The Sky is Changing Read online

  During her last year in the company, the fights and bitchiness between the dancers started to get on her nerves. The competitiveness of the everyone-wants-to-be-the-best atmosphere, which used to drive her on, was suddenly wearing her down. Younger dancers appeared, ambitiously fighting their way up the career ladder, and dancers of her own age dropped out, settling down to have babies or become teachers in favour of a slower-paced life.

  One of her best friends had to stop dancing for good because, after years of jumping up and down on hard surfaces, her hip was so badly worn out that she needed a replacement. But for Claire, there would be another show, another night, another round of applause. Surely, with her willpower, she could have gone on for a few more years and maybe, with some luck, become a principal dancer.

  It was around the events of September 11th 2001 that something changed. She had just broken up with a choreographer the night before. Anne had taken the week off to be in Hamburg with Karl and, without her, the flat they shared seemed big and empty. Anne and Karl had been going strong for several months and Claire sensed it was something serious. This was despite Anne having promised to never marry a German, as they regarded German men as unromantic. Once Anne had had a fling with a German who was completely silent and didn’t even move his facial muscles when he made love to her. “It was like being with a ghost!” Anne had told her, horrified, when she came back home the next day. From then on, they always made jokes about German men being somewhat inept showing any kind of emotion, let alone passion. In the international surroundings of the company, Claire had had liaisons with Russians, Eastern Europeans and Americans. Morgan was a choreographer from Boston. He was 45 and madly in love with her – too much in fact. He wanted to take her back to New York where he had an assignment. In bed he was slow and peaceful, like a grazing cow. She liked his plump belly, the cosiness of his imperfect body, so refreshingly different from the hard, sinewy physiques of the male dancers who surrounded her. She could throw herself onto him, with plenty of space to rest her tired head, and sink into his soft consoling roundness. After they made love he used to smoke a cigarette and talk about them living together in a brownstone house somewhere in downtown Manhattan, surrounded by arty friends, having a fabulous life in Greenwich Village. Claire never responded; she was just happy to lay her head on his broad chest, listening to his deep voice and looking at the smoke rising, slowly disappearing in the air. However, his desire to take her with him became ever more insistent.

  Finally, eating dinner at a cheap Italian after a show, the adrenalin still running high, Claire told him that there was no way in the world she would ever leave her job to live with him in New York. She looked at him, chewing on the limp crust of a lukewarm margarita pizza. With glistening eyes, he took her hand, stroking it as if he was saying goodbye to her hand rather then her. “You are too sensitive for all of this, you know,” he said. “I really hope someone will make you happy one day.”

  As so often happened, it was a clash of interests that brought the relationship to an end. There was no row, no fight when they parted, just the sharp sadness that comes with letting go. But she would have no time to miss him, or anyone else for that matter, as the three months before Christmas were the busiest of the year. With every single show sold out, she would be on stage almost every night, dancing with a disciplined smile. Because she had worked the previous weekend, Tuesday 11th of September was a free day and she was supposed to give her body a rest.

  Claire spent all morning in the bath, refilling it with hot water as it cooled down, thinking of Morgan and yet another failed relationship. Licking her wounds, she decided not to leave the house for the rest of the day. It was around three o’clock; she had just settled in front of the TV, watching Tom and Jerry and eating her favourite vanilla ice-cream with chocolate chips out of the tub, when Anne called.

  From her agitated voice she could tell something was wrong, but when she switched, from Tom chasing Jerry, to the news channel, her first reaction was a fit of laughter. That must be some sort of a stunt, surely, what she saw could not really be happening. One of the towers of the World Trade Center was on fire. A huge pillar of black smoke ascended into the blue sky. It was a golden day in New York and it almost looked beautiful, like the graphic work of an edgy artist.

  “Claire, this is not a joke, it’s real,” Anne said with a grave voice. “An airplane flew into the tower. A lot of people died.”

