Colum McCann - Dancer

Hamet glances at the handkerchief on the floor near Rudi’s feet.

Silently he steps past his son, pulls the armchair back to its original position near the door. Beneath his mattress, Hamet has enough money for the fare. Two months’ wages, bundled in elastic. He has been saving for a shotgun. Geese and wild fowl. Pheasants. Woodcocks. Without ceremony, Hamet takes the money from under the mattress and tosses it to Rudik, then lies back on the bed and lights himself a cigarette to argue against the scent of the room.

On the way to Leningrad — or rather on the way to Moscow, which is the way to Leningrad — there is a stop in the little village of Izhevsk where I grew up. I told Rudi he would know the village by the red and green roof of the railway station. If he wanted to, he could drop in at my old uncle Majit’s house, sleep the night, and if he was lucky he might even get a lesson from him on stilt walking. He said he’d think about it.

I had helped Rudi try out the stilts once before in the Opera House, when he had a walk-on as a Roman spear-carrier. We had been cleaning up after the show. He was still in his costume. I thrust the stilts into his hands and told him to get on them. They were short, only three quarters of a meter. He laid them on the floor, put his feet on the blocks, tied the straps tight and then sat there, dumbfounded, finally realizing there was no way for him to get up from the floor. He said: Albert, you bastard, take this wool out of my eyes. He unstrapped the stilts and kicked them across the room but then retrieved them and stood center stage, trying to figure it out. Finally I got a stepladder and talked him through how it was done. He stepped up to the top of the ladder, and I gave him the most important pointers. Never fall backwards. Keep your weight on your feet. Don’t look down. Lift your knee high and the stilt will follow.

I strung a rope across the stage at about armpit level so he could hold on to it if he fell. He tried to balance on the stilts at first, the hardest thing of all, until I told him that he needed to move and to keep moving.

He progressed precariously up and down the length of the rope, holding on most of the time.

When I was young, my uncle Majit used to practice in an abandoned silo just outside our village. He did it there because there was no wind and every other ceiling was too low for him. He had maybe twenty or thirty different pairs of stilts, all made from ash wood, ranging from half a meter to three meters. His favorites were the meter-high ones because he could bend down and talk to us children or rub the tops of our heads or shake our hands as we ran beneath him. He was the finest stilt walker I ever saw. He would build a new set and step onto them and right away find the sweet spot for balance. Within a day or two he’d be running on them.

The only time Uncle tumbled was when he was teaching us how to fall properly. Never backwards! he shouted, you’ll crack your skull open! And then he would start falling backwards himself, shouting, Never like this! Never like this!

As he was toppling, Uncle would switch his weight and turn the stilts and just at the last instant he would fall forwards instead, landing with his knees bent and sitting back on his heels. He was the only stilt walker I ever met who never even tweaked his collar bone.

I tried working with Rudi’s stilt technique over the last couple of evenings before he left, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Just the notion of going away was a walk in the air for him anyway.

I told him that if he looked out from the train he would see children beyond the fields, my nieces and nephews, their heads bobbing above the corn. And if he looked behind the station he might even see a group of them playing stilt soccer. Sit on the left-hand side of the train, I told him.

I’m sure he never did.

APRIL 15, ’59

R—

The magic of a dance, young man, is something purely accidental. The irony of this is that you have to work harder than anyone else for the accident to occur. Then, when it happens, it is the only thing in your life guaranteed never to happen again. This, to some, is an unhappy state of affairs, and yet to others, it is the only ecstasy. Perhaps, then, you should forget everything I have said to you and remember only this: The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.

The railway platforms were wet from the passengers’ shoes and their shaken umbrellas. The whole day seemed weighted under a subdued gray damp. Railway workers moved around in their dark boredom. A new symphony was being piped through the loudspeakers, some factory drill of cello and violin. I took a bench under the platform eaves and watched as a woman my age bid good-bye to two teenage children. I smoothed my dress, neither too solemn nor celebratory, trying all the time to imagine what he would look like.

My mother had sent me a photograph taken years before, while she was still teaching him in Ufa. He had the thin cheeky face of a peasant boy — high Tatar cheekbones, sandy hair, a cocked stare — but he was seventeen now and would surely look different. She said he was extraordinary and I would recognize him immediately, he would stand out from the crowd, he had even turned walking into a sort of art.

When the train finally arrived, pouring steam into the air, I stood and held out a hat that had once belonged to my father, a prearranged signal — it was patently absurd but I felt a vague thrill, waiting for a boy half my age to emerge out of the day. I scanned the crowd, but nobody matched his description. Walking through, I brushed against summer overcoats and suitcases, even went so far as to hail two young boys who, in their fear, thought I was an official and hurriedly showed me their papers.

The next train was not for another four hours, so I went out into a light rain. In front of the station someone had altered the face of Stalin, chipping out tiny, almost imperceptible pocks in the stone cheeks. The flowers beneath the statue had gone untended. The statue’s defacement was foolish of course, if not outright dangerous, but it was shortly before the ’56 Congress and we could already feel the thaw in Leningrad. It was as if a tiny crack had opened and light was spilling through, a cumulative light that would continue to spread, its existence becoming an undeniable fact of our lives. Black canvas tents stood over the tram tracks where they were being repaired. The price of radios had fallen. Shipments of oranges from Morocco were getting through — we hadn’t seen oranges in years. Buyers pushed at one another down by the Neva’s docks. Just a few months before, in an attempt to resuscitate desire, I had been able to buy my husband eight bottles of his favorite Georgian wine. We even had hot water piped into the apartment, and very late one night I had slipped into the bath with him, surprising myself, him even more so. For a while Iosif had brightened considerably, but when he finished the wine he revisited his policy of gloom.

Instead of waiting outside the station, I walked along the Neva, past the prison, down to the bridge, where I took a tram to the university. I rapped on my husband’s door to inform him of the situation, but he wasn’t in his office — probably working somewhere or dallying with one of the other physics professors. It was my first visit back to the university in quite a while, and there was a hollowness to the corridors as if I were walking through the belly of a drum that once formed the musical centerpiece of my life. I even toyed with the idea of going into the Linguistics Department, but I felt that it might rekindle old wounds, not salve them. Instead I dug an old pass out of the depths of my bag and put my finger over the expiration date so I could get into the canteen.