by Colum McCann
The factory alarm blew shrill at six in the morning. Anna turned the pillow to find the cool side, and I was left with her back to me. When the light broke through the crack in the curtains, I cobbled together some tea and kasha that still tasted all right from the day before, a small miracle.
We sat at the kitchen table beside the bed, and Anna played Mozart low on the gramophone, so as not to disturb the old washerwoman in the room next door. Anna and I chatted about the boy and then after breakfast she dressed and packed her dance skirt and slippers. When she raised her head from her shopping basket, she looked to me as though she was stepping back into days that once had been. With the corps de ballet in Saint Petersburg long ago she was given a special carrier bag for her slippers—Diaghilev himself had passed the bags around—but she had lost it somewhere in our shuffles.
In the corridor our neighbors were already about. Anna waved to me and closed the door as if the movement were part of a furtive dance.
That evening she brought the boy home a second time. He ate his potato carefully at first, as if unbuttoning an unfamiliar coat. He had no idea what to do with the butter, and he watched Anna for guidance.
The room and us, we were used to each other, but with the boy there it seemed like a foreign place, not seventeen years lived in.
Anna dared some Stravinsky low on the gramophone, and the boy loosened a little, as if he were eating the music with the potato. He asked for an extra cup of milk but ate in silence for the rest of the dinner. Looking over at Anna, I was put in mind of a crow calling out to another crow over the head of a sparrow.
He was pale and narrow-shouldered, with a face both cheeky and angelic at the same time. His eyes were a mixture of green and blue, and they darted around the room, never resting long enough, it seemed, to truly take stock. He ate ferociously, yet he sat straight-backed in the chair. Anna had already drummed into him the importance of posture. She said to me that he had almost immediately mastered the five positions, that he showed a natural turnout, but still he was a little uncouth and forced. Aren’t you? she said.
He held the fork at his mouth and smiled.
Anna told him he was to come to the school gymnasium every day except Sunday, and he was to tell his parents he needed at least two pairs of slippers and two sets of tights.
He paled and asked for another cup of milk.
We heard our washerwoman neighbor fumbling next door. Anna turned the gramophone a little lower, and we made the three short steps to the couch. The boy did not sit between us but wandered instead up and down the length of bookcases, touching the spines of the books, amazed that they were crammed four deep.
At seven o’clock he wiped his hand across his runny nose, said good-bye. When we opened the window to look out he was already running down the street, jumping over the ruts in the road.
Eleven years old, said Anna, imagine that.
We committed ourselves to the gray night with Pasternak once more. Anna fell asleep above the covers, breathing a sadness through her nostrils. I shaved—an old habit from the camps which used to allow me an extra moment in the mornings before the chill—and then carted my insomnia to the window, stars being infinitely more interesting than ceilings. It had begun to rain and the water funneled over the roof and sluiced down the gutter pipe, giving its acoustics to the city. Her breathing became so heavy it sang in my ears, and every now and then her body clenched itself as if dreaming of pain, but she woke cheerily, shifted herself into her housedress.
Sunday was our day to clean.
A few weeks before we had found silverfish in our photo album, moving through our tentative and uncertain smiles. All my military pictures had been destroyed long before, but we still had one or two others gnawed through at our feet—our wedding, Anna standing outside the Maryinsky, the two of us standing by a combine harvester in Georgia of all places.
Anna left the gray silverfish to me, and I squeezed them between my fingers. Over the years the silverfish had become fat with us, photos taken mostly in Saint Petersburg and mostly in sunlight for some strange reason. On the back of the photos we had scribbled little notes for ourselves, but we had written Leningrad, just in case.
There were some more recent photos from Ufa, but in their bitter little ironies the silverfish had spared them.
In the afternoon, after a merciful nap, I found Anna behind the changing screen at the foot of the bed, standing on the tips of her toes, wearing the outfit of her last dance, thirty-three years ago. It was a long, pale tutu, and she looked a bit like a footnote to her past. Embarrassed, she began to cry, then changed out of the costume. Her breasts swung, small, to her rib cage.
Once we had filled each other with desire, not remembrance.
She dressed and took my hat from the rack, her signal for us to go. I limped out, along the corridor, into the day, using my cane. The sun was strong and high, although the streets were still damp. The poplars swayed in a light breeze, and it felt quite fine to be alive even with the oil refinery dust still heavy in the air. At the bottom of the hill we stopped at the bakery, but for some reason the electricity had been turned off during the day and for the first time in weeks we weren’t greeted by the smell. We stood by the air vent to catch any remnant, but there was none so we walked on.
Even the mad war veteran at the bottom of Zentsov wasn’t around, so the day had acquired an unlived-in quality.
By the lake families sat with picnics. Drunks talked to their bottles. A kvass vendor busied herself at her stall. At the bandstand, a folk group struck up in hideous disharmony. Nothing in this world ever approaches perfection—except perhaps a fine cigar, which I had not had in many years. The thought of it made me wince with longing.
Anna was worried about my wheezing and tried to insist that we sit down on a park bench, but surely there could be no sadder or more ridiculous sight, old exiles on park benches, so we pressed on, down the streets by Lenin Park, through the archway, towards the Opera House.
