Colum McCann - Dancer

I read more Pasternak as she slept and then quoted it from memory when the candle burned all the way down. Her breath grew foul, and I leaned in against her, pulled the covers high. Her hair had loosened and it fell across her face and, with the little breeze from the open window, the strands crossed and recrossed her eyes.

Sentiment is foolish, of course, and I do not know whether I slept that night, but I do remember thinking a very simple thought — that despite all the years I was still in love with her, and at that moment it didn’t seem foolish at all to have loved her, or to go on loving her, even in all our wreckage.

The factory alarm blew shrill at six in the morning. Anna turned the pillow to find the cool side, and I was left with her back to me. When the light broke through the crack in the curtains, I cobbled together some tea and kasha that still tasted all right from the day before, a small miracle.

We sat at the kitchen table beside the bed, and Anna played Mozart low on the gramophone, so as not to disturb the old washerwoman in the room next door. Anna and I chatted about the boy and then after breakfast she dressed and packed her dance skirt and slippers. When she raised her head from her shopping basket, she looked to me as though she was stepping back into days that once had been. With the corps de ballet in Saint Petersburg long ago she was given a special carrier bag for her slippers — Diaghilev himself had passed the bags around — but she had lost it somewhere in our shuffles.

In the corridor our neighbors were already about. Anna waved to me and closed the door as if the movement were part of a furtive dance.

That evening she brought the boy home a second time. He ate his potato carefully at first, as if unbuttoning an unfamiliar coat. He had no idea what to do with the butter, and he watched Anna for guidance.

The room and us, we were used to each other, but with the boy there it seemed like a foreign place, not seventeen years lived in.

Anna dared some Stravinsky low on the gramophone, and the boy loosened a little, as if he were eating the music with the potato. He asked for an extra cup of milk but ate in silence for the rest of the dinner. Looking over at Anna, I was put in mind of a crow calling out to another crow over the head of a sparrow.

He was pale and narrow-shouldered, with a face both cheeky and angelic at the same time. His eyes were a mixture of green and blue, and they darted around the room, never resting long enough, it seemed, to truly take stock. He ate ferociously, yet he sat straight-backed in the chair. Anna had already drummed into him the importance of posture. She said to me that he had almost immediately mastered the five positions, that he showed a natural turnout, but still he was a little uncouth and forced. Aren’t you? she said.

He held the fork at his mouth and smiled.

Anna told him he was to come to the school gymnasium every day except Sunday, and he was to tell his parents he needed at least two pairs of slippers and two sets of tights.

He paled and asked for another cup of milk.

We heard our washerwoman neighbor fumbling next door. Anna turned the gramophone a little lower, and we made the three short steps to the couch. The boy did not sit between us but wandered instead up and down the length of bookcases, touching the spines of the books, amazed that they were crammed four deep.

At seven o’clock he wiped his hand across his runny nose, said good-bye. When we opened the window to look out he was already running down the street, jumping over the ruts in the road.

Eleven years old, said Anna, imagine that.

We committed ourselves to the gray night with Pasternak once more. Anna fell asleep above the covers, breathing a sadness through her nostrils. I shaved — an old habit from the camps which used to allow me an extra moment in the mornings before the chill — and then carted my insomnia to the window, stars being infinitely more interesting than ceilings. It had begun to rain and the water funneled over the roof and sluiced down the gutter pipe, giving its acoustics to the city. Her breathing became so heavy it sang in my ears, and every now and then her body clenched itself as if dreaming of pain, but she woke cheerily, shifted herself into her housedress.

Sunday was our day to clean.

A few weeks before we had found silverfish in our photo album, moving through our tentative and uncertain smiles. All my military pictures had been destroyed long before, but we still had one or two others gnawed through at our feet — our wedding, Anna standing outside the Maryinsky, the two of us standing by a combine harvester in Georgia of all places.

Anna left the gray silverfish to me, and I squeezed them between my fingers. Over the years the silverfish had become fat with us, photos taken mostly in Saint Petersburg and mostly in sunlight for some strange reason. On the back of the photos we had scribbled little notes for ourselves, but we had written Leningrad, just in case.

There were some more recent photos from Ufa, but in their bitter little ironies the silverfish had spared them.

In the afternoon, after a merciful nap, I found Anna behind the changing screen at the foot of the bed, standing on the tips of her toes, wearing the outfit of her last dance, thirty-three years ago. It was a long, pale tutu, and she looked a bit like a footnote to her past. Embarrassed, she began to cry, then changed out of the costume. Her breasts swung, small, to her rib cage.

Once we had filled each other with desire, not remembrance.

She dressed and took my hat from the rack, her signal for us to go. I limped out, along the corridor, into the day, using my cane. The sun was strong and high, although the streets were still damp. The poplars swayed in a light breeze, and it felt quite fine to be alive even with the oil refinery dust still heavy in the air. At the bottom of the hill we stopped at the bakery, but for some reason the electricity had been turned off during the day and for the first time in weeks we weren’t greeted by the smell. We stood by the air vent to catch any remnant, but there was none so we walked on.

Even the mad war veteran at the bottom of Zentsov wasn’t around, so the day had acquired an unlived-in quality.

By the lake families sat with picnics. Drunks talked to their bottles. A kvass vendor busied herself at her stall. At the bandstand, a folk group struck up in hideous disharmony. Nothing in this world ever approaches perfection — except perhaps a fine cigar, which I had not had in many years. The thought of it made me wince with longing.

Anna was worried about my wheezing and tried to insist that we sit down on a park bench, but surely there could be no sadder or more ridiculous sight, old exiles on park benches, so we pressed on, down the streets by Lenin Park, through the archway, towards the Opera House.

He was there, of course, as if in some divine comedy, standing on the steps of the Opera House. He was wearing a shirt that was obviously a castoff and the rear of his pants was streaked with mud like any boy’s. The back seams of his shoes were split, and the angle of his feet — in third position — accentuated the split. He held the position for as long as we held ours and, when we finally stepped forward to greet him, he acted as if the encounter was perfectly natural.

He bowed to Anna and nodded to me.

I am honored to see you again, he said.

There were bruises above his left eye, but I didn’t ask, too accustomed to the miseries of beatings and the small silences we bear with them.

Anna took him by the elbow and led him up the steps. She dug her pass out from her handbag, and the guard gave a gruff shake of the head. It was only then that Anna remembered me, and she came bounding down the steps to help.