Dancer

by Colum McCann

  The only good report he got was from the Pioneers, where he spent Tuesday afternoons practicing folk dances. And on the evenings when there was ballet at the Opera House—Esmeralda, Coppélia, Don Quixote, Swan Lake—he would be gone from his home, sneaking in the stage door, allowed a seat by my friend Albert Tikhonov, the stilt walker.

  It was when he got home and his father discovered where he had been that Rudik was beaten.

  Rudik didn’t whine about his bruises, and he didn’t have the empty gaze that I’d seen in other boys and men. He was being beaten for dance and still he went on dancing, so the whole thing balanced itself out. The beatings came on the spur of the moment, including a dreadful one the day after his thirteenth birthday. I didn’t doubt that Rudik deserved it—he could be terribly cantankerous—yet I could tell that by beating him, by refusing him the chance to dance, his father was giving Rudik the gift of need.

  Anna talked about going to see his mother but decided against it. If you are wise you step through the darkness only one foot at a time.

  I have always thought of memory as a foolish conceit, but as the gramophone crackled Anna began to tell him bits and pieces of her past. She glossed over her own youth and quickly settled into her years in the corps. How she yammered on! The costumes, the designers, the trains across borders! Saint Petersburg and the rain through the streetlights! The rake of the Kirov floor! The tenor aria from the last act of Tosca! After a while there was no arresting her—it was like the Dutch boy’s dam, except it wasn’t only the river that had burst but the ramparts, the bank, the weeds on the shore also.

  I was grateful that she didn’t lie to him, that she didn’t pretend to have been one of the great dancers, denied by history. No. There was a lovely truth to it all. She told him about standing in the wings of the grand theaters, dreaming herself onstage. She remembered Pavlova in less striking colors than anyone else, perhaps because Pavlova herself was such an elemental part of the dance. I found myself adrift too, back at the Maryinsky, in the front row, waiting desperately for Anna to come on with the corps. In Swan Lake, when the curtain call came, the cry went up for Anna! Anna! Anna! I felt it was my Anna they were chanting for, so I chanted too. Afterwards I would meet her and we would walk down Rossi with her arm linked through mine and at her building her mother would be looking down from the fourth-floor window. I would guide her close to the wall and kiss her, whereupon she would touch my face and giggle and run upstairs.

  How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes.

  Rudik listened to the stories with a sort of rapt disbelief. It struck me later that the disbelief was born of a benign ignorance. After all, he was thirteen now, and he had been taught to think differently than us. Still, it was remarkable to me that he remembered the stories weeks later, sometimes quoting Anna exactly, word for word.

  He inhaled everything, became taller and gangly, with an impish smirk that could silence a room, but he wasn’t aware of his body or its power. If anything, he was shy and afraid. Anna told him that his whole body must dance, all of it, not just his arms and legs. She tweaked him on the ear, saying even his lobe must believe in movement. Straighten your legs. Spot quicker on your turns. Work on your line. Absorb the dance like blotting paper. He stuck to it all diligently, never quitting until he had perfected a step, even if it meant another beating from his father. On Sundays, Anna took him first to the museum and then to watch rehearsals at the Opera House, so they were together every day of the week. As they walked home, Rudik would remember the exact movements he had seen—male or female, it didn’t matter—reconstructing the movements from memory.

  He lay between us, like a long and charged evening.

  Rudik began to develop a new language, not one that fit him, he was ill-shod for it. But it was charming to hear the rough provincial boy say port de bras as if he had stepped from a room full of chandeliers. At the same time, at our table, he would eat a piece of goat’s cheese like a savage. He had never in his life heard of washing his hands before a meal. Sometimes his finger went into his nose, and he had a terrible affinity for scratching his private parts.

  You’ll scratch it away, I told him once, and he looked at me with the sort of horror reserved for death and pillage.

  Late at night in bed, Anna and I talked until she fell asleep. It struck us that he was our new breath and that the breath would last us only a short while, that he would eventually have to move on. It gave us great sorrow, yet it also gave us a chance to live beyond any sorrows we had already accumulated.

