by Colum McCann
During school he imagines himself out on the river, skating. On the journey home he looks for the highest snowdrifts in the city, so he can step high and be close to the new telegraph wires, hear them crackle just above him.
In the evenings, after listening to the wireless, his mother reads him stories about carpenters and wolves and forests and hacksaws and stars hung on nails in the sky. In one of the stories a giant carpenter stretches upwards and removes the stars one by one, distributes them to the workers’ children.
How tall is the carpenter, Mama?
A million kilometers.
How many stars in each pocket?
One for everyone, she says.
Two for me?
One for everyone, she says again.
Farida watches as Rudik turns in the middle of the earthen shack floor, spinning on the heels of his boots. When he spins he raises dirt. So be it, let him spin, it is his joy. She will, one of these days, save enough money to buy a carpet from the old Turk in the local market. The carpets hang from twine and swing in the wind. She has often pondered what it would be like to have enough money to put carpets on the wall as well, to keep in the warmth, for decoration, to bring the shack to life. But before buying carpets she would purchase new dresses for her daughter, proper shoes for her son, a life away from this life.
Often Rudik’s mother shows him the letters that have come from the German border, where his father is still stationed as a politruk, a teacher. The messages are short and precise: All is well, Farida, do not worry. Stalin is powerful. The words accompany Rudik as he walks through the rain with his mother to the hospital, where at the gate she lets go of his hand, taps him on the bottom, says to him: Don’t be late, little sunshine.
She has rubbed goose fat on his chest to keep away the cold, now that the days are heading towards autumn.
The sick lift him in through the windows, already applauding. His appearance has become a weekly ritual. He grins as he is passed from one set of hands to another. Later he is guided from ward to ward, where he performs the new folk dances learned at school. Sometimes the nurses gather to watch. There are no pockets in Rudik’s dance costume, and by the time he finishes so many cubes of sugar are stuffed lumpily inside his socks that the patients laugh about his legs being diseased. He is given vegetable scraps and bread that the soldiers have set aside, and he crams them into a small paper bag to bring home.
At the farthest wing there is a ward for those soldiers who have gone mad. It is the only place in the hospital where he will not perform. He has heard they have machines with electricity to cure madness.
This ward is full—faces against windows, tongues lolling, rows of fixed eyes—and he stays away, though at times he sees a woman who lumbers up from the greenhouses. She stands at the window of the ward, talking to a soldier whose pajama top hangs loosely on his shoulders. One afternoon Rudik notices the same soldier hobbling through the grounds on crutches, the bottom of the pajama leg knotted just inches beneath his knee, the soldier moving determinedly from tree to tree. The soldier shouts to him—something about a dance—but Rudik is already gone, scared, looking over his shoulder, out the gate, along the rutted dirt streets. As he runs he imagines himself ripping stars from the sky like nails. He returns home, hopping one-legged through the darkness.
Where’ve you been? asks his mother, stirring in the bed beside Rudik’s sister.
In the palm of his hand he holds out the lumps of sugar.
They’ll dissolve, she says.
No they won’t.
Put them away and get to bed.
Rudik puts a lump between his gum and his cheek, drops the rest of the sugar into a dish on the kitchen table. He looks across the cabin at his mother, who has pulled the blankets high and turned her face towards the wall. He remains motionless until he is sure that she is asleep, then leans into the wireless radio and steadily adjusts the dial along the yellow paneling: Warsaw, Luxembourg, Moscow, Prague, Kiev, Vilnius, Dresden, Minsk, Kishinev, Novosibirsk, Brussels, Leningrad, Rome, Warsaw, Stockholm, Kiev, Tallinn, Tbilisi, Belgrade, Prague, Tashkent, Sofia, Riga, Helsinki, Budapest.
He already knows that if he stays awake long enough he will be able to turn the white knob to Moscow where, at the stroke of midnight, he will hear Tchaikovsky.
