Colum McCann - Dancer

After two weeks he had packed his case and was gone to the school dorms.

Iosif made love to me the evening Rudi left, and afterwards he padded across to the couch where he lit a cigarette and said, without turning in my direction: He’s a little shit, isn’t he?

All at once it felt as if my mother and father were surrounding me, and I turned to the pillow, said nothing.

It was almost three months before Rudi arrived back. He strolled in with RosaMaria, a girl from Chile. She was the sort of beauty who took the oxygen from the air. She wasn’t consumed by her own attractiveness but managed instead to carry it like an afterthought. Her father was the editor of a newspaper in Santiago, and she was at the Leningrad Choreographic to learn dance. Rudi, perhaps by virtue of being with her, looked different already. He was wearing a long army coat and boots to his knees, and his hair had grown longer.

RosaMaria laid a guitar case in the corner and took a seat in the background while Rudi sat at the table, listening, hunched over a small glass of vodka. Larissa, Petr, Sergei, Nadia and I were all quite drunk and deep into an interminable debate about Heidegger, who had suggested that life becomes authentic when lived in the presence of death. For me the debate seemed to relate ultimately to our lives under Stalin, but I also couldn’t help thinking of my father, who had lived his life in the shadow not only of his own death but of his former history too. I flicked a look at Rudi. He yawned and filled his glass again with a sort of theater, holding the bottle high in the air, so there was a deep splash against the side of the glass.

Petr turned and said: So then, you, young man, what do you think is authentic and inauthentic?

Rudi slurped his vodka. Petr pulled the bottle away and held it close to his chest. Around the table there was a quick blur of laughter. It was a delightful little showdown between a tired middle-aged man and a boy. I figured that Rudi would never be able to handle Petr, but he picked up two spoons, rose quickly, pushed his way past the rubber plants to the door, beckoned us all to follow. The simple strangeness of his action silenced us, although RosaMaria smiled as if she knew what was in store.

Rudi made his way down the corridor to the bathroom and sat down in the empty bathtub.

This, he said, is authentic.

He began to bash the spoons against the porcelain, reaching different notes where the bath curved, with longer, hollower notes at the base of the tub, higher notes where the spoons met the rim. The taps rang high metallic twangs, and then he reached to hit the spoons against the wall. He held his face perfectly serious, banging out a series of sounds that had no form or rhythm at all. It was pure circus.

Johann Sebastian Bach! he said.

He stopped and we launched into a drunken round of applause. Petr was momentarily shell-shocked but rescued himself admirably — instead of stalking away, he went to the bathtub, bottle in hand, poured a long measure of vodka down Rudi’s throat.

Together they finished the bottle, and then Petr held it above Rudi’s head and said: May you have as many troubles as there are drops left in this bottle.

I do not wish to get wet, laughed Rudi.

The evening grew wilder and drunker. We ate bread with horseradish sauce — it was all we could find — until a friend of Petr’s arrived with three hard-boiled eggs to share. RosaMaria took her guitar from its case and sang Spanish songs in a dialect I didn’t entirely recognize. Rudi went around the room with a metal saucepan, and he hammered on the woodwork, the tiles, the floor, the sink, until the neighbors began complaining.

Just at that moment Iosif came home. I met him at the door, shouted: Let’s dance! He shoved me away and I slammed into the wall. The room went silent.

Iosif yelled: Get the fuck out of here! Everyone! Get the fuck out!

My friends looked at me and began to stub out their cigarettes in the ashtrays in slow motion, not quite sure what to do. Out! shouted Iosif. He grabbed Rudi by the collar and dragged him into the corridor. Rudi was astounded, his eyes wide. But RosaMaria stood in front of my husband and — simply by keeping her eyes locked on his — she made him stare at the floor. Finally Iosif went downstairs to the courtyard, to smoke, chagrined.

The night began again. I was aware that something extraordinary had just happened, that RosaMaria had shifted a small axis in my life, if only temporarily, and I gave her a silent inner curtsy.

She returned the next evening, accompanied by Rudi. He made himself immediately at home, talking animatedly about a myth he had read in his world literature class that day. It had to do with the Indian god, Shiva, who had danced within a circle of fire. He and RosaMaria were arguing about whether the act of dance was one of construction or destruction, whether if by dancing you made a work of art or you broke it down. Rudi maintained that you built a dance from the bottom up, while RosaMaria believed that the dance was there to be torn apart, that each move was an entry into the dance until it lay all around in separate, splendid parts. I watched them, not so much with regret but as a mirror unto myself and Iosif ten years previously, remembering how we once had talked of physics and language in the same dark and concentrated manner. They held court together until Larissa came over and the talk veered off into science, the theory of uncertainty again, which clearly annoyed the young dancers.

When Iosif returned he actually sat at the table with everyone, and didn’t say a word, all polite resignation. He looked closely at RosaMaria, her dark hair, her wide smile, but then he pulled a chair next to me, even lit my cigarette. Iosif pronounced Chile to be his favorite country even though he had never been, and I sat pondering how rich I would be if every piece of horseshit that came from my husband’s mouth could be turned into a sliver of gold.

RosaMaria began visiting more and more, even without Rudi. I was aware that she was probably being watched, given that she was a foreigner. There was an intermittent clicking on my telephone. We turned the music loud in case the place was bugged, but really there was nothing extraordinary about our conversations anyway. She told me about Santiago, for which she was dreadfully homesick. I had, years before, translated some Chilean poetry and had imagined doorways, lean dogs, vendors of saints, but the country she talked of was all cafés, jazz clubs, long cigarettes. She spoke as if there were a tambourine in her throat. She loved dancing for the act of it rather than the art and so she was miserable at the school, where she felt that a rigidity was being forced into her. She had to wear skirts all the time and said that she had brought a pair of tight orange pants from Santiago — the notion of it made me laugh — and she was itching to wear them just once. The only person who kept her sane, she said, was Rudi, simply because he allowed himself to be Rudi. He was in constant trouble in school, especially with Shelkov, the school director. He refused to cut his hair, fought in rehearsals, put pepper in the dance belts of rivals. By all accounts he excelled in the classes he liked — literature, history of art, music — but he detested the sciences and anything else that didn’t suit his rhythm. He had stolen stage makeup, eyeshadow and a glaring rouge, and had worn it around his dorm. She said he had no respect for the other dancers but he adored his teacher, Aleksandr Pushkin, who had taken him under his tutelage. RosaMaria mentioned rumors that others had seen Rudi late at night, walking near Ekaterina Square, where perverted men were rumored to meet, a notion that didn’t seem to bother her, which surprised me, since it had seemed they were wearing each other like outfits.