a theatrical device, but a mockery of fate. She looked at Agott, so composed and icy, and did not dare to speak. Coco had always felt that behind this coldness hid something fragile, ready to crack if pressed a little harder. She sensed it with a sixth sense, the very one that allowed her to flawlessly catch the rhythm of another's breathing in a dance. The noise from the hall reached them here as a muffled, menacing rumble. There was no applause yet, only that steady, heavy murmur.
Qifrey appeared in the doorway silently, as always, yet his very suddenness made Richeh flinch and freeze for a second. He was not pale. On his already porcelain skin, with its sharp features, not a single drop of colour had risen. He leaned against the doorframe, and for a moment it seemed he could not catch his breath, though there was nowhere for him to have run from. He simply stood and looked at Coco, then shifted his gaze to Agott, as if deciding which of them to tell the news to. His right hand, with its long, pianistic fingers, convulsively clenched and unclenched the edge of a velvet curtain.
He began to speak, and his voice, usually resonant and deep, sounded flat, devoid of overtones.
"The stalls are full," he said, looking not at the ballerinas, but somewhere into the space above their heads. "The dress circle too. I went to the exit by the orchestra pit, looked through the crack. The boxes are lit up like shop windows. And they're all in uniform."
Agott stopped fingering her rosary. Her fingers froze on a large, faceted bead.
"I heard a conversation in the smoking room," Qifrey continued, his cheekbones sharpening even more. "One of the adjutants told his friend that after the final act they would arrange a little surprise for us. A document check. Everyone, from the prima to the last lamplighter."
"It was to be expected," Agott breathed out, dryly, almost soundlessly. "Today is the thirty-first."
"It's not just that, Agott." Qifrey finally detached himself from the doorframe, entered the room, and closed the door tightly behind him. "Kustas and Tarta. Are they in the fourth dressing room?"
"Do they know?" asked Coco, and her voice treacherously trembled.
"Kustas," Qifrey faltered, searching for words, "he bumped into a Standartenführer in the corridor. The man said that documents of persons of non-Aryan origin would be examined with particular thoroughness."
Silence hung in the room, broken only by the baritone of Olruggio drifting through the wall, who was berating someone for a poorly secured backdrop. His voice sounded almost blasphemously mundane. Kustas, a Persian by birth from Shiraz, who had received Islam from his father but had been baptised Orthodox by his mother, had long lived in Austria with the mark of a stranger. He was the finest Siegfried in Europe and still a stranger. Tarta, a Greek from Thessaloniki, whose family had fled the massacre of '22, danced Rothbart with such obsession that he himself seemed to believe in the possibility of transformation. Their documents, however meticulously forged, would not withstand even a cursory glance from the new regime.
Tetia, who up to that moment had been twirling in the corridor, suddenly froze on the threshold, hearing the last words. Her hyperactivity, which usually irritated everyone with its ceaseless motion, was replaced by an unnatural alertness. She was in a page's costume, and the tassels on her beret trembled, echoing an invisible vibration emanating from her entire body.
"How much time do we have?" she asked, and her childish, high voice sounded unexpectedly sober and sharp.
"The third bell will ring in ten minutes," answered Qifrey. "There are two intermissions. The performance lasts three hours, with the curtain calls. If we cancel now..."
"They won't have time to escape," Agott interrupted him, rising from her seat. She spoke as if she were moving chess pieces on a board. "If we announce a cancellation now, they'll block the exits within five minutes. They probably already have men at the stage door."
Richeh, without ceasing to stroke her hand, suddenly said clearly, addressing no one:
"Swans, before they die, hiss and flap their wings. Loudly. Very loudly."
Everyone was distracted for a second by this strange comment, unconnected to the situation. But there was some eerie, unconscious truth in it.
