Dancer

by Colum McCann

  Iosif said: The little bastard, how did he dare?

  He rose and paced the room, whispering: How did he dare?

  He looked me in the eye: How did he fucking dare?

  The next day Iosif surprised me by saying I had nothing to worry about, that I had done nothing wrong, that through his connections he could make sure I would be left alone. I ironed his shirt for a conference and as he prepared his briefcase he assured me that everything would be all right. He kissed me brusquely on the cheek and set out for the university.

  They came anyway, the following Monday morning.

  I was alone when I heard the rapping on the door. I stuffed money beneath the insoles of my shoes, even took a slice of bread and put it in the pocket of my housedress. Trembling, I went to answer. The man was the traditional sort, beady, in a gray overcoat, but the woman was young and beautiful, blond hair, green eyes.

  They drifted in without introducing themselves and went to sit at the table. I had the sneaking feeling that Iosif had maybe gone to see them in order to protect himself, that he had finally betrayed me in a tangible way, after all our tiny intimate betrayals over the years.

  Am I being arrested? I asked.

  They said nothing. I felt sure they were going to march me out of the room. Each lit a cigarette—taken from my pack—and blew smoke at the ceiling. They had perfected their drama. They asked me how long I had known him, if he had ever mentioned the West, who he talked about, why had he betrayed his people.

  You know he’s failing, don’t you, Citizen?

  I haven’t heard anything.

  Miserably.

  Really?

  They threw glass at him in Paris.

  Glass? I said.

  They wanted to rip his feet open.

  Why?

  Because he was terrible of course.

  Of course.

  I began to wonder how he had performed in Paris, since it was indeed possible that he had been booed or relegated to the corps. Perhaps Rudi’s style of dancing was anathema to the French, and it was conceivable that he really had failed. After all he was young, just twenty-three; he had been dancing only a few years.

  They kept examining my features, but I held my face tight. Eventually the talk got around to the gatherings in my old room.

  Your salon, said the woman.

  There was no point in arguing.

  She closed one eye: We need the name, address, occupation of everyone who came.

  I wrote the names down. It was a pointless exercise since they knew them all anyway—when I was finished they looked the list over and told me, with wry smiles, whom I had forgotten. They had been watching me, it seemed, for quite a long time.

  Write it again, they said.

  Pardon me?

  Your list.

  My hands shook. They had me write down a second series of names and addresses—all those people who had ever spent time in my house, whether or not they had chatted with Rudi. I ferociously protected the corner of my mind in which my father sat. I had a vision of him at home in Ufa, in the shadow of the refinery, limping to the door to find yet more agents and yet more trouble arching through his life. But they didn’t ask about him. It began to dawn on me that they were trying to find out if I could exert any influence on Rudi—to perhaps phone him and convince him to return—but they already saw that it was doubtful.

  Finally they asked if I was prepared to publicly denounce Rudi.

  Yes, I said, without a moment’s hesitation.

  They seemed vaguely disappointed and lit themselves another cigarette each. The man tucked a pencil behind his ear.

  You will write a letter to him.

  Yes.

  You will tell him that he has betrayed his Motherland, his people, our history.

  Yes.

  Do not seal the letter.

  I won’t.

  Your behavior is very precarious, the woman told me.

  I replied with a measure of dignity that I would certainly mend my ways.

  Do not mention this to anybody, the man warned.

  I nodded.

  Do you understand me?

  He was almost frightened—one foot wrong could have an effect on the rest of his life too, his wife, his children, his apartment.

  Yes, I understand.

  We’ll be back.

  The woman turned and said: As for me, I would not have spat on him even if he had been on fire.

  She glared, waiting for me to react.

  I nodded and said: Certainly.

  When they left I stood with my back against the door and waited for the elevator to begin its descent, and then for some reason, rather than cry, I laughed until I was exhausted, laughed as the pulleys clicked through the system of steel and rollers, laughed as I heard the pneumatic hiss, laughed as I heard the final stop, laughed, all the time remembering that night at the Kirov and the notion of sleeping with Rudi, or having slept with him, through Iosif. It struck me that I hated Rudi the way you can hate someone who makes love to you and leaves, in other words, with a certain grudging admiration or envy for the fact of having left.

  My friends were terrified to be seen with me ever again. Their political diligence and reliability had been called into question, and they would always, now, have files. They too would listen for the elevators. I thought about how my life had been pared down over the years, peeled away layer by layer.

  One night I found Iosif staring at a bottle. He curled his upper lip into a snarl, told me he had six shirts drying on the balcony and they needed ironing.

  No, I said.

  Iron the fucking shirts! he shouted.

  He lifted his fist to my face, and held it centimeters from my eyes.

  At the window—when I hauled the shirts in from the line—I could hear him behind me, pouring another glass of wine for himself.

  I took the only option I felt might clear my head—the train, to visit my father in Ufa. It was late September by the time I got my visa. The journey took three days because of the connections. Exhausted, I couldn’t find a taxi, or even a horse and cart, so I walked through the city, asking people for directions. Tatar and Muslim women were out walking with their children. They glanced at me and looked away. I couldn’t help wondering how a city like this could have made a dancer like Rudi.

