Dancer

by Colum McCann

  I looked at Rudi tossing on my couch, thinking that he was the secret now joining them together. And yet I didn’t feel jealous. I suppose one finally learns, after much searching, that we really only belong to ourselves.

  I was still awake when the white night integrated itself into the morning. My deadlines for the Institute of Translation still gnawed at me, three Spanish sestinas so complicated that I doubted I could arbitrate their elegance. After breakfast I took a tram and carted my self-pity to the countryside, to a place I had gone since I was a child. There was a peculiar spot where the river seemed to bend itself against the land—it was a trick of the eye but the water seemed to go uphill. A grassy bank was filled with wildflowers and a trio of willow trees bent down to the river. I have always liked the tactile feel of standing, fully clothed, in running water. I went in up to my thighs, then lay on the riverbank and let the sun dry me off. I shaped one of the poems and set it in order, the six incanted words working haphazardly for me: faithful, dead, candle, silence, nighthawk, and radiance. When I had achieved a modicum of success, I closed my notebooks and swam in my underwear.

  In truth I was still attractive then, having taken on my mother’s body, her dark hair, her fair skin, my father’s pale eyes.

  I stayed by the river until late and when I arrived home my friends were already gathered around the table by the window, chatting seriously in the guarded language we shared. This was the normal routine—Monday nights were generally spent in the company of scientists and linguists I’d been friendly with since university. The evenings weren’t so much a salon—the word disturbs me, reeking as it does of the unmistakeably bourgeois—more a simple relief, all cigarettes and vodka, philosophy, invective and half words. Larissa was a professor of French. Sergei, a botanist. Nadia, a translator. Petr dabbled in the philosophy of science, ranting about Heisenberg and the inherent uncertainty of our lives—he was the sort of red-faced bore who could sometimes shore up an evening. I was vaguely in love with another Iosif, a tall blond-haired linguist who, when he got drunk, would switch to Greek. My husband didn’t participate at all, staying late most nights at his university office.

  I entered the room quietly and watched a small drama unfolding at the table. Rudi was listening to the conversation, chin on his hand, somewhat taken aback, as if he’d just been presented with a great amount of words to swallow. The discussion centered on a new play reviewed in Pravda to great acclaim for its portrayal of striking workers in pre-Revolutionary Hungary. The talk spun on the phrase “linguistic dualism,” a term that had occurred quite often in recent reviews, though its meaning seemed nebulous to everyone but Petr. I pulled up a chair and joined the group. Rudi had opened a bottle of my husband’s vodka and had poured for everyone at the table, including a glass for himself. He looked close to being drunk. At one stage he leaned and touched my hand and said: Great!

  When the evening finished he spilled out into the night with my friends and came home three hours later—Iosif had already returned and gone to sleep—saying, Leningrad Leningrad Leningrad!

  He started dancing and looked as if he was checking the span of his wings. I let him be, moving around him to clean the dishes. Before I went to bed he shouted at the top of his voice: Thank you, Yulia Sergeevna!

  It was the first time I ever remembered being called after my father, since I had always used the patronymic of my grandfather. I climbed beneath the covers and turned away from Iosif, my heart beating. My father’s visage swam in front of my eyes and, in my fitful sleep, an idea for the last line of the sestina resurfaced. The next morning the other two sestinas came to life so effortlessly that their underlying politics—the poet was a Marxist from Bilbao—seemed a significant accident. I put them in an envelope and brought them to the institute, where money was awaiting me. I bought some Turkish coffee and returned home, where Rudi was waiting, despondent. His first day of dancing had not gone well. He drank three coffees and went outside to the courtyard—from above, looking down, I watched him practice around the ironwork fencing.

  All that week Rudi auditioned at the school and at night he wandered the city, sometimes coming back as late as three in the morning—it was white nights after all, nobody slept—talking about the beautiful palaces, or a vendor he had met outside the Kirov, or a guard who had swung a suspicious eye on him on Liteiny Prospect. I tried to warn him, but he shrugged me off.

  I’m a country bumpkin, he said. They’re not interested in me.

  There was something unusual in the clipped way he talked, a curious cocktail of rural arrogance and sophisticated doubt.