* * *
Well well well! His father stands in the doorway shaking snow from his shoulders. A black mustache. A strong chin. The voice raked with cigarettes. He wears a pilotka with the brims down fore and aft, so he looks as if he is both coming and going. Two red medals pinned to his chest. A Marx pin on the collar of his tunic. His mother hurries to the doorway while Rudik huddles in the corner beside the fire. Looking at his father is like looking at a painting for the very first time—he sees the painting exists, sees the colors and the textures, sees the frame within which it is hung, yet he knows nothing about it. Four years at war and another eighteen months in the territories. His older sister, Tamara, has long since made lace prints and jars of berry juice as homecoming gifts. She thrusts them into her father’s arms, clings to him, kisses him. Rudik has nothing to give. Still his father comes across, knocks away the high-backed chair in his joy, picks Rudik up and holds him in the air, spins him twice, all wide cheeks, yellow teeth. What a big boy! Look at you! Look! And how old are you now? Seven? Seven! Almost eight! My! Look at you!
Rudik notices the large puddles his father’s boots have left at the door, goes to the threshold and stands in the wet prints. My little boy! His father has a number of smells to him, not bad smells, a strange mixture, like trains and trams and the smell you get after wiping chalk from the blackboard with your elbow.
They walk in the street along the rows of cabins and wooden houses, into the late afternoon. Icicles hang from lampposts. Snow coats the rows of gates. The frost-hardened mud crunches beneath their feet. Rudik wears his sister’s old overcoat. His father stares at the coat, says the boy should not be dressed in his sister’s castoffs, tells Rudik’s mother to switch the buttons from one side to the other. His mother pales and nods, says of course she will. They watch the wind rip the cardboard and sackcloth from the window frames of the wooden houses. Men drink vodka in an abandoned car. His father looks at the men, shakes his head in disgust, links his arm with Rudik’s mother. Whispering, they seem as if they have years of secrets to tell each other. A cat wanders lean-shouldered along a crooked fence. Rudik flings a couple of stones at it. His father catches his arm on the second throw, but then he laughs, puts his pilotka on Rudik’s head, and they chase each other down the street, hot breath steaming. After dinner—cabbage, potatoes and a special piece of meat Rudik has never seen before—he is held so tight to his father’s chest that his head crumples the papirosy in the tunic pocket.
They spread the cigarettes out on the table and straighten them, stuff the stray tobacco back into the thin paper tubes. His father tells him that this is the dream of men, to straighten crumpled things.
Isn’t that right?
Yes, Father.
Call me Papa.
Yes, Papa.
He listens to the curious highs and lows of his father’s voice, the way it sometimes sounds torn, like radio waves when he turns the dial. The wireless, the only thing they haven’t sold for food, sits above the fireplace, dark and mahogany. His father tunes in to a report from Berlin, and says: Listen to that! Listen! Music, now that’s music!
His mother’s fingers are long and thin, and they tap out a rhythm on the chair. Rudik doesn’t want to go to bed, so he sits on her lap. He watches his father, a foreign thing. His cheeks are hollow and his eyes are larger than in the photographs. He coughs, a deep cough, a man’s cough, and spits in the fireplace. Embers jump out onto the dirt floor, so his father reaches down and extinguishes them with his bare fingers.
Rudik tries it, but his thumb blisters immediately and his father says: That’s my boy.
Rudik rocks against his mother’s shoulder while he holds back the tears.
&
nbsp; That’s my boy, says his father again, disappearing out the door, coming back two minutes later, saying: If someone thinks there’s no evil in this world, they should visit that fucking outhouse in weather like this!
His mother looks up, says: Hamet.
What? says his father. He’s heard language before.
She swallows, smiles, says nothing.
My warrior’s heard language, haven’t you?
Rudik nods.
That night all four of them sleep in the bed together, Rudik’s head by his father’s armpit. Later he slips away and crosses to his mother, her smell, kefir and sweet potatoes. There is movement deep in the night, the bed slowly throbbing, his father whispering. Rudik turns very suddenly, jams his feet against the warmth of his mother. The rocking stops and he feels his mother’s fingers on his brow. Towards dawn he is woken again, but he doesn’t move and when his parents fall asleep, his father snoring, Rudik sees the light begin to finger the parting in the curtains. Quietly, he rises.
