Colum McCann - Dancer

The food was grimier and more insipid than I remembered. The ladies behind the counter regarded me with a sort of disdain, and a man with a giant broom pushed bits of food and rubbish around the floor, moving slowly as if contemplating the deep mysteries of his sloth.

Feeling like an intruder into my former life, I left. Outside the sun had broken through the clouds and reefs of arctic light lay on the sky.

Back at Finlandia Station there was a hum and a bustle that had not existed earlier and the working men passed cigarettes back and forth. Inside, a huge banner hung from the ceiling, swaying in the breeze, a picture of Khrushchev folding and refolding into himself: Life has become better, life is more joyful. The sign had not been there earlier but it somehow made sense, illuminated by the sunlight from the windows.

I sat back down on a platform bench and waited, wondering what exactly it was my mother expected me to do with a seventeen-year-old country boy. In their letters they said they had been graced by Rudi — whom she affectionately called Rudik — but I had the feeling they were graced not so much by him as by the memory of what dance had once meant to them.

I had not grown up alongside my parents, and in truth, my time with them had wound itself on a modest spool. They were exiled in Ufa, but the foothold of their lives was in what they still called Petersburg — the palaces, the houses, the fencing duels, the sideboards, the inkwells, the Bohemian cut glass, the orchestra seats at the Maryinsky — but that had receded from them forever after the Revolution. My father had miraculously survived the purges over the years, arrested and rearrested, kept in different Siberian camps, finally deported to Ufa, where he and my mother were more or less left alone by the authorities. My mother had always insisted on living in towns close to my father and, for the sake of good schooling and an ancient family dignity, I was brought up by my maternal grandparents in Leningrad, took on their last name and patronymic. I married young, got a job in the university, and had seen my parents only a few times. Ufa was a closed city — industry, forestry, weapons manufacturing. It didn’t appear on maps and was an extremely difficult place for which to get a visa. And so my parents, although they never receded from my imagination or my affection, occupied dusty corners of my days.

I heard the whistle of another engine approaching the station and I dipped into my bag to take a quick look at his photograph.

The crowd from the Moscow train surged past. I felt momentarily like a upstream fish, flapping from side to side, waving my father’s hat in the air. Rudi did not show.

Alone and worried, I began to think I had slipped across a tiny line in my life. I was thirty-one years old, the author of two miscarriages. I still spent much of my time imagining my children at the ages they could have been. And now, with this young Tatar boy, I was saddled with the responsibility of being a parent without any of its joys — I fretted about whether something unfortunate had happened to him en route, if he’d lost our address, if he would have the wherewithal to find the tram, if he’d even arrive at all.

I left the station, cursing him, and returned to the heart of the city. I adored our crumbling room in the communal apartments along the Fontanka River. The walls were peeling. The corridors smelled of paint and cabbage. The window frames were rotted. And yet the place gladdened me. The ceilings were high and cornices were molded in the corners. The wood was dark and secretive, the door was intricately carved, and in summer the light streamed through the windows. I could hear the canal water when boats went by, waves splashing against the embankments.

For hours I sat at the window, watching the street. Finally Iosif came home, tie askew. He looked at me wearily.

He’ll get here, he said.

Iosif ate his dinner, went off to sleep with a grunt, and I thought of myself then as a piece of china — a single saucer, perhaps, or a lid — decorative and useless.

I paced the room, twelve steps from window to back wall, six steps across. I had deadlines for poems to translate but had neither the energy nor the inclination to tackle them. I gazed at myself in the mirror obsessively, held my face at different angles. A hard feeling of dislocation came over me. We don’t ever, I thought, grow sharper, clearer, or more durable. I had a feeling that any youth I once owned had dramatically fled from me. How piteous! How mournful! How ridiculous! I pinched my cheeks for color, pulled on my coat, and descended the rank stairwell, wandered the courtyard, hearing noises from neighboring apartments, laughter, anger, a stray piano note.

It was white nights, the pale blue of midnight, no moon, no stars, just a few clouds still straggling along. My father had once written to me saying that the stars were deeper than their darkness, and I stayed out for an hour pondering that line when a figure finally broke the shadow of the archway.

Rudi had not turned walking into an art at all. Instead he was slumped and his shoulders looked rounded. In fact he might as well have stepped out of a cartoon, hauling a suitcase tied with string, his hair sticking out at angles beneath a corduroy hat. He was quite thin, which accentuated his cheekbones, but when I moved up close I noticed that his eyes were complicated and blue.

Where’ve you been? I asked.

I’m honored to meet you, he replied, his hand outstretched.

I waited for you all day.

Oh, he said.

He cocked his head, gazed at me with a sideways innocence, testing my resolve. I came in on the morning train, he said. You must have missed me in the station.

Didn’t you see me holding the hat?

No.

I knew it was a lie, not even a good one, but I let it go. He hopped nervously from foot to foot, and I quizzed him on what he had done the rest of the day.

I went to the Hermitage, he said.

Why?

To look at the paintings. Your mother told me that to dance you have to be a painter too.

She did, did she?

Yes.

And what else did she say?

She said it’s a good idea to be a musician also.

She didn’t say that to be a dancer you have to get your timing right?

He shrugged.

Do you have a piano? he asked.

There was a hint of impishness at the edges of his eyes and I had to hold back a smile.

No, I said.

Just then another piano note wafted out from the fourth floor, and someone began to play Beethoven, quite beautifully. Rudi brightened, said perhaps he could meet the owner of the piano, convince them to let him practice.

I don’t think so, I replied.

He took the stairs two at a time, even with his suitcase. In our room I sat him down at the table and made him eat his dinner cold.

Your cooking’s better than your mother’s, he said.

I joined him at the table, where he flicked another quick smile at me before he buried himself in the food once more.

So you want to be a dancer? I asked.

I want to dance better than I already do, he said.

He had a fleck of cabbage on his teeth, and he scratched it off with his thumbnail. He seemed so young and vital and naïve. His upturned smile made him look sad somehow, which he wasn’t, not at all. The more I studied him the more I noticed his extraordinary eyes, huge, untamed, as if they were independent entities that just so happened to sit in his head, searching the apartment, scanning my record collection. He asked for some Bach, which I played low, and the music seemed to move through him as he ate.

You’ll sleep on the couch, I said. You’ll meet my husband in the morning. He’ll be up early.

Rudi stood and yawned, stretched his arms, went to the couch, leaving the dirty dish on the table. My back was turned, but I caught sight of him in a mirror as he undressed to his undergarments. He slid onto the couch, pulled the blanket high.