  At the very end of the week I was hanging laundry in the communal kitchen when I heard my name being called from below. Yulia! I looked out the small window to see him in the rear courtyard, perched high on the ironwork fence, balanced precariously.

  I got it! he shouted. I’m in! I’m in!

  He jumped from the fence and landed in a puddle and ran towards the stairwell.

  Clean your shoes! I shouted down.

  He grinned and wiped his shoes with the cuff of his shirt, ran up the stairs to hug me.

  I found out later that he had talked his way into the Leningrad Choreographic as much as he had danced. His level was still just high average, but they liked his fire and intuition. He was much older than most students, but the birth rate had dropped so significantly during the war that they were willing to audition dancers his age, even give them scholarships. He was to stay in a dorm with mostly eleven- and twelve-year-olds, which horrified him, and he pleaded with me to let him come along to my Monday evening gatherings. When I said yes, he took my hand and kissed it—he was, it seemed, already learning Leningrad.

  After two weeks he had packed his case and was gone to the school dorms.

  Iosif made love to me the evening Rudi left, and afterwards he padded across to the couch where he lit a cigarette and said, without turning in my direction: He’s a little shit, isn’t he?

  All at once it felt as if my mother and father were surrounding me, and I turned to the pillow, said nothing.

  It was almost three months before Rudi arrived back. He strolled in with RosaMaria, a girl from Chile. She was the sort of beauty who took the oxygen from the air. She wasn’t consumed by her own attractiveness but managed instead to carry it like an afterthought. Her father was the editor of a newspaper in Santiago, and she was at the Leningrad Choreographic to learn dance. Rudi, perhaps by virtue of being with her, looked different already. He was wearing a long army coat and boots to his knees, and his hair had grown longer.

  RosaMaria laid a guitar case in the corner and took a seat in the background while Rudi sat at the table, listening, hunched over a small glass of vodka. Larissa, Petr, Sergei, Nadia and I were all quite drunk and deep into an interminable debate about Heidegger, who had suggested that life becomes authentic when lived in the presence of death. For me the debate seemed to relate ultimately to our lives under Stalin, but I also couldn’t help thinking of my father, who had lived his life in the shadow not only of his own death but of his former history too. I flicked a look at Rudi. He yawned and filled his glass again with a sort of theater, holding the bottle high in the air, so there was a deep splash against the side of the glass.

  Petr turned and said: So then, you, young man, what do you think is authentic and inauthentic?

  Rudi slurped his vodka. Petr pulled the bottle away and held it close to his chest. Around the table there was a quick blur of laughter. It was a delightful little showdown between a tired middle-aged man and a boy. I figured that Rudi would never be able to handle Petr, but he picked up two spoons, rose quickly, pushed his way past the rubber plants to the door, beckoned us all to follow. The simple strangeness of his action silenced us, although RosaMaria smiled as if she knew what was in store.

  Rudi made his way down the corridor to the bathroom and sat down in the empty bathtub.

  This, he said, is authentic.

  He began to bash the spoons against the
porcelain, reaching different notes where the bath curved, with longer, hollower notes at the base of the tub, higher notes where the spoons met the rim. The taps rang high metallic twangs, and then he reached to hit the spoons against the wall. He held his face perfectly serious, banging out a series of sounds that had no form or rhythm at all. It was pure circus.

  Johann Sebastian Bach! he said.

  He stopped and we launched into a drunken round of applause. Petr was momentarily shell-shocked but rescued himself admirably—instead of stalking away, he went to the bathtub, bottle in hand, poured a long measure of vodka down Rudi’s throat.

  Together they finished the bottle, and then Petr held it above Rudi’s head and said: May you have as many troubles as there are drops left in this bottle.

  I do not wish to get wet, laughed Rudi.

  The evening grew wilder and drunker. We ate bread with horseradish sauce—it was all we could find—until a friend of Petr’s arrived with three hard-boiled eggs to share. RosaMaria took her guitar from its case and sang Spanish songs in a dialect I didn’t entirely recognize. Rudi went around the room with a metal saucepan, and he hammered on the woodwork, the tiles, the floor, the sink, until the neighbors began complaining.