  I finally found my father’s street. It was lined with old wooden houses where the bright shutters made an argument against the nearby tower blocks. I negotiated the muddy ruts, pondering how in the world my father managed such a difficult walk with his cane.

  He came to the door and almost giggled when he saw me. He was looking remarkably well, although he had let his hair grow past his ears, which gave him a faintly mad look. He wore a suit and a tie with a few food stains. His shirt buttons were done up to the neck, but the tie was open as if it and the shirt had different intentions for the day. One of the earpieces of his spectacles was broken and he had looped a piece of string around his ear to keep them from, falling. Still, the only real evidence of serious aging were the few capillaries that had burst in his face. Yet I thought the burst vessels looked oddly handsome on him.

  When we hugged I could smell the mustiness of his hair.

  We sat down to Beethoven, and he made tea on the tiny stove. There was a portrait of my mother by the bedside. My father had met a young artist who had copied a photograph of her, using charcoal. How diligent the artist had been to her beauty, I thought, and now it seemed she would remain forever beautiful.

  He caught me looking at the portrait and said: It’s our function in life to make moments durable.

  I nodded, unsure of what he meant. He drank his tea. I hesitated to tell him about Rudi, knowing the news had not yet been made officially public, but finally I blurted it out.

  Rudi’s in Paris.

  Yes, he said, I know.

  How do you know?

  He looked around as if there might be somebody else in the room. I have my ways, he said.

  He shuf
fled to the cupboard: It calls for a small celebration, don’t you think? I haven’t yet celebrated.

  I don’t think so.

  Why not?

  They’ll sentence him to death.

  What? he said. They’ll send a death squad to Paris?

  Perhaps.

  The thought of it sobered him up. He moved his mouth around as if he were tasting whatever idea it was that had come to him.

  We’re all sentenced to death, he finally said, with a certain amount of glee. At least he’ll have a better one than us!

  Oh, Father.

  He always was a clever little cockroach, wasn’t he?

  Yes, I suppose he was.

  From the cupboard he produced an old bottle of vodka, which he opened with a flourish, draping a white cloth over his arm for style.

  To the clever little cockroach, Rudolf Hametovich Nureyev! he said, holding his glass in the air.

  We cooked a small meal under the charcoal gaze of my mother. He recalled her days with the Maryinsky, saying she was robbed of her prime, that she could have been one of the greatest—he knew it was a lie but it was a good lie and it made us both feel warm.

  I made a bed on the couch.

  Just before I fell asleep he coughed and said: His father.

  What?

  I was just thinking of his poor father.

  Go to sleep.

  Ha! he said. Sleep!

  Later I heard him sit down at the table with a book, leafing through the pages—a pen nib scratched across the paper—and I fell asleep to the sound.

  He was gone early in the morning, worrying me, so I dusted the room and cleaned in the corners to occupy the time.

  On the table, beneath a stack of poetry books, I found a journal. I flicked through. On the first page he had written the date of my mother’s death. The paper was cheap and the ink had soaked through to other pages, making it difficult to read. His penmanship was ragged and spidery, and I thought to myself, This is my father’s life. I willed myself not to read his words and began dusting what I had already dusted. He had allowed his plants to dry up, so I carried them to the communal bath and put them in an inch of water to see if they could be resurrected.

  An old woman, a neighbor, came and watched me in the bathroom without saying a word. She was heavy but frail with age. She asked who I was, and when I replied, she returned to her room with a snort.

  I sat at the edge of the bath. There was hair in the drain, and it did not belong to my father—it was a young man’s hair, dark and vital. It seemed somehow offensive that my father should bathe in a place others used.

  All the time the idea of the journal was burning a hole through me. I went back along the corridor, sat at the table, touched the journal’s black cover, finally turned to a section about a third of the way through:

  And yet it’s true that—while I have never

  believed in god, which on its own does not

  make me a good Citizen—that perhaps, in the

  end, it will endear god to me if he really does

  exist. Most of my time in this life has not been spent living

  in any real sense, more a day-to-day survival, going

  to sleep wondering, What will happen to me tomorrow?

  Then tomorrow arrives while I am still wondering.

  And yet a landscape of sighs can come together in a

  collective music. At this moment there are birds in the

  trees, a dozen children outside my room window,

  playing, even the sun is shining. And, I will tell you

  this, since it is all I want to say: Anna, the sound of your

  name still opens the windows of this room.

  He returned home at noon, startling me. I was still looking at the same page when I heard the door creak. I fumbled to put the journal back under the pile of poetry books he had left on the table, but they went tumbling. I got to my knees and started picking them off the floor. He saw me tucking the journal beneath an old copy of Pasternak.

  He held a bunch of lilies in his hand. He put them in a vase by the window, where they nodded in the wind. I wondered how many times he had said my mother’s name as he was cutting the flowers.

  His face betrayed nothing. I thought about asking him whether he would let me read the whole journal but, before I could, he said in a strange voice: Did you know that his father never saw him dance?

