Colum McCann - Dancer

Rudik sat down and watched their antics, chin on his knees until one of the older boys came up to him and started pushing him around. Rudik shoved back and screamed an obscenity.

Anna got to her feet, but I pulled her down. I poured her a glass of berry juice and said: Let him fight his own battles.

She sipped the juice and let it be.

A couple of minutes passed. Then a look of terror crossed Anna’s face. Rudik and the other boy had climbed up to the very top of the rock. All the other children were watching. Some of them began to clap, slowly and rhythmically. I stood up and began to move my old cart horse of a body as quickly as I could along the riverbank. Rudik was poised, motionless, at the top of the rock. I shouted at him. It was a five-meter jump, next to impossible since the base of the rock was so wide. He spread his arms, took a deep breath. Anna screamed. I stumbled. Rudik spread his arms farther and flew outwards. He seemed to hang in the air, fierce and white, and then he dropped into the water with a huge splash. His head narrowly missed the rock edge. Anna screamed again. I waited for him to emerge. He stayed under a long time but eventually surfaced, a piece of river plant stuck to his neck. He flicked the plant away, shook his head, grinned enormously, then waved at the boy who was still standing at the top of the rock, frozen in fear.

Jump, shouted Rudik. Jump, asshole!

The boy climbed back down without jumping. Rudik swam away and came up to us, sat down nonchalantly on the blanket. He took a pickle from the jar, but he was trembling and I could see the fear in his eyes. Anna started to scold him, but he kept eating his pickle and finally she shrugged. Rudik looked up at her from under a stray lock of hair, finished his food, and came over to lean his head against her shoulder.

You’re a strange child, she said.

He came to our room every day, sometimes two or three times. Some of our phonograph collection was proscribed. We hid it in a wooden bookshelf that had a false back, one of the few pieces of my carpentry that had actually worked, having survived visits by the Ministry. He learned how to remove the records from their sleeves and catch them sideways so he didn’t leave fingerprints. He was always careful to take the dust off the stylus. It was like medicine to him when the gramophone gave out a couple of clicks and the sound moved into violins.

Walking around the room, he kept his eyes closed.

He came to adore Scriabin, listening while standing still, as if he wanted the music to repeat itself a thousand times until Scriabin himself stood beside him, feeding the fire with flutes.

He had this terrible habit of leaving his mouth open as he listened, but it seemed wrong to tap him on the shoulder and lift him out of the moment. Once Anna touched his chin, and he recoiled instantly. I knew it was his father. They weren’t bad bruises, but you could see that he had been knocked around. Rudik had told us that his father worked on the river, hauling logs. It seemed to me that he was slinging down the old curse of fathers — wanting his son to take advantage of the things he had fought for, to become a doctor or a military man or a commissar or an engineer. To him dancing meant the poorhouse. Rudik was failing in school, his teachers were saying he was fidgety, spending his time humming symphonies and occasionally looking at art books his sister had borrowed. He had developed an attachment to Michelangelo, and in his notebooks he made sketches — they were adolescent but well-realized.

The only good report he got was from the Pioneers, where he spent Tuesday afternoons practicing folk dances. And on the evenings when there was ballet at the Opera House— Esmeralda, Coppélia, Don Quixote, Swan Lake —he would be gone from his home, sneaking in the stage door, allowed a seat by my friend Albert Tikhonov, the stilt walker.

It was when he got home and his father discovered where he had been that Rudik was beaten.

Rudik didn’t whine about his bruises, and he didn’t have the empty gaze that I’d seen in other boys and men. He was being beaten for dance and still he went on dancing, so the whole thing balanced itself out. The beatings came on the spur of the moment, including a dreadful one the day after his thirteenth birthday. I didn’t doubt that Rudik deserved it — he could be terribly cantankerous — yet I could tell that by beating him, by refusing him the chance to dance, his father was giving Rudik the gift of need.

Anna talked about going to see his mother but decided against it. If you are wise you step through the darkness only one foot at a time.

I have always thought of memory as a foolish conceit, but as the gramophone crackled Anna began to tell him bits and pieces of her past. She glossed over her own youth and quickly settled into her years in the corps. How she yammered on! The costumes, the designers, the trains across borders! Saint Petersburg and the rain through the streetlights! The rake of the Kirov floor! The tenor aria from the last act of Tosca! After a while there was no arresting her — it was like the Dutch boy’s dam, except it wasn’t only the river that had burst but the ramparts, the bank, the weeds on the shore also.

I was grateful that she didn’t lie to him, that she didn’t pretend to have been one of the great dancers, denied by history. No. There was a lovely truth to it all. She told him about standing in the wings of the grand theaters, dreaming herself onstage. She remembered Pavlova in less striking colors than anyone else, perhaps because Pavlova herself was such an elemental part of the dance. I found myself adrift too, back at the Maryinsky, in the front row, waiting desperately for Anna to come on with the corps. In Swan Lake, when the curtain call came, the cry went up for Anna! Anna! Anna! I felt it was my Anna they were chanting for, so I chanted too. Afterwards I would meet her and we would walk down Rossi with her arm linked through mine and at her building her mother would be looking down from the fourth-floor window. I would guide her close to the wall and kiss her, whereupon she would touch my face and giggle and run upstairs.

How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes.

Rudik listened to the stories with a sort of rapt disbelief. It struck me later that the disbelief was born of a benign ignorance. After all, he was thirteen now, and he had been taught to think differently than us. Still, it was remarkable to me that he remembered the stories weeks later, sometimes quoting Anna exactly, word for word.

He inhaled everything, became taller and gangly, with an impish smirk that could silence a room, but he wasn’t aware of his body or its power. If anything, he was shy and afraid. Anna told him that his whole body must dance, all of it, not just his arms and legs. She tweaked him on the ear, saying even his lobe must believe in movement. Straighten your legs. Spot quicker on your turns. Work on your line. Absorb the dance like blotting paper. He stuck to it all diligently, never quitting until he had perfected a step, even if it meant another beating from his father. On Sundays, Anna took him first to the museum and then to watch rehearsals at the Opera House, so they were together every day of the week. As they walked home, Rudik would remember the exact movements he had seen — male or female, it didn’t matter — reconstructing the movements from memory.

He lay between us, like a long and charged evening.

Rudik began to develop a new language, not one that fit him, he was ill-shod for it. But it was charming to hear the rough provincial boy say port de bras as if he had stepped from a room full of chandeliers. At the same time, at our table, he would eat a piece of goat’s cheese like a savage. He had never in his life heard of washing his hands before a meal. Sometimes his finger went into his nose, and he had a terrible affinity for scratching his private parts.