  Just at that moment Iosif came home. I met him at the door, shouted: Let’s dance! He shoved me away and I slammed into the wall. The room went silent.

  Iosif yelled: Get the fuck out of here! Everyone! Get the fuck out!

  My friends looked at me and began to stub out their cigarettes in the ashtrays in slow motion, not quite sure what to do. Out! shouted Iosif. He grabbed Rudi by the collar and dragged him into the corridor. Rudi was astounded, his eyes wide. But RosaMaria stood in front of my husband and—simply by keeping her eyes locked on his—she made him stare at the floor. Finally Iosif went downstairs to the courtyard, to smoke, chagrined.

  The night began again. I was aware that something extraordinary had just happened, that RosaMaria had shifted a small axis in my life, if only temporarily, and I gave her a silent inner curtsy.

  She returned the next evening, accompanied by Rudi. He made himself immediately at home, talking animatedly about a myth he had read in his world literature class that day. It had to do with the Indian god, Shiva, who had danced within a circle of fire. He and RosaMaria were arguing about whether the act of dance was one of construction or destruction, whether if by dancing you made a work of art or you broke it down. Rudi maintained that you built a dance from the bottom up, while RosaMaria believed that the dance was there to be torn apart, that each move was an entry into the dance until it lay all around in separate, splendid parts. I watched them, not so much with regret but as a mirror unto myself and Iosif ten years previously, remembering how we once had talked of physics and language in the same dark and concentrated manner. They held court together until Larissa came over and the talk veered off into science, the theory of uncertainty again, which clearly annoyed the young dancers.

  When Iosif returned he actually sat at the table with everyone, and didn’t say a word, all polite resignation. He looked closely at RosaMaria, her dark hair, her wide smile, but then he pulled a chair next to me, even lit my cigarette. Iosif pronounced Chile to be his favorite country even though he had never been, and I sat pondering how rich I would be if every piece of horseshit that came from my husband’s mouth could be turned into a sliver of gold.

  RosaMaria began visiting more and more, even without Rudi. I was aware that she was probably being watched, given that she was a foreigner. There was an intermittent clicking on my telephone. We turned the music loud in case the place was bugged, but really there was nothing extraordinary about our conversations anyway. She told me about Santiago, for which she was dreadfully homesick. I had, years before, translated some Chilean poetry and had imagined doorways, lean dogs, vendors of saints, but the country she talked of was all cafés, jazz clubs, long cigarettes. She spoke as if there were a tambourine in her throat. She loved dancing for the act of it rather than the art and so she was miserable at the school, where she felt that a rigidity was being forced into her. She had to wear skirts all the time and said that she had brought a pair of tight orange pants from Santiago—the notion of it made me laugh—and she was itching to wear them just once. The only person who kept her sane, she said, was Rudi, simply because he allowed himself to be Rudi. He was in constant trouble in school, especially with Shelkov, the school director. He refused to cut his hair, fought in rehearsals, put pepper in the dance belts of rivals. By all accounts he excelled in the classes he liked—literature, history of art, music—but he detested the sciences and anything else that didn’t suit his rhythm. He had stolen stage makeup, eyeshadow and a glaring rouge, and had worn it around his dorm. She said he had no respect for the other dancers but he adored his teacher, Aleksandr Pushkin, who had taken him under his tutelage. RosaMaria mentioned rumors that others had seen Rudi late at night, walking near Ekaterina Square, where perverted men were rumored to meet, a notion that didn’t seem to bother her, which surprised me, since it had seemed they were wearing each other like outfits.

  We’re not in love, she told me one afternoon.

  You’re not?

  She raised her eyebrows, making me feel like I was twenty years old, not her.

  Of course not, she said.

  With RosaMaria I began to feel that I had once again opened myself to the world. We brewed coffee late into the night. She tutored me in Chilean dialects and wrote out old ballads, which I translated—she knew more love songs than anyone I’d ever met. Through her connections I managed to get my hands on a new gramophone. I read whatever I could find, Gorky, Pushkin, Lermentov, Mayakovsky, Mao, a Theodore Dreiser novel, Mitchel Wilson, Dante’s Inferno, Chekhov, even reread Marx, of whom I was very fond. I took on some more work with the institute and went on long walks with RosaMaria.

