Praise bounteous
providence if you will
that grants even an ogre
a tiny glow-worm
tenderness encapsulated
in icy caverns of a cruel
heart or else despair
for in the very germ
of that kindred love is
lodged the perpetuity
of evil.
- Achebe.
2007. Poland.
The only thing that had changed were the weeds.
Ethan expected the building to have rotted down, decayed in someway. But apart from the weeds, the dance hall stood exactly as it had done all that time ago.
It wouldn't crumble, of course it wouldn't. Buildings around it, small independent shops and scout huts and housing developments will come and go. Demolished, foreclosed, simply abandoned.
But this building lives to remind him.
It won't go. Not in his lifetime.
He managed to prise the window open, sliding his fingers through a small gap just below the window frame and he pushed it upwards.
It was tough, and it was a struggle.
Ethan was pretty old, not as athletic as he used to be. White flecks of old dried up paint showered down as he struggled.
It was stuck fast.
But eventually he got it open and climbed on through.
Not much dust. Not enough to leave footprints on the dim wooden flooring, but enough to catch in the sunlight that shone through the windows.
The trailing dust motes were calming, but somehow saddening. It's the same in all empty buildings, long neglected, especially ones where life once lit every corner. As if the building itself was once alive.
But now it sits empty. Silent. Long awaiting people who will never return, perhaps from here until the end of time.
He unpacked the shoes from his backpack. They're worn now, worn down in his many years of coming here. The material faded, the velcro strips no longer sticking properly.
But they always work in their weekly dance.
He takes off his trainers and slips on the ballet shoes.
He worries for the day they finally fall apart, because they don't make ballet shoes like the pair he has.
Ethan doesn't like the pumps and plimsoles in that horrible pink colour that look like those nasty plastic foot-covers they make you wear in hospitals.
But it's so much more than that. He feels that if he doesn't have the right ballet shoes, their ballet shoes they wore in their dance hall when they did their dance, then he might not come out to dance.
It's foolish, but Ethan reckons he might feel forgotten. Or worse, he'll think that he's moved on.
As if he could do a thing like that.
Even if he wanted to.
From the second he puts them on, the entire place seems to hum and come to life. The beautifully lit candelabras lower from the gloom above, casting out the muddy orange gloaming from the room and brightening everything into the sunniest day. The place seems to whirl.
Colours, patterns, faces swinging out of darkened space. And then his, followed by his figure, folded out from the corner of the room.
He saw them all as they had been. Lucy, Charlotte, Old Bertie, Sam, Dennis. The band, sawing and thrashing away on their instruments with jubilance. He saw the other dancers, arm in arm, wearing suits and petticoats and jackets and cravats and the very clothes of the ones who had left.
And Mark, of course, was the most beautiful of all.
He took his hands, and they danced.
1954. Poland.
The Nazi occupation of Poland had drawn itself into a living hell on Earth. When it seemed as if Hitler was going to lose the war, he didn't order the concentration camps in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen to stop murdering millions of jews, homosexuals, blacks and gypsies.
He doubled down, making his weapons of genocide process even more walking corpses.
Every day, every hour, every minute and every second.
Many historians now wonder if Hitler's vision of one thousand years of Aryan rule and a world in the clutches of the evil axis powers was a vision he genuinely believed in.
If he'd been attempting to win the second world war, he would have concentrated on his war efforts. Turned his death camps into labour camps.
But he didn't. He simply went on torturing, killing, maiming, experimenting.
The people in those camps, canvas-thin skin stretched over breaking-out bones, weren't liberated until 1945. And by then, it was too late for so many. Mark was just one.
Ethan and Mark co-owned the little nameless dance hall in the little Polish city of Bielsk Podlaski. They had customers, and business was fairly steady. At its height, way back before they had taken their signs down and relied on people finding out about the little sanctuary through word of mouth, the dance hall had been packed. Filled with laughter and filled with life.
Poland had never really approved of two men running a business together, but since both men paid their taxes the government looked the other way.
Of course, this was before the Gestapo arrived, followed by the notes through the door filled with foul threats and the stones hurled through the windows by an intoxicated member of the S.S.
Ethan broke open their piggy bank funds to replace the broken windows, money that they wanted to spend on new and freshly-made wax vinyls, some new music for their record players. Or some new shoes for some of their poorer customers, who never had the money for new shoes.
Lucy and Charlotte never had much, and they desperately needed new shoes. They only had a few scrips and scraps to afford entry, and to dance with their friends under the lights whilst the music played.
