Chapters (23)
Everything recedes into that twilight round: I won’t remember the concert itself, but this moment, the music brilliant, this moment singular and bright in memory as some Russian gem. Here is the Princesses’ Round, all sway and respite, elegance and reserve. But out of nowhere comes a walloping burst, kettle drum and horn, the Dance of the King; spinning on the axis of one leg, the other kicking at whatever would restrain me, I am power and authority. One arm up and one down, switch again, every muscle animated by what travels through me; now I’ve disappeared, now I’ve put myself entirely into someone else’s hands; not my will but will itself is what courses through me. There’s that skittering bird again, the hurry of his heated wings, and my ferocity quiets to lullaby, croon, and pulse, I’m on my knees and swaying, a gnarled shape, a root, and Oriental smokes drift slowly up from the towers, the minarets and onion domes decorating the lid of a black lacquer box. Everything quietens, everything’s diminished, till—there, you hear it, what is this that has been granted us, what is this purity and force emerging in the horns? It is the firebird after all, no longer a hide-and-seek flitting in the trees but who he always was, beneath the scorch and the ashes, beneath the ordinary ugly body in which he has been disguised, under the shame he’s worn like a cloak, under the misunderstandings and the knowledge that he can’t be who they want, that they do not want who he is.
Here is who he is, swelling, taking form, the real body, triumphant boy, the bird in the fullness of its light, larger, empowered. Isn’t it fire itself, the fact of burning, which enables the bird to dance? Then swirling around him the gorgeous cloaks, the brassy fabric of trumpets, the facades and the fanfares glorious, above them all. And rising, higher, the tower of light the bird is entering, which is the calmly flaming elevation of his own body, transfigured to something we can barely see—but given, here, sound.
And so we’re left with shimmer and the downward drift of a minor chord, darkening, and then the emphatic burst of conclusion. Unsayable movement, given form, in the body of a heavy little boy no longer weighted, without limit, hardly held to earth at all.