by Colum McCann
Twelve-forty-five
I decided to leave him alone. As I left I saw him slip the earphones off his neck as if they might muffle anything Mother might say. I stood outside the door. He continued to whisper, although I couldn’t make out what he said. For a while it seemed as if Rudik was speaking a foreign language.
One-thirty
He came out of Mother’s room. His eyes were rimmed red. Emilio, he said, calling for his bodyguard. Rudik said that Emilio was a masseur with some knowledge of medicine, he might know of some way to make Mother feel better. His stupid Western ideas, I thought, how could his medicine be any better than what we had already given Mother? I hated that monstrous man as he walked towards Mother’s room. What right did he have to interfere? I hissed at Rudik but he ignored me and slammed the door.
Two o’clock
The bodyguard came out. He smiled at me and spoke in a broken English that was impossible to understand. Finally he made gestures in the air. It seemed he was telling me that Mother must once have been a beautiful woman. I changed my mind about him, despite his ponytail. He took many helpings from the banquet table and made sounds to say that things were delicious. And then he sat quietly for the rest of the day.
Two-thirty
I entered. Mother was awake. Her eyes were fully open as if startled. Rudik was hunched over her and there were tears in his eyes. He was alternating between Russian and Tatar. Mother’s lips were moving but it was impossible to make out her words. Rudik reached for my hand. Tell her it’s me, Tamara, he said. She knows your voice. She still doesn’t know that it’s me. I leaned across and told Mother: It’s Rudik come back to see you. There was a flicker in her eyes although I did not know whether she understood. I will sit here until she recognizes me, said Rudik. I will not move. I pleaded with him to come out and enjoy the banquet but he said that he was not hungry. I pleaded again. No! he shouted. And then I did something that I will never forget. I slapped Rudik once on the side of the face. His head turned in the direction of the slap and he stared at the wall. I could not believe myself. The slap was so hard that it stung my hand. Rudik slowly turned his head and looked at me for an instant. Then he bent down to Mother again. I will come to your dinner table, Tamara, when I am ready. I closed the door. A terrible feeling went through me when I stepped into the living room. Nuriya was staring at her new wristwatch, which was loudly beeping. She couldn’t stop it.
Two-forty-five
Ilya filled the bodyguard’s plate once more. They drank kumis together. The bodyguard showed Ilya a game of sorts. The bodyguard plucked a hair from his head and then closed his eyes and told Ilya to place the hair between the pages of the book. With his eyes closed, the bodyguard started feeling the book with his fingers, lightly touching the pages. It was an old masseur’s trick which helped him keep his touch. The bodyguard was so good at the game that he could feel the hair eight pages away. The snow blew against the window.
Three o’clock
I created a plate for Rudik, pickled meat, cabbage salad, hard-boiled eggs. The door creaked when I opened it. I was surprised that he smiled at me. He seemed to have forgotten I had slapped him. There was something good in the air between us again, a distance had been bridged. Rudik did not eat the food but held the plate as if he might. Then he made room on the seat and I slid onto the chair beside him. We watched Mother’s lips moving minutely. Her hair was spread on the pillow. She’s saying your name, I said. What? he replied. I said: She’s saying your name, look at her. He paused a long time but then he began to nod vigorously. Yes, she’s saying my name. Just then he said something about the flags along the lake, about the radio and times when he would listen to music as a child. I couldn’t understand him, he was talking gibberish. I took his hand. The chair was awfully small for the two of us.
Three-thirty
I left the room. The bodyguard was fiddling with a book, feeling its pages. He asked for another helping of cake.
Four o’clock
Rudik came out of Mother’s room. He looked stiff, but his face betrayed nothing. He nodded at Nuriya and Ilya and went to the window. He parted the curtain where, outside, the officials were sitting in their cars. Rudik turned. He signaled something to his bodyguard. He was feigning happiness, I’m sure. The bodyguard opened his suitcase and Rudik handed out the last of his presents, more jewelry and makeup and chocolates. Then he flapped his arms to get warm even though the house was toasty. Well, he said. He dug down into his pocket and threw a sheaf of rubles on the table. It was a lot of money. Nobody moved. Outside, one of the cars beeped. The flight to Leningrad was due to leave soon. The snow was still falling. At the door he pulled his beret down, hugged Nuriya and shook Ilya’s hand yet again. I stepped across to him at the threshold. She didn’t recognize me, he said. I whispered in his ear: Of course she did. We repeated ourselves. No, she didn’t. Yes she did. He looked at me and smiled a half-smile. My face still stings, he said and for a moment I thought he was going to slap me back, but he didn’t. He twirled his scarf and then turned his back and went out to the car. We stood there with all our new possessions.
* * *
Yulia, my dear, let me guess, you still don’t have a piano?
He was panting somewhat from the five flights of stairs. I gasped, unaware that at my age such deep surprise was still a possibility. He smiled at his own little joke, introduced his companion, Emilio, and apologized for calling so late at night. He said he felt awful for bringing no gifts, but that he had already given everything away. I embraced him as he studied the darkness of the apartment from the vantage of the threshold.
