Hans Brandt and the Ballet Shoes

The best day of Hans Brandt’s life was a quiet sunny day on a stage in March 1890. He halted down-stage. His brown eyes peeled wide with wonder as Amalie Bauer swept past. Pale pink tulle ruffles flowed around her ankles. Ivory ribbons adorned her legs. Red hair spiralled about her shoulders, radiant curls brighter even than the sun. A smile lit up her lips, and a twinkle danced behind her eyes as she turned to him and extended her hand.

Every bone in his body screamed at him to pick up his own pace, that his steps were due mere seconds away. The longer he watched her, the more his heart jumped, his stomach churned, his breath caught in his throat. He thought it peculiar, that they had danced together for years, with nothing. Not a flutter. Yet he stood here now, the world shifting under his feet. He tumbled head-first into what he could only assume was love. For the life of him, he could not understand why it was born from one tiny dance out of hundreds. Thousands, even.

Amalie simply smiled at him, and he smiled back.

On the fourth day of April, some four long years after his wife’s death, Hans Brandt wobbled through his ice-cold living quarters, sweeping a dirty rag over the thick layers of dust caking his crockery. A cynical sigh slipped out. No matter how hard Hans tried, he could not maintain a clean household. These days, his efforts were dependent upon the weakest traces of energy creeping in. Just dangling his dishcloths put a hearty strain upon his once-nimble dancer’s joints.

He dumped the cloth on the old hawthorn table and hobbled into the carpenter’s terrace next door. Deafening silence which rippled through Stettser house. His ears throbbed under the weight of it. A sudden banging upon Johannes’s front door shattered the silence. Hans jumped a mile. His gaze fixed upon a cloudy blue sheen in the eyes which slowly blinked open above the doorknob. Johannes, Hans thought to himself with a steady nod. Those cold, foggy tones in the carpenter’s security system were his own today.

“Johannes!” Antoinette Bauer, a stocky woman who ran the town’s only bakery, screamed. “Johannes, the ballet is back!”

Hans clenched his jaw and covered his ears. She had not changed an ounce since he had met her, introduced in a cramped ballroom as Amalie’s aunt, at his wedding. His desire to strangle her had not subsided over the years. Even now, jarred as he was, he began to reach for the door to shout her down.

Before he could touch the doorhandle, Johannes carolled him onto the cobblestones outside. Eight carriages hurtled by; dancers waved from boxed windows and the villagers cheered. Hans did not share their joy. Instead, blood pulsing with fury, he saw his beloved Amalie white as snow in a coffin. He saw the ballet abandoning her as they had done, leaving him penniless, widowed, and without a soul to turn to.

He clamped broken fingernails into his palms and stomped away towards his own house. He denied every attempt Johannes made at soothing his hair-trigger temper. He locked himself in his study and neglected to take dinner. Instead, he gazed on his wife's portrait, consoling himself that he might see her again one day. His consolation dipped down like an orange sun against a burgundy backdrop.

A soft but unrelenting thud ripped him from his hope. His head tilted and his eyes flitted idly onto the door of his office.

“Cleo?” Hans called. 

He dreaded what the cat may have knocked from the counters this time. It seemed he was forever cleaning up after that animal. Sometimes he had the mind to return it to that peculiar fae that had gifted Cleo. The old man sighed. He left the solitude of his office and pottered down the hallway. At the top of the staircase, he twisted his body around the bannister, peered down into the dark, and frowned.

“Cleo, was that you?”

The thudding continued unabated. Nerves gripped him, but he hobbled down the narrow stairwell and headed for the kitchen before a thought struck him and stole his breath clean away. The disruption was not from the kitchen. It escaped through cracks in the door of his own workshop. A slow, gentle rhythm took form as Hans thrust the heavy door open. Horror shuddered through him as the ballet shoes pattered forth and his violin burst to life. His jaw slacked, but his terror bloomed into awe and excitement.

Hans launched himself towards the shoes and swept forward into a low bow.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance! Amalie! Amalie, you must come and see…”

He trailed off, his joy turning to ash upon his tongue. The violin bow plucked a melancholy tune and the ballet pumps halted upon their toes, heels high in the air. Hans drifted sluggishly to the window and slouched into an armchair by the window. His gaze flitted across the lane, where he spied Johannes’s door watching him. Its cloudy blue eyes darkened to reflect Hans’ own desperate detachment back at him.

They again refused to blink, and his grief swelled into paranoia. Those blasted eyes bore straight through to his soul. His deepest worries twisted into something uglier than he could bear. The first time he had gazed upon them, he had believed there was a loneliness about them. Something in need of comfort, even companionship, but he knew better now.