  It took some time to take her words in. The presenter was looking increasingly nervous, as if he couldn’t believe himself what he was reporting. “And I just received a message there is a second plane,” he stumbled, and there it was, a white plane like a fastapproaching arrow, which crashed into the second tower.

  “Oh, my God,” Anne yelled into the phone. “What the fuck!” Claire could hear Karl in the background shouting. The presenter was stepping back as if he was suddenly thrown off balance.

  “What’s going on here?” Claire whispered, but Anne didn’t reply. Even the presenter remained silent, watching as the massive explosion created a cloud of smoke of atomic proportions. In seconds, and in front of her eyes, the pinnacle of the world had turned into hell. Quickly, the presenter picked himself up again, delivering the news like pieces of a puzzle that he was keen to get completed. It wasn’t just a horrible accident but an attack. Terror. That was the word that was used over and over again, delivered with a seriousness which made it clear that from now on people would have to get used to it. A word like a stab in the back. Terror.

  “Do you remember when we went up there?” Anne asked with a battered voice. It was on a trip to New York with their parents, Anne and she were still children. Claire remembered the big dark elevator that took them up to the Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th floor. It was exciting to be so incredibly high up, and a bit scary too. They were holding hands when they pressed their noses against the window, looking down at the Hudson River with the boats as small as toys. “Of course, I remember. You were scared because Dad told us that at that height the towers always sway a little in the wind.”

  Suddenly Anne shouted into the receiver. There was some movement on the top floor of the tower above the fire, but it took a moment for Claire to realise that those tiny figures were in fact people. She looked closer. Some had taken their shirts off, waving them like flags to surrender. Then they started to jump. It was bizzare seeing these people, as small and unreal as toy soldiers, jumping to their death, with the polished steel of the building behind them still and gloriously shining in the sun.

  When Anne hung up, Claire heard the bleak dialling tone and looked anxiously at the phone. She was alone. Alone with these TV images, which were repeated over and over again. And then the tower collapsed; it just sunk into itself like it had finally had enough of standing there being stared at by the whole world. Claire held her breath; it was incredible to be watching this historical event in real-time, like an evil game just invented as a cynical new form of entertainment.

  She was sitting at the edge of the sofa, the tub of melted ice-cream in her hand. She would be unable to do anything for the rest of the day, glued to the sofa as if she were watching a thriller. In some twisted and disgusting way, it was also terribly entertaining. But in order to bear it she was in desperate need of a stiff drink. She rummaged in the kitchen for that old bottle of single malt whisky that was still unopened – a souvenir from their parents of a long-ago visit to Scotland. ‘Single Malt’. She read the golden letters on the label: something one was supposed to offer guests after dinner but then forgot about. It felt devious and completely out of character to pour herself a glass of whisky. Just when she sat on the sofa again, listening to a terrorism expert give a chilling analysis of the situation, her parents called. They were on holiday on a cruise ship. She had assumed that they were bronzing on a deckchair, blissfully unaware of what was happening in New York. But of course, the luxury liner had a high-definition plasma screen the size of a cinema.

  The
ir voices came from afar; she could hardly hear them through the crackling of the phone line. The phone network was completely overloaded and it sounded like they were in some sort of a storm. “Stay home,” they shouted. “I am home,” she shouted back. As soon as she hung up, a peculiar silence unfurled. Everyone seemed to be sitting in front of the TV, the whole population of Berlin, Anne and Karl in Hamburg, even her parents on their cruise ship, somewhere in the Caribbean Sea, were watching the twin towers collapse. Everyone was connected by the same images, simultanously taking in the same information, mysteriously bound together by these attacks that until that day had been unimaginable. This was new, in scale and impact, and targeted at the very heart of modern society.

  At first she tried the whisky in tiny sips, the sharp taste burning her throat. Gradually it became smoother. A deep warming sensation ran through her body as though someone had wrapped a blanket around her. As the full scale of the atrocity slowly unfolded, she remained transfixed to the screen. She couldn’t break away from it, as if the screen were a big magnet in her living room and she was forced to take in everything it showed. It was people’s crumbling faces that were the most disturbing, the collapsing twin towers mirrored in their panicked, wide-opened eyes.

