Letters from Yelena by Guy Mankowski

develop, some of the boys at the school started to take an interest in me. Though I had initially felt pleasantly surprised, the sensation was to be short-lived.
    One in particular, a tall and muscular boy from the city with a quizzical smile, started to pass me notes during quiet moments in class. I didn’t dare tell anyone else about these notes.
The contents of them were by turns flattering and, it had to be said, a little frightening. After a few weeks, I started to write him the odd note back, more out of boredom and slight curiosity
than anything else. I hadn’t yet ever felt romantically inclined, but in a moment of weakness, I agreed to meet him in a quiet place behind the log cabins after school.
    When he arrived, there was an urgency about him that seemed to suggest I had promised something that I couldn’t remember doing. For a while we sat and talked, and it felt good that someone
was interested in aspects of my life that I felt were so mundane. Then he wanted to kiss me. At first I resisted, but gradually I began to relax. Then the moment came when he started to touch me. I
felt the tension in me rise, and then to my horror, I began to wet myself.
    ‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be late.’
    ‘Where are you going?’ he said. Just then, the wet patch on my trousers became visible and he began to laugh. On my way back to the dormitory I couldn’t find my key, and in
that awful moment a group of girls saw the wet patch on my clothes and began to openly laugh at me. I’d never felt so ashamed.
    At about sixteen, Therese and my father agreed that I had won enough local awards to start applying to the Russian schools. Though the audition itself would not cost, the flights to St
Petersburg most certainly would. For the first time, I had a goal on the horizon. I wanted desperately to escape this stifling town for the excitement of St Petersburg, and the elegant streets of
Ulitsa Rossi, which housed the Vaganova Academy.
    Eventually, I had to hear Bruna’s thoughts on the matter. On one occasion, she snapped down the knife she’d been using and said, ‘Yelena, you are too ugly and fat to be a
ballerina. What makes you think you are so special?’ Something shifted in her face as she said it, as if she had wanted to unload this thought for a while. I left the room, but Bruna was not
to know that I went straight upstairs and cried. That evening, the razor blade came out again, the shock of the vivid red and the blessed sense of calm returned. I pulled the pillow hard around my
face, desperate to not leak a single sound. Deep down I was terrified that she was right. On the internet, Therese had showed me videos of girls who had been accepted there. Their bodies had been
so beautiful, flexible and disciplined. However many classes I undertook, and however much practice I did, I had still never been a member of a ballet school, and here I was applying to the best
one.
    After school, alone in my bedroom I would sometimes strip off and inspect my body in the full-length mirror. It gave me a curious sensation. For years I hadn’t done anything to earn the
body of a ballerina and yet, if what the other girls were saying was true, I had one. Yes, I still badly wanted to reduce the swell of my stomach and the weight at the top of my thighs. But I had
at least got my mothers’ neck, expressive eyes and long legs. Looking in the mirror it occurred to me then that this body was simply on loan to me for a few years, and I had to fight with
every ounce of strength I had not to loathe it. I knew I had to learn to see it as an instrument. A lump of rock that I needed to chip away at in order to make the sculpture required. And yet this
increasingly practical attitude to my body was very different to the way I saw myself, as a person. I felt that my Mum had abandoned me because I wasn’t good enough, and that perhaps Bruna
was the only one unafraid to tell me that. She simply treated me as I