She felt nostalgic for the time when ballet dancers, ice skaters, and

gymnasts from behind the Iron Curtain had defected from East to West.

As a child she’d sat at home Saturday mornings coveting Nadia

Comaneci’s hair bows on American TV, and watched as ballet dancers,

ice skaters, and gymnasts twirled out from a grim gray ground of

poverty and tight control, or so she was told on TV, with their exquisite

bodies, their exquisitely precise bodies, exquisitely precisely disciplined

bodies (more disciplined than in the West, because who needs discipline

when you are “free”?) into her imprecise and undisciplined Saturday

mornings watching TV. * The word “defected” had made her

think of “infected,” or of an abbreviation of “disinfected,” the disciplined

ballet dancers, ice skaters, and gymnasts had disinfected from the

East to the undisciplined West, so scrupulously disaffected, and got

added to a collection of Iron Curtain dolls that twirled and twirled

the gray from their pink toe shoes, their hand-sewn costumes, their

accents, their blackening lungs, or so she was told, on TV. * As they

defected, she cathected. She imagined tutus torn on barbed wire,

furious officials fuming in fusty offices, getaway Corvettes, exhilaration

mingled with tears. Somehow she understood that she would never

have to be that disciplined—or that brave—but she did not understand

why. * Discipline, yes, but also drugs, it turned out later, discipline and

drugs, State Plan 14.25, e.g., but then everyone, East and West, North

and South, was on drugs, despite the “war on drugs,” though not

everyone was disciplined, because how much discipline do you need

when you are already free. * Now the Iron Curtain was dismantled, there

was no need to defect anymore, twirling from East to West, and she

wondered if the word “defect” was now, essentially, defunct—like her

old TV set was defunct, like the war on drugs was defunct, like the

Cold War was defunct, like “East” and “West” and Corvettes were defunct,

like her childhood and everything in it was defunct. But then a friend

pointed out a building in an East European capital as one of many

owned by Katarina Witt, “the Most Beautiful Face of Socialism,”

and she saw like an X-ray straight through the flickering blue windows

to the ruins of her exquisitely undisciplined nostalgia.