A handful of cabbage from the iron pot. The last of the milk, kept cold on the windowsill. His high-collared gray school tunic hangs on the wall. Dressing, he moves through the room on the balls of his feet.
His skates are hooked on the inside knob of the front door. He made them himself—filing down iron scraps from the refinery, embedding the metal into two pieces of thin wood, fashioning leather straps from scraps found behind the warehouses along the railway tracks.
He quietly unhooks the skates, closes the door, runs to the city lake, the straps joined around his neck, his gloves over the sharp steel so the blades don’t cut his face. Already the lake is dark with movement. Sunlight kindles the cold haze. Men in overcoats skate to work, hunched, smoking as they progress, solid figures against the skeletal trees. The women with shopping bags skate differently, taller somehow, erect. Rudik steps onto the ice and breaks against the traffic, going the wrong way in the flow, people laughing, dipping, cursing him. Hey, boy. You! Salmon!
He bends his knee, shortens the thrust of his arm, quickens his pace. The metal blades have become slightly loose in the wooden slats, but he has learned balance and counterbalance and, with a small flick of his ankle, he persuades the steel back into the wood. In the distance he can see the roof of the banya where he goes each Thursday with his mother and sister to bathe. There, his mother scrubs his back with birch twigs. He likes to lie on the wooden benches and receive the slap of the twigs. He finds patterns in the tiny pieces of birch leaf that dot the length of his body. His mother has told him that the baths will make him immune to sickness, and he has learned to endure the scalding steam longer than any other child his age.
He jumps, turns, lands, feels the skates catch once more.
On the ice many patterns are etched beneath him, and he can already tell by the marks who is a good skater and who isn’t. If he were to twirl for a long time in one place, he could get rid of everyone else, destroy their marks, be the only person ever to have skated there. A piece of litter catches beneath the blade, and he lifts his foot slightly, circles to crush it. Flecks of ice jump up from his boots. In the distance he hears his name called, the voice arriving from the edge of the lake, carried by the wind. Rudik! Rudik! Instead of turning, he leans on his right foot, and his whole body spins in the opposite direction to the shout. He knows not to swerve too hard, to lean just the right amount so he won’t fall. Then he is off against a head wind, small specks of litter still clinging to the blade. Rudik! Rudik! He leans over farther, his body concentrating itself in his shoulders. Beyond the lake, on the roads, he sees trucks, motorbikes, even men on bicycles—their tires fat to deal with the ice. He would love to hold on to the rear bumper of a car, to have it drag him along like the older boys, careful with their scarves so they don’t catch around the wheels, keeping an eye out for the brake lights so they can ready themselves to let go and travel faster than anything else on the road.
Ru-dik! Ru-dik!
He barrels in the direction of the road but is stopped by the sound of a whistle, a guard waving him away. He turns with one skate, the other foot high, makes a wide arc, and is forced around to the sight of his father, red-faced now, panting, on the bank, without skates. A wind rips along the lake, making the end of his father’s cigarette glow bright. How small he looks, the smoke trailing away from his mouth.
Rudik, you’re fast.
I didn’t hear you.
You didn’t hear me what?
I didn’t hear you say Rudik.
His father opens his mouth to say something, decides against it, says instead: I wanted to walk you to school. You should have waited for me.
Yes.
Next time, wait.
Yes.
Rudik puts his skates around his neck and they walk together, hands balled into their gloves. The road circles past a row of old houses to the schoolhouse. Above the school wall is an arched iron insignia where four crows sit. Father and son make a bet on which of the crows will leave first, but none do. They stand silent until the bell sounds, and then Rudik tugs away his hand.
Education, says his father suddenly, is the foundation of everything. Do you understand me?
Rudik nods.
The bell sounds once again, and the children in the yard run towards the building.