He knew they were not after friendship; they didn’t wish to fit in, nor to help anyone. They sought information—nay, gossip. They were Johannes’s way of siphoning out the villagers’ secrets. To what end, Hans did not know, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. He'd begged Johannes over the years to discard them, but he never did. No matter how much he cared for Johannes, or wanted his approval, those eyes drove Hans mad. No-one seemed to notice either. Stricken with impatience, he yanked his curtains shut and paced the workshop.

“I despair, I do! He is entirely unconcerned by the incessant staring. It watches every soul in this town without blinking and he cares not!”

A sharp pain tore through his ankle, snatching him unkindly from his growing wrath. He frowned and glanced downwards, a sinking feeling of judgement settling under his skin.

“I suppose you are right. Speak kindly.”

The violin recommenced its playing and the pearlescent ballet shoes graced the floor. Hans shot after them, spinning in time. A soft smile spread across his lips and he followed the pumps into a sweeping fleckerl. He danced until the early hours of the morning, wherein a bright turquoise dawn lit up the sky.

The house grew quiet around five o’clock and Hans fell into a peaceful slumber. He remained so until a harsh rap upon his front door echoed through the house five minutes after six. The shoes continued to tap back and forth while Hans dragged himself to his front door, and flung it open. Johannes stood on the front step, purple bags under his pale, scowling eyes.

“Hans.”

“What is the matter, Johannes?”

“You have kept me awake all night with your music. Some of us need rest, Hans.”

Hans blinked, somewhat sheepish. The idea of pulling back Johannes’s approval from the brink of destruction was almost too good to resist. It had been four years since Hans had felt at home in this town. He had nothing to give. Nothing to connect him to these people with their star-specked inventions.

Johannes with his beady, watchful eyes, implanted into every door in his house. Antoinette Bauer with her self-cleaning dishware and the oven that never dirtied. Even little Paola Winter, an orphan at eight years old, had tricks up her sleeve. As Hans understood it, Paola had an arrangement of some sort with a fellow who lived inside a hawthorn tree. The details were foggy in his mind, but he suspected it involved maintaining her mother's farm.

He was envious of them all, and this envy had driven him through his grief. He had hope that they might reach out and accept him into their ranks, past his lack of imagination or invention. Even past Amalie being his only connection to these people.

Her rosy cheeks popped into his head again, her perfume sifting through his senses. He could feel the curve of her belly under his fingertips and when tears welled behind his eyes, he remembered with torturous clarity the night her ballet shoes fell into a four-year-long slumber, leaving him completely alone. He didn’t care now to wonder why they were revived.

He felt only joy, which washed his embarrassment away and tugged him back into the moment. Grabbing Johannes by the sleeve of his robe, Hans tugged him down the corridor and into the workshop. He ushered Johannes inside and gestured at the dancing shoes. He did not once tear his eyes from his neighbour’s face. Hans savoured every tiny muscle twitch, every flicker of surprise, pride, and disbelief.

“You… you did it,” Johannes choked. “You brought them to life! How?”

“No questions, only dancing!”

Hans paid no mind to the cracks in Johannes’s smile. He approached the pumps and bowed for a second time, finding nothing better than his soaring spirit as he engrossed himself back into their Viennese Waltz, rotating to his right for three measures. The lilac top notes of Amalie’s perfume wafted through the workshop. Its fragrance tickled his nose, stronger even than the barrel of wood shavings at the end of the pine bench.

ADD CONNECTION

Hans closed his eyes and whispered words under his breath, locking Johannes out of sight and mind. A small, sharp gust of air washed over Hans as he moved around the workshop. Johannes vanished with a growl. For the following three months, Hans remained indoors, so enthralled was he in the dance. Now he felt worthy. Now he felt like he was home. In any case, he knew he was not alone. Her perfume trickled into every corner of the house, and sometimes, he swore he saw her.

His excitement quashed his awareness. He spent every night dancing and giggling and drinking sherry. Outside, his friends grew intolerant. By the thirteenth week, a queue of townsfolk stretched from his door to Antoinette’s bakery. The longer his neighbours went ignored, the closer to the brink of madness they became.

Hans never once noticed the rats collecting on his doorstep, nor the groaning fields refusing to yield, nor even the nightly clanging of the workshop next door, and the first time he ever noticed it was the afternoon in which Johannes all but axed down his door and demanded the ballet shoes.

“Why?” 

“These wretched things have brought nothing but misery and chaos to the rest of us, Hans! I have not slept in two months for all your incessant partying. You have thrown the town into a complete shambling. Do you know when we last had fresh vegetables? Five weeks, because your monstrosities refuse to let the rain pour down so crops may grow! Your happiness is killing our town!”

Hans gawped at his neighbour. He stammered and waved his hand at the violin, silencing it.

