by Colum McCann
To which my father said: You’re Anna Vasileva and you did a wonderful job with Rudik too.
We left into the cool spring night. The city was quiet. Rudi was waiting outside, and we huddled together, congratulating him. His body odor was severe, but still I wanted to draw closer and inhale him, his energy. He leaned over my mother and asked her how he had done. She seemed to hesitate a moment but said: You were marvelous.
On the plié I think I was going too deep, he said.
Then he touched my father’s shoulder in a manly gesture and was gone down the street with RosaMaria, holding hands.
Who would have thought? said my father.
He had lit his last cigar and was puffing the smoke towards the sky. My mother watched Rudi disappear. You know, she whispered, his legs do look longer.
That’s easy, said my father.
He smiled and went, on his good foot, to his toes.
Just then Pushkin emerged from the studios. He wore a tan overcoat and tie. He was accompanied by his wife, Xenia, a woman I had seen before on the streets of Leningrad. It was impossible to ignore her, the depth of her beauty, her blond hair, the magnificence of her clothes, the way she seemed lit from the inside. They turned to us briefly and waved, and I thought what curious mirrors they were in the world: my parents, teachers of the boy, looking at the Pushkins, teachers of the man, and the man himself already gone down the street.
My mother said to the Pushkins with great formality: Good evening. May I extend my congratulations.
Pushkin turned: Rudi has often talked about you.
She smiled and said: My deepest thanks.
A month later my mother was dead. In my room she suffered a brain hemorrhage, which took her in her sleep. I woke up to see my father sitting quietly by her body, his hand at the back of her hair. I expected him to weep, but he calmly said that she was gone, would I please make arrangements to have her buried in Piskarovskoye Cemetery. Then he closed his eyes and tightened his grip on her hair and whispered her name over and over until it sounded like a prayer or a song, gently sung. Later that day, as was old custom, he spread her body out on the table and washed her. He used an old shirt of his, saying that it would be his final gesture to sentimentality. She looked terribly emaciated. He dipped the collar of his shirt in warm soapy water and bathed her neck and smoothed the cloth along her collarbone. With the sleeve he wiped her arm and with the body of the shirt he washed her small wizened breasts. It was as if he wanted her to wear the shirt in some way, to carry it with her on whatever journey she was on. He covered her with a sheet, and only then did I see my father cry, deeply, inconsolably.
He had left the water tap dripping, and there was a gurgling from the pipes as if the sadness was in the throat of the building. I went outside and left him alone. The air was hard and raw. By the time I came back he had dressed her and put traditional coins on her eyes.
It was noticeably sunny the day we buried her. At Piskarovskoye we were given a plot in a copse of trees not far from the mounds of those who had died during the Blockade. Light slanted through the trees, midges rose from the bushes, small birds darned the air with their wings. There was little or no ceremony. It cost us three hundred rubles to bribe for the plot and another hundred for the ground to be dug. Nearby a man on a tractor was cutting the grass on the mass graves, beautifully tended to, ringed with red roses. He respectfully turned his engine off and waited.
My father held his hat to his chest, and I noticed the little graph of sweat stains that appeared inside the rim. How many years had he worn that one hat and how many times had she put it on his head? He shifted, coughed and said he didn’t feel in the mood for words but that, even in her leaving, my mother had left many signs that she had been here.
May her influence enter the air, he said.
With this he coughed a second time and gave the ground a little grimace, turned his face away.
In a distant corner, through the trees, I caught a glimpse of a Black ZIL limousine pulling up in the graveyard, flanked by a fleet of black cars. We were startled a moment, thinking there might be some important visitor, but then the cars pulled away to the far end of the graveyard and we were glad to be left alone.
Rudi and RosaMaria stood next to each other. At first Rudi held his lower teeth against his upper lip. I wanted to berate him, to slap him, to jog a tear from him, but eventually, and for no particular reason, he broke down and began to weep.
My father, for his part, threw a handful of dirt on the coffin.
When we turned to leave the small forest, I noticed that the man on the tractor had fallen asleep, but he had taken his hat off and it sat lightly in his lap, and I thought that my mother would have enjoyed such a moment.