Olruggio, having finished his squabble, barged into the dressing room, filling all the remaining space. On his large face, which usually expressed only fastidious condescension, there was now undisguised, almost childlike suffering. He had heard everything. He walked up to Qifrey and, without a word, placed his enormous palm on his shoulder, squeezing it so that his knuckles whitened. That gesture was more eloquent than any words. He could not save Kustas and Tarta, could not protect them, and from this impotence rage was boiling up inside him.
"We must dance," Agott said, and it sounded almost naive in its simplicity. "It's the only way to give them a chance. While we are on stage, the auditorium will be focused on us. Backstage there will be relative calm. At the stage door right now there may be one or two men. In three hours, when the exodus begins, there will be a dozen of them."
Coco looked at Agott with wide eyes. Her kind, impressionable heart clenched. She understood the design. Agott was coolly disposing of them, like pieces on a board, again, as always. But this time the cold logic was dictated not by career, not by envy, not by rivalry, but by a desperate, paralysing love. Agott never looked at Kustas when he rehearsed, but Coco had seen how, in the dressing room, her hands would reach out to straighten the collar of his doublet, her fingertips lingering on the fabric a moment longer than necessary. She never spoke of Tarta except with a sardonic curl of her lip, yet it was she who had procured the medicine for him when he fell ill with fever in Prague, who had sat by his cot through the night, dabbing the sweat from his brow with a damp cloth. Coco knew the texture of those kindnesses the way she knew the feel of Agott's palm against her own, the particular pressure of her fingers interlacing with hers in the darkness of the wings before every entrance.
"But the parts of Siegfried and Rothbart," whispered Coco. "Odette and Odile without them... We cannot go out on stage as a quartet, as if that were the plan. The story will fall apart and they will understand everything."
"They will understand," Agott nodded. "But not immediately."
She turned to the mirror. Reflected in it was not the queen of swans, but a true general. The silence in the dressing room became absolute, only the sound of water rushing somewhere in the bowels of the building, like the heart of a great beast. Tetia, no longer able to contain the energy tearing its way out, spun around sharply and ran out into the corridor to warn the corps de ballet, not of the danger, no, but that the performance would begin on time, and that they all had to smile as they had never smiled in their lives.
Richeh finally stood up, peeling herself away from her saving wall. She walked over to the rack with the tiaras, chose the one meant for Odile, with its sharp, aggressive points, and crossed the room to where Coco stood. Without a word, she reached up and settled the tiara into Coco's hair, her small fingers brushing the shell of Coco's ear, trailing down to smooth an invisible crease at the nape of her neck before she stepped away.
She heard, two metres behind her, Olruggio, trying not to rattle, lowering the heavy bolt on the door to the basement that led through the coal store to a side street. Qifrey was somewhere in the wardrobe room, rummaging through fabrics, looking for something civilian, nondescript enough to blend into the New Year's crowd. And here, on a tiny patch between the backdrop depicting the moonlit surface of the lake and the first row of spotlights, only the two of them remained.
Agott stepped closer. Without looking at Coco, she adjusted the strap on her shoulder, it had not even thought of slipping, but her fingers needed some occupation. She smelled of powder and the dry, barely perceptible scent of orris root, which she always added to her blotting paper. Coco, unable to stop herself, reached out and brushed a stray wisp of hair from Agott's temple, letting her knuckles graze the curve of her cheek before tucking the strand behind her ear. Agott leaned into the touch, just barely, a fraction of a second of yielding before she caught herself.
"Without Siegfried and Rothbart, the second act really will fall apart," she said, and in her voice there was no pathos, no fear, only infinite vexation, as if she were speaking of a ballet slipper worn through. "The corps de ballet will last about fifteen minutes in the first scene, if Tetia doesn't speed up and gallop through the whole stage. Then comes Odette's entrance. I will have to come out alone."
"You can't," Coco replied, turning her whole body towards her. The light from the sole blue lamp left backstage fell on her face, making it look gaunt, almost sickly. "It's a duet. There are lifts, overhead presses. Do you have any idea what that looks like without a partner?"
