Book excerpt: RED SQUARE DANCE--a novel by Gerasim Geiger-Garagayev © 2005 RED SQUARE DANCE deals with an evercurrent topic: the Fate of Women through the Ages. RED SQUARE DANCE pays tribute to a Moscow ballerina as representative of the “Calvary of Women”--throughout the World and in History--as lovers, mothers, bearers of burden, and custodians of a people’s soul. The story of RED SQUARE DANCE is based on a visit to Russia in 1994-1995 and lengthy familiarity with “Things Russian.” With love stifled by the allpowerful-and-everpresent State, with irrepressible human yearnings, expressed in soaring leaps of mind and body, Katya, the ballerina, and Patrick, her American lover-protector-husband, fight--inspired and in despair--to assert what human grace and genius are left to them after their mauling by life in a world at war with itself--as it was, is now, and shall... RED SQUARE DANCE paints a touching portrait of the romantic side of harassed human nature, so often ideologically ravished, culturally manipulated, and affectively stunted. The healing--and indomitable--mystery of the Church is balmed upon the two dramatis personae as she unites Katya and Patrick, these two battered children of the Cold War, in the breathtakingly beautiful ceremony of matrimony, hinting at wedded bliss, to be tragically terminated as the snowflakes gently fall on them in Red Square. As a point of interest, after an all-too-brief flirtation with “demokratsiya,” Holy Mother Russia is reverting to form, popping up on our radar screen now as a big blip that may yet again turn into the menacing “bogey” it once was. A tragic love story-ballet. American boy meets Russian girl--they fall in love--create a thing of timeless beauty--and die for it in snow-dusted Red Square in the swirlwind of the 1991 Moscow people’s rising. Katya, the heroine of the tale, is the embodiment of Russian--yes, worldwide--womanhood: suffering yet rising to glory as the BELOVED of the Lord, as the custodians of a nation’s soul.