Later that day we took my father to the train station.
I am going home to Ufa, he said.
There was irony of course in the way he said home, but it was where he had survived most of his years with her and there was an eloquence, if not a practicality, to his return. Iosif came with us to Finlandia Station. I asked for a moment alone with my father. I carried his suitcase through the crowd. Light came in shafts through the windows, falling on the grayness below. We stopped by a train window. An old woman in a headscarf glared at us. My father held me tight and whispered in my ear that I should be proud of myself, that I should do what pleased me, within reason of course. He touched my cheek and I sniffled stupidly.
Great billows of steam were suspended above the station, hanging there as they have always hung, as if to say that most of us spend our lives breathing in our breathed-out breath.
* * *
Music sheets, Bach and Schumann. Piano lesson, Mali Opera. Talk with Shelkov re military conscription. Special salts for bathing feet. Postcard for Father’s birthday. Scrounge portable radio. Shorten lunchtime for barre work on extension. Take empty room. Sasha: Perfection is the duty. Work work work. In difficulty is ecstasy.
Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing. Nietzsche. Yes! Elocution lesson. Visa for Moscow. Tell Shelkov to eat shit or to eat more shit than he already does, bring him a bucket and a spoon. Better still, ignore him completely, the ultimate victory. Shoes. Permit. Clothes cleaned for conservatory concert. The boy on the bus. Vigilance.
Sleep less. Morning routine. Take twice as long with each grand battement to build control and strength. Stand long in relevé for strength. Nine or ten on pirouette. Chaboukiani, I kiss your feet! Do cabrioles face-on to the mirror rather than sideways. Sasha: Live inside the dance. Out-think. Out-maneuver. Out-learn. Even the wig should be alive! Triple assembles tours. Work on phrasing. The others like to take a bite to see if I am gold or brass. Let them. They will break their teeth either way. L’Après-midi d’un faune. Estrade Guerra says that Nijinsky’s ballon was like seeing a hare wounded by the huntsman’s shot, rising before the fall. Nijinsky said it is not difficult to stay in the air, you just have to pause a little while up there. Ha! Anna was correct after all.
Sasha says much of the ballon came from the strength in Nijinsky’s back. Exercise: walk on hands to strengthen back muscles. Richter tickets. Boy at the Hermitage said he had contacts in the conservatory. Rumors about Xenia, but if you don’t try everything your life is wasted. Find name of Ukrainian poet who said that nothing will ever be good until you learn to drink champagne from your boots!
Pas de trois from Guyane with torches, second act pas de deux from Swan Lake, Corsaire duet with Sizova. Read Byron for texture. Ask RosaMaria to patch tights. Cut fingernails to stop scratching Masha while lifting. Tell P. to stop counting out the phrases, her lips move when she dances. The pas de deux is a conversation not a fucking monologue. Forget all this talk of F. as a rival. Bullshit. Become a toilet bowl and you will see better movement. Demand five dozen pairs of shoes and maybe you will get a dozen, use the best maker, the Georgian woman with the lisp. Haircut: slant parting? Gorky says that life will never be quite so bad that the desire for something better will ever be
extinguished in men. Yes.
Cloth hat left in the changing room. Letter from Bashkirian Ministry. Nineteenth birthday party. Eugene Onegin. Tchaikovsky score. In Corsaire achieve Byron’s romanticism and defiance. Sasha: The greatest artists are born to enrich their art, not themselves. Toothbrush. Honey for tea.
Perform as if things have to be said all over again. Sasha says the known way leads us to the unknown. Also, it is the unknown way that will finally lead us back to what is known. You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it! Those assigned to watch me—ignore them and you will lose an eye, but bow to them and they will strike you blind.
Extra practice in Room 17. Fix radio and put in order for telephone. Degas exhibition—RosaMaria said he wakens the sleep in her. Photographs. Destroy Xenia’s letters.