  I even went back to my garden patch to see if I could resurrect it.

  Years ago we were given a plot, eight tram stops from our house. Someone in the Ministry had overlooked our history, and we were graced with a letter that said a plot, two meters square, could be ours. It was poor land, brittle and gray. We grew a few vegetables—cucumbers, radishes, cabbages, wild onions—but Anna also had a penchant for lilies, and each year she exchanged a couple of food coupons for a packet of bulbs. We put the bulbs deep in the soil, on the rim of the plot, sometimes used donkey manure for fertilizer, waited. We failed miserably with the flowers most years, but life deals us its strange little ecstasies, and that particular summer, for the first time ever, we had a patch of dark white.

  In the afternoons, when she was at the gymnasium, I would catch the tram out there, limp up the hill and sit on a folding chair.

  Often, on weekends, a short man with dark hair knelt over his plot, ten meters from my own. We caught each other’s eye every now and then, but we never exchanged a word. His face was tight and guarded, like that of a man who had lived his life with his traps constantly baited. He worked on his garden with a fierce industry, growing cabbages and potatoes mostly. When it came time to harvest, he brought a wheelbarrow with him and filled it high.

  One Saturday morning he arrived up the path with Rudik at his heels. I was surprised—not just because this man was Rudik’s father, but because the boy was supposed to be at the gym with Anna and, over the course of a year, he had never once missed a session. I dropped my trowel into the soil and coughed loudly, but Rudik kept his eyes on the ground, as if there were terrible events lurking around each plant.

  I rose to my feet to say something, but he turned away.

  It struck me then that Rudik’s genius was in allowing his body to say things that he couldn’t otherwise express. It was simply the way his shoulders slumped from one side to the other and the angle of his head that gave him a look—even from the rear—that said any approach would not just impinge on him but wound him deeply. He was forever removed from his father, and yet he was forever removed from me also.

  I could see that he was cut above the eye but that his father also had a large bruise on his right cheek. It was clear to me that his father was trying to reconcile all that had happened between them, but no reconciliation would be forthcoming.

  His father troweled in the ground and spoke up at his son. Rudik occasionally gave a word back, but most of the time he said nothing.

  I knew that there would never again be another beating.

  I decided to leave well enough alone and put on my hat, went home, told Anna about what had happened.

  Oh, she said, and then she went to sit at the table, curling and uncurling her fingers.

  One of these days I’m going to have to pass him on to Elena Konstantinovna, she said. He’s learned all he can from me. It’s only fair.

  I went to the cupboard to take out the small bottle of samogon that we had kept for many years. Anna wiped two glasses with a clean towel, and we sat down to drink.

  I raised my glass and toasted.

  She wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress.

  There was only enough in the bottle to get us to the stage where we wanted more. Still, we allowed our happiness to reach instead into the gramophone, Prokofiev, over and over. Anna said she didn’t mind letting Rudik move on to another teacher, especially Elena.
Elena Konstantinovna Voitovich had been a coryphée in Saint Petersburg and was now the mistress at the Ufa Opera House. She and Anna kept in touch, and they had exchanged memories and favors—Anna said it might be possible after a few years for Rudik to get a walk-on role, maybe even a solo or two. Perhaps he can go all the way to the school at the Maryinsky, she said. She even talked about writing a letter to Yulia to see if she could negotiate any favors. I knew Anna was recalling herself when she was there, younger, more pliant, still full of promise, and so I nodded, let her talk. There is only so much we can do, she said, teaching is elastic, and if we stretch it out it will only snap back on us at some later date. She explained that she would bring him down to the advanced classes on Karl Marx Street some time during the week. First of all, however, she would cook up a great feast to surprise him.

  My hand slipped across the table to hers. She told me to go and grab a book and that maybe with the samogon warming our bodies we would both be allowed a generous night’s sleep. It wasn’t true.

  She danced with him all that week. I watched through the window of the gym door.