Just little gifts for the people who'd appreciate them the most.
Things escalated, as Mark stopped going out in public with Ethan, and they were often stopped and searched.
During one search, a humiliating strip-search, Mark asked for his trousers back.
Hitler's troops, of course, would not hand the clothes back and Ethan watched, mortified, as Mark was told in the broken and stilted dialect of a German trying out Slavic language for the first time, that the trousers did not belong to him anymore.
He asked for his wallet back, only a small bundle of leather straps containing barely enough coins to pay for lunch.
He was punched in the face.
As Mark fell to the ground, the S.S. squad pummelled him. They kicked and they clawed, tearing at his remaining clothes.
He cried out for Ethan, but Ethan only watched. It was all he could do.
A single hellhound, an S.S. man named Friedrich held a pistol to his temple and laughed.
Some time later, Mark cried out for his mother, some thirty years cold in her grave and so unspeakably far away from the place that Mark found himself.
As the beating continued, he pissed himself out of fear.
Finally, he called out to God, an action that seemed to drive the Nazi soldiers into a frenzy. Hard boots and fists rained down on him.
One young rifleman rammed the stock of his rifle into his face, causing his teeth to break out of his gums and his nose to snap.
This was, at least, the last of the pain.
The Nazi who had been levelling the pistol, Friedrich, took it upon himself to finish the job.
He took a run up to the bleeding man on the ground and kicked out, as if kicking a rugby ball. The foot connected with the ruined head.
Mark's spinal column snapped as he head whipped to the side, on a neck that flopped back as if it were made of nothing but jelly. His bleating stopped.
Ethan screamed.
And so the S.S. men rounded on Ethan, and he was surrounded.
An ocean of swastika armbands, all heading towards him in a world that Ethan knew was made wrong, if it had been made at all.
Blood seeped silently out of Mark's open mouth.
And Ethan closed his eyes and awaited the end, hoping at least that it would be quick when it came.
But it never came.
What did come was a voice. A voice from Charlotte, coming from the end of the road. It echoed over everything, a voice of pure authority. The men turned.
"What are you doing to my husband?!" she bellowed.
The S.S. men seemed to shrink as the imposing woman stepped forward.
She was just over five foot tall, with fiery ginger hair that hung down to her shoulders.
She repeated herself as she stepped closer.
"What are you doing to my husband?"
One of the Nazi soldiers took off his helmet, revealing a thick crop of velvety blond hair.
He stammered as he spoke.
"Nuh- nothing madam. We, uh, we... We thought he was gay."
Another soldier spoke up. "We heard from some locals that he ran some sort of queer club nearby. That isn't true?"
Charlotte scoffed. "Of course not!" She gestured to Mark, who noticed that her arm was trembling inside of a cardigan that Lucy had knitted for her. "Straight as they come!"
"What about his friend?"
Charlotte didn't hesitate. There was just too much at stake.
"Oh, him? Well, we all had our suspicions around here."
"So you're not his husband, sir?"
It was a moment before Ethan realised that the officer was addressing him. A dangerous moment.
And it was a moment in which Ethan wondered if dying wouldn't be so bad after all.
Later, when it was all over, he often reflected that he would have preferred death over betrayal.
And they tell him, the survivors, they tell him about the mother that spurned her child and pretended it wasn't hers as it screamed for her. About the father that abandoned his family in their most dire time of need just to live a few more piteous days longer.
A decade later, when Charlotte quietly tied the knot with Lucy, she had told him how Mark had already been dead when the guard spoke and that Mark never heard a word of what Ethan said.
And that even if he had been alive, it would have been a matter of survival.
Saying no would save his life.
Saying yes would kill them both.
But for all the talk, Ethan could never shake that feeling of cowardice.
That feeling that he should have gone with him.
2007. Poland.
It was like a music box you might have had when you were younger.
They don't stop suddenly, do they? They slow down, as the music fades and the little ornament doesn't turn another rotation.
The candelabras slowly rose back up into the dark above. The musicians stopped, one at a time, as each one of them fell into the blackness.
Ethan would catch each ghostly face as it slipped away. Some would smile. Others were blank.
As the lights left the room, the dancers drifted out. The music had entirely faded out and the dance hall only had one magical spotlight, holding together two men locked in an embrace that neither wanted to leave.
But eventually, we must all let go.
Mark slipped out of the embrace like sand through a sieve, stepping back into the darkness and disappearing completely.
The old man stood alone in his dance hall, and nothing more.