by Colum McCann
A child! I had to laugh at myself. Not only was I half a century in the world, but I had not met anyone since the divorce. I paced my room from wall to wall, mirror to mirror. I bought a box of clementines in the market as a birthday treat, but even peeling back the soft skin of the orange seemed to relate, however absurdly, to my desire. My father had once told me the story of how, when he was in the work camp, a truckload of giant logs was brought in to be chopped. He was on ax duty with a gang of twelve. It was a dreadfully hot summer and each swing of the blade was torture. He hacked at a log and there was the unmistakable sound of metal hitting metal. He bent down and found a mushroom-shaped chunk of lead embedded in the trunk. A bullet. He counted the rings from the perimeter to the bullet and found that they matched his age exactly.
We never escape ourselves, he said to me years later.
One spring morning I took a tram to the outskirts of Leningrad, where an acquaintance of mine, Galina, worked in a state orphanage. When I sat in her dark office she raised an eyebrow, frowned. I told her that I was beginning to look for other work in addition to my translations. She hardly seemed convinced. The desire to be around orphan children was considered strange. Mostly they were idiots or chronically disabled. To work with them was a social embarrassment. On the wall above Galina’s desk there was a print of an old saying she said came from Finland: The crack of a falling branch is its own apology to the tree for having broken. I had convinced myself that going there, even for an afternoon, was simply to get away from the poems. But I had also heard of certain women—women my age—who had opened foster homes, adjuncts to the dyetskii dom, the baby houses. The women were allowed to operate on a small scale, sometimes as many as six children, and they got a desultory pension from the state.
Are you no longer in the university? asked Galina.
I’m divorced now.
I see, she said.
In the background I could hear wailing voices. When we left the office a group of boys crowded around us, hair shaved, tunics gray, red sores around their mouths.
Galina showed me the grounds. The building was an old armory, brightly repainted, with a chimney stack that pierced the air. Prefabricated classrooms were propped on cinder blocks. Inside, the children sang paeans to a good life. A single set of swings stood in the garden where each child was allowed half an hour during the day. In their spare time the maintenance men were attempting to build a slide and the unfinished structure stood like a skeleton beside the swings. Still, three children had found a way to climb it anyway.
Hello! one of them shouted. He looked about four years old. He ran over and made a gesture to rub his soft fuzzy head, where his hair had begun to grow. The skull seemed too large for his tiny body. His eyes were huge and strange, lopsided, his face terribly thin. I asked his name.
Kolya, he said.
Go back to the swing, Nikolai, Galina said.
We continued through the grounds. Over my shoulder I saw Kolya climb the makeshift slide once again. The sunlight caught the dark stubble on his head.
Where’s he from? I asked.
Galina touched my shoulder. Perhaps you shouldn’t draw so much attention to yourself, she said.
I’m just curious.
You really must be careful.
Galina had been assigned the work in the orphanage after failing at university. The seasons had passed through her face and it struck me that they had now conjured themselves into one which had become bland and nondescript, not unlike myself.
But at a copse of trees Galina stopped, coughed then half-smiled.
It turned out that Kolya’s parents were intellectuals from the far eastern stretches of Russia. They had been posted to a university in Leningrad where they’d been killed when their car smashed into a tram on Nevsky. There had never been any contact made with other relatives and Kolya, three months old at the time, had spent his first few years not saying a single word.
He’s a clever child but ruthlessly lonely, said Galina. And he has certain behaviors.
What kind of behaviors?
He hoards his food and then waits until it’s stale or moldy to digest it. And toilet things as well. He’s not yet trained himself for the toilet.
We rounded a corner where a group of boys and girls were chopping wood, their breath steaming in the cold. Their axes glinted momentarily in the light as they raised them above their shoulders.
But he shows some promise as a chess player, she said.
Temporarily stunned by a vision of my father pulling a bullet from a core of wood, I said: Who?
Kolya! she said. He’s already carved his own chess set from the slats of his bed. We discovered it one evening when he crashed to the floor. The pieces were tucked in his pillowcase.
I stopped on the path. An oil tanker had pulled up to the main building and Galina checked her watch. She sighed and said: I must go.
In the background I could hear the children laughing.
I suppose I can help arrange a job for you here if you desire, she said.
She shook her head and began to leave, jangling her keys.
Thank you, I replied.
She didn’t turn. I knew what I wanted, perhaps what I had always wanted since a young age. Before I left I stood watching Kolya swinging from a monkey bar. A shrill whistle blew, calling the children in, while a guard swept a dozen more kids out into the grounds.
I returned to my room, to my dictionaries, my clementines.
At the Ministry of Education the following week I was told that all adoptions had been curtailed, and I concurred with the official that custody by the People was a far better thing, but then I plied her gently on the question of wardship. She gave me a fierce look and said: Wait here please. She came back carting a file and was rifling through it when suddenly she asked: Do you like dance?