Well then, says his father.
Bye.
Bye.
Rudik steps away, but then returns and rises to his toes to plant a kiss on his father’s cheek. Hamet shifts his head slightly, and Rudik feels the edge of his mustache, wet with ice.
Rudik runs the gauntlet to the classroom. Blondie. Froggy. Girl face. Smaller than most, he is often beaten up. The boys push him into the wall, grip his testicles, squeeze them—pruning, they call it. They leave him alone only when a teacher turns the corner. Inside, flags on the wall, pennants, portraits. The wooden desks with their lifting lids. Goyanov the teacher on the platform, pasty-faced, calm. The early morning call. The Motherland is benevolent. The Motherland is strong. The Motherland will protect me. The rustling of boys and girls settling down, the scratch of chalk on the board, mathematics, his name called, five times fourteen, you, yes you, five times fourteen, yes you, sleepyhead! He gets the answer wrong, and Goyanov strikes his ruler hard on the desk. Three more wrong answers and he is slapped on the palm of his left hand. And then, before the right hand is hit, a puddle appears on the floor. The other children laugh when they realize that he has pissed himself, giggle behind their hands, trip him as he walks the aisle. Seventeen steps from the toilets to the top of the noisy stairs, where the mosque and the blue sky hang together in the window frame. He roots himself there, touches the front of his wet pants. Beyond the mosque stand the chimneys, bridges, low smokestacks of Ufa. The sky is broken by the horizon’s clean sharp shapes. Goyanov comes up behind him and takes him by the elbow back to the classroom, and he pisses himself a second time as he enters, all the children quiet now, hunched over their inkpots, dropping beads of black ink onto copybooks. He sits in his seat and waits, even through the lunch call, Our Leader is powerful, Our Leader is great, his stomach tight and knotted, until he is fully dry, and then he disappears to the bathroom once more, the mirror cracked, his face a thousand pieces, the rank piss around him, but it is quiet here, he leans into his reflection, the angle of the cracks distorting his face.
After school his father is waiting again, against the wall, coat collar turned up. Resting against his thigh is a muslin sack. In his other hand, a large bag with the bulge of a lantern. Hamet beckons him over, puts an arm around Rudik’s shoulder and they walk silently towards the tram.
By the time they reach the foothills of the city, the sky is already darkening. Birch trees stand in armies along the ice-covered road. The last of the red light filters between the branches. They cross a broad rockslide threaded with the footprints of wild animals and snow falls in clumps from the trees. A cold wind huddles them together. His father takes a jacket out of his bag and puts it around Rudik’s shoul
ders. They walk down a narrow gorge, and when they get to the small frozen mountain river at the bottom Rudik sees a line of fires along the ice where men are fishing in holes.
Trout, says his father. He slaps Rudik’s back. Now go get some firewood.
Rudik watches his father stake out an empty ice hole. He re-breaks the ice and uses two thin blocks of wood for makeshift chairs, covering each with a blanket. Hamet sets up the lantern between the chairs and pulls a fishing rod out from the muslin sack. He snaps it together, runs a line through the eyes of the rod, attaches some bait to the hook, anchors the apparatus, stands over the ice hole clapping his hands.
Rudik waits near the trees, two large branches tucked beneath one arm and a handful of twigs in the other.
His father looks up. We need more wood than that!
Nudging his way along the tree line, Rudik dips out of view, clears snow from a rock, sits down and waits. He has never fished before. How can there be trout in a river that is frozen solid? How can they swim through ice? He breathes warm air into the openings of his gloves. A single star claws its way into the sky. No moon. He thinks about the warmth of the bed at home, how his mother nestles the gray blankets to his chin, arcs her arm to snuggle him. He is sure animals await him in the trees beyond the river, badgers, bears, even wolves. He has heard stories of wolves carrying children away. Other stars rise in the sky as if on a series of pulleys. He hears a plane but can see no moving lights in the sky. Sniveling, he drops the wood at his feet, runs back across the frozen river.
I want to go home.