Same old Yulia, said Rudi. So many books that you can’t see the wallpaper.
How did you find me?
I have my means.
The electricity was off again in the building. I lit two candles and the light flared. Emilio stayed at the door and shook the snow off his shoulders. I invited him in and he was a little surprised at what he called my perfect Spanish. I explained that the language had been much of my life and he went to the bookshelf to look at my collection.
I pulled my dressing gown tight, then stepped behind the partition that divided the room. Kolya was sleeping. He grumbled at first when I woke him, but then he sat upright. Who? he said and he leaped out of bed, his hair tousled.
Put whatever food we have on the table, I whispered.
In the bathroom I rouged my cheeks with my knuckles, looked at myself in the mirror and laughed. The ghosts of my life had walked out to greet me at sixty-two years of age.
Hurry, called Rudi. I have only an hour or so.
Out on the table Kolya had spread a loaf of bread and some leftover cucumber salad. The bottle of vodka was already open but the glasses beside it were empty. The candles made nervous points against the darkness.
We’re honored, I said.
Rudi waved his hand: They wanted me to go to a dinner at the French embassy, he said, but they bore me.
So they let you come back?
They allowed me forty-eight hours to see Mother. My flight was delayed. It leaves from Pulkovo in a few hours.
A few hours?
I didn’t even get to see the Kirov. They managed the visit so that it would be closed.
Your mother? I asked. How is she?
Rudi smiled but didn’t reply. His teeth were still strikingly white as if making an argument against the rest of his face. There was a short silence as he looked around the room. He seemed to be searching for other figures to come out from the shadows. Then he clasped my hands suddenly and said: Yulia, you have lost none of your beauty.
Pardon me?
Not a day older.
And you, I replied, are still a liar.
No, no, no, he insisted. You’re still beautiful.
I am an old woman, Rudi. I have accepted my headscarves.
He reached for the vodka, poured out three small glasses, looked at Kolya, wondered aloud if he were old enough to drink. With his teenage gait Kolya went
to the cupboard to get a fourth glass.
Your son? whispered Rudi.
In a manner of speaking, I said.
You are married again?
I hesitated, shook my head. They had been long years of poverty and struggle for Kolya and me. My translating skills were as good as useless: there was no longer such a call for foreign literature and many of the publishing houses had been closed down. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a new life, already half-exhausted. I had begun to take on some menial cleaning jobs to put bread on the table. But my joy was in the fact that Kolya had grown into a good young man, tall, dark-haired, reclusive. Seventeen years old, he had given up the chess but he was working on becoming an artist—he had begun by drawing landscapes, solid and real, but he was branching out now, blurring the edges. He believed that change needed a reason, otherwise there would be no respect for the past: he wanted to paint through the traditions in order to find the new. He had done a series of portraits of Lenin, using milk. The paintings were history as parody—nothing showed up on them until held to a candle or a match. Kolya hadn’t sold any but kept them under his bed and his favorite was one that he’d accidentally left near a heating pipe and only the nose had emerged. Above his bed he had written a quote from Fontanelle from one of my old books: It is true that the philosopher’s stone cannot be found, but it is good to search for it.
What panicked me was that Kolya would soon be coming up to his military service. The thought of it was horrific—war closing off parts of him as they had closed off parts of my parents—and I often woke at night in a pool of sweat with visions of my son rounding a corner in a village in Afghanistan, a rifle strapped across his chest. Kolya, however, thought he had found a way to circumvent the system: when giving a urine sample, he said, he would prick his finger with a pin and allow a drop of blood to fall into the sample. If his urine showed an excess of protein he could skip the military. It often occurred to me that Kolya had somehow inherited my father’s spirit, although he looked nothing like him, of course. He had the tenacity, the intelligence, and the temperament. He had taken an interest in my family history and was amplified by the echoes he had found—inevitably, through his questions, he had discovered Rudi.
I scanned Kolya’s face for a reaction to the visit but he was, surprisingly, unruffled.
Emilio, I noticed, had taken a translation of Cervantes from my shelf. But instead of reading it he was feeling through the pages as if divining the words, his eyes closed. Rudi explained that he’d put a hair in the book earlier when they were alone in the room and now Emilio was searching for it, something Emilio liked to do to pass the time.
I surround myself with crazy people, said Rudi.
Rudi reached for the bottle of vodka and poured two more glasses. He smiled at me in our small and awkward silence. A quarter of a century had gone by and while the difference in age may have become less pronounced, a thin curtain of embarrassment had been drawn in the space between us. We began desperately talking around it. He sat forward, with his elbows on his knees, his chin in his palms, his eyes sparkling with the same old delight.
Tell me everything, he said.
He lifted the glass to his mouth, waited for me, and so I tried to unravel what I had thought had been firmly spooled—my apartment, my divorce, my street.
Do you still translate?