  She had certainly knocked the roughest edges off his movement. His plié was still quite unaccomplished, and his legs contained more violence than grace, but he could pirouette well, and on jumps he had even learned to hang a moment in the air, which delighted Anna. She clapped. He responded to her gestures by jumping again, moving diagonally forward with slow grands jêtés and sweeping arcs, then crossing the rear of the room with a series of bad sissonnes where he bent the second knee. He retreated and stopped suddenly with his arms looped in a garland above his head, having scooped the air and made it his, which was certainly not something that Anna had taught him. His nostrils flared, and I thought for a moment that he might paw at the ground like a horse. Certainly there was more intuition in him than intellect, more spirit than knowledge, as if he had been here before in another guise, something wild and feral.

  On Friday she pulled him aside and told him the news. I excused myself and watched from outside the door. I expected silence, maybe tears or a puzzled sorrow, but he just looked at her, hugged her close, stepped back, and took the prospect with a vigorous nod of his head.

  Now, said Anna, for your last dance I want you to drop a tray of pearls at my feet.

  He went across to the bench and picked up the watering can and did a series of chaînés up and down the room, sprinkling the floor for grip. For the next twenty minutes—before I went home—he strung together all she had taught him, moving from one end of the gym to the other, his tights worn and stretched. Anna glanced out the window at me, and we both knew, at that instant, that whatever attended us in the future we would at least have this.

  * * *

  In the hall on Karl Marx Street he is one of seventy young dancers. At fourteen he is given a whole new language: royales, tours jêtés, brisés, tours en l’air, fouettés. He stays late, practicing. On entrechatquatres he beats his legs together like a barber’s shears. Elena Voitovich watches him with her lips pursed and her hair pulled back in a severe bun. Once or twice her mouth curls into a smile, but mostly she remains uncertain. He tries to outrage her with a brisé volé but she simply scoffs and turns away, says that they would not tolerate form like his in the Kirov or the Bolshoi or even the Stanislavsky. She speaks of the ballet companies with a tinge of regret, and sometimes she tells him of Leningrad, of Moscow, of how the women dancers there work so hard their feet are bloodied at the end of their sessions, and that the sinks in the opera houses are tinged with the blood of great performers.

  He carries the notion home, practices with the thought of red soaking through his slippers.

  His sister Tamara has left the house to study teaching in Moscow and he now has room for a full-length bed. Taped to the wall near the bed he has scribbled notes to himself: Ask Anna to patch slippers. Work on spotting so as not to get dizzy. Find walk-ons. Get good piece of oak for barre. Have interest only in what you can’t do well. Beethoven was sixteen when he wrote the second movement concerto number 2! No direct sunlight hits the wall but still he has hooded the paper with foil like his mother used to do. His father paces the house but ignores the notes.

  One March morning Rudik awakes to hear Yuri Levitan, the state radio’s chief announcer, interrupting a slew of solemn music with a bulletin: The heart of the Comrade Stalin, inspired Continuer of Lenin’s cause, Father and Teacher, Comrade in Arms, Coryphaeus of Science and Technology, Wise Leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, has ceased to beat.

  Three minutes of silence is called for. Rudik’s father moves out into the street to stand beneath the trees, where the only sound is that of the grackles. His mother remains at the window and then turns to Rudik, takes her son’s face in her hands, not a word passing between them.

  That evening, at the end of another broadcast, Rudik hears that Prokofiev has died on the very same day. He climbs through the window of the locked hall on Karl Marx Street and, in the bathroom sink, he scrapes the soles of his feet against the metal mouths of the taps so savagely that they bleed. He comes out, dancing for nobody, blood on his slippers, sweat spinning from his hair.

  * * *

  It was just before the May Day celebrations. We hadn’t seen each other in about four years. He knocked on the door of the electrician shop on Karl Marx Street where I was an apprentice. He looked different, more grown-up, hair long. We used to bully the little bastard at school, but he stood at the door now, as big as me. I had heard he was dancing, that he’d appeared at the Opera House a few times, mostly as a walk-on, but so what, I didn’t care. I asked what he wanted. He said he’d heard I owned a portable gramophone and he’d like to borrow it. I went to close the door, but he put his foot in it and it bounced back at me. I grabbed him by the shirt but he didn’t flinch. He got right to the point, said he’d like the gramophone for an exhibition he was giving in the basement canteen of the oil refinery. I told him to jump in the lake and fuck a few trout. But he began to plead like a little child and finally he said he’d give me some money. So I got him to promise me thirty rubles out of his one hundred. He said okay, as long as I got him some good phonographs to play. My cousin was high up in the Komsomol and he had some recordings, mostly army songs but some Bach, Dvorak, others. Besides, thirty rubles was thirty rubles. So I got the portable gramophone for him.

