Dancing on Thin Ice

by Arkady Polishchuk

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come in, Petrovich!” Nastya called, raising her voice, “We have a guest—the correspondent of the blind magazine.”

  In the doorway stood a broad-shouldered man in a faded soldier’s field shirt carelessly tucked into his pants. “Yes, truly an eyeless magazine,” he said. “They just write about how our plans are being over-fulfilled and what songs we sing.”

  “Maybe I’ll write about how your friends raise their children,” I said.

  “Stop looking at my hand!” He shook his tousled hair. “I was holding a machine gun when a German shot off all my fingers except the thumb. As you see, a dozen fragments landed on my mug too. Oh boy, I was a good-looking youth! Big eyes. The girls couldn’t keep from looking at me.”

  “Petrovich is a good man, quiet,” said Nastya. “Only, like today, we’re at times tipsy.”

  “Because money jingles in my pocket, especially on Victory and October Revolution Days. I put my orders and medals on this tunic and walk, begging from car to car on the Moscow-bound train.” He turned his face covered with small scars toward his hostess. “Who brings candies from Moscow for your child every time?”

  “You do,” said the little fellow.

  “Have you ever been to Moscow?” I asked him.

  The boy looked at his mother.

  “I want to take him there,” said the soldier, “but she’s afraid that I’ll get drunk there and Gypsies will steal the boy.”

  The mother’s voice faltered. “Have you seen many Muscovites who help the blind to cross the street?”

  The soldier said, “The war has made us all cruel.”

  And Comrade Stalin has made us kindhearted, I thought bitterly, but said, “The war ended almost fourteen years ago.”

  “No,” Petrovich said firmly. “We’re still at war. I listen to the radio every day.”

  The woman said, “Petrovich knows everything about politics.”

  Petrovich turned to her. “How can we not speak about this damned war? America and Germany are about to attack us. The border is long, and we have enemies on all sides. That’s why all of our money is spent on defense.”

  The host put his arm around his wife. “That’s why your military pension is so small?”

  He sounded ironic.

  “Stalin made a big mistake, that he didn’t take the whole of Germany,” Petrovich said, completing his review of the international situation.

  As I was departing, the kid asked, “Why did you come to us?”

  “I wanted to get acquainted with your parents; they are true heroes.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “And they love you very much.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Learn well.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m learning how to read. I will read books for them.”

  Climbing to the next floor, I started panicking. Nahl had played a dirty trick. I was in a leper colony. There was nothing I could write about them. I was frantically looking for a way to say at least half-truths about their everyday concerns instead of reporting on the contribution of the blind to our common cause of building socialism.

  I kept climbing the smelly stairs, up and up, and realized it only when I was already on the top, on the fifth floor. I leaned my damp forehead against a wall of indeterminate color and spoke to myself, “It’s easier to break this wall with this stupid head than to find a way out of this impasse. If we glorify the wounded and dying soldiers, why couldn’t I sing of the disabled’s daily fight for the right to stay alive? This fight blows up human flesh just like the war.”

  A cheerful fellow of my age opened the door. “I heard you talking with someone about the war,” he said. “Looking for some war veteran?”

  “What a relief!” I said. “Probably, I was looking for you.”

  His unseeing eyes were focused directly at me. He was healthy and recently married, and his heavily pregnant wife was at the factory and threatened to deliver the baby right on the shop floor.

  “Did you choose your wife for her voice?” I asked brazenly.

  “I touched her.”

  “And you could not stop touching anymore?”

  “Uh—huh. I touched her . . . breast.”

  “And she?”

  “She said that I wasn’t shy.”

  “And you?”

  “I said, ‘If I were not bashful, my hand wouldn’t have moved from your body as quickly as if it hit a burner.’”

  “And she?”

  “She laughed.”

  “And you?”

  “I said, “My fingers are still burning …’” He furrowed his brow. “Are you going to write about this?”

  “I’d love to, but a prudish censor would ban it.”

  “Do we have censors?”

  “Yes. They guard our state secrets. Our enemies shouldn’t know that Russian women have breasts. What do you do for fun?”

  “Sing in a choir. Together. I hope it’s not a state secret.”

  “Let’s ask a censor.”

  We two authentic men enjoyed each other’s company.

  “Why are so many blind people ill?” was my last question.

  “From poverty,” was his lightning-fast response.

  On the way home, I muttered angrily under my breath, “They have nothing. No guide dogs, which are busy guarding our borders. A city of the blind in the country of the eyeless. Fred was right—get a stagehand position and, in the midst of this painted plywood universe, forget about the real world.”

  ABOUT THREE MONTHS LATER, on my way toward an assignment in the huge Siberian city of Novosibirsk, I felt lucky. This time my job seemed easier for a change and even entertaining—to cover preparations for a nationwide show of blind amateurs. I kept looking from my sleeper carriage at the forests and on the third day clearly realized why I was so pleased that the trees had already dropped their leaves. The lush fall in the drab “city of the blind” was still on my mind. But Rusinovo was quickly forgotten when I stepped on the concrete railroad platform of Novosibirsk. In a minute I felt like one of Napoleon’s soldiers dying in a Russian snowdrift. I had left my felt winter boots, my valenki, at home, and my toes quickly informed me why this third most populous city in the Russian Federation was the capital of Siberia. My leather boots with warm lining, a gift of my parents for work in the fields and forests of Kostroma, had served me faithfully for two years of my extensive travels. But even with woolen socks, they were not able to withstand the murderous Siberian frost.

