II. “Dalida. A Dress for an Entrance”

Passport

1. Literary project: “Disco”
2. Project tagline: “From Dance to Freedom!”
3. Author and copyright holder: Iskandar Kadyrov
4. Format: Eight Heroines · Eight Stories · Eight Discos
5. Genre: Literary fiction, literary parable
6. Age rating: 18+
7. Story: II. “Dalida. A Dress for an Entrance”
8. Concept: Disco as a state in which music gives a person back the sense of being alive; each heroine gave the world her own disco and her own freedom of choice: of style, color, mood, euphoria

Teaser

A novella about four dresses that can talk, and a woman who chooses not an outfit but an entrance.

Announcement

A dressing room half an hour before curtain. Four dresses in the wardrobe, each knowing who she could become. A velvet parable about color, mirrors, and a choice that closes nothing.

About the project

“Disco” is a literary project by Iskandar Kadyrov, written as parables about music, the body, and freedom. Eight novellas about heroines, each of whom gave the world her own disco: her own rhythm, her own color, her own way of stepping into the light. Every story has its own laws: its own genre, its own voice, its own view of freedom. This is not an encyclopedia of a genre or a ranking of stars. These are eight authorial variations on what happens to a person when music gives back the feeling of being alive. Real names stand for cultural phenomena; the plots and scenes are works of fiction.

Each of them gave the world her own disco.

Hashtags

#DISCO #FromDanceToFreedom #Dalida #IskandarKadyrov #LiteraryUniverse #TheArchitectureOfMeaningHouse #LiteraryHauteCouture #ContemporaryFiction

Half an hour before curtain, the dressing room smelled of lavender, hot bulbs, powder, and something else, something elusive, like the memory of warm sand from a faraway south.

It was not so much a room as a small theater, in which the performance began before the performance. Mirrors in gilt frames ran along the wall, and every bulb around them glowed as if preparing for its own entrance. Velvet curtains kept their silence. The table trembled with bottles, brushes, and bracelets, a small army awaiting orders.

The wardrobe did not appear all at once. First the eye slid over the mirrors, the lamps, the bracelets, and only then did it bump into a tall dark door the size of a carriage, and it became clear that all this splendor had been merely the vestibule. The wardrobe did not creak and did not smell of mothballs; it behaved like a man who knows other people’s secrets and will never tell them, if asked nicely.

The wardrobe’s mistress was Madame Justine, the costumer. For thirty years she had dressed women on their way into the light, and she knew three things for certain. First, a dress is put on a person, not the other way around. Second, a zipper always jams a minute before the call. Third, in her wardrobe nothing ever happens.

Madame Justine believed in this “nothing” as sincerely as other people believe in fate.

The dressing room belonged to Dalida. Of a woman who sang in more than ten languages and was a little bit different in each, it was said that one outfit had never been enough for her for a whole evening. Madame Justine considered this normal. You cannot dress in one language when you speak ten.

There were five hangers in the wardrobe. Four were taken tonight, and the fifth Madame Justine, out of old habit, left empty: just in case, the way one keeps a place at the table for someone who might come.

A black dress, heavy and severe, like a decision made without witnesses. A garnet one, deep and dark red, like seeds hidden in a thick rind. A ruby one, as if wine had been poured into silk. And a gold one, thin and fluid, with light caught in its folds.

Behind the wall the orchestra was tuning a new rhythm, pulsing and made for dancing, the one all of Europe was changing clothes for that season. The bass was still distant, but the bottles on the table were already tapping along to it, and the four dresses on their hangers shivered on every strong beat, like a heart in a chest. From the sound of the hall, nobody out there intended to sit still.

Dalida came in without a sound, the way silence comes in before the first chord.

The lamps around the mirrors did not flare up; they simply grew warm. The gilt frames seemed to straighten. Dalida said nothing. She stopped in the middle of the room and, with a light turn of her head, let it be known that the evening could begin, and the whole dressing room followed that turn with its eyes.

Madame Justine did what she always did. She opened the wardrobe, took the black dress off its hanger, and held it up at arm’s length.

“Let’s start with this,” she said briskly. “It knows how to be confident even when you’re tired.”

The dress swayed. From its velvet folds came a voice, low and even, like a cello note. It did not ask and did not promise; it informed:

“I will make it so that you walk in. And everyone goes quiet.”

Madame Justine pretended not to hear. This was her professional skill number four.

But the room heard. The bass behind the wall struck, and the lamps dimmed in time, as before a storm; the mirrors filled with a deep blackness edged in silver, and the curtains stirred with such dignity that they might have been attending a coronation.

“Granted,” said Madame Justine aloud, to no one. “Let it not be the black.”

She hung it back and took down the garnet.

“I will make it so that they are gentle with you…” it whispered in the voice of a quiet piano, and added, embarrassed: “Is that really so little?”

