Letters from Yelena (28 page)

‘I thought you needed no introduction?’ the orderly replied, prompting another booming laugh.

‘You have been here two minutes, Yelena, and yet you have already decided this place is so bad that you must sit in darkness!’ She swept the curtains open, allowing thick blasts of
white light to douse the room in colour. ‘I know that you ballerinas can be tortured sorts, but there will be no room for that if I am going to get you walking again. You are going to have to
start working very hard for me, and if it takes me wearing a tutu in order to get you to do that, then I will. Won’t I, Nurse Polly?’

Polly laughed, and looked at me. ‘Please don’t let Grace wear a tutu,’ she said. ‘No-one on the floor will get any sleep.’

‘In five minutes I will come and call for you again my darling,’ Grace said. ‘First I must get you some decent crutches, and then we will see exactly how much work lies ahead
of us.’

Grace took me to a gymnasium in the basement of The Cedars. I felt my heartbeat quicken as I took in the array of ropes, pulleys and exercise balls all around me. What exactly was she going to
make me do? But the warmth of her hand on my shoulder quickly calmed my nerves. Grace began by sitting me down and asking me to stretch my legs and feet as much as I could. She then had me stand in
front of her and sway gently from side to side without support. I could read my anxiety on her face, as she held out her arms and promised to catch me if I toppled over.

Over the course of the next few weeks she made me walk, again and again, injured foot first, down the winding corridors of The Cedars. She would stand one foot behind me, encouraging me as I
made my unsteady progress. Those sessions reminded me of the time Uncle Leo taught me to ride a bike. He used to run a foot behind me as I pedalled away, shouting ‘I’m still
here!’ so I knew that I would be caught when I inevitably fell off.

Quickly, Grace became the hub of my life. Occupational Therapists consulted with her before teaching me how to cook simple meals in their bespoke kitchens, as I couldn’t carry anything
with a broken foot. Dieticians bartered with her about which of my favourite foods I could eat. But after a while my natural fitness seemed to kick in, and I was delighted that I surpassed even
Grace’s expectations during the sessions we had together.

‘I always push my patients hard,’ she said, as I clambered in a frame towards the other side of the gym. ‘But I am not used to them exceeding my expectations. You were
obviously in peak physical condition when you had your accident, Yelena, you were far fitter than I have
ever
been. In fact I expect I was not as fit as you the day I left the womb, and it
has all been downhill from there. You are doing great, you seem to have no pain barrier!’

And she was right, Noah. Grace had ejected me from the dark, lonely room that I had been living in, and prompted me to become the real Yelena again. A woman who drove herself, a woman who was
pushy and ambitious.

‘That is enough for today!’ she would shout, when I had reached the other side of the gym. ‘Why do you have to break every record going? As far as I see it, you should match
your previous session and then do a tiny bit more. You do not need to charge the wall down!’

It delighted me to hear her speak like that, as it meant I was doing all that I could.

After that session, one of the orderlies brought us a cup of tea, but for once Grace did not rush me back up to my room. A mood seemed to have taken over her, and her demeanour was very
different to the brash, vivacious one that I had grown used to.

‘Why do you have to push yourself so hard, my darling?’ she asked, as I sat down to catch my breath. ‘You are like so many Western women,’ she continued.
‘Constantly pushing yourself towards the next achievement. But where is your quality of life? Pushing this hard is counter-productive if the journey itself always feels tortuous. Do you not
ever ask yourself why you do it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I guess I just want to be better.’

‘But, my darling, your sense of being better or worse does not come from what you do, or from what you achieve, it comes from how you feel about yourself. How can you like yourself, if all
you do is endure? You need to be kind to yourself, Yelena. It’s so important to be happy in your own company, and to not be fearful of your next demands.’ She sipped from the cup of
tea, whilst looking momentarily distracted. ‘Where I come from, there is none of this perpetual testing, like there is here. Life is for living – for laughter, for food and for family.
I apply effort to causes that are important to me, but I never strive just for the sake of it. Yelena, my dear, you have shared your wonderful gift with many people, but you must allow them in
enough so that they can help you as well. Tomorrow we will take a break from this work. We will go out into the garden. We will enjoy fresh air and conversation. How does that sound?’