He was there, of course, as if in some divine comedy, standing on the steps of the Opera House. He was wearing a shirt that was obviously a castoff and the rear of his pants was streaked with mud like any boy’s. The back seams of his shoes were split, and the angle of his feet—in third position—accentuated the split. He held the position for as long as we held ours and, when we finally stepped forward to greet him, he acted as if the encounter was perfectly natural.
He bowed to Anna and nodded to me.
I am honored to see you again, he said.
There were bruises above his left eye, but I didn’t ask, too accustomed to the miseries of beatings and the small silences we bear with them.
Anna took him by the elbow and led him up the steps. She dug her pass out from her handbag, and the guard gave a gruff shake of the head. It was only then that Anna remembered me, and she came bounding down the steps to help.
If I were eleven years old I’d be jealous, I said.
Oh you.
Inside the Opera House the carpenters were at work on a set for The Red Poppy, which had been renamed The Red Flower, and I thought to myself, Why not rename everything, donate to it all its proper inconsequence?
The scaffold was up, and my old friend Albert Tikhonov—indeed a quiet one—was on his stilts as usual, painting the backdrop. He was covered foot to hair in many different paints. He hailed me from on high, and I waved back up. Below him a young woman in a blue uniform was welding a leg onto a broken metal chair. The stage seemed ablaze with the sparks from the welding gun. I sat four rows from the rear and watched the drama, significantly more interesting, I’m sure, than any Red Flower, rose or poppy or michaelma.
Anna took the boy backstage, and when they reemerged after an hour he was carrying two sets of slippers, a dance belt and four sets of tights. He was ecstatic, begging Anna for the chance just to stand on the stage, but there was too much going on there, so she invited him to try out his positions in the aisles instead. He put on the new slippers, which we
re too big for him. Anna removed one elastic band from her hair and one from her bag, snapped them around the shoes to keep them intact. She worked with him in the aisle for half an hour. He kept grinning as he moved, as if picturing himself onstage. In truth I saw nothing extraordinary in him—he seemed ragged at the edges, overly excited and there was a dangerous charm to him, very Tatar.
As far as I could see he had little control of his body, but Anna complimented him and even Albert Tikhonov stopped working a moment, leaned against the wall to steady his stilts and gave a quick round of applause. To console myself for my sloth I too joined in with the applause.
I could tell from Anna’s face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.
Still, I could see that the boy was good for her—her cheeks were flushed and there was a high timbre in her voice that I had not heard for years. She saw something in him, a light intruding upon the shadows to make sense of all our previous gloom.
They worked on a few more steps until finally Anna said: Enough! We left the Opera House and the boy walked home, the slippers slung over his shoulder, his legs deliberately turned out from his hips.
It had grown dark, but Anna and I stopped at a park bench by the lake, weariness defeating us. She put her head to my shoulder and told me that she was not so foolish as to believe that Rudik would ever be anything more than a dancer to her. Anna had always wanted a son, even in our later years. Our daughter, Yulia, lived in Saint Petersburg, thousands of kilometers away. For most of our lives we had reluctantly lived away from her, and Anna had never had the chance to teach her to dance. It was, we knew, a history wasted, but there was nothing we could do about it.
That night I didn’t read to Anna. It was enough that she stepped across the room and kissed me. I was surprised to find there was still a stir in my groin, then even more surprised to remember that there hadn’t been a stir in almost five years. Our bodies are foul things to live inside. I am convinced the gods patched us together this disastrously so that we might need them, or at least invoke them late at night.
The small mercies of life struck a couple of weeks later, when a package from Saint Petersburg managed to find its way to us—Yulia cleverly sent it through the university. Inside was a pound of Turkish coffee and a fruitcake. The cake was wrapped in paper and taped behind the paper was a letter, kept largely innocuous, just in case. She cataloged the changes in the city and touched on whatever was new in her life. Her husband had been promoted in the physics department, and she hinted that she might be able to send us a little money in the coming months. We sat back in our armchairs, read the letter twelve times, cracking its codes, its nuances.
Rudik came over and devoured a slice of the fruitcake, then asked if he could take a slice home for his sister. Later I saw him open the package halfway down the road and stuff the piece into his mouth.
We used and reused Yulia’s coffee grains until they were so dry that Anna joked they might bleach—before the Revolution we often used a pound of coffee a week, but of course when there is no choice it is extraordinary what you adapt to.
My own afternoon walks—slow and careful because of my foot—began to take me to the School Two gymnasium. I watched through the small glass window. Anna had forty students all together, but she kept only two of them behind after class, Rudik and another boy. The other was dark-haired, lithe and, to my eye, much more accomplished, no ruffian edges. Together, if they could have melded, they would have been magnificent. But Anna’s heart was for Rudik—she said to me that he was somehow born within dance, that he was unlettered in it, yet he knew it intimately, it was a grammar for him, deep and untutored. I saw the shine in her eyes when she berated him on a plié and he immediately turned and executed it perfectly, stood grinning, waiting for her to berate him again, which of course she did.
