Colum McCann - Dancer

He carries the notion home, practices with the thought of red soaking through his slippers.

His sister Tamara has left the house to study teaching in Moscow and he now has room for a full-length bed. Taped to the wall near the bed he has scribbled notes to himself: Ask Anna to patch slippers. Work on spotting so as not to get dizzy. Find walk-ons. Get good piece of oak for barre. Have interest only in what you can’t do well. Beethoven was sixteen when he wrote the second movement concerto number 2! No direct sunlight hits the wall but still he has hooded the paper with foil like his mother used to do. His father paces the house but ignores the notes.

One March morning Rudik awakes to hear Yuri Levitan, the state radio’s chief announcer, interrupting a slew of solemn music with a bulletin: The heart of the Comrade Stalin, inspired Continuer of Lenin’s cause, Father and Teacher, Comrade in Arms, Coryphaeus of Science and Technology, Wise Leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, has ceased to beat.

Three minutes of silence is called for. Rudik’s father moves out into the street to stand beneath the trees, where the only sound is that of the grackles. His mother remains at the window and then turns to Rudik, takes her son’s face in her hands, not a word passing between them.

That evening, at the end of another broadcast, Rudik hears that Prokofiev has died on the very same day. He climbs through the window of the locked hall on Karl Marx Street and, in the bathroom sink, he scrapes the soles of his feet against the metal mouths of the taps so savagely that they bleed. He comes out, dancing for nobody, blood on his slippers, sweat spinning from his hair.

It was just before the May Day celebrations. We hadn’t seen each other in about four years. He knocked on the door of the electrician shop on Karl Marx Street where I was an apprentice. He looked different, more grown-up, hair long. We used to bully the little bastard at school, but he stood at the door now, as big as me. I had heard he was dancing, that he’d appeared at the Opera House a few times, mostly as a walk-on, but so what, I didn’t care. I asked what he wanted. He said he’d heard I owned a portable gramophone and he’d like to borrow it. I went to close the door, but he put his foot in it and it bounced back at me. I grabbed him by the shirt but he didn’t flinch. He got right to the point, said he’d like the gramophone for an exhibition he was giving in the basement canteen of the oil refinery. I told him to jump in the lake and fuck a few trout. But he began to plead like a little child and finally he said he’d give me some money. So I got him to promise me thirty rubles out of his one hundred. He said okay, as long as I got him some good phonographs to play. My cousin was high up in the Komsomol and he had some recordings, mostly army songs but some Bach, Dvorak, others. Besides, thirty rubles was thirty rubles. So I got the portable gramophone for him.

The refinery was a big area of pipes and steam and canals, with its own three ambulances that would pick up the dead or the injured when there was an accident. Sirens going off all the time, searchlights, dogs. You’d know a refinery worker just by the way he looked at you. The entertainment collective was run by a fat old babushka called Vera Bazhenova. Most of the time she showed films or bawdy puppet shows, and every now and then she stretched to a little folk dancing. But Rudi had talked her into letting him perform for one night. He was good that way, he could call an ass a racehorse and get away with it.

The canteen was dirty and it stank of sweat. It was six in the evening, just after the shifts had changed. The workers sat down to watch. There were about thirty men and twenty-five women — welders, toolmakers, furnace men, forklift drivers, a couple of office workers, some union representatives. I knew a few of them, and we shared a glass of koumiss. After a while Rudi came out from the kitchen, where he’d changed his clothes. He was wearing tights pulled up high on his stomach and a sleeveless top. A long fringe of hair was hanging down over his eyes. The workers started laughing. He pouted and told me to put a record on the gramophone. I told him I wasn’t his little Turkish slave, he should do it himself. He came across and whispered in my ear that I wouldn’t get any money. I thought, fuck him, but I put the record on anyway. The first thing he did was a piece from the Song of the Cranes, and just three or four minutes into it they were laughing at him. They’d seen plenty of dancing before, these workers, but this was the end of the day, flasks were being passed along the rows, everyone smoking and chattering, and they were saying, Get this shit off the stage! Get this piece of shit off the stage!

He danced some more, but they got louder, even the women. He glanced across at me, and I began to feel a little bad for him, so I lifted the needle from the gramophone. The canteen fell silent. There was a mean look in his eyes — as if he was all at once challenging the women to fuck him and the men to fight. His lips twitched. Someone threw a dirty rag up on the stage, which set off another great roar. Vera Bazhenova was red in the face, trying to get them to quieten down, it was her head on the block, she ran the collective.

Just then Rudi stretched out his arms wide and began a gopak followed by a yiablotshko, up on his toes, then slowly sinking to his knees, and then he moved into The Internationale. The laughter turned to some coughing and then the workers began to turn toward one another in their chairs, and then they began stamping out The Internationale on the floor. By the end of the performance Rudi was back to ballet, the Song of the Cranes, full circle, and the stupid bastards were applauding him. They passed around a tin cup, and he got another thirty rubles. He glanced at me and tucked it all in his pocket. The workers gathered around after the show and invited us for some more koumiss. Soon everyone in the canteen was shouting and drinking. A little red-haired man got up on the aluminum counter and gave a toast, then stood on one leg and extended his arms. Finally Rudi grabbed the man, steadied him and showed him how it was done properly.

When we took the tram home, both of us drunker than elephants, I asked him for some of the extra money. He told me I was a miserable Cossack, that he needed it to pay for his train ticket to Moscow or Leningrad, whichever would accept him, to go fuck myself, that it was him earned all the money anyway.

He has rouged his cheeks with a red stone and darkened his eyes with black liner stolen from the Opera House. His eyelashes have been thickened with a paste and his hair swept back with pomade. At home alone, he smiles and then grimaces in the mirror, creates a series of faces. Stepping frontways to the mirror, he adjusts his tights and his dance belt: the mirror is tilted downwards so he can see no more than his midtorso. He stretches his arm high beyond the reflection, takes a bow, and watches his hand reentering the mirror. He steps closer, exaggerates his turnout, tightens the upper muscles of his legs, brings his hips forward. He removes the tights to unhook the dance belt, stands still and closes his eyes.

A row of lights, a sea of faces, he is in the air to great applause. The footlights flicker and the curtains are opened again. He bows.

Later he removes the rouge and the eye makeup with an old handkerchief. He shifts the few pieces of furniture — sideboard, armchairs, cheap wall paintings — and begins to practice in the dark cramped space of the room.

In the afternoon his father returns earlier than usual and nods in the manner of men grown accustomed to silence. His eyes rest for a moment on the row of notes Rudi has taped to the mirror: Work on battements and accomplish proper order of jêtés coupés. Borrow Scriabin from Anna. Liniment for feet. At the end of one row of notes, the word Visa.