The bass softened, as if someone had wrapped it in a scarf. The dressing room grew warm, like a coat pocket where someone has found forgotten gloves still holding a stranger’s warmth. The light hushed. The air thickened and smelled no longer of lavender but of dried flowers and evening tea. The bottles on the table chimed against one another in a soft, homely chord.

Madame Justine cleared her throat.

“The ruby.”

“Oh, I will make it so that they love you!” it blurted out, before she had finished the word. “Everyone! All at once! Loudly!”

Its voice was neither a man’s nor a woman’s, but rather like a smile too big to fit in a mouth. Color poured into the room like wine into a glass. It flooded the walls, the ceiling, the carpet, the powder in the puff, and Madame Justine’s hands. The bulbs blushed in embarrassment. The mirrors flared, and in every frame a small sunset caught fire. The music behind the wall suddenly became visible: red waves ran across the floor in time with the bass, and the hem of the ruby dress bounced on the offbeat.

“Well, now that is going too far,” said Madame Justine, and hurriedly reached for the gold.

“And I will make it so,” sang the gold on an indrawn breath, ringing like a trumpet that is not afraid of a wrong note, “that for one evening you forget everything unnecessary. Everything. Even me.”

Madame Justine could not help appreciating the honesty.

The light in the room grew thick as honey. It ran down the walls, over brushes and bottles, and every speck of dust hung in it exactly until the next bass beat, then shifted itself half a beat ahead. The bracelets on the table rose above the wood and hung in the golden air, slowly turning like tiny carousels.

Now all four dresses hung side by side and spoke at once. The black demanded silence. The garnet asked not to be rushed. The ruby was already laughing. The gold was singing something wordless, in some eleventh language. The room trembled in every color at once, and the colors took turns like voices in a score: black came in as a cello, garnet as a piano, ruby as laughter, gold as a trumpet, while the bass behind the wall kept the count for them all. It was an orchestra without a conductor, and Madame Justine, who in thirty years had not once lost her composure, felt for the first time that she did not know who here actually held the power.

Dalida stood in the middle of this color and looked into the mirrors.

There were three. The left showed a woman a little younger, with a touch of daring in her shoulder, the one who was only about to come in. The right showed a woman a little older, with a barely visible smile she did not yet allow herself tonight. And the middle one showed the woman who was really standing in the room, but a beat late, like a singer coming in just after the count, because she needs a moment to decide who she is tonight.

“Ten minutes, madame!” came a muffled voice from behind the door.

“Madame,” said Madame Justine quietly, “I am not sure that I am the one choosing tonight. And I am not sure that you are.”

The dresses leaned toward Dalida. It was not noticeable at once: the sleeve of the black was closer than it had been, the hem of the garnet seemed to have taken half a step, the ruby turned a shoulder, the gold simply shone and did not hide its hope. They leaned not boldly but the way those who have waited a long time for their entrance lean toward the door of the hall.

Dalida walked up to the hangers.

She did not choose with her eyes and she did not ask anyone’s advice. She raised her hand, and the orchestra behind the wall, like an obedient musician, struck exactly when her fingers touched the first fabric. The black. Then the garnet, the ruby, the gold, each in time, barely, the way you touch keys before you play.

The dresses fell silent, the way a room falls silent when the lady of the house walks in.

The color drained from the walls. The lamps went back to their ordinary warm light. And then Madame Justine saw what she had not seen in thirty years of work: the linings.

In the black dress, where the velvet ended, a ruby lining showed through. In the ruby, a garnet one smoldered. In the garnet, gold glimmered. And in the gold, deep down at the very hem, lay a thin dark strip of night.

Not one dress was merely a dress. Each kept all the others inside it, the way a person keeps all the versions of herself she has ever been, or will be.

Dalida turned to Madame Justine and nodded at the black.

“The black?” the costumer asked. “Are you sure?”

Dalida smiled. Not because she was sure. Because she had chosen.

Madame Justine helped her into the dress. The zipper, against three laws of physics and one law of spite, did not jam. The other dresses went quiet on their hangers, not sulking, but the way guests go quiet when they understand that the evening is not over yet.

At the door Dalida turned. The skirt of the dress swung in time with the bass, and for one moment in the lamplight a ruby lining flashed, then a garnet one, then a gold spark, as if she were taking all of them with her onto the stage.

The door closed. A wave rolled in from the hall, and the sound of applause passed through the wall as warm golden light.

Madame Justine was left alone.

The three mirrors showed one and the same room again, under one and the same lamp, without delay. She put away the ribbons, closed the bottles, picked a fallen pin up from the carpet. The hanger where the black had hung stood empty and swayed a little, still remembering the weight of velvet.

The room suddenly smelled again of lavender and of warm sand from a faraway south. Madame Justine turned around.

She had not seen it appear. Simply, on the fifth hanger, the one she always left empty just in case, a dress now hung.

Not black. Not ruby, not garnet, not gold. Madame Justine could not have named its color if she had been asked under oath.

“Tomorrow’s,” she said aloud.

The dress swayed, like a nodding head.

She closed the wardrobe, but did not lock it.