There was only one possible reason that she could have asked the question. Rudi had been gone for over a decade. Talk about him had softened somewhat in recent years and there had been other high-profile defections that had taken the spotlight away from him. There had even been a review in Izvestiya of a tour in Germany that quoted Western newspapers saying how Rudi’s touch had all but faded from the firmament. When Alexsandr Pushkin died in the early seventies the papers had mentioned Rudi briefly, but they had written that it was exclusively the teacher’s genius, not Rudi’s, which had made him an interesting dancer.
I tightened my fingers and waited for the official to clarify herself. She was looking closely at the particulars of my file. I felt that in my feverish haste I had dug myself a pit. Nothing had ever been stamped in my identity papers about the problem of having known Rudi, but obviously the files went deeper. I tried to mumble an apology, but the woman adjusted her glasses, peered over the half lenses.
She said sternly that she had seen a certain dance in the Kirov in the late fifties. The performer had danced beautifully, she said, but in later years he had disappointed her terribly. She was talking in half words, but it felt as if we had taken an irreversible journey together. She scanned my file further. I allowed myself a breath. She did not mention Rudi’s name, but he lay in the space between us.
The truth was that I didn’t really want Rudi in my life anymore, or at least not the sort of Rudi I had known years before. I wanted a Nikolai, a Kolya, someone I could help up from the slats of my own existence.
I may be able to help, Comrade, the official said.
I wondered what exactly I had allowed myself into. She said there was a provision under Article 123 of the Family Code for wardship, and there was a further provision under another law for Party members to have access to children of talent. I had been a member of the Party, but since leaving Iosif I had hidden low, afraid he might hunt me down. The thought even occurred that the woman at the Ministry was somehow connected to him, that she would betray me. And yet there was something about her that seemed honest, a display of simplicity that blended a sharp intelligence.
Does this boy show
any particular talents? she asked.
He’s a chess player.
At the age of four?
She made a note on a piece of paper and said: Come back next week.
I had often believed, to that point in my life, that friendships among women were fickle things, dependent on circumstances other than the heart, but Olga Vecheslova, as I got to know her, was extraordinary. She was younger than I and insecure behind her gold-rimmed spectacles. Dark brown hair. Dark eyes, almost black. She herself had been a dancer although there was no whisper of it in her body anymore—her hips were wide and her carriage bent, unlike my mother, who, even when sick, had walked as if balancing china on her head. Olga was unnerved but pleased by the notion of me having known Rudi. She disliked him of course, for betraying our nation. She also disliked him for his betrayal of the very thing we ultimately wanted for our own lives, the realization of desire. And in that hatred there was a need. It was a disease of sorts; we couldn’t shake Rudi from our minds. Olga and I began to meet once a week, to walk along the canals together, aware that our actions could draw the wrong attention, but we forged on regardless.
Olga arranged that I be allowed to visit Kolya at the orphanage. Nearing the end of summer he seemed undernourished, his legs thin and spindly in his shorts. Terrible sores had erupted on his face. He had been punished for incontinence and there were welts on his back. At Galina’s office I learned that he was actually six years old, not four, that his growth was stunted. I began to doubt myself, started biting my nails for the first time since I was sixteen. I cannot handle a child like this, I thought.
Even the bureaucracy of having a child would be a strategic nightmare, waiting in lines for schools, name changes, apartment applications, vaccinations, identity cards.
Still, I bought paint, a brush, a secondhand set of lace curtains for the one window, decorated the corner of the room blue, copied out pictures of chess pieces from a book, sketched them around the sill. On the shelves I placed knickknacks. The shelves themselves were made from orange crates. The main problem was that I had no bed for Kolya. There was a four-month waiting list in the government department stores for a new one and though I was translating more and more, money was still an anguish. Finally Olga managed to find a mattress which, when cleaned and patched, was quite presentable.
I looked around the room. It was still functional and drab. There were always plenty of birdcages to be found in Leningrad and so I hung one from the ceiling and inside I placed a porcelain canary, tasteless but delightful. At the market I managed to find a beautiful hand-crafted music box, which, when wound, played an Arcangelo Corelli concerto. It was an odd item which cost the price of many poems but, like the china plate my father had given to me, it seemed to resonate into both past and future.
When Olga was finally able to institute wardship, in late September of that year, nothing in my life, absolutely nothing, was better than that moment.
Kolya stood in my room and wailed so much that his nose bled. He scratched himself and an array of fresh cuts appeared on his arms and legs. I prepared a poultice, wrapped the wounds, and later that evening gave him a chocolate bar. He didn’t know what it was, just stared at it, began unwrapping. He nibbled then looked up, bit a whole chunk, and tucked half of it under his pillow. I stayed up all night, nursing him through a series of nightmares, and even put some of the foul poultice on my own fingers to stop myself from biting my nails.
When he woke in the morning Kolya kicked out in fright but, finally exhausted, he asked for the other half of the chocolate bar. It was one of those simple gestures that, for no obvious reason, shores up the heart.
After a month I wrote to Rudi, telling him how life had quickened and veered. I never sent the letter. There was no need. I was a mother now. I gladly accepted the gray at the roots of my hair. I went down to the Fontanka with Kolya. He rode a bicycle we had found in the rubbish dump and he stayed close by my side, wobbling on the bike. We were on our way to the Ministry to file a report on his progress.
