Miss Nadrai’s School of Ballet

This morning’s breakfast: Oatmeal and almond/coconut milk with home-made strawberry jam. The recipe for this jam has been circulating social media and is well worth a try. Put 2 cups of fruit or berries (such as strawberries) with 2 Tablespoons honey (or to taste) and 1 Tablespoon Chia seeds in a blender. If you want the jam a bit chunky you can add some more fruit after you’ve blended this. The Chia seeds will turn the mixture into a gel if you put it into glass containers in the fridge overnight.

When I was four, my mom took me to ballet school. It was run by a Hungarian woman, a former ballerina with the Budapest Ballet, named Eva Nadrai. Miss Nadrai was short and stout and spoke with a heavy accent. She wore a black leotard and black tights, a wide, sweeping skirt, and soft ballet shoes. She had black hair cut into a blunt bob and a round Kalmuck face. Miss Nadrai was stern and we were terrified of her

My first leotard was light pink and had a little transparent skirt attached to it.

I began my ballet training at the same time as I began swimming. But the talent I had for swimming, I lacked for ballet. I amassed a great deal of medals in swimming, but could never force my legs down into a split.

The ballet school, tucked away on a quiet street, consisted of a huge room with a parquet floor and barres nailed to three of the four walls. The fourth wall was completely mirrored. In a corner stood a grand piano, but Miss Nadrai was not above using taped music when she needed it.

Class, which I now suspect was quite Soviet-inspired, slow and rather conventional, began like ballet classes everywhere in the world: at the barre. We learnt the five ballet positions, we pliéd, we relevéd, we developpéd, we learnt how to carry our arms.

“Port de bras,” said Miss Nadrai.

“Port de bras,” we repeated, and formed halos with our arms over our heads.

Like the archetypical ballet mistress she was, Miss Nadrai would walk around the room pushing a lazy leg up further here and adjusting a sagging arm there. She was forever telling us “in with the stomach” (sometimes accompanied by a pat on the belly) and “in with the bottom” (occasionally illustrated with a slight slap on the butt). I never understood how one could hold both in at the same time.

From the barre we moved out into the center of the room. Miss Nadrai took out pieces of silky blue fabric cut into cloudlike shapes, and threw them on the floor. This was my favorite ballet exercise, we called it “jumping over the puddles”, although its real, technical name is grand jeté. I loved the feeling of flying over those puddles to the big music played on the piano. I also loved to do the polka, for which Miss Nadrai divided us into pairs. Class ended, an hour later, with a deep, slow reverence. Reverence to the teacher – Miss Nadrai – and reverence to the art form of ballet. Afterwards my mom picked me up in our old Volvo and drove me back home. While waiting for dinner to be served, I flicked on the TV: Ballet class was followed with half an hour of Betty Boop and BBC’s series about Madame Curie.

I continued taking ballet until I was 12 years old. I liked the smell from the resin box, I liked the height the toe shoes gave me and the intricate pattern of the bourrée and I liked to perform, which we did once a year in the big theater in town, wearing the loveliest of costumes. I also liked to be around the older girls, who sat on benches in the green room doing their homework while waiting for us, the younger girls, to be done. The walls of the green room were decorated with black and white photographs from Miss Nadrai’s illustrious career as a ballerina.

One of my strongest memories from ballet class is of a girl who peed while we were doing exercises at the barre. She was too scared to ask for permission to go use the bathroom, and we watched her pee and watched the puddle form around her feet. A puddle, which she and the rest of us girls carefully sidestepped for the remainder of the class. Not a word was said, the music kept playing. Our pointed feet went this way and that in battement tendus and ronds de jambe but never for a second forgetting that pool of urine.