Colum McCann - Dancer

If I were eleven years old I’d be jealous, I said.

Oh you.

Inside the Opera House the carpenters were at work on a set for The Red Poppy, which had been renamed The Red Flower, and I thought to myself, Why not rename everything, donate to it all its proper inconsequence?

The scaffold was up, and my old friend Albert Tikhonov — indeed a quiet one — was on his stilts as usual, painting the backdrop. He was covered foot to hair in many different paints. He hailed me from on high, and I waved back up. Below him a young woman in a blue uniform was welding a leg onto a broken metal chair. The stage seemed ablaze with the sparks from the welding gun. I sat four rows from the rear and watched the drama, significantly more interesting, I’m sure, than any Red Flower, rose or poppy or michaelma.

Anna took the boy backstage, and when they reemerged after an hour he was carrying two sets of slippers, a dance belt and four sets of tights. He was ecstatic, begging Anna for the chance just to stand on the stage, but there was too much going on there, so she invited him to try out his positions in the aisles instead. He put on the new slippers, which were too big for him. Anna removed one elastic band from her hair and one from her bag, snapped them around the shoes to keep them intact. She worked with him in the aisle for half an hour. He kept grinning as he moved, as if picturing himself onstage. In truth I saw nothing extraordinary in him — he seemed ragged at the edges, overly excited and there was a dangerous charm to him, very Tatar.

As far as I could see he had little control of his body, but Anna complimented him and even Albert Tikhonov stopped working a moment, leaned against the wall to steady his stilts and gave a quick round of applause. To console myself for my sloth I too joined in with the applause.

I could tell from Anna’s face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.

Still, I could see that the boy was good for her — her cheeks were flushed and there was a high timbre in her voice that I had not heard for years. She saw something in him, a light intruding upon the shadows to make sense of all our previous gloom.

They worked on a few more steps until finally Anna said: Enough! We left the Opera House and the boy walked home, the slippers slung over his shoulder, his legs deliberately turned out from his hips.

It had grown dark, but Anna and I stopped at a park bench by the lake, weariness defeating us. She put her head to my shoulder and told me that she was not so foolish as to believe that Rudik would ever be anything more than a dancer to her. Anna had always wanted a son, even in our later years. Our daughter, Yulia, lived in Saint Petersburg, thousands of kilometers away. For most of our lives we had reluctantly lived away from her, and Anna had never had the chance to teach her to dance. It was, we knew, a history wasted, but there was nothing we could do about it.

That night I didn’t read to Anna. It was enough that she stepped across the room and kissed me. I was surprised to find there was still a stir in my groin, then even more surprised to remember that there hadn’t been a stir in almost five years. Our bodies are foul things to live inside. I am convinced the gods patched us together this disastrously so that we might need them, or at least invoke them late at night.

The small mercies of life struck a couple of weeks later, when a package from Saint Petersburg managed to find its way to us — Yulia cleverly sent it through the university. Inside was a pound of Turkish coffee and a fruitcake. The cake was wrapped in paper and taped behind the paper was a letter, kept largely innocuous, just in case. She cataloged the changes in the city and touched on whatever was new in her life. Her husband had been promoted in the physics department, and she hinted that she might be able to send us a little money in the coming months. We sat back in our armchairs, read the letter twelve times, cracking its codes, its nuances.

Rudik came over and devoured a slice of the fruitcake, then asked if he could take a slice home for his sister. Later I saw him open the package halfway down the road and stuff the piece into his mouth.

We used and reused Yulia’s coffee grains until they were so dry that Anna joked they might bleach — before the Revolution we often used a pound of coffee a week, but of course when there is no choice it is extraordinary what you adapt to.

My own afternoon walks — slow and careful because of my foot — began to take me to the School Two gymnasium. I watched through the small glass window. Anna had forty students all together, but she kept only two of them behind after class, Rudik and another boy. The other was dark-haired, lithe and, to my eye, much more accomplished, no ruffian edges. Together, if they could have melded, they would have been magnificent. But Anna’s heart was for Rudik — she said to me that he was somehow born within dance, that he was unlettered in it, yet he knew it intimately, it was a grammar for him, deep and untutored. I saw the shine in her eyes when she berated him on a plié and he immediately turned and executed it perfectly, stood grinning, waiting for her to berate him again, which of course she did.

Anna found herself a new dance dress, and although she kept herself covered with leg warmers and a long sweater, she was still slender and delicate. She stood beside him at the barre and corrected his tendus. She had him repeat the steps until he grew dizzy, shouted at him that he was not a monkey and that he should straighten his back. She even pounded a few notes on the piano for rhythm, although her skill on the keys left a lot to be desired. I was amazed to see her one winter afternoon developing runnels of sweat on her brow. Her eyes quite honestly sparkled, as if she had borrowed them from the boy.

She began working with him on jumps — she told him that above all he must create what his feet wished for, and it was not so much that he must jump higher than anyone else but that he should remain in the air longer.

Stay in the air longer!

Yes, she said, hang on to God’s beard.

His beard?

And do not land like a cow.

Cows jump? he asked.

Don’t be cheeky. And keep your mouth closed. You are not a fly swallower.

I’m in the circus! he shouted, and he began leaping around the room with his mouth open.

Anna developed a system with him. Rudik’s parents were of Muslim stock and as the only boy he was not expected to do much. Buying bread was his only chore, but after a while Anna began to pick it up for him to give him time to practice. She lined up twice outside different bakeries, one on Krassina and one on October Prospect. I often went along to wait with her. We would try to keep our place by the bakery vents if we could — the great solace of queuing was the smell that hung in the air. I took the first batch of bread home while she waited with his family’s coupons at the second bakery. The process often took a whole morning, but that didn’t matter to Anna. At the end of his lesson he would kiss her on the cheek, put the bread in his shopping bag and run home.

One summer evening we took him on a picnic: pickles, some black bread and a small jar of berry juice.

In the park, by the Belaya, Anna spread a blanket on the ground. The sun was high, and it threw short shadows on the surrounding fields. Farther downstream a group of boys dove off a giant rock. One or two of them pointed in our direction and shouted Rudik’s name. Anna had a word in his ear. Reluctantly he got into his swimming gear and walked along the riverbank. He hung around near the rock for a while, a deep scowl on his face. It was easy to pick Rudik out in the crowd — he was thinner and whiter than the rest. The boys jumped from the rock into the water, grabbing their knees in midair. Great jets of water splashed up when they landed.