"Then we will not leave an emptiness." Agott finally raised her eyes. Her eyes, usually cold, distant, like the water of an alpine lake, now burned with a dry, calculating heat. "We will fill it with ourselves. You and I."
For a moment, it seemed to Coco that the hall, separated from them only by a heavy fold of velvet, had breathed out a single, impatient sigh. She could almost physically feel the mass of bodies there, in the stalls, hundreds of people in grey-green uniforms, with neat partings and badges on their lapels. They were waiting for beauty; they were waiting for swans. They wanted a fairytale. And she, Coco, wanted only one thing: to close the distance between herself and the woman standing before her, to press her palm flat against Agott's sternum and feel the heartbeat beneath the boning of the corset.
"You're proposing we dance the female variation as a duet?" Coco asked, and her fingers found Agott's wrist, circled it, thumb resting against the pulse point. "To divide the choreography? But the score..."
"The score can be bent," Agott interrupted, but she did not pull away from the touch. Her other hand came up, hesitant, and settled on Coco's waist, the warmth of her palm seeping through the stiff tulle. "The Kapellmeister will slow if we slow. He will give us breath."
She spoke dryly, as if at a rehearsal. But beneath the dryness, her thumb was tracing a small, unconscious circle against the dip of Coco's waist, and that single point of contact was more honest than any words. Agott never revealed her cards entirely. Even now, when the lives of Kustas and Tarta depended on their every gesture, she hid the main thing behind tactical calculations. But Coco had learned to read this cipher, in the way Agott's breath caught when Coco leaned in, in the way her fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on her waist before releasing. Behind the words "we will fill it with ourselves" lay something that had been growing between them for years, in stolen glances across the rehearsal hall, in hands that brushed in the corridor and lingered a heartbeat too long.
"Agott," Coco moved right up close, so that their skirts touched, the stiff tulle of one tutu scratching the silk of the other. She brought both hands up to cradle Agott's face, thumbs smoothing over the sharp arches of her cheekbones. "You're not just talking about redistributing variations. You're talking about the two of us playing... everyone?"
Agott's eyes fluttered shut for the briefest moment. When they opened again, they were wet, though no tears fell.
"You will perform the two of them, Odette and Odile," she said, her voice quieter now, roughened at the edges. "I will give you the role and will come out as your partner." She turned her head just enough to press her lips to the centre of Coco's palm, a kiss so fleeting it might have been imagined. Then she stepped back, and with a sharp tug at the ties of her tutu, slipped out of the snow-white cloud of the skirt in a single motion, left in her tights and bodice.
Coco stood frozen, her palm still tingling where Agott's lips had touched it. She watched the woman she loved strip away Odette with hands that trembled, just slightly, the only crack in that pristine armour.
"Kustas's stage doublet is hanging in the fifth dressing room, I know," Agott said, already moving toward the door. "In the dark, under the spotlights, no one will notice it's a couple of sizes too big. I'll bind my chest."
The plan had been forming in her head, probably, from the very minute Qifrey had uttered the word "check." Coco crossed the space between them in three quick strides and caught Agott by the elbow, spinning her back around. She did not speak. She simply wrapped her arms around her, pulling her close, tulle and silk and the bony ridge of Agott's spine beneath her palms. She felt the resistance in Agott's frame, the instinctive stiffness of a woman who had spent her whole life refusing to be held, and then, slowly, the surrender. Agott's forehead dropped to the curve of Coco's shoulder. Her hands, which had hung at her sides, came up to fist in the fabric at the back of Coco's bodice.
"Agott, if you put on a man's costume," Coco whispered into her hair, her lips moving against the shell of Agott's ear, "you worked so hard for your role. If your debut as prima ballerina goes like this... it could ruin your entire career. You are billed as Odette." She pulled back just enough to look into Agott's face, her hands sliding down to cup her elbows, thumbs stroking the delicate skin of her inner wrists. "Agott, I can't, please, I love you. But this could be... the end."