The next day, during our allotted time together, Grace and I walked through The Cedars’ garden. It felt somehow audacious to step out of the therapeutic environment and just enjoy the
bracing November air. Admiring the recently planted flowers whilst listening to Grace talk about her family, I felt myself take on aspects of her temperament. She seemed so calm, so accepting and
so content to let time sweep her along its strange and convoluted path. Despite being acutely aware of how far I still had to go, that afternoon for once I truly felt comfortable in my own
skin.

It was the following day when I received a postcard from Inessa. Though we had spoken briefly on the phone since the accident, given her naturally elusive nature I had not felt a sense of
kinship with her over it. Though she’d sounded concerned for me, she was still as distant as ever. But the postcard suggested that something might have shifted in her.

Dear Yelena
, it read.
It has been so long since we have been together, far too long. A lot has happened here, and for me, a change of scenery is now required. I would very much like to
come and visit you. Message me to let me know if that would be alright. It would be wonderful to see you again. From your loving sister. Inessa.

Coming from Inessa, I found the choice of sign-off particularly unusual. I called her to say I would be very happy to see her, and the cryptic and rather emboldened woman on the end of the phone
could not have sounded more thrilled. We arranged for her to come and stay for a few days in the nurses’ quarters. She didn’t exactly say what had sparked this sudden resolve, only
mentioning that she had been following my progress as a dancer over the last year, and that of course she had been extremely worried about my accident. Somehow I was not quite ready to accept that
I was about to have the type of sister I had always longed for. Just before she arrived it occurred to me that in many ways, Inessa was a stranger to me, and yet the two of us were going to need to
find a way to feel at ease with one another.

I was sat in the drawing room, in a chair overlooking the driveway, when I saw Inessa for the first time in many years. I was instantly struck by how tall and slim she was, dressed in an
expensive-looking, fur-trimmed coat. She had grown a little into her face since I had last seen her, and she now looked refined, elegant even. Her high heels looked handmade, and the curls of hair
that I could see burgeoning from her hat looked carefully coiffed. As she approached the door she caught my eye, and her pale face erupted into a childish smile.

I heard her asking the nurses urgent questions about my welfare, with a concerned manner that I didn’t recognise. Seconds later she was upon me, kissing my cheek as I inhaled the scent of
her designer perfume. ‘Oh my goodness, it is so good to see you,’ she said, her voice containing an intriguing new English inflection. ‘I have missed you so much.’

‘I must look pretty terrible to you,’ I whispered.

‘You look anything but. You have grown so beautiful. Though that’s not a surprise. The nurses tell me you’re recovering really well!’

‘They do?’

‘Yes. I’ve been on the phone to them a few times after you’ve hung up. Sometimes I even rang them back! You didn’t think that I wouldn’t ask after my sister’s
welfare?’

I paused. ‘I don’t know. What’s with the expensive clothes, Inessa? I should have known you would make quite the girl about town.’

‘Thanks. But I have none of the natural glamour of a
prima ballerina.
’ She seemed to say the words with genuine admiration. I laughed. ‘I helped negotiate the sale of
Dad’s business, and with the money I made, I started my own beauty retail company. But haven’t I told you that already? So far it’s going really well! But I don’t need to
sell myself to my sister. Dear Yelena. How did we fall out of touch for so long?’

Because you didn’t help me fight Bruna, I thought. You weren’t there for me. You were in another world. I looked up at her, making the effort to bite my tongue. She registered my
silence, whilst seemingly absorbing my expression. I wondered if it caused her some pain.

‘We’re going out for dinner tonight,’ she told me. ‘I will arrange us a taxi in a few minutes, and we can talk properly then.’

After a few effusive conversations with the staff, Inessa ordered us a taxi to a small Italian restaurant overlooking the coast. It was good to leave The Cedars, but I was rather disappointed
when Inessa led me down a small flight of steps to the restaurant’s candlelit cellar. I didn’t protest as her body language suggested she had something to disclose, something which
would perhaps not suit wide-open spaces. Nonetheless, this sudden intimacy slightly unsettled me.

