“Look into your partner’s eyes. Make the connection. Helen, put your hand on your man’s shoulder. Bruce, put your hand on Helen’s waist. Get closer, so you can almost feel the other person’s heart beating. Then gently grasp your other hands with flat palms. Don’t interlace your fingers, or you will be unable to twirl her.”
I want to be twirled, so we do as Erik says.
We are in a ballroom in a recently refurbished castle in the Bavarian Alps, learning how to waltz. I’m 63, my husband is 66. Erik Dietrich, who moves like water over stones, is our instructor. As a teenager, he says, dancing saved his life. Now, at 27, he works as a dance teacher in a high school in Munich. He wants his pupils to enjoy the experience, to feel the joy that comes from moving to music, to have conversations with our bodies. To “make the connection.”
The ballroom (which doubles as a concert hall) is part of a hotel, spa, and cultural center called Schloss Elmau. There are many reasons why one might choose to vacation here: the views; the hiking; the Pilates and yoga classes; the eight swimming pools, most outdoors and heated even in the winter (I swam in the salt water pool with steam rising during a magical March snowfall); the concerts and lectures; the eight restaurants, one with two Michelin stars and another devoted to fondue. The G7 met here, twice. You might remember a famous alfresco photo of Angela Merkel, standing with her arms outstretched in animated conversation with a rapt Barack Obama lounging on a bench.
But none of that has brought me and my husband to Schloss Elmau. The resort periodically offers weekend-long dance intensives and we have come to twirl! And, as Erik says, to make a connection—in my case, to some family history.
You see, this isn’t my first waltz lesson. Five decades ago, my grandmother, a Jewish refugee from this part of Middle Europe, taught me the dance. After my grandfather died, she moved into a studio apartment in the same Greenwich Village building where my family was subletting a one-bedroom apartment. Later, when we moved to the Upper East Side, she moved in with us. She had no money of her own and she was lonely. We ended up sharing a bedroom for much of my childhood, and well into my teenage years, until my sister went to college, and Grandma got her little maid’s room behind the kitchen. I remember one afternoon in the early years when Grandma was lying on her twin bed with her eyes closed, as I read a book sitting up on mine. The book’s main character had been to a party. I asked her, “Grandma, what’s a waltz?”
Her life had been hard. She had lost so much: her mother to cholera, a brother stolen by the Russian army when soldiers invaded in what was then Austro-Hungary during World War I. When she was 18, her father sent her alone to a brother in America and she never saw any of her relatives again—most were murdered in the Holocaust, except her youngest brother who escaped to Palestine as a teenager. She met and married my grandfather, a Russian refugee, and they owned a laundry. He washed the clothes and she did the mending and ironing. By the time she and I ended up as roommates, Grandma, now in her seventies, had lived a life she’d never expected as a child.
To cheer herself up, she liked to talk about her youth—climbing a cherry tree in her white graduation dress because she just had to have this one gorgeous cherry, ripping the dress her mother had hand-sewn for her on the way down. She sounded so high-spirited to me; her life seemed so magical before the wars swept her whole world away. She was educated, too, which was unusual for a girl in those times, and a Jewish one at that. She could read and write in seven languages. She was an expert seamstress and embroiderer, and she took dance lessons, which she loved. I was a dancer, too! Not social dancing, like her, but ballet and modern. As I read my book, I fantasized about the parties she must have attended at school.
Now, she was heavy-set, you could even say lumbering. But when I asked my question, she got up and began to slowly demonstrate by circling around my bedroom. One-two-three, one-two-three…her arms orbiting a phantom partner. I laughed when I saw her—she wasn’t exactly an active senior, and she had neither a bra nor girdle on under her house dress. But then I recognized she could really move. The muscle memory was still encoded in her body. She had rhythm and grace. Her grief and loss had not stolen this from her.
“Pussycat,” she said, “Come try.” I walked over and she put her arms around my waist and shoulder and began to hum, some waltz-y type music from her memory that I didn’t know, as she spun me around our bedroom. We were both so happy.
I have continued to dance ever since, taking ballet and jazz classes well into my forties and since then barre class every day and a lot of yoga. Dance has sustained me my entire life. But before we’d met Erik, that brief lesson from my grandmother was the only moment that I’d ever truly experienced ballroom dancing.
Now, I am going to be twirled again. Eric first puts on “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss and then “The Second Waltz by Dmitri Shostakovich”. He tells us to hold each other and move naturally, so Bruce and I sway side-to-side. He teaches us a two-step first and then the box step. Fun, but not what we’d come for. “I want to swirl her around the room,” Bruce had said, when Erik had originally asked us for our goals. We keep knocking into one another. We laugh at our own clumsiness, and Erik laughs too. He is so glad that we are enjoying ourselves. Erik teaches us “the lady turn,” where Bruce spins me under his arm, and then we two-step away from each other and he spins me back to him. Maybe it is the altitude, maybe it is the romance of it all, but by the time Eric puts on Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You”—also in ¾ time!—we are both breathless. And we are waltzing.
After waltz class, we retreat to Schloss Elmo’s luxurious hamam, the largest one outside of Turkey. Two lovely masseuses, both wearing bathing suits, introduce themselves, the man assigned to Bruce and the woman to me. Soon we are naked, scrubbed, and massaged in foam on the same heated stone. My attendant even washes my long hair. Bundled up in towels, we are brought into a lounge area where we are poured tea and fed dates and Turkish Delight. Our limbs are butter. I have never felt so relaxed and blissful.
The next day, Bruce and I continue our dancing intensive. This time Erik partners Bruce, to show him how to lead. Then he takes me in his arms, teaching me to step forward when he steps backwards, and that if I angle my body some, and step between his legs, we can begin to make those big giant turns Bruce was aiming for. Faster and faster we twirl, in great big sweeping circles, the smile on my face so big it hurts.
“This is what it felt like with my grandmother,” I say. Bruce breaks in and we try it together, cracking up as we go. Erik is delighted. He says, “If I am still dancing when I am 70, I know I will have lived a good life.” I tear up at that, because that is around the age my grandmother was when she and I danced together. It’s my hope, too. To never stop dancing.