“I am… I- you expect me to return to stasis? The years in which I could scarcely feel a wound from shaving, much less Amalie’s passing? Do you wish me to sacrifice what life I have discovered now?”

“No. I expect you to get rid of those cursed pumps. I am pleased that you are engaged again, of course I am! But these- they benefit no-one. Not even you.” 

Hans was incredulous. He shook his head and jabbed at the door, snarling out half-baked, ancient grievances. His hands curled into fists so tight that his knuckles were whiter than his linen bedsheets.

“Damn you and your self-righteous hypocrisy!”

“Hans,” Johannes protested weakly.

Hans glared at the carpenter, brown eyes turning pitch black. A red haze descended upon his vision. He trembled under his hate, knees shaking, then succumbed willingly. He had never been so furious. He would not say he enjoyed the suffocating intensity of it, but it did consume him and he felt no urge to fight it.

“Where was your concern when my wife died? My child? All I have ever tried to do is fit in. The second I finally make something worthwhile, something wonderful, you turn me away! You leave my home now and do not darken these rooms again.”

Johannes’ fingers clasped his own neck and he choked, as if swept up into an iron vice.

“Please, Hans,” he gasped.

“Leave!”

Johannes flashed out of sight. Smoke billowed in his wake. Hans spluttered into his right arm and waved his left through the dense smog to break it up. Once dissipated, he leaned through his window and screamed into the street. His blazing eyes, now a white hot red, met Antoinette Bauer’s. Hans grabbed a hammer from his workbench, squeezed back through the window, and hurled it at her.

“Let that be a lesson to you!”

He snapped the window shut and yanked the curtain closed. Ashen breaths heaved inside his chest and he slumped into the armchair. He cursed the arrogance of them all. Forcing him through hoops for a few measly nods. Really, he thought, what they wanted was someone to fit into their haughty aspirations. To enhance them. To satiate their greed.

“The audacity! Nothing I do will ever be good enough!”

Hans peered at the shoes and shook his head at them, still seething. As he did so, a faint sense of reality crept back into his lungs and his brain, spurred on by their nervous tiptoeing.

“You have done everything right, my dears. They are simply envious that I have outdone them all. You are innocent,” he insisted. “I could never…”

He flung up his hands and thundered into the kitchen. Utensils clattered across the surfaces. Water spilled from the rusty boiling pot, spilling upon charred firewood. He did picture the shoes soldering to dust, and felt empty. He clung instead to images of Amalie floating across distant stages. They chased away his thoughts of executing the pumps, but only just.

“The audacity!” Hans hissed, hurling his fist at the wall. “The utter contempt, the disregard, the nerve of these fellows, intruding into my head—my house! And telling me I should cease happiness! I ought to…”

A word then hit him. Sacrifice. Perhaps the fool had a point. Wild-eyed, Hans turned his head and scratched his unkempt hair. Hans could almost taste burning flesh upon his tongue. He imagined pork roasting on a spit. He would like nothing more than to set Johannes’s home alight and destroy his wretched shop. That would serve a most delectable lesson to his spiteful neighbour.

“Maybe it is he that I should toss upon the fire. He will lose his livelihood and suffer for his insolence and pride!”

His eyes, still ablaze, danced around the kitchen, hunting for the log barrel. He discovered it by the back door, scurried over to snatch the barrel up, then wobbled out of the back door. He limped through the garden, his arms aching under his cargo, and looked up. He stopped in his tracks, frozen in time. The hawthorn trees glowed white. Traces of red flickered within the light, and Hans felt certain he could see pale pink ruffles. All he could do was stand and stare.

“Amalie?”

The light smiled upon him a while before it faded into the trees. Hans looked down at the barrel and indulged in a moment of clarity. He tossed the logs away, watching them spill across the dull grass, hardly visible under the black sky. He exhaled and glanced towards the pumps. They padded backwards upon the fixation of his sorrowful gaze.

Perhaps Johannes was right. Perhaps in trying to fit in, or to hold onto the past, he would remain an outcast, never to belong or be happy. Miserable and alienated for the rest of his days. Not a glimmer of respite to free him. With reluctance, he knew Johannes was right.

He whispered words to the scattered kindling and they collected into a tall pile and lit up. Hans scooped the reluctant ballet shoes into his trembling hands. He paced to the fire and hovered before it. His mind raced. He thought of his wife. Of the approval of his neighbours. Of the single thought he’d spared to their daughter since that night, out of refusal to admit the gravity of his loss.

“Please forgive my stubborn grief, Amalie…”

He cast the satin pumps upon the bonfire, listened to them hiss and scream and cry, and watched in silence until they left nothing but dust and black plumes.