dancing at dam square
üstün bilgen reinart
On a September afternoon, while dry oak leaves rustled on sidewalks in Amsterdam, I watched an old woman dance to the drums of a group of young Africans, at Dam Square.
The wanton beat rose above the din of the crowds and pigeons on the stone mosaic plaza between Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum and the Royal Palace where Louis Bonaparte's troops were received in 1808. Young black men seated ceremonially on low stools nodded solemnly at the dancing woman, as their lean fingers flew over the drums. The woman looked European, had gray, shoulder-length hair, and was wearing a long skirt covered with batik designs. The roundness which her hips had lost had settled on her belly, though she was not overweight. She was whirling in abandon all by herself; her eyes half-closed, her arms flailing, her hair and skirt flying. A shaman conjuring spirits.
I stood and stared. Her unseemly exuberance filled me with foreboding. I was forty at the time.
A March morning in Ankara. Snow falls in large flakes on horse chestnuts in the park outside my windows. I have a day off from teaching. I am alone at home, and free. Shostakovitch's Jazz Suite on the CD player. I close my eyes and let the discordant lilt of a waltz (which Stanley Kubrick used as background music in Eyes Wide Shut) flow through me. The next thing I know, I get up, shake the fluffy slippers off my feet, and begin to dance. The hard wood floor is slippery under my socks; I raise my arms, bend my body backwards from the waist as if an aristocratic partner were holding me on a ballroom floor. I feel graceful, slender, and beautiful. I hum along; I turn my head back and turn round and round. I laugh out loud.
Suddenly, I remember the woman at Dam Square. Priestess. Crone. Witch. I see myself as an onlooker might see me: thickening waist, round belly protruding in loose jeans and t-shirt, hair carelessly attached with combs, and white cotton socks slipping and sliding. Ridiculous old woman.
I stop at the balcony door to watch the magpies flitting and chattering between the branches of horse chestnuts, under the snow. The Shostakovitch waltz soars. But I put my slippers back on. It has arrived. So soon.
Now I know why I felt such foreboding while watching her dance at Dam Square. She had struck a chord; sounded a warning to me. “If your greed for life isn't quenched soon, you too may become an eccentric old woman who still abandons herself to the music.”
But who says only young, slender women have the right to dance? Otherwise you're reminded of death, so what? So what, if the passing of all things makes you weep in the midst of joy? If that woman dancing in Amsterdam had been young and beautiful, I would have forgotten her long ago.
Magpies cackle. Falling snow paints the sky creamy white. The Shostakovitch Waltz is not without sadness. That sadness might give me permission to dance. Yes. And I start to move again—more restrained this time.
Ah, sister who once danced at Dam Square, now I know how those African drums entranced you. They too held sadness along with joy. A young woman may dance without sadness, for youth is eternal during the dance. But when we, older women, dance, we have to conjure our youths knowing their fragility, and hold the memory ever so delicately against the backdrop of mortality. Our dances are more beautiful because our joy is tinged with mourning.
I wonder if she is still alive, I wonder what she did in life, when she wasn't dancing. In my memory, all she ever does is dance. In my mind's eye she continues to whirl, as if nothing mattered outside the dance. She dances with me now, in Ankara, to a discordant waltz, while snow falls outside. With me in Ankara, but alone at Amsterdam's Dam Square. The pulse of lean, black fingers on tautly stretched skin surges towards eternity, and time stops in her dance.
return to archive >