Watched All in the Family then cabbed to Judy and Sam Peabody’s to see Nureyev (cab $2.50). Nureyev arrived and he looked terrible—really old-looking. I guess the nightlife finally got to him. His masseur was with him. The masseur is also sort of a bodyguard. And I didn’t know this before I went over there, but Nureyev has told the Peabodys that if Monique Von Vooren showed up, he would walk out. He says she used him. But he’s terrible. When he was so cheap and wouldn’t stay in a hotel, Monique gave him her bed, and now he says she uses him. He’s mean, he’s really mean. At 1:30 the Eberstadts wanted to leave and I dropped them off (cab $3.50).
—the Andy Warhol diaries,
SUNDAY, MARCH 11, 1979
3
PARIS, LONDON, CARACAS • 1980s
Monsieur was still sleeping and the city was quiet in the way I had loved since I was young. I stood by the window and took in the smell of the Seine, which was occasionally foul but on that morning quite fresh. The pastries were baking in the kitchen and the two scents merged together in the air.
At nine in the morning the bells from Saint Thomas d’Aquin were carried on the wind along the quays. The kettle boiled for the fourth time as I waited for Monsieur to wake. He generally did not sleep in beyond nine, no matter how late he arrived home. I always knew whether he had a companion with him since there would be jackets and other clothes strewn on the chairs. On that morning, however, there were no guests.
I took the kettle from the stove top and heard Monsieur rumbling as Chopin came to life on the record player in his bedroom.
When I first began my duties, years earlier, it was Monsieur’s custom to come out from his room wearing only his undershorts, but I had bought him a white bathrobe for one of his birthdays, which, in appreciation, he had begun to wear every morning. (He had dozens of silk pajamas and many fine Tibetan robes, none of which he ever used, but he gave them to house guests who had not expected to stay over.)
I rinsed the teapot with a little hot water, spooned the tea, and put the kettle back on the stove over a low heat. Monsieur appeared and greeted me in his customary manner, grinning broadly. The simple things in life still pleased him, and there was seldom a morning when he didn’t go to the window and take a deep breath.
I always thought that, for a young man of infinite means—he was forty-two years old at the time—there should be nothing but happiness, but he had days when the sky was indeed upon him and I would leave him alone to brood.
That morning, he yawned and stretched. I put the tea and pastries on the table, and Monsieur announced that he would be leaving the apartment later than usual. He said he had a visitor, a shoemaker from London, who he wanted to keep a secret as there were other dancers in Paris who might steal his time.
It was unusual to have morning visitors and I worried that perhaps there were not enough pastries or fruit, but Monsieur said he had met the shoemaker many times before, he was a plain man who would desire nothing more than tea and toast.
I knew about Englishmen since my aunt had for twelve years after the War kept house in Montmartre for a celebrated theater actor. The English had always struck me as polite, but I had grown to prefer the Russian way, demand and apology, which Monsieur displayed quite openly. He would, for example, raise his voice significantly over a meat dish that was overcooked and then afterwards express sorrow for his ill humor. I had even grown to enjoy Monsieur’s tantrums, plentiful as they were.
Monsieur had laid a number of his old dancing shoes out on the floor when the shoemaker arrived. I answered the door to a small bald man who carried his overcoat draped over his arm, a suitcase in his other hand. He was about a decade older than me, in his late fifties at least.
—Tom Ashworth, he said.
He bowed and said he was here on instructions. I reached for his overcoat but he did not seem to want to part with it. He smiled apologetically and hung the coat on the stand himself. Monsieur paced across the floor and embraced the shoemaker who stepp
ed back in embarrassment. His suitcase hit the coat stand and it rocked on its legs. I managed to suppress a laugh.
The visitor had a ruddy face, his eyebrows were full and bushy, and he wore crooked spectacles.
I retreated to the kitchen, leaving the door slightly ajar so I could see into the living room, where Monsieur and the shoemaker had taken their seats. The visitor fumbled with the lock on his suitcase and then opened it to an array of shoes. His demeanor loosened as he took the shoes out one by one.
I had guessed that, as an Englishman, he would take his tea with milk and perhaps sugar. I carried a tray out into the living room. I had forgone my own breakfast pastries in case he might want one, but he hardly looked up, so engaged was he by the shoes. They chatted in English, each leaning forward to hear the other. Monsieur had, it seemed, formed a deep attachment to certain older shoes and the tenor of the conversation was such that he wanted the old shoes to be repatched.
—They live on my feet, said Monsieur, they are alive.
Mister Ashworth said he would be delighted to repatch them to the best of his ability. I closed the kitchen door, began making an inventory of what I would need for the evening’s dinner party: capon, spices, carrots, asparagus, butter, milk, eggs, hazelnuts for pudding. Monsieur had invited twelve guests and I would have to check the stock of champagnes and liqueurs. I generally cooked with a country flavor that had been passed down through my family. It had been for this reason that Monsieur had hired me, preferring, as he did, strong hearty meals. (Four generations on my mother’s side had cooked in a country inn in Voutenay, outside Paris, but the inn was a victim of the victory in 1944, burned by the Germans in retreat.)