  Someone had to meet me on the platform, but the damn someone was late, and to save my life from negative-forty-degree temperatures, I decided I’d run inside an unheated station building and within a couple of minutes jump back onto the platform. In the station, a girl in a downy shawl which covered her eyebrows and the mouth, came up to me from behind and said, “Forgive me for being late, Comrade Polishchuk!”

  “How did you manage to recognize me from the back?” I asked.

  She said, “You are the only person in this town with no valenki.”

  Life at the club was in full swing. The city was home to a large community of the blind, with its own amateur theater. Everyone was convinced that the Moscow correspondent would glorify creative Novosibirsk across the country and that my assessment would affect the selection of participants for the nationwide show of the amateur blind. After the play rehearsal, all were eager to hear my opinion. I was determined to hide it. As in any theater, in the struggle for better roles all means were acceptable—from intrigue to attempts to make a drunkard out of the unstable artistic director. One girl whispered in my ear, “It’s high time for this old cow to stop playing Juliet, and to play her grandmother instead.”

  After that we listened to poets, singers and musicians, among them two good accordionists. It was late, and the whimsical frosty patterns were no longer visible on the blackened windows. The cold was gathering force, and all but the tipsy artistic director hurried home.
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  “Want to see the seventh wonder of the world?” came a voice behind me, hoarse from the cold air.

  I turned around. A man in his forties and a boy, both in sheepskin coats, stood next to me. The kid looked not so much at me as at my shiny boots. On his father’s right shoulder hung an instrument in a wide black case which could be an accordion or its close relative, the Russian bayan. The empty left sleeve of his coat was tucked in his pocket.

  “Sure,” I said, and glanced with concern at the director sitting next to me, already dozing off.

  “Quick, my boy! Prepare the stage!” ordered the father.

  They dropped their gloves, coats, and winter caps with earflaps on a bench behind us and headed to the stage. The man was wearing an untucked Russian shirt of ancient style with a collar that fastened at the side. It was red, with embroidery on the edge of the flap, and belted with a narrow Circassian strap.

  I shouted, “Wow!” and the musician waved to me and yelled, “My wife sewed it from a Soviet flag!”

  I expressed my amazement again.

  The boy helped his dad climb the stairs to the stage and walked him behind the curtain. A minute later the son appeared again, apparently in anticipation of a command from his father.

  Finally a loud order “Open up!” was given, and the curtain began to move slowly apart. First, I heard a heavy rhythmic stamping of felt boots, which meant dance. By that time the director’s chin had firmly come to rest on his chest. Then a merry raucous singing started which soon was joined by the heartbreaking sounds of a bayan. After the audience was electrified, the curtain fully opened, and I saw the glorious performer. At first glance, his instrument looked like a hybrid of a large manual harmonica and a push-button accordion popular in the Russian countryside. However, the left keyboard was not there. Instead, there was just a smooth surface. All the vertical rows of bass buttons had been moved to the right side of the instrument, where both keyboards were somehow lumped together. The musician used his left stump only to stretch the bayan as wide as the bellows would allow, even a bit wider. In response it roared like a wounded Siberian bear. He sang, or perhaps I should say shouted, two folk songs and not very funny limericks. When he went from raucous baritone to effeminate squealing, the artistic director was already sleeping serenely.

  It was all the same to me how well or poorly this strong-willed man played and sang. It was amazing!

  After coming down from the stage, he said, “The secret of the bayan is that the listeners cannot weep. You can only have fun, dance and sing bawdy ditties with it.”

  His wise observation has been supported by Russian drug addicts of this century who call the syringe used for injecting drugs, the “bayan”.

  I asked why he called himself only the seventh wonder of the world, not, at least, the third one. His upper eyelids dropped and he said, “From modesty. People don’t know, but there is also an eighth wonder of the world.”

  I asked, “Who? Comrade Stalin?”

  He said firmly, “No. In Vologda.”

  “I was in that city and didn’t find anything special,” I said.

  “Now, now. There is another war veteran over there, a one-armed bayan virtuoso. Like me.”

  The man certainly did not know a thing about the seven remarkable structures of classical antiquity.

  We were leaving the club, treading carefully on the plank floor so as not to wake the snoring artistic director. The musician noticed, “Good music will never wake a drunken man, but steps, even cautious ones, can.”

  “Dad,” his kid said on the threshold of the club, “we need the same general’s boots as this friend has. They can stomp louder.”

  In the frozen bus on the way to the hotel, I looked at my knee-high boots and recalled the one-armed cobbler who sewed them. When I was fifteen, I saw him for the first time through the iron bars covering two window wells. The shoemaker raised a hammer to his mouth, disengaged the index finger and the thumb to take one of the tiny nails gripped between his lips, pressed it with the stump right to a graceful heel, and with one stroke drove the baby into it up to the very head. Meanwhile his stump cleverly held the shoe to a metal stand turning it around in all directions. I watched as he pressed to his chest dummies of different forms with leather and carved out of it a future shoe.