  She saw people running for their lives, covering themselves from the plumes of smoke worming their way through the streets. Downtown Manhattan was drowned in debris and ashes. Terrified people were screaming, crying, some were holding their heads in their hands as if they wanted to screw them off so as not to see, not to witness. A man in a suit with a briefcase was completely covered in ash. There was even ash on his eyelids. He looked confused, shouting into the camera, indecipherable sentences as if he had lost his mind.

  Now she was drinking the whisky in big gulps. Maybe it was its numbing effect, or perhaps she had seen too much already, with the attack on the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania failing to trigger the same harrowing effect. Compared to the other two attacks, they seemed almost negligible, an afterthought. By late afternoon Claire couldn’t move anymore. She muted the TV and, lying there on the sofa drunk and heavy, she fell asleep.

  Shortly after midnight she woke up. A parching thirst made her open her eyes. Her tongue was clinging to her palate. But as soon as she tried to get up, she was so dizzy that she had to sit down again. It was dark. Only the blueish flickering light of the TV filled the room. She held her head; a headache was creeping up her neck and would soon burst into a full-blown migraine.

  She couldn’t believe she had let herself go like that. She stumbled to the toilet as fast as she could. Embracing the toilet pan, she vomited violently. Lying on the cold bathroom floor, her body deflated and completely powerless, moaning and weltering from one side to the other, waiting for the next sick wave, she knew there and then that something had changed profoundly.

  It wasn’t just a building that had collapsed in New York. She recalled the image of the falling people and imagined what it looked like when they hit the ground. Men in white shirts and ties. Men who looked like her father, or the waiter in the Windows on the World restaurant who had given them the Coke with a pink straw in it. “Now that’s a view! You are lucky girls, it’s a golden day today.”

  She remembered him saying that. A golden day. Slurping their Cokes, they looked down the Hudson River in awe. How beautiful it was. The little boats crossing the blue. Later on that day they were on a boat themselves to Liberty Island. There she was, the woman in blue-green copper, standing on a stone pedestal in the form of a star, holding up the torch. Her right foot raised, trampling on broken shackles as if she was about to walk forward. Inside the Statue of Liberty she followed Anne closely, going up the narrow, winding staircase, some 300 steps.

  “We are in her head,” Anne said. It was fascinating, being inside and walking around the head of the Statue of Liberty. For them, New York was just one huge playground. That’s what the Americans were so good at – creating the illusion that everything was just some sort of toy, even a huge, ruthless city like New York.

  Claire’s stomach churned painfully. Although it was empty and all fluids squeezed out of her, there was still the urge to vomit, with nothing left apart from bitter-tasting foam. For a moment Claire thought she might just die there of alcohol poisoning on the bathroom floor. She tried to remember how much she drank. Two thirds of a bottle – was that enough to die? Her forehead was cold but sweaty, shivers went through her body like electrical currents, just as she imagined suffering from malaria would be like. She closed her eyes, her parched lips half open. Claire didn’t know how long she lay there but, when she returned to the living room, she could already see the light of dawn creeping in.

  The alcohol had knocked Claire for six and, because she wasn’t used to it and had literally flushed her veins with a toxic substance, she had a hangover for almost a week. She felt sick throughout, cursing herself for her weakness. She didn’t tell anyone, not even Anne, and did everything not to let on. But it was as if she was oozing the smell of alcohol from every pore. The faint taste of whisky remained on her tongue for days, and she had to force herself to eat. She was surprised and disappointed that her body, a perfectly designed dancing machine, had collapsed so easily.