  Every few months I sent my traditional package to my parents, including a letter to tell them that Rudi was doing just fine, progressing in his classes, that he had found a teacher who understood him.

  My father replied, in the simple code we used, that the fruitcake hadn’t nearly as many raisins as usual, meaning of course that the letter was scant. He said that Ufa was gray under gray under yet more gray, and that he and my mother would desperately like to make a trip away from the city.

  He wondered if I could pull any strings—Saint Petersburg, he wrote, had always been famous for its puppetry.

  * * *

  You see him on Rossi Street with his boots high on his calves and his long red scarf trailing the ground behind him; you see him with his collar turned up, his hands deep in his pockets, his shoes tipped with metal so that they raise a spark; you see how he stands in the canteen line with his head slightly angled as if he is dealing with a wound; you see him receive an extra ladle of soup from the canteen woman with the black hairnet; you see him lean over the counter and touch her hand, whispering, making her laugh; you see, when he lifts the flap of his shirt to clean his spoon, that his stomach has flattened and tightened; you see him eat quickly and wipe a rough hand across his mouth; you see the canteen woman watching him as if she has found her own long-lost son.

  You see him in the attic studio, in the morning light, earlier than anyone else, intuiting a move that has taken you three days to learn; you see him jostling in the corridors wearing your brand-new leggings and when you confront him he says, Screw a horse; you see him without his modesty shorts; you see him preening; you see him elbowing forward to front and center, where he can properly look in the mirror; you see him counting impatiently as he watches others moving through their combinations; you see him drop a partner because she is a shade too slow and he doesn’t help her up, though she is crying and her wrist might be sprained, and he goes to the high window to yell Fuck! out over Theater Street; you see him through the winter and the summer and each time he appears larger to you and you are at a loss to explain what is happening.

  You see him dye his white slipper
s black and sew on buttons so that they look different to everybody else’s; you see him take your dance belt, but you don’t say a word until he returns it filthy, and you ask him to wash it but he tells you to go take a shit and put your face in it; you see him the next day and tell him you want the belt washed and he says, You miserable Jewboy; you see him walk away chuckling; you see him when he passes you on the street without even moving his eyes in your direction and you think maybe he is a little mad or lonely or lost, and then suddenly he is dashing across the avenue towards the Chilean girl, who has opened her arms to him, and within seconds they are running along the street together; you see them go, you feel empty, foiled, until you decide you will open up to him, you will become his friend, and so you join him in the canteen but he says he is busy, he has something important to do, and immediately goes to the woman behind the counter; you see him chat and laugh with her and you sit there glaring, wanting to ask him if he ever met anyone he likes better than himself, but you already know the answer so you do not ask.

  You see him taken under Aleksandr Pushkin’s wing; you see him reading constantly because Pushkin has told him that to be a great dancer he must know the great stories and so, in the courtyard, he bends over Gogol, Joyce, Dostoyevsky; you see him curl into the pages and you think that he has somehow become part of the book, and you think that whenever you read that book in the future you will be reading him.

  You see him and ignore him but somehow begin to think of him even more; you see him tear a ligament and you delight in the news but then you watch him dance and you wonder if your hatred helped heal his ankle; you see him before class practice Kitri’s variation, his feet in half high-pointe, everyone staring in amazement, he is dancing a woman’s role and even the girls wait around to watch; you see him studying the original Petipas, getting to know them inside out so he can show you any combination with his hands, the hands themselves a complicated ballet, tough and fluid; you see him respond to Pushkin with silence and respect, you even hear him call Pushkin by the familiar name of Sasha; you see him haul the other students short when they miss a step and you see the way he accepts their stares, their shouts, their small hatreds; you see him stride into the office and call the director a fool and you see him step away from the outrage smiling; later you see him weeping uncontrollably for he is sure he will be sent home and later again you see him doing a handstand outside the director’s office, an upside-down grin on his face, until Pushkin emerges, having saved him once again from expulsion.