* * *
There is a story my husband used to tell Rudi. He recounted it over and over, after classes, when they were both exhausted and we would sit, all three of us, by the fireplace in our courtyard apartment. Once or twice Rudi played the piano softly while Sasha talked. The story shifted and changed, but Sasha enjoyed the telling and retelling of it and Rudi, for his part, listened intently. Even long afterwards, when Rudi left our place for his own apartment—when Sasha and I were alone again—the story left its mark.
Dmitri Yachmennikov, my husband said, was a minor figure in the world of Leningrad ballet in the late nineteenth century. A thin little man, a patch of black hair on the dome of his head, given to eating shoots of asparagus, he was a choreographer in a hall north of Obvodnyi Canal. He worked closely with his brother Igor, who played the piano.
Together the brothers were kept alive by the good graces of the young dancers they worked with—at their door someone always left some bread so they never starved.
One late winter evening Dmitri’s brother died, slumping face forward into the piano. Shortly after the funeral Dmitri went blind. People said the double calamity was caused by the strong bond between the brothers—Dmitri had been shocked into blindness and nothing would ever heal him. He walked up and down the street from his house to the hall, seldom straying farther than the market for his bundles of asparagus.
Dmitri decided to continue his career in choreography since it was the only thing he knew. He returned to the hall, locked the door behind him. But he could no longer plot a dance—instead he crawled about on the floor on his hands and knees, feeling its texture, rubbing his hands over the grain of wood, sometimes even chafing his cheek against the boards. He brought in a number of local carpenters and quizzed them about the composition of the wood, the length and direction of the grain. Everyone thought him thoroughly mad.
He was seen walking home at night, the sprig of asparagus crooked in his mouth, feeling his way forward into the faintly lit doorway of his home.
On the anniversary of his brother’s death, Dmitri opened up the doors of the hall and invited local dancers in for an audition, explained to them what he wanted. The dancers were curious at first—the thought of a blind man telling them how to move seemed preposterous—but some began auditioning anyway. Instead of using his brother’s old piano Dmitri brought in a cellist and a violinist, and as they played, he sat in the front row. Finally he picked a group of dancers he wanted to work with. They rehearsed for several weeks, during which Dmitri said little, but then suddenly on a whim he started to scold them.
Without seeing them, he was able to tell that the timing in their pirouette was off, that a hip was not aligned with a shoulder, that a jump was at the wrong angle. The dancers were stunned—not so much because the choreographer was blind but by the fact that he was correct.
The show soon became a local success.
The story spread in the autumn of 1909, when an article appeared in a local gazette. Dmitri was invited to larger halls within the community, but he refused. He fought off offers from factories, schools, and finally even a teacher from the Kirov who was perplexed by Dmitri’s method. He did however organize one guest appearance for an aging dancer, Nadia Kutepova, whom his late brother had once adored. She came to the hall and performed a solo especially for Dmitri, with no audience present. On his insistence there was also no music in the hall. Outside a crowd waited to hear the result.
The pair came out after two hours, Dmitri’s arm hooked through the crook of her elbow.
When asked by the crowd how the dance had gone, Kutepova pronounced that under Dmitri’s tuition she had danced perfectly. He had given her direction to make every move exquisite and it was, she said, one of her finer performances.
For his part, Dmitri told the crowd that as Kutepova danced he had heard one of his brother’s symphonies being played in the hall, that through her body the music had emerged, and that by the time she was finished he could almost hear every note his brother had ever created.
Dmitri Yachmennikov had been listening to the floorboards.
* * *
It was a hot summer in Ufa, the city enveloped in smoke from the factories and ash blown in from the forest fires off the Belaya River. A thin film of soot lay on the benches in Lenin Park. I was finding it difficult to sit and breathe, so I finally plucked up the courage to spend the last of my money on the extravagance of the cinema.
Having not been there since Anna passed on, I thought I might be able to revisit her, twine a lock of her gray hair around my finger.
The Motherland cinema was located down Lenin Street, gone slightly to ruin, the beginnings of cracks in the magnificent facade, posters yellowing in their glass cases. Inside, fans on the ceiling were at full force in the heat. I hobbled in on my cane and, having forgotten my eyeglasses, sat close to the front.
