Evan Fallenberg. When We Danced on Water. Harper Collins, 2011.
Reviewed by Madison Natt
Eighty-four year old Teo is a man set in his ways, staunchly devoted to routine. He has had the same housekeeper for 25 years, goes to the same café every day to order the same drink, and has written to his sister on the same stationary for decades so that their correspondence forms “remarkably uniform stacks.” Teo was once a great ballet dancer and is now a world-renowned choreographer; repetition and attention to detail have shaped him.
In many ways, Vivi appears to be his polar opposite. A forty-two
year old artist working as a waitress, Vivi’s path crosses Teo’s when she takes
over his section at the café. Vivi hates the mundane and is constantly on the
move. She takes Theme Walks around the city of Tel Aviv: Scent Walks, Foliage
Walks, Jewish Walks, Graffiti Walks, Merchandise Walks, Architecture Walks,
People Walks, Baby Walks, Ugly Walks. She has never narrowed her passion down
to a single art; Teo tells her that she is nothing more than a “dabbler” who
cannot be great at any one thing, while Vivi insists, “With breadth you get
variety. You get excitement. Fun. You never get bored.”
When We Danced on
Water is written in a series of short vignettes alternating between the
perspectives of Teo and Vivi as the two form an unlikely friendship. The prose
is lilting, beautiful, and often heartbreaking, much like dance itself. The
story spans more than 60 years and paints vivid portraits of pre-WWII Poland
and Denmark, Berlin during WWII and in the 1980s, and modern day Tel Aviv.
Teo and Vivi ultimately discover that they are not so different
after all: both are Jewish and have been forced to face the history of their
people head on; both had something stolen from them by a man in Berlin that has
altered them forever; both regret that they have never started families and
feel that their lives are somehow incomplete. They also find that they are
“co-stimulants to one another,” inspiring creativity and drive.
It is Vivi who first pushes their interactions at the café to the
next level by asking to watch one of the rehearsals of his ballet Obsession, which she
wants to try to recreate in glass. The central focus of the ballet is the
nature of obsession: how it engenders passion and drives people from mediocrity
toward perfection, but can also occlude everything else and lead to
destruction. As Teo tells Vivi, “the origin of the word is Latin, it means
‘siege’ or ‘blockade.’ As if one’s senses are besieged by the object of one’s
desires.”
Obsession is at the heart of Teo’s dark personal history and he
has always been unable to watch the ballet being performed. Vivi forces Teo to
attend the opening night despite his protests, and then eventually explains to
him how the ballet tells the war story that he has never been able to talk
about with anyone.
For six decades, Teo has avoided thinking of his past promise as a
dancer and the terrible events that ended that possible life for him. He longs
to remember the one dance in Berlin that changed his life, the only dance that
he cannot call to mind. Through his bond with Vivi, he is able to look back on
his time in Berlin and finally share it with someone else; hearing his story
also makes Vivi face her own. As their difficult, silent, and buried pasts
unfold, it becomes clear how both ended up feeling so stuck and unsatisfied in
their lives. More importantly, however, it is equally evident that they can
break free of the bonds of the past and choose a different future.