Colum McCann - Dancer

You’ll scratch it away, I told him once, and he looked at me with the sort of horror reserved for death and pillage.

Late at night in bed, Anna and I talked until she fell asleep. It struck us that he was our new breath and that the breath would last us only a short while, that he would eventually have to move on. It gave us great sorrow, yet it also gave us a chance to live beyond any sorrows we had already accumulated.

I even went back to my garden patch to see if I could resurrect it.

Years ago we were given a plot, eight tram stops from our house. Someone in the Ministry had overlooked our history, and we were graced with a letter that said a plot, two meters square, could be ours. It was poor land, brittle and gray. We grew a few vegetables — cucumbers, radishes, cabbages, wild onions — but Anna also had a penchant for lilies, and each year she exchanged a couple of food coupons for a packet of bulbs. We put the bulbs deep in the soil, on the rim of the plot, sometimes used donkey manure for fertilizer, waited. We failed miserably with the flowers most years, but life deals us its strange little ecstasies, and that particular summer, for the first time ever, we had a patch of dark white.

In the afternoons, when she was at the gymnasium, I would catch the tram out there, limp up the hill and sit on a folding chair.

Often, on weekends, a short man with dark hair knelt over his plot, ten meters from my own. We caught each other’s eye every now and then, but we never exchanged a word. His face was tight and guarded, like that of a man who had lived his life with his traps constantly baited. He worked on his garden with a fierce industry, growing cabbages and potatoes mostly. When it came time to harvest, he brought a wheelbarrow with him and filled it high.

One Saturday morning he arrived up the path with Rudik at his heels. I was surprised — not just because this man was Rudik’s father, but because the boy was supposed to be at the gym with Anna and, over the course of a year, he had never once missed a session. I dropped my trowel into the soil and coughed loudly, but Rudik kept his eyes on the ground, as if there were terrible events lurking around each plant.

I rose to my feet to say something, but he turned away.

It struck me then that Rudik’s genius was in allowing his body to say things that he couldn’t otherwise express. It was simply the way his shoulders slumped from one side to the other and the angle of his head that gave him a look — even from the rear — that said any approach would not just impinge on him but wound him deeply. He was forever removed from his father, and yet he was forever removed from me also.

I could see that he was cut above the eye but that his father also had a large bruise on his right cheek. It was clear to me that his father was trying to reconcile all that had happened between them, but no reconciliation would be forthcoming.

His father troweled in the ground and spoke up at his son. Rudik occasionally gave a word back, but most of the time he said nothing.

I knew that there would never again be another beating.

I decided to leave well enough alone and put on my hat, went home, told Anna about what had happened.

Oh, she said, and then she went to sit at the table, curling and uncurling her fingers.

One of these days I’m going to have to pass him on to Elena Konstantinovna, she said. He’s learned all he can from me. It’s only fair.

I went to the cupboard to take out the small bottle of samogon that we had kept for many years. Anna wiped two glasses with a clean towel, and we sat down to drink.

I raised my glass and toasted.

She wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress.

There was only enough in the bottle to get us to the stage where we wanted more. Still, we allowed our happiness to reach instead into the gramophone, Prokofiev, over and over. Anna said she didn’t mind letting Rudik move on to another teacher, especially Elena. Elena Konstantinovna Voitovich had been a coryphée in Saint Petersburg and was now the mistress at the Ufa Opera House. She and Anna kept in touch, and they had exchanged memories and favors — Anna said it might be possible after a few years for Rudik to get a walk-on role, maybe even a solo or two. Perhaps he can go all the way to the school at the Maryinsky, she said. She even talked about writing a letter to Yulia to see if she could negotiate any favors. I knew Anna was recalling herself when she was there, younger, more pliant, still full of promise, and so I nodded, let her talk. There is only so much we can do, she said, teaching is elastic, and if we stretch it out it will only snap back on us at some later date. She explained that she would bring him down to the advanced classes on Karl Marx Street some time during the week. First of all, however, she would cook up a great feast to surprise him.

My hand slipped across the table to hers. She told me to go and grab a book and that maybe with the samogon warming our bodies we would both be allowed a generous night’s sleep. It wasn’t true.

She danced with him all that week. I watched through the window of the gym door.

She had certainly knocked the roughest edges off his movement. His plié was still quite unaccomplished, and his legs contained more violence than grace, but he could pirouette well, and on jumps he had even learned to hang a moment in the air, which delighted Anna. She clapped. He responded to her gestures by jumping again, moving diagonally forward with slow grands jêtés and sweeping arcs, then crossing the rear of the room with a series of bad sissonnes where he bent the second knee. He retreated and stopped suddenly with his arms looped in a garland above his head, having scooped the air and made it his, which was certainly not something that Anna had taught him. His nostrils flared, and I thought for a moment that he might paw at the ground like a horse. Certainly there was more intuition in him than intellect, more spirit than knowledge, as if he had been here before in another guise, something wild and feral.

On Friday she pulled him aside and told him the news. I excused myself and watched from outside the door. I expected silence, maybe tears or a puzzled sorrow, but he just looked at her, hugged her close, stepped back, and took the prospect with a vigorous nod of his head.

Now, said Anna, for your last dance I want you to drop a tray of pearls at my feet.

He went across to the bench and picked up the watering can and did a series of chaînés up and down the room, sprinkling the floor for grip. For the next twenty minutes — before I went home — he strung together all she had taught him, moving from one end of the gym to the other, his tights worn and stretched. Anna glanced out the window at me, and we both knew, at that instant, that whatever attended us in the future we would at least have this.

In the hall on Karl Marx Street he is one of seventy young dancers. At fourteen he is given a whole new language: royales, tours jêtés, brisés, tours en l’air, fouettés. He stays late, practicing. On entrechatquatres he beats his legs together like a barber’s shears. Elena Voitovich watches him with her lips pursed and her hair pulled back in a severe bun. Once or twice her mouth curls into a smile, but mostly she remains uncertain. He tries to outrage her with a brisé volé but she simply scoffs and turns away, says that they would not tolerate form like his in the Kirov or the Bolshoi or even the Stanislavsky. She speaks of the ballet companies with a tinge of regret, and sometimes she tells him of Leningrad, of Moscow, of how the women dancers there work so hard their feet are bloodied at the end of their sessions, and that the sinks in the opera houses are tinged with the blood of great performers.