Word had gotten around that Rudi was featured in the newsreel, and there was a noise in the air, his name being whispered by what presumably were old classmates, young men and ladies, some former schoolteachers. Yulia had written to say that in Petersburg young women had begun to wait outside the stage door to get a glimpse of him. She mentioned that he was even due to dance for Khrushchev. The thought was chilling and wonderful—the barefoot Ufa boy performing in Moscow. I chuckled, remembering the names Rudi had been called at school: Pigeon, Girlie, Frogface. All of that had been forgotten now that he was a solo Kirov artist—the arrogance had been taken from the air and put in the victory soup.
After the anthem the newsreel came on. He was featured dancing the Spaniard in Laurencia. The sight of him was an acute but pleasing thorn. His hair was dyed black for the role, and his makeup was garish. I found myself holding Anna’s hand, and midway she leaned over to me. Rudi was being savage and exotic, she said. He was bringing a flagrant ruthlessness to his idea of dance. She whispered urgently that he was altogether too flamboyant, that his feet weren’t pointed well, his line was slightly wrong, that he needed to cut his hair.
I thought: How wonderful—even as a ghost Anna didn’t hold back.
I recalled the last time I had seen him, at Anna’s funeral, the look on his face that his gift was no longer a surprise. Now he seemed generations removed from the boy with the runny nose who had stood outside the Ufa Opera House, bruises above his eye, feet turned out.
The newsreel ended. I felt faintly nostalgic and dozed briefly in my seat before being awakened by some crude Western fare, Tarzan, the main feature of the day. I went out into the last of the sunlight. The sun had baked potholes in the dirt roads. Ravens were out pecking around the shriveled weeds. In the distance the forests flared orange. A cello was being played in a tower block along Aksakov. I turned onto my street, almost expecting to meet Rudi, his younger self, with Anna trailing behind.
I had forgotten provisions, but there were a few leftovers in the room, potatoes and cucumbers. The stylus on the gramophone was worn down, yet it still managed a little scratch of Mozart.
Remembering Anna’s old trick, I dented the pillow. My prolonged wakefulness had in recent times become almost unbearable and so I was surprised upon
waking in the morning, not at the fact that I was awake but at the novelty of having slept at all.
* * *
After four days of traveling, his mother arrives at the hotel where he is staying before his first performance in Moscow. Gray coat and headscarf. Exhausted, she goes to tiptoe and kisses him on the cheek. He takes her by the elbow, leads her past the heavy, velvet-colored armchairs; through the gauntlet of antique furniture. Her shoulder brushes lightly against the red drapes, and she recoils slightly. A chandelier casts light on the giant portraits of the Heroes of the Soviet Union. They enter the banquet room where, earlier, Premier Khrushchev gave a speech announcing the opening of the national student showcase.
At one end of the room, the remnants of the banquet are spread out on the table.
I danced at the reception, he says.
Where?
On the wooden platform down there. Nikita Sergeyevich saw me. He applauded. Who could believe it?
Look, she says.
Farida shuffles alongside the table: a splotch of beluga caviar on a starched white cloth; a plate with a touch of duck pâté rimed to it; the smell of sturgeon, herring, beef, truffles, wild mushrooms, cheeses; krendeli biscuits in their broken figures of eight; a single Black Sea oyster on a glistening tray. She lifts a slice of salted meat to her mouth, decides against it, moves on, noticing empty silver ice-buckets for champagne, crumbs on the floor, cigar ashes on the windowsill, cigarette butts, lemon wedges in empty glasses, bent and broken toothpicks, a display of red chrysanthemums in the center of the room.
Rudik? she says.
Yes?
She goes to the window, looks down at her boots, worn and salt-stained: Your father says he’s sorry he couldn’t be here.
Yes.
He wanted to be.
Yes.
That is all, she says.
Yes, Mother.
At the hotel exit a guard makes way for them as they step into the cold. He begins to skip down the street, the lining of his coat flapping. Farida smiles, quickens her step, feels a momentary lightness. Things spinning: snowflakes, boots, the chime of a distant clock. Watching people nearby, watching him, being watched.