Her lips remained pursed until we had ordered our meals. Finally, when the waitresses had left us alone, Inessa leant in conspiratorially.

‘I wanted to come here to see how you are,’ she started. I tried not to react. ‘We are not good at looking out for one another in our family, Yelena. Dad is – I’m
sure you know – very worried about you. But how could he bring himself to come right out and say it, let alone visit? He always was so poor at communication. He sends his love. I know he
does, but you know as well as I that he could never put it quite like that himself.’

I smiled. I tried not to think of the loneliness I’d felt in those early days just after the accident. When even a card from my family would have meant so much. There had been nothing but
silence from my father, and Inessa.

‘I’m not sure I know him as well as you,’ I said.

Instantly I felt transformed back to the fourteen year old who was envious of their bond. Her eyes darted between me and the table, in what seemed a spontaneous reaction of guilt.

‘Perhaps,’ she  conceded.  ‘But  if  that’s  true,  it’s  only because I stuck to him to keep me safe from Bruna. And I learnt a
little more about him as time went on. What surprised me most was that he didn’t even enjoy his work. The truth is, when Mum died his light was snuffed out. It all became too much for him.
The only way he was able to get through each day was to get his head down and work. Working meant he didn’t have to ask himself questions about how well he understood his daughters. But, what
you’ve got to remember is that at the root of all that was a love for us. It’s just that he turned that love into fear.’

I knew that inevitably this was only a compacted version of  my  sister’s  understanding  of  him,  but  it  surprised  me how shaken my
perception of my father was simply by the language someone else used to describe him. I realised I might have been working from misconceptions and in time building them, making them more
elaborate.

‘I should have supported what you were trying to do before you went away, Yelena. I was young, yes, but you were right to try and bring Bruna to justice before leaving. You were right to
push me to admit what she had done.’

I felt a powerful urge to speak, to remonstrate with her. Again I restrained, but I felt her sense my anger.

‘What you have to understand is that Dad was my whole life, Yelena. You had your dancing, but I had nothing else.’ There was a pleading edge to her voice now. ‘Keeping him
content and happy was all I had, and at that age, I wasn’t ready to distress him by admitting the things that Bruna had done to us.’ Her expression softened. ‘But once the
business was sold, I gained a little confidence. By then Bruna and Dad were, of course, separated. She’d moved back to… whatever rock she had crawled out from. Yelena, I have been
desperate to tell you this,’ she leant forward. ‘After you left for the Vaganova I got in touch with a local police officer, and started to sound out how one would go about reporting a
case of child abuse. Gradually, over the course of a many months I told her our story but I wasn’t quite ready to submit an official testimony. I suppose I didn’t think Dad was ready to
confront the truth just yet and I didn’t want to pull you back to Donetsk when you had only just got away. I suppose I let the trail run cold, to be honest. But then I had a call, a month
ago, from the police officer I had first spoken to about Bruna. I had, for a long while, known that when the time was right I needed to bring her to justice, to make sure that another child was
never at risk of abuse from her again.’ I forced myself to stay silent. I told myself I had waited so long to hear her speak about this, that I must not interrupt her now.

‘This  officer,’ she  continued,  ‘was  only  a  new  recruit when I first brought our case to light. Now she is in a more senior position,
and it just so happened that when she was promoted she became a senior officer in the district that Bruna now lived. One day she was asked to look into a woman who had recently been offered a
position at a school, as a dinner lady. Unfortunately this woman’s criminal checks had gone through, and without the charges having been pressed, the case had been dropped and Bruna was about
to start working. However, her file had been brought to this senior officer as the policeman permitting Bruna’s new appointment had been unsettled by some of the allegations he’d read
about her, and had wanted someone above him look into it. Having found out about Bruna’s current situation, the senior officer tracked me down and contacted me to ask if I was ready to pursue
the charges. They needed me to testify, she said, if Bruna was going to be prevented from working in a school.’