Tatiana Pankratova

Alina

Excerpt

Most days, after school, Alina took the tram to the bakery. It was a small shop run by a babushka named Dasha. Most of the employees, all eight of them except for Alina, were elderly women in need of assistance. Babushka Anya had worked there alongside Dasha since the beginning. As a kid, Alina was brought to the shop when Lyuba was not available to watch her.

After roughly a decade, Alina still liked working at the bakery. Out of everyone in the shop, she was the only one with fingers steady enough to create and decorate pastries with rose petal fondant and stenciled images. She would help the elderly women but did not get compensated until she turned fourteen. At that age Dasha finally decided to officially make her an employee. The payment was not much, but it helped the family somewhat. They were able to maintain their apartment and eat dessert every night. 

Most kids were allowed to go and stay home by themselves. Most parents did not care. Alina’s mom probably would not have cared, but her babushka was a paranoid woman who commanded Alina to meet her after school. 

The travel was not as grueling a task as it seemed, especially since Maria rode the tram with her. They would get off at the Leningrad Oblast and follow the path of shops to the ballet studio, where Maria went off to ballet classes, and then the bakery, where Baba Anya worked. On slow days, babushka would allow Alina to leave the shop and go watch the ballerinas. They danced only a block away from the bakery. 

“If you finish folding these two dozen vareniki,” Babushka would sometimes say, “get them in the oven, you can leave early.” 

As her tram slid off the slope from Zvenigorod to Leningrad, Alina could see the girls holding on to the bar and practicing first through fifth position. They started with touching heels, toes apart, and ended on their toes with their arms raised above their heads, extended fingers tips to not touch. 

Sometimes Alina would see Maria in the wall-long window of the second floor studio. And sometimes Alina would look up and pretend to see her, or rather, remember watching her, because Alina could not convince herself that Maria was actually there. Had Maria been there, she would have stood out. 

All the ballerinas wore black and white on days they had miniature performances. They would come into the studio, change into costume, and apply makeup. Rubies around their flat standing tutus and royal red weaved through their upper wear. The accent color would shape their outlines in the dark auditorium; Maria always had the reddest lips, her lipstick imported from France. The ripe tomato solution was painted on, not dragged. 

The winter went beautifully with her cheeks. When the air woke, a gust of wind would chip away at their faces and produce a superficial pain. Dry cold was not as bad, but their breaths were not visible in still air. Alina blew a breath at the absent street, seeing little to no vapor. 

“Do you ever notice that our breath becomes more visible the closer we are to main street?” Alina asked one day while they were walking to the studio. 

“Huh?” Maria asked. She blew a breath toward the road of cars and watched the vapor expand. “Why is that?” 

“I don’t know? Condensation?” 

Again, Alina coughed up a breath from the back of her throat. This time, closer to the Leningrad Oblast, she watched the puff of air expand and disperse behind her. From across the street, she watched other people in the busy square talking, laughing, breathing, and wondered if they ever noticed such a thing. If they could tell who was breathing by the way they exhaled, by the way their water particles expanded and vanished from sight. 

In the right light, Maria’s release sparkled as if dozens of tiny diamonds surrounded her. Her carbons were unlike any other.

About the Author

Tatiana Pankratova is a Fiction student in Columbia’s School of the Arts MFA Writing Program. Tatiana writes realistic fiction with a focus on a character headspace and romanticizes symbols like no other.