  I stayed quiet for a long time and then asked: How do you know?

  Oh I went to visit.

  Where?

  At his house.

  You’re friends?

  We talk.

  What’s he like? I asked.

  Oh he’s a good solid man.

  My father turned to the window and spoke as if to the world outside: I fear he will eventually be ruined.

  He remained at the window, fingering the curtain.

  And his mother? I asked.

  She’s stronger, he said. She will survive.

  He made his way to the table, picked up his journal, rifled through the pages.

  You can have this if you want, he said.

  I shook my head and told him I had read a sentence or two, that it was beautiful.

  It’s balderdash, he said.

  He touched my hand and said: Yulia, don’t ever let them poison your life with narrowness.

  I asked him what he meant and he replied that he wasn’t quite sure, it was just something that he felt fated to say.

  I clung to him those few days, clung to his spirit. Whenever he left the house I read his journal. What it amounted to was a song of love, and it bothered me that he didn’t once mention me. The only people to appear were he and my mother. His recollections of their life were a jumble—the last days were nudged up against the first days and sometimes the later years seemed to have shaped the earlier ones—as if time had been gripped and squeezed formless. It struck me that, despite everything, my parents had lived their lives with a certain panache. They had been born into plenitude and lived with the knowledge that they would die in poverty, yet they appeared to have accepted everything that had happened to them—perhaps in some ways they were happier for the reversal, cementing them together.

  I thought of my own small pleasures, having lived much of my own life avoiding difficulty. I went wandering around Ufa, the dirt streets, the factories, the few remaining bright houses. At a bird auction near the mosque I bought a goldfinch being sold as a songster. I declined the cage and took the bird in the cup of my hands towards the Belaya River. When I opened my hands it seemed startled a moment but then took off, surely to be captured again. I detested the fatuous self-pity I had sunk into, yet embraced it also, since in some ways it was healing. Foolishly I bought two more birds and set them free, only to realize that I had no money for the tram. I took it as an appropriate irony and walked back to my father’s house.

  I stayed for three more days. On the evening before my return to Leningrad I told my father that I was pondering a divorce. He didn’t seem surprised, maybe happy even.

  Go ahead, get a divorce.

  I frowned, and he flung his arms out.

  Or at least marry someone else!

  What about the apartment?

  Who cares? he said. We live with ourselves, not our rooms.

  I sulked for a while until he said: Yulia, dear. Get a divorce. Stay in Petersburg. Live what you have left.

  He sat back in his chair and smoked the butt end of a foul-smelling cigar he had kept hidden.

  Later that evening he told me he had something special to do. He put his finger to his lips as if there were other people in the room and then fumbled at the gramophone. I thought he was simply putting on music, but he lifted the stylus and began dismantling the apparatus. In the belly of the gramophone he had hidden a small flat box. He handed the box to me and said it had been my mother’s, she had always wanted me to have it.

  I should have given it to you before, he said.

  His voice trailed off as I trie
d to open the box. It had not been opened for a long time and the clasp was rusted. I took a knife and delicately began to pry it open. My father watched silently. I expected to find another journal, perhaps one she had kept before the Revolution. Or maybe some of their old love letters. Or some trinkets they had collected through the years. I went to rattle the box, but my father grabbed my wrist.

  Don’t do that, he said.

  He took the knife and pried the clasp. Without opening the lid, he handed the box back to me.

  Inside there was a tiny china saucer, no bigger than an ashtray. It was small and delicate and pale blue, with bucolic pictures of farmers and draft horses painted around the rim. It disappointed me at first, how light it was, how fragile, how it seemed to have nothing to do with either of them.

  It’s one hundred years old, he said. It belonged to your mother’s grandmother. Your mother rescued it from a cellar in Petersburg after the Revolution. Along with many other pieces. She wanted to keep them all.

  What happened to them?

  They broke on our journeys.

  This is the only piece left?

  He nodded and said: Poverty lust sickness envy hope.

  Pardon me?

  Poverty lust sickness envy and hope, he said again. It has survived them all.

  I held the tiny piece of china in my hands and wept until my father told me, with a smile, that it was time for me to grow up. I wrapped the saucer again and placed it in the box, then swaddled it between clothes in my suitcase, hidden deep so it would not be found or harmed in any way.

  Make sure it’s safe, he said.

  We hugged, and he quoted a line about watching random fleets of night birds flying across the face of the moon.

  I returned to Leningrad by train—the landscape speeding by—and on the journey I plucked up the courage finally to get divorced. It was a matter of saving enough money for the tax and waiting for the right time. Over the next eighteen months I cobbled together a number of translations and hid the money along with the china dish.

  And then one evening, in the early summer of ’63, I woke up a little disoriented, wondering whether it was morning or evening. The news blackout on Rudi had been lifted that day. For two years he had not been mentioned anywhere, but that day both Izvestiya and Pravda carried articles about him. They said he had morally debased himself and his country, which was amusing, maybe even true. There was no photo of Rudi, of course, but he still shone somehow in the vitriol.