Anna found herself a new dance dress, and although she kept herself covered with leg warmers and a long sweater, she was still slender and delicate. She stood beside him at the barre and corrected his tendus. She had him repeat the steps until he grew dizzy, shouted at him that he was not a monkey and that he should straighten his back. She even pounded a few notes on the piano for rhythm, although her skill on the keys left a lot to be desired. I was amazed to see her one winter afternoon developing runnels of sweat on her brow. Her eyes quite honestly sparkled, as if she had borrowed them from the boy.
She began working with him on jumps—she told him that above all he must create what his feet wished for, and it was not so much that he must jump higher than anyone else but that he should remain in the air longer.
Stay in the air longer!
Yes, she said, hang on to God’s beard.
His beard?
And do not land like a cow.
Cows jump? he asked.
Don’t be cheeky. And keep your mouth closed. You are not a fly swallower.
I’m in the circus! he shouted, and he began leaping around the room with his mouth open.
Anna developed a system with him. Rudik’s parents were of Muslim stock and as the only boy he was not expected to do much. Buying bread was his only chore, but after a while Anna began to pick it up for him to give him time to practice. She lined up twice outside different bakeries, one on Krassina and one on October Prospect. I often went along to wait with her. We would try to keep our place by the bakery vents if we could—the great solace of queuing was the smell that hung in the air. I took the first batch of bread home while she waited with his family’s coupons at the second bakery. The process often took a whole morning, but that didn’t matter to Anna. At the end of his lesson he would kiss her on the cheek, put the bread in his shopping bag and run home.
One summer evening we took him on a picnic: pickles, some black bread and a small jar of berry juice.
In the park, by the Belaya, Anna spread a blanket on the ground. The sun was high, and it threw short shadows on the surrounding fields. Farther downstream a group of boys dove off a giant rock. One or two of them pointed in our direction and shouted Rudik’s name. Anna had a word in his ear. Reluctantly he got into his swimming gear and walked along the riverbank. He hung around near the rock for a while, a deep scowl on his face. It was easy to pick Rudik out in the crowd—he was thinner and whiter than the rest. The boys jumped from the rock into the water, grabbing their knees in midair. Great jets of water splashed up when they landed.
Rudik sat down and watched their antics, chin on his knees until one of the older boys came up to him and started pushing him around. Rudik shoved back and screamed an obscenity.
Anna got to her feet, but I pulled her down. I poured her a glass of berry juice and said: Let him fight his own battles.
She sipped the juice and let it be.
A couple of minutes passed. Then a look of terror crossed Anna’s face. Rudik and the other boy had climbed up to the very top of the rock. All the other children were watching. Some of them began to clap, slowly and rhythmically. I stood up and began to move my old cart horse of a body as quickly as I could along the riverbank. Rudik was poised, motionless, at the top of the rock. I shouted at him. It was a five-meter jump, next to impossible since the base of the rock was so wide. He spread his arms, took a deep breath. Anna screamed. I stumbled. Rudik spread his arms farther and flew outwards. He seemed to hang in the air, fierce and white, and then he dropped into the water with a huge splash. His head narrowly missed the rock edge. Anna screamed again. I waited for him to emerge. He stayed under a long time but eventually surfaced, a piece of river plant stuck to his neck. He flicked the plant away, shook his head, grinned enormously, then waved at the boy who was still standing at the top of the rock, frozen in fear.
Jump, shouted Rudik. Jump, asshole!
The boy climbed back down without
jumping. Rudik swam away and came up to us, sat down nonchalantly on the blanket. He took a pickle from the jar, but he was trembling and I could see the fear in his eyes. Anna started to scold him, but he kept eating his pickle and finally she shrugged. Rudik looked up at her from under a stray lock of hair, finished his food, and came over to lean his head against her shoulder.
You’re a strange child, she said.
He came to our room every day, sometimes two or three times. Some of our phonograph collection was proscribed. We hid it in a wooden bookshelf that had a false back, one of the few pieces of my carpentry that had actually worked, having survived visits by the Ministry. He learned how to remove the records from their sleeves and catch them sideways so he didn’t leave fingerprints. He was always careful to take the dust off the stylus. It was like medicine to him when the gramophone gave out a couple of clicks and the sound moved into violins.
Walking around the room, he kept his eyes closed.
He came to adore Scriabin, listening while standing still, as if he wanted the music to repeat itself a thousand times until Scriabin himself stood beside him, feeding the fire with flutes.
He had this terrible habit of leaving his mouth open as he listened, but it seemed wrong to tap him on the shoulder and lift him out of the moment. Once Anna touched his chin, and he recoiled instantly. I knew it was his father. They weren’t bad bruises, but you could see that he had been knocked around. Rudik had told us that his father worked on the river, hauling logs. It seemed to me that he was slinging down the old curse of fathers—wanting his son to take advantage of the things he had fought for, to become a doctor or a military man or a commissar or an engineer. To him dancing meant the poorhouse. Rudik was failing in school, his teachers were saying he was fidgety, spending his time humming symphonies and occasionally looking at art books his sister had borrowed. He had developed an attachment to Michelangelo, and in his notebooks he made sketches—they were adolescent but well-realized.