On the odd occasion, I replied, but I’d rather not talk about it, I’d rather hear about you.
Oh everyone hears about me, they always get it wrong.
Even you?
Yes, even me. But I get it wrong on purpose, he said.
On purpose?
Of course, nobody knows me.
It was as if, between the two of us, we were playing a bizarre form of chess, that we were each trying to lose all our pieces, to get down to the final king, topple it over and say: Here, now, the board is yours, explain to me my loss.
Just then there was a deep thump and the electricity came on again and the room was pooled in bright light.
Turn them off please, said Rudi, I prefer candles.
Emilio’s hands lay in the center of the book.
Rudi said loudly: Medicine please.
Emilio closed the book, took out a bottle of pills from his pocket, threw it into Rudi’s lap. Rudi took four pills in quick succession. There was a mist of sweat on Rudi’s forehead but he wiped it away with a sweep of his hand. I wondered what it was that, on other days, Emilio found beneath Rudi’s skin.
And are you still dancing? I asked.
They will put me down dancing, he said.
I couldn’t help but believe him—one day they would exhume Rudi and find his bones set in an attitude of leap, or perhaps even a bow, rising up to say: Thank you, thank you, please allow me to do it once more. He had no idea what he would do if he ever retired, perhaps choreograph. He had made some movies in the West, but he said they were all nonsense, and besides he was not built for the camera, his was a stage body, he needed an audience.
An audience indeed, I thought.
Ah-ha! Rudi said suddenly.
He reached into his pocket, took out a wallet, and thrust it across the table at Kolya. There was no money in it but the wallet was beautiful, its edges trimmed in gold.
American snakeskin, he said.
Kolya stared at it: For me?
Rudi put his arms behind his head and nodded. For a brief moment the jealously of my youth returned. I wanted to take Rudi aside and tell him that there was no need to show off, that he was acting like a spoiled boy at a lifelong birthday party. But perhaps there was something deeper in the way he had given the wallet to my son. It occurred to me that Rudi wanted to be left with nothing, in the same way that he had left before. Kolya flipped through the empty wallet and Rudi slapped him playfully on the shoulder.
Watching them together slipped a knife between my ribs and hit my heart exactly.
Emilio continued his search in the book but after a few moments he began to doze. I went to the window. Outside, the dark brushed the city and the wind unleashed the snow. Down below three cars sat in the street. I pulled the curtain back further, saw a shadow and then a flash of light from a camera. A photographer. I turned away instinctively and closed the curtains.
How come they let you back?
Raisa Gorbachev, he said.
Have you met her?
He shook his head, no.
But she got you a visa?
He didn’t respond but then said curiously: We have always absorbed our own disintegration.
I didn’t know quite what to say, not sure if it was self-pity or pure nonsense. I almost laughed. But it was impossible to get angry at Rudi for becoming what he had become. Something about him released people from the world, tempted them out. Even Kolya had begun to move his chair closer. We poured a little more vodka and talked briefly then of my father’s gramophone; my mother’s lessons; the night Rudi arrived in Leningrad; his dances at the Kirov. He had seen RosaMaria once, he said, but had fallen out of contact with her. There was almost a second-handedness to our conversation, as if we had talked it all before, and yet that didn’t matter: what we lacked was made up for by the tenderness of his visit.
We silently toasted each other and then he flicked a look at his wrist as if he expected to see a watch there, but his arm was bare.
Emilio, he said loudly, what time is it?
The Spaniard awoke with a start: We should leave, he said, closing the book shut.
Just a few more minutes, said Rudi.
No, we really must leave.
A few more minutes! Rudi snapped.
Emilio waved his hands in the air, a gesture he had surely learned from Rudi: Okay, he said, but we’ll miss our plane.
He put the Cervantes book back in the space on the shelf. I had a vision of a day in the future, cold and rainy, when Kolya and I would take the book from the shelf and touch its pages to feel for a tiny bump.
Rudi sat back in the chair, perfectly ca
lm, took a minute to become the focus of the room once again.
Then, without missing a beat, he stood up quickly: My drivers are downstairs. They’ll think I have defected again.
He pulled on his coat and spun on his heels: Can you believe it?
What?
After all these years, he said.
He carefully screwed the bottle top back on the vodka and stared at the table as if gathering strength for something to say. He stepped across, held my shoulders, bit his lip and whispered: You know, my own mother didn’t recognize me.
What?
She didn’t know who I was.
I recalled my father’s story about the workcamp and the bullet and how he said that we never escape ourselves. I considered telling Rudi the story, but he was already wrapped in his scarf, about to go.
Of course she recognized you, I said.
Why should she? he asked.
I wanted to come up with a perfect rejoinder, to bring him back to earth, to receive another thrilling smile, another surprise, but he was turning the handle. I went to hug him. He took my face in his hands, kissed me on each cheek.
Wait, I said.
I went to the cupboard and took out the china dish that had belonged to my mother. I opened the lid of the box. The dish felt cold and brittle. I handed it to him.