  The refinery was a big area of pipes and steam and canals, with its own three ambulances that would pick up the dead or the injured when there was an accident. Sirens going off all the time, searchlights, dogs. You’d know a refinery worker just by the way he looked at you. The entertainment collective was run by a fat old babushka called Vera Bazhenova. Most of the time she showed films or bawdy puppet shows, and every now and then she stretched to a little folk dancing. But Rudi had talked her into letting him perform for one night. He was good that way, he could call an ass a racehorse and get away with it.

  The canteen was dirty and it stank of sweat. It was six in the evening, just after the shifts had changed. The workers sat down to watch. There were about thirty men and twenty-five women—welders, toolmakers, furnace men, forklift drivers, a couple of office workers, some union representatives. I knew a few of them, and we shared a glass of koumiss. After a while Rudi came out from the kitchen, where he’d changed his clothes. He was wearing tights pulled up high on his stomach and a sleeveless top. A long fringe of hair was hanging down over his eyes. The workers started laughing. He pouted and told me to put a record on the gramophone. I told him I wasn’t his little Turkish slave, he should do it himself. He came across and whispered in my ear that I wouldn’t get any money. I thought, fuck him, but I put the record on anyway. The first thing he did was a piece from the Song of the Cranes, and just three or four minutes into it they were laughing at him. They’d seen plenty of dancing before, these workers, but this was the end of the day, flasks were being passed along the rows, everyone smoking and chattering, and they were saying, Get this shit off the s
tage! Get this piece of shit off the stage!

  He danced some more, but they got louder, even the women. He glanced across at me, and I began to feel a little bad for him, so I lifted the needle from the gramophone. The canteen fell silent. There was a mean look in his eyes—as if he was all at once challenging the women to fuck him and the men to fight. His lips twitched. Someone threw a dirty rag up on the stage, which set off another great roar. Vera Bazhenova was red in the face, trying to get them to quieten down, it was her head on the block, she ran the collective.

  Just then Rudi stretched out his arms wide and began a gopak followed by a yiablotshko, up on his toes, then slowly sinking to his knees, and then he moved into The Internationale. The laughter turned to some coughing and then the workers began to turn toward one another in their chairs, and then they began stamping out The Internationale on the floor. By the end of the performance Rudi was back to ballet, the Song of the Cranes, full circle, and the stupid bastards were applauding him. They passed around a tin cup, and he got another thirty rubles. He glanced at me and tucked it all in his pocket. The workers gathered around after the show and invited us for some more koumiss. Soon everyone in the canteen was shouting and drinking. A little red-haired man got up on the aluminum counter and gave a toast, then stood on one leg and extended his arms. Finally Rudi grabbed the man, steadied him and showed him how it was done properly.

  When we took the tram home, both of us drunker than elephants, I asked him for some of the extra money. He told me I was a miserable Cossack, that he needed it to pay for his train ticket to Moscow or Leningrad, whichever would accept him, to go fuck myself, that it was him earned all the money anyway.

  * * *

  He has rouged his cheeks with a red stone and darkened his eyes with black liner stolen from the Opera House. His eyelashes have been thickened with a paste and his hair swept back with pomade. At home alone, he smiles and then grimaces in the mirror, creates a series of faces. Stepping frontways to the mirror, he adjusts his tights and his dance belt: the mirror is tilted downwards so he can see no more than his midtorso. He stretches his arm high beyond the reflection, takes a bow, and watches his hand reentering the mirror. He steps closer, exaggerates his turnout, tightens the upper muscles of his legs, brings his hips forward. He removes the tights to unhook the dance belt, stands still and closes his eyes.