disintegrating newspaper—but she can’t stop dancing, she can’t wake
up. Vicky tries to give up dancing. She hides the red shoes in a drawer.
She falls in love with a composer, she marries him. At the end of the
ĕlm, she is invited to dance one more time in Lermontov’s ballet. Her
husband begs her not to go. Lermontov warns her, “Nobody can have
two lives.” She must choose. What makes a person do one thing and
not another? I wonder. Vicky puts the red shoes on again. is time
they dance her off the edge of a building to her death. e other
dancers perform the ballet without her, a spotlight trained on the
empty place on the stage where Vicky should be dancing.
It’s not a ĕlm about trauma. In fact, I don’t yet understand that I
am living with trauma. But e Red Shoes gives me a vocabulary of
images, it teaches me something about myself, the tension between my
inner and outer experiences. And something about the way Vicky put
on the red shoes for the last time and took Ęight—it didn’t look like
choice. It looked compulsive. Automatic. What was she so afraid of?
What made her run? Was it something she couldn’t live with, or
something she couldn’t live without?
“Would you have chosen dance over me?” Béla asks on the bus ride
home. I wonder if he is thinking of the night in Vienna when I told
him I was taking Marianne to America, with or without him. He
already knows I am capable of choosing someone or something else.
I defuse his question with Ęirtation. “If you had seen me dance
then, you wouldn’t have asked me to choose,” I say. “You’ve never
seen a high kick like mine.” I pretend, I pretend. Somewhere deep in
my chest I suppress a scream. I didn’t get to choose! the silence in me
rages. Hitler and Mengele chose for me. I didn’t get to choose!
* * *Béla is the ĕrst to collapse under the pressure. It happens at work. He
is liing a box and he falls to the ground. He can’t breathe. At the