  Even in the ivory tower of the ballet academy everyone was talking about what had happened in New York. Everyone seemed to know someone who knew someone who was injured or killed or missing. There was an atmosphere of disbelief and outrage. 90 countries had lost people. Every day new bodies emerged form the rubble, as did new stories of missing people. Soon the faces of the terrorists appeared on the front pages. Somehow she had imagined old, bitter men. But they were young and didn’t look particularly mad or stupid or suicidal. Although, what was a terrorist supposed to look like?

  Outrage spread through Germany when it emerged that Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, had in fact lived in Hamburg. In Marienstrasse. The most unassuming of street names. The fact that the terror attack of the century had actually been planned in a room of the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg made it even more disturbing. Especially as Anne knew the place well, having once been to a seminar and having friends studying there. Her phone was ringing frantically; everyone wanted to know whether she had ever met him. She hadn’t. “Maybe I passed this guy in the cafeteria or the hallway, you never know. He could have been one of those nerds who don’t look you in the eye because they are full of thought and on a mission, but usually they want to build stuff, not blow it up.”

  It made Claire sick that her sister may have encountered such a terrorist, or even that she had walked through the same building. There were no boundaries anymore; the world had shrunk to an inextricable wireball, everything was linked up and anything could happen anywhere.

  On the S-Bahn, she started to look at people more closely. One evening, only a week after the attacks, Karl had visited for the weekend and he and Anne had had an argument.

  Anne confessed that she had actually left a train because of three young men who had reminded her of the suicide bombers she had seen in the papers; they were whispering, and she thought something fishy was going on. “Next they’ll probably blow up the trains,” she said.

  However, Karl argued that this is exactly what they wanted, to spark fear and distrust, and ultimately to divide people. He thought it paranoid to leave a train just because someone might look suspicious and accused Anne of being judgmental, which she thought outrageous. Claire could sense that they were on the brink of a full-blown fight and left the table, but the air remained highly charged the whole evening.

  In the week after the attacks a number of controlled explosions were carried out at train stations and airports around Europe. Claire had a dull apprehension that this wasn’t it, that something worse was still to come. If causing angst and confusion is what the terrorists wanted, as Karl had said, they had certainly succeeded with her.

  Politicians meanwhile were quick in urging people to go back to busi
ness as usual. This was exactly what the ballet company was doing. The shows went on uninterrupted and the curtain went up every evening. It was as if there was a sigh of relief in the audience, relief that on stage there was still this intact perfect world. Princess Aurora fell asleep before she got kissed to life again by the prince so they could get married for the umpteenth time. Stripped bare of the dancing, the storyline of The Sleeping Beauty was silly, and it amazed Claire that it had still worked every time since Tchaikovsky wrote it over a hundred years ago.

  Watching the dancers warming up for a dress rehearsal one could think the world was indeed a wonderful place where beauty was truth, truth beauty and this was all we know on earth and all we need to know. Claire took the Post-it with the quote from the mirror.

  “The world is fucked; what are we dancing The Sleeping Beauty for?” Claire said to a fellow dancer getting into her fairy costume. Suddenly it felt so pointless, even ignorant. What was she doing here, graciously hopping around in a tutu? The answer was persuasively simple, and the fairy delivered it so drily that she was taken aback. “We are here to make people happy, Claire.”

  On stage she slipped into her alter ego; she left the worrying Claire with the bad hangover in the changing room and transformed into Claire the dancer. She could feel her muscles tightening and her feet followed the sequence of steps as if of their own accord. Swishing forwards and backwards in a pendulum movement, the supporting leg straight, she glided effortlessly from one position into another. Preparing for a leap, she bent her knees for a grand plie, her back perfectly aligned with her heels and her legs turned out. With the front leg sweeping forcefully, she performed the splits in mid-air in one fluid movement. Every limb reaching out, she felt her old self again. She didn’t have to think about it, her body just did what it was trained to do, and for a moment she forgot everything else. It was in those moments, when she was completely immersed, connected with the other dancers through their simultaneous movements, gliding over the floor and jumping through the air, that she felt most alive.