"I will be Rothbart," Agott said. Now she was not looking at Coco, she was looking through the curtain, into the hall, as if she could see through the heavy velvet the disposition of enemy forces. But her hands had moved of their own accord, one settling on Coco's hip, the other rising to trace the line of her collarbone where it emerged from the white feathers of her costume. The touch was featherlight, reverent. "Think only of me. And of nothing else. You have earned this role no less than I. Besides, the situation is a stalemate."
In the silence that fell, the sound of water in the old heating pipes became audible. Somewhere above, in the fly loft, a pulley creaked. Coco felt her knees weaken treacherously. She had always been afraid of this double role, had feared it since childhood, not the physical strain, not the technical difficulty, but the bottomless emotional pit into which one had to leap in order to contain within a single body both holy innocence and demonic seduction. But now Agott was proposing something greater: she was proposing that she play both of them with her, with Agott, in the role of the eternal pursuer, the eternal partner, the eternal adversary.
"Do you understand what you're doing?" Coco's voice broke almost to a whisper. She leaned forward, seized Agott's hands and lifted them to her own lips, kissing each knuckle in turn. "You're going to go out on stage before three hundred people who are looking for the slightest excuse to destroy us all." She pressed Agott's palms flat against her own racing heart, holding them there so that Agott could feel every frantic beat through the boning of the corset.
"If they notice," Agott did not pull her hands away. On the contrary, she spread her fingers wide, as if trying to hold as much of Coco as she could, "if they notice, Kustas and Tarta will have half an hour more than if we simply stop. Every minute counts. Olruggio is taking them out through the basement now. They need to get to Neubaugürtel. They have forged passports under the names of Croatian Catholics, but the passports need to be exchanged at a flat on Mariahilferstrasse." She paused, and her voice softened, losing its strategic edge. "Coco."
She pulled her hands gently from Coco's grasp, only to frame Coco's face between them, thumbs wiping at the dampness that had begun to gather beneath her eyes. For a long moment she simply looked at her, memorising the arch of her brows, the curve of her lower lip, the small freckle beneath her left eye. Then she leaned in and pressed her forehead to Coco's, their noses brushing, their breath mingling in the narrow space between their mouths.
"I will be Rothbart," Agott whispered against her lips, "but you will be my Odette. And my Odile. My everything. Dance with me."
She pulled away and headed for the exit from the dressing room, into the corridor, to the fifth door on the left, where Siegfried's doublet hung. Her back, straight, with the shoulder blades showing through, clad in white tights, retreated into the semi-darkness, and Coco watched her go, her own lips still parted, still chasing a kiss that had not quite happened.
"Agott!" she called out, not knowing herself why. Just to hear her name once more. Just to delay her for one more second.
Agott stopped without turning. The line of her shoulders rose and fell with a single, steadying breath.
"You are not Rothbart," Coco said, her voice clear now, ringing across the dusty floorboards. "He could never become what you are. And I love you. More than anything in the whole world."
Agott slowly turned around. In the blue semi-darkness of the wings, her face momentarily lost its habitual sharpness, became softer, younger, almost the way Coco remembered it from their first meeting in the dormitory, when the twelve-year-old newcomer with the icy gaze had handed her, in tears, a handkerchief. She walked back, each step deliberate, and when she reached Coco, she did not hesitate. She cupped the back of Coco's head with one hand, the other sliding around her waist, and pulled her into a kiss. It was brief but deep, the kind of kiss that says everything words cannot, and when she broke it, she kept their foreheads pressed together, her thumb stroking the nape of Coco's neck in slow, tender arcs.
"Very well," Agott answered, her voice husky.
She pressed her lips once more to Coco's palm, like a true prince and this time when she walked away, Coco let her go, pressing her own hand to her mouth as if to hold the kiss there forever.
From above, under the fly loft, came the first, barely audible sigh of the oboe.