  I walked past those windows barely protruding above ground quite often, and he looked up and smiled at the sight of me, with silvery nail-heads sticking out of his clenched lips. The shoemaker did not know that he also was one of the wonders of this Russian post-war world.

  In my report I did not mention the wonders of the world but wrote about the kids of the blind who grew up caring for their parents.

  WITHIN ONE YEAR, I had traveled extensively, and my reports appeared in every issue of the magazine. My offers to use pseudonyms were rejected. In the summer of 1959, my last assignment brought me to Chelyabinsk, the city on the mountainous border of Europe and Asia. On the warm July day of my arrival, the Chelyabinsk Hotel’s manageress in a lacy blouse confided to me some state secrets. Two of them had been known to the whole country since the war. The natives called their Southern Ural city Tankograd, the City of Tanks; it also could be called the Katyusha-Town, after the truck-mounted missile launchers.

  The third secret still was not known to the one million of its residents. The chatty manageress solemnly warned that I would have to leave as soon as a classified message came from Moscow about the upcoming arrival of a foreign dignitary. I was the lucky last traveler allowed to stay in this freshly painted hotel, surrounded by a fragrant circle of brand-new asphalt. The four stories above us had been already sealed and guarded for several days.

  I said, “It’s probably the American vice-president, Richard Nixon, with a huge entourage. They say he offended Khrushchev on July 24, at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow.”

  She was impressed by my knowledge of state secrets and asked, “Did he call Nikita Sergeevich some bad names?”

  I reassured her that Khrushchev knew far more bad words than the completely out of touch U.S. vice-president.

  “Why did Nikita Sergeevich go to such a foolish exhibition? America is capable of employing any provocation,” she said.

  “To promote world peace,” I said. “The whole of Moscow was trying to get there. People stood in line for hours to have a look at it all. Indeed, this had never happened before.”

  The stunning news of Nixon’s upcoming arrival to Chelyabinsk was known only to the Party apparatus, to the KGB personnel, and, thanks to me, from now on, to the manageress of the best local hotel, and to her employees, friends and acquaintances. She wanted to show me the luxury accommodations with new Finnish furniture “brought from Moscow” for the picky overseas visitors and said to a guard in a black suit, “Let the Moscow correspondent have a look at the paintings of our artists in this corridor.”

  He looked at me keenly. “No one should go near the pictures.”

  This smart-ass required my favorite shtick, and I used it. “One doesn’t need to look at these local paintings to know what’s depicted there.”

  He screwed up one eye. “What?”

  To prolong the suspense, I said, “The foreign bastards couldn’t swipe them from their rooms, even if they wanted to.”

  When a nervous expectation lit up his face, I said, “Khrushchev’s portrait; happy steelmakers around an open hearth furnace; beautiful collective farmers in long skirts and sturdy high boots, maybe with red carnations in their hair; Chelyabinsk’s famous tractors with red flags; a military parade in Red Square, and the Ural Mountains in different seasons, all painted with photographic precision.”

  The manageress was impressed again.

  “It’s not entirely accurate,” said the guardian of art, and he wouldn’t let us in the hallway.

  She said, “Don’t worry, we don’t have bad paintings here. All of them were selected by the Regional Party Committee.”

  In the morning she knocked on my
door and whispered, “He isn’t coming.”

  I asked, “Could I move upstairs? Fresh asphalt smells a bit.”

  “No. It will take some time to remove the new furniture, crystal vases, carpets, silver, and all that from all four floors.”

  “And the paintings?”

  “Yes, how do you know? You’re so sharp. They ordered me not to touch them.”

  “The KGB art collectors will do this sophisticated job themselves.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry, I’ve got to run,” I said. “Could we have a rendezvous tonight at your restaurant?”

  “What a romantic French word!”

  “Which one?” I asked.

  She laughed, raising her shoulders and pressing her elbows to her sides and her palms to her thighs like a child who was all of a sudden tickled. “I’ll tell you why we shouldn’t have invited this warmonger, what’s his name, Nixon.”

  The workshop on the edge of the town looked from a distance like a long stable inappropriately set amid village houses. On the way from the bus stop, the half-blind chairman of the regional branch of the All-Russian Society for the Blind was carefully checking with his lofty stick the downhill cobblestone road that had long yearned for repair.

  “This shed is probably much older than me,” he said to maintain a conversation.

  “The first rope was produced by monkeys,” I said, endorsing his point of view. “It was called liana.”

  He tactfully corrected me: “Yes, manufacturing of ropes is likely older than the production of wheels.”

  I also corrected my faux pas. “It’ll be necessary for centuries to come.”

  “Yes, we’ve made the right choice,” observed my companion.

  The door and small windows of the low structure were wide open. On a bench near the door two blind workers smoked cigarettes rolled from newspaper. I hadn’t seen such do-it-yourself cigarettes since my childhood during the war. Large dust particles stuck to their hair, shoulders, and unshaven faces.