Katerina lets out a gleeful “oh!” as Ivan begins moving them, recognizing the tune soon after he starts humming. None but the Lonely Hearts. A very new piece of music, Agafya had insisted very intently that Katerina listen to the melancholy score whilst reading the poem its composer has been so rightly inspired by. The similarly named ‘Only He Who Knows Loneliness’ is a sense of desolate yearning that speaks to the very heart of Romanticism, and Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky clearly owes allegiance to that aesthetic. The text Agafya had found for her is probably a little different from the original German, but the piece is no less beautiful and touching. It takes her less than a moment to meet the music at the same volume as Ivan, and they hum together a few bars before his own voice let’s hers carries on alone.
There isn’t much to the dance—swaying in slow circles, keeping sure to mind one another’s feet—but every dance takes a certain amount of attention. She interrupts herself, moving one of her arms farther up towards his neck. “They were closer than this,” she insists, stepping up closer to him. “There.” Her smile is very matter-of-fact, falling into closed lips as she begins humming again. It doesn’t take much longer after that for them to have the repetitive motions down pact and she can see why the dance is so childishly simple and entirely without demand: when the music is playing something lovely and the lights would be incredibly low, and when one’s partner has an embrace like Ivan’s, eyes like Ivan’s, oh how could anyone think about anything more complex like dancing?
When there’s a break in the music where she would have taken a breath, Katerina instead sighs without much notice, letting her head rest against his shoulder, much like the girl in the photograph was doing with her partner. She begins humming again, and closes her eyes as he gently pulls her around for another circle.